FRIEDRICH-EBERT-STIFTUNG – AN EU FUTURE FUND: WHY AND HOW? rules and the end of the current European legislature this summer, the European Parliamentary elections will set the course for the next term of office until 2029. The Council has already set out the initial priorities for the next Commis­sion, whose input will be used to set the new reform agen­da in autumn 2024. Among other things, negotiations will then get rapidly under way on the next Multiannual Finan­cial Framework from 2028. In the case of the last EU budget, the first Commission proposal was submitted just under two and a half years before its final adoption, which would mean mid-2025. As far as the Member States are con­cerned, elections will be held in Germany in September 2025, and in France(and Italy) in 2027. If, as we expect, the German government is not prepared to launch a large-scale new investment campaign in the EU by then, even though it was included in the coalition agreement, 2026 would in all likelihood provide a window of opportunity for reaching agreement in the Council. In our view, a discussion on an EU Future Fund would take place from 2027 onwards in a com­bination of the MFF budget negotiations and a separate re­form process on the future of the STEP instrument and a successor instrument for the reconstruction fund. The dis­cussion about new EU own resources, which was promised in an interinstitutional agreement from December 2020 in order to prevent possible real budget cuts due to the repay­ment obligations and interest costs of the recovery fund, is also based on this. In any case, in the new legislative period actors at national level, in the Council and in the European Parliament need to advance these parallel reform processes towards an EU Fu­ture Fund. Fortunately, there are already a number of pow­erful partners: both the Commission and the current Euro­pean Parliament have spoken out in favour of setting up a European sovereignty fund, even though this ultimately failed in the Council last year due to other priorities. Impor­tant international institutions such as the IMF(2022) or – in particular detail – the ECB(2023) have also advocated in­vestment-boosting funds in the context of the transforma­tion and could support and advise on corresponding politi­cal efforts. In our view, the present background paper and the underlying network, as well as existing alliances such as Fiscal Matters at EU level, provide a robust basis for these upcoming processes, on which political efforts can continue in the coming years towards bringing an EU Future Fund in­to existence. 22