Draghi Accepts Charlemagne Prize; Merz Demands EU Budget Overhaul

Mario Draghi, the 78-year-old former European Central Bank president and Italian prime minister, accepted the 2026 International Charlemagne Prize on Thursday in the Krönungssaal of Aachen's town hall and used the speech to deliver one of the sharpest European warnings of the year. "For the first time in living memory, we are truly alone together," he told an audience that included Chancellor Friedrich Merz, his ECB successor Christine Lagarde, and Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis. The United States, he said, had become "more adversarial and unpredictable" and "may no longer guarantee our security"; "every strategic dependence must now be re-examined". He reiterated the diagnosis of his 2024 competitiveness report — whose annual price tag has since risen from €800 billion to €1.2 trillion — and singled out artificial intelligence, defence and energy infrastructure as the urgent investment frontiers. On EU process, he was unsparing: "Agreements are processed in committees that water them down and delay them until the outcome bears little resemblance to what was intended. The result is measures that fall so far short of the scale of the challenges that they are worse than inaction." His prescription was a coalition of the willing: countries "that feel the burden of this moment most strongly… must have the freedom to lead".

Merz's laudatio threaded the Draghi argument into Berlin's own fiscal fight. He returned again to the 2012 "whatever it takes" pledge, calling the euro today "unangefochten" — uncontested — and shared Draghi's diagnosis that a 450-million-consumer single market had failed to translate into political power: "that conviction has proven to be an illusion". On the Commission's draft Multiannual Financial Framework for 2028-2034, which would expand the bloc's budget to roughly €1.76 trillion in inflation-adjusted terms, he was caustic: the current structure was "planwirtschaftlich" — centrally planned seven years in advance — and routes "more than two-thirds" of funding into redistribution and subsidies. A modernised budget had to be leaner and focused on competitiveness, defence and economic sovereignty. He firmly rejected new joint EU debt: "Germany cannot follow that road for constitutional reasons alone… enough countries today already spend more on interest than on defence". In parallel he used the Bundestag's general debate on the 2026 budget to fold the same case into domestic numbers, earmarking €11.5 billion for Ukraine — "as long as it is necessary" — and casting competitiveness, security and democratic solidarity as the budget's three priorities. "We don't want any blank spots when it comes to the security of our citizens," he said. Mitsotakis, the ceremony's second laudator, used his remarks to vindicate the Draghi bet on Greek reform.

The day landed on a fortnight that has frayed Merz's room for manoeuvre. On May 12 he was booed by the floor at the German Trade Union Confederation (DGB) congress over the welfare and pension reform plans he is preparing; on May 9 Health Minister Nina Warken put the long-term-care-insurance gap at €22.5 billion by 2029, sharpening the squeeze on social budgets; on May 7 a German expert panel proposed a €50-billion annual investment package to give Europe genuine defence autonomy, a number that bookends the Draghi €1.2-trillion ask. The chancellor is also pushing back against a Kremlin proposal to engage the European Union through pro-Kremlin former chancellor Gerhard Schröder; in Aachen he dismissed it with the line, "We Europeans decide for ourselves who speaks for us, no one else does".

The second strand of Thursday belonged to civil rights. The German Institute for Human Rights (DIMR) published an analysis by author Hendrik Cremer warning that the Alternative for Germany (AfD) poses a manifest danger to people with disabilities, with their "devaluation" a defining part of party ideology. The report cites a 2018 AfD parliamentary query linking disability rates to migration and inbreeding, and remarks by Thuringian leader Björn Höcke characterising inclusion as a burden. The intervention lands as the AfD polled at a record 41 percent in Saxony-Anhalt on May 7, and as the Bundestag in the same week debated stricter accessibility rules under criticism that the framework remains under-enforced.