Eurobloat #0193 • May 2026
May was the month Brussels pressed on with reading your private messages, postponed its proudest law because it could not switch it on, and then asked the member states for a great deal more money.
Folly of the Month: the plan to read everyone's messages
On 11 May the fourth round of talks on the Chat Control proposal took place, with a fifth and final round set for the end of June. The Council still wants mandatory age checks for messaging services, which in plain terms means proving who you are, by document or by face scan, before you may send a private message. It still leans on scanning installed on your own device, which breaks the protection that end-to-end encryption is supposed to give. The whole thing is sold as a way to protect children, yet the method on offer is to watch everyone, all the time, and to end anonymous communication for the innocent and guilty alike. A union that cannot run its own laws would now like to read your post before you send it.
1. The world-first law nobody could switch on
On 7 May the Council and Parliament agreed to delay the high-risk rules of the AI Act by up to sixteen months, as part of a tidying-up package now called the Digital Omnibus. The reason given is that the standards and tools the law depends on are not ready. So the Union wrote the planet's first artificial intelligence rulebook, announced it to the world, and has now quietly pushed it back because it cannot run the thing it passed.
2. Pay the publishers, says the court
On 12 May the Court of Justice backed Italy's regulator in its fight with Meta, ruling that a member state may set up machinery to force online platforms to pay news publishers for their content. The judges even frowned on platforms that lower the visibility of articles while the money is being argued over. A union that began as a common market now supervises the price one private company must pay another.
3. The fining machine grinds on
On 7 May Euronews looked back on the Digital Markets Act and counted the scalps so far, a €500 million penalty against Apple and a €200 million one against Meta, both under appeal. Across the Atlantic the response was a threat of tariffs on European goods. The Commission has decided that the way to help European business is to pick a trade fight with the United States over how American firms run their app stores.
4. The court tells Italy whom to pay
On 7 May the Court of Justice struck down Italy's rule that you must live in the country for ten years before claiming its minimum income scheme, calling it indirect discrimination against people granted international protection. Whatever one thinks of the welfare in question, the design of a national benefit, and who may draw it, is now settled in Luxembourg rather than Rome.
5. And how to count a pension
On 21 May the same court ruled that when a member state works out a pension it must take account of certain activities a person carried out in other member states. Another corner of national social policy is quietly harmonised by judgment, one case at a time, until the word national means very little at all.
6. Border control, only fifteen years late
On 8 May the Commission reported proud progress on its Migration and Asylum Pact, noting that illegal crossings fell by 26 per cent in 2025 and that a common returns system is, at last, under negotiation. Securing the border is exactly the right aim. The folly is that it took the Union the best part of two decades, and a great deal of damage, to start building the machinery that any ordinary country keeps as a matter of course.
7. Parliament wants another two hundred billion
On 12 May it emerged that the Parliament wants roughly €197 billion more than the Commission proposed for the next long-term budget, pushing the bill above 1.27 per cent of the Union's income. Faced with a Europe that worries about its competitiveness, the answer from the chamber is the answer it always gives, which is that the institution should be larger and should spend more.
8. Taxes of its very own
To pay for the wish list, Brussels keeps pressing for its own resources, including a lump-sum levy on larger companies and charges on tobacco and electronic waste, so that the Union may tax directly rather than ask the member states. A body that cannot run the laws it already has would now like the power to raise money on its own account. The appetite grows with the eating.
9. Ninety billion, borrowed together
The €90 billion support loan for Ukraine, underpinned by a memorandum signed in May, is raised on joint debt, with the member states standing behind it as one. Helping Ukraine is one thing. Turning every such effort into common borrowing, repaid by everyone, is how a union meant to police a single market keeps acquiring the habits of a single treasury.
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