“There is no strategy without money,” said Juliana Wahlgren, director of the European Anti-Poverty Network. “How are we going to implement it if, funding-wise, this is not a priority?”
Poverty target slipping
The EU wants to reduce the number of people at risk of poverty or social exclusion by at least 15 million from 2019 to 2030, and eradicate it by 2050.
That target was set in 2021. But by 2025, that number had fallen by just 3.4 million, according to the draft of the strategy seen by POLITICO. Across the bloc in 2025, 20.9 percent of the population was at risk of poverty, down only marginally since 2019, when it stood at 21.1 percent.
The picture varies sharply across the bloc. Romania and Bulgaria have reduced the share of people at risk of poverty by around a third over the past decade, while some of the EU’s richest countries have moved in the opposite direction.
The Covid-19 pandemic reversed a trend of falling poverty numbers in France, Austria and Germany, among others. In those countries, the share of people at risk of poverty was higher in 2025 than it was a decade earlier. In Germany, the share rose from 17.3 percent in 2019 to 21.2 percent last year. Support for the far-right Alternative for Germany also grew significantly over that period, with the biggest jump after the 2016 migration crisis.
For people experiencing poverty, the problem is not only whether support exists, but whether they can get it.
“It’s very difficult to access some benefits because of the bureaucracy, the system itself, it is very hard to navigate,” said Ema Popovici, a person experiencing poverty and project assistant for the Bucovina Institute NGO in Romania.
The EU should engage with people experiencing poverty, Popovici said, “because they can report the reality of what’s happening. Because on paper, again it can be declared that the strategy is going very well and we have solutions and so on, but in reality it doesn’t work. So we need people going outside and speaking with people.”