European Parliament calls for renewed EU strategy to end poverty

The European Parliament urges the European Commission to present a new, comprehensive and adequately funded EU strategy to eradicate poverty by 2035 at the latest. The demand comes in a resolution on developing a new EU anti-poverty strategy (2025/2095(INI)), adopted on 12 February 2026 and published in the Official Journal of the European Union of 12 August 2026 (C/2026/3766). The text anchors EU social policy in the European Pillar of Social Rights and its 2030 targets.

The resolution, based on a report by the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs (A10-0260/2025), warns that poverty reduction has stalled: in 2024, 93.3 million people in the EU — 21.0 % of the population — were still at risk of poverty or social exclusion, barely below the 2019 level, including 20 million children (one in four), while 27 million people suffered severe material and social deprivation. Under the EPSR action plan, the Union pledged to lift at least 15 million people, including at least 5 million children, out of poverty or social exclusion by 2030; Parliament notes that the trend points in the opposite direction in nearly half of the Member States.

A strategy aimed at eradicating poverty

Parliament insists that the most sustainable anti-poverty policy is one that prevents poverty from arising in the first place, tackling root causes across jobs, social protection, housing, energy, education and health. The general objectives it asks the Commission to include are:

• recognition of poverty as a violation of human dignity and a rights-based approach, in line with Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights;
• the goal of eradicating poverty by 2035 at the latest, with interim indicators, milestones and a monitoring framework;
• coordination between the Commission and the Member States, respecting subsidiarity;
• a people-centred, life-cycle approach combining universal and targeted measures, starting in childhood;
• participation of people with lived experience of poverty in designing, implementing and evaluating policies;
• a horizontal principle of non-discrimination to tackle structural inequalities;
• adequate and sustained budgetary resources through the MFF and national mechanisms.

Members also want gender-based violence treated as a key driver of poverty and urge Bulgaria, Czechia, Hungary, Lithuania and Slovakia to complete ratification of the Istanbul Convention.

Fair work and child poverty at its core

In-work poverty affects 8.2 % of employed people in the EU, and the share of children at risk of poverty or social exclusion rose from 23.6 % in 2019 to 24.2 % in 2024. Parliament therefore insists that there should be no in-work poverty in the Union and that the strategy must put child poverty at its core, calling for full implementation of the European Child Guarantee with a dedicated budget of at least EUR 20 billion in the next MFF.

It also demands adequate and ring-fenced funding for cohesion policy and the ESF+, investments for a socially fair green and digital transition in the 2028-2034 MFF, and measures ranging from free or affordable school meals and after-school care to the deinstitutionalisation of children in care.

Governance, participation and measurement

To make the strategy deliver, Parliament recommends an annual conference on implementation with the direct participation of people with lived experience of poverty — “nothing about us without us” — and asks the Social Protection Committee to renew the AROPE indicator towards a multidimensional measure of poverty. It also calls for simpler access to EU funds at local level, keeping the ESF+ co-financing rate for support to the most deprived at around 90 %.

The resolution sets the political benchmark for the Commission’s forthcoming proposal and for the next multiannual financial framework, framing poverty as a structural, multidimensional phenomenon that no single policy can solve. It gives citizens, local authorities, social partners and civil society a yardstick to hold EU institutions to account as social legislation for the rest of the decade takes shape.

Source: Official Journal of the European Union, C series, C/2026/3766, 12 August 2026, notices, p. 1-21 (official reference: 2025/2095(INI) — P10_TA(2026)0049).