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The digital euro, a founding act of federal monetary sovereignty

As the European Parliament prepares to vote on the digital euro regulation and the European Central Bank targets a first issuance by 2029, Europe stands at a monetary crossroads whose full significance it has yet to grasp. The creation of a public digital currency, complementary to euro cash, is not a technical adjustment. It engages the very nature of the European project: will the Union be able to guarantee its citizens sovereign access to central bank money in a world where payments have become the terrain of geopolitical competition between great powers?

Minn Emmanuel Gerbault 20 min ta’ qari
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This article analyses the digital euro project through three complementary lenses. The first is the European payments landscape, whose fragmentation and dependence on non-European infrastructures now constitute a diagnosis shared by the ECB, the Commission and the Council. The second lens is legislative: the Commission's draft regulation, the Council's negotiating position adopted in December 2025, and the ongoing work in the European Parliament outline an ambitious but still contested regulatory framework. The third lens is the federalist reading that PromethEUs intends to defend: the digital euro must not be a compromise between national and corporatist interests, but a federal public good, a concrete expression of European monetary sovereignty.

1. The European payments landscape: a structurally deficient sovereignty

1.1. The fragmentation of the retail payments market

The European payments market suffers from a fundamental contradiction. The Union has built a single market, a single currency, an area of free movement, yet it has never been able to produce a truly pan-European and sovereign retail payment system. Each member state has developed its own national solution: Bizum in Spain, iDEAL in the Netherlands, Payconiq in Belgium, Girocard in Germany. None of these solutions works across national borders. A Belgian consumer purchasing from a Dutch retailer must resort to an international card scheme. This fragmentation is not an accident of history: it results from the superposition of national pride, competing banking interests, and a lack of common political will to build the infrastructure the internal market still lacks.

1.2. Dependence on non-European infrastructures

1.2.1. A diagnosis quantified by the ECB

The ECB's report on card schemes in the EU, published in February 2025, provided an unambiguous diagnosis. Of the twenty-one eurozone countries, thirteen depend entirely on international card schemes for in-store retail transactions. In 2022, international schemes accounted for approximately 61% of all card payments in the euro area, with national schemes covering only the remaining 39%. This ratio worsens further when cross-border transactions by euro area cardholders with merchants outside the zone are included, as these are carried out exclusively by international schemes. Moreover, none of the four main cross-border card processors identified in the EU can be described as a fully European-owned entity.

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Topics Ekonomija / Kummerċ Politiki pubbliċi

Referenzi

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