EU Unblocks €6.6 B European Peace Facility Package for Ukraine After Budapest Veto Lifted

European cash for arms has been stuck before: in 1948 the U.S. Marshall Plan cleared Congress only after months of wrangling, unlocking $12 bn (1940s dollars) that reshaped post-war Europe. Like that moment, today’s decision reflects a larger trend—the EU’s halting but steady pivot from an economic club to a security actor, increasingly willing to pool debt and defence procurement and to override individual capitals once viewed as immovable. Hungary’s electoral U-turn exposes how small-state vetoes can delay but not permanently derail bloc consensus, echoing the 1963 “Empty Chair Crisis” when de Gaulle stalled the EEC for six months yet could not stop institutional deepening. On a 100-year arc this vote matters less for the €6.6 bn (roughly one month of Ukraine’s war burn-rate) than for the precedent: an off-budget mechanism that normalises EU financing of lethal aid, edging Europe toward strategic autonomy and a continental military-industrial base—an evolution that, if sustained, could redefine what the EU is by 2050 just as the Coal and Steel Community morphed into the current Union by 1993.