New strategy to build a fairer future across generations
The EU is finally naming what's broken. Now comes the hard part.
Every generation inherits the choices of those before it, but today’s young people across Europe are being left with less. Housing is increasingly out of reach, the burden of public spending is shifted to the future, and mental health support remains underfunded. The climate transition needed to protect future generations has not been implemented at the scale required, and young people are still too often excluded from the decisions shaping their lives.
On March 4, 2026, the European Commission adopted its Strategy on Intergenerational Fairness, and for the first time, named all of this as a single, structural problem. We have been fighting for this for years and the fact that the Commission is now naming all these issues is not a small thing.
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What is the Strategy on Intergenerational Fairness?
The Strategy on Intergenerational Fairness is the EU's commitment to the UN Pact for the Future, an agreement from the 2024 UN Summit of the Future to protect the rights of future generations. It asks a simple question: are today’s decisions fair to those who will live with their consequences? The Commission admits that the EU has not done enough, and calls for policies to be designed with future generations in mind.
The Strategy is a political commitment to make intergenerational thinking a core principle across all EU policies. As Commissioner Glenn Micallef said at its launch, the true measure of success is “how far this lens gets infused into every policy area.” It’s ambitious, and the real test will be putting it into action.
What problem is it trying to fix?
Policymakers often prioritise short-term benefits, even if these create problems for younger people - who are not yet eligible to vote - or future generations. Over time, this creates accumulating economic, social, environmental and democratic debt.
We have been pointing this out for years. Our Youth Progress Index shows Europe has made virtually no progress on young people's rights and wellbeing since 2015, with housing, mental health and precarious employment among the most persistent failures. The Commission's new strategy names exactly these issues as intergenerational challenges. This framing matters because these are symptoms of structural political choices that have disadvantaged younger and future generations.
When policies are perceived as failing younger generations, trust in institutions erodes. That trust, once lost, is hard to rebuild.
How does the strategy propose to address this?
The strategy introduces a New Intergenerational Contract, structured around three pillars:
Fair Policymaking, which is about changing how decisions get made. It calls for anticipatory, evidence-based governance: using strategic foresight, impact assessments and genuine participation of those most affected by long-term decisions. The strategy is clear: young people must have a meaningful seat at the decision-making table.
Fair Opportunities, which focuses on access to quality education, stable and fair employment, affordable housing, and healthcare including mental health. It also recognises that wealth distribution and inheritance taxation shape how advantages and disadvantages are passed between generations.
Fair Places, which recognises that geography is an intergenerational issue too. Where you live (whether urban or rural, in a thriving city or a region experiencing decline) profoundly shapes your opportunities. The strategy calls for place-based action in partnership with local and regional authorities.
What we're celebrating
The Strategy paves the way for the Youth Check - an impact assessment tool which ensures that young people are considered when the EU is deciding on new policies and law - to become part of the Better Regulation framework. It also sets the foundations for the Youth Check to become part of the Better Regulation framework, the rules that govern how the EU creates and evaluates its policies. Getting the Youth Check in there means securing its use not as optional, but as a standard part of policy-making.
It also recognises a simple truth, that the generation in power has a responsibility to include young people in decision-making and make the investments they will live with longest — in climate transition, housing, health, welfare and in those systems that determine whether the green and digital transitions are effective and fair. That is not a radical ask, it is the baseline for achieving fairness between generations. Seeing it stated in an EU Commission strategy is worth naming.
The Strategy also highlights Erasmus+ and the European Solidarity Corps as key tools for intergenerational fairness, echoing our calls to embed youth priorities across all relevant programmes and support an ambitious Erasmus+ in the next budget cycle.
Its bigger ambition is mainstreaming: intergenerational fairness should not stand alone but guide all EU policies from the Multiannual Financial Framework to the European Semester, and beyond.
By 2026, the strategy commits to finalising an Intergenerational Fairness Index — a beyond-GDP measurement tool designed to capture inequalities across generations over time. As our own Youth Progress Index has shown, what we measure shapes what gets prioritised. A new index will create real accountability for the future.
Where we want to see this go
A strategy is just the start, the real question is what it unlocks.
Our top demand: the Youth Check must become mandatory, transparent, and embedded in the Better Regulation framework, applied consistently across all youth-relevant legislation. It shouldn't just headline Commission priorities. The Strategy is a very ambitious starting point, recognising Better Regulation is where foresight and good policy-making should be rooted.
More broadly, this Strategy gives youth organisations, civil society and supportive institutions a shared language to hold policymakers accountable. The European Parliament, Council, and all the other Commission Directorate-Generals (DGs), are invited to make intergenerational thinking part of their everyday work. That invitation needs to become a routine.
A progress report is due in early 2028, aligned with the United Nations’ follow-up on the Declaration on Future Generations. Until then, we will use this strategy to turn political promises into real change.
The EU has named what's broken. Now we need to make sure it gets fixed.
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