The Right to Stay Strategy: Helping Regions Make ‘Staying’ a Real Choice

Themis Christophidou

The Director-General of the European Commission’s Regional and Urban. Policy department (DG REGIO)

In the 2024 report ‘Much more than a market: empowering the Single Market to deliver a sustainable future and prosperity for all EU citizens’ Enrico Letta warns that widening regional inequalities risk creating a ‘geography of discontent’, while the Draghi report ‘The future of European Competitiveness’ made clear that territorial imbalances are not only a social risk but an economic one, weakening Europe’s overall capacity to grow, innovate and compete globally.

The message from both reports is clear: the Single Market will remain incomplete so long as opportunity, investment and essential services are concentrated in a limited number of successful hubs, while other regions face decline, depopulation and a steady erosion of quality of life.

In this spirit, Executive Vice-President Fitto has been tasked is to match Europe’s cherished freedom of movement with a genuine right to stay: a commitment to ensure that people are not forced to leave their home regions for lack of jobs, housing, services or infrastructure. The Right to Stay Strategy, planned for adoption early 2027, will aim to ensure that regions across Europe are better equipped not merely to withstand demographic and economic change, but to turn it into a foundation for renewed prosperity and choice, closely linked to a broader agenda of competitiveness, skills, connectivity and resilience.

The Right to Stay places regions at the center of the conversation. The realities of depopulation in a mountain village are not the same as those in a post-industrial town or a remote island. Effective action can only be delivered through place-based solutions that build on local strengths and ambitions. In this context, regional and local authorities are indispensable actors. They know where infrastructure is missing, where services are under strain, where housing markets are failing, and where investment could make the greatest difference.

The Right to Stay advocates for policies designed around integration rather than fragmentation. Economic development cannot be separated from mobility, housing, education or digital access. If a region has jobs but no childcare, families leave. If it has decent housing but poor transport, workers leave. If it has schools but no business opportunities, young graduates leave. What is needed is a coherent framework that links investment, services and economic opportunity in the same territorial strategy.

That is why the debate about the future EU budget matters. The next generation of National and Regional Partnership Plans has the potential to translate the Right to Stay into practical reality. If designed well, these plans will give Member States and regions a simpler and more flexible framework to invest in business opportunities, employment, skills, connectivity, innovation and essential services in a coordinated manner. Just as importantly, they will make funding easier to navigate and more responsive to the realities of different territories. Simplification here is a precondition for action.

The challenge for each region will be to turn powerful ideas into durable policies. That will demand data-driven insights, coordination across levels of government, real partnership with stakeholders on the ground, and the political courage to prioritise long-term territorial resilience over short-term convenience. It will also require Europe and its regions to listen closely to the people living in places affected by depopulation and decline: they need to be engaged and provided the tools to shape their own future.

For the Right to Stay to have results on the ground, public authorities must shape investment choices in a clear and measurable way. They should embed the ‘right to stay’ principle when infrastructure is upgraded, when deciding how housing is supported, which services are protected, and how connectivity and economic opportunities can help linking rural and urban areas for the benefit of all. Reforms and multi-level governance arrangements are key enablers for successful action. While regions are best placed to design strategies that strengthen territorial attractiveness addressing local challenges, their ambition should be supported through national action.

The Right to Stay is one of the defining territorial ambitions of this Commission, because it answers a real European need. If Europe wants to remain competitive and cohesive it cannot allow opportunities to cluster in only a few places. People should always be free to move. But they should also have a genuine chance to stay, to prosper, and to believe that their future can be built at home.

The European project has always promised more than access to a single market. It has promised shared prosperity, social progress and territorial cohesion. The Right to Stay offers a way to renew that promise. It says that no region should be written off as peripheral or destined to slow abandonment. Geography should not determine opportunity so rigidly that entire communities are left behind.

That is the real promise of the Right to Stay. And it is a promise Europe can no longer afford to postpone.