From Contracts to Agency: The Commission’s Entrepreneurial Leadership Role in the 2025 RRF Amendment Cycle

The Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) has been widely interpreted as a turning point in EU economic governance, introducing a form of contractual governance in which national Recovery and Resilience Plans, Council Implementing Decisions and Operational Arrangements function as quasi-contracts between the European Commission and the Member States. While existing research has analyzed the design and implementation of these instruments by the Member states, we still know little about how the Commission’s leadership evolved during implementation and how its attempts to strategically reorient the Facility have been taken up across countries. This paper provides the first systematic analysis of whether the Commission’s call after June 2025 Communication, On the Road to 2026, which urged Member States to reorient their Recovery and Resilience Plans towards strategic objectives such as defence-industrial capacity, was translated into actual plan amendments. Using a hand-coded dataset of all post-July 2025 modification submissions, we examine the extent to which national amendments incorporated defence-related reforms and investments, and how these align with the Commission’s expectations. Empirically, we develop three indicators: 1) an alignment indicator capturing the presence of defence-oriented measures in each Member State’s updated plan; (2) a defence share ratio measuring the proportion of defence-related amendments relative to the total number of changes introduced; and (3) a financial reallocation measure estimating how much amended RRF funding was redirected toward defence or dual-use capabilities. Our findings reveal two core dynamics. First, the Commission’s role during the amendment cycle reflects a shift from strict contractual oversight toward a more entrepreneurial form of leadership that combines guidance and flexible interpretation of contractual provisions. Second, the extent of defence-oriented reorientation is uneven across the EU. Member States with higher structural commitment to defence showed higher alignment scores, larger defence shares, and greater funding reallocations in their amendments. Others with lower defence commitments introduced little or no defence content. This variation shows that the Commission’s policy ambition was taken up unevenly and was filtered through domestic priorities. Overall, the paper conceptualises the late-stage RRF not as a fixed contractual regime but as an evolving mode of executive action, and documents how the Commission’s attempt to open a defence-industrial window within the RRF was translated into highly uneven national amendments across the EU.