Freedom to Stay: delivering the Single Market where people feel at home
Europe did not build the Single Market alone. From the outset, market integration was paired with cohesion policy so that prosperity could extend beyond capitals and core regions. That balance created trust, legitimacy, and shared progress in the European Union.
Today, that balance is under strain. Too many citizens experience the Single Market as working primarily for those who can move easily, while others feel compelled to leave their communities to access jobs, housing, or essential services. More than thirty years after its creation, the Single Market faces a simple but decisive test of credibility: can people rely on it to build a life where they feel at home, regardless of their location?
When territories lose access to essential services, people, jobs, companies and SMEs,, investments, and confidence soon follow. If opportunity continues to concentrate in a limited number of places, Europe risks drifting into a two-speed reality, regardless of its shared values and Treaty commitments.
Freedom to Stay: strengthening the Single Market from the ground up
The freedom to stay is not about limiting mobility. It is about making mobility a choice, not a necessity. It strengthens the Single Market by reconnecting competitiveness, territorial and social cohesion. It enables Europe to produce, innovate, and invest everywhere, because every place offers the foundations that citizens and businesses need, including reliable, accessible, affordable and high-quality services of general interest, skilled workers and strong local cohesion.
Services of General Interest (SGIs) sit at the heart of this vision. Access to affordable and high-quality SGIs is a fundamental right under the European Pillar of Social Rights and a shared EU value under Article 14 TFEU and Protocol No. 26. High-quality, affordable, and universal SGIs are not only pillars of social and territorial cohesion: They are structural assets for Europe’s competitiveness, resilience, and democratic trust.
A call for action to turn the Freedom to Stay into a reality
With this pledge the signatories want to address shared and systemic challenges: persistent investment gaps, skills shortages, digital transitions that risk widening territorial and social divides, demographic ageing, infrastructure deficits, regulatory fragmentation, and funding models that remain short-term or misaligned with the missions of SGIs.
Together, we speak with one voice: the Single Market requires a strong social and territorial foundation to deliver industrial ambition, demographic resilience, and public trust.
This pledge calls for:
1. Integrating the Freedom to Stay into the next Cohesion Policy cycle and the next Multiannual Financial Framework as a guiding objective.
2. Creating a “Freedom to Stay” indicator, designed to complement the European Semester and translate cohesion and SGI objectives into measurable outcomes.
3. Co-designing a European Action Plan on Services of General Interest, to deliver concrete follow-up to the Letta Report by developing a holistic Action Plan on SGIs.
Transforming the pledge into an EU-wide alliance
This pledge is a starting point of a broader alliance the signatories aim to create around the concept of Freedom to Stay, embracing all those parts of the economy and society who believe that this freedom should be an essential feature of a modern and inclusive Internal Market.
Find more on www.freedomtostay.eu
4 – 5 June 2026 (1,5 days)
Hotel Olsanka, Táboritská 1000/23, 130 00 Praha 3-Žižkov, Czechia
