From having worked at a large French mobile operator, I can tell you that the EU money granted in European projects was/is not solely favoring France and Germany: we had a couple of people working full time to put together proposals for EU funded projects; they had a very high success rate and one of their tricks was to always include partners from small/poor European countries, because EU wanted to help these countries. So for a while, we had a bunch of projects with greek partners, even if they didn't bring much to the table from a project perspective. I hope this genuinely helped them.
You reaction is typical of small, rich nordic countries unfortunately.
How about lower taxes and no need for full time proposal writers? EU literally cannot see small companies, and I'm not even talking about that stupid preferred values wheel. Projects being evaluated on merits? Nah, let's fund things because they have a gender balanced team (look it up, I'm not kidding).
From a nordic perspective:
- We could have gotten our vaccines quicker outside of the EU.
- Insane amounts of our tax money is spent on idotic programs, often favoring France and Germany.
Somehow, an EU membership seems a lot lot less appealing now.