Sebastian Bergmann, board member of The PHP Foundation, argues in a blog post that European public administrations have already chosen PHP as the backbone of their digital sovereignty, largely without noticing it. His core thesis: when procurement documents say "digital sovereignty", they repeatedly describe PHP applications.

Germany is spending €108 million over four years on version 11 of the Government Site Builder, the federal administration's standard CMS: €26.88 million for development and support, €73.2 million for migration and relaunch, €8 million for operations. More than 80 federal agencies already use it across over 250 websites. The evaluation shortlist consisted exclusively of PHP applications, Drupal and TYPO3, with TYPO3 winning. A consortium led by CPS develops GSB 11, while 17 TYPO3 agencies under the Materna Group handle migration. Swiss parliamentarians have cited the German decision as best practice.

Other cases: the European Commission's Europa Web Publishing Platform runs 770 Drupal sites for 44 services with 700 million visits and 2.2 billion page views per year. EASA's Sustainability Portal serves over 350 airlines and 31 national authorities on Drupal, with Matomo and Mautic. The Netherlands' GovNL CMS, France's state design system theme, LocalGov Drupal with over 58 UK and Irish councils reporting 50 to 80 percent savings, and Australia's GovCMS with more than 370 sites for 115 agencies all run on PHP.

The sovereign workplace follows the same pattern. The Bundescloud's SIB-Box, built on Nextcloud, serves roughly 300,000 federal users. openDesk integrates Nextcloud and is anchored in the German coalition agreement with an October 2028 deadline. Baden-Württemberg has migrated close to 60,000 teacher workplaces, and the International Criminal Court in The Hague plans adoption. Bergmann notes a caveat: Nextcloud's Files High Performance Backend is written in Rust, and the ADA engine announced in 2026 rewrites file access in PHP, Go, and Rust, so PHP carries the business logic while I/O paths shift away.

The asymmetry is the point. The PHP Foundation received $730,534 in 2025 contributions from 536 donors, with expenses exceeding donations by roughly $139,000, while thirteen contracted engineers maintain the language. Bergmann frames this as a structural gap: dependent institutions have no mechanism to turn dependency into maintenance funding.

He highlights one working model: Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency funded the PHP-FPM Web Services Tool and the evolution of PHP's stream layer. He then relays three procurement proposals from Drupal Association Interim CEO Tiffany Farriss: a sovereignty criterion worth 20 percent of tender evaluation points under the MEAT framework for verified open-source contributions, a maintenance line item of roughly 2 to 5 percent of contract value (up to 10 percent on complex projects), and a 30-day rule requiring non-sensitive publicly funded code to be contributed upstream. His call to action: administrations should put these criteria in their next tender, and agencies should include upstream maintenance as a standard bid line item.