Pursuant to EU primary law, the establishment of the internal market must be combined with the objective of the sustainable development of Europe based in particular on ‘a highly competitive social market economy, aiming at full employment and social progress’. As the Court has held, the EU has not only an economic purpose, but also a social objective. Legal scholarship has devoted considerable attention to the interactions between the economic and social dimensions of the EU constitutional framework. From a methodological standpoint, a free and competitive internal market is often portrayed as being inherently in tension with the achievement of the EU social market economy. In this conflict, the argument goes, social rights are on the losing side because the Court favours the free market over social progress in its interpretation of economic freedoms and Union citizenship rights. This article calls these assumptions into question in the light of case law in the areas of social security and tax law.