A major new investment commitment announced during President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan’s (pictured) state visit to Berlin signals a deeper economic relationship between two countries looking for reliable partners in an increasingly uncertain world.

The United Arab Emirates has announced plans to invest an additional €40 billion in Germany, one of the most substantial signals yet that the economic relationship between Europe’s largest industrial economy and the Gulf state is entering a new phase.

The commitment, announced during President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan’s state visit to Germany, will target sectors including industry, advanced technology, artificial intelligence, digital infrastructure and energy. Of the total, €10 billion is set to be invested in the German state of Bavaria.

The headline figure is striking. But its significance goes well beyond the amount involved.

The UAE has already invested around €34 billion in Germany. The new commitment therefore represents not simply another large capital allocation, but an attempt to deepen a relationship increasingly built around the industries and technologies that both countries see as central to their future competitiveness.

As Dr Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, UAE Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology and Envoy of the Minister of Foreign Affairs to Germany, put it: “The UAE invests for the long term and builds partnerships that endure.”

For Germany, the fresh injection of long-term capital arrives at an important moment.

The country has formidable strengths in engineering, manufacturing, chemicals, industrial technology and applied research. Yet maintaining that industrial position is becoming ever-more expensive. Artificial intelligence, digital infrastructure, advanced manufacturing, energy systems and industrial decarbonisation all require substantial investment at a time when German companies are also confronting higher costs, geopolitical uncertainty and growing international competition.

The UAE brings a different set of strengths: investment capacity, energy expertise, digital infrastructure and commercial connections across the Gulf, Asia and Africa. The logic of the partnership is therefore not simply that one country has money while the other needs investment. It is that their economic capabilities are increasingly complementary.

This synergy is reflected in the sectors identified for the new commitment. Rather than focusing narrowly on established assets, the investment is intended to support areas expected to shape industrial competitiveness over the coming decades.

Al Jaber said the intention was to support “the industries, technologies and skilled jobs that will drive future growth and competitiveness”, while strengthening energy security and supply chains and helping German companies continue to grow internationally.

That last point matters because the relationship works in both directions.

Germany gives Emirati investors access to one of the world’s deepest industrial and technological ecosystems. German companies, meanwhile, increasingly see the UAE not simply as a domestic market but as a platform from which to reach faster-growing economies across the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

The two countries’ economic relationship has already strengthened significantly in recent years, with a number of notable examples of cooperation. Emirati investment has reached sectors including chemicals and offshore wind, while leading German companies have become increasingly embedded in the UAE economy, with bilateral trade worth more than €13 billion last year, an increase of 15% compared to the previous year.

The new €40 billion investment marks a significant new phase of this deepening relationship, and the timing of the announcement also gives it a wider geopolitical significance.

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier captured the mood during the state visit when he observed that “the world has become a more turbulent place; old certainties are crumbling.” Against that backdrop, he argued that reliable and rational partners mattered more than ever, telling Sheikh Mohamed: “Germany is that kind of partner for you; you are that kind of partner for us.”

Those comments go to the heart of why Germany and the UAE’s economic relationship now matters far beyond the balance sheet.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine exposed the risks created by concentrated energy dependencies for Germany and countless other countries in Europe and around the world. Conflict in the Middle East has again demonstrated the vulnerability of trade routes, energy markets and supply chains. Global competition over AI and other critical technologies has made industrial capacity a highly strategic question as well as an economic one.

Both Germany and the UAE have reasons to diversify their partnerships in response.

Germany needs capital, energy relationships, technology partnerships and access to growing markets. The UAE is seeking to diversify an economy historically built around hydrocarbons while deepening its position in advanced technology, industry and global investment.

The €40 billion investment is a powerful statement of intent and a reaffirmation of a long-standing partnership between the two countries that could transform their industrial and technological strategies for years to come.

Summary

• The Kremlin is promoting Ukraine war veterans and, in so doing, cultivating a proto-elite to fill future vacancies and reinforce Russia’s militarised course.
• Through programmes such as “Time of Heroes”, and through elections, at least several thousand actual and nominal veterans now already hold political or government posts.
• The new preference for war credentials has supplanted the earlier trend of hiring technocrats. Russian cadre policy has shifted towards “making loyal people competent”, as in other consolidated autocracies. Technocrats will remain important, but their declining influence will gradually reduce the state’s economic and administrative adaptability.
• The Kremlin is dispersing veterans across institutions and deliberately mixing combatants with regular officials who have acquired veteran status. This will likely constrain the emergence of a coherent political veterans grouping.
• Nevertheless, the 2026 State Duma election is likely to bring around 50 nominal and actual veterans into parliament. Their presence could become an institutional brake on foreign policy moderation after a ceasefire or even future change of the top leadership in Russia.
• European governments should remain cool in the face of enhanced rhetoric from the new elite; maintain informal contact (where possible and safe) with less confrontational sections of Russia’s governing class; and keep mobility options open to young Russians, while taking necessary precautions.

Cadres in khaki

Like much else in wartime Russia, the United Russia line-up for the September 2026 State Duma election was settled only at the eleventh hour and with Vladimir Putin personally involved. The five names placed at the top of the ruling party’s nationwide list made for a revealing mix: foreign minister Sergei Lavrov; Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin; Yevgeny Poddubny, one of Russia’s best-known pro-war military correspondents; Maria Lvova-Belova, who is subject to an International Criminal Court arrest warrant alongside Putin for her role in the deportation of Ukrainian children; and Vladislav Golovin, a young veteran who lost a leg during Russia’s assault on Mariupol.

This choice offers a snapshot of a broader shift already under way within Russia’s bureaucracy, and one that is likely to accelerate in the coming years. Lavrov represents the old guard bureaucracy; Sobyanin, the mid-2010s class of capable managers with appeal among urban Russians; the other three owe their newfound political prominence largely to the war in Ukraine. Technocrats and qualified administrators, like Sobyanin, whose presence within the elite expanded in the years preceding the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, are receding into the background. They will not disappear altogether, because their expertise remains crucial to keep the Russian economy functioning. But they are no longer a rising force. The war is producing a new elite cohort whose careers and status are inseparable from the war. Like any elite group in other post-Soviet authoritarian systems, this cohort has its own set of functions and tasks, which it performs in the interests of the ruling circle or—in the highly personalist Russian system—for the ruler himself.

Putin set out his intention to create a new group within the Russian bureaucracy most explicitly in his February 2024 annual address to senior officials. In it, he announced the launch of the “Time of Heroes” programme to retrain military personnel and prepare them for appointments to civilian posts. In particular, Putin said a “genuine elite” should be drawn from contract soldiers and mobilised servicemen who had fought in Ukraine and, after further training, take up positions “across education…, in state-owned enterprises [and] business, in state and municipal administration”. They would replace parts of the old elite, particularly those who had “lined their pockets in the 1990s”. Ultimately, he suggested, they could become the generation to which “Russia might one day be entrusted”.

Between February 2024 and July 2026, Putin returned to this idea at least 22 times based on the Kremlin.ru record of his official and public activities (calculations undertaken by the author). Some of these remarks came during dedicated meetings with officers or their wives. But Putin also raised the subject in less obvious settings, including a forum with municipal leaders and his most recent televised Direct Line, a regular event where he responds to questions from citizens and journalists. During the latter, he repeatedly gave the floor to a specially invited officer and even asked his advice; the officer was later killed at the front.

Putin’s de facto promise to “entrust” Russia to people who had fought in the war, his repeated references to a new elite and the constant emphasis on his personal oversight of the Time of Heroes programme have prompted several explanations.

The most common is that the initiative is meant to support military recruitment by showing that fighting in Ukraine can lead to substantial career opportunities after a return to civilian life. The second sees it as a means of political control: the Kremlin can identify ambitious veterans, bind their careers to the state and absorb them before they organise independently or become political rivals. The third assigns veterans a larger political role. In this reading, Putin is seeking to push aside established business and bureaucratic elites in favour of ideologically conformist loyalists, including veterans, with the supposition that Russia could turn into a closed, North Korean-style militarised autocracy over the next 6-10 years.

Without dismissing any of these three explanations, this paper shows that the Kremlin’s integration of war veterans into the government system is part of a structural, long-term project. The state is creating a new recruitment pool of people tied directly to the war. It is selecting and training them for gradual promotion into positions of power. This marks a genuine shift in Russian cadre policy, away from a “make competent people loyal” model, associated with competitive authoritarianism, to a “make loyal people competent” logic, which is more typical for consolidated dictatorships. In his forthcoming book, “Autocratic Intelligence: How Modern Dictatorships are Getting Smarter”, George Washington University political scientist David Szakonyi identifies a broader tendency across regimes. Despite a steady trend between 2000 and 2020 towards increasing the share of technocrats in government, in more recent years dictators have found it less expensive to build up the competence of those already considered loyal (largely because securing the loyalty of competent officials has become more costly).

The paper maps this new recruitment pool by using a dataset including a named roster of federal Time of Heroes participants, their biographies, actual combat participation and post-programme appointments. These data were supplemented by three interviews with programme lecturers undertaken by the author and by publicly available information on applications and enrolment in regional equivalents of the Time of Heroes programme. The paper also draws on a named roster of 2026 Russian State Duma candidates who identified themselves as war participants, including their biographies and actual combat participation. This is supplemented by aggregate data on serving deputies with military experience elected to all regional and selected municipal legislatures between 2022 and 2025.

The data allow us to test whether two forms of loyalty appear to be rewarded via these programmes. It is assumed, first, that most veterans promoted through the system will owe their careers to Putin personally. The second assumption is that they will have an ideological coherence and loyalty intimately bound up with Putin’s decision to wage war against Ukraine and to a broader clash with NATO.

The findings of the paper confirm that the Russian regime is placing veterans in the middle and upper-middle ranks of the bureaucracy and state-linked structures. It seems to be integrating them into existing elite structures without fully displacing the other main elite groups, including siloviki (individuals with a background in the security services), technocrats and state company managers. The paper further suggests that veterans’ presence will place pressure on bureaucratic and business elites to demonstrate their loyalty to the military by extending tangible support for the war. Over time, these developments have the potential to create a vocal, embedded constituency for a militarised foreign policy orientated towards preparing society and the bureaucratic system for wider confrontation with the West; or protecting Putin’s wartime legacy if the regime weakens or pursues a partial rapprochement with Europe and America.

Putin’s need for new recruitment pools

In democracies, governing elites are renewed through channels such as competitive elections, party turnover and entry from business or civil society. In contrast, autocracies close these channels off. Personnel appointments are thus instrumental to helping the winning coalition in authoritarian regimes reward allies, co-opt rivals and remove potential challengers. Yet regime survival also depends on having competent officials to do the work of running things. This creates what political economists Georgy Egorov and Konstantin Sonin (drawing in part on evidence from Russia) call the “loyalty-competence trade-off”: capable subordinates improve state performance but may gain the networks and authority to threaten the ruler; yet safer loyalists may lack the skills to govern.

The practical challenge for leaders like Putin is to build recruitment pools that provide competence without allowing rivals to emerge. Party-based autocracies can manage this risk through internal career ladders and controlled competition. The ruling party screens, trains and monitors candidates. This gives the leadership a broad pool of officials whose performance it can observe and whose careers it can control. In more personalistic regimes like Russia, capable outsiders have little incentive to build a career in politics or state service and are unlikely to make their abilities more widely known. So the ruler must draw on groups already within reach—or create new recruitment pools by establishing dedicated programmes.

During his first two presidential terms, Putin drew senior personnel from two main recruitment pools. One consisted of his childhood friends, former KGB colleagues and associates from St Petersburg city hall; the other was siloviki. Personal acquaintance was enough to advance members of the first group. Siloviki could gain posts without a direct connection to Putin because they came from a professional and ideological milieu he knew and trusted. The model worked partly because some longtime associates brought genuine economic or administrative expertise along with their loyalty.

By around 2016, the first pool was running dry: most available figures had already received positions while others had fallen out of favour. Although people with a silovik background held around 20% of key posts by 2008, their progression into senior civilian roles later slowed. Instead, the security agencies gained broader powers as the regime grew more repressive.

At the same time, the Kremlin’s need for capable managers increased. The return of gubernatorial elections in 2012 created particular demand for candidates who were loyal, independent of regional elites and able to manage an administration and run a public campaign. Such people were difficult to find, especially as by that time governors in Russia had lost autonomy and faced a growing risk of prosecution.

Putin initially responded by recycling personnel. His third and fourth terms brought frequent rotations of the same figures between senior posts in the bureaucracy and state-owned companies, while some officials remained in place for decades. This produced a personnel bottleneck and left mid-ranking officials with few routes to the top.

An experiment with appointing members of Putin’s personal body guard detail as governors showed the limits of personal familiarity as a selection mechanism. These officials were loyal, but often lacked experience in management. All of them were later dismissed from their posts as governors.

A more successful approach emerged after the current supervisor of domestic politics, Sergei Kiriyenko, joined the presidential administration in 2016. He turned previously marginal personnel reserves into an important source of appointments. Kiriyenko created the “School of Governors”, “Leaders of Russia” and other specific cadre programmes, combining competitive selection and training with visible presidential sponsorship. Participants met Putin and were presented as young, effective technocrats. This gave the Kremlin candidates who appeared competent but remained dependent on the regime for advancement. The technocratic turn peaked with Mikhail Mishustin’s appointment as prime minister in 2020 and the subsequent reshaping of the government.

These programmes, together with recruitment into Mishustin’s government, formed a new technocratic pool for mid-to-senior level federal officials (ministers, deputy ministers and departmental directors), as well as senior regional officials. As a result, between 2017 and 2024, almost 400 people were trained through the School of Governors, and 52 graduates went on to become heads of regions. The Leaders of Russia programme produced similar results, with more focus on the federal level. Szakonyi’s biographical database of 1,578 senior Russian officials shows that roughly one in six top officials serving in 2024 was a technocrat, nearly three times the share in 2000.

Yet the prolonged war in Ukraine may have eroded the confidence of Putin and his circle in the technocratic recruitment pool. Technocrats appeared insufficiently committed to the war, while some failed on tasks central to it, including the construction of fortifications in the frontline Kursk region. Russia’s technocratic turn is now losing momentum, and Putin’s relationship even with key figures in this group, such as central bank governor Elvira Nabiullina, appears to be changing. This has made the creation and expansion of a new, more reliably loyal recruitment pool increasingly urgent.

Federal “heroes”: Filling the bureaucracy’s middle ranks

The Time of Heroes programme announced by Putin in February 2024 is the main vehicle for building the recruitment pool needed for his new “elite”. It is run by the Higher School of Public Administration of RANEPA (the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration). The programme follows the model of earlier cadre initiatives, combining lectures and team building with practical placements. In 2025, it effectively supplanted the technocrat-orientated School of Governors, whose next intake was postponed. (The next section in this paper discusses the regional Time of Heroes variants, which were set up later.)

Time of Heroes is open only to participants in Russia’s war against Ukraine, including contract soldiers and mobilised servicemen with a university degree. Official figures show more than 65,000 people applied online and underwent initial testing for the programme’s two federal cohorts in 2024 and 2025. Just under 170 progressed to in-person training.

Unlike other RANEPA cadre programmes, Time of Heroes has not published a detailed curriculum. However, this paper draws on both the programme curriculum and the full participant lists for its two cohorts, obtained from lecturers who taught on the programme.

Both in-person cohorts began the programme with a two-week voyage aboard a nuclear-powered icebreaker from Murmansk to the North Pole and back. The journey was symbolically important, given the place of the Arctic in the worldview of Russia’s ruling elite. But it also served a political purpose: two weeks of isolation from the outside world provided an intensive opening exercise in cohort-building for participants.

Overall, however, Time of Heroes devotes relatively little time to such activities. Instead, it focuses on honing participants’ hard skills and giving them practical administrative experience. In contrast, School of Governors puts the trainee technocrats through numerous team building, patriotic and sometimes extreme exercises, including jumping into water from a 7-metre-high cliff and lying beneath a moving tank. Hard skills and practical administrative work account for 68% of Time of Heroes compared with 34% of the School of Governors. Team building and activities intended to foster horizontal ties make up just 11% against 35%. For all these differences, the programmes devote a similar share of 11-13% to “political information”: talks by senior state officials and propagandists on national priorities and patriotism.

The contrast between the two programmes suggests a shift from the “make competent people loyal” cadre model to “make loyal people competent”. School of Governors appears to have selected recruits for their administrative ability and then worked to bind them more closely to the regime. By contrast, Time of Heroes treats participation in the war as proof of ideological loyalty and concentrates on turning those already trusted by the Kremlin into capable administrators.

Early expert and media commentary questioned whether the Time of Heroes programme was genuine. It suggested that serving officials and politicians might simply use it to advance their careers without experiencing real combat. But the author’s research of all 169 participants in the two Time of Heroes cohorts (see detailed methodology of data collection and analysis in the appendix) suggests it does provide a genuine route into civilian career for military personnel who have fought in Ukraine.

Of the participants, 84% have exclusively military backgrounds. Another 9% moved between military and civilian work, either joining the armed forces after a brief civilian career or returning to them following the full-scale invasion. Junior officers—from lieutenant to captain—and senior officers—from major to colonel—together account for around 90%; only a handful are generals. Participants’ average age is 40. The programme includes 159 men and 10 women, most of the latter medical officers who worked as critical-care specialists or surgeons, likely close to the frontline.

Drawing on official Russian sources, independent media investigations and Ukrainian projects, we found strong evidence of actual combat participation for 94% of the 156 participants whose records we could assess (out of the 169 in total). Moreover, almost 40% of the recruits have been awarded major combat decorations, with recipients concentrated in the second cohort of the programme. In addition, at least 13 have been accused of war crimes, including involvement in some of the most notorious crimes committed in the Kyiv region in spring 2022. Public records or participants’ interviews indicate that almost half were seriously wounded. Some, including participants later appointed to senior government posts, applied to the programme directly from hospital after sustaining severe injuries.

One lecturer on the programme summed up the participants as “very simple, well-drilled Russian blokes”. Another said that after a trial class on a very specific economic topic, he had to simplify an already adapted syllabus even further to accommodate participants who “could not focus for even half an hour”, which he thought might be a consequence of their injuries.

Progression

Nevertheless, by July 2026, 108 of the 169 participants in the two Time of Heroes cohorts had been appointed to posts at different levels of government or in state-owned companies. Another four had continued working in the government posts they held before entering the programme, although one was later killed in an explosion after returning from the front. Yet none of the biographical or service-related characteristics described above is a statistically significant predictor of receiving an appointment. This confirms thatthe programme appears to genuinely serve as a route for upward mobility and starting point into a civilian career for participants.

Although Time of Heroes is a federal programme, only just over half entered federal-level bodies. The remainder secured appointments on the regional or municipal level.

For this analysis, all appointments were grouped by their primary function into four categories. “Management” covers posts carrying substantive responsibility for running a particular sector, organisation or segment of the economy, mostly in the form of heading a ministry department or state-company division. “Ideology” includes youth policy, patriotic education and state messaging, including posts in Yunarmiya, Znanie and Movement of the First—state-sponsored organisations for patriotic education, revived from its Soviet predecessors. “Veteran liaison” covers non-security roles supporting veterans and their families. “Security liaison” refers to civilian posts coordinating with the security services in regional government or at strategically important enterprises.

Management is the largest category at both federal and regional levels, accounting for 47-54% of appointments. These posts frequently place veterans in sectors in which they have no relevant education or training. Such mismatches are not unprecedented in the Russian bureaucracy, but they had become less common at federal level as technocratic recruitment gained ground from the mid-2010s. Veteran appointments therefore represent a partial departure from that recent trend.

The range of managerial roles also shows how broadly war veterans are distributed across the Russian bureaucratic landscape. Participants in the all-out invasion of Ukraine can now be found in the presidential administration monitoring public sentiment, running the Roscosmos Corporate Academy, overseeing special communications at Rostelecom, managing the training process of Russian athletes and monitoring elections in the Central Election Commission.

For roughly the other half of appointees, the Kremlin has found three more clearly defined uses: of ideology, veteran liaison and security liaison, as outlined above. These narrower remits better fit veterans’ profiles, require less general administrative expertise and serve the Kremlin’s immediate and medium-term needs.

Ideological roles are concentrated at the federal level, where they make up 35% of appointments. They turn veterans into public advocates for the war and use them as an additional tool for the ideologisation of primary and secondary education. Golovin, mentioned earlier as the fifth-placed candidate on United Russia’s election list, now heads Yunarmiya’s Main Staff; the youth movement operates through schools and cadet classes. Meanwhile, the federal education ministry department responsible for pupils’ moral and patriotic upbringing is headed by Igor Yurgin, who previously commanded an assault unit of convicts and mobilised soldiers notorious for high-casualty “meat assaults”.

Veteran-liaison posts are at 15-20% for both the federal and regional level, where appointees’ role appears to be to manage rising social tensions over delayed payments, prolonged frontline deployments and issues with employment after discharge. At the federal level, one veteran now advises the labour and social protection minister, with responsibility for gathering feedback from former servicemen and their families. At a regional level, this intermediary function has often been embedded directly in the welfare bureaucracy: for example, in Altai Krai, a major decorated with the Order of Courage twice became deputy social protection minister.

The smaller security liaison category supports security coordination in the regions and at strategically important industrial facilities. Typically, a veteran becomes the civilian institution’s interlocutor with the military and siloviki. Their background is expected to help them understand security requirements while negotiating how these are applied, so that civilian administration or operations are not unduly disrupted. Examples include a deputy governor overseeing public safety and relations with the police and security agencies, or an adviser to the head of the federal civil aviation agency handling relations with the defence ministry.

Veterans’ career trajectories suggest that appointments usually build on existing connections. In 88% of cases in which a veteran received a regional post, it was in their home region (defined as a place of birth, education or extended previous military service). In around 45% of cases, the appointment also matched the institution or region of the participant’s first or second internship in Time of Heroes.

Together with the division of appointments among the four categories, these patterns point to a practical approach adopted by the programme’s supervisors in the presidential administration. On the one hand, their objective is to find managerial posts for as many participants as possible across a wide range of sectors and regions. This gives the Kremlin a pool of loyal candidates who have acquired relevant experience, available for when Putin later calls for a veteran to fill a particular and more high-ranking vacancy. On the other hand, it seems that the supervisors are also using veterans to address medium-term political aims for the regime. This is producing a group that promotes militarised values in education and youth policy, a second group that mediates between the state and dissatisfied servicemen and their families, and a third that connects civilian institutions with the security apparatus.

At this stage, veterans’ longer-term prospects do not appear to differ substantially according to the function of their first appointment. The exception is with the municipal posts, which carry the least status and appear unlikely to provide a route to significant promotion. Across federal and regional appointments, subsequent advancement may depend more on performance and the appointee’s relationship with their senior supervisor than on the initial brief.

The timing and sequencing of appointments support this interpretation. Initial batches follow Russia’s electoral calendar, peaking around the annual voting day in September. Veterans who perform well in their posts can then be fast-tracked from regional to federal ministry; from deputy director to director of a state organisation; from deputy governor to governor; or some receive a symbolic but higher-status seat on a presidential commission alongside more managerial appointments. For at least 10 veterans, the September 2026 State Duma election is likely to be the next step, giving them a second or third appointment.

One programme lecturer described a similar logic with reference to the project’s length and multiple stages: all the “capable” and “more or less healthy” veterans had already received government posts. Meanwhile, those “in good standing” with their current senior supervisors were being lined up for promotion.

Yet Time of Heroes also serves a third, more immediate political function. When the programme was launched, analysts often interpreted it chiefly as a publicity instrument: by showcasing veterans entering prestigious civilian careers, the Kremlin could present wartime service as a route to social mobility, encourage contract enlistment and reassure servicemen that their participation in the war would be rewarded after their return to civilian life. How far the appointments perform this function becomes clearer when the substantive authority they confer is considered alongside the recipients’ previous careers.

By July 2026, no war veteran had reached the highest state offices, such as federal minister, head of a federal agency or deputy prime minister. Only four of the 108 appointees had reached the next tier down in the nomenklatura hierarchy, which includes governors and presidential envoys.

Of these, only Alexander Shuvaev, appointed governor of Belgorod region in spring 2026, had pursued an exclusively military career before 2022. His promotion illustrates the career ladder envisaged by the programme: after gaining short civilian experience as deputy governor in another region, he was selected when Putin called for a veteran to fill the more senior vacancy, becoming governor of a region bordering Ukraine where his frontline background seems more relevant.

However, the remaining three senior appointees entered the programme with prior political or bureaucratic experience. Artyom Zhoga, among the programme’s first appointees, went straight into the post of presidential envoy to the Urals Federal District. He had fought in Ukraine since 2014 but began building a political career in the occupied territories from 2023. The other two, Yevgeny Pervyshov and Maria Kostyuk, already had bureaucratic careers before 2022; the war and the programme accelerated their advancement into governorships. Kostyuk offers the clearest example of this political function. Formally the programme’s head rather than a participant, she nevertheless appeared on the participant lists supplied to us. The programme’s official website also regularly presents her governorship as one of the promotions produced by Time of Heroes. Kostyuk has not seen combat, but after her son was killed in 2022, she developed a nationally prominent pro-war media project and moved into veteran policy roles, helping her advance from a senior regional administrative post to governor.

These four senior appointments provide the Kremlin with highly visible examples of the social mobility promised by the programme. But they remain exceptions within its broader record. Ninety-two of the 108 appointments (85%) have settled in the middle and upper-middle ranks. Career military personnel hold most of these posts, which carry real but bounded authority, from heads of departments, units and public organisations to deputy ministers and senior managers in state-linked companies. Another 12 received positions such as advisers and project officers; nine of these came from military backgrounds and the remaining three had held only junior civilian roles before 2022.

Taken together, the appointments reveal a managed career pipeline. Time of Heroes supplies visible success stories for the Kremlin’s recruitment campaign, deploys veterans to meet immediate wartime needs and endows a broader cohort with the civilian experience needed for possible promotion. Advancement remains selective and dependent on existing patrons. This allows the presidential administration to build a reserve of war-linked officials while retaining control over when and how far they rise.

Regional “heroes”: Managing the return from war

In December 2024, Putin again invoked the idea of a new elite and ordered Russia’s regions to set up their own versions of Time of Heroes. Their purpose, he said, was to bring into “regional teams” people for whom “a sense of duty and service to society and the country come first”. Five months later, the Kremlin issued a requirement for Russia’s regions to train up 30-60 veterans each year. (This requirement joined metrics including poverty levels, access to healthcare and demographic trends.) In effect, the shift in federal cadre policy was extended to the regions, to be led largely by technocratic governors appointed under the previous recruitment model.

During 2025, every Russian region except Moscow launched its own equivalent; the capital apparently treated hosting the federal programme as sufficient. Regional programmes largely replicate the federal scheme: they recruit locally rooted combat veterans for posts in their home administrations, combine classroom instruction with practical placements and mentoring by serving officials, and are often delivered through regional RANEPA campuses. Federal Time of Heroes graduates serve as mentors or sit on their public councils.

The authoritarian dynamic in Russian centre-region relations rewards governors for demonstrating zealous, often excessive, compliance with Moscow’s demands. This existing dynamic is now also shaped by the Kremlin’s wartime priorities and thus produced the usual bureaucratic competition among regions over meeting the new veteran-training target. This saw governors attempt to give their own programmes maximum publicity, devise inventive names such as “The Call of Stalingrad” and “Valour of the Mountains”, and try to exceed the targets set by Moscow. By September 2026, one region had already run three separate, consecutive cohorts, more than the federal analogue; 31 (out of more than 80 regions) had formally enrolled more than 60 participants in a single cohort.

According to official regional figures, almost 44,000 people have applied to these programmes since 2024, with nearly 4,500 admitted. This puts the acceptance rate at around 10%, well above the 0.26% acceptance rate for the federal programme. But around 1,200 of those formally admitted to regional programmes remained in a deferred pool because they were still deployed. Both the use and size of this pool grew after the Kremlin introduced a rule preventing programmes from taking personnel away from the front.

In absolute terms, large regions with major military garrisons lead the number of enrolled veterans on their programmes. Moscow oblast received 2,400 applications, followed by Bashkortostan with 2,026 and Krasnodar region with 2,000. Formal enrolment followed a different pattern. Among regions with more than one million residents, Tula recorded the highest rate, with 130 admissions, or 8.93 per 100,000 residents, followed by Kursk (8.19) and Kaliningrad (6.78).

There is no statistically significant relationship between enrolment and either basic regional socioeconomic indicators or confirmed military deaths. Among regions with more than one million residents, the 10 with the highest per capita enrolment together recorded 8.2 confirmed military deaths per 10,000 residents, below the national rate of 9.05. Higher wartime losses therefore did not systematically translate into larger regional training cohorts.

Instead, the scale of regional programmes highly likely depends on an administrative and political choice by governors. The outliers are often regions whose governors have personal reasons to overperform. The Jewish Autonomous Region received almost 11 times the median number of applications, while Tambov enrolled as many participants as Moscow region despite having one-ninth of its population. As noted, governors Kostyuk and Pervyshov took part in the federal Time of Heroes programme and have a personal stake in making the model work. The Republic of Altai accepted 28% of applicants, more than twice the median, and has among the largest number of participants appointed to government posts. Following his demotion from senior federal politics to head of the poor, remote region of Altai, governor Andrei Turchak has strong incentives to regain Moscow’s trust. In Samara region, 93% of the first cohort found posts, while the second intake doubled to 90 participants, exceeding the KPI by 50%. This likely reflects governor Vyacheslav Fedorishchev’s conservative, outspokenly pro-war populism.

The architecture and public image of the regional Time of Heroes reproduce the federal political demand of elite building. However, the programme supervisors in the presidential administration have reportedly also insisted on prioritising short-term administrative function for the veterans in regions. They expect to see them serving as credible intermediaries with other returnees, who might dismiss an ordinary official who had not fought, but would be more willing to engage with a fellow veteran.

This search for intermediaries appears to reflect concern that regions have started to feel the pressure of the ever-growing population of returnees. An estimated 170,000–400,000 people have already come back from the war. Many are struggling to find work and are facing social deprivation, fuelled partly by crimes committed by returnees, with some with previous criminal records and PTSD.

The regions are already feeling this burden, but the pattern of how Russia’s central-regional relations are structured overall is also evident in the context of work with veterans. As recent studies by political scientist András Tóth-Czifra show, federal measures for the integration of veterans are inadequate, and overall the Kremlin is reverting to a familiar tactic: delegating responsibility for returning servicemen without providing regions with additional resources.

The intermediary function envisaged by the Kremlin, together with this shortage of resources, helps explain why regional appointments differ from those produced by the federal programme. Although information on appointments from regional programmes remains fragmentary, veteran-liaison roles appear to account for 44% of regional appointments. This compares with 18% among graduates of the federal programme, while only 22% enter general management, against 50% federally. Ideological posts are also slightly more common, at 30% compared with 26%.

Regions are not simply filling vacancies, as was largely the case under the federal programme: 31% of all appointments went to newly created or repurposed veteran support posts, including units in regional ministries, agencies and advisers to governors. Six per cent of ideology-related appointments have the same logic. This is a regional strategy for adapting the federal elite-building model to scarce resources: create a limited administrative infrastructure around the new cohort and use its members to manage the much larger veteran population and social discontent regarding the war.

The shift in cadre policy is thus generating a new regional personnel pool of politically approved veterans, even if most are unlikely to reach senior office. With Moscow demanding their integration but leaving regions to manage the social costs, governors have little choice but to use this cohort to draw a visible line between “good” veterans who serve the state and “bad” returnees associated with crime and disorder, while buffering the tensions that mass demobilisation could bring.

Elected veterans: Blurring the boundaries of veteran status

Elections have become the third and final main route for integrating veterans into elite structures. This was not a significant feature in the first years of the war but became more common following Putin’s 2024 call for a “new elite”.

Russia’s 2026 State Duma election will be the first federal parliamentary contest since the full-scale invasion. The data suggest that a trend of promoting veterans into regional and municipal legislatures is set to continue at the federal level. That being said, (semi-official) ambitions in this regard appear to have tempered over time. In 2025, Kremlin-aligned experts predicted that veterans could take 40% of the Duma’s 450 seats. The estimate later fell to 20%, or 100 seats, and with the final confirmed number of candidates we now know this is yet lower. This retreat may reflect concerns within the presidential administration that a large veteran bloc would be harder to manage than the existing parliamentary factions.

The main route into the Duma mirrors the pattern seen in regional elections. All parliamentary parties are fielding veterans in this election, but the overwhelming majority of those set to win represent United Russia. Analysis of the 2025 regional election results suggests that United Russia veteran candidates enjoyed an electoral premium, aided by stronger administrative mobilisation as regional officials sought to meet a Kremlin priority. Veterans standing for other parties faced an electoral penalty, reflecting broader public unease and suspicion towards those returning from the war.

Of the 546 veterans who entered United Russia’s 2026 primaries for the State Duma election, the party ultimately registered 83 as candidates, or 15% of the total. Twenty-eight individuals had completed the federal Time of Heroes programme, 17 of whom secured a job following the programme. For 11 participants, election would be their first public post. The remaining 55 presented themselves as war participants but had not taken part in the federal or regional Time of Heroes programme. One federal Time of Heroes lecturer said that programme organisers explained the absence of a third cohort by describing the Duma election as “the real third cohort”.

Unlike the federal Time of Heroes programme, whose participants and appointees were mostly career military personnel with actual combat experience, United Russia’s veteran candidates for the State Duma have a markedly different profile. Analysis of their biographies found that at least 31 of the 83 are unlikely to have seen combat, despite presenting themselves as “SVO participants” (“special military operation” candidates) on the party’s primary website and during the election campaign. Twenty of these candidates were already politicians or officials before 2022, including serving Duma deputies, regional legislators, sectoral lobbyists and former Ukrainian officials who sided with Russia. Most of the 31 claim war participant status through special “volunteer battalions” set up by officials, which independent media investigations have found generally operate far from the frontline.

The filtering out of combat veterans began at the primary stage. Our calculations suggest that 427 of the 463 war-linked contenders excluded from United Russia’s final slate had probably seen combat; even a 25% bonus added to veterans’ results could not overcome the party’s tightly managed selection process. In one single-member district, the bonus produced an apparently unplanned victory for a combat veteran over a three-term Duma deputy. The veteran withdrew two weeks later, allowing party managers to return the nomination to the incumbent.

Based on list positions and the dynamics in single-member districts, our projection suggests 47 likely veteran winners, 25 of whom are career military personnel, with 19 already officials or politicians before 2022, and three from civilian careers without prior public office (who were drafted and participated in the war). Enrolment in Time of Heroes is the clearest marker of favourable electoral prospects: 19 of the programme’s 28 candidates are projected to win—68%, against 51% for the remainder of the list. With only four of the 48 veteran candidates fielded by other parliamentary parties in potentially winnable positions, the next Russian State Duma is likely to contain no more than 50 self-declared war veterans, making up around 11% of its 450 deputies.

The same pattern appears in regional legislatures: veterans remain a limited presence, and confirmed combatants sit alongside politicians who have acquired the label. Although officials claim that hundreds or even thousands of war participants became deputies in elections in 2024 and 2025, most hold unpaid seats on municipal councils. According to our data, by July 2026 in more consequential legislative bodies, such as regional parliaments and the city councils of regional capitals, veterans generally occupy only 6-10% of seats. Beyond the least populous regions, higher veteran representation is found mainly in territories with high confirmed military losses, such as Republic of Tuva, where veterans hold five of 32 seats (16%), and Komi, with five of 30 (17%), as well as annexed territories: in occupied Sevastopol, veterans hold five of 24 seats (21%).

Across the Duma contest and recent regional elections, the evidence points to the same logic as Time of Heroes. The “new elite” is not replacing established groups, although the project is clearly more than a mere publicity exercise. The Kremlin is building a recruitment pool through controlled routes, testing entrants for discipline, competence and political reliability, and reserving higher-status posts for those who are confirmed as loyal and having performed well.

This strategy also has room for nominal veterans. Recent media reports suggest that short, carefully managed trips to the war zone, followed by a return to the same job or a modest promotion, account for a significant share of officials now presented as war participants. Some experts believe that this path to the elite is coordinated and even overseen by the presidential administration, which is also responsible for integrating actual military personnel into government structures.

The profile of the Duma candidates and the wider use of nominal military service demonstrate how the bureaucracy is adapting to a new political fashion. Where officials once joined Leaders of Russia or the School of Governors to present themselves as technocrats, some now acquire a military credential through nominal service. Mixing officials who have briefly donned khaki with career soldiers in executive bodies and legislatures would dilute any “combat brotherhood”, making it harder for veterans to coalesce into a coherent political bloc and allowing the system to absorb them gradually.

The Kremlin has reason for such caution: over the past 30 years, even military figures and combat veterans once regarded as entirely loyal have repeatedly unsettled Russia’s central authorities. Lev Rokhlin tried to mobilise officers against Boris Yeltsin in the late 1990s; Igor Strelkov went from a leading figure in Russia’s 2014 war against Ukraine to an imprisoned Kremlin critic after the full-scale invasion started; and Wagner’s 2023 mutiny exposed the risks posed by an armed network with its own leadership and loyalties.

What Europe should expect and how it should prepare

The routes into the wartime recruitment pool examined in this paper—federal and regional cadre programmes, elections at different levels and officials’ short deployments with “volunteer battalions”—do not capture every group whose influence has grown through Russia’s war against Ukraine. Nearly five years of war have also elevated previously marginal ultraconservative actors such as Konstantin Malofeev, an Orthodox nationalist financier; propagandists and Z-war correspondents, including Poddubny, now placed third on United Russia’s federal list; and officials who have served in Russian occupation administrations in Ukraine.

Two very recent publications help establish both the scale and the institutional significance of this wider wartime reshaping of Russia’s political class. The latest journalistic count, from summer 2026, puts the lower-bound estimated at more than 1,300 formally recognised veterans in government bodies, with their number continuing to rise rapidly year by year. What could still be dismissed in 2024 as Kremlin PR strategy aimed mainly at supporting military recruitment is now harder to treat as merely symbolic. Recent research by Joris Van Bladel interprets this expansion as part of a deeper institutional transformation: Russia is redistributing war experience through political, educational, patriotic and coercive institutions, with veterans becoming the human infrastructure of a state reorganising itself around permanent mobilisation for the war. 

The present paper adds an empirical cadre-policy dimension to Van Bladel’s broader argument. Drawing on original data on participants’ backgrounds and subsequent appointments, it shows the Kremlin is embedding both actual and nominal veterans across the state through federal and regional programmes and elections. The previous preference for technocrats is giving way to people whose political credentials derive from the war. Their gradual entry into government at different levels, and into Putin’s personal recruitment pool, suggests that Moscow is staffing the state for a prolonged period of active conflict.

This cadre shift forms part of the wider normalisation of war within the regime’s operation. There is little to suggest Putin is likely to end the war. If anything, increasingly damaging Ukrainian strikes during 2026 appear to have strengthened his resolve to continue, provoking anger and retaliation rather than greater willingness to compromise.

The promotion of veterans, of course, should not be read as evidence that Russia is moving inevitably towards a military regime resembling the classic dictatorships of Latin America or Africa. The system may remain highly personalist even as veterans acquire a larger place within it. Still, their incorporation into the bureaucracy, including in the form of a mixture of actual and nominal veterans and the veterans’ varied presence across different regions, will have medium-term consequences for Russia’s internal evolution. European policymakers should bear this evolution in mind as it considers the possibility of further escalation.

Stay cool in the face of sharpening rhetoric

The Kremlin’s shift in its cadre policy means the number of pro-war voices emanating from within the Russian elite will continue to grow. This will heighten the anti-Western—and especially anti-European—rhetoric. The regime’s controlled recruitment system will usher in the more regular articulating of hardline positions once associated mainly with siloviki and radical conservatives. For instance, career officers with real combat experience have publicly rejected a ceasefire along the current frontline. Nominal veterans, whose political capital depends even more directly on issuing pro-war rhetoric, have campaigned on promises to continue “destroying the enemy’s manpower”.

Up to 50 war veterans may enter the State Duma in September. Even if the current Duma—which mixes federal powerbrokers, sidelined regional leaders, and industry (including military-industrial complex) lobbyists and scattered celebrities—already provides reliable support for aggressive Kremlin initiatives. The veterans cohort in the new assembly will matter chiefly as a source of further self-orientated militarist, repressive and anti-Western proposals and as a parliamentary amplifier of the most aggressive positions.

However, European governments should not read too much into the bombast likely to follow September’s election. Instead, they should take care to monitor the more gradual consequences as veterans ascend the broader power vertical: the Kremlin-centred top-down chain of federal, regional and state-linked institutions, held together by presidential control over appointments, resources and political advancement. These will emerge over the next 4-6 years as today’s mid-ranking appointees move upward and form a constituency whose careers depend on preserving the war as an affirmative political myth. Such a cohort could narrow the scope for normalisation after a ceasefire, during elite turnover or with a future change of leadership.

Still, the bark of elite rhetoric is likely to remain worse than its bite.

Throughout the full-scale war, hawks within the Russian elite have steadily escalated their rhetoric, using increasingly extreme threats and predictions to command attention abroad. Dmitry Medvedev’s recurrent warnings of nuclear escalation, Nikolai Patrushev’s prediction that Ukraine might cease to exist in 2025 and repeated claims by the SVR (Russia’s foreign intelligence service) of imminent Western false-flag operations illustrate the pattern. Such statements attract international headlines and seek to intimidate policymakers and shape wider public debate, although the dramatic events they threaten or predict have rarely materialised.

European planning should therefore assume considerable continuity in Moscow’s (already highly) confrontational course. Governments should weigh any new railings against observable changes in force posture and operational preparations. They should avoid amplifying them in ways that allow Moscow to set the European public debate.

Prepare for a more polarised post-Putin elite

For now, veterans’ prospects for further advancement depend on their performance in their current (usually first) appointment and on the relationship they build with their immediate superior, whether a senior federal official or regional governor, and with the programme’s curators in the presidential administration. They are dispersed across institutions, placed under the mentorship of incumbent officials and mixed with nominal veterans. This will dilute any shared identity based on combat experience. Most owe their new careers to presidential programmes or individual officials. They have stronger incentives to cultivate these relationships than to organise among themselves.

The September election could weaken this system of controlled distribution. Bringing up to 50 veterans into the State Duma—most with real combat experience—means they will soon be rubbing shoulders with one another day to day. They will also have parliamentary staff whose work can amplify their profile, as can their committee work. It is not too hard to see how a shared agenda around veterans’ benefits, appointments and the commemoration and legacy of the war could bring them together (and help them forge ties with veterans and other supporters outside the Duma). 

A formal veterans caucus would not be necessary for them to nevertheless gain in importance. Joint legislation, coordinated public campaigns and informal support for one another’s appointments could gradually turn a shared political credential into an organised interest. Such a network will remain loyal to the Kremlin while its members bargain collectively for budgets, positions, legal privileges and political protection. The opportunity exists to acquire influence within the governing coalition without becoming an autonomous challenger to it.

European governments should not expect the impact of this network to emerge only over time. Its political weight is likely to become apparent during an eventual transformation, when an organised veteran fraction could polarise the post-Putin elite and raise the domestic cost of normalising ties with the West. Such a more organised fraction would strengthen the position of those committed to confrontation with the West against comparatively pragmatic technocrats such as Mishustin or business tycoons cautiously loyal to the Kremlin, such as Andrey Melnichenko. 

European leaders, working with other Western governments, should preserve (where possible and safe) informal channels to less confrontational parts of the Russian elite, for whose members the prospect of restoring external ties could become an important source of leverage during a future transition. The point is not to naively hope that these groups can overthrow the current leadership, but to understand and identify those whose positions might be strengthened if a verifiable de-escalation in Ukraine and with the West takes place. This is as opposed to the more hawkish elites, now reinforced by the organised veteran voice.

Expect strains on the regional level 

The fashion for technocrats in the Russian government has now given way to a tendency towards khaki. At the federal level, the controlled integration of veterans will leave much of the technocratic group in place because its expertise remains essential to the system. Even so, its influence and share of senior posts will continue to decline. As war credentials and loyalty acquire greater weight in appointments, the economy and bureaucracy will gradually lose some of their capacity to manage the mounting pressures created by the war.

The effects will be more pronounced in the regions, where veteran appointments are expanding faster and Moscow has delegated reintegration without providing adequate resources. The early replacement of technocrat regional governors by veterans already points to declining managerial standards. Other veteran officials on the regional and local levels have also proved poorly equipped to handle social discontent. In some instances, they have met complaints with military habits of command or open aggression. 

Overall, regional systems for employment, rehabilitation and social support for veterans are unlikely to cope with a larger wave of demobilisation. Many returnees will remain marginalised, while public attitudes towards them will continue to be shaped by news of violent crimes perpetrated by veterans and other highly publicised incidents. This will deepen local polarisation and leave some veterans with a strong sense of grievance.

The Kremlin’s response to this is likely to preserve the distinction between small numbers of “good” veterans, rewarded with training, positions and public recognition, and the bulk of the rest: “bad” veterans, whose complaints or political activity are met with repression. This social group may direct its discontent against the authorities while remaining nationalist, militarist and revanchist. They could outlast Putin and create political problems for future Russian governments.

European policymakers should expect disputes over employment and unpaid benefits, crimes involving returnees and local protests to become early signs of strain. These pressures are more likely to produce a prolonged pattern of local violence, repression and administrative failure than any immediate challenge to the federal regime. Scenarios for how to deal with post-war Russia should therefore account for an uneven and potentially violent demobilisation whose destabilising effects will accumulate gradually, without necessarily encouraging liberalisation or opposition to the war.

Keep routes open to younger Russians

As this paper shows, a substantial share of veterans entering government structures are being placed in youth policy and patriotic education. These appointments add a new cadre of wartime loyalists to the ideological infrastructure already embedded in schools and universities. Their importance lies mainly in the institutional authority they acquire. But there are reasons to doubt that veterans will prove persuasive public speakers, especially when addressing younger audiences.

The broader ideological campaign developed in Russia since 2022 has struggled to win over younger Russians. Efforts to recruit university and college students into the new drone forces have increasingly relied on large payments and pressure from university administrations. These exposed the limits of patriotic appeals, and eventually failed. The removal of Yabloko, the only party campaigning for peace, from the 2026 election prompted an unusually young wave of online support, protests and detentions outside the Supreme Court. These episodes do not necessarily mean that younger Russians are broadly anti-war. But they show the state has failed to secure their automatic support, particularly in larger cities where alternative sources of information remain accessible.

Nevertheless, veteran appointments can still reshape the institutions in which this contest takes place. Officials controlling curriculums, grants, promotions and youth organisations can pressure teachers and university administrators to pursue more militarised priorities, while marginalising those who resist. Their careers also present military service and public association with the war as routes to status and advancement. A possible outcome of all this is a growing divide between an educational system imposing wartime values from above and young people who remain sceptical of them.

European governments should make use of this by widening educational and professional mobility for Russians who remain inside the country, without compromising on their own security. This year the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) suspended selection inside Russia after being designated an “undesirable organisation” by the Kremlin. However, some European mobility programmes should remain open to Russian-based students and researchers. Security risks for both students and recipient institutions and countries may be addressed by providing remote or third-country selection, individual vetting, secure communications and tailored protection protocols. European governments should also continue funding independent Russian-language media, accredited online education and tools that provide ways to circumvent censorship. 

Maintaining these routes would give younger Russians alternatives to state institutions, draw students, teachers and researchers away from an increasingly militarised system, and preserve an educated community with experience outside Kremlin control.

Methodology for data collection and analysis

This paper draws on three linked datasets covering the federal Time of Heroes programme, its regional equivalents and war veteran candidates in the 2026 State Duma election. The coding rules developed for the federal dataset were reused where relevant in the other two; the collection, verification and analysis of each dataset are described separately below.

The analysis of the federal Time of Heroes programme in this paper draws on a participant-level dataset covering the biographies, military service, previous and/or subsequent careers of all participants in its first two in-person cohorts. Built incrementally through OSINT collection, it combines official programme materials with media reports, specialist databases and investigative lookup tools, as detailed below:

• Since Time of Heroes publishes no participant roster, complete lists for its two in-person cohorts were initially obtained from a programme lecturer interviewed for this research. The public figures relating to cohorts’ enrolment are 83 and 85 participants. But the first cohort list, which we obtained, also included programme head Maria Kostyuk as an attendee. Although she did not participate in actual combat, after her son was killed in the war in 2022 she developed a nationally prominent pro-war media project and later became head of the programme and the governor of the Jewish Autonomous Region. The programme’s official website cites her governorship in typical publications about appointments received by participants. She was therefore included, bringing the dataset to 169 people.
• Collecting information on each participant started with a complete scrape of the programme’s website and Telegram channel, using the Telegram API and web-scraping tools. It was then expanded through manual search of participants in Russian news agencies and outlets; participants’ own interviews with programme organisers or with regional media; Russian governors’ Telegram channels, earlier investigations by Russian independent media and specific war-related Russian websites and Ukrainian databases.
• For a narrow set of indicators that public sources rarely report (participants’ year of birth, military rank and unit and so on), we supplemented this with lookup tools common in Russian-language investigative practice, including caller-ID aggregators such as GetContact and commercial search services indexing leaked and aggregated personal records, such as Himera Search.
• Collected biographical, career and service information was cross-checked across multiple sources and converted into standardised analytical variables. Pre-war careers were coded into four categories: career military personnel, security-service commanders, junior civilian employees and senior political or managerial figures. Combat experience was confirmed only where evidence identified a unit and area of operations, provided a first-person account of frontline service, or linked a decoration to a specific episode. Participants documented solely in staff or rear roles, or as volunteers or mobilised servicemen without an identifiable unit or area of deployment, were coded as non-combat. Wounds required direct evidence, such as hospitalisation, amputation, an explicit biographical statement or admission through the programme’s medical track. Where evidence pointed in none of these directions, the relevant indicator was coded as unknown rather than zero.
• Participants’ internship and appointment were verified through an official announcement, a news report or the appointing institution’s personnel page. Posts were coded by institutional level, primary function, a five-tier seniority scale and sequence, allowing repeated appointments to be traced as career trajectories. Four participants had already held their posts before entering the programme; these cases were excluded from counts of programme outcomes.

Statistical analysis of this dataset was used to test whether participants’ observable characteristics affected their likelihood of receiving an appointment. Appointees and non-appointees were compared using a two-sample t-test for age and chi-squared tests for categorical variables, including career background, civilian experience, rank tier and so on. A multivariate logistic regression then tested all factors jointly. Wound status approached significance in the bivariate analysis (p≈0.05), but because it was known for around half of participants, no conclusion was drawn from this result.

To supplement the OSINT dataset, the author conducted three semi-structured, in-depth interviews with lecturers who delivered courses or individual modules to one or both federal cohorts of Time of Heroes. The interviews took place online between January and April 2026. To allow the respondents to speak freely, their identities have been withheld.

The analysis of regional Time of Heroes programmes draws on a dataset covering 83 Russian regions, excluding the occupied Ukrainian territories. All data are current to September 1st 2026. A programme was identified in every region except Moscow. As no federal register exists and no region publishes a complete participant roster, the dataset was assembled from open sources through automated collection followed by manual verification:

• An initial inventory of websites, Telegram channels and other resources associated with regional programmes was compiled using an LLM-based agent with web-search and browsing tools, which queried Russian-language search engines and followed references from regional government portals. Every link the agent returned was checked by hand for validity, correct regional attribution and actual relevance to the programme.
• All accessible material was scraped from the relevant sections of these websites: news feeds, official documents, descriptions of the selection stages and eligibility criteria, and the composition of programme public councils. From this corpus, an LLM-generated set of regular expressions extracted messages containing the numerical parameters, such as number of applications, candidates passing selection, enrolment, reserve enrolment, graduates, appointments and cohort dates. Every extracted figure was then checked manually against its primary link, and corrected where the automated extraction had misattributed a value. In 14 programmes, some of the individual participants were also named on these websites; that information was extracted as well.
• Using the Telegram API, the channels of regional governors were downloaded in full, together with a set of further official channels in which mentions of the programmes had surfaced during initial collection. An LLM applying regular expressions identified and extracted messages referring to participants in regional programmes, and from these the fact of a post-programme appointment and any available biographical information. The results were verified manually, and biographical data were supplemented through the same OSINT procedures used for participants in the federal programme. This yielded 436 documented appointments across 79 of the 83 regions.

Population and baseline socioeconomic indicators were taken from the dataset published by the “To Be Precise” project, which draws on Rosstat data. Regional casualty figures came from the register of confirmed, named Russian military deaths maintained by Mediazona and the BBC Russian Service.

Enrolment and application counts were normalised per 100,000 residents and tested against basic regional socioeconomic indicators using Spearman rank correlation, followed by partial correlation controlling for population. Each test was recomputed with the smallest-population regions excluded, as their per capita rates are unstable. Raw counts correlate with casualties (ρ = +0.49 for enrolment, +0.62 for applications), but this reflects region size: once population is controlled for, the association between casualties and the number of participants selected falls to near zero and reverses direction relative to the raw correlation (ρ = −0.08 to −0.15), while the association with the number of applications remains weakly positive throughout (ρ = +0.17 to +0.20). The same pattern was found between the number of selected participants and the regional socioeconomic indicators tested.

The analysis of war veterans contesting the September 2026 State Duma election draws on a candidate-level dataset covering nominees whom parties or candidates publicly presented as war participants, with more detailed biographical coding for candidates from the ruling United Russia party. It was assembled through automated collection from party platforms followed by manual verification:

• Official sources give different numbers of United Russia candidates with war experience. The United Russia leadership spoke of 76 war participants; the head of the Central Election Commission put the figure at 52. Neither body publishes the criteria behind its figure. By our count, the certified United Russia lists contain 83 such candidates. Our figure comes from a complete download of United Russia’s primary election website, which offered all candidate profiles in machine-readable form. We collected all regional lists, totalling 18,976 people, and filtered them with the “svo”: true (special military operation) field, United Russia’s own marker for war participants. That yielded 1,273 candidates, 546 of whom were running for the State Duma. Each was then matched by full name against the United Russia’s certified list (613 entries: 388 on the federal list and 225 in single-mandate districts). This produced 83 matches.
• Individual primary profiles were collected for all candidates carrying United Russia’s war-participant marker. Where available, these provided date and place of birth, education, current employment and position, and a free-text biography. Information on the 83 registered Duma candidates was supplemented through the same OSINT procedures used for the federal Time of Heroes dataset. Cross-matching identified 28 programme participants, whose previously verified biographical records were carried over.
• The information was converted into standardised variables using the federal programme’s coding rules. Combat experience required evidence identifying a unit and area of operations, a first-person account of frontline service or a decoration linked to a specific episode. Candidates documented solely in rear, staff or medical-support roles, or in officially sponsored short-deployment formations within the BARS system, such as Kaskad, were coded as non-combat unless separate evidence placed them at the front. Cases with insufficient evidence were coded as unknown rather than zero.
• Pre-war careers were divided into five tracks: career military personnel without public office; career military personnel appointed to public office after 2022; civilians without public office; civilians entering public office after 2022; and candidates who already held political or administrative office before 2022. The final category took precedence over all others, while elected and civil service positions were treated equivalently.
• For nominees from other parliamentary parties, published candidate lists and biographies were reviewed manually to identify those presented as war participants. This produced 48 additional veteran candidates from the other parliamentary parties.

Likely outcomes were modelled under the most recent reported assumed United Russia party-list result of approximately 45% at around 50% turnout. Projections for single-member districts incorporated the 2021 State Duma election results in the same constituencies and documented cases of informally negotiated districts left by United Russia to candidates from other parties. This allocation placed 47 of United Russia’s 83 veteran candidates in winning positions. Applying the same criteria to the other parliamentary parties placed only four of their 48 war veteran candidates in potentially winnable positions.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank ECFR’s editorial and programme teams, especially Jana Kobzova, Adam Harrison and Jeremy Cliffe, above all for the patience that working with him on this policy brief required. Their substantive comments and careful editing greatly improved how the research and its findings are presented.

He is also grateful to political scientists András Tóth-Czifra, Ekaterina Shulmann, Nikolai Petrov and David Szakonyi, as well as journalists Andrey Pertsev, Olesya Shmagun and Tatiana K., for thoughtful discussions of the early findings of this research in settings both formal and less so. Several former Russian officials, who understandably prefer to remain anonymous, also helped the author test his hypothesis that technocrats are gradually going out of fashion in Russia’s wartime bureaucracy.

The author’s deepest thanks go to the (also anonymous) respondents who taught on the federal Time of Heroes programme and generously shared their knowledge and materials.

The author would especially like to thank his wife, Dr Viktoria P., and his friend Mr Churchill the Dog, for their patience, support and very different but equally effective forms of encouragement throughout the project.

All opinions and any remaining errors are the author’s alone.

About the author

Mikhail Komin was a visiting fellow with the Wider Europe programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations and now is a fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis. His analyses and commentaries have featured in international and Russian independent outlets, including The Economist, the New York Times, Politico, EUobserver, El Mundo, Meduza, TVRain and others. Komin is listed as a foreign agent by the so-called Russian Ministry of Justice.

Source

The European Commission has proposed an overhaul of the European Capitals of Culture programme beyond 2033, aiming to make it easier for cities to join forces, involve more young people and turn a year in the cultural spotlight into a lasting legacy.

The plans draw on more than 40 years of experience and would simplify selection and open the door wider to joint bids, including cross-border partnerships. Inclusive and sustainable urban development would also play a bigger role.

“A city holds the European Capital of Culture title for one year, but the community and its people should feel the benefits for a generation,” said Roxana Mînzatu, Executive Vice-President for Social Rights and Skills, Quality Jobs and Preparedness. “Our proposal puts that lasting legacy at the heart of the initiative.”

Glenn Micallef, Commissioner for Intergenerational Fairness, Youth, Culture and Sport, said the new framework would bring “broader territorial participation, stronger youth involvement, new horizons for artists and creative industries, and greater attention to long-term legacy”.

Surge in visitor numbers

A Commission-funded study found that host cities staged an average of 1,000-1,200 cultural activities in their title year, drawing 38.5 million audience attendances and visitor numbers jumped by an average of 30–40%.

The investment impact was also significant: a modest EU investment of €3-5 million helped per year had leveraged around €900 million in cultural investment across Europe between 2013 and 2022.

Long-term benefits

The benefits can stretch well beyond the title year. The evaluation points to urban regeneration, increased cultural budgets, stronger creative sectors and greater civic participation. It also highlights the programme’s European added value in fostering international cultural cooperation, cultural diplomacy and a shared European identity.

Launched in 1985, the initiative has had 85 title-holders. Oulu and Trenčín hold the title in 2026, followed by Évora and Liepāja in 2027.

Under the proposal, third countries participating in or associated with Creative Europe could compete from 2034. The European Parliament and Council will now negotiate the plans, with a final agreement targeted for mid-2027.

PHOTO: Toripolliisi statue ('The Bobby at the Market Place'), Oulu, European Capital of Culture 2026 © European Union

Rugby spent its first century as an amateur game run by national unions that answered to nobody but themselves, then three decades of professionalism have changed that. Players sign contracts across borders, clubs compete in cross-border leagues, and private capital owns stakes in its biggest competitions. That places rugby inside the reach of European Union law, which treats an athlete as a worker and a governing body as an undertaking.

Competitions and the European sport model

In December 2023 the EU's top court ruled in football's Super League case that a governing body can only block a rival competition if its rules for doing so are clear, applied equally and no stricter than necessary. 

In October 2025, eight national rugby unions declared that anyone joining the proposed R360 franchise league would lose eligibility for Test rugby. If that ban is challenged, unions would likely keep the power to say no, but they will have to publish rules for saying it, as UEFA did after its defeat.

Grassroots, Inclusion and the Emerging Nations

Below the regulated professional game, the EU's influence comes through money rather than courts. Erasmus+ has a sport budget aimed at grassroots participation and equality, and rugby has already used it for women's projects, some built around sevens, where the calendar of rugby sevens fixtures gives newer unions a realistic way into international competition. 

The Parliament wants that budget increased from 2028, which matters most to unions outside the Six Nations and its broadcast deals.

Workers who happen to play rugby

A rugby player is a worker in the eyes of EU law, and that has shaped who clubs can sign for thirty years. Bosman in 1995 stopped leagues capping the number of EU players in a squad, and Kolpak later gave the same rights to players from countries with EU trade deals, including South Africa. 

Brexit ended both for clubs in England, Wales and Scotland while Ireland's provinces kept them, so one league now recruits under two sets of rules. 

The next shift is about conditions rather than passports. In October 2025 the European Parliament backed treating athletes as employees with full labour rights and player unions having a say on calendars and welfare.

Autonomy on condition

Rugby's governing bodies still write their own laws, calendars and eligibility rules, but what has changed is that those choices are now reviewable by courts and shaped by policy that treats sport as an economic activity first. Autonomy remains, but only on condition of compliance, and the exceptions keep narrowing.

The European Commission has adopted a Communication on a new Strategic Approach to Research and Innovation for competitive, resilient and sustainable agriculture, forestry, rural areas and food systems. This strategic document brings together two closely interlinked frameworks, to guide future research, innovation, deployment and uptake across the entire agri-food sector. These frameworks are AgRI 2040, focusing on agriculture, forestry and rural areas, and Food 2040, focusing on food systems, including fisheries and aquaculture.

The Communication aims to strengthen the agri-food innovation ecosystem from early-stage research and innovation to deployment and market uptake, and to accelerate the uptake of knowledge and innovation across the entire sector. It puts greater emphasis on users’ challenges and needs and on the delivery of real impact on the ground by bringing together multiple actors including end users, researchers and businesses, to co-create, test and demonstrate solutions in real-world settings. This will also help startups, scaleups and SMEs to move promising innovations closer to the market.  

The Communication will help turn Europe’s scientific excellence into practical solutions for farmers, foresters, rural communities, researchers, food businesses and consumers, for a more competitive, resilient and sustainable agri-food sector. It contributes to the objectives of the Vision for Agriculture and Food and the Strategy for European Life Sciences and complements the EU Bioeconomy Strategy by supporting innovation and sustainable value creation.

By developing the AgRI 2040 and Food 2040 frameworks, a common strategic approach for EU-funded R&I that enables competitive, sustainable, resilient and fair agri-food systems will be ensured. Both frameworks will be deployed under Horizon Europe 2028-2034 and relevant parts of the European Competitiveness Fund.

Agriculture and Food Commissioner Christophe Hansen said:

"Research and innovation can make a real difference to how we farm and manage our rural areas: from crops that can better withstand drought and extreme temperatures, to faster ways of detecting plant diseases, more sustainable crop protection and digital tools for smarter use of resources like water. Our task is to make sure these ideas do not stay in the laboratory, but are tested, adapted to local conditions and turned into practical solutions that can be used and scaled up. In this way, research can have a real impact on the ground, helping farmers and foresters respond to new challenges and build a more competitive, resilient and sustainable agri-food sector."

Startups, Research and Innovation Commissioner Ekaterina Zaharieva said:

"Europe is leading in science and research, but too many breakthrough solutions still struggle to reach consumers and markets. The ultimate goal is to help innovators, start-ups and businesses turn bold ideas into innovative solutions that boost competitiveness, strengthen food security, food safety, sustainability and resilience, and deliver real benefits for people and the planet. Europe can lead with confidence, unity and ambition."

The next major milestone will be the EU AgRI 2040 Conference – “Future-proofing EU Agri-Food through research and innovation”, taking place in Brussels on 24 and 25 September. Christophe Hansen, Commissioner for Agriculture and Food, and Ekaterina Zaharieva, Commissioner for Startups, Research and Innovation, will open the conference, which will bring together key stakeholders from across the agri-food sector and the research and innovation community to contribute to shaping future EU research and innovation priorities.

Background

Vision for Agriculture and Food and Life Sciences Strategy

The new Strategic Approach brings the Vision for Agriculture and Food and the Strategy for European Life Sciences together to cover agriculture, forestry, rural areas and food systems, providing long-term policy direction without prejudging the next EU budget negotiations.

The agri-food sector is strategically important for Europe’s food safety and security, jobs and skills, competitiveness and strategic autonomy. It faces increasing challenges from climate change, resource constraints, geopolitical instability, labour and skills shortages, changing consumer attitudes and global competition.

AgRI 2040 and Food 2040

AgRI 2040 will focus on agriculture, forestry and rural areas. Its eight preliminary areas of action will cover soils and agri-ecosystems, cropping and livestock systems, the bioeconomy, multifunctional forests, rural areas and stronger agri-food value chains, as well as digitalisation, artificial intelligence and robotics.

Food 2040 will focus on food systems, including fisheries and aquaculture. Its six areas of action will address place-based food systems; healthy and sustainable diets; resource efficiency and zero pollution in food systems; food environments and consumer empowerment; scaling innovations, business models and fair food systems solutions; and aquatic food.

The two frameworks are guided by six shared priorities: competitiveness, startups and scaleups; food security, resilience and preparedness; natural resources and circularity; food and feed safety, nutrition and health; fairness; and global cooperation. Common enablers include governance, technologies, and territories and communities.

Evidence and stakeholder engagement

The Commission Staff Working Document accompanying this Communication provides the evidence base for the new approach. It assesses the achievements, investments, results and implementation experience of the 2016 strategic approach to agricultural research and innovation, and the Food 2030 framework.

Stakeholder consultations highlighted the need for stronger links between research, deployment and market uptake, better alignment with users’ needs, improved monitoring and governance, and greater attention to competitiveness, resilience, sustainability, strategic autonomy, health, circularity, fairness and public trust. Their engagement will continue as AgRI 2040 and Food 2040 are implemented.

Future-proofing EU agri-food through research & innovation

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The European Commission has proposed mobilizing €1.1 million from the European Globalization Adjustment Fund for Displaced Workers (EGF) to support 351 workers in Finland dismissed by four paper manufacturers.

The EGF helps build a more dynamic and competitive European economy by improving the skills and employability of dismissed workers. Since 2007, the EGF has been mobilized in 192 cases, allocating €737 million to offer support to more than 185,000 people across 20 member states. This funding complements national active labour market measures.

The paper industry has faced significant challenges in recent years, as demand has fallen due to digitalisation. In Finland the sector has also been hit by the closure of the border with Russia and the halt in wood imports following Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. It concerns four paper manufacturers: Metsä Group, Stora Enso, UPM Communication Papers, and SAPPI.

Today’s proposal will support the dismissed workers through measures such as job-search assistance and career counselling, including an AI-based pilot project to identify recruitment needs and skills demands in the affected labour market and improve job matching. 

It will also fund training in new professional and transferable skills, recruitment incentives, mobility allowances, financial support for business start-ups, and allowances during the set-up phase.

The total estimated cost of the package is €1.8 million, of which 60% (€1.1 million) will be covered by the Commission and 40% (€735,000) by the South Karelia and Lohja-Karkkila Employment Regions, the local public employment services.

Finland began supporting the workers concerned in January 2026 and the EGF may reimburse these costs retroactively.

Next steps

The EGF proposal now requires approval by the European Parliament and the Council. It needs a simple majority in the European Parliament and a qualified majority in the Council.

What is the EGF?

Since 2007, the European Globalization Adjustment Fund for Displaced Workers has supported more than 185 000 people in 20 EU countries, with €737 million in funding. It works alongside national employment services to improve skills and employability and to build a more dynamic European economy.

The EGF was originally designed to support people who had already lost their jobs. It now also helps workers at risk of unemployment. Since May 2026, the EGF can fund training for workers who are likely to be dismissed, so they can move into new roles in the same company or find jobs elsewhere. EU countries can apply for EGF support while companies are still restructuring, so help can start before dismissals happen.

In November 2025, the Commission launched a Skills Guarantee pilot to support workers in transition by helping them acquire new skills. This flagship initiative under the Union of Skillls will strengthen strategic and growing sectors, in line with the future European Competitiveness Fund.

How does it work?

Following an application from a member state for EGF support, the Commission assesses the request on the basis of the number of displaced workers and targeted beneficiaries, the measures proposed to help workers return to employment, and the estimated costs.

Support may include career counselling, job search assistance, upskilling and reskilling, recruitment incentives, allowances, and financial support for business start-ups. 

Commission proposal

Press release

On 9 September, the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies (EGE) released its new statement, Governing Neuro-AI: Towards an Infrastructure Approach.

Neurotechnology and artificial intelligence are increasingly converging as neurodata can be collected, combined and reused to develop AI models and applications across different contexts. This creates opportunities for healthcare, rehabilitation and scientific research, but also raises important questions for fundamental rights, democratic accountability and the public interest.

In this context, the EGE calls for a systemic and anticipatory approach to governing neuro-AI. The Statement shifts the focus from individual devices and neurodata privacy to the wider impacts of the infrastructures through which neurodata are collected, processed and reused. It also addresses questions of European technological sovereignty and public-interest infrastructures.

The EGE recommends:

1. Robust protection of neurodata: define and reinforce protections for neurodata and neurodata-derived inferences under EU data protection law
2. Responsible development of neuro-AI technologies: ensure possible development of Brain Foundation Models and related neuro-AI infrastructures
3. Strong Rights protection: ensure that individuals are protected against disproportionate control where neurodata and neurodata-derived data inferences are used in consequential contexts
4. Enhanced governance capacity: build European public-interest governance capacity for neuro-AI infrastructures
5. Comprehensive fitness check: conduct a targeted regulatory assessment of the EU framework governing neuro-AI systems

Background

Neuro-AI Infrastructures are interconnected systems through which neurodata are collected, processed and reused to create, deploy and manage AI-powered neurotechnology applications.

The European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies (EGE) is an independent, multi-disciplinary body of experts providing ethical advice, and its secretariat within the EC.

It is part of the Ethics Advice Mechanism (EthAM), which provides the European Commission (EC) with high quality, independent advice on all aspects of EU legislation and policies, where ethical, societal and fundamental rights issues intersect with the development of science and new technologies.

More information

Statement: Governing Neuro-AI: Towards an Infrastructure Approach

The EU welcomes Cambodia’s decision to join the Multi-party Interim Appeal Arbitration Arrangement (MPIA) for WTO members, contributing to efforts to uphold a rules-based multilateral trading system. 

With Cambodia’s participation, the MPIA now covers 62 World Trade Organization (WTO) members and 60.4% of world trade.  

The MPIA brings together participants from all continents and at different levels of development, united by a shared commitment to upholding the rules-based trading system. 

The MPIA preserves the right to appeal in trade disputes among participating WTO members, at a time when the WTO’s Appellate Body remains non-functioning. It helps ensure that disputes can continue to be resolved in an orderly and binding manner, avoiding appeals 'into the void'. 

“I welcome Cambodia to the MPIA. The arrangement plays an important role in upholding the rules-based trading system. Each new participant helps reinforce the predictability, stability and credibility of global trade rules. I encourage other WTO members to join the MPIA,” said EU Trade and Economic Security Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič. 

Background 

The MPIA was established in 2020 and has proven its effectiveness in many WTO disputes.  

Under the MPIA, appeals are heard by arbitrators randomly selected from a pool of 10 standing appeal arbitrators set up by the participating WTO members. These arbitrators are persons of recognised authority, with demonstrated expertise in law, international trade and WTO agreements.  

The MPIA is open to all WTO members as a practical tool for appeal arbitration, pending the restoration of a reformed and fully functioning WTO dispute settlement system. 

As of 1 June 2025, the MPIA has an updated pool of appeal arbitrators to ensure that appeals continue to be heard by independent arbitrators of the highest calibre. 

At the WTO Ministerial Conference that took place earlier this year, MPIA ministers stressed the importance of the MPIA for the security and predictability of the multilateral trading system.  

The current MPIA participants are Australia, Barbados, Benin, Brazil, Cambodia, Canada, China, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, the European Union (and its Member States), Guatemala, Hong Kong (China), Iceland, Japan, Liechtenstein, Macao (China), Malaysia, Mexico, Moldova, Montenegro, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Pakistan, Paraguay, Peru, the Philippines, Singapore, Switzerland, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, Uruguay and Vietnam.

More information

MC14: Supporting the rules-based multilateral trading system: the role of the MPIA

On 9 September, Biodiversa+ launched the BiodivFuture call to support innovative research on the biodiversity, socio-ecological consequences and future trajectories of novel ecosystems. Novel ecosystems are ecosystems that, often as a result of human influence, differ from those that prevailed historically in an area, and that are unlikely to return to previous conditions, with or without human intervention.

The funded research projects will produce actionable knowledge to drive nature-positive transformative change and reverse biodiversity decline. That knowledge will help sustain resilient and ecologically functioning ecosystems, thus contributing to the goals of the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 and the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

With a total budget of around EUR 40 million, this call will address the causes, effects and consequences of novel ecosystems in different environments across the world, supporting high-quality research projects with holistic, systemic, and integrated approaches.

The call covers three non-mutually exclusive themes that cover key aspects of novel ecosystems: 

1. understanding the functioning of novel ecosystems
2. studying pathways to novel ecosystems
3. studying the fair and equitable sharing of biodiversity benefits in the context of novel ecosystems

Successful proposals must demonstrate significant added value at transnational level and are strongly encouraged to pursue inter- and transdisciplinary approaches, involving also non-academic stakeholders to co-produce new knowledge relevant for society.

How to apply

To be eligible for funding, transnational research consortia will have to include eligible partners from at least three different countries financially participating in the call (including from at least two EU member states or EU Associated Countries).

The complete announcement and call documents, including full eligibility and evaluation criteria, are available on the Biodiversa+ website. The Partnership also organises a general information webinar for interested researchers on 10 September 2026.

What is Biodiversa+?

Biodiversa+ is the European co-funded biodiversity partnership supporting excellent research on biodiversity with an impact for policy and society. It was jointly developed by BiodivERsA and the European Commission and was officially launched on 1 October 2021. Biodiversa+ is part of the European Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 that aims to put Europe’s biodiversity on a path to recovery by 2030. The Partnership has launched six co-funded joint research calls over the seven years of its implementation with an estimated budget of around €250 million.

European Partnerships such as Biodiversa+ bring the European Commission and private and/or public partners together to address some of Europe’s most pressing challenges through concerted research and innovation initiatives. They are a key implementation tool of Horizon Europe, and contribute significantly to achieving the EU’s political priorities. Biodiversa+ currently gathers 81 research programmers and funders and environmental policy actors from 40 European and associated countries, and aims to connect science, policy and practice for transformative change.

More information

2026-2027 Joint Call - BiodivFuture

Biodiversity research and innovation

Nature-based solutions

On 9 September, the European Commission adopted a proposal for a new Regulation to modernize and simplify the EU's public procurement framework to support effective investments in public services and infrastructure in line with the Union's policy objectives.

Drawing on extensive consultations with public buyers, businesses, trade unions, and civil society, the Commission is proposing an ambitious reform to make public procurement simpler, more flexible, and more effective. It will help complete a Single Market for public procurement, which accounts for around 15% of the EU's GDP.

Public procurement is central to both the European economy and citizens' daily lives, covering
everything from transport, infrastructure, and energy systems, to schools and health care services. The proposal is expected to deliver significant administrative annual savings of €649 million, resulting from a burden reduction of €80 million for public buyers and of €570 million for economic operators.

The proposed Public Procurement Regulation builds on the strengths of the Single Market
in four key ways.

Simpler and clearer rules
The proposed Public Procurement Act makes the rules simpler and clearer by consolidating into one directly-applicable Regulation the three existing public procurement directives and procurement provisions currently spread across sector-specific legislation. This will create a more coherent and predictable procurement framework, reducing complexity, administrative burden, and inconsistencies in how the rules are applied with three procedures instead of five currently. It will reduce complexity and inconsistency resulting from separate legislative acts and divergent national transposition choices.

The new framework gives public buyers greater flexibility, allowing negotiations with the applicant during the procedures. It encourages better market consultation, simplifies administrative procedures and allows for negotiations, making public procurement more similar to private procurement. It also introduces an innovation procedure for the development and acquisition of innovative solutions not yet available on the market. One single platform for all procurement in the EU Key to simplification and administrative burden reduction is the creation of an integrated digital procurement marketplace consisting of interconnected and interoperable member states' eProcurement platforms.

The digital marketplace will simplify and facilitate procurement for public buyers (for example, through the automatic verification of exclusion criteria). It will allow companies to take part in procurement procedures and submit tenders across the EU through any of the connected eProcurement platforms applying the ‘once-only' principle, avoiding repeated requests for information and documentation requirements. This will promote access to new business opportunities and increase the number of offers public buyers receive, maximising the potential of the single market.

The digital marketplace will moreover streamline data exchanges between member states' eProcurement systems through the creation of a unified framework for data management, thereby strengthening transparency, accountability, and anti-fraud capabilities. Stronger support for environmental, social, and innovation goals The proposal makes the Best Price-Quality Ratio (BPQR) the standard award method, with quality criteria accounting for at least 30% (50% for labour-intensive contracts), subject to a ‘comply or explain' mechanism. Contracting authorities may deviate from this approach if they explain how quality will otherwise be ensured, for example through minimum quality requirements.

Public buyers will thus have to systematically consider not only price, but also quality, including environmental, social, innovation, security and resilience, and 'European preference' considerations. Public buyers will have full discretion over which quality criteria to apply and in which proportion in individual procurement procedures, with the proposal offering practical tools to support public buyers in this. Greater security, resilience and strategic autonomy In line with the recommendations of the Draghi report, the proposal reflects the growing geopolitical importance of public procurement. It enables, and in some cases requires, public buyers to address risks related to security and public safety of the Union or member states, sensitive information, cybersecurity, and undue third-country influence.

New provisions on resilience and security of supply would apply to contracts involving entities linked to critical infrastructures and aim to support diversification of supply chains, security of supply and crisis preparedness. Finally, the Regulation introduces a horizontal European preference framework for public procurement in line with the Union's international legal obligations. It clarifies which operators and products are covered by the Union's international procurement commitments and makes this easier to check. The Commission would be able to restrict such coverage where a market access analysis establishes that a third country has failed to grant Union operators fair market access in line with its commitments, or where restrictions are needed to avoid security of supply dependencies or protect our economic security interests.

Next steps
The proposed Regulation will be negotiated by the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union before its adoption and entry into force. Background The revision was announced in President von der Leyen's Political Guidelines. It responds to long-standing shortcomings identified by the European Court of Auditors , including declining competition, limited SME and cross-border participation, and the rise of single-bid procedures. It also follows calls from the Council of the EU and the European Parliament for a strategic, simplified, and competitive framework. It also responds to the recommendations of the Draghi and Letta reports, which highlight public procurement as a strategic tool to strengthen Europe's industrial base, support innovation, advance the green and digital transitions, and reinforce economic security.

British parliamentarians, former ministers, researchers and security experts gathered at the House of Lords in London for the sixth TRENDS Annual Forum on Political Islam, focusing on Muslim Brotherhood networks in Europe, education, funding and digital influence.

The London meeting opened the first part of the forum, organized by TRENDS Global and TRENDS Research & Advisory. Proceedings will continue on September 10 at the French Senate in Paris, with a focus on legislative responses and cooperation between European and partner countries.

Opening the event, Dr. Mohammed Abdullah Al Ali, Chairman of Trends Group, argued that political Islamist movements operate across borders and can exploit the openness of democratic societies to build influence in education, media, business and the digital sphere. He stressed the distinction between Islam as a religion and Islamism as a political ideology seeking power and influence.

Dr. Khalifa Mubarak Al Dhaheri, Director of Mohammed Bin Zayed University for Humanities, focused on Britain, describing it as a longstanding centre for individuals and networks associated with the Muslim Brotherhood and political Islam. He said the organization should not be treated as representative of Muslims in Britain or elsewhere in Europe and warned that ideological loyalties placed above citizenship can create “societies within societies.”

From Education to Funding

The first session examined the Brotherhood’s ideological structures and its influence on education and younger generations. Participants also discussed the Gaza Children’s Village, established in July 2025 by Palestinian-American neurosurgeon Dr. David Hassan in cooperation with IMPACT-se, as an alternative educational model to counter incitement and extremism.

The second session turned to legislation, prevention and enforcement. Lord Walney, who moderated the discussion, urged a review of existing legal tools and warned of a “blind spot” allowing some networks and think tanks to penetrate charities and the education sector. He also advocated greater intelligence sharing and international cooperation.

Baroness Foster of Oxton addressed financial oversight, arguing for tighter scrutiny of charities, their funding and tax benefits. Former MP Daniel Kawczynski urged the Home Office to respond to parliamentary demands to ban the Muslim Brotherhood and designate it as a terrorist organization. Lady Olga Maitland warned that “soft extremism” and structures targeting young people require updated legislation.

Matthew J. Leavitt of the Labour Party described the Brotherhood as a “multi-headed beast” and urged Britain to examine evidence gathered in Austria, Germany and France. Major Jason Olson, a U.S. Navy officer and former counter-extremism official, argued that prevention should begin in schools.

Markus Sheff, CEO of IMPACT-se, identified education as the first line of defence against digital extremism, advocating critical thinking and digital literacy in school curricula.

Pressure for a UK Response

Sir Oliver Dowden, former Deputy Prime Minister and Chair of the UK-UAE Parliamentary Friendship Group, addressed the Brotherhood and its links to extremism, noting growing attention to the issue among British parliamentarians and the need for institutions to better assess potential threats to the United Kingdom.

Tom Wilson, Chairman of the Counter Extremism Group, and Dr. Alan Mendoza, Executive Director of the Henry Jackson Society, highlighted the legal and media difficulties involved in exposing front organizations. They announced the “Ban the Brotherhood” campaign and proposed using parliamentary privilege to bring evidence into the public domain.

Professor Andrew Davies of the University of Birmingham advocated carefully targeted bans on organizations that threaten social cohesion and religious pluralism. Professor David Abrahams, Senior Adviser at the Arab Global Network and former Deputy Chairman of RUSI, described political Islam as an “existential threat” while stressing the need to protect religious freedom and pluralism.

Alessandro Bertoldi, Executive Director of Italy’s Milton Friedman Institute, questioned whether a ban alone would be sufficient without confronting the Brotherhood’s operational tools. He also raised the need to monitor the use of artificial intelligence to spread its messaging.

Phil Rosenberg, President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, advocated an international alliance against extremist ideology, noting that Muslims themselves are among its largest victims. Imam Mohammed Tawhidi, counter-extremism adviser at TRENDS, described the Brotherhood as the “parent company” of organizations including al-Qaeda, ISIS and Hamas, while stressing that the vast majority of Western Muslims reject this approach.

Measuring the Brotherhood’s Reach

TRENDS researcher Hamad Al Hosani argued that the Brotherhood increasingly operates through flexible networks and community institutions able to exploit democratic freedoms. Any response, he said, should protect national security without collectively stigmatizing Muslim communities.

Badriya Al Riyami presented figures from the 2025 Global Brotherhood Power Index. Europe ranked fourth at 17.0%, behind the Americas at 24.8%, Asia at 22.5% and Africa at 20.2%. She described Europe as an important political and media base for the organization.

Participants recommended moving beyond procedural bans by addressing networks and ideological structures, strengthening educational programs and improving capabilities to track extremist content spread through digital platforms and artificial intelligence. Citizenship and tolerance education were identified as key preventive tools.

The meeting drew a broad parliamentary and political audience, including Richard Tice, Sir Robert John Blackman, Baroness Deech, Baroness Foster of Oxton, Nadhim Zahawi, Lord Howard of Lympne, Lord Austin of Dudley, Lord Eric Pickles, Sir Michael Ellis and Sir Oliver Dowden.

Journalists attending included Marcus Donaldson of GB News, Camilla Turner of the Sunday Telegraph and Natalie Lisbona of the Daily Mail.

The forum now moves from Westminster to the French Senate, where its second part will examine legislative responses, research cooperation and measures to counter Brotherhood-linked networks while protecting religious freedom and equal citizenship.

The European Commission wants to cut the EU’s public procurement rulebook from around 900 pages to 200, in a sweeping reform that aims to simplify tendering while giving governments greater scope to favour European economic and security interests, writes Catherine Feore.

Executive Vice-President Stéphane Séjourné held up the existing body of rules alongside its much slimmer replacement, to illustrate his point. 

“These here are the European rules which currently govern public procurement in Europe: 900 pages,” he said. “And this is what we are proposing today… down to 200 pages.”

The proposed Public Procurement Act would replace three EU procurement directives with a single regulation, with a view to simplifying procurement provisions spread across 26 sectoral laws and cutting the number of procedures from five to three.

The Commission estimates the changes could save businesses and public authorities €650 million a year in administrative costs.

The reform matters because of Europe’s massive purchasing power involved. EU public procurement exceeds €2.5 trillion annually, around 15% of EU GDP, covering everything from trains and hospitals to energy infrastructure, schools and IT systems.

From lowest price to strategic purchasing

The proposal is not just about cutting red tape. Brussels wants governments to use their purchasing power more strategically.

The Best Price-Quality Ratio would become the standard method for awarding contracts, with quality normally accounting for at least 30% of the assessment and 50% for labour-intensive contracts. Authorities could consider environmental and social performance, innovation, security and resilience alongside price.

The commitment to a so-called European preference has been tempered by the EU’s international commitments, but access can be restricted when a country doesn’t reciprocate market access. Restrictions could also be imposed where reliance on foreign suppliers creates security-of-supply dependencies or threatens EU economic security.

“European public money should, wherever possible, create jobs, investment and opportunities in Europe rather than filling the order books of our competitors,” Séjourné said.

Five procurement procedures would become three: open, dynamic and innovation procedures. Each would allow negotiation between buyers and bidders.

The Commission also plans an integrated EU digital procurement marketplace connecting national e-procurement platforms. A company registered through one connected system should be able to bid elsewhere in Europe without repeatedly submitting the same documentation. This is intended to reduce bureaucracy and tackle one of the current system's weaknesses: too little competition, particularly from SMEs and companies bidding across borders.

National, regional and local priorities may appreciate this flexibility in theory, but constrained budgets often mean that price will remain the bottom line for many. This legislation offers greater freedom in determining needs, but it remains to be seen what its impact will be.

PHOTO CREDIT: European Commission Executive Vice-President Stéphane Séjourné says the rules reduced from 900 pages to 200 pages © European Union

For much of the 20th century, the US represented not just a place on the map. It was also a point in time. When Western Europeans looked at images of America after the second world war—depictions of Hollywood’s glamour, American cars and newfangled labour-saving devices—they thought they were looking into the future.

The American Dream had an especially irresistible draw for Eastern Europeans behind the Iron Curtain, and for tens of millions of Chinese during the opening and reform era that began after Mao Zedong’s death in 1976. China’s great economic reinvention was inspired, in part, by Deng Xiaoping’s awe at American modernity, which he witnessed firsthand during an official visit in 1979.

But fast-forward to 2026, and the positions have been reversed. For most people in most countries, the future can now be seen in China. Just as Hollywood once showed the world what modern life looked like, China is showing African, Latin American and even American young people what an economy built on green energy, mobile payments and other services, and advanced robotics looks like. For Cobus van Staden of the China-Global South Project, the West is “increasingly being framed as backward-looking [and] associated with the past”, a phenomenon presumably accelerated by Trumpism, with its rejection of renewable energy, diversity and its social conservatism.

In the global south, young people aren’t just imitating Chinese practices like drinking hot water or trying out tai chi. They are watching as China reshapes their daily experiences

In many parts of the West, disillusionment has given rise to Chinamaxxing on social media, with American and European influencers performatively embracing Chinese mannerisms and aesthetics. And in the global south, young people aren’t just imitating Chinese practices like drinking hot water or trying out tai chi. They are watching as China reshapes their daily experiences.

This signals a genuine historical rupture. For generations, most countries defined themselves in relation to the West. Some sought (or were convinced) to emulate Western development models like the Washington Consensus, and many were keen to acquire Western technology and aid, or simply to get the West’s approval. Other countries did push back against the West’s influence and attack Western hypocrisy, but their counter-models were themselves defined by opposition to the West.

Either way, West-centrism was the prism through which geopolitics was conducted and interpreted. When countries in the Sahel invited Russia’s Wagner Group mercenaries to help them deal with insurgencies, it was seen as a reaction against France and its traditional role in the region. When Angola invited Sinopec to exploit its oil fields, it was seen as a snub to Portugal and Britain. And then there are the many challenges to US hegemony in the Middle East, Latin America and South-East Asia. Around the world, memories of bloody Western interventions or financial crises still linger.

Yet younger generations around the world are not even pro- or anti-Western so much as they are post-Western. For them, China, not the US, is at the centre of their conceptual universe and envisaged future.

What happened? One of the big differences between countries in the global south and the global north is their demographic profile. In the US and Europe, the median age is 40–50, compared to 19 in Nigeria, and 29 in South Africa, India and Lebanon. That means some 70% of Nigerians aren’t even old enough to have registered the 2003 US invasion of Iraq or the 2008 global financial crisis. As Cobus points out, young West Africans “never knew anything more than the US as we know it now”. The era of Donald Trump encompasses their entire political memory, and they presumably are not very impressed.

This shift in perceptions is not just an African story, of course. In Vietnam, which has long had a fraught relationship with China, young people are becoming less reflexively Sinophobic than their elders. Chelsea Nguyen, a researcher at the London School of Economics, credits the covid-19 pandemic for catalysing this change. The West’s perceived mishandling of the pandemic undermined its status as a model worthy of emulation. Many Vietnamese turned to exploring their own history and that of their Asian neighbours, including China. As in much of Africa, growing exposure to China’s rapid technological progress and Chinese consumer goods transformed the country’s global brand.

Meanwhile, Loubna El Amine, a China scholar at King’s College London, notes that in regions riven by instability—such as the Middle East, where the US itself is a big part of the problem— “a lot of the attraction of China is its absence rather than presence”. The latest Arab Opinion Index bears this out, showing that 77% of respondents view US policies as a threat to the region’s security and stability, compared with just 25% for China—and that was well before Trump launched his catastrophic war against Iran. And, of course, China carries none of the colonial baggage that complicates European interventions (or even peacebuilding efforts) in the region.

Still, China has been known to be aggressive in pursuing its economic agenda in the developing world, whether through predatory loans, acquiring critical national infrastructure or deliberately exporting its domestic overcapacity. Such behaviour ruffles feathers as much in Thailand, Mexico and Nigeria as it does in the US and Europe. Moreover, young people’s widespread distrust of their governments can easily bleed into unhappiness with China when political leaders are seen to be giving it undue privileges.

Since the pivot to China as an exemplar of modernity is in many ways pragmatic and non-ideological, its hold on the popular imagination is still tenuous. Lots of leaders in the West want to compete with China for “soft power”. But the key is not to counter Chinese “propaganda” or improve Western PR. The winners in the battle for hearts and minds will be those who offer real solutions to people’s problems and create more opportunities for prosperity than are currently available.

This article was first published by Project Syndicate on August 18th 2026

Source

A European Parliament compromise on reforming the EU’s Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) has opened a politically sensitive dispute over whether entire industries should be excluded from sustainable investment — with fossil fuels offered a conditional transition route while tobacco remains outside.

The revision of the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation, better known as SFDR, is emerging as a key political battleground over the future boundaries of sustainable finance in the European Union.

Although formally concerned with disclosure requirements and the categorisation of financial products, the dispute now goes considerably further. At stake is a fundamental question: should entire sectors be excluded from sustainable and transition finance because of the nature of their business, or should companies be judged primarily on their actual environmental performance, investment plans and capacity to transition?

That distinction has potentially significant consequences for companies, investors and access to capital.

The file is currently under consideration in the European Parliament’s Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee, ECON, where a compromise has been reached between political groups ahead of the committee vote.

Under the emerging agreement, sectoral exclusions remain within the proposed framework. Tobacco cultivation and production, as well as controversial weapons, remain outside the relevant sustainable investment categories.

Fossil-fuel companies, however, have been given a potential route into the proposed transition category where specified conditions are met.

The result is an unusual regulatory distinction.

An oil or gas company may potentially demonstrate that it is directing sufficient capital towards sustainable activities and implementing a credible emissions transition. A tobacco business, however substantial its environmental improvements, would remain excluded because of the sector in which it operates.

Crucially, however, the EPP’s decision not to challenge the tobacco exclusion should not be read as an endorsement of blanket sectoral exclusions.

Markus Ferber, the EPP’s ECON coordinator, has told EU Reporter that the decision was driven by parliamentary arithmetic and the need to assemble a stable majority for the overall compromise.

In other words, the EPP did not abandon its reservations about blanket exclusions because it had become convinced that such exclusions were the right policy. It accepted the compromise because, in Ferber’s assessment, there was no realistic parliamentary majority for an alternative amendment that would have created a performance-based pathway for tobacco.

That distinction is politically important.

It means the tobacco exclusion survives not because the EPP has embraced the principle behind it, but because the group concluded that challenging it would jeopardise the broader compromise.

Ferber: transition should matter more than sector

Ferber made clear that his underlying policy position remains strongly performance-based.

“Per se, EPP does not like blanket sectoral exclusions, but unfortunately it is not only the EPP’s position that determines the final outcome of negotiations and we had to strike compromises with other political groups to achieve a stable majority,” he told EU Reporter.

Asked whether sustainable-finance rules should judge companies according to the sector in which they operate or according to their measurable environmental progress, Ferber was unequivocal.

“In my view, the objective should be to finance the transition,” he said. “Hence, environmental performance and credible transition plans should matter more than the sector.”

That comment goes to the heart of the controversy surrounding tobacco.

The sector remains excluded irrespective of whether individual companies reduce emissions, restructure production, invest in Taxonomy-aligned activities or adopt measurable transition plans.

Fossil-fuel companies, by contrast, are being offered a conditional route into the transition category.

The tobacco exclusion survived because of the numbers

Ferber’s most significant intervention concerns why the EPP did not attempt to overturn the tobacco exclusion through an alternative compromise amendment.

Asked directly why he was not tabling such an amendment, despite previously opposing blanket exclusions affecting tobacco, Ferber replied:

“We have assessed all options for a stable majority in the Parliament and were not convinced that tabling alternative compromises would yield such a majority.”

That answer makes the political calculus unusually clear.

The tobacco exclusion was not retained because Ferber or the EPP ECON leadership had positively embraced the underlying principle. It remained because the EPP judged that there were insufficient votes to replace it while preserving the wider agreement.

The distinction matters because it changes the interpretation of the compromise.

Rather than representing an ideological conversion by the EPP towards sector-based sustainable-finance rules, it represents a tactical concession made in the context of difficult parliamentary mathematics.

Ferber reinforced that point when discussing the wider negotiations.

“I am not enthusiastic about the compromise,” he said, “but it reflects what is politically possible in light of difficult majorities and a rapporteur that has pursued a hard-left line from the beginning.”

The Parliament’s lead rapporteur on the file is Dutch Renew Europe MEP Gerben-Jan Gerbrandy.

Ferber’s description of Gerbrandy’s approach as “hard-left” is his own political characterisation, but his remarks underline how far the SFDR revision has moved beyond a purely technical debate over disclosure rules.

EPP reservations remain

The EPP has repeatedly positioned itself as an opponent of unnecessary blanket exclusions and an advocate of competitiveness, regulatory simplification and performance-based rules.

A number of centre-right amendments tabled during the ECON process sought to remove or narrow the exclusion provisions.

The material submitted to EU Reporter notes that among the amendments tabled in committee, several concerning exclusions were proposed by EPP, ECR and other centre-right lawmakers.

Asked whether significant numbers of EPP members would have preferred the exclusions to be removed or narrowed, Ferber acknowledged that different views existed within the group.

“In a large and diverse political group, you always have different positions to reconcile,” he said.

He added that EPP shadow rapporteur Luděk Niedermayer had “checked back frequently to ensure that he has sufficient backing within our group.

Luděk Niedermayer said "There were different priorities from different political groups and differences are even above different MEPs from same group. The current text reflects the agreement reached as a compromise. 

Asked how much room did the EPP have to negotiate changes to Article 7, and what
concessions did the Group obtain in return for accepting the final package?  he said :

"As with every file, each political group has its own priorities. For the EPP, one of the key
priorities was Article 7, where we managed to secure a text that is acceptable to the Group
and which, in my view, better reflects the nature and purpose of the transition category than
the Commission proposal."

Ferber therefore rejects the suggestion that the final compromise amounts to Niedermayer departing from an agreed EPP line.

Asked directly whether there had been a disagreement between the two men over the treatment of tobacco and sectoral exclusions, he replied:

“No, our shadow rapporteur has faithfully defended the line agreed within our group, but it has always been clear that in compromise negotiations the EPP would not get 100% of its wishes. That is the nature of a compromise.”

Niedermayer said " Maintaining a limited set of exclusions helps preserve the credibility of products marketed as sustainable without extending blanket exclusions more broadly. Furthermore, energy and utility companies are more likely to follow a credible transition pathway than the sectors mentioned above. Consistency between SFDR and Delegated Regulation (EU) 2020/1818 under the Benchmark Regulation is also a strong argument for such an approach.

Tobacco as the test case

The tobacco issue exposes the central philosophical question running through the SFDR revision.

Under a blanket exclusion, the decisive question is: what does this company produce?

Under a performance-based model, the question becomes: what is this company actually doing to transition?

The distinction matters because an automatic exclusion can remove the regulatory benefit of environmental improvement.

A company that reduces emissions, changes production methods, invests heavily in renewable energy or directs substantial capital expenditure towards EU Taxonomy-aligned activities may still receive exactly the same treatment as one making no transition effort at all.

That is the fundamental criticism of blanket exclusions contained in the material examined by EU Reporter.

The fossil-fuel exception makes the question more acute.

If an oil or gas company can potentially qualify for the transition category by demonstrating credible investment and emissions reductions, opponents of the tobacco exclusion ask why businesses in another lawful sector should not at least be permitted to make the same case.

Ferber’s own words strengthen that argument: environmental performance and credible transition plans, he says, should matter more than the sector itself.

Why fossil fuels are treated differently

Ferber nevertheless argued that there is a rationale for distinguishing between some industries.

“One can make an argument that energy companies engaged in fossil fuel projects today are likely to ultimately change their business model towards more sustainable projects, while a controversial weapons manufacturer is likely to still manufacture deadly weapons in the future,” he said.

“So, the transition case is weaker.”

That explanation addresses controversial weapons more directly than tobacco, however.

For tobacco, the unresolved policy question remains whether environmental transition should be assessed separately from the social and health characteristics of the product being manufactured.

That is precisely where the SFDR debate is becoming politically significant.

The issue is no longer merely whether tobacco is socially desirable. It is whether a sustainable-finance regulation should use sector identity as an automatic barrier to recognising environmental transition.

The Green Deal legacy

The controversy also reaches into the EPP’s wider political argument that the EU needs to move away from parts of the regulatory philosophy associated with the previous Commission and the European Green Deal.

Asked whether retaining blanket exclusions amounted to accepting part of that earlier approach, Ferber was sharply critical of the sustainable-finance framework as a whole.

“The whole sustainable finance framework is a legacy product from the previous two terms,” he said.

“In my personal view, it contains some fundamental flaws, that are difficult to change with targeted reviews of individual files.”

“We have done the best we could to fix some mistakes within the SFDR. That does not mean it is perfect. If I was given a blank slate, I would design the framework differently.”

His comments underline the political paradox.

The EPP remains sceptical of the principle behind some sectoral exclusions, yet has accepted a compromise that preserves them.

The explanation, according to its ECON coordinator, is not policy conversion but political necessity.

That is likely to become one of the most important distinctions in the debate as the file moves towards its committee vote and later parliamentary stages.

Two different approaches inside EU sustainable finance?

The controversy also raises questions of regulatory coherence.

The EU Taxonomy measures environmental sustainability using economic indicators including turnover, capital expenditure and operational expenditure associated with qualifying activities.

The SFDR compromise can operate differently by establishing a sectoral gateway before a company’s environmental performance is assessed.

The material examined by EU Reporter argues that this risks creating two different regulatory philosophies: the Taxonomy assesses measurable activity, while SFDR can exclude by sector identity.

That matters at a time when Brussels has promised simpler and more coherent regulation.

If transition finance is supposed to encourage companies to change behaviour, critics argue that the system needs to explain why measurable transition is sufficient for one sector but irrelevant for another.

Growers and SMEs watch closely

The impact is not confined to multinational tobacco manufacturers.

European tobacco growers and processors have warned MEPs that exclusion from sustainable-finance frameworks could have consequences for agricultural communities and smaller businesses.

Ten thousands of family farms would be potentially affected, alongside thousands of SMEs, many of them located in economically vulnerable agricultural regions.

The broader economic figures advanced by industry organisations should be treated as industry estimates, but the principle being argued by growers is more straightforward.

They are not asking for tobacco automatically to be labelled sustainable.

They are asking to be allowed to demonstrate transition against objective criteria.

In that respect, the fossil-fuel derogation has become politically significant.

If Europe is prepared to recognise transition in one of the world’s most carbon-intensive sectors, tobacco industry stakeholders ask why no equivalent environmental-performance test should exist for their own.

No change expected before the vote

Despite his reservations, Ferber told EU Reporter that he does not expect the compromise to be altered before the ECON vote.

“I do not anticipate any changes to the text that was agreed ahead of the vote,” he said.

The immediate political battle may therefore already have been settled.

But the wider argument is unlikely to disappear.

The SFDR revision was intended to simplify sustainable finance and make it clearer for investors.

Instead, it has exposed a fundamental policy choice over whether sustainable finance should reward measurable transition or exclude entire sectors in advance.

And in the case of tobacco, the EPP’s position is now particularly clear: the exclusion remains not because its ECON leadership endorses blanket sectoral exclusions, but because it concluded that Parliament did not contain the votes necessary to remove it without jeopardising the wider SFDR compromise.

That distinction is now stated in the introduction, given its own section, and repeated in the conclusion, so it becomes the central political takeaway rather than being buried inside the Ferber interview.

Le Yémen est à son tour entraîné dans la guerre au Moyen-Orient. Les rebelles houthis intensifient leurs attaques contre l'armée régulière yéménite, mais aussi contre son principal soutien, l'Arabie Saoudite. Une escalade condamnée par l'Union européenne et les Nations unies. Précisions de Nicolas Chamontin.

Après l’annonce par 12 pays de restrictions visant le commerce avec les colonies israéliennes en Cisjordanie, l’ambassadrice de Palestine en France, Hala Abou-Hassira, salue sur France 24 des mesures prises à un "moment crucial". Elle appelle désormais à aller plus loin pour faire pression sur Israël et "faire respecter le droit international".

European leaders losing sleep over Trump’s economic and territorial threats should spare a thought for their Canadian counterparts. On August 22nd, Canadian prime minister Mark Carney announced that his country was “at war” with the United States after trade negotiations collapsed at the eleventh hour. Trump’s subsequent renaming of Lake Ontario to Lake America echoed the crisis with Greenland in January, when the US called into question Denmark’s sovereignty over the territory and refused to rule out taking it by military force.

Both the EU and Canada, in other words, face a similar conundrum: how to de-risk their relationship with an increasingly predatory United States, which exposes them to security threats from Russia and poses a new threat of its own. It is against this backdrop that Carney will attend commission president Ursula von der Leyen’s State of the European Union Speech in Strasbourg on September 16th. An EU-Canada summit will follow in October. The timing could scarcely be better for Europe and Canada to make common cause. But if European leaders want to shift the relationship into a new gear, they will have to revise their usual approach to how the EU treats third countries, particularly in defence and security, where both sides’ dependence on the US runs deepest.

Blurring the lines

Some Canadians, traumatised by Trump’s bullying, have fantasised about joining the EU. Alas, Article 49 of the Treaty on European Union—its accession clause—restricts membership of the bloc to European states. But the EU need not choose between full membership and arm’s-length third-country status. A strict in-or-out model of security and defence co-operation risks excluding partners like Ukraine, Britain, Norway and Canada from key initiatives and the bloc’s defence technological and industrial base—leaving Europe less safe as a result.

The EU already treats one non-member as something more than an ordinary third country or even one on the path to membership: Ukraine has received notable carve-outs for the European Defence Industry Programme (EDIP) and the EU’s Security Action for Europe (SAFE) mechanism, which offers €150bn in low-interest defence loans—not to mention exemptions in other areas like trade, energy, and telecommunications. In other words, the question is not whether bending the rules is permissible under certain circumstances, but what those circumstances are. Extending the same treatment to Canada (as inoffensive an ally as they come) would be popular at home and would offer a template for how other relationships, including with Britain, could be structured.

There is already a clear trend towards a closer relationship between Brussels and Ottawa, especially on the defence industrial side. In 2021, Canada joined the military mobility project of the EU’s framework for deeper defence co-operation, PESCO. Last year, both sides signed a security and defence partnership and this year they agreed to Canada’s participation in SAFE.

On the bilateral front, Berlin and Ottawa are finalising a strategic partnership agreement which will include elements on defence cooperation, on top of agreements already signed with France, Denmark, and other Nordics. On the procurement side, German shipbuilder ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems won a contest to build 12 submarines for the Royal Canadian Navy—the biggest defence deal in Canadian history. Canada is also considering buying Swedish Gripen fighter jets instead of American F-35s and is building ice-breakers in Helsinki. Finally, Canada is actively involved in deterring Russia with boots on the ground in Latvia, where it leads a multinational brigade as part of NATO’s Enhanced Forward Presence (eFP).

But these efforts are mostly non-binding and aspirational—except for SAFE (which is time-limited) and eFP (which sits outside of EU structures entirely). The EU-Canada summit at the end of October gives Brussels and Ottawa a concrete opportunity to turn these efforts into specific investments, capabilities and operational co-operation.

Under the radar

Canada is an underrated military power. The 2% of its GDP that it currently spends on defence is already more than the 14 smallest EU defence budgets combined

The EU stands to gain more from a closer relationship than one might think. Canada is an underrated military power. The 2% of its GDP that it currently spends on defence is already more than the 14 smallest EU defence budgets combined. Compared to the EU’s biggest defence spenders, it ranks behind only Germany, France, Italy and Poland. And its budget is set to increase significantly as Canada moves to spend 4% by 2030 and C$500bn (€310bn) over the next decade.

Much of that money will be invested in equipment and suppliers outside of Canada. As Carney made clear in a recent speech: “The days of our military sending 70 cents of every dollar to the United States are over.” EU defence projects should open up to countries outside the EU and the European Economic Area. Canada’s armed forces bring significant know-how in Arctic warfare, an area of increasing interest to Europe amid growing threats from both Russia and the US. And its six decades within the joint US-Canadian air-defence command, NORAD, give it rare experience of continental-scale air defence and early warning, just as Europeans scramble to expand their own independent missile-defence network.

Deeper cooperation

The EU can use these resources and capabilities to deter Russia and wean itself off its dependence on America, starting with deeper Canadian co-operation with the EU’s defence projects and agencies. A first step would be encouraging Canada to join further PESCO projects. Canada’s expertise could be of great help in ACCESS, which aims to develop Arctic-capable, GPS-denied electronic warfare and sensor systems, and TWISTER’s space-based early warning strand. Canada could join both without too much red tape (for EU standards) because neither project is supported by the European Defence Agency (EDA). A second step would be an administrative arrangement between Canada and EDA, which would allow Canada to join EDA-supported PESCO projects it is currently ineligible for, as well as joint training, monitoring and research. Since the US already has such an arrangement, extending it to Canada should prove uncontroversial.

But the most ambitious step the EU could take would be to treat Canada as a full-fledged member of the EU’s defence technological and industrial base instead of as a third country. Member states and the commission should write Canada into EDIP’s successor, the ring-fenced defence-spending stream—or “window”—of the upcoming European Competitiveness Fund (ECF), which is currently being negotiated as part of the EU’s next budget.

As it stands, current EDIP rules will likely roll over into the ECF unchanged. Under those rules, a system built in Europe carrying 35% American components would qualify for funding, but a wholly Canadian one would not. When EDIP was being negotiated, members states deliberately created a carve-out for Ukraine. Member states should extend the same preferential terms to Canada under the ECF, but also go further, letting Canada run programmes as well as bid for them.

These would be major concessions and they must not be given away for free. The expectation should be that Canada pay for access, open its own procurement to European firms in return, and align its export controls with the EU’s. As a proof-of-concept, both sides could design at least one major system with no US export-controlled parts in it (a counter-drone system would work very well).

In addition to these efforts, Berlin and Paris should also throw their weight behind Canada’s proposal for a Defence Security and Resilience Bank. They might even propose merging it with Britain’s proposed Multilateral Defence Mechanism to create a coalition spanning Britain, Canada and EU member states.

Skin in the game

As the EU’s borders come under pressure from multiple directions, there is a strong case for expanding Canada’s stake in European territorial integrity. That begins by establishing reciprocity. Europeans shouldn’t scoff at Canadian concerns—just as Denmark flew blood bags to Greenland in anticipation of a US invasion in January, so too have the Canadian Armed Forces modelled a possible US military invasion.

European countries should make it clear to Washington that its statements calling into question its ally’s sovereignty are intolerable. They should also prevail upon Canada to unequivocally pick sides should the US raise the Greenland issue again. In the event of a future military mission to Greenland, similar to the Danish-led Operation Arctic Endurance, or even a mission under the EU’s common security and defence policy, Copenhagen should invite Ottawa to join with boots on the ground, just as it has done in Latvia. Likewise, the EU could bind its anti-coercion instrument to equivalent Canadian countermeasures, ready for joint activation during a crisis.

Boosting Ottawa’s participation in Arctic issues would tie it more closely to the defence of the region more broadly and would give it a bigger role in defending European borders. After all, no serious conversation about the region is conceivable without Canada, whose Arctic territory is vastly larger than that of most other Arctic states. Canada is already part of the region’s multilateral infrastructure, but there is still scope to deepen its co-operation with the EU instruments specifically. One way to bridge the gap would be to take up the European Parliament’s proposal to create a dedicated EU-Canada Arctic cooperation framework with structured dialogues between EU and Canadian institutions.

An additional step which would contribute decisively to European security would be to invite Canada to the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF), the UK-led coalition of northern European states. Canadian forces have already taken part in JEF exercises in Latvia last year and Carney has participated in virtual meetings of the group. Formally joining JEF, which sits outside NATO and EU structures, would involve little red tape and could happen almost immediately. As the US considers far-reaching troop reductions in Europe, any step that improves interoperability among non-US NATO allies is a win for the entire continent.

A price worth paying

The steps outlined above are likely to draw America’s ire and invite retaliation. The US has repeatedly cast scorn on Carney’s middle powers strategy—an effort to rally mid-sized states against pressure from larger ones—which it increasingly views as a serious challenge to its primacy. Under-secretary of war for policy Elbridge Colby recently suspended the Permanent Joint Board on Defence, a longstanding US-Canadian strategic consultative body, and linked the pause to Canada’s weak defence spending and its middle powers strategy. Both the EU and Canada should expect increasing pushback if they embark on this joint course. But any American paroxysm will prove the point—that both Europe and Canada are better off together than alone or in thrall to Washington. If that means blurring the boundaries between EU member states and third countries, so be it.

Source

The election of Mahnaz Maimanat (pictured) to lead the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran highlights more than three decades of continuous female leadership within one of Iran’s principal organised opposition movements. An important development has taken place within the Iranian democratic opposition. On 6 September, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK), the principal organized component of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), elected Mahnaz Maimanat as its new Secretary-General, at the beginning of the organisation’s 62nd year.

The election took place through three successive rounds involving PMOI members in seven countries — France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Albania. In the first round, Maimanat received 56% of the votes, ahead of Badri Pourtabbakh and Narges Azdanlou. The position is for a two-year term and may be renewed by the PMOI’s Central Council. Born in Tehran in 1959, Maimanat has spent most of her adult life in the movement.

She became acquainted with the PMOI as a university student and participated in demonstrations against the Shah’s dictatorship. She joined the organization following the 1979 revolution and went on to assume a succession of senior responsibilities: she became a member of the Executive Committee in 1989, the Leadership Council in 1993, the Central Council in 2014, and co-Secretary-General in 2021. Her personal history also reflects the heavy price paid by many PMOI families under the clerical regime. Her mother, Akhtar Mowlavi, a teacher, was killed by the Revolutionary Guards in 1988.

One of her brothers, Massoud, was executed in Evin Prison at the age of 19 after months of imprisonment and torture. Another brother, Mahmoud, an architecture student, was executed during the 1988 massacre of political prisoners. The significance of the election, however, goes well beyond a change of office-holder. Mahnaz Maimanat is the tenth woman to serve as Secretary-General of the PMOI. Maryam Rajavi became the first woman to hold the organisation’s top leadership position in 1989, and for more than three decades every PMOI Secretary-General has been a woman.

Eight women succeeded Mrs Rajavi before Maimanat. This is particularly significant in the Iranian context. Within the PMOI, women’s leadership is not simply a matter of ceremonial representation or political imagery. Its female Secretaries-General have exercised real executive and organisational authority, often during extraordinarily difficult periods involving clandestine activity inside Iran, severe repression, imprisonment and executions, attacks on PMOI members, displacement from Iraq and the subsequent rebuilding of the organisation.

After assuming responsibility for leading the National Council of Resistance of Iran in 1993, Maryam Rajavi ceased to hold a formal organisational position within the PMOI. Nevertheless, she remains the most prominent political figure of the Iranian Resistance and, for many Iranians, particularly women, has become a symbol of resistance to religious fundamentalism and a pioneer of women’s equality and political leadership. This model of female leadership has also had important consequences inside Iran. Women have increasingly assumed leading responsibilities within the PMOI’s underground Resistance Units, which the movement says have played an active role in successive uprisings against the regime, including the nationwide protests of January 2026.

For young Iranian women confronting compulsory veiling, institutional discrimination and a political system that treats women as second-class citizens, the sight of women exercising genuine authority within an organised opposition movement carries considerable political and cultural significance. It also helps explain the intensity of the attacks directed against the PMOI’s leadership by the Iranian regime and, increasingly, by hardline monarchist circles. Both have devoted considerable efforts to portraying the PMOI, and particularly its female leadership, as illegitimate.

Yet the central issue is that the PMOI remains a highly organised democratic opposition movement with an extensive network inside Iran and therefore represents a serious challenge to the survival of the ruling theocracy. The election of its tenth female Secretary-General should therefore be viewed in a broader perspective. It represents more than three decades of continuous female leadership and constitutes a profound ideological and cultural challenge to Islamic fundamentalism: not simply women demanding equality, but women assuming responsibility, exercising authority and leading an organised struggle against a system built upon their discrimination and subordination.

Summary

• To find out what “Europe” means to people today, ECFR commissioned almost 6,000 interviews in six European countries and qualitative desk research across 15 more.
• The interviews reveal that most people have strong opinions about Europe and its future; the complementary research found that geopolitical chaos and culture wars are helping the EU become more politicised in domestic debates.
• How people feel about Europe may thus affect how they vote in the potentially seismic domestic elections to come, in many of which the far right leads in the polls.
• The interviews also found many people want a stronger, more independent and more united Europe. But relatively few can picture a credible route from today’s disruptions to that destination.
• This imagination gap is most prevalent among a pivotal constituency we call “the uncertain”. Pro-European leaders need to fill it, lest people become more receptive to politics that reinterpret the past as the future.
• These leaders can do so by harnessing the power of “future nostalgia”, or a longing for a time when a better future seemed within reach.

Broken records

“Europe leaves me completely indifferent.”Read the extended quote from A European from France, born in the 1970s01

For decades, Europe had quite a successful record. Its countries grew accustomed to living under America’s protection, trading freely with one another, and enjoying peace and prosperity at home. Borders opened and the EU expanded. Europe came to think of itself as one of the world’s economic and political centres of gravity—or even a model for others to follow.

But then, one by one, the cosy assumptions on which Europe had built its post-cold-war existence began to fall apart. It was time for Europe to change its tune. As European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen put it, there was “no time or room for nostalgia… this must be Europe’s independence moment”. Leaders across the continent offered variations on the same theme: Europe must become stronger, more united and more independent.

As the months passed, parts of the public saw Europe moving in that direction. But many others concluded different things from the same events. For some, the disruptions had exposed a system that had long been dysfunctional and captured by elites. Others hesitated, realising that the danger could finally stir Europe from its slumber but that it could also expose divisions impossible to overcome. And then there were some like the Frenchman quoted at the start of this section who just did not care: Europe was and always had been a background hum that barely registered in their lives.

This paper shows that people with views like his are in a minority. “Europe” may not be the most important issue in people’s lives, but it is something a lot of them care about. How people feel about Europe may thus affect how they vote at home and contribute to how much say the far right has in shaping the future of the continent.

The paper draws on 5,834 AI-moderated interviews with European citizens conducted in May and June 2026 in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland. These capture how ordinary people, in their own words, imagine Europe’s future. They also provide (after weighting) a nationally representative picture of how people’s views are distributed. The interviews are complemented by comparative desk research on public and political debates in 15 EU member states. This examined how Europe and the EU are discussed across national political and media environments.

The main finding of the research is that many Europeans have an “imagination gap”. A lot of the people interviewed—especially among a substantial group we call the “uncertain”—want a stronger, more integrated and more independent Europe. But they often struggle to picture a credible route from today’s disruptions to that destination. The complementary research finds this gap exists at a time when Europe and the EU are becoming more salient in the public debate, and more politicised.

The people we spoke to are hardly alone in their pessimism. ECFR’s 2025 polling revealed Europeans to be notably gloomy about the future of their countries and the world, and that Americans and Turks shared similar sentiments. But pessimism comes with a unique political risk in Europe. Americans who lose faith in the future cannot realistically demand that the US be dismantled. Yet Europeans who lose confidence in the EU can plausibly ask for “less Europe” or even their country’s exit. And European integration has always depended on a future-facing promise: the idea of an “ever closer union” asks people to believe in both what Europe is and what it might become.

So, the imagination gap could help explain why nostalgic politics has become attractive to some voters in Europe. When people struggle to imagine a believable tomorrow, they become more receptive to visions that reinterpret the past as the future. But pro-European leaders should aim to harness a different kind of nostalgia—a “future nostalgia”, to borrow Dua Lipa’s 2020 album title, or a longing for the sense that a better future was within reach. They may need to hurry. As Europe braces for national elections in several influential countries, some with the far right leading in the polls, pro-Europeans need to help ensure a recognisable Europe exists to defend in the years ahead.

Europe’s alarm bells

“Go back to sleep; things are going downhill.”Read the extended quote from A European from Germany, born in the 1950s02

Each interview begins with an icebreaker question: “Let’s imagine you have a friend who fell asleep five years ago and has just woken up. This friend asks you: ‘How is Europe doing at the moment?’ How would you describe Europe today—what would you tell them?” In their answers, by far the largest group of respondents (on average 68% across the six countries studied) talks about a general deterioration or loss of normality. Only 12% see opportunity in the crises confronting the continent and frame their responses in terms of Europe’s awakening or renewal.

Respondents speak of Europe’s awakening most often in Poland (21%). This is the most recent one of the six countries studied to join the EU and is closest to the Ukrainian war zone. According to one Pole, born in the 1980s, “Europe is doing reasonably well. It’s trying to strengthen itself and be more independent from the USA.”Read the extended quote from A European from Poland, born in the 1980s03 Or, to quote an older respondent in Germany, where just 13% of people raise these themes, “Crises make you stronger, and I think that applies to Europe as well. Investment in defence is increasing again. The crises have revealed the weak points, and we can start working on them.”Read the extended quote from A European from Germany, born in the 1960s04 Such voices of encouragement are particularly sparse in France, where a mere 5% of respondents describe today’s Europe in terms of awakening or renewal. This is despite a decade of calls for “strategic autonomy” from President Emmanuel Macron.

When it comes to naming Europe’s challenges, people most often talk about war and security, followed by economic pressures. But almost three-quarters of the people interviewed say Europe is coping badly with its greatest challenges. For this, they blame national governments twice as often as European institutions and EU leaders. According to a French respondent, born in the 1960s, “Leaders of the countries do what suits their own country; they don’t see unity and don’t want it.”Read the extended quote from A European from France, born in the 1960s05

Turning to where things are heading, the AI asks: “Some people say that Europe’s future is in danger. How do you react when you hear that?” In response to this, on average 56% agree, against only 21% who disagree.

Still, many of the people interviewed identify strongly with Europe and want it to flourish. When asked what they would like Europe to look like in 20 years, three-quarters describe a positive European vision. They most often talk about unity and political integration, peace and security, and prosperity and well-being. Only around 13% hope for “less Europe” or for the EU’s dissolution.

But big dreams about Europe often come with big doubts. As one German, born in the 1990s, says: “I’m regularly relieved that I live in Europe. It’s not perfect and some things are going in the wrong direction at the moment, but no region in the world is safer, freer and more democratic.” He sees “climate catastrophe and attacks on democracy from the far right” as the greatest challenges facing Europe today—but does not think Europe is handling them very well. Asked about the reasons for this, he replies: “Elections focus too much on the here and now and not enough on the future.” Thinking about Europe in 20 years, he would like it to be “free, democratic, sustainable, less indebted, politically further to the left [and] peaceful”. But, on whether this is likely to happen, his response is a brusque: “No”Read the extended quote from A European from Germany, born in the 1990s06.

Across the countries covered by our interviews, many conversations followed a similar pattern. People appreciate Europe, but they recognise the challenges it faces and express little faith in its collective capacity to deal with them. Even when respondents have big ambitions for Europe, they often talk about them as mere aspirations that are unlikely to become reality.

So, it may no longer be enough to distinguish only between pro-European and Eurosceptic voters. Another important divide is whether people believe European leaders (EU and national alike) can turn their hopes into reality.

Four tunes

And how would you like Europe to look in 20 years’ time?

“Like Poland is now.”Read the extended quote from A European from Poland, born in the 1950s07

Most of the people interviewed express strong opinions about Europe’s future. And they tend to imagine that future in one of four ways.

The positive hear an anthem of renewal: today’s disruptions are finally forcing Europe to become stronger and more united. The negative hear a ballad of decline, with each new crisis confirming the continent’s best days are behind it. For the uncertain, the melody of a better Europe is recognisable, but the song is not finished—and they are not convinced it ever will be. Very few people belong to the disconnected, for whom Europe is just a background hum coming from too far away to command much attention.

The tunes vary by country. But the four basic themes recur across borders, genders and generations.

The positive

Europe’s future is not a scary place for the positives. “Fundamentally, the EU is still a good story,”Read the extended quote from A European from Germany, born in the 1970s08 says one German, born in the 1970s, who votes for the centre-left Greens. “It still has a bright future ahead of it,”Read the extended quote from A European from France, born in the 2000s09 asserts a supporter of the leftist France Unbowed (LFI), who was born in the 2000s. Just under 20% of the people interviewed belong to this group of optimists.

The present: The positive identify strongly as European, and two-fifths of them describe the EU’s situation today in terms of awakening. They are well represented in the electorates of EU-enthusiastic parties like the centrist Civic Coalition in Poland, Liberal Democrats in Britain and D66 in the Netherlands, as well as left-leaning EU-fans like the German Greens and the UK’s Labour Party.

Many of this group see the disruptions of the present as giving the EU the shock it perhaps always needed for its leaders to push for greater European integration and autonomy. One Dutch D66 voter, born in the 1980s, describes this as “a sense of urgency, the realisation that we must stand up for ourselves”. He stresses “a shared awareness from the population”Read the extended quote from A European from the Netherlands, born in the 1980s10 as contributing most to this.

The future: This is not to say the positive think it will be easy. They recognise that to overcome Europe’s problems, political will and institutional reform will be necessary. Many of this group also think the EU will have to address the national vetoes that hinder collective action.

It is common among the positive to worry about the rise of the far right, but they still tend to believe change is possible precisely because the alternative has become so visible: a fragmented Europe, dependent on others and unable to defend itself or its interests. “Five years ago, I think there was more of an illusion of stability,” says one Italian, born in the 1990s, but “today many things are more explicit … so I’d say [Europe has become] more unstable but more honest compared to before.”Read the extended quote from A European from Italy, born in the 1990s11

Still, most of the positive disagree with the idea that Europe’s future is in danger. “It’s a very serious crisis, but I think that with wise policymaking [the danger] can be avoided,”Read the extended quote from A European from Poland, born in 1990s12 says a Civic Coalition voter in Poland. Members of this group want Europe to show leadership and assertiveness internationally. And in 20 years, most of them hope to see a more united and better integrated Europe. They also tend to believe such a future is achievable.

In the world of the positive, the EU does not need to take a fundamentally different direction; rather, it needs to become what it was always meant to be. “We have it in our hands,” says a Dutch D66 voter, born in the 1980s, who has “doubts about the pace, not the direction”Read the extended quote from A European from the Netherlands, born in the 1980s13.

The negative

At the other end of the spectrum sit the negative. This is the largest group in every country studied, except the Netherlands, and is home to almost half of respondents in France, Italy and Germany. The negative hold a near-hegemonic position in the electorates of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), National Rally (RN) in France and Reform UK. They are also strongly present on the Polish right and far right, among Party for Freedom (PVV) voters in the Netherlands, and in the electorate of the progressive populist Five Star Movement in Italy. They are well represented among non-voters in Italy, Germany and Poland, too.

The present: The negative stand out in their strong criticism of today’s Europe, which is characterised by a notable anti-elitist and anti-migrant streak. One Italian, born in the 1980s, describes Europe as: “A community run by people who have only thought about their own well-being until now; they’ve ruined our lives with surreal green ideologies, financing unjust wars, opening up to immigration that is destroying European identity and that of member states. [They are] unprepared on the military front [and] divided as peoples both in terms of collective thinking and economically.”Read the extended quote from A European from Italy, born in the 1980s14

Such pessimism is not always rooted in opposition to European cooperation. Many of the negative instead rail against what they consider the EU’s over-reach: “The EU is pushing itself literally everywhere, even into areas where it was never granted any competencies,”Read the extended quote from A European from Poland, born in 1980s15 says one Pole, born in the 1980s, who votes for the radical-right Konfederacja. It is common for people in this group to describe politicians as self-interested, captured by lobbies or too removed from ordinary life to be able to do the right thing. Negatives tend to interpret the crises piling up—and this group cites migration and inflation above all—as symptoms of deeper decay: “I feel sad for what once was a great place,”Read the extended quote from A European from the UK, born in the 1960s16 says a Reform UK voter, born in the 1960s.

The future: For most of the negative, Europe’s future looks bleak. But variation exists in how they feel about this. One Pole, who was born in the 1980s and votes for the nationalist Law and Justice party (PiS), agrees Europe’s future is in danger and is “pleased about it.”Read the extended quote from A European from Poland, born in 1980s17 Her Italian peer, who votes for the ruling Brothers of Italy party, expresses fear and anxiety: “I am afraid,” she says, before adding, “of war.”Read the extended quote from A European from Italy, born in the 1980s18 Asked about her hopes for Europe in 20 years, she mulls whether the EU will still exist. Other negatives actively want the EU to be whittled down or dismantled altogether. As they see it, less or no Europe would restore national sovereignty and give citizens a more direct say in how they are governed. Some of them want to recover what they feel they have lost: “We lived much better when the European Union didn’t exist,”Read the extended quote from A European from France, born in the 1950s19 says an RN voter in France, born in the 1950s.

The uncertain

Somewhere between the negative and the positive dwell the uncertain. This group accounts for around a third of the public in most of the countries studied (but only around a quarter in Britain). They are common among the electorates of left-wing parties in all six countries, though they also feature prominently among voters of the ruling centre-right parties in Germany, the Netherlands and Poland.

The present: More than half of the uncertain identify strongly as European. Yet they rarely describe Europe today in terms of “awakening” and often bring up themes of decay and loss of normality. “Europe is doing badly, the different countries are not united, and we are facing a war on our doorstep,”Read the extended quote from A European from France, born in the 1960s20 says a French respondent born in the 1960s, who votes for Macron’s Renaissance party.

People in this group often see the case for optimism and pessimism alike. They recognise that the EU has made it through crises before and that the threats of today are producing solidarity. They tend to see support for Ukraine, developments in defence cooperation and the gradual reduction of dependence on the US as indicators that something is shifting for the better.

But political will appears fragile to the uncertain. They worry that nationalist and far-right forces could unravel European cooperation and that a gulf exists between European leaders’ words and their deeds. According to a Polish progressive, born in the 1990s, the EU suffers from a “lack of a common direction, disagreement amongst member states, poor ideas being implemented by force.”Read the extended quote from A European from Poland, born in 1990s21 Another Pole points to “lack of imagination among politicians, the habit that Europe doesn’t need to take responsibility for itself because someone will always save us.”Read the extended quote from A European from Poland, born in 1980s22

The future: When the uncertain think about the future, they worry. Most of them believe Europe’s future is in danger and what becomes of the EU will depend on choices that leaders have not yet made. Like the positive, most uncertain want Europe to become more united and integrated—but they are much less confident that it will.

A Social Democrat (SPD) voter in Germany, born in the 1960s, hopes for a “solid, united union”. But asked whether this could become reality, he says: “I have great doubts about it.”Read the extended quote from A European from Germany, born in the 1960s23 A liberal voter from Italy, born in the 1990s, dreams of a “more united, more efficient [Europe], able to harness the strength of its single market and with a long-term vision for the future.”Read the extended quote from A European from Italy, born in the 1990s24 But he doubts this will materialise. Meanwhile, his Dutch peer, who is a D66 voter, hopes for a Europe that is “green, peaceful and safe” but gives just a “fifty-fifty”Read the extended quote from A European from the Netherlands, born in the 1990s25 chance of this vision becoming reality.

The disconnected

The disconnected account for only around a tenth of the public in most countries studied, except in Britain, where (perhaps reflecting the country’s non-EU status and the legacy of Brexit) their share rises to 22%. They feature in the electorates of every party but almost never constitute more than 15%. The only exception is the UK’s Conservative Party, in which they account for almost a third.

The present: This group sees Europe’s future as largely not their business because they do not experience it as central to their lives (and this often extends to politics in general). “I don’t ask myself all these political questions,”Read the extended quote from A European from France, born in the 1990s26 says a French respondent, born in the 1990s. Asked to describe today’s Europe to a friend who had just woken from a five-year sleep, a Pole born in the 1980s replies: “Mate. You’ve only just woken up and that’s the first question you’re asking?”Read the extended quote from A European from Poland, born in 1980s27 A Dutch respondent, born in the 1990s, is more direct still: “I just live my life the way I want, and Europe or whatever doesn’t interest me.”Read the extended quote from A European from the Netherlands, born in the 1990s28 Their responses to questions concerning Europe tend to be brief and evasive—don’t know, no idea, don’t care.

The future: When asked what they want Europe to look like in 20 years, the disconnected tend to reach for similar answers: more or less the same, no idea, it doesn’t matter. They are animated neither by fear of European collapse nor by hope for European renewal (although many still describe today’s Europe in terms of deterioration or a loss of normality). For the disconnected, the EU is largely a background institution. It occasionally affects prices and makes rules but otherwise feels remote from everyday life and domestic concerns. This group is unlikely to have much say in Europe’s political direction.

***

That role as a pivotal constituency belongs to the uncertain. This is not to say they are the only ones suffering from an imagination gap. Three-quarters of them are, but so are almost half of the negative and a third of the disconnected. Overall, about half of the European public seem to have an imagination gap. Poland is the exception: only around a third show symptoms there.

What makes the uncertain so pivotal, apart from the group’s size, is that they have not decided where things will end up. This distinguishes them from the positive, for whom Europe is already succeeding; the negative, many of whom have concluded that it cannot; and the disconnected, who just aren’t that bothered. Pro-European leaders will therefore need to focus their attention on filling the imagination gap among the uncertain, particularly given the growing salience and contestation of the EU in the public debate.

European rhapsody

“The first time I drank a milkshake with a paper straw at McDonald’s, it was a disgusting experience.”Read the extended quote from A European from Germany, born in the 1990s29

The dominance of strong opinions about Europe—positive, negative and uncertain—in the interviews aligns with our complementary research across 15 countries. That research suggests “Europe” has become more prominent in the public debate and thus more politically salient. This is corroborated by findings from other research that points to growing identification with Europe throughout the crises.

Three overlapping dynamics seem to be driving these developments.

First, foreign policy upheavals mean geopolitical questions of European power and vulnerability have landed squarely on people’s kitchen tables. Should we prepare for war? Can our countries defend themselves alone? If not, whom should they consider as their key allies—Americans or other Europeans? And is the EU, conceived as a peace project, still fit for purpose in times of “unpeace”?

Second, the EU is becoming “domesticated”. This is because the bloc’s policymaking increasingly reaches into some of the most politically sensitive areas of people’s lives (migration, climate and the cost of living, for example). Some member states, like Greece and Cyprus, experienced this well before others. In their case, the euro-zone crisis led to a lasting slump in public trust towards the EU.

But now the EU is in the limelight almost everywhere, in part because of Brussels-led policy initiatives. These policy choices are testing people’s vague or instinctive pro-Europeanism against consequences they feel. Should the EU spend more on defence? Is it a good idea to ban plastic straws, or phase out diesel cars and fossil fuel boilers? Should all European countries have mandatory refugee quotas? Such decisions can nudge European citizens towards developing more concrete pro-European attitudes. But they can also make their views more conditional, critical or ambivalent.

Finally, some political actors are stoking the culture wars. As I argued in last year’s Sentiment Compass, “Europe” is a target in the Trumpist political project and those of like-minded forces on this side of the Atlantic. Some well-known social media moguls and platforms play an active and polarising role in this. European far-right politicians need not support Trump or advertise closeness to his administration to draw on a similar repertoire: Brussels is bureaucratic; Europe is weak; the mainstream is ideologically captured; European institutions are obstacles to national sovereignty and cultural authenticity. Such narratives contest what “Europe” is for. They also call into question whose values it represents and whether its institutions deserve citizens’ allegiance.

This is not to say greater salience always translates into less support for a stronger, more united Europe. It can also open up space for a more serious debate in which pro-Europeans can clarify and update the case for integration. Geopolitical insecurity, for example, can strengthen the perceived value of European cooperation in the eyes of the public, as a growing pro-Europeanism of Danes and Swedes suggests.

The politicisation gap

But greater salience can push people to start feeling anxious about Europe’s future. It also strengthens the temptation for political forces to convert the EU into one of the main political and electoral battlegrounds. This is especially the case on the far right. The AfD’s co-leader Alice Weidel, for example, has called for Germany to leave the euro zone and the Schengen area; President Karol Nawrocki in Poland attacks European “follies”. They and others, like RN leader Marine Le Pen, seem to have concluded that trolling the EU gives them a language through which they can explain who they are. Such figures also use it as shorthand for what they oppose and what future they offer.

Pro-European political leaders often struggle to respond with the same confidence. Some react with unconditional defence of the EU (for instance, the Dutch prime minister Rob Jetten and his Spanish counterpart Pedro Sánchez). But that can stop them addressing people’s anxieties about Europe. Other leaders, including Donald Tusk in Poland and Friedrich Merz in Germany, offer a trimmed pro-Europeanism instead (for example, by posing as “realist” on migration and climate). This might bring them closer to a median national voter, but it also risks making far-right views about Europe look more normal.

Leaders thus tend to preach to the positives or bow down to the negatives. Yet it is among Europe’s uncertain that belief in Europe’s future is up for grabs. If the uncertain’s anxieties remain unaddressed, they could veer away from pro-European parties or even detach from politics altogether. And if people choose not to vote or to vote for far-right or Eurosceptic parties in their national elections, the entire continent could move in a direction that renders it unrecognisable in 20 years’ time. This is not to mention that it could become more vulnerable to Russia and even Europe’s old friend across the Atlantic.

One example of how things could be done differently comes from Romania. Speaking on television on Europe Day, President Nicusor Dan offered a nuanced view. He accepted that Europe has made mistakes, but at the same time defended its capacity for self-correction. In a country that has become highly polarised, this may have been an instinctive appeal to Romania’s version of the uncertain.

Other pro-Europeans who take the uncertain seriously may also be able to come up with a better response. In their voting preferences and media habits, the uncertain resemble the positive much more than the negative. (For more evidence, see the bonus track at the end of this paper.) Yet, when asked about Europe’s future, they do not share the positives’ confidence. And if these voters already inhabit relatively pro-European political and media environments (and, as discussed, identify strongly with Europe), their doubts cannot be explained only by exposure to Eurosceptic parties, hostile media and culture wars. Something other than old-school pro-Europeanism might thus be necessary to make them believe in Europe again.   

Chords of doubt

“I would like Europe to behave less fearfully.”Read the extended quote from A European from the Netherlands, born in the 2000s30

Three recurring concerns appear to be holding the uncertain back: they doubt whether Europe can act when it needs to; whether it can live up to the values it professes and command respect; and whether it can really keep Europeans safe.

European slowness

One of the most striking findings from the interviews was that, across the six countries, respondents often mention Europe’s “slowness” as one of its most frustrating characteristics. This theme comes up most often in the Netherlands and Germany (where Merz once criticised the EU’s “massive over-bureaucratisation of almost all parts of life”). Positive and negative respondents also mention slowness, but the uncertain talk about it even more than any other group.

Many of the uncertain focus on the pace of decision-making. One millennial German, who voted for the centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) in 2025 but now prefers the SPD, complains that “the bureaucratic apparatus is far too large and cumbersome. It takes far too long for a decision to be made. Some issues need to be addressed quickly, but by the time everything has gone through all the levels and member states, it’s usually already too late.” Asked who is responsible, he blames both sides: “EU institutions are too bureaucratic and bloated, and the member states don’t want to give up any responsibility or authority whatsoever.”Read the extended quote from A European from Germany, born in the 1980s31

For others, the problem is more structural. As a young Pole, born in the 2000s and looking beyond the mainstream parties, puts it: “The EU fundamentally discusses a lot but does nothing.” He attributes this partly to “the culture of operation of the states with the greatest influence in the EU.”Read the extended quote from A European from Poland, born in 2000s32 A Bavarian, born in the 1970s, who voted CDU/CSU in 2025 but is considering switching parties, says: “Everything takes far too long. By the time Europe reaches agreements, years have passed or nothing happens because one EU country is against it.”Read the extended quote from A European from Germany, born in the 1970s33 Her solution is to replace unanimity with, for example, a three-quarters majority. Similarly, a Dutch respondent who used to vote for the centre-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, born in the 1970s, complains about “Lengthy consultations [and] little or slow decision-making,”Read the extended quote from A European from the Netherlands, born in the 1970s34 blaming member states for this.

But something else emerges from these conversations besides familiar complaints about Brussels bureaucracy. In a faster-moving and more dangerous world, slowness becomes a measure of Europe’s (in)ability to act.

A German man, born in the 1960s, links cumbersome procedures to declining competitiveness: “If a simple approval procedure in Europe takes years and sometimes decades, nobody can compete with such an industry-friendly society as in the USA, China or India.”Read the extended quote from A European from Germany, born in the 1960s35 His compatriot, a Green voter born in the 1990s, goes further, describing Europe as being “in an odd in-between state between the old and a new world order”. Because of regulation and bureaucratic hurdles, she argues, Europe is “not really able to adapt quickly enough and is being massively overtaken technologically by Asia and the USA.”Read the extended quote from A European from Germany, born in 1990s36

So, slowness makes the future the uncertain want hard to believe in. If Europe aspires to become more sovereign and competitive, as several European leaders have promised, then the uncertain first need to see evidence that the EU can make decisions and implement them—and that it can react quickly enough to the fast-changing global environment. This might require the EU to eliminate national vetoes in some areas. Or smaller groups of countries could lead on some initiatives when unanimity between countries is impossible to reach. But whatever the actions, they need to challenge the overwhelming impression of Europe being unable to act. Otherwise, too many people will continue to have the same impression as a British Labour voter, born in the 1990s, according to whom Europe simply “feels slow”Read the extended quote from A European from the UK, born in the 1990s37.

European hypocrisy

The second chord of doubt relates to perceptions of Europe’s lack of integrity. This theme is most common among the negative, but the uncertain also raise it fairly often. It comes up regularly among uncertain supporters of more radical left-wing parties, like LFI in France, Die Linke in Germany, and the Green Party in Britain. Yet the negative and uncertain focus on different things. The negative tend to focus on the dishonesty and hypocrisy of the political class; the uncertain are more likely to point to moments when Europe disappointed them.

Complaints among the uncertain take two main forms: Europe failing to live by the values it professes, and Europe failing to stand its ground when confronted by more powerful actors.

On double standards: “First the silence. Then the hypocrisy”, says an LFI voter who was born in the 1990s. “Russia attacks Ukraine; Russia is the villain. Israel attacks Palestine, but they’re terrorists. It doesn’t make sense.”Read the extended quote from A European from France, born in the 1990s38

On a lack of courage, the EU’s tariff agreement with Donald Trump’s administration seems to have become a powerful symbol. A Die Linke voter in Germany, born in the 2000s, says he felt “terribly ashamed” when “von der Leyen just caved in to the US”. He found it “really embarrassing personally, that we capitulated so hard”. For him, the episode represented something larger: “Every time the EU capitulates, it shows … we don’t want to do anything and would rather cling to the old status quo.”Read the extended quote from A European from Germany, born in the 2000s39

The disappointment about the tariffs crosses political boundaries. A Renaissance voter in France, born in the 1950s, was similarly ashamed of the tariff agreement. She saw it as “Letting ourselves be led by the nose by a madman,”Read the extended quote from A European from France, born in the 1950s40 and used even stronger words to describe what she saw as von der Leyen’s submission to Trump.

Nor does the accusation come only from those who want Europe to confront America or Israel more forcefully. A German, born in the 1980s, who previously voted Green but has since shifted towards Die Linke, is disappointed by what she considers insufficient support for Ukraine. “The usual hypocrisy,” she says. “Words are easy to say—actually providing real help is another matter. It requires genuine action.”Read the extended quote from A European from Germany, born in the 1980s41

This is particularly damaging given European leaders’ rhetoric about sovereignty and independence. The uncertain observe a distance between the Europe they are told is entering its “independence moment” and the one they see backing down when confronted by a stronger power. This does not mean they reject compromises as such, given compromising is something all political actors need to do. But for many uncertain, giving in on values is a no-go. One German, born in the 2000s, was also ashamed of the tariff agreement with Trump but saw it as a demonstration of a broader pattern: “The EU no longer stands unreservedly behind its values. Everything becomes a compromise solution; no solution is confined to true values.”Read the extended quote from A European from Germany, born in the 2000s42

As the “Samples of hope” section will show, shared values come first when the uncertain are asked to explain what being European means for them. So, when leaders in Europe appear to be compromising on these values in their foreign policy, this not only tarnishes Europe’s image abroad but also comes with a political cost at home. The challenge for leaders is to show that people can still take seriously both the values Europe professes and the claims it makes about its own power.

European insecurity

The third chord of doubt is about people’s feelings of insecurity. Half of the uncertain describe war and security as Europe’s greatest challenge. The positive mention it just about as often, but they also tend to refer to the more strategic notion of “geopolitical autonomy” (which fewer of the uncertain do); the negative divide their attention more evenly between inflation, immigration and war.

The uncertain tend to connect insecurity to broader European vulnerabilities, such as dependence on America. They also talk about the EU’s internal divisions and the rise of the European far right. “The USA will increasingly withdraw and Europe must be able to defend itself,”Read the extended quote from A European from Germany, born in the 1980s43 says a German, born in the 1980s, who previously voted SPD and now leans Green. She links this to concerns about the possibility of the AfD entering government and the divisions this could create in the face of Russia. A progressive Dutch voter, born in 2000s, makes a similar connection: “I’m worried about poor cooperation and that Europe is therefore less resilient to external threats—for example Russia, but also the US which wants to portray Europe as weak.”Read the extended quote from A European from the Netherlands, born in the 2000s44

This is not far removed from the positive vision of a more autonomous Europe. The difference lies in the extent of the imagination gap. A Renaissance voter in France, born in the 1950s, describes “war on Europe’s doorstep” as a major problem. But thinking about Europe’s response makes her feel “Europe is doing what it can, but it doesn’t actually have the means.”Read the extended quote from A European from France, born in the 1950s45

Finally, one Italian Five Star Movement voter, born in the 1960s, connects insecurity back to Europe’s slowness. “The first [challenge] is certainly security because the war near our borders has changed the general atmosphere,” she says. But Europe is not tackling it well because “there is often a lack of speed and unity in decision-making.”Read the extended quote from A European from Italy, born in the 1960s46

***

The imagination gap among the uncertain thus comes from things they believe they can observe. They see decisions that take too long, aspirations that sound hollow and threats Europe may lack the means to confront. To close the gap, leaders will have to offer more than an attractive vision of the future. They will have to show people Europe can act, command respect and protect them.

Samples of hope

“I adore Sánchez, and Macron gives me orgasms when he treats Trump badly.”Read the extended quote from A European from Italy, born in the 1960s47

Still, if everything were gloomy in the world of the uncertain, they would belong among the negative. Like the positive, though, they often invoke shared values and principles when explaining what being European means to them. When asked what they would like Europe to look like in 20 years, many hope for greater European unity and political integration. They can also usually identify moments when Europe made them proud.

All these can serve as potential “samples of hope” for pro-European leaders to reconnect with the uncertain. But two aspects appear politically the most crucial: their memories of when Europe made them proud and the type of leadership they admire.

Memory bank

Politicians need to be able to tap into people’s best memories about Europe. When asked about moments when they felt proud of Europe or of being European, the uncertain can usually reach into their own experience and find evidence of Europe behaving in ways they value. This suggests that their attachment to Europe does not come from aspiration alone.

The examples differ widely and reflect the varied national histories of the respondents. They also come from people’s diverse political outlooks and personal experiences—from witnessing the opening of borders to participating in the Erasmus programme of academic exchange.

More than 70 years since European integration began, people still recognise how remarkable the beginning of the story was (even if they were born decades later). As a young Pole, born in the 1990s, says, “Europe emerged from a tremendous crisis after the [second world] war and rose above its divisions—that’s a great reason for pride.”Read the extended quote from A European from Poland, born in 1990s48

Her German peer, a Die Linke voter, remembers feeling proud “When we collectively took in refugees during the [2015] refugee crisis.”Read the extended quote from A European from Germany, born in 1990s49 Another German of similar age points to the moment “when we supported Ukraine and restricted the USA regarding Greenland.”Read the extended quote from A European from Germany, born in 1990s50

A French respondent, born in the 1950s, remembers the 2015 terrorist attacks in his country and the solidarity they generated across the continent: “I had the impression that Europe was entirely with us, the French, and I felt proud to be part of this union.”Read the extended quote from A European from France, born in 1950s51

A Briton, born in the 1980s, points both to the EU’s “big bang” enlargement in 2004 and to Europe’s united response after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which showed that “we had a common sense of ideals.”Read the extended quote from A European from the UK, born in the 1980s52 Another British respondent, born in the 1950s, cites Europe’s “solidarity and courage”Read the extended quote from A European from the UK, born in the 1950s53 in standing up to Trump and staying out of the war in Iran.

For an Italian, born in the 1990s, the defining moment was the covid-19 pandemic, when European institutions intervened with economic support and helped secure vaccine distribution. What impressed him was that “for once the interests of individual countries were set aside to advance a broad-reaching, visionary and solidaristic intervention.”Read the extended quote from A European from Italy, born in 1990s54 “A much older Italian recalls the 1976 earthquake in Friuli and the aid received from other Europeans.”Read the extended quote from A European from Italy, born in 1940s55

People’s national experiences offer particularly vivid sources of pride. Respondents in Poland often point to their country’s accession to the EU, and the freedom of movement that followed. In the Netherlands, respondents mention the introduction of the euro and European support for Ukraine—but also, rather wonderfully, the “Eurovision Song Contest.”Read the extended quote from A European from the Netherlands, born in 1990s56

The pattern underneath these scattered memories is that people tend to feel proud when European countries act collectively in accordance with something respondents value. When the EU shows solidarity, for example, or protects freedoms. Or when the bloc overcomes national divisions to stand up to external pressure. Or when the EU shows European cooperation can make things happen that individual countries could not achieve alone.

This is almost the mirror image of the hypocrisy described in the previous section. Shame arises when Europe’s leaders proclaim values but fail to act on them, or talk about power while appearing unable to exercise it. Pride wells up when words and actions come together.

These memories thus provide something the uncertain otherwise struggle to find: evidence that collective European agency is possible. Europe has acted. It has overcome national differences. It has shown solidarity. It has occasionally behaved with the ambition and courage the uncertain would like to see more consistently.

Given how much bad news about Europe people see, any piece of good news has a strong chance of standing out and being remembered. Indeed, some people actively seek out more promising stories. One example was the defeat of Viktor Orban in Hungary after 16 years in government. This was fresh in respondents’ minds at the time the interviews took place and was mentioned more than sporadically in the conversations, including among the uncertain. They would certainly welcome more good news like this.

Faces of change

The second sample of hope might prove politically harder to act on. This is about national leaders being able to offer principled leadership at the European level, so that the promise of Europe’s renewal can have a face attached to it. The song of Europe needs its lead singers to tell, and show, people who the leads are—not only who and what they are against.

As things stand, respondents struggle to name any countries, institutions or political figures that would represent, in their eyes, positive examples of European action. Almost half of the respondents (44%) fail to mention anyone; this is also the case among the uncertain. When they do mention someone, they often point to their own country or the leader of the party they vote for.

One European leader bucks this trend: Sánchez. Across the six countries polled (which did not include Spain), 8% mentioned Sánchez specifically, or Spain under his watch, as positive examples. No other country or leader generated comparable admiration. Sánchez and Spain proved especially popular in Italy, where (quite remarkably) a quarter of respondents referred to them, and in France, where 1 in 10 did. In both places, left-wing voters were particularly fond of the Spanish example. And the popularity of Spain and Sánchez was equally visible among positive and uncertain voters, with 10% of each group mentioning them as an example worth following.

According to a Five Star Movement voter in Italy, born in the 1960s, “perhaps the one who seems to want to do something is Sánchez.”Read the extended quote from A European from Italy, born in 1960s57 A German Green voter, born in the 1950s, shares that feeling. A good example? “Spain. Excellent how Mr Sánchez stands up to the USA,”Read the extended quote from A European from Germany, born in 1950s58 she says. Another Italian, born in the 1960s, offers a glimpse of what some voters might consider so worthy of admiration. What role would she like Europe to play in the world? “It should have the courage to say no, as Sánchez has already done in Spain,”Read the extended quote from A European from Italy, born in 1960s59 she says. The Italian quoted at the beginning of this section was more direct still.

Sánchez is a controversial figure. His country lags the rest of Europe in terms of defence spending, even if it has raised its level from previous lows. He is unpopular at home and often seen as using international activity to repair struggling domestic ratings. He does not have many friends in other European capitals, and even fellow social democrats from Denmark criticised his government’s migration policy in reaction to events in Ceuta over the summer. And as the leader of a country far away from Russia and Ukraine, he can afford more assertiveness vis-à-vis the US than his peers in Berlin or Warsaw. 

But it is hard to dismiss the fact that today hardly any European leader offers an equally principled foreign policy stance. It is also rare for leaders to place Europe so centrally in their politics, and say things like: “We defend Europe because we can no longer conceive of any other way of being and existing in the world,” or, “the EU is the greatest project of peace and unity in history.”  

Macron used to offer a similar form of leadership, using his speeches and interviews to urge other countries to boost Europe’s strategic autonomy. But, as he prepares for retirement and deals with a divided parliament, his star has clearly faded. Across the six countries studied, just 4% mention him as a positive example (though this still puts him in second place). And apart from these two, hardly any other politician not from the respondent’s own country—not even von der Leyen—is mentioned more than sporadically as a positive example. Undoubtedly, there is a vacuum here.

***

Taken together, the conversations suggest that the foundations for belief in the future extend well beyond committed Europhiles. The uncertain retain a language of European belonging, a relatively clear sense of the Europe they would like to see, and memories of moments when collective European action made them proud. Yet they still need convincing that the moments of pride can become the norm in the future, not exceptional memories of the past. And Europe often lacks leaders the uncertain consider an example worth following. 

Future nostalgia (reprise)

“The EU has disappointed me so much. But I hope that one day I’ll be able to be proud and talk about historical moments when Europe did good things for the world.”Read the extended quote from A European from France, born in 2000s60

Pro-European leaders cannot afford to be naive about the contested information environment in which arguments (and falsehoods) about Europe circulate. But Europe’s imagination gap cannot be fact-checked away or repaired with the help of influencers alone. Many of the doubts our interviews uncovered come from what people believe they can see with their own eyes. The uncertain and many people in other groups resent decisions that take too long and principles that the EU applies inconsistently. They also see a continent that still seems unable to guarantee its own security or even stand up to those who threaten it. These are matters of policy as much as communication.

In their policymaking and communications, pro-European leaders should take a broader political lesson from our research. This paper has shown how geopolitics and culture wars combine with the domestication of EU policy to increase the salience of Europe in national political competition. But the mainstream has too often participated in this politicisation by offering an unconditional defence of Europe against its critics or by ceding ground to them.

The problem with blind defence is that it polarises voters into “for” and “against” Europe. Some leaders therefore risk treating people’s doubts about Europe’s performance as evidence of insufficient commitment. This could end up alienating the uncertain voters who identify strongly with Europe but who doubt whether what they want for the continent will come to pass. By moving closer to Eurosceptic or far-right views, other leaders allow their opponents to define what is wrong with Europe and what policies might rectify that.

So, pro-European leaders need to take back control of Europe’s politicisation. They should start by going beyond defence of the status quo. Uncertain voters already want the things the mainstream defends, but they worry that something not quite as rosy may lie ahead. To address these anxieties, leaders should acknowledge Europe’s slowness and inconsistencies. They should also speak openly about the EU’s policy failures. But they must offer clear ideas of their own about how to correct them, spelling out why dismantling the capacity Europeans have built together will do nothing of the sort.

But Europe’s mainstream also needs to change its relationship with time. When EU and national leaders alike offer grand visions but do not show how they intend to get there, people seem to doubt they ever will. But showing only small steps with no clear destination looks like crisis management. Leaders need to connect the two more explicitly.

If they do not, the past may become an even more attractive place for people to look for direction. Nostalgic politics thrives on offering familiarity in place of possibility, repackaging versions of yesterday as answers to tomorrow. This is proving only too successful. Far-right parties lead in the polls in several member states, with the AfD winning the largest share of votes in a regional election in Germany in early September. The same weekend as the AfD’s seismic triumph, Britain saw masked protesters clad head to toe in black march on the south coast, just after Reform UK leader Nigel Farage signed a pact with Le Pen’s protégé Jordan Bardella to “stop the boats” crossing the English Channel. All these parties and their many kin across Europe sell the vision of the past as the future. All these parties, in power, would also likely attempt to enact policy agendas to weaken Europe and dismantle its frameworks of cooperation.

Pro-European leaders urgently need to put Europe’s past to work for a different purpose. The conversations in this paper are full of memories of moments when Europe acted collectively, overcame national divisions, stood by its principles or simply made people proud to belong. Leaders will need to help those memories become evidence: reminders that European collective action is possible and that periods of crisis need not last forever. This is the possibility contained in “future nostalgia”. Its promise lies not in a longing to return to yesterday, but in a desire to gain a sense that the tomorrow people want is within reach.

Practical politics with a horizon

So, Europe needs practical politics capable of reproducing future nostalgia. Proponents of European integration once excelled at creating expectations and turning some of their most ambitious plans into reality. Europeans gained a sense of direction from successive waves of enlargement, the removal of borders and the introduction of a common currency. The future exerted a pull on the present.

Today, the direction seems reversed. Politicians manage one emergency after another, while the future increasingly appears to be something threatening. Some of these threats are existential, like war creeping ever closer and the climate disruption that landed so forcefully on Europeans’ doorsteps this summer (and the summers before that). Some are less immediately perceptible, such as Europe’s technological decline and economic “slow agony”. Some, like demographic ageing, are more generational. Others, such as “civilisational replacement”, are based in conspiracy theories but nonetheless provoke anxiety among parts of Europe’s population.

Telling people to “dream big” cannot overcome such a range of fears for the future. Pro-European leaders instead need to govern the present in ways that make a better future imaginable. Future nostalgia therefore describes a capacity that European politics has lost—and might recover—rather than a mirror image of the backward-looking politics it seeks to counter.

Again, the way national leaders respond to Europe’s politicisation will be important. As Europe has become more domesticated, issues like migration that citizens experience as national and personal are increasingly becoming debates about “Europe” itself. So far this has often worked to pro-Europeans’ disadvantage because Europe becomes implicated in people’s grievances; the EU becomes associated with the costs and constraints of policies that touch their everyday lives.

Leaders instead need to make European action today part of a practical account of how they intend to improve people’s lives tomorrow. Many of them have to date struggled to tell this side of the story, leaving Europe’s critics freer to define integration primarily through its costs, constraints and risks. This also gives Eurosceptics space to sell the illusion that the future would be so much easier with less integration.

To reach beyond the most committed Europe-believers, pro-Europeans cannot simply say: “Vote for me because I believe in Europe.” Nor can they tell people to “accept this painful policy because Europe requires it.” Their arguments need to be more concrete: “Here is the problem you care about today. Here is what we can do nationally. Here is what we cannot do nationally and where we need other Europeans. And here is what that combination could make possible five years from now.” If getting there requires changing the way the EU works today, so be it. But those reforms should not become another abstract European project that looks like a distraction; leaders really need to show what policies would bring the desired future within reach.

That would amount to a rather different kind of European politics. It would cast “Europe” as neither an identity proposition nor a distant dream. Europe would instead become part of the causal chain connecting the problems people feel now to tomorrow’s improvements. Pro-European leaders’ task is thus to show people where Europe’s unfinished song is going rather than keep on promising a future masterpiece. It is also to show the public, measure by measure, that Europe is truly capable of keeping the record turning. 

Methodology

This paper draws on 5,834 AI-moderated interviews (AIMIs) conducted by Mandate Research on Glaut—a market research platform focused on AI-moderated voice interviews. The interviews were conducted between April 30th and May 15th 2026 across six European countries: France (815 interviews; May 5th-15th), Germany (1,253; April 30th-May 13th), Italy (1,039; April 30th-May 14th), the Netherlands (556; April 30th-May 15th), Poland (989; April 30th-May 15th), and the United Kingdom (1,182; April 30th-May 7th).

Participants were recruited from an online panel provider using quota sampling. After an initial pre-survey, respondents were asked whether they consented to take part in the AIMIs; 5,834 of the original 9,757 respondents (60%) consented to participate and subsequently completed the interview. These final interviewees were weighted according to their demographic and political characteristics to ensure the final sample aligned with the profile of each country’s adult population.

Each interview followed a structured discussion guide. Because the UK was the only non-EU state included in the research, the discussion guide here differed somewhat from the one used in other countries. Interviewees chose between conducting the conversation by providing audio responses (21%) or through a written chat (79%). On average, the interview took just under 18 minutes to complete. Responses were subsequently transcribed, machine translated into English and thematically coded with AI assistance.

The taxonomy of the four segments (the positive, the negative, the uncertain and the disconnected) was designed by the author based on the analysis of the data and interviews. Each interview was allocated to one of the four segments using AI-assisted coding to help manage the large volume of interviews. The research team provided a large language model (LLM) with detailed definitions of these four groups (see below). Acting as a digital research assistant, the model read through each interview, evaluated the respondent’s view of Europe’s future, and—based on the guidelines—assigned the most fitting label to each conversation.

For the purposes of the coding, the following definitions of the four groups were used:

• The positive: “Those who feel European, and even if they are concerned about Europe, they still retain hopes about the continent’s capacity to surmount the current challenges. Some of them might feel proud of how it’s already dealing with those, but this is not a must to qualify for this group. The key criteria are feeling European and seeing the light, even if it’s only at the end of a long tunnel.”
• The negative: “Those who are the most critical about Europe, the EU, its leadership and where the things are going. They might still be concerned—but for them Europe’s problems might largely be proof that European integration was a bad idea in the first place.”
• The uncertain: “Those who feel European but have much less confidence about where things are going. They might display some ambivalence, for example: great hopes, little confidence; or strong attachment to Europe but major disenchantment with leaders.”
• The disconnected: “Those who do not necessarily feel European that much and therefore, whatever the state of Europe or its imagined future, it does not concern them that much. They might often lack an opinion or their opinions might be very brief, basic and superficial. They seem as though they do not really care about Europe and its future.”

Similarly, the AI helped to assess the scale of the “imagination gap” by allocating respondents to groups based on the following definitions:

• Hopeful but doubtful: “Expresses a clear desire, hope or preference for a positive future (unity, peace, prosperity, geopolitical strength, democracy, environment, and so on) for Europe, but simultaneously expresses scepticism, pessimism or significant doubt that this future will actually materialise. They want the European project to succeed but feel constrained by current political, economic or social realities.”
• Hopeful and confident: “Expresses both a desire for a positive European future (unity, peace, prosperity, geopolitical strength, democracy, environment, and so on) and genuine belief or confidence that this future will come to pass. Their positive hopes align directly with their positive expectations for the future.”
• Rejecting Europe: “Expresses a hope or desire for less Europe/EU involvement in the future or the dissolution of the EU. This includes individuals who are actively opposed to the European project and believe it is fundamentally flawed.”
• Uninvested: “The participant is disengaged on the question of Europe and their future expectations or the participant does not discuss their personal hopes, dreams regarding Europe or the EU”

For this paper, AIMIs were complemented by qualitative research on public and political debates in 15 European countries: Bulgaria, Cyprus, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Spain and Sweden. This comparative desk research examined how Europe is discussed and framed across different national political and media environments. It was carried out—in June 2026, using a standardised questionnaire—by ECFR’s staff and through ECFR’s network of associate researchers.

About the composer

Pawel Zerka is a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. As lead analyst on public opinion, he spearheads the organisation’s polling and data research on foreign affairs.

Credits

The author would like to thank the European Cultural Foundation (ECF)—especially André Wilkens, Isabelle Schwarz and Tsveta Andreeva—for their unfailing interest and support in exploring the nexus between culture and foreign policy, and for their confidence in developing the European Sentiment Compass as a joint ECFR-ECF partnership and initiative: already in its fifth consecutive year!

The use of AI-moderated interviews for this study would not have been possible without the close assistance of and prior inspiration from our colleagues at Mandate Research who were responsible for the technical and operational part of this endeavour. In particular, Alex Hymer has been a tireless partner in conducting the analysis.

This project is also based on qualitative research conducted by ECFR’s associate researchers, whose hard work needs to be recognised. They included: Hüseyin Silman (Cyprus), Christine Nissen (Denmark), Stephan Naumann (Germany), Harry Higgins (Ireland), Alberto Rizzi (Italy), Justinas Mickus (Lithuania), Niels van Willigen (Netherlands), Lívia Franco (Portugal), Oana Popescu-Zamfir (Romania), Matej Navrátil (Slovakia), and Ludvig Broomé (Sweden). Our colleagues at ECFR offices in Madrid and Sofia—Carla Hobbs, Irene Olombrada, Maria Simeonova and Alexander Velichkov—provided research on Spain and Bulgaria. (The author covered France and Poland, the two countries he knows best.)

A project of this scale is inevitably the result of teamwork. It would be hard to overstate the contribution of Kim Butson, who demonstrated incredible patience, meticulousness and ingenuity as editor. Jeremy Cliffe and Adam Harrison provided sage advice. Special thanks go to Chris Eichberger for graphic design, Nastassia Zenovich for data visualisations, Martin Tenev for his brilliant web design, Andreas Bock for managing the communication side of the project, as well as Angela Mehrer and Karel Solar for leading on the advocacy side. And the author would not get very far without the trust of Susi Dennison and Anna Kuchenbecker, who have supported this project since its inception in 2021.

We are also grateful to MEP Michal Wawrykiewicz for offering the opportunity to discuss this paper in the European Parliament on its launch day; and to MEP Hannah Neumann for accepting our invitation to speak at that event.

Finally, big thanks to Dua Lipa for offering such a well-fitting framing. We will be happy to explore further collaboration.

This year’s project has also been supported (in part) by a grant from the Open Society Foundations.

Any mistakes or omissions are the fault of the author alone.

Bonus track

The charts below provide more evidence on the media habits of the four groups; the shares of the groups within the electorates of each of the six countries’ main political parties; and on people’s hopes for Europe in 20 years in the countries covered.

Source

The Yara Sluiskil plant, the largest commercial carbon capture and storage (CCS) project in Europe has started its operations in Sluikil, a village in the Zeeland province of the Netherlands.

The CO₂ will be transported by ship and permanently stored under the Norwegian North Sea at the Northern Lights facility, funded by the EU under the Connecting Europe Facility. The industrial ammonia and fertiliser facility is expected to capture and liquefy up to 800 000 tons of CO₂ annually from ammonia production.

This cross-border project is a direct result of the EU-Norway Green Alliance signed in 2023 – a powerful example of the benefits of European cooperation, combining private investment and public support and bringing together industry, the EU, its Member States, and Norway. Today's inauguration ceremony, attended by Commissioner for Climate, Net-Zero and Clean Growth, Wopke Hoekstra, reflected this partnership with the presence of Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, Dutch Prime Minister Rob Jetten and President and CEO of Yara International, Svein Tore Holsether.

Yara's Sluiskil plant is a strategic investment in Europe's industrial decarbonisation and competitiveness. It is expected to capture and store around 12 million tons of CO₂ over the next 15 years. It will promote the reduction of emissions from energy intensive industries like fertilisers and ammonia. It will foster innovation, the creation of a strong industrial base and the development of this clean technology, as underlined in the Clean Industrial Deal and the recent proposal for the EU Emissions Trading System review. 

In his keynote speech at the opening ceremony, Commissioner Hoekstra (pictured) said:

"Europe needs practical climate solutions that deliver real emissions reductions while strengthening industrial competitiveness. The carbon capture and storage project at Sluiskil shows what is possible when innovation and cross-border cooperation come together. This is exactly the kind of project Europe needs to combine climate ambition with a strong and resilient industrial base."

You can follow the speech of the Commissioner on EBS.

Related links

• Industrial carbon management
• EU-Norway energy co-operation