Problem

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen’s offer this week of “associate membership” for Canada was received rapturously in the European Parliament. But member states, noting that the EU treaties say nothing about “associate membership”, have already tempered expectations, as has the Canadian ambassador to the EU. Make no mistake, “associate membership” does not mean that Canada will join the single market or become bound by EU directives anytime soon. The offer is currently a rhetorical gesture that, without a legal definition, risks meaning nothing at all, or becoming an expanded version of CETA, the EU-Canada trade deal in force since 2017, rather than a genuine new form of partnership.

Solution

As the United States estranges its allies, the EU has an opportunity to position itself as an alternative geopolitical anchor. New forms of association could help the EU build the capacity to act as a genuine world power. But to succeed, “associate EU membership” must be narrow but deep. Narrow in that it stops short of single market access or freedom of movement (not because it is undesirable but because it is currently unworkable); deep in that it can provide the basis for a unique alliance on security, defence and resilience—and offer a template for co-operation with other allies.

To prevent the proposal from landing dead on arrival, the commission should quickly define what associate membership means, with a timetable and clear objectives. This would also reassure candidate countries that others are not jumping the queue, and distinguish the offer from the “associate membership” Friedrich Merz, Germany’s chancellor, has pitched for Ukraine as a waiting room for accession.

To carry real weight, associate membership must address the pressures driving Canada into the EU’s arms in the first place. Security, defence and resilience are where both sides depend the most on America, where both sides face similar threats, and for which they can get public buy-in. Easy wins exist in low-friction defence-institutional steps, such as deeper Canadian participation in PESCO, the EU’s defence-cooperation scheme; an administrative arrangement with the European Defence Agency; and a role in future EU security missions.

But the boldest step would be to make Canada a full member of the EU’s defence technological and industrial base. This would bind Canada into Europe’s security architecture and give EU members access to Canadian expertise and industrial capacity for joint development and procurement. France’s protectionist zeal will be an obstacle; its EU ambassador this week pushed for tougher “Made in Europe” rules that would restrict non-EU firms’ access to defence funding. However, if Germany, the Nordics and the Baltics put their combined weight behind associate memberships, they might just bring the French on board.

Context

The war in Ukraine, America’s treatment of its allies and rising global instability have prompted EU states to explore association models that offer their neighbours and allies closer ties without watering down EU membership itself. In her State of the European Union speech, von der Leyen invited Canada to become the bloc’s first “associate member”, but the commission has yet to explain what that would mean in practice.

Source

Summary

• Europe still expects Turkey to pick a side. It has refused, and a post-Erdogan government would refuse too.
• Turkey has become an embedded outsider: a middle power that builds strategic autonomy from inside the Western system—because that is where its leverage comes from.
• Ankara has now tools of its own: troops abroad, a $10bn arms industry, partners in the global south, a geography everyone needs and channels to actors Europeans cannot reach.
• Yet it still needs NATO for its security, Europe to buy its exports and fund its factories, and Western technology to power its best weapons.
• Europe should stop trying to resolve the contradiction and learn to capitalise on it. It should deepen cooperation where interests converge, tie benefits to reciprocal obligations and withhold access when Ankara acts against fundamental European interests.

At the NATO summit he hosted in Ankara this July, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish president, gifted visiting heads of state a peculiar souvenir: a Turkish-made revolver, loaded with live ammunition. Several delegations were left wondering how one declares an unregistered firearm at customs.

It was a fitting emblem: a gift no one could quite accept, from an ally no one can quite place. At the summit itself, Turkey had never looked more central to the alliance. The Ankara Summit Declaration called for “a stronger Europe in a stronger NATO”, reaffirmed Article 5 and placed European support for Ukraine at the heart of the alliance’s future. With NATO’s second-largest armed forces, an expanding defence industry and control of the Black Sea’s southern gateway, Turkey looked indispensable.

Look closer though and the picture is less tidy. This is still the NATO ally that bought Russia’s S-400 air-defence system, the EU candidate country whose membership negotiations have effectively collapsed, and the Black Sea power that arms Ukraine while maintaining extensive ties with Moscow. It is also, thanks to Erdogan’s close relationship with US president Donald Trump, an ally with unusual leverage over Washington at a time of strained transatlantic relations.

Turkey is neither drifting away from the West nor it is coming home. It has become an embedded outsider: a middle power that has learned to build strategic autonomy from inside the Western system rather than by leaving it. NATO still guarantees its security, Europe still buys its exports and funds its factories, and Western technology still powers its best weapons. But none of that buys alignment with Western preferences any more.

European policymakers have often treated this contradiction as a problem to solve. Their debate has revolved around whether Turkey can be “anchored” in the West or prevented from “drifting” towards Russia, China or the Middle East. Both approaches assume that Ankara must eventually pick a geopolitical home. It has chosen not to. Nor is this likely to change after Erdogan. A post-Erdogan government could be more democratic and predictable, but it would still be unlikely to abandon defence autonomy, regional activism or Turkey’s desire to balance among larger powers.

This paper argues that Europe should stop trying to resolve this contradiction and instead learn to capitalise on it. Turkey’s autonomy can frustrate Europeans, but it has also produced capabilities and relationships that Europe itself lacks. Its ability to maintain channels to Moscow helped it broker the Black Sea Grain Initiative and prisoner exchanges while continuing to arm Ukraine. Its military presence and political networks in Syria give it influence that few European states can match. Its growing defence industry could also make it an important partner in Europe’s rearmament.

It is true that the same autonomy sometimes works against European interests. In the eastern Mediterranean, Turkey’s assertiveness has brought it into direct conflict with EU member states Greece and Cyprus. Elsewhere, its balancing between Russia and the West has sometimes undermined European objectives.

The more useful question for Europe therefore is not whether Turkey can ever be a reliable ally, but when its autonomy serves Europe and when it cuts against it. The answer is managed interdependence: deepen cooperation where interests converge, tie the benefits of cooperation to clear and reciprocal obligations and withhold these benefits when Ankara acts against fundamental European interests. The aim is not obedience. It is to make Turkey’s autonomy pay for Europe more often than it costs.

Under Erdogan: An old instinct transformed

Turkey’s pursuit of greater foreign-policy autonomy did not start with Erdogan. Since the early republic, Turkey’s Western alignment has coexisted with suspicion of Western intentions.

The young republic pursued Westernisation after fighting a war of independence against European powers. It developed close ties with Soviet Russia after the war, but Soviet pressure later helped justify Turkey’s integration into the US-led Western bloc, culminating in NATO membership in 1952. But alliance membership did not end tensions with the West. The Cyprus crisis, the 1974 military intervention and the subsequent US arms embargo reinforced Turkey’s conviction that it could not always rely on its allies.

Erdogan inherited this impulse, but he also transformed it. Over more than two decades, his governments have expanded Turkey’s geographical ambitions and given them a neo-Ottomanist flavour at home. Turkey has become more willing to use force abroad and built the institutions needed to sustain a more autonomous foreign policy. Erdogan has also added a personal style of decision-making and an ideological vocabulary. His slogan “the world is bigger than five” calls for reform of the UN Security Council. The term “precious loneliness”, coined in 2013 by his then foreign policy adviser Ibrahim Kalim, casts Turkey’s regional isolation as the price of moral consistency.

This transformation unfolded in four broad phases:

European integration

In the Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) first years in power, from 2002 to roughly the end of that decade, Erdogan and his government were celebrated in the West as reformists. They used the EU accession process to modernise the economy, pursue political reforms and curb the military’s influence over civilian politics. Ankara also expanded trade and diplomacy across its neighbourhood, presenting this activism as complementary to its Western orientation.

Closer ties with Europe accompanied an economic boom. Turkey’s GDP rose from roughly $241bn in 2002 to $775bn in 2008, while GDP per capita tripled. Foreign investment surged after accession talks opened in 2005, from about $900m in 2002-04 to nearly $12bn a year in 2005-08. EU member states accounted for roughly three-quarters of inflows by 2008.

Regional ambitions and civilisational mission

From the late 2000s through the Arab uprisings, Ankara became more ambitious in its neighbourhood. Foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu’s “zero problems with neighbours” doctrine reflected a growing belief that Turkey’s history, location and political model gave it a distinctive regional role. Economic growth and mediation underpinned this confidence, while construction companies, television dramas, Turkish Airlines, diplomats, religious institutions and development agencies extended the country’s soft power.

However, the Syrian civil war, Egypt’s military coup and the regional backlash against the Arab uprisings upended this strategy. Soft power gave way increasingly to hard power and regional rivalry.

“Precious loneliness”

The decisive turn came between 2015 and 2020. The collapse of the peace process with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and a failed coup attempt of July 2016 fed a sense of geopolitical isolation and a more combative foreign policy. As Turkey grew more authoritarian, with executive power consolidated in the presidency, the country launched several external military operations in Syria, Iraq and Libya, and expanded its overseas military presence across the Middle East. It also cultivated closer economic and defence ties with Russia to reduce dependence on the US and Europe, both of which were becoming increasingly concerned about Turkey’s democratic backsliding and regional activism.

Turkey’s purchase of Russia’s S-400 systems in 2017 became the clearest symbol of this rupture. It led to Turkey’s removal from the F-35 programme—the US-led fighter-jet project for which Turkish firms were supplying components—in 2019 and to American sanctions in 2020. This purchase showed that Ankara was prepared to defy its allies when it believed core security interests were at stake.

Anti-Western sentiment rose significantly during this period. Many Turks blamed the US for the failed coup attempt and for supporting Kurdish forces in Syria affiliated with the PKK. The post-coup crackdown, along with the 2017 constitutional referendum, helped create a national security state and concentrated decision-making even more in the presidency.

Military interventions in Syria and elsewhere during this period also created their own momentum. The armed forces, intelligence services, defence companies and the state bureaucracy acquired the skills and experience to sustain overseas operations, cooperate with non-state partners and convert military involvement into diplomatic leverage.

Transactional re-embedding

By the end of 2020, Ankara concluded that its assertive posture had become counterproductive—it had alienated Western allies and Middle Eastern governments alike, thereby helping create an anti-Turkey alignment across multiple fronts. Intensifying great power rivalry and the fragmentation of the West also made Turkish leaders more anxious about being left out in the cold in a tumultuous world. The recalibration was also economic: a currency crisis at the end of 2020 left Ankara in acute need of external capital—Western and Gulf alike—and de-escalation on both fronts was the price of access to it.

From 2021, Ankara therefore sought to repair ties with former regional rivals, from Saudi Arabia to Greece, and pursued a pragmatic reset with Europe and America—while preserving its autonomy.

Turkey’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine captured this shift. Ankara condemned the invasion, supplied Kyiv with drones that proved highly effective early on, refused to recognise Moscow’s annexations, and invoked Montreux’s wartime provisions to close the Straits to belligerents’ warships, which mainly constrained Russia’s Black Sea fleet. It saved its neutrality for the economic sphere, declining to join Western sanctions and casting itself as mediator, keeping Moscow close.

Donald Trump’s return to the White House created another opportunity to reboot ties with the Western system. Erdogan and Trump share a disdain for liberal Europe and a preference for flexible, transactional and personalised diplomacy. Close ties between the two presidents and their inner circles also facilitated dialogue on Gaza, Caucasus, Ukraine and Syria, with a surprising degree of alignment on many of these files.

Ankara increasingly saw its military leverage and geography as the basis for strategic autonomy—a foreign policy built on cultivating ties across rival centres of power so that no single relationship became indispensable and none foreclosed another. It sought closer defence-industrial ties with European states without abandoning its domestic production. It normalised relations with Gulf monarchies while retaining military or political networks in Libya, Syria, Palestine and Somalia. It renewed dialogue with the EU while prioritising bilateral ties with individual member states. Even as a NATO member, it flirted with membership of BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.

In August 2026, Turkey joined Saudi Arabia and Pakistan in the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement—a trilateral mutual-defence pact dubbed in the media as a “Muslim NATO” that commits the three states to Article 5-like security guarantees. Building on a 2025 Saudi-Pakistani accord, the pact signals Turkey’s ambition to make regional security arrangements of its own, even as it remains in NATO. However, the new pact so far lacks the integrated command, joint planning and shared threat perception that would make it a functioning alliance rather than a political declaration.

The Mecca agreement aligns with Turkey’s ambition to keep a foot in several camps. Many in the country’s ruling elite see a larger role in the Middle East and on the world stage as Ankara’s natural destiny. Meanwhile, where previous US presidents saw Turkey’s regional ambitions as disruptive, the Trump administration came to view Ankara as a useful and capable regional partner.

Turkish foreign policy under Erdogan has not travelled a simple path from pro-Westernism to anti-Westernism and back again. Ankara has rebuilt its foreign policy repeatedly around the needs of the ruling far-right nationalist coalition at home and what a changing international order permits abroad. The re-embedding since 2021 is no exception: it did not reverse Turkey’s pursuit of strategic autonomy, but relocated it. Ankara now seeks that autonomy from inside Western structures, because that is where the leverage lies.

Beyond Erdogan: Different versions of autonomy

Although Erdogan’s dominance at home is a reality, in 2024, the opposition alliance led by the Republican People’s Party swept local elections, taking Istanbul, Ankara and most major cities—its best showing since 1979. The following March, Istanbul’s mayor Ekrem İmamoglu, the opposition’s presidential candidate and the man most likely to beat Erdogan, was arrested on corruption charges widely seen as politically motivated. Two decades of Erdogan rule have narrowed political space, but they have not closed it.

So what would change in foreign policy in a post-Erdogan Turkey? A successor could reset relations with the West and rebuild institutions. But a new government would not rethink the fundamentals—that Turkey must keep its freedom of action, arm itself and depend on no single power. Those assumptions no longer rest on one man’s decisions. They rest on an elite consensus, underpinned by a domestic defence industry, bases across three continents and Turkey’s own geography—and reinforced by a fragmenting international order that makes autonomy look like a necessity.

Public sentiment also seems to embrace an independent foreign policy. Turks might be split over Erdogan and domestic governance, but they largely agree on autonomy and avoiding unconditional alignment with any single outside power. Ukraine makes this point clearly. In a 2022 Kadir Has University survey, 52% of respondents wanted Turkey to remain impartial and 50.7% wanted it to mediate. Only 21.5% backed sanctioning Russia and 20.8% backed supporting it. In spring 2024 polling by Pew Research Center, a plurality of Turks (46%) said Turkey was providing the right amount of support to Ukraine.

The Iran war reveals a similar picture. A MetroPoll survey in March 2026 found that 68.1% wanted Turkey to remain neutral between Iran and the US, compared with 22.6% favouring support for Iran and 2.1% for the US and Israel. Neutrality won among the voters of every major party. This was no affection for the mullahs; rather, Turks fear a collapsing Iran would send refugees across the border, give the Kurdish insurgency new momentum, disrupt the Turkish economy and embolden Israel.

The argument at home is therefore about the methods, not autonomy itself. The opposition parties criticise the AKP-MHP government’s rhetoric and self-inflicted isolation, yet they treat maritime jurisdiction, the Aegean and Cyprus as national issues. In the 2022 Kadir Has survey, half or more of every major party’s supporters named maritime jurisdiction and the militarisation of Aegean islands among Turkey’s main problems with Greece.

A 2022 Carnegie study that interviewed opposition foreign-policy figures found the same. Most favoured repairing relations with the US and EU, restoring the foreign ministry’s authority, reducing personal diplomacy, and resolving the S-400 dispute to reopen the path to the F-35 programme. They also wanted no confrontation with Russia, no concessions on Turkey’s maritime claims, and no American weapons for Syria’s Kurds.

A post-Erdogan Turkey would therefore be a different kind of embedded outsider, not a former one. Democratisation and a return to institutional decision-making would make Turkey more predictable. But Ankara would still likely pursue diversified partnerships, its own arms industry, regional influence and the ability to say no to allies.

Turkey no longer treats the West as a complete strategic home or a reliable guarantor of its interests. Yet Russia, China, Iran and the Gulf cannot replace the security, markets, technology and institutional ties it draws from NATO, Europe and America. Turkey thus hedges from the inside. Europe cannot end that, and no Turkish government would tolerate the attempt. Its only realistic aim is to keep the hedge bending westward.

What Turkey is embedded in

Turkey today is rarely described as a European power. Yet it is still a NATO member and, technically, an EU candidate. It is also a partner for Europe and the US on critical regional issues ranging from containment of Iran to counter-terrorism and support for Ukraine.

But Turkey’s Western embeddedness goes much deeper than institutions. Its economy, private sector, defence industry and society are tightly integrated with the West, particularly Europe. These connections constrain Turkish autonomy, but they also enable it: the markets, technology, capital and security relationships Turkey draws on to project power remain disproportionately Western.

Economic embeddedness: Europe as market and regulatory ecosystem

The EU remains the centre of gravity of the Turkish economy. The customs union, in force since 1996, goes far beyond an ordinary free-trade agreement. It removed tariffs and quantitative restrictions on industrial goods and required Turkey to align with important parts of EU customs, commercial, competition, intellectual-property and technical legislation.

The numbers remain striking despite political tensions. The EU accounts for 42.7% of Turkey’s goods exports and 35.3% of its imports, with volume reaching €217.6bn in 2025. Services trade added €42.1bn in 2024.

Trade volumes understate the depth of integration. Turkish factories are embedded in European production networks, supplying the automotive, appliance, machinery, textile and electronics industries while relying on European capital goods, technology, standards and intermediate inputs. By mid-2025, Turkey reported that it had aligned 24,597 national standards with European standards, a harmonisation rate of 99.5% with the European Committee for Standardisation and the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardisation systems.

European capital has been equally important. Turkey received roughly $200bn in foreign-equity inflows between 2003 and 2025, with around 60% originating in the EU. The West as a whole, including the US, UK and Canada, supplies roughly 70% of Turkey’s foreign direct investment.

Ankara has tried to diversify, towards Russia, the Gulf and, above all, China. It joined the Belt and Road Initiative in 2015, applied to BRICS in 2024 and courted Chinese manufacturing, including electric vehicle manufacturer BYD, whose $1bn plant in Turkey will benefit from access to the EU market. But China has not emerged as an alternative to the EU. Chinese firms treat Turkey as high-risk and stayed out of the top 20 sources of foreign investment in 2024. Turkey runs a large trade deficit with Beijing and competes with it for influence in Africa and Central Asia, while Beijing’s treatment of its Uyghur population remains a source of tension.

No partner has been able to match Europe’s market, investment stock and dense supply chains. Ankara’s economic autonomy therefore has limits. It can diversify eastwards, but the capital, technology and markets on which much of its industry depends remain Western. That dependence is sharpened by chronic macroeconomic fragility—high inflation, a weak lira and reliance on external financing—which has repeatedly forced Ankara to seek Gulf and Western capital, setting a hard ceiling on its autonomy.

This dependence also comes with a political irritation. Through the customs union, Turkey aligns with relevant EU regulations but has no say in making them. The agreement is also outdated, excluding services, digital commerce, public procurement, agriculture and climate regulation. The European Commission proposed negotiations to modernise it in 2016, but the European Council has yet to approve a mandate.

This captures a contradiction in Turkish foreign policy. Ankara seeks privileged access to the EU economy while demanding political distance from Brussels. Yet much of its industrial power, export capacity and ability to attract investment still depends on its position at the edge of Europe.

Security embeddedness: Inside NATO’s architecture

Turkey’s security ties with the West are deep. A NATO member since 1952, Turkey has the alliance’s second-largest military after the US and critical infrastructure including the Incirlik air base, where US nuclear weapons are widely believed to be stored; the Kurecik early-warning radar system that covers the Middle East; the Allied Land Command headquarters in Izmir; and forward bases at Konya and Istanbul. Turkey and its territory are therefore woven into a NATO security architecture that stretches from the Middle East to Europe’s eastern flank.

Despite the on-and-off crises with America and a more ambivalent policy towards Russia than most European allies, Turkey’s relationship with NATO is not dormant. Not only has Ankara recently hosted the NATO summit, it has also continued to support NATO’s collective defence missions, including participating in the Baltic Air Policing in 2006 and 2021. After the summit, Turkey agreed to do so again in 2026, even as it maintains cordial relations with Moscow. And while Turkey has worked hard to reduce its military dependence on its allies, many of its high-end programmes still depend on Western engines, components, certification, financing and export access.

Yet embeddedness has not meant deference or loyalty. For example, when Sweden and Finland sought to join NATO, Ankara used its veto in the alliance as leverage—delaying ratification until it had extracted commitments on the PKK and, from the US, approval of a major F-16 sale. Turkey capitalises on its position in NATO as much as it upholds the alliance.

Social and political embeddedness: A diaspora and a stalled accession

Turkey’s political relationship with Europe is weakest precisely where its institutional ties are deepest. Ankara applied to the European Economic Community in 1959, signed the Ankara Agreement in 1963, became an EU candidate in 1999 and opened accession talks in 2005. Those negotiations have now effectively collapsed: only 16 of 35 chapters were opened and just one closed before the process froze. In 2018, the EU General Affairs Council noted that accession talks had come to a standstill, stopping short of formal suspension, but freezing the opening or closing of any new chapters. In 2025, the European Parliament reaffirmed this, on the grounds that Turkey’s strategic importance cannot offset its democratic backsliding and divergence from European norms.

Yet neither side has formally ended the process. Turkey remains a candidate, receives pre-accession funding and participates in EU programmes like Erasmus and Horizon Europe. It is also in the European Political Community and has expressed a desire to be part of a future European security architecture.

Turkey’s European embeddedness is also demographic. Since the 1960s, migration has created communities whose lives span Turkey and Europe. At the end of 2024, around two million Turkish citizens held valid residence permits in the EU, excluding naturalised citizens and second generation Turks born in Europe. Germany alone is home to about 2.6 million people of Turkish background, the country’s largest single-origin immigrant community. Belgium, Britain, France, the Netherlands and Sweden also have sizeable Turkish communities.

Turkey’s European diaspora connects Turkish cities and regions to European labour markets, schools, businesses, media and political parties. They also make Europe an arena of Turkish domestic politics: governments and opposition parties campaign among overseas voters, while disputes about nationalism, religion, Kurdish identity and democratic rights spill into European public life. Europe is therefore not just an external actor but an extension of the political debate in Ankara.

Turkey’s political estrangement from the EU can also obscure the continued attraction Europe holds for many Turks. In a spring 2025 survey commissioned by the EU delegation to Turkey, 58% said they would support EU membership in a referendum and 66% said membership would bring more advantages than disadvantages. Visa-free travel, higher living standards and employment opportunities were the most frequently cited benefits. Similarly, Pew found in 2024 that 56% supported EU membership, rising to 66% among those under 35. Polls show mixed motivations for supporting Turkey’s accession to the EU, with younger, urban and educated Turks consistently aspiring to European legal and political standards even as faith in accession has eroded.

Migration creates another form of interdependence between Turkey and Europe. Turkey hosts a large refugee population and sits on major migration routes from the Middle East and Asia into Europe. European governments have relied on Turkey as a buffer, most explicitly through the 2016 EU-Turkey migration deal. Meanwhile, Ankara has periodically used refugee flows as political leverage, but it has also come to rely on EU funds to manage migration. Neither side can manage migration sustainably without the other.

The instruments of autonomy

Turkey’s distinctive position among middle powers lies not only in its aspiration to act independently but in the tools it has built to do so. It is one of the few middle powers that treats military force as a routine instrument rather than an exception, and the only one that has turned the resulting hardware into a diplomatic currency.

Five tools carry Turkish influence abroad: an expeditionary military, a strong arms industry, a geography that charges rent, an apparatus for soft power and a habit of brokering other people’s wars. Each has widened Ankara’s room for manoeuvre, but each also reveals the limits of Turkish autonomy.

An expeditionary military

What changed under the AKP was less Turkey’s appetite for military activism abroad than how it used force. Before the Arab uprisings, Turkish deployments took place largely within NATO and UN frameworks. But over the past decade, Ankara has increasingly acted unilaterally to advance its own security interests, using forward bases, long-term deployments and partnership with local armed actors. Syria, Libya, Iraq and the Caucasus region each show a version of the method.

In Syria, four cross-border operations between 2016 and 2020 created a belt of Turkish-controlled territory in the north, governed through the Turkey-backed Syrian National Army. Ankara’s presence also helped preserve an opposition-controlled enclave in Idlib, from which Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) emerged and eventually overthrew Bashar al-Assad, in December 2024. Turkey has since become the most important external backer of Syria’s new government, signing a defence accord in August 2025 to train, equip and advise the army Damascus is rebuilding out of former rebel factions. Ankara’s leverage nonetheless has limits: it has not yet converted this partnership into permanent bases beyond the north, constrained by Israeli red lines and Damascus’s own wariness of overdependence.

Turkey has similarly intervened militarily in Libya since 2020, when it helped prevent warlord Khalifa Haftar’s forces overrunning the internationally recognised government in Tripoli. The intervention has shifted the military balance and entrenched a Turkish security presence, which Ankara subsequently converted into economic and political leverage—against the will of competitors like Cyprus, Egypt, Greece and the UAE. However, Turkey has recently repaired relations with Egypt and opened channels to actors in eastern Libya.

In Iraq, Ankara’s footprint has proved more durable, driven primarily by its campaign against the PKK. A network of forward operating bases across the north has hardened into a de-facto security belt along the border. And despite renewed efforts to resolve the Kurdish question—such as PKK founder Abdullah Ocalan’s 2025 call to disarm and the party’s subsequent dissolution—Ankara is unlikely to dismantle that presence in the near future.

Beyond those, Turkey maintains bases in northern Cyprus, facilities in Qatar, and a training base in Mogadishu. Turkey’s regional footprint today is far larger than it was two decades ago.

Defence

Turkey’s expanding defence industry provides the material foundation for this more assertive foreign policy. Once a buyer of US weapons systems, Turkey has spent the last three decades building its capacity to produce a range of high- and low-end systems, from armed drones and navy vessels to armoured vehicles, missiles, tanks and artillery shells.

Defence and aerospace exports reached $10.05bn in 2025, a dramatic hike from $248m in 2002. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute ranked Turkey the 11th-largest exporter of major arms for 2021-25, with five Turkish firms—MKE, ASELSAN, Turkish Aerospace, Baykar and Roketsan—entering its global top 100 in 2025. Many of their systems have been battle-tested in Karabakh, Libya, Syria and Ukraine. In the early phase of the Ukraine war, Baykar’s TB2 “Bayraktar” drones gained particular prominence and have since become a symbol of Turkey’s defence-industrial rise. This transformation in the defence industrial base has given Ankara capabilities and relationships in Africa, Central Asia and Europe it did not possess two decades ago.

Greater autonomy, however, is not self-sufficiency. Turkish officials boast that the domestic share of defence production has risen from about 20% in the early 2000s to roughly 80%. But that figure conceals continued dependency on imported technology in propulsion, power transmission, advanced materials and aviation components. For example, Turkey’s flagship fifth-generation fighter-jet, the KAAN, relies on imported engines, as its indigenous turbofan is still in development. Altay tanks entered production with a South Korean power pack, pending integration of the domestic BATU engine and transmission. Imported engines and export licences have also complicated both production and sales of systems such as the Firtina howitzer.

One way Turkey has sought to overcome these constraints has been by embedding itself into the European defence base. In 2025, Baykar and Italy’s Leonardo formed LBA Systems, a fifty-fifty joint venture headquartered in Italy to build unmanned systems, while Baykar outright bought Italian aerospace company Piaggio Aerospace, with its production lines inside the EU. Also in 2025, Turkish Aerospace agreed to supply Spain with Hürjet trainer jets in a €2.6bn deal, which includes substantial production in Spain. These are co-production arrangements inside European supply chains.

Turkey’s defence-industrial autonomy is therefore uneven. It is strongest where companies have accumulated design experience and domestic supply chains, and weakest where production depends on complex propulsion or externally controlled components. And while the industry’s rise has reduced the ability of any single country or supplier to block Turkish military action, its most ambitious programmes still depend on Western technology, certification, finance and markets. This captures the logic of the embedded outsider. Turkey has built greater autonomy not by leaving Western industrial networks, but by using domestic production, offset agreements and selective partnerships to improve its bargaining position within them.

Connectivity

Ankara has not created its own geography, but it has learned to monetise it. Turkey sits between Central Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Russia, astride important trade and energy routes. It is crisscrossed by several energy pipelines despite producing little energy itself. And regional disorder only makes Turkey’s location more valuable.

Azerbaijani oil and gas cross Anatolia through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline and the Southern Gas Corridor. Russian gas reaches Turkey and south-eastern Europe through Blue Stream and TurkStream, while Iranian gas enters from the east. Expanding liquefied natural gas terminals give Ankara access to seaborne supplies from America, Qatar and elsewhere.

Turkey has also invested in logistics and connectivity. The Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway connects Turkey to the trans-Caspian Middle Corridor, linking Central Asia and China westwards. Ankara regards the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, which bypasses Turkey, as a geopolitical challenge. It has instead backed the $17bn Development Road, linking Iraq’s al-Faw Grand Port through Turkey to Europe. Instability in the Strait of Hormuz has given a boost to this project. This eastward reach also has an institutional home: Turkey leads the Organization of Turkic States, a bloc spanning Azerbaijan and Central Asia that hopes to turn the corridor’s unique geography and ethnic ties into standing political influence.

Soft power

Turkey’s ambitions are also supported by an extensive cultural and diplomatic network. It now operates 255 diplomatic missions, up from 163 in 2002, with the number of African embassies rising from 12 to 44 in this period.

In addition to its diplomatic corps, there is the Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency, the Turkish Maarif Foundation, the Presidency of Religious Affairs, the Yunus Emre Institute and the state broadcaster TRT World. All of those are active in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Turkish Airlines has also become an unusually effective instrument for connectivity and visibility. The Antalya Diplomacy Forum now serves as a flagship venue to showcase Turkey’s ambition to convene international actors, modelled after the Munich Security Conference, India’s Raisina Dialogue and Russia’s Valdai Discussion Club.

Perhaps Turkey’s most effective soft power, however, is one the state neither built nor controls. In 2024, Turkish producers exported more than 300 television dramas to over 150 countries, earning over $500m a year and reaching close to a billion viewers. They have made Turkey’s language, cities and lifestyle familiar across the Balkans, Middle East, Latin America and parts of Africa. The state has since moved to harness this success: TRT’s own historical epics carry a more explicit neo-Ottoman message abroad, while per–episode export subsidies introduced in 2026 aim to bend the commercial sector toward promoting Turkey’s image.

Meanwhile, humanitarian aid, education, religion, media, commerce and defence partnerships reinforce the conservative government’s “civilisational” narrative, placing Turkey at the centre of a wider historical and cultural world. Turkey’s overseas network promotes Palestinian rights and positions Turkey as a natural leader of Muslim nations. Erdogan’s slogan that “the world is bigger than five”, referring to the UN Security Council, captures this ambition.

Yet Turkey’s economic fragility sets a hard limit on its ambitions. Inflation peaked at 85.5% in October 2022 and, despite the return to orthodox monetary policy after the 2023 election, remained above 32% in mid-2026. A volatile lira and persistent inflation make it harder to finance reconstruction in Syria, sustain long-term influence in Africa and compete with other powers. Technological dependence, weak institutions and personalised decision-making reinforce these constraints.

Mediation

Mediation became a signature of Turkish foreign policy in the mid-2000s. Under the Davutoglu doctrine of “zero problems with neighbours”, Ankara presented itself as a country able to speak simultaneously to the West, the West’s regional adversaries and the Muslim world. Ankara facilitated indirect talks between Syria and Israel in 2008, engaged in Balkan diplomacy and, alongside Brazil, negotiated a nuclear fuel-swap with Iran in 2010. Also that year, Turkey and Finland launched a UN Friends of Mediation group.

That premise collapsed with the Arab uprisings. Ankara’s support for Syrian opposition and the Muslim Brotherhood, along with its feuds with the Arab Gulf monarchies, Egypt and Israel, made Turkey increasingly party to the region’s conflicts rather than a neutral mediator. As it expanded its regional entanglements, the nature of its mediation efforts changed. From 2017, Ankara worked with Russia and Iran through the Astana process on ceasefires and de-escalation deals in Syria even while backing the opposition on the ground. In Libya in 2020, Turkey participated in the Berlin process as a stakeholder while its troops were deployed in Tripoli. Ankara was not mediating because it stood outside these conflicts, but because it was embedded in them.

From the 2020s, Turkey’s mediation rested on a different foundation. Its leverage came from its higher international profile and its unique access to regional conflicts, such as in Gaza and Ukraine.

Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Turkey has hosted several rounds of negotiations between Russian and Ukrainian officials, facilitated prisoner exchanges and, with the UN, brokered the Black Sea grain deal in 2022. None ended the war, but the grain agreement kept a critical maritime trade route open for almost a year and demonstrated the value of Ankara’s working relationships with both Moscow and Kyiv.

In the final round of negotiations leading to the Gaza ceasefire, Turkey used its relationship with Hamas to convince the armed group to sign the US-brokered agreement with a specific clause for disarmament. Ankara provided political guarantees that helped bring Hamas to the table, but its involvement also led Israel to veto a greater Turkish role in a multinational peacekeeping force in Gaza.

Turkey’s comparative advantage in mediation therefore does not come from neutrality but access. Its willingness to maintain relationships across geopolitical divides can make Ankara frustrating for its Western allies. But it is also precisely what allows Turkey to reach actors that Europeans and Americans sometimes cannot.

What it means for Europe

For Europe, the instruments described above could be assets or liabilities, depending on where and how Turkey uses them. The three case studies that follow trace that variation. In Ukraine and Syria, autonomy generates outcomes Europe wants—grain corridors, prisoner exchanges, a check on Russian and Iranian influence—that a more compliant ally could not have delivered. In the eastern Mediterranean, the same autonomy cuts the other way, pitting Turkey directly against two member states. Together, the three cases leave Europe with a question: how to channel an autonomy it can influence but cannot switch off.

Ukraine: Pro-Kyiv, but not anti-Moscow

Ankara’s position is often summarised as “pro-Ukraine without being anti-Russia”—a formulation that frustrates European allies but has proved durable. Turkey recognises Ukraine’s territorial integrity, including Crimea, and built a substantial defence relationship with Kyiv before the full-scale invasion, selling it Bayraktar TB2 drones and agreeing joint production. It was also among the few NATO states willing to provide strategically significant military technology before February 2022.

At the same time, Ankara refused to join Western sanctions, kept extensive ties with Moscow and described Russia’s aggression in cautious language. After the invasion, it invoked the wartime provisions of the Montreux Convention, closing the Straits to belligerent warships—a move that limited escalation while also constraining NATO’s naval access.

Ankara’s access to both capitals produced results, though not a ceasefire. In 2022, Turkey brokered the Black Sea grain deal with the UN and has facilitated several prisoner exchanges. But it has also been a key conduit for trade with Russia, the flipside of its balancing act.

Ukraine shows the embedded outsider at work: Turkey supports the principles and institutions that protect its own security while reserving the right to diverge from the broader Western strategy. While this balancing is self-interested, it has at times served Ukrainian or European interests.

Syria: Access without capital

Syria offers the clearest demonstration of Turkey’s embedded-outsider role in practice. After more than a decade of cross-border operations, troop deployments, intelligence work and local patronage, Ankara entered the post-Assad period with leverage few external powers could match: close access to President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s government, influence over armed groups in the north, control of border routes, a substantial military presence, and a strong hand in debates about reconstruction and refugee returns. Assad’s fall also weakened Turkey’s rivals, Iran and Russia, and opened up space for Ankara to expand its political and economic influence.

Yet Syria remains a work in progress. Turkey met its core security objective—blocking a PKK-linked autonomous zone along its border—and deepened its leverage in Damascus, but it has neither established a new order nor reaped the economic benefits of its patronage.

Syria’s battered economy is one constraint. Ankara can reopen trade routes, repair energy links and position its companies for reconstruction, but it cannot finance Syria’s recovery alone; that will depend on external capital, European and Gulf support and governance reforms.

Israel is another problem. It remains deeply suspicious of an enlarged Turkish role and has attacked sites earmarked for Turkish military installations. Turkey, in turn, views Israeli support for Syria’s Druze and Kurdish minorities as an obstacle to state consolidation. The Turkish-Israeli rivalry, sharpened since 2024 by Gaza and in the contest for Syria’s new government, increasingly structures the regional order into rival camps: Ankara’s Sunni grouping on one side and an Israel-Greece-Cyprus bloc on the other.

Syria is therefore where Turkey’s embedded-outsider status could pay off most—and where its limits show most clearly. Ankara has access, military leverage and relationships Europe cannot easily reproduce, but not the financial resources and institutional capacity to rebuild Syria on its own. Its ability to shepherd the transition depends, paradoxically, on the very Western relationships it has sought to loosen.

The eastern Mediterranean: Autonomy that backfires

The eastern Mediterranean shows the other side of bounded autonomy. Turkish hydrocarbon exploration in waters claimed by Greece and Cyprus triggered EU sanctions in 2020, and contested maritime claims between the three countries remain. This is potentially the most dangerous flashpoint in Turkey’s relations with the EU.

The dispute predates Erdogan. It is rooted in the unresolved conflict in Cyprus and competing interpretations of maritime jurisdiction in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean. Ankara rejects Greek claims that islands close to the Anatolian coast should generate extensive maritime zones, and resists any arrangement it sees as restricting Turkey’s access to the open sea. Successive rounds of UN-led negotiations—including a 2004 referendum and the 2017 talks at Crans-Montana—have failed to produce a settlement.

These longstanding trilateral disagreements have sprawled into a regional confrontation. Offshore gas exploration around Cyprus has repeatedly stoked tensions over the past decade, while closer defence and energy ties between Cyprus, Greece and Israel have reinforced Ankara’s sense of encirclement.

Tensions peaked in 2020, when Turkish and Greek vessels came close to direct conflict. The EU subsequently imposed targeted sanctions linked to Turkish drilling activities. At that time, the German former chancellor Angela Merkel became personally involved in shuttle diplomacy between Ankara and Athens and helped avert a military confrontation. But since Merkel left office, no European leader has had the same standing with Erdogan or mounted a comparable sustained effort to address the underlying political dispute.

As long as Cyprus remains divided, Ankara is unlikely to abandon its insistence that Nicosia cannot unilaterally develop the island’s hydrocarbon resources without agreement on how Turkish Cypriots will share in them. Ankara is also unlikely to accept any Greek extension of territorial waters from six to twelve nautical miles in the Aegean—a step the Turkish parliament declared a casus belli in 1995—on grounds that it would sharply curtail its own access to the open sea. That suggests a limit to punitive conditionality by the EU. Targeted sanctions may raise the price of Turkish actions, but by themselves they are unlikely to change Ankara’s position on an issue it regards as a core national interest.

But Europe has not yet seriously tested sustained diplomacy aimed at the source of the dispute. The EU should invest political capital in a renewed Cyprus settlement process, working alongside the UN and encouraging a negotiated arrangement between the island’s two communities. It should not approach the conflict simply as a dispute between a member state and an outside power. The EU cannot easily present itself as a neutral actor when Cyprus is itself a member state, but it can provide incentives, pressure Nicosia into talks, and use diplomatic weight and the prospect of deeper Turkey-EU integration, with security guarantees for Cyprus, to support a settlement. Without progress on Cyprus, the island will remain a perennial obstacle to a more functional relationship between Turkey and Europe.

***

The three case studies show the uses and limits of Turkish autonomy. In Ukraine, Ankara worked both sides without breaking with either, creating access Europe could use. In Syria, Turkish power created leverage but not the resources to consolidate it. In the eastern Mediterranean, autonomy produced confrontation, while European sanctions contained some of the immediate costs without resolving the political dispute that generated them.

A European strategy for the embedded outsider

Europe’s Turkey policy swings between two illusions: that Ankara can be brought back to the Western alignment of the 1990s, or that it is lost and can only be contained. A country this entangled with Europe yet so determined to act alone fits neither.

The alternative is managed interdependence. It begins from two facts: first, Turkish autonomy is here to stay—no future government will return to unquestioned Western alignment; second, autonomy stops well short of independence—Turkey still relies on NATO for ultimate security, Europe for markets, capital, technology and regulation, and America for advanced defence cooperation and regional deterrence.

Europe should use that dependence without trying to eliminate Turkish autonomy. It should make Western cooperation valuable enough that Ankara keeps its forces interoperable, honours common rules and avoids partnerships that damage allied security.

There are limits to this policy. Ankara is unlikely to agree to Greek or Cypriot maritime claims, but it could be open to a UN-led settlement or a deal dividing hydrocarbon resources. Europe should push for that instead of settling for the status quo, even at the cost of having to pressure Cyprus into a new framework or resumption of UN-led talks.

The reality is that European leverage on the eastern Mediterranean is limited, and punitive measures will not change the Turkish calculus. In order to build leverage, Europe first has to define a credible endgame in the conflict and try something new: positive engagement with Ankara aimed at a durable settlement to the frozen conflict. A good place to start would be a pan-Mediterranean conference, inviting Turkey, to set out the disputes and the case for diplomacy. Following that, the EU could work with the UN to push Cyprus and Turkey back to the table, either for a final settlement on Cyprus or a resource-sharing deal on hydrocarbons. 

On the broader agenda with Turkey, the EU should pursue separate, self-contained deals across defence, trade, regional security, migration and mobility. Cyprus can block some of these deals, but in the end can be persuaded by other member states to agree to a more pragmatic approach in return for security guarantees. Each deal should exchange concrete benefits for defined obligations with clear monitoring so that cooperation no longer rests on personal ties between leaders.

The return of Donald Trump somewhat complicates this strategy. Erdogan’s direct relationship with Washington can reduce the immediate cost of ignoring Brussels by giving Ankara another route into the Western system. But transatlantic uncertainty also cuts the other way. Turkey likes to hedge and understands that Trump’s America is a risky player—and that Europe is a good hedge against US volatility. As Europe assumes more responsibility for its own defence and Washington becomes less predictable, Turkey’s military capacity, geography and defence industry become more valuable to Europeans. The result is mutual leverage rather than European dependence alone. Ankara has alternatives to Brussels, but Europe also has assets—market access, industrial integration, finance and regulation—that Washington cannot replace.

Integrate Turkey into European defence

This is where Turkish and European interests overlap most obviously. Europe is rearming; Turkey has factories, a fast-growing arms industry and capabilities relevant to Europe’s eastern and southern flanks. Excluding Turkey entirely from emerging defence-industrial arrangements would be self-defeating.

Yet that is roughly what has happened. In 2025, the EU launched its most ambitious defence effort to date—ReArm Europe, including SAFE, a €150bn joint-procurement instrument. SAFE is open in principle to candidate countries such as Turkey, but deeper participation requires a separate bilateral agreement with the EU, and Turkey has yet to conclude one. Cyprus and Greece have made clear that they view such access through the prism of their own security disputes with Ankara, and this is another way unresolved conflicts in the eastern Mediterranean constrain Europe’s ability to draw Turkey more deeply into its emerging defence architecture.

Turkey should be let in. Europe should use the linkage constructively: greater Turkish access to European defence programmes should accompany sustained de-escalation with Greece and progress on Cyprus, rather than being treated either as an unconditional entitlement or as a permanent exclusion.

EU institutions and member states should pursue this at different levels. The Commission and Council should create pathways for Turkish participation in EU-level defence instruments where political and security conditions are met. Meanwhile, individual member states should expand bilateral procurement, co-production and supply-chain partnerships with Turkish firms on a project-specific basis. Access should be conditional: tied to end-use guarantees, IP protection, sanctions compliance and limits on transferring jointly developed technology to third countries. Kept modular and reversible, such projects give Ankara a stake in interoperability and give Europe access to Turkish capacity without waving away its political and security concerns.

Modernise the customs union

Economic interdependence is Europe’s strongest lever and Turkey’s main reason to stay close. Yet the existing customs union is outdated and ill-suited to a world of supply chain fragmentation, US tariffs, Chinese overcapacity, digital trade and climate regulation. It covers goods and little else—no services, no digital trade, no public procurement and almost no agriculture—besides having weak dispute mechanisms.

Modernisation of the customs union should be at the centre of the Turkey-EU relationship. An expanded agreement would deepen supply-chain integration, attract investment, support green and digital transitions, and pull Turkish regulation closer to that of the EU. And by helping the EU’s industrial competitiveness, it would strengthen its hand against both China and America.

Modernisation should proceed in stages, with access to new sectors tied to measurable compliance and stronger dispute settlement. The objective is not more trade for its own sake. It is to make the dependence run in both directions.

Build coalitions in the neighbourhood

Turkey is now central to many crises in the Middle East, and there is room for Ankara and Brussels to work together more closely. But this does not have to be a single regional bargain. A more realistic model is a portfolio of issue-based coalitions.

In Iraq, both want stronger state institutions, better energy and transport links, reduced dependence on the Strait of Hormuz and Iranian-backed militias out of the military and politics. In Lebanon, both want functioning state institutions and reconstruction while containing escalation with Israel. In Libya and Somalia, maritime security, migration, energy and political stabilisation all provide areas for cooperation.

In the South Caucasus, Europe should continue to support Turkish-Armenian normalisation, the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace process and the east-west transit corridor. On Iran, Ankara’s rivalry with Tehran and diplomatic access to it are useful: both Europe and Turkey want neither an Iranian hegemon nor an Iranian collapse.

Cooperate on migration

The 2016 migration deal reduced a complicated relationship to cash for border control, punctuated by political threats. Europe treats Turkey as a wall; Turkey periodically opens a door in it to make a point. This has delivered no more than short-term containment.

A more durable framework should distribute responsibilities more evenly between Turkey and Europe. It should combine joint border management with sustained refugee protection, greater EU financial support for Turkish municipalities and host communities and expanded resettlement from Turkey to EU member states. Any large-scale return to Syria should be voluntary and depend on improvements in security, housing, documentation, ability to earn a living and protection from persecution. Achieving that will require the EU to do more than simply leave returns for Turkey to manage: it should jointly monitor conditions on the ground, while helping finance reconstruction of civilian infrastructure Syria needs to improve those conditions.

The EU should also make legal travel easier for Turkish citizens: faster visa processing for students, academics, businesspeople, and families, alongside expanded educational and professional exchanges. The point is to replace money-for-containment with better mobility, giving Turkish citizens a reason to care about Europe while reducing Ankara’s ability to weaponise migration.

Make conditionality targeted, not existential

Managed interdependence cannot ignore Turkey’s authoritarian turn. Politicised courts, jailed political opponents and hollowed-out institutions render commercial deals less reliable and foreign policy less predictable.

But Europe’s response has often produced the opposite of what it intended. Keeping Turkey at political distance has not reversed democratic backsliding. It has instead weakened constituencies invested in European integration, reduced the EU’s influence over domestic reform and recast the relationship as an increasingly transactional exchange between governments. The lesson is not to abandon conditionality, but to use it more precisely and consistently.

Europe’s experience with Viktor Orban’s Hungary offers a partial lesson. It demonstrates the value of linking material benefits to specific institutional and rule-of-law conditions, and that different policy areas can be treated separately. But Turkey is not an EU member. It has an independent, regional presence, relationships beyond Europe and no obligation to submit to European courts. The EU’s leverage therefore is much narrower.

Conditionality should therefore be specific, proportionate and tied to the area of cooperation concerned. Instead of making the broader relationship contingent on an open-ended judgment about Turkey’s political trajectory, the EU should tie access to particular benefits to transparent and measurable commitments. Serious rule-of-law violations might affect access to EU financing or progress in areas requiring high levels of regulatory and judicial trust. Coercive actions abroad might trigger restrictions on particular defence-industrial partnerships or targeted measures against the individuals and entities responsible. Measures should have clearly defined triggers and, equally importantly, a clear route to reversal when the triggering behaviour stops.

This approach also requires distinguishing between the Turkish government and Turkish society. Measures intended to constrain the government should not unnecessarily restrict students, researchers, businesses, municipalities or civil society organisations whose interaction with Europe sustains the social foundations of the relationship. Visa access, academic cooperation, municipal partnerships and civil society programmes should therefore be insulated, as far as possible, from political disputes between Ankara and European governments.

Conditionality also has limits when disputes concern interests that Ankara defines as fundamental to sovereignty or national security. In such cases, increasing the cost of Turkish behaviour may signal European resolve without producing a change in policy. Conditionality works best when it creates incentives for a negotiated adjustment, not when it becomes a substitute for diplomacy. Europe therefore needs to pair credible costs with equally credible benefits and a political route back to cooperation.

Keep the accession question open

Managed interdependence is not a substitute for democracy, nor does it require pretending that Turkish accession is imminent. It is a framework for organising relations in the space between joining and walking away. But that raises the question of what should happen to Turkey’s candidate status. Three options are on the table.

Re-opening accession negotiations is unrealistic: the talks have been at a standstill since 2018 and there is neither consensus for a fresh start nor much value in pretending membership is approaching. Formally closing the process would be worse. It would remove one of the last institutional links between the two, weaken pro-European constituencies inside Turkey and make cooperation harder without resolving a single underlying dispute.

The better course is to leave candidate status legally intact but politically dormant and build the cooperation around it. However, the relationship should not be called a “privileged partnership”. This term, floated in some European capitals in the past, remains toxic in Turkey as Ankara sees it as a demotion that in practice would close the accession door forever. The substance is more important: a deep and differentiated partnership of managed interdependence that both sides have reason to maintain, with the formal question left open.

Turkey would remain outside the EU’s political core but get closer where interests align: NATO planning, Ukraine and Black Sea security, defence production, trade, energy, migration, mobility and Syria. In return, Europe would demand greater predictability, sanctions compliance, institutional accountability and adherence to agreed rules.

Disagreement would persist over Cyprus, the eastern Mediterranean, Israel, aspects of the regional order, and Turkey’s continued relations with Russia and China. Managed interdependence is not designed to erase those differences, but to prevent them from bringing down the wider structure of cooperation.

Europe’s choice is not between restoring the Turkey of the past and accepting permanent divergence. It is between an interdependence left hostage to crises and personal bargains, or one organised around common projects, reciprocal obligations and enforceable conditions. A successful strategy would give Turkey room to act as a middle power while making Western cooperation more valuable than the alternatives.

Neither home nor away

Over the past two decades, Turkey has gone from aspiring to regional influence to building the capabilities to exercise it—military deployments, overseas bases, defence exports, economic networks and diplomatic channels. The paradox is that much of this autonomy rests on continued integration with the West. Turkish embeddedness is the platform Turkish autonomy runs on. Ankara has learned to operate in the space between alliance and independence, sufficiently autonomous to shape regional crises, yet sufficiently embedded that the West cannot easily exclude it.

There are limits to this model. Turkey might be able to disrupt arrangements it opposes, but it has been less successful at building durable regional arrangements of its own. That asymmetry is the opening for Europe. A Turkey that can obstruct but not construct needs partners for what it wants to achieve—reconstruction money in Syria, advanced technology for its defence programmes and markets for its exports. Europe has been slow to use this leverage because it keeps looking for a different kind of relationship: an ally that agrees, or an adversary it can hold at arm’s length. Turkey is neither.

Europe needs to stop waiting. It should start using the interdependence that already exists around common projects and enforceable terms. This will not eliminate the contradictions at the heart of the relationship. It will instead turn those contradictions into a framework for bargaining, making cooperation possible without requiring alignment and disagreement manageable without producing rupture.

Acknowledgments 

We are grateful to Jana Puglierin and the Re:Order team at ECFR for encouraging us to take on this project and for helping shape the original idea, and to Angela Mehrer for her coordination throughout. Thanks also to Jeremy Cliffe and the ECFR publications team for their guidance on the initial proposal and outline, and to Nastassia Zenovich whose work on the maps was essential. We would also like to thank the many officials, experts and practitioners who shared their insights with us on an off-the-record basis; their perspectives informed the argument in important ways. Finally, we are especially grateful to Taisa Sganzerla for her thoughtful and incisive editing, which sharpened both the structure and the argument of the paper. 

About the authors

Aslı Aydıntaşbaş is an associate senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) and a fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, where she also directs the Turkey Project. Before joining the foreign policy community, Aydintasbas had a long career in journalism, including writing a Global Opinions column for the Washington Post. She has covered wars in the Middle East and lived in New York and Istanbul, holding positions at Milliyet, Cumhuriyet, and CNN Turk. She is a regular commentator on the Middle East and Turkey and her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, among others. Her recent publications include “Turkey’s search for a new Middle East order” and “Turkey’s post-American hesitation” on the impact of the Iran war. She has also recently written “Here is how one country may have solved a violent uprising” and “Trump, don’t repeat Churchill’s mistake” for the New York Times. 

Evren Balta is a professor of international relations at Özyeğin University in Istanbul. She is also academic coordinator of the TÜSİAD Global Politics Forum, co-director of the Democracy Lab at Özyeğin University, a permanent member of the North South Futures Forum and a member of the Global Scholars Network on Identity and Conflict at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. She is also affiliated with the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC. She is the author or co-author of several books, including “The American Passport in Turkey: National Citizenship in the Age of Transnationalism”, which received a Best Book Award from the American Sociological Association. She holds a PhD in political science from The Graduate Center, City University of New York, an MIA from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and an MA in sociology from Middle East Technical University.

This paper is part of the Re:Order project and was made possible with support from Stiftung Mercator, but does not necessarily represent its view.

Source

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

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

Problem

Saxony-Anhalt has returned 43.8% of the vote for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in its state election. The result puts the party within reach of forming what would be the first state government run by the far-right in the history of the German federal republic.

The AfD has no executive experience and its Saxony-Anhalt branch is riven with tensions and splits. A chaotic state government could deter voters elsewhere from backing such parties. But if the AfD manages to govern halfway coherently, it will have the chance to pick fights with authorities in both Berlin and Brussels, and significant leeway to try out policies that could later be applied elsewhere. This might then embolden the radical right elsewhere in Europe.

Meanwhile the result increases the pressure on Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s centrist federal coalition. Already before the Saxony-Anhalt election, splits were widening between eastern and western branches of his Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU), and between him and his conservative party base. The result exacerbates these and, in turn, increases the chance that Merz will be too distracted and constrained by domestic politics to provide European leadership.

With France, Italy, Poland and Spain all entering election seasons, a Germany riven by internal drama cannot be the anchor that Europe needs.

Solution

Bold action is needed both in Berlin and beyond Germany. Talk of a party ban is too late and would anyway be unlikely to quell the underlying discontent felt by AfD voters. Action by the federal authorities against stand-out extremists in the party, and its funding streams, is both more realistic and more likely to keep its voters open to persuasion.

Meanwhile the CDU/CSU needs to make a strategic decision about what sort of party it wants to be; including where it will and will not cooperate with parties outside the traditional mainstream. Germany’s other pro-European parties also need to marshal a better answer to the radical right: substantive policies proving that they are on the side of ordinary people rather than powerful interests (Piotr Buras, Jeremy Cliffe and Susi Dennison have made concrete suggestions along these lines where climate policy is concerned.)

Other European capitals should curb their expectations of German leadership and nurture broader sources of impetus, including the new E6 group of major EU economies and the “coalition of the willing” on Ukraine. Merz, for example, is now even less likely to achieve a breakthrough on the EU’s 2028-2034 budget negotiations or on EU accession talks. Other European leaders, including European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, will need to depend less on him to advance ambitious proposals. European diplomats in Berlin should think hard about how to sell their ideas into a more distracted and inward-looking government.

Context

Saxony-Anhalt is a small and demographically unrepresentative German state, with an atypically old and homogeneous population of 2.1m out of a national total of 83.5m. Nevertheless, its election result has reverberated through European capitals.

The vote on September 6th gives the AfD 39 seats, three short of a majority, requiring the party to seek support either from the left-conservative Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) or the right flank of the CDU in order to govern. The only alternative would be a government supported (at least passively) by all five of the other parties, including the socialist Left party, cooperation with which is anathema to the CDU. The development comes as Merz’s fragile “grand coalition” is struggling to pass reforms aimed at reviving Germany’s stagnant economy.

Two upcoming state elections on September 20th—in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and in Berlin—could further dent his authority. It is possible, though not currently probable, that he will be forced out as chancellor in the coming months. The obvious frontrunner to replace Merz is Hendrik Wüst, the premier of North Rhine-Westphalia, but his moderate politics may not fit the polarised mood.

Source

This week, Mark Leonard is joined by Jana Puglierin, senior policy fellow and head of ECFR’s Berlin office, in a World in 30 Minutes Emergency Room episode to discuss the latest in German politics.

The AfD’s win in the small eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt was widely expected, but the scale of the result and the collapse of Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) have still shocked Berlin. For the first time since the second world war, a far-right party is within reach of governing a German Bundesland. Jana unpacks the AfD’s possible paths to power, the pressure on Merz and his grand coalition, and what the result says about the far right’s continued rise in Europe.

Why does an election in a state of two million people matter so much for a country of 84 million? Can the AfD govern without a formal coalition partner, and would CDU lawmakers break the historic “firewall” to make that possible? Why is the party still treated as beyond the pale, even as it leads national polls? And should Europe prepare for a Germany too absorbed in its own crisis to lead?

This episode was recorded on September 7th 2026.

Source

💾

The Gripen fighter jet came in low over the medieval rooftops of Visby, stood on its tail and climbed vertically out of sight. Hundreds of hands went up holding phones. Every late June, all Swedish party leaders gather for Almedalen Week in this town on Gotland, the Baltic Sea’s most strategic island. This year, the military display drew the only unanimous reaction of the week.

Sweden holds a general election on September 13th, but defence has barely featured in the campaign. All parties take the Russia threat seriously, and all want to face it as one. The election is being fought instead over welfare, migration, crime, climate and the economy—and on many of those, the government parties are losing.

Ulf Kristersson’s centre-right Moderates have held the prime minister’s office for four years, after an agreement in 2022 secured them the support of the far-right Sweden Democrats in exchange for a hard line on migration and crime. The so-called Tidö agreement—named after the castle where it was negotiated—broke a taboo: for the first time the Sweden Democrats had formal influence over a government, though it stopped short of joining the cabinet. Now the four parties supporting Kristersson’s government are trailing the opposition in the polls. The Liberal Party, currently in government, has suffered the most from the cooperation with the Sweden Democrats and is now polling below the 4% threshold to get into parliament.

Many analysts therefore expect Magdalena Andersson of the Social Democratic Party to return as prime minister. Her party governed Sweden for most of the 20th century and again between 2014 and 2022, when the country abandoned centuries of military non-alignment to join NATO. What would an Andersson government mean for Sweden’s foreign policy and its role in the EU? Based on several conversations with key people in the opposition parties, in Almedalen and elsewhere: not a dramatic change. But look closer and the differences start to show.

The maths

The political course will partly depend on the majority Andersson can assemble. A deal with the formerly communist Left Party, which is still formally committed to leaving NATO, would create a different government from one built with the market-liberal Centre Party and perhaps the Christian Democrats—and getting all them into the same majority would require political magic. The Green Party is likely to be part of the coalition either way, although senior figures say the case for being in government is still hotly debated internally.

The most likely outcome is that Andersson will lead a red-green coalition, assembled over months of difficult negotiations. The Greens and the Left would push for a less restrictive migration policy than the Social Democrats are ready to accept, having themselves tightened asylum rules when they were in power. For its part, the Centre Party would press for deregulation and other market liberal reforms Swedish business wants—against the trade unions as well as the Greens and the Left.

If Andersson struggles to hold a red-green government together, a grand coalition between the Social Democrats and the Moderates also cannot be ruled out. But that would require a serious external crisis and a significant change within the Moderates.

Names circulating for foreign ministers or “sherpa” for the prime minister are Paula Carvalho, Morgan Johansson, Ylva Johansson, Ann Linde, Kerstin Lundgren, and Oscar Stenström. Peter Hultqvist is likely to return as defence minister.

What will not change

On many key issues, a government led by the Social Democrats would continue Sweden’s current course, regardless of coalition partners. Support for Ukraine is strong across the Riksdag. NATO membership will not be reopened: the security situation and strong public support for NATO membership discourage the Left Party from pushing its formal position, and the Social Democrats would refuse if it tried.

Sweden rejected the euro in a referendum in 2003 and will not revisit it in the coming four years unless there is a deep economic crisis, although the Centre Party may extract a report on the topic. The country’s dependence on exports keeps every party in favour of open trade. Sweden will also remain one of the EU’s most frugal members in negotiations of the next Multiannual Financial Framework.

‘Magda will be Magda’

Elsewhere, the change will be real. A centre-left government will focus more on relations with the global south and gradually increase aid spending. The Social Democrats have a long tradition of cooperating with countries such as South Africa and Brazil and have deepened those ties while in opposition. If Lula da Silva is re-elected, Andersson will be well-placed to strengthen EU-Brazil engagement. The Social Democrats also want closer relations with African states and OECD countries such as Canada, where Andersson has built a strong rapport with Mark Carney.

This agenda includes climate politics—all red-green parties want greater ambition at home and in Europe. For the Social Democrats, green industrial policy is the way to keep workers on side in the green transition, a view shared by trade unions and many industrial leaders. The Green Party might get the development and environment portfolios back, but they would have to fight with the Centre Party for climate and energy.

Middle East policy would also shift. In 2014, a Social Democratic-led government recognised Palestine, the first EU member state in Western Europe to do so, to loud criticism by the centre-right. An Andersson-led government is more likely to criticise Israel’s actions while also condemning terrorism. The complication is Ebba Busch: her Christian Democrats are strongly pro-Israel, and if they join the coalition, Middle East policy will become more complicated.

Andersson would champion a strong UN and revive the “feminist foreign policy” of Margot Wallström and Ann Linde. But in an EU dominated by the European People’s Party, she would find few allies for traditional social democratic causes. The Nordic and Baltic countries are her natural bloc. Beyond them, only a re-elected Pedro Sánchez in Spain—a big if—would give the Party of European Socialists a large member state. However, leading Social Democrats are keen to avoid comparisons with Sánchez or Denmark’s Mette Fredriksen. “Magda will be Magda”, says one. On other topics, such as support to Ukraine, Sweden will continue to be part of coalitions of the willing.

A rapid increase of defence spending would continue with either Kristersson or Andersson as prime minister, with the Social Democrats also advocating additional resources for civil defence.

The consensus on security policy runs deep. In the all-party Defence Commission’s report this summer, the Social Democrats fully agreed with the government’s assessment of the security situation. A rapid increase in defence spending would continue with either Kristersson or Andersson as prime minister, with the Social Democrats also advocating additional resources for civil defence.

However, a centre-left coalition could face internal conflicts over the envisaged rotating presence of French nuclear-capable aircraft in Sweden or cooperation with Turkey on intelligence and anti-terrorism, both of which the Left Party would resist. Rather than fight it, the coalition might just pay them off. “Magda will buy them out,” says a prominent Social Democrat, comparing to how Fredriksen made a deal with the left-ish Enhedslisten in Denmark, giving them social reforms in exchange for staying out of her cabinet.

And while the Social Democrats accept the role of nuclear weapons in NATO strategy, they press harder than the Moderates on global non-proliferation.

Biting their tongue on Trump

Although senior Social Democrats are highly critical of US president Donald Trump in private, and Andersson expressed solidarity with Denmark when he threatened Greenland, the party will not pick a public fight. It agreed with the conclusions of the Defence Commission, such as the importance of the American security partnership, and even in background talks Social Democrats decline to discuss alternatives to NATO command structures for large military operations. “We presume that SACEUR is responsible”, says one senior figure, referring to NATO’s commander in Europe, who has always been an American. Sweden’s reliance on American aircraft, interceptors and satellites in the sensitive Baltic Sea area leaves Andersson far less room than Sánchez has in Madrid.

If Kristersson survives

None of this is settled. ECFR’s New Politics research shows how volatile European electorates have become, and a late swing could leave Kristersson in office—this time with Sweden Democrats in ministerial posts, as the Moderates have promised.

That would hand the far-right party real power this time. Given its size, it will likely take influential portfolios, such as representing Sweden in EU negotiations on migration policy and home affairs, and perhaps finance and competitiveness too, like the Finns Party in Finland.

Even more importantly, the Sweden Democrats would fully participate in foreign and security policy decisions. In Sweden, ministers make government decisions collectively and are briefed on sensitive intelligence matters at cabinet meetings. While the party has been vocal in criticising Vladimir Putin since its links to Moscow were exposed, the opposition still sees them as a security risk.

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A new government will bring more of a tilt than a dramatic change in Sweden’s foreign and European policy. This will be important in the decisive year of 2029, when a new president of the European Commission will be chosen—and in a political landscape that might include far-right leadership in France, Italy and Poland. The Gripen will keep flying over Visby whoever wins in September. What changes is Sweden’s place in an EPP-dominated Europe.

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Berlin; late August: when politics normally stirs into life after the holiday lull. But this year, the lull never came.

German chancellor Friedrich Merz is beset by approval levels plumbing the depths of the depleted Rhine and Danube. His governing conservative CDU party spent the summer at war with itself over pension reform (not helped by a botched cabinet reshuffle). Some of the chancellor’s staunchest supporters are even openly wondering whether he is still up to the job. To get out of the hole they are in, Merz and his ministers now want to project a sense of Aufbruchstimmung—a feeling of renewal and restart.

Whether they succeed will determine Europe’s future.

Germany’s economy has endured six years of paltry growth. Its traditionally strong industries are screaming for protection against China, US tariffs and energy price shocks (and against their own past decisions). Strong end-of-the-republic vibes suffuse dark political commentary, “mainstream” parties oscillate between panic and despair, and resignation has set in among voters. What until recently seemed little more than a media talking point on an “Andy Burnham moment”—meaning the possibility of Hendrik Wüst, North Rhine-Westphalia’s minister-president, succeeding Merz as chancellor this autumn—could yet become reality.

For decades, Germany was Europe’s byword for political stability and predictability. Today, it is hard to overstate how little is now unthinkable in German politics. All bets are off. Decision-makers elsewhere in Europe should get ready for the possibility of a new kind of Germany: no longer boring, no longer stable—and no longer rich.

Why the Angst is now real

Germany is days away from elections in three eastern states which could shake the government in Berlin to its foundations. First up is Saxony-Anhalt, where on September 6th the far-right populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) could rewrite German post-war history and turn the decades-long mantra of “never again” into “actually, maybe”. Polling suggests even an absolute majority for the party is within reach. The AfD, the CDU and the Left could be the only parties to clear the 5% threshold for the state parliament. Two weeks after that possible momentous result, the states of Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern will also elect new parliaments.

While the situation for the political centre looks a little less dire in the latter two places, complicated three-party coalitions are the likely outcome in both. This will have a compounding effect on the stability of the federal government. The CDU leadership under Merz remains adamant that the “firewall” must hold, ruling out any coalition or cooperation with the AfD. Yet this position is increasingly being questioned by local politicians and by conservative thinkers within and around the party. Many in the CDU are frustrated by what they see as the strategic price of the firewall. With their preferred coalition partner, the liberal Free Democrats, now struggling to clear the 5% threshold almost anywhere, ruling out the AfD leaves the CDU ever-more dependent on centre-left coalitions. In critics’ view, this deprives the party of options and leaves it hostage to the remaining potential coalition partners.

An AfD minister-president would be a brutal demonstration of the political establishment’s inability to provide a convincing vision for the country

An AfD minister-president in one of Germany’s states would be more than a striking political development. It would be a brutal demonstration of the political establishment’s inability to provide a convincing vision for the country’s economic, political and social future. In recent years, German leaders have made more reform announcements than actual reforms. The previous government tried to adapt to the Zeitenwende without imposing any hardship on Germans—and failed. Now, the Merz government seems equally unable to muster the political strength for major reform.

Instead, it has too often looked to the past for answers: back to the combustion engine, back to looser labour rights, back to family values. The only policy area where the government now seems readier to change course is on China, where it has said it will push through a more active European position on protecting markets and punishing China’s predatory economic behaviour. In a revealing commentary, however, Merz himself announced this was enabled, not by his decisive political leadership, but by the altered posture of the German car industry.

This vacuum in dealing with the implications of the changing global environment leaves huge room for the political fringes, especially from the far-right. The AfD’s offer is revisionist—drastically curb immigration and asylum, reverse key elements of the energy transition, challenge European integration, end the euro and pursue a distinctly nationalist approach to foreign policy. All this is deeply unsettling to the political establishment, but resonates with a growing constituency of voters united by restrictive stances on migration and cultural issues.  

The strength of the AfD is a symptom, not a cause. It did not rise to prominence overnight and has been part of Germany’s political landscape now for more than a decade. But the party is now within striking distance of actual political power at a time when the country’s political and economic foundations are starting to crumble. The war in Ukraine, volatility in America and conflict over the Strait of Hormuz are stretching the limits of German leaders’ attention as well as the country’s fiscal space. Germany’s long-term trade relationship with China is now a liability and an epic drought has shrivelled what little hope remained for Germany’s economic recovery. Berlin is not only forced to reckon with the failures and missed opportunities of the past decade on everything, everywhere, all at once; but the politicians seem unprepared either to put up a real fight for survival or even adjust to this new reality in a form of managed decline.

No time for Schadenfreude

Germany is hardly the first European country to experience a radical reshaping of its party system and the rise of the far-right; Italy and France have been through similar upheavals. And Germany itself, amid deep economic problems, was called “the sick man of Europe” back in 1999, only to recover and to become the continent’s exporting powerhouse. Why should the rest of Europe now worry so much about Germany’s malaise?

The answer is: because a German crisis is a European crisis. Germany is too economically and politically important to fail. Its economic weight, role at the heart of the EU and position as Europe’s most populous member state mean this would be more than just another episode of national political turbulence. A Germany that is oozing 15,000 industrial jobs each month, becoming even more dependent on technology imports and increasingly incapable of internal reform risks dragging Europe towards fragmentation and exploitation.

Unless political leaders come up with something new, a German pall will blot all major items on the EU’s agenda: the next multiannual financial framework; the future of the bloc’s industrial policy; European efforts to rearm and build resilience; a more autonomous capacity on emerging technologies and the economic muscle to create international leverage behind a new global trading agenda. That is not to mention the serious consequences of a German disengagement for Europe’s continued support for Ukraine.

“German leadership is not optional”, Sweden’s defence minister said at a public event this month, attended by one of the authors. German political elites seem to disagree. Theirs is the third largest economy in the world, sitting at the core of the world’s largest single market, boasting leading international companies and building up one of the largest defence budgets anywhere. Yet they appear to lack any sense of their own domestic, let alone global, agency. The three upcoming state elections may give them their last chance and some momentum to turn things around. But if Berlin becomes entirely enfeebled under the ensuing political fallout, the rest of Europe is likely to suffer in the same way.

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In Wilbert L. Cooper’s new memoir, The Black Shield, he tells two intertwining stories: the history of the city’s Black Shield Police Association, one of the country’s oldest Black policing organizations, and the multigenerational narrative of his own family, embedded in the police force. Both of his parents and sister are retired Black Cleveland cops, and on his mother’s side, there’s been a Cleveland cop in the family since 1950. In this book about race, policing, and power, Cooper examines the complex duality of the Black cop, what it was like for his parents to navigate an institution that was hostile to their own community, and, ultimately, what this all has meant for him.

This excerpt combines the prologue and a chapter focused on his mother’s beginnings in Cleveland’s police department. Two individuals mentioned spearheaded legal efforts in the 1970s to diversify the department: Fred Johnson, the association’s president who led a lawsuit over the department’s discriminatory hiring and promotion practices, and Jean Clayton, a policewoman and the organization’s secretary whose parallel lawsuit disbanded the segregated Women’s Bureau and integrated women into the department. Below, Cooper recounts how his mother, Gayle, walked through the door that they opened. But it was not without a struggle.

—Cheri Lucas Rowlands

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The gun was always there. I used to see it in flashes as Dad would get ready to leave the house. After he doused himself in spicy cologne and sliced a plastic comb through the waves of his jet-black Jheri curl, I would catch that 9-millimeter sliding between the small of his back and the belted waistband of his blue jeans. 

Mom had her own. She kept it in her purse. One of those big leather bags, the kind they show behind the counter at Dillard’s, with shiny metal clasps and countless compartments. Her gun would be in there with red lipstick, a double-sided compact mirror, and her bulky pager. I knew the gun was there because I sensed its heft whenever I’d have to move the bag off the kitchen table to do my homework. It felt like a bowling ball in a pillowcase.

Dad used to store his 9-millimeter above the fine china, on top of the large, baby-pink Victorian-style cabinet in our dining room. One time while he was sleeping, I climbed on top of the pink-velvet-upholstered chairs to get a good look at it through the scrollwork. When I came face-to-face with the gun, I was too intimidated to actually pick it up and play with it.

It took a few moments for me to work up the gumption to run my little fingers across the raised bumps of its grip. Then I touched the ridges of the slide and the smooth, cold, hard barrel from where bullets burst. And just that alone felt crazy to me. Even in the dusty, mundane space of the cabinet, the stock-still object pulsated with wild energy. It was like petting a tiger.

Even now, it’s overwhelming for me to imagine that all that calamitous potential to take life, to inflict pain, to inspire fear, to demand subservience, to have your way with the world, to finally be the actor instead of the one who is acted upon—was right there and it was theirs.

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I was 7 or 8 when I saw Dad shoot that gun. It must have been the summer, because I still remember the heavy outside air kissing my arms and legs, the suburban sunlight beaming on me. I see that light reverberating off the concrete, making vivid every blade of green grass in the yard and every goose-egg stone in the gravel strips. But I cannot hear the gunshot. I cannot tune in to the boom. All I sense is the fear, because it is so foreign. I’m still there. Standing in the driveway. Stuck and dumbfounded. Until Dad’s shouts break through, begging me to run inside before those crackers come back, commanding me to have Mom call the cops.

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Have you heard of Pastor Leon McCray? The man of faith who saw two White people dumping a refrigerator on his property. When McCray tried to stop them, the duo threatened him. One of the Whites ran off to grab three more racists. McCray says that’s when they all ganged up on him. That’s when they told him that his “Black life didn’t matter.” The beating didn’t stop until McCray pulled out his gun. When the police showed up at the scene, they handcuffed McCray and put him in the back of the cruiser. His assailants laughed and waved at him as he was taken off.

But at least McCray survived. You know that many of us aren’t so lucky: The police shot and killed the father Philando Castile during a traffic stop after he told them he had a firearm. The police shot and killed the father John Crawford while he was carrying a pellet rifle inside the Walmart that retailed the damn pellet rifle. Police shot Emantic F. Bradford Jr. at a shopping mall while they were responding to a call about gunshots at the mall. Witnesses say they killed Bradford as he was trying to direct shoppers to safety.

These killings now give shape and sharpness to that immense and totalizing fear I felt in the driveway as a child. That American malice is always there anytime we try to commandeer a power that wasn’t intended for us. Black people are killed or incarcerated every day for much less than what Dad did. Simply owning a gun can put a bullseye on your back. Pulling one on a White man can turn you into a hashtag.

So why did Dad want to call 911? I know that he’d tell you it was because his gun was different from Pastor Leon’s. Dad didn’t buy it at Walmart or Bass Pro alongside camouflage galoshes and fly-fishing rods. He didn’t pick it up at a gun shop with a shooting range full of targets depicting men in turbans and hip-hop gear. He didn’t procure it across state lines at a gun show with bundles of cash and no identification or background check. And he didn’t get it off the street, with scratched-out serial numbers and bodies on it.

Dad got his gun from the City of Cleveland. That’s where Mom got hers, too. Both are tools of policing, the Cooper family business. They hold up those guns and their power to use them as symbols of our freedom in a country that will not stop killing or incarcerating Black folks. When I was a child, I never questioned that contradiction. But to become my own man in the America I inherited, I realized I’d have to try to solve the paradox of my parents.

By the time the Black Shield had forced the hand of the Cleveland Police Department in 1977, Gayle had given birth to another child—a little boy named Geoffrey. Now with three kids, she was even more entrenched in a wrathful marriage and farther away from the working world. And losing her uncle Lloyd, which felt a lot like losing a father, only made her feel that much more alone. When he died, the dream of becoming a cop and the freedom the job promised died with him. 

It was at the moment that she’d almost completely resigned herself that it all came raging back. She opened up an issue of the Plain Dealer to find that people who’d taken the test with her and were lower than her on the eligibility list were being appointed to the police academy. And quickly, her despondency turned to confusion. And then her confusion turned to anger. She said to herself, “I know my number is higher than this and they’ve gone eighty past me and I’m not getting called?!” As she started to look into the issue, she found out that the city had expunged her from the eligibility list. “They were trying to lose Black folks’ stuff,” she told me. The city claimed it was because her addresses had changed and she hadn’t notified the civil service. To get back on the list, she had to go to court. “They claimed I had moved, but I owned my own home!” she said. “I told them, ‘I bought this house, I haven’t gone anywhere.’” As soon as she prevailed in her hearing, a White officer walked up to her in court. He simply said, “I’m from the academy.” He took her information. And then he said, “You will start the police academy on Monday.”

Later that same night, Fred Johnson called Gayle’s phone. It was the first time she’d ever spoken to the man. Lloyd was never big on the Shield Club, and Curtis was much closer with her younger brother, his namesake, who would join the police department five years later. Gayle didn’t have a complete idea of what the Shield Club had been up to at that point, or of how much it had shaped the situation she was walking into. Because of all the lawsuits, more than 40 percent of her classmates would be people of color and women. But the department they were entering was only 9 percent Black or Hispanic, and 2 percent women. For his part, Johnson stressed the struggle happening in the city to resist the change that Black women like Gayle represented. The academy was framed as a contentious environment controlled by people who were intent on destroying Gayle’s professional prospects and her spirit.

Despite the reforms that resulted from the Shield Club and the Women’s Law Fund cases, Gayle was still put through a series of tests, during which she could still be expunged. She had to meet with a psychiatrist, who asked her questions about her affiliations. Although this test had been revised thanks to the efforts of Fred Johnson and the Shield Club, it remained biased. As many of us conclude from a life living in this country run by White people, Gayle figured the best way to stick around was to hide herself. Her strategy was to answer every question like a White man of modest intellect.

In the 1970s, Gayle had spent a few years in the Nation of Islam. Although she never really let go of Jesus, she converted aesthetically and culturally to satisfy the whims of her second husband. She traded her hot pants for conservative flowing dresses. And instead of sweet potato pie, she started baking bean pies. When she did make a Polish Boy, she did it with beef sausage. She even traveled to Chicago once for Saviours’ Day to see the honorable Elijah Muhammad with her own eyes. But she put all that behind her when she found out that her proud Muslim husband was sleeping with a fellow “sister.” By the time she took the psych test to become a police officer, she’d gone back to straightening her hair and listening to gospel music. But some of the political knowledge she gained from the Nation, especially its perspective on America, stuck with her. She understood things differently than most—like the “riots” that happened in Hough and Glenville. She saw them as a natural reaction to the way her people had been done in this city and done in America. To her, the people who stormed the streets weren’t criminal. The crimes being committed were by the landlords renting rat-infested apartments and the Board of Education shoving kids into overcrowded schools and businesses charging a premium for rancid meat. She had a lot of ideas about these sorts of things, but none of them could feed her kids or free her from her marriage. And so she kept them to herself during her psych test.

The new hires were also required to do a complete physical examination. This was especially humiliating for Gayle. The whole ordeal was a perverse take on the idea that if women want to be in the academy, if women want to do what the men do, then they have to go through the exact same processes. For the physical exam, this meant standing around nearly nude to be ogled by their peers. “They made us stand up there in paper gowns and these guys were trying to catch glimpses at us. And they make you do stuff in the gowns so the gowns get all torn up. My breasts and everything were just hanging out,” Gayle recalled. She was so thoroughly humiliated that a fellow female in the academy came to her with some Scotch tape to try to cover her up. “They did that kind of thing because they wanted us to quit. The guys didn’t want us, their wives didn’t want us, it was terrible. They treated us like new meat, picking out which one they were going to take.” 

Fred Johnson made himself available to all the Blacks in the academy because he was prepared for the city to try to find excuses to fail them. Gayle didn’t think she’d have a problem. She was voted the vice president of the academy class and consistently scored high on all of the interstitial tests. Those high scores were attained by studying alongside her new girlfriend. But when they both got good grades on a test with similar answers, they were accused of cheating and threatened with expulsion from the academy. Fred Johnson had to step in and help them prove that they’d arrived at the same answers because they’d been preparing together.

After passing the academy, but before they could be sworn in as officers, they were also required to take a qualification test administered by the State of Ohio that evaluated their skills. Cadets could fly through the academy with high marks and still get disqualified to be a police officer. Although policewomen in Cleveland had been in the academy before the 1970s, they weren’t required to take the qualification test because officers in the women’s bureau didn’t carry guns. Anticipating that they would do whatever they could to disqualify her, Gayle prepared for the test with the desperate intensity of a woman fighting for her life. “To prepare for the running test, I used to run up and down the steps whenever I’d put the kids down for nap,” she told me. To make her qualifying time, she outran some Vietnam veterans, who threw up before they crossed the finish line. The state also required people to do a series of chin-ups and push-ups and dips that demanded upper body strength that seemed to favor the male physique, but Gayle fought her way through those. When she finally had to take her shooting test, the last phase, it was 19 degrees below zero. In 1977, Cleveland was in the midst of one of its coldest winters ever. But one of the essential rules of the academy was that it never canceled or postponed qualification tests for any reason, in an effort to help simulate what it’s like to be a police officer and have to work when everyone else gets the day off. And so Gayle stood at the outdoor range with the soft skin of her red-nailed fingers sticking to the ice-cold metal of her gun, her body involuntarily shivering, hoping the icy air didn’t tank her shot.

The first night Patrolwoman Gayle Smith reported to the Fifth District of the Cleveland Division of Police in the winter of 1977, her supervisor showed her two things: the coffee machine and the broom. It was expected that she would be the shift’s glorified janitor. But she bucked back. “I did not go through all that training to do no housekeeping. I came here to be a police officer,” she remembers saying to him, surprised by her own candor. Ridiculous as it seems now, perhaps this kind of insult by her male colleagues should have been expected. After all of the efforts by the Women’s Law Fund and Jean Clayton to break down the formal barriers in the CDP, women still constituted only 2.3 percent of the police force when Gayle started. The assholes she was working with had almost no experience working alongside women as equals and little incentive to see them as such. Gayle was basically a guinea pig. Ironically, it was because of Jean Clayton, Gayle’s initial inspiration to become a lady cop, that the women’s bureau was dissolved and lady cops ceased to exist. Although Gayle had been intent on following Clayton’s path, she found herself involved in something entirely new.

While most of the male cops were unhappy with the gender integration of the department, a lot of the women officers were displeased, too. They were especially pissed at Jean Clayton and her damn lawsuit. These were women who had no interest in being partnered with men and participating in a form of policing that oriented itself around violence and punishment. There were certainly fair criticisms of the women’s bureau, from its troubling focus on purity to the fact that its diversion efforts and empathy weren’t as equally distributed to Black suspects as they were to Whites. But I wonder if the department would be less lethal and repressive today if the men on the Cleveland Police Department had become more like the women and their women’s bureau. Instead, the women became more like the men. After the women’s bureau closed, some of its important work, such as sex crimes, was shamefully ignored or mishandled. Gayle would see this firsthand. But first she needed to get out of coffee duty.

It took some convincing, but eventually Gayle got her first assignment outside the district. After roll call, she would be taken to White City Beach, a former park on Lake Erie that in the 1940s was home to attractions like Bonavita the lion trainer, along with fishing and a yacht club. After natural disasters hurt the park and desegregation saw the City of Cleveland give up on supporting community spaces shared by both Blacks and Whites, White City Beach went the way of Euclid Beach. By the 1970s, it became a dumping ground for garbage and a place where the city parked vehicles that were towed to clear the streets for snowplows or as the result of car wrecks. That year, it was overflowing with gnarled automobiles. It had been the coldest Cleveland winter of the century, complete with “superbomb” blizzards and scores of days that were more than 20 degrees below zero. There were more than one thousand cars down there at White City Beach, but not another soul in sight.

“They dropped me off at White City Beach every night and stuck me in a shell of a car that was up on bricks and cinder blocks, with a wire heater inside of it. There was no bathroom. They’d leave me there all night and they’d come back and get me in the morning. I was just down there by myself in pitch blackness and cold. Even if I had wanted to get out, I couldn’t go nowhere. If someone had tried to steal the cars down there, there is nothing I could have done about it. It was demoralizing.”

Mom told me this in the kitchen, where I’d often heard her talk about the bad early days on the job. I’m not sure whether this was the first time I was really listening, or if she was telling it differently. Usually, her stories were never this detailed and specific. It was just “racism” and “men being nasty.” Perhaps because I was taking a real interest, she started accessing parts of the story she had often left untouched in her recounting.

There is a feeling of humiliation that stings long after an event has passed. It doesn’t just hurt because of what was done, it hurts because you feel as though you had some agency in the matter. That you let it happen. When she started telling me what it was like, I could feel her own surprise at the disregard she had endured. In the zone car with White partners, she was beneath speaking to. These were men who would greet a dog if they saw it on the street, but wouldn’t say one word to her. In this sense, despite the lawsuit and the consent decree, not much had changed on the job since the late 1950s, when White officers would “throw a shoe” to avoid being paired up with Curtis and Fred Johnson.

“When they finally had two guys take me out, they put me in the back seat where a prisoner would sit. And they didn’t let me touch the radio. They were supposed to show me some things. But instead, they got out of the car and went to eat. They just left me locked in the back of that car without saying anything. I’m just beating on the door and everything.”

It wasn’t until an old, White, Catholic officer who looked like Santa Claus decided to take Gayle under his wing that she finally got to learn a bit about real policing. The rotund veteran with snow-white hair explained to Gayle the first time she got in the car with him exactly why he was willing to teach her. It wasn’t that he was pleased about working with Blacks or with women. He simply realized the futility of resistance: “If we get rid of her, they will just send another one of them down here.”

“It was crazy to have me on the job that length of time and nobody taught me nothing except what I learned in the academy,” she remembered of her time wasted on frivolous assignments. “When he took me out, the first thing he ever told me was this: He said, ‘Okay, kid, what time is it?’ I looked for my watch. He said, ‘That is the first rule. Don’t you ever take your eye off anybody. If they ask what time it is, say you don’t know or your watch is broke. But you don’t look down.’”

It was with Santa Claus that she got to see how the men handled sex crimes now that the women’s bureau was closed. The first rape call that they ever responded to together involved a White woman. The lady had walked three doors over from where she lived to bum a cigarette from her neighbor. Before she could get back home, three men had grabbed her off the street, dragged her into a car, and took turns raping her. While Gayle was wrenched by the story, calling back to her own experiences of sexual abuse, the veteran was incredulous. “He talked to that girl so bad, I felt sorry for her,” she remembered. “He asked her, ‘What were you wearing?’ ‘Why were you out at that time of night?’ ‘What did you expect was going to happen?’ It was horrible . . . I will never forget it. That girl ended up not even filing.”

It was also alongside Santa Claus that she finally proved she could be real police, like the men. The call was a robbery at a drugstore that drew several cars to the scene. The suspect was a young Black man who managed to run out the back door. To show her tenacity, Gayle took off after him ahead of the rest of the cops, moving just as she had when she was training for the department’s entrance exam, going up and down those steps. Santa, who was heavy and plodding with bad knees, couldn’t keep up as Gayle tailed this man through an alleyway. And then from behind her, a shot rang out.

When a police shooting happens, officers come together to get their story straight. Although this was an era when it was still legal for officers in Cleveland to shoot fleeing felons, all the patrolmen made sure they agreed on what took place. After they were finished, they looked over at Gayle to see if she saw it the same way they did. Forget the police academy. The offensive rape call was a pop quiz, and this shooting was the final exam of real police shit. And Gayle passed with flying colors. “After that, I started having people to work with,” she told me. “It didn’t feel good, but I had a demon behind me.”

Browse Wilbert L. Cooper’s book-related events and appearances or buy the book today:

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Wilbert L. Cooper grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio. He studied journalism at Ohio University and earned a master’s degree in publishing at New York University. He has written for outlets such as The Guardian, The New York Times, The Marshall Project, and The Wall Street Journal. His Vice documentary The Cleveland Strangler was nominated for a National Magazine Award. In 2024, he was the recipient of the Richard J. Margolis Award. The Black Shield is his first book.

This week, Mark Leonard is joined by Janka Oertel, director of ECFR’s DARE* initiative, and Andrew Small, head of ECFR’s Asia programme, to examine the growing impact of the “China shock 2.0” on Germany and Europe.  

A new wave of Chinese competition, driven by overcapacity and state-backed industrial strength, is hitting sectors such as car manufacturing, chemicals and machine tools. Germany is at the epicentre, with mounting job losses raising questions about Europe’s long-term economic resilience and competitiveness. The crisis is reshaping German politics, exposing government divisions and putting pressure on Chancellor Friedrich Merz ahead of September’s potentially divisive regional elections.

Together, Mark, Janka and Andrew discuss the policy options being considered in Brussels and in European capitals—from emergency trade measures to new industrial strategies. Can Europe protect its industrial base without triggering a damaging escalation with China? Is Germany able to lead a coherent European response amid its own political turbulence?

This podcast episode was recorded 12th August 2026.

Bookshelf
China Shock 2.0: The Cost of Germany’s Complacency, by Brad Setser and Sander Tordoir
The art of the swarm: Systemic rivalry with China on European terms, by Andrew Small
Dear Britain, by Annette Dittert

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This week, Mark Leonard is joined by Jörg Lau, international correspondent at Die Zeit and Jana Puglierin, head of ECFR’s Berlin office, to explore the political turmoil in Germany ahead of an electoral autumn. Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s government is becoming increasingly unpopular: it faces collapsing approval ratings, growing tension within the governing coalition and mounting pressure from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).

As regional elections approach, Jana argues that Germany’s traditional parties face difficult choices that could reshape the country’s political landscape, while Jörg discusses what the AfD’s rise means for Germany. A “firewall” has kept mainstream parties from cooperating with the far right in the post-war period—but Jörg reflects on the strain this is under, and whether the AfD’s first taste of regional power could transform German politics.

Together, Mark, Jörg and Jana assess the prospects for Merz’s leadership, the future of the CDU and whether Germany’s political centre can withstand such pressure. Are established parties capable of renewing themselves? What happens if the AfD makes gains at the regional level? And what would prolonged instability in Berlin mean for Europe?

This podcast episode was recorded on August 12th 2026.

Bookshelf
The Names, by Florence Knapp
The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran, by Shida Bazyar
The Invite, by Olivia Wilde

Source

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Reluctance among German decision-makers has long stopped Berlin taking a tougher economic approach towards China. When France, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Spain recently pressed the European Commission for tougher measures and faster trade defence action against China, Germany not only declined to join, it even called for stronger industrial ties with Beijing.

Yet, one thing Berlin should not worry about is voters’ disapproval should it pursue a more hawkish China policy. ECFR polling data find that Germans are the most China-sceptical out of 15 European countries surveyed. No fewer than 60% of Christian Democrat and Social Democrat supporters regard the country as an adversary or rival. In contrast, elsewhere in Europe, majorities still see China as either a “necessary partner” or even an ally. In Italy and Spain, 56% and 65% of people hold this view respectively. (Closest to the sceptical Germans are the French public; President Emmanuel Macron’s increasingly hawkish political posture vis-à-vis Beijing may have found an audience willing to listen.)

The China shock has hit Germany particularly hard: its manufacturing sector lost around 420,000 jobs between 2019 and 2025 and it continues to shed 10,000 jobs each month. The car industry is paying the highest costs, being squeezed out of a market increasingly dominated by Chinese manufacturers at home and abroad.

The mood in the European Council is shifting, and with Germany’s acquiescence. When EU leaders met in June 2026, they backed a stronger trade defence toolbox of existing measures against China. This included instruments such as the Industrial Accelerator Act’s “Buy European” provisions and limits on high-risk Chinese technology. Despite its past hesitations, Germany no longer acts as a spoiler on firmer EU action, and it has cautiously supported this new direction. Nevertheless, the combination of growing public scepticism towards China, mounting pressure on German industry and appetite for a more assertive policy on the European level creates a political mandate that German decision-makers could yet seize.

The German public’s views on the energy transition should also prove encouraging for their leaders. Voters want to see investment in renewables: 57% back what would amount to the growing electrification of the economy. Across the countries polled by ECFR, 61% of respondents say they support prioritising renewables and the clean tech sector.

This public support should help persuade leaders, including in Germany, that they can take action to limit emerging dependencies on China. They can accelerate the energy transition while de-risking the clean tech sector through providing support for domestic European industries, from wind to batteries.

For Berlin, and capitals across Europe, it is safer to move ahead rather than delay. Chinese economic policy is already doing irreparable damage to European industry—but European policymakers still need to protect an increasingly electrified economy from weaponisation by China. If they fail to do so, governments will almost certainly pay the price at the ballot box. Those that pursue electrification and economic de-risking as a single package are most likely to reap the political rewards.

Source

Summary

• Marine Le Pen’s candidacy for president means Europeans should brace for the possibility of a France wholly different to the one they know.
• A Rassemblement National government would be hostile to the EU and a disruptive partner on numerous issues facing Europe; including on Russia, enlargement, climate and migration.
• The party is divided over whether and how to work with other right-wing parties in France; and how to position the country within Europe and the Western alliance.
• Le Pen is likely to work in a “duo” with party leader, Jordan Bardella, but there are notable differences between their outlooks. Europeans should pay attention to these.
• European political leaders would struggle to influence a Le Pen-led government, but nor should they expect a unified European far-right to emerge. They would be wise to begin their preparations now.

Note: This policy brief is a second edition of an earlier paper published on June 9th 2026. It updates the prior analysis in light of Marine Le Pen’s confirmation that she will run for the French presidency.

The restoration of a matriarch

In the early hours of November 2nd 1976, a bomb exploded outside the Paris home of the far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen and his family. The perpetrators were never found. His youngest daughter, Marine, 8 years old at the time of the attack, later seethed that the family was not shown “the slightest sign of solidarity or compassion” by the French authorities. Today, as Marine Le Pen launches into her fourth—and most competitive—bid for France’s presidency, that quote reveals something of the woman who might soon occupy the Elysée Palace. If she wins, European policymakers will need to understand this self-defined outsider and how her family’s and party’s long years in the political wilderness shape her domestic and international agenda.

That insurgent self-perception may seem odd now. After all, the National Rally (Rassemblement National, RN) is far ahead in polling for the first round of the election, is accepted by an increasing share of French polite society, and is close to some of the country’s most powerful economic elites. But it still explains why the rest of Europe should brace for the possibility of a French president who sees herself as a rebel against the country’s and the EU’s established norms and institutions. As this paper will argue, a Le Pen presidency of France would be a significantly more formidable challenge to European orthodoxies than Giorgia Meloni is in Italy or Viktor Orban was in Hungary.

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Only one thing is certain about the result of France’s presidential election next year: President Emmanuel Macron’s decade in power will come to an end. Who replaces him is an open question, with any number of conceivable outcomes. The exact field of candidates is not yet clear, not even in Macron’s centrist camp, where two former prime ministers—Édouard Philippe and Gabriel Attal—are vying for primacy. French presidential election campaigns are often volatile; both those in 2017 and 2022 saw major shifts over the half-year before polling day. But current polling suggests that the RN party candidate is on track to win the first round, on April 18th 2027, and to enjoy good prospects in the second, due on May 2nd.

The RN went through months of speculation over who would represent it at the presidential election. In March 2025, Marine Le Pen was convicted of embezzling European parliamentary funds and received a five-year ban on standing for election. Over recent months, Jordan Bardella, the RN’s untested young leader and Le Pen’s protégé, was talked about as the party’s best hope.

On July 7th 2026, however, the Court of Appeal reduced Le Pen’s ineligibility penalty, which enabled her to run. It also required her to serve a year of house arrest with an electronic ankle tag. That evening, Le Pen announced that she would seek the presidency and would appeal to the Court of Cassation. The penalty is suspended until France’s highest court rules on the case, which could take place as late as April 2027.

Her candidacy has significant implications for the rest of Europe. Le Pen is an experienced campaigner and an established (though also divisive) figure in France. Her bid for the presidency is perhaps more likely to survive the heat of the campaign than a Bardella run would have. The fact that she is the candidate probably increases the chances of the French far-right coming to power for the first time since Marshal Pétain, the puppet leader of Vichy France.

Le Pen is marked by the RN’s long years in the wilderness. She believes in radical solutions. As president, she would likely be a confrontational and abrasive force in Europe.

To reiterate, the outcome of the election remains wide open. But the scale of the potential rupture of a Le Pen win means policymakers elsewhere in Europe must both understand the RN and prepare for that eventuality. To that end, the authors of this paper have extensively researched the party’s Europe and foreign policies. The following study is based on in-depth interviews with an array of senior RN figures and external experts as well as analysis of the party’s speeches, legislative proposals, voting records and electoral programmes. The result is a series of five theses about what a Le Pen win next year would mean for Europe.

Understanding an RN presidency

Point 1: Marine Le Pen’s candidacy reaffirms her primacy inside the RN, although her duo with Bardella will endure

Marine Le Pen’s decision to run for president despite her upheld conviction—and in contradiction of her own prior statements—is a reminder of her centrality to the RN. She is still the party’s dominant leader. The decision also dispelled the illusion that Bardella constitutes a real alternative to her leadership. It showed that today’s RN is still Marine Le Pen’s inheritance and achievement.

The party was founded as the National Front (FN) in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen, along with French former members of the Waffen-SS and other nostalgists for colonial French Algeria. It drew together different threads of the far-right. For decades most French citizens considered it beyond the pale. When Jean-Marie Le Pen narrowly made it into the second round of the 2002 presidential election, it shocked both France and Europe. He was roundly defeated by 82% to 18% by then-president Jacques Chirac.

Taking the reins of the party from her father in 2011, however, Marine Le Pen pursued a strategy of “dédiabolisation” (“detoxification”). This saw her expel Jean-Marie from the party in 2015 over his racist and anti-Semitic comments. After her resounding defeat to Macron in 2017 she intensified the process, renaming the party and dropping its commitment to “Frexit” (leaving the EU).

In 2019, she appointed a fresh-faced young activist from a deprived Paris suburb to lead the RN’s campaign for the European Parliament election. Jordan Bardella delivered the party’s first ever first-placed result in a national election and was rewarded with the RN presidency in 2021. He would play a central role in the party’s 2022 presidential campaign—a much closer contest—and in its triumphant win in the 2024 European vote. Le Pen further empowered Bardella when she announced he would be her choice for prime minister. When it looked like she might be banned from running, Bardella became her natural replacement as a presidential hopeful.

Nevertheless, despite Bardella’s rapid rise and growing public profile, the RN remains firmly in Le Pen’s hands. For nearly half a century, the promotion of family members, such as Marine Le Pen’s niece Marion Maréchal, and significant turnover among the lower levels of the party has kept power within the Le Pen clan. Many of the party’s cadres remain more loyal to her than to Bardella, and were determined that she should run rather than him.

Now that the party is back behind its leader, Le Pen will continue to highlight the duo she forms with Bardella—as she did on prime-time television when she launched her campaign. She once again promised to make him prime minister if she becomes president. Running a “ticket” for the French presidency is unprecedented and anathema to the function. But it has a distinct advantage: broadening her voter coalition while keeping the party together.

Le Pen’s own political base has two main parts. First, an anti-elite and disaffected working- and middle-class electorate in the northern post-industrial Pas-de-Calais region that she has represented since 1998 (as a councillor, MEP and in the National Assembly), And, second, a chain of strongholds along the Mediterranean coast, which adhere to long-term RN positions hostile to immigration and taxes.

By contrast, Bardella appears more economically liberal and temperamentally closer to other parts of the French right, including the conservative flank of the Republicans (LR, the rump centre-right force) and culturally reactionary forces like Éric Zemmour’s far-right Reconquest. He is also more engaged with the wider European right, especially Meloni in Italy. Within the RN itself this aligns him more with a more bourgeois and younger new electorate.

Over the last year, Bardella had even started to sand down some of the party’s most abrasive ideas. Where Le Pen cleaves to some of the party’s old Putin-friendly instincts on Russia, he has spoken in defence of Ukraine’s sovereignty. He also broke from Le Pen on pensions reform, suggesting dropping the fixed retirement age and moving to a more contributory system. Where Le Pen went to Budapest to help out an embattled Orban, he struck a friendly tone towards Germany and even met with the country’s ambassador in Paris. All this created expectations in Brussels and other EU capitals that a President Bardella might be closer to the bloc’s economic orthodoxies and more open, at least, to compromises.

Le Pen’s candidacy firmly relegates him to a subordinate position within the party. Gone, too, is the spectre of a somewhat more conciliatory RN presence in the Elysée Palace if the party wins power next year. “Bardellism cannot exist, as it is ultimately Marinism”, Jean-Philippe Tanguy, a senior RN figure, has said. The reassertion of Le Pen’s primacy within the RN thus makes the party both more likely to take power and more likely to disrupt the rest of the EU and its foreign policies if it does.

Point 2: An RN presidency would be a rupture in French and European politics

France is a highly centralised state, and its president wields executive power more akin to an American president than to counterparts in its European neighbours. The country also remains a pivotal power in Europe as one of its two nuclear-armed countries and half of the Franco-German motor that long drove the European project.

News of an RN win would therefore send shockwaves around the continent, stunning the mainstream. It would also lift the spirits of much of Europe’s radical right after a difficult 2026 in which its pre-eminent governing leader, Orban, lost power and its links with Trump turned out to be liabilities. After all, the RN has been unapologetic in its support for fellow “patriots” across Europe. Le Pen campaigned for Orban, and Bardella has engaged closely with Meloni and her government in Italy and Nigel Farage’s Reform in the UK.

Farther afield, the RN has been increasingly welcomed by fellow nationalists like Israel’s Likud government, which hosted Bardella and other far-right leaders in 2025. The Trump administration has professed its own commitment to supporting “patriotic parties” and would react favourably to an RN win. This is despite Bardella’s and Le Pen’s efforts to cool their party’s earlier enthusiasm for the US president.

The RN would revel in the sense of rupture. In private, party leaders compare their potential accession to power to left-winger François Mitterrand’s historic victory in 1981—which they see as the only true political change France has undergone in the last 50 years.

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Thus empowered, the RN would want to enact its programme. Although foreign and defence policy may not be its top policy priority, “fixing” France’s relationship with the EU is bound to be one.

In its 2019 and 2024 European election campaign manifesto, the RN suggested transforming the European Commission into a mere secretariat of the EU, leaving legislative initiative only to the European Council. The party decries attempts to expand qualified majority voting, refuses any new transfers of competencies on foreign and defence policy to the commission—and seeks European allies in that endeavour.

The RN is vehemently against EU common taxation and borrowing. Both Le Pen and Bardella have proposed slashing the French contribution to the EU budget (by “between €2bn and 3bn”, as Bardella suggested, equivalent to 9-14% of the French payment in 2024). RN MPs have already put forward several amendments to the budgetary laws to that effect. In July, Bardella has even advocated reducing the contribution by half. In place of European joint spending, the party wants the creation of a sovereign wealth fund to back “sovereign industries” in defence, technology and energy.

The party’s antipathy towards NATO means it plans to prioritise national-level defence instead. The RN has committed to maintaining current defence spending, but argues this should support France’s own military-industrial infrastructure first and foremost. Even if it has paused an earlier plan to leave NATO’s integrated command, at least for “as long as the war [in Ukraine] goes on”, Le Pen revived the idea as recently as May 2026.

The strictly national principle applies to energy too. The RN has promised to lower French energy costs, notably by breaking from EU-wide electricity pricing (which often depends on gas prices less relevant to France’s nuclear-heavy energy system) and thus allegedly reducing the French retail price. And, despite claiming to be concerned about the consequences of climate change, the RN is relentless in its opposition to the European Green Deal and its insistence that French nuclear energy should exempt the country from EU climate strictures.

Overall, if Le Pen were to become president, the RN’s highly disruptive European agenda would inevitably put France on a path to confrontation with European partners and institutions. As the fight against the EU is both a symbolic and a policy priority for the RN, other European leaders may have to find a way to negotiate on some of the demands—that for a budget rebate, for example—in order to prevent French vetoes.

Point 3: The RN’s inexperience and lack of interest in foreign policy would make France an erratic partner, especially in a crisis

Europe’s best hope, in the event of a Le Pen presidency, may reside in the fact that foreign policy would not be the top priority for the RN in power.

First, the RN’s foreign policies often remain vague or only partially formed. Despite its long-standing presence in the French political landscape, the party has no national governing experience and only in 2022 won a significant share of seats in the National Assembly. With little network among the French diplomatic establishment, RN leaders have rarely engaged closely with foreign policy debates. The party prefers to hide behind references to General de Gaulle’s pro-independence foreign policy to justify criticisms of the EU or NATO without being too specific.

According to RN insiders, the party’s foreign policy decisions emanate from private discussions between Le Pen and Bardella, with the occasional counsel of the advisory group Les Horaces. If she attains power in 2027, Le Pen may seek to attract more experienced figures from the traditional right (from LR or UDR) or from the military to lead on top foreign policy positions.

Second, the RN is clearly prepared to change its tone on international topics when political expediency dictates. RN figures privately insist that foreign policy cannot win it elections, but can lose it ones. They blame Le Pen’s defeat in April 2022 on her failure convincingly to pivot away from Russia after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine two months earlier.

The party abandoned Frexit after the UK’s Brexit turned out to be a disaster. It curbed its old openness to strongmen such as Putin (repaying a contentious loan to a Russian bank in 2023) and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. In recent years, it attempted to erase its anti-Semitic past by adopting a strongly pro-Israel line. Since February 2022, the party has walked a tightrope: paying lip service to Ukraine’s right to self-defence while criticising sanctions against Russia as costly to French consumers and opposing some military aid to Kyiv as escalatory. Having greeted Trump’s re-election in 2024, the party has become a nimble critic as his erratic foreign policies have made alignment with him a political liability.

It is safe to assume, then, that, even with Le Pen as candidate, the party will tend towards orthodox language on most foreign policy ahead of the election. It has a vested interest in a campaign that focuses on topics such as immigration, crime and purchasing power (where the party is most confident), rather than one that debates France’s role in Europe or global geopolitics (where it is more uncertain and, in some cases, divided).

And even if the party wins power, the domestic agenda will likely come first. This can be summarised as: countering cultural and industrial decline by pursuing “national preference”. In policy terms it would include harsher law-and-order measures (especially on migration and crime), trade protectionism and efforts to reverse green policies in the hope of revitalising industry, and prioritising French nationals over foreigners in accessing welfare or public services. European partners should reckon on an RN presidency being most intransigent on EU matters related to those domestic priorities—and possibly being more open to negotiation in other areas.

In sum, however, they should expect a Le Pen foreign policy that is unclear, evolving or even contradictory. Under her leadership, France would take few initiatives and rather behave as a blocker. For example, it is hard to imagine an RN president responding decisively to a security crisis on Europe’s eastern flank. If under pressure from EU member states to be tougher on Russia, she would likely seek concessions and negotiations rather than further action.

If it does anything proactively, such a presidency would concentrate on disentangling France from EU policies that contradict its domestic goals. At best, the RN’s lack of interest and inexperience may be an opportunity for other European governments to shape some of the outcomes, as long as they keep their expectations low.

Point 4: How broad and how European? The strategic debates running through the RN

Today’s RN is infused by two strategic debates that would shape Le Pen’s tenure as president.

Movement or coalition?

The first has to do with the RN’s political identity: the party is struggling to determine whether it seeks to forge an union des droites (union of the right) or whether its outsider populist status remains its core identity.

In the long years the FN and the RN spent on the political margins, the Le Pens’ “neither left, nor right” approach appealed to disillusioned voters who rejected all forms of politics. It acknowledged the cordon sanitaire between the mainstream right and their parties. Even back in the FN days, Jean-Marie Le Pen crushed several internal attempts to unite the right. Marine Le Pen remains firmly opposed to any such efforts today.

But the RN’s proximity to power is challenging its outsider identity. Proponents of a union of the right are multiplying. One is Eric Ciotti, the mayor of Nice and former president of LR, who decided to join forces with the RN ahead of the 2024 snap legislative election. This created a major clash with his party and ended with the foundation of a new outfit (the Union of the Right for the Republic, UDR). The union of the right has also been promoted by Maréchal. She quit the RN in 2021 for Zemmour’s Reconquest, though has since drawn back towards her aunt’s party.

If she is elected, it is unclear how Le Pen will position herself towards other right-of-centre French parties. Her instinct seems to be that working with them would dilute the RN and prevent it from conducting truly disruptive policies. Given her aversion to compromise and her long years of ostracism by the mainstream political class, Le Pen would struggle to extend a hand to others to form a majority in the National Assembly.

She may, however, continue using Bardella as a useful bridge to other parties of the right, at both national and European levels. In an interview with Le Figaro after Le Pen’s official launch of her presidential bid, he insisted that, as prime minister, he would seek to gather the right-wing electorate back to his party in order to build a “solid majority”.

It is reasonable to expect that, if Le Pen allows Bardella to forge these links at home, she will let him do so abroad too. If so, Bardella would continue building alliances with the European right spanning conservatives and various families of the radical right, likely with immigration as a focal point. The RN has already demonstrated its ability to build coalitions with other far-right parties and the European People’s Party to advance tougher migration legislation in the European Parliament. It would likely continue to do so if elected. Bardella has indicated that he would share this agenda with leaders such as Meloni and German chancellor Friedrich Merz and seek to work with them.

Rival futures

The second faultline within the RN today is between rival conceptions of national sovereignty, a point that came across especially strongly in the authors’ interviews with senior party figures. Le Pen and the “old guard” around her have long held the view that France must resist Anglo-American hegemony and EU technocracy alike. They treat Washington and Brussels as equal threats to French autonomy.

Yet a new generation around Bardella—having come of age against the backdrop of the 2015 terror attacks in Paris and the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine—has adopted an identity-based sense of Europeanness. It acknowledges the need for European cooperation against common threats, as long as this cooperation is “chosen”. It is inclined to invoke a shared Western and European cultural affinity.

For example, on Russia and Ukraine, Le Pen and the old guard have continued to blame NATO’s enlargement for “provoking” Russia. This fits their antipathy to Washington and Brussels. Their old ideological affinities with Moscow as a counterweight to American hegemony allow them to imagine a future in which Russia might even be a partner in a multipolar order once the war ends. But Bardella has admitted the “naivety” of Europeans in the face of the Russian challenge. Despite a less-than-keenly pro-Ukrainian voting record in the European Parliament, he has also spoken in favour of Ukrainian national sovereignty and against Russian imperialism.

These debates will continue within the RN—especially because Le Pen has been unwilling to sweep aside Bardella’s “union of the right” and rhetorically “pro-Ukraine” positions. For as long as she wants the electoral breadth he brings, the tension will persist.

Point 5: The likeliest outcome of an RN presidency would be a more isolated France in a weaker EU

The disruptive nature of RN policies towards Europe means France’s relationship with European partners would deteriorate over time.

At first, the RN would likely seek to reassure the financial markets and its international partners. Victory for the party may be accompanied by protests and strikes, and the new government would face economic limitations like France’s high levels of debt. In this context, Le Pen may want to project stability. Nevertheless, the RN has promised to engage on a number of priorities that will put it at odds with other European governments—including those led by the right—as well as EU institutions.

Opting out of the EU-wide electricity pricing could push up prices for other member states; quitting the migration pact would put greater pressure on others; curbing the French contribution to the EU budget would force others to pay more and possibly trigger an infringement procedure. More generally, Paris governing in a spirit of French exceptionalism would roil Europe’s collective efforts on common challenges.

Enlargement could prove an especially inflammatory topic. Plenty of European governments have concerns about bringing Western Balkans countries, Moldova and especially Ukraine into the EU. But if the RN wins the French presidency, it will be the most outspokenly opposed government among major European states. It has warned that enlargement would ruin French agriculture and suppress French wages; intensify the EU budgetary demands on France; and further centralise power within the EU at the cost of individual states. The accession of Ukraine, with its vast agricultural industry, particularly alarms the RN.

The long-term result of these trends would likely be some degree of French isolation. The party’s policies and instincts would set Le Pen up for conflict with the European Commission—but also with other national governments, including right-wing counterparts. Although others in the EU might conceivably come around to RN doubts about enlargement, the insistence on French national priority will alienate even ideologically sympathetic forces elsewhere.

Tensions could emerge with other far-right leaders, such as Meloni, over issues like migration. Despite broad ideological alignment on reducing migration, the RN prioritises national sovereignty over the management of borders and migration flows. By contrast, Brothers of Italy has advocated greater EU coordination and burden-sharing. As a result, a cohesive far-right alliance at the EU level should not be taken for granted. If these conflicts escalate, an “empty chair” moment, where France simply withdraws from EU meetings as it did under de Gaulle in 1965, is not unthinkable.

At a time when nationalist parties are rising in other major EU states, including Germany, an RN presidency could encourage unilateralism there too. The result could be doubly paradoxical: a lonelier right-wing France in a more right-wing Europe, and a more nationalist France more exposed to the interference of external powers like China, Russia and the US.

How the rest of Europe can move into “brace position”

As the rest of Europe faces up to the possibility of President Le Pen, the risk is that leaders and other policymakers bunch around one of two poles: complacency (the over-confident belief that she could simply be “handled” like any other challenging leader); and panic (the fatalistic assumption that an RN-led France would automatically mean the beginning of the end of the European project). Of the two courses, the first—the assumption of business as usual—currently looks like the greater risk. But neither is advisable.

This paper has shown that an RN win is a real possibility and would herald great disruption for the EU and its place in the world. It has argued that a Le Pen presidency would see itself ultimately as a radical insurgency against the French and European establishment. But it has also explored some of the complexities and shed some light on how the rest of Europe should think about them. In particular, leaders elsewhere on the continent should:

Abandon all precedents when thinking about an RN-led France

As president, Le Pen would be as fundamentally rooted in French traditions and peculiarities as equivalent leaders are in those of their countries. Trump’s America is simply too different to be closely relevant to France, despite the executive power both presidents wield. Orban’s Hungary does not fit either, with its distinctive tale of state capture and subordination to kleptocratic interests. Meloni’s Italy, meanwhile, is a complex story of creeping authoritarianism at home but emollience internationally. A Le Pen presidency would bear passing resemblances to each, but be sui generis.

Seek to understand the party and its instincts

Le Pen is a familiar figure, but her party has never held national power before and has evolved over time. Knowing how it ticks will be essential. This should lead decision-makers to engage with the party now, including by pursuing carefully calibrated efforts to meet with its senior figures to assess their true intentions. The decision of the German government to make contact with Bardella, for example, was the right one—though Europeans should be wary about reading Le Pen’s positions and instincts via Bardella and his circle.

Brace for a wider, but not necessarily more unified, European right

An RN win would be significant for Europe’s far-right. But ECFR’s research points firmly away from the idea of a coherent and durable European “union of the far-right” of any sort. The radical right has an emphatic sense of momentum, but that is not the same thing as a common project. Indeed, dismantling European integration is likely to generate conflicts over budgets and policies on issues like borders, energy, industry and defence—even between governments of similarly nationalist ideological hues.

Manage expectations when seeking to work with an RN-led France

Even in today’s more plural Europe, France is too big and too important to be circumvented entirely in a world of predators. Perhaps there would even be some limited common ground (most likely to be around defence, geoeconomics and building strategic autonomy). There could even be the possibility to mould a party that is still uncertain about its exact foreign policy agenda. But, especially under Le Pen rather than Bardella, this would still be a significantly less predictable, less collegiate and less European France than the one partners have known under Macron.

Prepare to deploy all the arts of European and international politics

An RN-led presidency would be complicated and disruptive. It would call for real diplomatic skill and political leadership in the EU and the rest of Europe, especially in powerful states like Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and, outside the bloc, Britain. In some cases, the task at hand might be to moderate France and bind it into groups of other states on matters of common and agreed interest. In others, it would be to build coalitions of the willing where France was reluctant to join. This would be a good time to deepen relationships between Brussels, Berlin, Rome, Warsaw, Madrid and London, as well as other capitals.

The other futures

Europeans prepare for the possibility of Le Pen as president of France, they should keep in mind that an array of outcomes is still possible. There is also a significant chance of a moderate candidate making it to the second round and rallying the republican front once again against the RN. And in today’s volatile and fragmented French politics, there is even the possibility of a far-right against far-left runoff. But polls are polls, and probabilities are probabilities. This paper is a response to one major possibility among several—and an urgent call to France’s European partners to be ready.

About the authors

Célia Belin is a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and head of its Paris office.

Jeremy Cliffe is editorial director and senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. He co-heads the New Politics Project within the European Power programme.

Camille Lons is a policy fellow and deputy head of the Paris office at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

Constance Victor is the Paris office coordinator at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

Acknowledgments

We would like to start by thanking ECFR colleagues, including Piotr Buras, Teresa Coratella, Agathe Demarais, Janka Oertel, Nicu Popescu, Jana Puglierin, Marta Prochwicz Jazowska, Herman Quarles, Jeremy Shapiro, Vessela Tcherneva and Pawel Zerka who gave thoughtful comments on various drafts. We would also like to thank Zineb Bouziane for her thorough research support in the earlier stages of this project.  

We are grateful to experts such as Catherine Fieschi, Jacob Ross and Victor Mallet for engaging with us and offering constructive feedback. We also would like to acknowledge the politicians, journalists and thinkers we interviewed over the course of this research; while we respect their anonymity, we thank each of them for their time and insights.

The task of editing the two editions of this paper fell to Kim Butson and Adam Harrison and we are grateful for their time and dedication in bringing it to completion. Thanks also go to Chris Eichberger for offering beautiful visuals to complement our work.

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Dopo l’estensione del 2020, il golden power ha ridotto le operazioni di fusione e acquisizione nei settori più innovativi dell’economia italiana. L’effetto è stato particolarmente intenso nel primo biennio, per poi attenuarsi fino a scomparire.

L'articolo Quelle attività di M&A frenate dal golden power * proviene da Lavoce.info.

Problem

Poland’s party system is unravelling. The Law and Justice (PiS) party, led by Jaroslaw Kaczyński, has split. More than 40 of its members have formed a separate parliamentary caucus that includes Mateusz Morawiecki, prime minister for most of the party’s rule from 2015 to 2023. This ends an era of over 20 years that has been shaped by two powerful men and their parties: Kaczynski’s right-wing nationalist, Eurosceptic PiS and Donald Tusk’s liberal-conservative, pro-European Civic Coalition (KO).

At first glance, the collapse of his old enemy is a gift to Tusk. KO leads with 29%; PiS has slipped below 19% since the split. Four groupings now compete on the right, and Poland’s voting system punishes fragmentation, so four medium-sized parties win fewer seats than one large party on the same vote.

However, Morawiecki broke away in protest at PiS’s radicalisation, hoping to win over the very centre-right voters who helped return Tusk to power in 2023 after eight years of PiS rule. Most are now disillusioned (Tusk’s government has dismal approval ratings), politically homeless and angry. If they split their vote among the four right-wing parties or stay at home, Tusk may meet the same fate as Kaczynski in 2023: he could win the election in 2027 but be unable to assemble a majority coalition.

The other problem is one of method. For two decades Tusk has, often successfully, run against Kaczynski rather than on a programme of his own. Polarisation served both men well: each could rally his own voters by invoking the threat of the other, and smaller parties were squeezed out. Kaczynski’s decline forces Tusk to find another way to win.

Solution

Rather than betting on his enemy’s demise, Tusk should proactively set the agenda and win centrists beyond his base, as in 2023. Economic and social questions will matter, but foreign policy is set to loom unusually large in next year’s campaign. A record 25% of Poles favour leaving the EU (“Polexit”), hostility to Ukraine is rising and the right-wing parties are competing to outdo one another in anti-EU, anti-German and xenophobic rhetoric.

Tusk, a risk-averse tactician, has long avoided confrontation on those fundamental issues, calculating that exposing himself to attack from the right would be self-defeating. The far-right, however, has filled that vacuum, for example through its campaign against SAFE, the EU’s defence-loan scheme, and in the hardening mood towards Ukraine.

A more volatile party system may paradoxically make anti-Tusk majorities easier to build. That is an argument for the leader of Poland’s pro-European camp to take up the fight rather than duck it. Tusk needs to explain to Polish voters, more forcefully than before, why the EU is the best response to pressure from Donald Trump and Russia; why anchoring Ukraine in Europe is a Polish raison d’état; and how Poland’s interests differ from those the nationalists describe.

Context

Poles vote for a new parliament in October 2027. Tusk’s five-party coalition faces an uphill struggle to stay in office. The coalition partners have weak support or may not be able to re-enter the government at all.

Recent polls give the four right-wing parties a majority between them; whether their rivalries would allow a coalition is another matter. PiS has moved further right in recent months to stop core voters defecting to more radical rivals, in a shift which provoked Morawiecki’s rebellion. His departure will probably set off further political realignments before the 2027 election.

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Problem

Bulgaria has agreed to host up to eight American refuelling tankers at its Bezmer military base to support US operations in the Middle East. The announcement came just days after prime minister Rumen Radev withdrew his country from the European coalition of the willing (CoW) for Ukraine, arguing that military support would only prolong the war and that Bulgaria lacks the resources to contribute.

Radev has put the final decision on Bezmer to a vote in Bulgaria’s parliament, allowing him to spread the political responsibility and limit direct ownership of the move. Now the prime minister can maintain his rather clumsy position: by rejecting military support for Ukraine (despite previous parliament votes) and justifying logistical support for American military operations elsewhere, he hopes to preserve US security guarantees without dedicating Bulgaria to Europe’s developing security architecture.

These decisions expose a growing inconsistency in Bulgaria’s strategic posture. Sofia is distancing itself from European efforts to strengthen Ukraine and is planning for its own defence, while simultaneously supporting Washington’s military operation in the Middle East. Rather than aligning with the broadly pro-European consensus and anti-American sentiments in Bulgarian society, Radev is attempting to balance competing security frameworks without sufficiently considering European security interests.

This ambiguity also presents a broader challenge for Europe. As the Trump administration continues to conduct foreign policy through bargaining, some European governments appear tempted to pursue bilateral arrangements with Washington rather than invest in European unity. Such behaviour risks weakening collective defence, precisely when strategic coordination is needed.

Solution

European security cannot rely on member states choosing cooperation only when politically convenient. The EU needs to engage more actively with the Bulgarian government and push back on Radev’s form of hedging while political conditions remain favourable, to help strengthen defence cooperation among the EU’s 27 member states.

The EU should also reinforce the political and practical incentives for participation in common defence initiatives, for example through its Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) and other European defence instruments. At the same time, it needs to reduce opportunities for external powers—particularly China, Russia and the US —to exploit divisions, institutional weaknesses and the strategic ambiguity encouraged by MAGA. Bulgaria’s recent work to delist two Russian oligarchs and a Russian patriarch from the EU’s 21st sanctions package is an example of Russia’s growing leverage over the government in Sofia.

Overall, the EU should treat Bulgaria as an urgent political case rather than a lost cause. This is especially true given that, in 2027, Europe will see several major elections which have the potential to return governments that are more concerned with nationalism than European unity. This, in turn, would constrain the political space in which governments committed to a strong European foreign and security policy can act.

Context

Since taking office in May 2026, Radev has gradually shifted Bulgaria’s foreign policy away from alignment with its European partners. Bulgaria did not join the international agreement to establish the Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine, nor did Radev attend May’s B9 summit in Bucharest. Bulgaria’s decision to leave the CoW has attracted strong criticism from pro-European parties and raises broader questions about Bulgaria’s long-term strategic orientation.

The latest move in Bezmer follows the previous deployment of as many as 15 US tanker aircraft at Sofia Airport between February and June, which sparked political controversy. The government ended the deployment, which was linked to arrangements for (unsuccessful) discussions on Bulgaria’s inclusion in the US Visa Waiver Program, on June 30th.

Delays in military modernisation and uncertainty surrounding planned defence-industrial cooperation, including a Rheinmetall partnership, are compounding Sofia’s lack of clarity about whether it intends to become a consistent contributor to Europe’s security architecture. As it stands, Radev appears to be pursuing more transactional, case-by-case relationships with both Europe and the US.

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Problem

Industrial decarbonisation is not easy. While EU leadership in the field has brought some benefits—it was the first to offer innovative, low-carbon products to the global market, for example—there are also transition costs, especially in sectors such as steel and chemicals.

Now Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine and the US-Israel-Iran conflict are pushing up energy prices; there is fierce competition from China and others for products such as chemicals, fertilisers and steel. At the same time, companies also face growing emission trading costs. Other parts of the world are not moving fast enough to reduce cost differences for European front-runner companies; the 2025 IEA Breakthrough Agenda report shows that global low-carbon industrial transitions are happening too slowly to achieve the targets of the Paris Agreement.

At the EU level, climate diplomacy is not sufficiently prioritising partnerships for industrial decarbonisation and instead focuses on general mitigation and financing issues. While the launch of the EU Task Force for International Carbon Pricing and Markets Diplomacy in 2024 was an important step, it did not address how Europeans can help develop the infrastructure, access to finance, intellectual property rights and personnel skills necessary for industrial decarbonisation.

The EU thus requires a stronger and more coherent diplomatic approach to industrial transformation. Most of all, it needs to focus on improving its outreach and expanding its offers on finance, market demand and innovation cooperation.

Solution

An informal meeting of environment and climate ministers (ENVI) is taking place on July 23rd-July 24th. It has two relevant items on the agenda: decarbonisation and competitiveness, and climate diplomacy. But these items are interconnected, and ministers should take an integrated approach when addressing them.

The EU should learn from the more active industrial policies of China, Japan and South Korea, which have the institutional capacity to make strategic choices about which technology to support, and have designed a good mix of policy instruments to promote them. Europeans should also look at how European coal regions, for example in Poland, have transitioned to create new green jobs. Such areas provide a blueprint for other countries trying to build public acceptance for closing mines and winding down fossil-dependent manufacturing.

The EU needs to devote more resources to international cooperation with partner countries on industrial transformation, for example by lowering the climate impact of steel and cement production. Such partnerships should be long term and include innovation cooperation for emerging clean technologies. Ministers should include industrial transformation diplomacy in the strategic roadmap document that underpins their discussions, and push for adequate funding in the next “Global Europe” instrument for development policy.

The EU must address the lack of coherence between EU and member state initiatives and promote a “Team Europe” approach. To meet the China challenge, even big member states such as Germany cannot build strong enough partnerships alone. But this requires a more cooperative culture; staffing for climate diplomacy in Brussels and at EU delegations should be increased to facilitate this.

Finally, ministers should engage more positively in the industrial decarbonisation agenda under the Paris Agreement. This could follow Brazil’s 2025 initiative to launch a process for accelerating low-carbon transformations of industry, and Turkey’s ambition to continue this work at COP31 in November 2026.

Context

The EU has set ambitious climate targets for 2030 and 2040, with the bloc aiming to become climate neutral by 2050. However, policy instruments are being hotly debated. For example, on July 17th the European Commission proposed weakening EU emission trading to accommodate industry while simultaneously strengthening its support mechanism for green transitions.

In parallel, EU environment ministers and their climate negotiators have started a process to improve climate diplomacy after what many saw as disappointing, weak language on reducing overall emissions at the 2025 COP30 in Belém. The process has so far focused on improving preparations for formal climate negotiations, such as the upcoming COP31 in Turkey—and less on broader partnerships around, for example, industrial decarbonisation.

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European leaders breathed a sigh of relief as US president Donald Trump departed last week’s NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey. Despite a few unseemly moments in which Trump reiterated his desire to seize Greenland and nonsensically ordered a halt to all trade with Spain, the meeting went off without any major catastrophes.

Most importantly, Trump did not announce any major troop withdrawals from Europe or any moves to leave the alliance. He even had warm words for Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, and pledged to grant Ukraine a license to manufacture Patriot air-defence missiles domestically. By the end, even Trump proclaimed that there was “love” in the air.

But optics aside, the summit was an absurd exercise. NATO leaders revelled in their pledges to increase defence-related spending to 5%, even though everyone knows that this arbitrary number means nothing in the absence of deeper discussions about capabilities. The figure was pulled out of thin air last year to appease Trump. In the months leading up to the summit, the same leaders had worried that Trump would withdraw the US from the alliance or dramatically reduce its presence in Europe, which would then find itself at the mercy of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. 

That is why NATO leaders expended so much energy preparing a summit that would not allow for any unscripted moments. Fears that the mercurial US president would use the occasion to undermine the alliance were palpable. When the moment came, European leaders reportedly fell over themselves to praise Trump, with NATO’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, leading the sycophantic charge.

Some commentators believe that saving NATO and keeping the Western alliance alive was worth this self-abasement. But by kowtowing to Trump and indulgently harking back to the good old days of the transatlantic relationship, Europe’s leaders are risking more than just their dignity.

Consider the period following the fall of the Berlin Wall. After the initial euphoria, many parts of the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany) were emptied out as their populations left, even as property prices were driven up by an influx of wealthier West Germans. The result was a wave of nostalgia for a lost world, expressed in films like Good Bye, Lenin!

The term coined to describe this emotion was Ostalgie (“Eastalgia”), and it has shaped German politics and culture for almost 40 years now. Although many East German writers have criticised such sentimentality for trivialising East Germany’s decades-long repression, some see it as the key to understanding what ails Germany’s eastern regions today. There one finds a widespread refusal to acknowledge that the world has changed, a habit of free riding, and a tendency—occasionally—to look ridiculous, such as when East Germans parrot Russian talking points on Ukraine.

Ironically, Europe’s problem today is not just that Ostalgie has held back eastern Germany; it is that a new malady, Westalgia, has taken hold. It was on full display in Ankara.

Westalgia has several key features. The first is a refusal to acknowledge that the world has moved on. By acting as if US security guarantees are still as ironclad as they were under the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, and by continuing to purchase US weapons, they hope to turn back the clock. But a better strategy would recognise that America has changed in fundamental ways. Even if a Democrat moves into the White House in January 2029, US retrenchment will continue.

Europe’s hyper-reliance on American power clearly had an infantilising effect

Those who want to turn back the clock naturally see the past through rose-tinted glasses, even though elements of the post-cold war settlement were not to Europe’s advantage. Specifically, Europe’s hyper-reliance on American power clearly had an infantilising effect. Even when caught between a predatory Russia, a fickle US and a coercive China, Europeans are still wont to downplay and underestimate their own power and influence.

The second feature of Westalgia is a tendency to free ride. Just as eastern Germans grew accustomed to the transfer payments and subsidies (the infamous Solidaritätszuschlag, or “solidarity tax”) that flowed eastward after unification, so have Europeans become accustomed to America bankrolling their security. As a result, Europeans have under-invested, not just in defence but also in their industrial base, technological sovereignty and energy independence.

Instead of complaining that US citizens no longer want to be responsible for defending Europe, and instead of spending billions of dollars to satisfy Trump’s vanity, Europeans would be better off having a serious conversation about how they could fight a high-intensity conflict on their own, if necessary. Instead of spending an arbitrary share of their GDP on defence, they should critically evaluate their capability gaps and adjust their spending to match their needs. Coffers are tight everywhere, but it will be easier to justify expenditures on weapons if they appear less geared toward flattering Trump.

Third, in their subservience to the US president, Europeans often do not hide it well, which prevents them from being taken seriously—be it by Trump, Putin, or Chinese leader Xi Jinping. If there is one man who presumably respects Rutte less than Rutte himself, it is Trump. Europe will garner the world’s respect only when it stands up for itself. 

Whereas Ostalgie was a bottom-up phenomenon, Westalgia is being driven by elites. Of course, European politicians need to allay their skittish electorates’ fears. But if they want to succeed in the 21st century, they must stop selling nostalgia and start looking to the future.

This article was first published by Project Syndicate on July 15th 2026

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Problem

Italy’s 2027 electoral campaign has begun. So far, the contest has been defined by opposition parties exploiting what they see as prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s flaws in government policy on Russia, Ukraine and defence spending.

One person in particular is fuelling this criticism: former general Roberto Vannacci and his far-right party, National Future (Futuro Nazionale). With Meloni struggling to justify her commitment to Ukraine, NATO and the EU, and an Italian left radicalising along pacifist lines, National Future embodies an ideological nationalism which could prove indispensable for Italy’s right-wing bloc ahead of 2027.

Vannacci is also a Trojan horse for Russian influence inside Italy. He has publicly stated that he would have “no problem” accepting party and legal funding from Moscow or Beijing, and has adopted a transactional, sovereigntist posture modelled closely on Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. Domestically, this is an easy argument to win: a recent ECFR policy brief confirmed that Italians are favourable to resuming imports of Russian gas and oil. This openness to Russia is compounded by his military past: Vannacci was Italy’s military attaché in Moscow, raising anxieties about counterintelligence and security.

Should National Future enter a governing coalition, Vannacci’s background could shatter the EU’s collective security consensus. A Rome influenced by Vannacci would actively block EU defence initiatives, veto sanctions and leak sensitive security coordination. For Meloni, normalising Vannacci would trigger an immediate rupture with the European mainstream with which she has been cooperating since 2022. Ultimately, he alone could paralyse Brussels’ capacity as a coherent geopolitical actor.

Solution

To fully grasp the extent of the danger that Vannacci poses to the EU, Europeans need to look beyond the playbook of contemporary European populism. While figures like Marine Le Pen have spent years achieving dédiabolisation—meticulously distancing themselves from Vladimir Putin’s regime to capture mainstream credibility—Vannacci is highly likely to align himself with the pro-Russia Alternative for Germany (AfD).

Italians and Europeans alike should thus not treat National Future as just another right-wing movement. Instead, Vannacci—who also sits in the European Parliament—should be dealt with as a strategic issue. Whether or not National Future joins a second Meloni government, his party’s emergence demonstrates that Europe’s mainstream must no longer simply contain the far right or the far left. Now Europeans need to preserve the credibility of democratic politics as new radical actors reshape the political landscape.

Meloni should exclude National Future from any form of governance. She needs to resist this new far-right siren call by using the political capital she has built in the EU since 2022: she has been at the forefront of support for Ukraine, collaboration on trade, initiatives on migration, and contributions to EU reactions to international developments. Importantly, Meloni has maintained a friendly relationship with European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen.

However, the conservative mainstream also needs to react. It is normalising anti-EU parties by seeking their political support at the EU level and in the European Parliament. Building a cordon sanitaire around anti-EU forces requires everyone’s engagement: EU conservative leaders should work together to show their voters that they reject such extreme views. Pragmatic collaboration will also help overcome some divisions which are freezing decision-making on issues such as Russian security threats and migration.

Context

Meloni entered office in 2022 and gradually established herself as a pragmatic conservative leader, separate from more openly revisionist forces on the European right. But her recent decision not to attend a Coalition of the Willing meeting in Paris on July 13th highlights the pressure she is under, ahead of Italy’s 2027 election, to focus on domestic commitments instead of European debates on Russia, Ukraine and defence.

Here, Vannacci is a key force. National Future, which he founded only four months ago, is polling around 6% and establishing itself as the second-largest force in Italy’s right-wing bloc. Vannacci’s platform combines nationalist rhetoric, opposition to military support for Ukraine, openness to legally permissible Russian and Chinese electoral funding, and a confrontational approach to liberal democratic values.

His ideological trajectory mirrors the social architecture, ethnonationalism and systemic Euroscepticism of the AfD. Vannacci is not constrained by regional economic interests or coalition dynamics, unlike the leader of Italy’s right-wing League party, Matteo Salvini. This defines Vannacci as a loose cannon; National Future is well-positioned to capitalise on societal anxieties and economic grievances to pull the Overton window toward radical revisionism.

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America has long been the go-to home for emerging tech companies. With this, it has reaped economic and geopolitical benefits such as technological sovereignty, innovation culture, brain gain and standard setting, to name a few. But President Donald Trump’s rule is now eroding some of America’s most competitive assets: predictability and legal certainty. From tariff volatility and political pressure on independent agencies to restrictions on foreign researchers and the politicisation of investment decisions, doing business in America now comes with much higher risks.

For the first time in decades, Europe has a chance to compete by offering emerging companies an alternative: stable institutions, clear rules, independent regulators and a rule-of-law guarantee. To beat the US at its own game, the EU will need to take a much more continental approach.

In some ways, Europe is not too far behind. It currently competes head-to-head with the US and China in the creation of new tech companies, for example. Since 2015, it has produced more start-ups than America and has the same share of founders creating new companies with Asia.  Talent costs are lower than in the Bay Area or New York, and Europe holds advanced positions in quantum technology, climate tech and biotech.

The problem arises at the scaling stage. The fragmentation of 27 member-state markets and the regulatory complexity this brings is an invisible ceiling on the continent’s start-up environment. In 2024, investment rounds above $100m totalled $120.8bn in the US compared to just $18.1bn in Europe. And in 2025, deep tech investment reached $130bn in the US compared to just $16bn in Europe, a gap that widens when looking at AI and other breakthrough technologies.

Over time, these dynamics have led to a structural decline: Europe’s share of global tech market value has plummeted from 30% in 2000 to just 7% today, even though the tech industry now accounts for 15% of Europe’s GDP, compared to 4% in 2015. The consequences for Europe’s tech sovereignty and geoeconomic sway are unquestionable.

It would be misleading to only blame regulatory fragmentation for this gap. Other factors weigh heavily on European venture capital growth too. There are few deep pockets in public equity markets able to absorb large tech IPOs; European institutional capital, like pension funds, chronically underinvests in venture capital; and the broader institutional culture prices risk more conservatively than America’s.

A lack of European money means that much capital comes from overseas. Nearly half of Europe’s growth-stage funding last year came from abroad, predominantly America. In itself this is not a problem, but it becomes one when those investors push entrepreneurs to relocate their companies once they reach scale. This creates a “high-growth forum shopping”that drains talent, high-quality jobs, innovation capacity and previously invested public funding out of Europe. This has created a familiar pattern of European-born companies ending up incorporated on the other side of the Atlantic.

Creating an EU Inc

To address these issues, the European Commission recently took a decisive step towards approving a European company model: EU Inc., otherwise known as the 28th regime. The idea is to create a harmonised EU-level legal framework to allow companies, especially startups and scale-ups, to operate in the single market under one set of rules rather than facing 27 different national systems. This should create European-born and -raised firms.

The first part is already on the table: a regulation establishing EU Inc. as an optional, automatically recognised and fully digital corporate entity covering commercial, tax, insolvency and labour law. In theory, this should lead to less regulatory fragmentation, more risk investment and better access to capital markets and European talent. The practice, however, is more difficult.

Achieving a broad ecosystem of innovative EU Incs will depend on whether founders choose it and whether investors trust it is consistent and usable. On the attractiveness front, the current proposal faces two big difficulties. First, the regime can only reach its full potential if the EU makes progress on other files including key items of the startup and scaleup strategy, the European Innovation Act, the capital markets union and the transformation of certain merger guidelines.

Second, in the complex institutional negotiations up until 2027, certain countries and stakeholders will likely seek to dilute the regime’s capacity to become a unified standard. This is because it will need to bypass certain domestic legal barriers to make it easier to build, invest, and scale across Europe. Germany, for example, will scrutinise any framework that bypasses its co-determination model (Mitbestimmung). France will defend the centrality of its tech national champions agenda. And the Nordics will protect the favourable tax treatment of stock options and employee share schemes. In June 2026, the Council’s own legal service already advised national delegations that the proposal may need to be downgraded from a regulation to a directive, which would undermine its harmonising ambition from the outset.

Should the 28th regime derail under pressure from national interests, it would be a macroeconomic failure of the first order

Should the 28th regime derail under pressure from national interests, it would be a macroeconomic failure of the first order. To prevent that and keep the capitals on board, the proposal must be preserved as the commission designed it, as a regulation, not a directive. That means EU Inc is optional for entrepreneurs and businesses, but not for member states: national company law stays in place, and companies simply gain a European corporate form alongside it. Capitals therefore retain their legal sovereignty while their most promising firms become less likely to move abroad. Within this, the new legislation must include tax measures to prevent huge imbalances of member states with more attractive tax laws such as Ireland, Luxembourg or the Netherlands.

Moreover, in case of an effective blockage of negotiations, parallel levers should be activated: the move away from unanimity voting suggested by Ursula von der Leyen in April together with fast-track routes such as mutual recognition mechanisms between member states. The European Competitiveness Lab is a good model to inspire this member-state coordination. The geopolitical urgency framing the debate can provide the political tailwind.

Europe has networks of academic research centres and connected clusters such as the AI factories which are already generating projects and spin-offs in critical technologies. There is still time for these spin-offs to be born as EU Incs. The combination is straightforward: AI factories and the EuroHPC joint undertaking provide the scientific infrastructure, EU Inc is the legal vehicle, and the European innovation council and investment bank work as the financing bridge between laboratory and market. This is the most scalable path available to Europe to turn its research strength into corporate strength; it just requires the alignment of institutions and laws that already exist.

The EU can do it again

The potential transformative dimension of the 28th regime has two precedents worth recalling, both of which combined a common legal framework, pooled public investment and continental scale to overcome the limits of national efforts.

In the late 1960s, Airbus emerged as a political-industrial project to equip Europe with a champion capable of competing with the US in commercial aviation. France and Germany agreed in 1970 to a single legal vehicle, joined shortly after by the UK and Spain. They then channelled public funding into a shared corporate structure, and eventually consolidated their fragmented national aerospace industries into one European company.

And in the 2000s, Galileo gave Europe its own global positioning technology based on a system that was open, civilian-controlled and compatible with GPS but more precise. It required EU member states to agree on a common legal and governance framework under EU law, to commit more than €10bn of joint EU-budget funding over two decades and to operate the system as shared European infrastructure rather than as competing national projects. Its development is widely credited as a factor that pushed Washington to end the deliberate restrictions of GPS for civilian use.    

Today, both operate at a global scale. The lesson for the 28th regime is the same: a single legal framework, pooled resources and continental scale turned political ambition into industrial reality. Europe’s competitiveness in the coming decades will depend on its capacity to do this again and support companies, especially those driven by emerging technologies. With this, the EU could achieve a new strategic form of sovereignty and the greatest practical step forward for the single market in decades.

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