The European Union enters the mid-2020s as the world reorganises itself around power blocs and long-term strategy. Europe, one can’t escape concluding, finds itself preoccupied with following protocol and maintaining brittle coalitions.
The June 2024 European Parliament elections crystallised the shift. Far-right and hard-right parties expanded their footprint, reshaping the centre of gravity in Brussels and national capitals alike. In France and Germany, governing parties were humbled; across the bloc, roughly a quarter of MEPs now sit in far-right groups, narrowing room for grand bargains in climate, migration, and industrial policy.
In Search of a Strategy
National politics reinforce the trend. Italy’s government under Giorgia Meloni has adopted a tougher line on migration and clashed with Brussels over rule-of-law concerns; the European Parliament’s watchdogs have stepped up scrutiny of Italy’s democratic standards, and rights groups warn about executive overreach.
Hungary, meanwhile, continues to wield veto power as it threatens to block budget deals while facing withheld EU funds over rule-of-law deficits and fresh criticism for restrictive social legislation. The Netherlands offered a case study in volatility: a right-wing coalition formed in 2024 collapsed within a year amid disputes centred on migration, underscoring the fragility of coalition governance on the continent.
On policy, Brussels can point to real achievements—but also to stalemates, rollbacks, and litigation that saps it of any momentum it might have. After four years of negotiation, the Pact on Migration and Asylum finally cleared Parliament and Council in spring 2024, a headline reform meant to standardise border procedures and share responsibility. Yet implementation is already torn between a desire for deterrence and legal constraints, as capitals test ‘externalisation’ schemes that push asylum processing beyond EU borders.
Italy’s offshoring deal with Albania and newer proposals echoing the UK’s defunct Rwanda model face mounting judicial and political hurdles.
Agriculture shows the same pattern: policy by emergency derogation. Farmer protests from Paris to Warsaw forced rapid rewrites of green conditions under the Common Agricultural Policy, with targeted CAP amendments and loosened environmental rules introduced in 2024 to defuse unrest. Short-term relief came at the price of longer-term credibility for the EU’s climate ambitions.
Climate, too, has veered from ‘whatever it takes’ to ‘whatever survives.’ The landmark Nature Restoration Law did ultimately pass in June 2024 after months of negotiations, but subsequent political pressure has pushed the Commission to dilute or ‘simplify’ parts of the Green Deal’s corporate reporting and due-diligence pillars—moves welcomed by some industries yet criticised by investors and climate advocates as a step back from strategic clarity.
Process-obsessed
Europe’s institutions are not so much powerless as bereft of credibility. Public trust is not collapsing wholesale—indeed, Eurobarometer finds trust in the EU at its highest since 2007—but this rise coexists with a perception that the bloc is hyper-normative and slow to decide.
