Piero Graglia The European Union is a cold-blooded political animal when it comes to how it operates: countless technical details, a vast and complex institutional architecture, procedures and processes that are not immediately easy to grasp — and yet this cold-blooded animal is capable of stirring up wildly disproportionate passions, for or against, fuelling political rhetoric that all too often stops at appearances. The latest case in point is the vote against reopening the accession process expressed by Icelanders a few days ago. This is an event concerning a country roughly a third the size of Italy (103,000 square kilometres), with a population of 397,000. Italy covers 301,000 square kilometres but has sixty million inhabitants. That alone should give a sense of what we’re actually talking about: not the accession of millions of people, but a country with as many inhabitants as the city of Florence, and roughly the land area of the Po Valley plus Emilia-Romagna. ...

Giuseppe Sacco A Cautionary Tale As every child brought up in the English-speaking world knows, a “cautionary tale” is a story that carries a moral and a warning. That is, a tale that teaches them not to do reckless or dangerous things, not to indulge in foolish behavior. And that is exactly what, in the words of the Financial Times, Giorgia Meloni’s experience has become: “a cautionary tale for European leaders tempted to believe that ideological affinity with Donald Trump also entails political protection.” ...

Corradino Mineo “I fear the Greeks, even when they bear gifts” (“Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes”). Laocoön tried in vain to stop the destruction of the city walls to admit that strange gift from the Greeks. Today it is Giorgia Meloni who embodies the Trojan horse being used to try to destroy Europe, reopening the wounds of the twentieth century’s civil wars and calling into question rights and protections won over the past 80 years. On 23 August, the New York Times presented her as the face of “a post-fascist Italy opening the door to power for the far right,” explicitly referring to the possibility that, after her, Marine Le Pen might win the 2027 presidential election. ...

Interview by Maurizio Donini Ambassador McCullough, Ireland takes on the Presidency of the Council of the European Union at a particularly complex moment. What political vision will guide the Irish semester, and what will be the main priorities of your programme? During our presidency, we want to focus on delivering tangible improvements for citizens across the European Union. We are therefore prioritising three major thematic pillars: competitiveness, values and security. These pillars are closely interconnected and mutually reinforcing; they will guide every aspect of our work as the presidency. ...

Philippe Ward The diagnosis of Europe’s loss of momentum has been apparent for several years, but in the early summer of 2026, Brussels’ bureaucratic agenda has become inseparable from geopolitical urgency. By assuming the Presidency of the Council of the European Union, Ireland inherits a demanding programme: more than 400 official events are scheduled across the Emerald Isle to steer negotiations ranging from the EU’s multiannual budget to trade relations with Beijing. ...

Paolo Borioni The Danish government agreement, reached with great difficulty, includes four parties in the executive. Two are centrist, but the other two, which are larger overall, belong to the socialist tradition (the Social Democratic Party, which holds a relative majority, and the Socialist People’s Party, which emerged from the elections greatly strengthened). However, the government will also need external support from a post-communist party list (which has also grown considerably) and from the environmentalists, who have only just surpassed the 2% electoral threshold. The Social Democrats must recover from an electoral decline of around 5%, which also reflects a degree of dissent towards them, both in public opinion and, certainly, within the trade union movement. This will not be easy in the context of the growing party fragmentation that characterises Danish democracy. ...

Philippe Ward The diagnosis has been clear for nearly two years. Yet, by the summer of 2026, the conclusion has become increasingly stark: the flagship recommendations of Mario Draghi’s report on the European Union’s competitiveness and strategic autonomy have been implemented only in part. While the analysis was lucid and the structural proposals compelling, political and administrative execution has proved to be the initiative’s greatest blind spot. Europe knows what it must do; it simply does not know how to do it within a fragmented institutional framework. ...

Chloé Maurel This programme, originally known as the “European City of Culture”, was championed with determination by an extraordinary figure: the Greek singer, actress and Minister of Culture, Melina Mercouri. Forty years later, the “European Capitals of Culture” have become one of the European Union’s most emblematic cultural initiatives. More than sixty cities have already received this designation, which has profoundly transformed historic metropolises such as Athens, Florence and Paris, as well as industrial cities in decline such as Glasgow, Lille and Liverpool. Behind this success lies a dual reality: on the one hand, cultural democratisation and urban revitalisation; on the other, processes of real-estate speculation, mass tourism, and sometimes social marginalisation. What does the history of the European Capitals of Culture reveal about the enduring tensions between the European cultural ideal and economic logic? To what extent has this initiative contributed to strengthening the European project? ...

The Prime Minister is dead, long live the Prime Minister! It will take the UK two months to replace the resigning Starmer with Andy Burnham, 56, the long-serving mayor of Greater Manchester, a ‘man of the North’ and therefore feared by the City, but also a politician who has worked with three very different Labour leaders: Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Jeremy Corbyn, and who is suspected of being a smooth talker but remains a ‘chameleon’. However, the crisis runs deeper, caused by the hubris that led to the break with the European Union 10 years ago, by the rise in racist unrest, and by the uncertainty surrounding foreign policy. ...

Philippe Ward Ten years after the 2016 referendum and more than five years after leaving the single market, the United Kingdom resembles neither the Global Britain promised by Brexit enthusiasts nor the wasteland predicted by its most radical opponents. In April 2026, the country finds itself in a phase of uneasy normalization: a pragmatic yet difficult realignment with the European bloc, against a backdrop of economic slowdown and political fragmentation. ...

What is your assessment following the latest informal European Council, Orbán’s defeat and the change of government in Bulgaria? Have the political balances shifted? They have changed, but only to some extent. We need to see what political priorities Magyar, the new Hungarian Prime Minister, will pursue. In any case, I would like to point out that, until two years ago, he was a member of the same party as Orbán. Some deadlocks have been broken, such as the €90 billion loan to Ukraine, as Orbán’s veto has been lifted. However, there are other issues where we need to understand what the new government’s stance will be. Incidentally, Orbán did not attend the last European Council, whilst Magyarhad had not yet been officially appointed: so Hungary was not represented, whereas for Bulgaria, the outgoing government was still in place, pending the formation of the new government. ...

Francesca Tortorella The diagnosis of a demographically ill Europe is entirely accurate: the active workforce is shrinking, while economic dependency — young people, retirees and inactive populations — is increasing. National social systems are therefore becoming more fragile, raising questions about their long-term sustainability. However, it is precisely on this issue that federalist ideas could provide a solution. First of all, a genuine European federal system would make it possible to pool demographic risks. Today, although the European Union as a whole is clearly a “very old” continent, population ageing and productivity decline do not occur at the same pace in all Member States. A coordinated European fiscal and social policy could help compensate for these differences, just as a federal state redistributes resources among its regions. ...

Ioan-Victor Popa November 2025: Romania’s presidential and legislative elections sent a shockwave through Europe. The far right’s strong showing in the parliamentary vote, combined with the first-round success of a little-known candidate with fringe views in the presidential race - a result ultimately annulled by Romania’s Constitutional Court - marked a sharp and sudden break with a political landscape long defined by stability. The status quo built on the alliance between the Social Democratic Party (PSD) and the National Liberal Party (PNL) absorbed an unexpected blow, made all the more striking by the fact that the Social Democratic candidate, Marcel Ciolacu, failed to make it to the second round - an unprecedented outcome in the party’s history. Parliament emerged considerably fragmented, forcing the former PSD–PNL alliance to seek new coalition partners. ...

Giuseppe Sacco With unusual boldness, the Financial Times published a front-page article based not on verified information—as is the tradition of the London daily—but on rumors, leaks, and indiscretions coming from Brussels and Oslo, though certainly read with great interest in Berlin. According to EU sources, or at least those close to them, the leadership of the European Union is seriously considering the possibility of further backtracking—after other decisions, such as postponing the date after which it will no longer be possible to market cars with internal combustion engines—on one of the main pillars that has shaped the current worldview over the past fifty years: environmental awareness. Within the framework of a true turning point, they are reportedly assessing the convenience and opportunity of abandoning their opposition to oil exploitation in the Arctic region. ...

The defeat of Viktor Orbán carries an очевидent geopolitical dimension. For sixteen years, he had established in Hungary a model for the far right in Europe and the United States. Donald Trump himself had drawn inspiration from it. This model, described as an “illiberal democracy,” was gradually evolving toward a form of authoritarian regime. Its fall therefore also constitutes a new symbolic defeat for Trump. Orbán’s regime had become deeply unpopular. This unpopularity is particularly strong among those under 30: 65% of them voted for the opposition Tiza party, and only 15% for Orbán. There is a strong generational divide: young people suffer from structural unemployment, and emigration in search of work is high. Other converging factors explain Orbán’s predictable defeat. As early as the 2010s, he clearly displayed his ambition to transform Hungary. As Steve Bannon, ideologue of the MAGA movement, pointed out, he was “a Trump before Trump.” The first step in this transformation was control of the media: today, nearly 85% of Hungarian media are under government influence. After public media, the few remaining independent private outlets were gradually targeted. Young people were able to access alternative information through the internet. The judiciary has lost all independence. It is the primary target of far-right governments, along with the press. ...

In mid-March, Romania, together with Austria, Croatia, Greece, Italy, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, signed a letter addressed to the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and to the President of the Council, António Costa, calling for an urgent revision of the deadlines set by the energy transition plan. This issue, seemingly highly technical, brings together a group of states with specific interests: some display a clear hostility toward European institutions in their current form (the most extreme case being that of Viktor Orbán, who has based his electoral campaign on AI-generated videos portraying the EU and Ukraine as public enemies); others have direct economic interests, linked to the nature of their energy consumption or to infrastructure projects, which are largely incompatible with the timelines adopted at the European level. ...

European governments—and the media that follow their lead—continue to react to Donald Trump’s “National Security Strategy” as if the current president had invented Washington’s hostility toward any genuine European unity, whereas he has merely made it provocatively explicit, in well-tested alignment with Moscow. In doing so, the President of the United States provides Europeans with a valuable opportunity to define and focus the urgent correction of the structure and direction of the European Union, toward its independence —not merely “autonomy”— in strategic terms, restoring to its peoples the only sovereignty possible. A further paradox is that Giorgia Meloni —the supposed sovereigntist and former fascist who, as Prime Minister of the Italian Republic, allows herself to be kissed on the head by Joe Biden, only then to become the factotum (certainly not a courtier) of Donald Trump— reminds our homegrown pseudo-Europeanists that there exists another Europe beyond the current EU: that of Ventotene. It will not happen now, but that must be the perspective. ...

Today the whole world is discovering Pedro Sánchez, the Spanish socialist leader who heads a left-wing coalition government. His “no to war” in Iran resonates as a powerful warning signal in the face of the deadly danger threatening the system of collective security established in 1945. The United Nations—whose true meaning was an “organization of nations united against fascism”—was meant to prevent any new war. This “no” is also a resounding rejection of Trumpism. Pedro Sánchez is the only European head of government to oppose head-on the war sought by Donald Trump, by refusing to allow the United States Air Force to use American bases located in Andalusia. By contrast, France and United Kingdom have granted the U.S. military access to their bases as American aircraft methodically bomb Iran, in disregard of international law. This refusal is all the more striking given that Trump’s war initiative appears wholly reckless: a war against a country with a millennia-old history could lead the world toward general chaos. ...