Building Sea Legs

Dear Readers,
Over the holidays, GlobalPost is collaborating with our sister publication, World Politics Review, to bring you special coverage of the key geopolitical issues facing some of the major regions of the world in 2025.
Today, Alexander Clarkson takes a look at Europe.

We wish you happy holidays and best wishes for the New Year.

Your GlobalPost Team

The trajectory of European politics in 2024 frequently generated the appearance of progress without achieving much concrete change. Whether elections resulted in parliamentary deadlock, as in France, or a big majority for a single party, as in the United Kingdom, they rarely led to swift strategic successes.

How the European Union and the UK overcome such political paralysis to meet pressing internal challenges and guard against what they see as external threats – be they from Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, or US President-elect Donald Trump after he takes office in January – will be the dominant theme of European politics in 2025.

One example of political paralysis in 2024 followed French President Emmanuel Macron’s shock move in June to call snap parliamentary elections in a bid to reaffirm his centrist movement’s grip on the legislative body. Instead, it led to parliamentary deadlock, with the left, center and far right each holding a more or less equal number of seats.

By contrast, the huge parliamentary majority won in the following month by the UK’s opposition Labour Party under Sir Keir Starmer seemed to embody the kind of political realignment that eluded Macron and other EU leaders. Yet Starmer’s inability as prime minister to build momentum for economic growth or achieve the swift improvements in public services he had promised are further examples of how structural constraints have limited European governments’ short-term room to maneuver.

If other governments that also enjoy strong majorities can only achieve incremental improvements to public services and economic growth, then Europe in 2025 will continue to witness public backlashes against governing parties of the left and right, parties that had promised quick results when they were still in opposition.

While European governments of every ideological hue have found themselves struggling, the primary risks for European integration are now found in countries that until recently still viewed themselves as the central decision-makers in the EU. In addition to France, Germany now faces political paralysis ahead of parliamentary elections scheduled for early February, with negotiations over the formation of any forthcoming government likely to extend into the summer.

Campaigning in Germany is already dominated by anxiety over the country’s – and Europe’s – economic future. That reflects how the need to reshape economic production along carbon-free lines has become a particularly fraught reform dilemma across the northern EU states and post-Brexit UK, which once constituted Europe’s economic core.

Things aren’t all bad, of course. In Ireland, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael used deft policy moves as a governing coalition to first weather – and then roll back – a fleeting surge of public support for the left-wing populism of Sinn Fein, allowing them to buck the anti-incumbent trend in recent elections. The electoral defeat is likely to force Sinn Fein, which still faces lingering public concerns over its historical links to the Provisional Irish Republican Army, to work even harder to demonstrate that it accepts Ireland’s constitutional order.

At first glance, the current crisis unfolding in Romania after its first-round presidential election, in which far-right social media influencer Calin Georgescu unexpectedly won 22 percent of the vote, suggests trouble ahead for Romania and the EU as a whole. But it may ultimately demonstrate similar resilience among the country’s established political structures. Though Georgescu’s emergence reflects deep vulnerabilities within a political system that is mired in cronyism, the Romanian Supreme Court’s decision to force a rerun of the election after significant Russian influence operations were uncovered signals how seriously key state institutions took the threat.

The situation in Romania, in which a majority of voters are in equal measure shocked by Georgescu’s neo-fascism, but also frustrated with a discredited political class, encapsulates another major trend facing the EU in 2025 – the continued rise of far-right movements with varying degrees of commitment to liberal democracy, amid popular disavowal of establishment parties. How the majority of equally shocked and frustrated voters respond to this populist threat to democracy, as well as the moves made by the political establishment to counter it, will have profound implications for the EU as a whole, next year and beyond.

This tension between public impatience and geopolitical pressures has put governing parties of all ideological hues in a near-impossible bind on the national level. Yet the global scale of the challenges they face will create opportunities for EU institutions that have a greater ability to respond to crises that can overwhelm individual nation-states.

As a result, in 2025, the power to manage or generate change may increasingly sit at the EU’s supranational level, meaning that politicians in Brussels – particularly European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, but also those commissioners overseeing strategic portfolios – will be key players next year.

But the EU’s dominance of European politics is taking shape at a moment when the way politics is conducted in Brussels is also radically changing. The outcome of the European Parliament elections in June strengthened the hand of anti-system populists and generated greater friction between more established political parties. That has fostered a more competitive and adversarial political environment in Brussels, in which support for the priorities of the commission or member state governments is not guaranteed. Faced with increasingly fractious and assertive members of the European Parliament, von der Leyen will need to put in far more work to secure parliamentary majorities for key legislation in her second term than was required during her first.

This shift to confrontation rather than consensus between rival party machines in the European Parliament could ironically increase the similarities between EU-level and national politics at the very moment that the power of nation-states in Europe is going into relative decline. As the EU becomes the central instrument through which Europeans overcome threats posed by Russian expansionism, Chinese competition, and what they perceive as US instability, it should surprise no one that the struggle for control of the EU’s institutions is becoming increasingly intense.

As a result, if 2024 was marked by signs that Europe’s old order is on its last legs, what emerges from the battle for control of the EU in 2025 might mark the beginning of what comes next.