Von der Leyen, Metsola and Costa: now it's your turn to trigger a big breakthrough

Open letter to Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, Roberta Metsola, President of the European Parliament, and António Costa, President of the European Council

Faced with the 'existential' consequences that Donald Trump's victory will produce on the European Union (EU), one is struck by the rapidity and (perverse) consistency with which the new US Administration is being formed in comparison to the conflicts that have delayed the decision on the formation of the new European Commission and that have made the commitments of the Budapest European Council generic and partial compared to the recommendations of the Draghi and Letta reports. It is a plastic manifestation that the EU's institutional arrangements and governance are not up to the challenges we face.

Most of these weaknesses are due to historical-structural factors that prevent the EU from presenting itself as a federal body and that can only be overcome in the long term. Yet other weaknesses are the result of a lack of leadership at the central level and short-sighted choices at the level of individual member states. If the Commission's policy line is changed before the hearings of the candidate commissioners, or if national tribal dynamics are transferred to the European Parliament, it is inevitable that cross-vetoes and 'hostage-taking' will be triggered; and if the European Council's indications are entrusted to leaders who are entirely absorbed by national problems, it is obvious that the decisions taken are so general as to lack credibility.

In order to prepare for the impact of the Trumpian era on the EU's social-economic model, those in charge of European institutions must commit to clear choices that eschew gradualist options justified by apparent prudence. If Trump's approach prevails, the multilateral international institutions, which in the recent past have allowed conflicts between economic areas to be channelled, would be replaced by a congeries of bilateral agreements and segmented markets burdened by increasing tariffs. Against this backdrop, it would be imprudent to aim at reforming the growth model of a European economy dependent on mature technologies and high-cost energy sources and driven by net exports only at the margin; instead, it is a question of aiming at radical changes in the European business model. It would be equally imprudent to tackle the problems of security and immigration by being content with gradual increases in national defence spending (2% of GDP) and national barriers to migration flows. Instead, in the face of geo-political instability and conflicts on Europe's borders, it is necessary to decline the issues of economic and military security with farsightedness in a centralised manner, giving concrete expression to the principles of 'open strategic autonomy'. In the current circumstances, gradualism can become neither a method nor, still less, an objective.

Even when they have not sinned with 'imprudent' over-caution, European and national leaders have shown little courage in exploiting the potential of the initiatives undertaken. The most recent case in point is offered by Next Generation-Eu (Ngeu): instead of serving as a substantial first step to build permanent fiscal capacity, this programme was only downgraded to an extraordinary one-off measure. Besides reducing the market attractiveness of EU-issued debt securities (and thus pushing up their cost), this resulted in a lack of ownership of the initiative by European social actors. Citizens did not grasp the potential benefits of Ngeu on their lives, present and future, and treated the programme as an elite affair. Instead, it is up to the leaders of European institutions and national governments to emphasise that bolder European choices, such as those indicated by Letta's and Draghi's reports, respond to both European and national interests because they are essential to prevent the decline of the EU and its member states