THE YEAR EUROPE MUST CHOOSE ITS FUTURE

How economic insecurity, geopolitical rivalry, artificial intelligence and a crisis of democratic trust are reshaping the continent

Editorial, September 2026

Europe is entering one of the most consequential political periods of the post Cold War era. Across the continent, elections that may appear at first to be about governments, parties and personalities are becoming something larger. They are becoming arguments about what Europe is for, what it is willing to defend and whether it still has the confidence to shape its own future. In many European countries, the next electoral contests will not simply determine who governs. They may determine how Europe positions itself in a world increasingly defined by great power rivalry, technological upheaval and growing skepticism toward the political institutions that have governed the continent for decades.

Europe’s predicament did not arrive in a single dramatic moment. It accumulated slowly. The financial crisis of 2008 damaged confidence in economic institutions and left political scars that never fully disappeared. The migration crisis of 2015 exposed profound disagreements over borders, identity and solidarity. The Covid 19 pandemic revealed how dependent even wealthy European economies had become on fragile global supply chains. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shattered the assumption that major war had become a thing of the past in Europe. Then inflation and the rising cost of living brought the consequences of those global shocks directly into kitchens, apartments and family budgets.

At the same time, another transformation has begun, one that may ultimately prove even more consequential. Artificial intelligence is changing the economy, the workplace, communication and the way people receive information. Semiconductors, data centers, computing power and digital infrastructure are no longer simply components of modern commerce. They are instruments of national power. In this new environment, technological dependence can become a strategic vulnerability in much the same way that dependence on energy once could.

This leaves Europe facing two problems at once. Its governments must respond to immediate concerns about wages, housing, energy and employment while preparing societies for a much harsher international environment. The question is no longer whether Europe will change. It already has. The question is whether Europeans will shape that change or discover, too late, that the forces reshaping their continent are being controlled elsewhere.

For much of the postwar period, Europe lived with a remarkably reassuring assumption. The continent had experienced two devastating wars, yet by the second half of the 20th century its former enemies had built something unprecedented: a political and economic system in which cooperation increasingly replaced confrontation. Borders became less important. Trade expanded. European institutions grew stronger. For millions of people, peace and prosperity ceased to feel like historic achievements and began to feel like the normal condition of life.

That assumption has now been broken. The Europe approaching its next political turning points is not the Europe that emerged after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is a continent confronted simultaneously by war, economic competition, technological disruption, demographic aging, political fragmentation and declining confidence in institutions. Beneath all these developments lies a question that is becoming increasingly difficult for European leaders to avoid: who is actually protecting the future of ordinary Europeans?

The importance of that question lies in what it reveals about the political mood. Europe’s transformation cannot be reduced to a single ideological revolt. It is also a reaction to uncertainty. For decades, stability was treated almost as a permanent feature of European life. Today, Europeans are discovering that stability has a price. It requires money, political choices, industrial capacity, military strength and, above all, the willingness to acknowledge that security cannot simply be assumed.

For years, European politics rested on another powerful promise: that each generation would live better than the one before it. Economic growth, social protection and European integration appeared to point in the same direction. The future was expected to bring greater prosperity, better opportunities and a higher standard of living.

That promise has become harder to believe. For many younger Europeans, housing is increasingly difficult to afford, employment can feel less secure and the cost of basic necessities has risen faster than incomes in ways that are impossible to ignore. The old expectation that economic progress would gradually improve everyday life has weakened. For a generation accustomed to hearing that its future would be better than its parents’ past, that change is more than an economic problem. It is a political one.

Democracy depends on more than elections and constitutions. It also depends on confidence. Citizens must believe that institutions are capable of responding to their concerns and improving their lives. When that belief begins to disappear, dissatisfaction does not remain confined to economic statistics. It becomes political. Voters begin looking for alternatives, sometimes not because they have embraced a coherent ideology, but because they no longer believe that the existing system can deliver what it once promised.

Europe is also aging, and demographic change may prove one of the least dramatic but most consequential challenges of the coming decades. An older population places growing pressure on pensions, health systems and labor markets. Unlike a financial crash or a geopolitical crisis, demographic change rarely produces a single moment of shock. It advances quietly, year after year, until governments discover that the arithmetic has changed.

A smaller working age population will increasingly be asked to finance social systems serving a larger retired population. Governments will have to confront difficult choices involving pensions, taxation, immigration, productivity and the organization of work. None of those choices is politically easy. Together, they represent a structural test of the European social model.

This is why the cost of living matters so much. Political leaders often speak in the language of ideology, constitutional reform and geopolitics. Voters frequently make decisions based on something much simpler. They look at the price of food. They open the energy bill. They calculate the cost of rent or a mortgage. They ask whether their wages are keeping pace and whether their jobs will still exist in five or ten years.

The inflation that followed the pandemic and the energy crisis left a particularly deep impression because it created a gap between what governments said about the economy and what households experienced. Officials could point to improving indicators. Families could point to grocery receipts. Both could be telling the truth, yet they were describing entirely different realities. That distance between macroeconomic performance and personal experience has become one of the most important sources of political distrust in Europe.

The European Union sits at the center of this tension. It remains one of the great political achievements of modern Europe. It reconciled former enemies, created a vast common market, encouraged economic and scientific cooperation and helped establish an extraordinary period of stability across much of the continent.

Yet the same institution that represents cooperation and stability has also become, for some citizens, a symbol of political distance. The problem is not necessarily hostility toward the European idea itself. It is often the feeling that important decisions are made too far away, through institutions whose procedures are difficult for ordinary citizens to understand.

There is an uncomfortable contradiction at the heart of European politics. National governments participate in decisions made at the European level, yet they sometimes present unpopular measures as decisions imposed by Brussels. European institutions, meanwhile, point out that member states participated in creating those policies. The result is a political system in which responsibility can become difficult to locate. And when citizens cannot determine who is responsible for a decision, they often conclude that nobody is listening.

That makes the European Union’s challenge not merely economic or institutional but democratic. Europe has to explain more clearly what it does, why it does it and who is accountable for the choices being made. Complexity may be unavoidable in a union of 27 countries. But complexity without political clarity eventually becomes a liability.

The political consequences are already visible. For decades, European politics was organized around a relatively stable contest between traditional conservatives, social democrats and liberal parties. That balance is weakening across the continent. Established parties are losing voters to movements that promise to challenge the political order, and the shift cannot be explained by one ideology or one side of the political spectrum.

On the right, nationalist and sovereigntist parties have gained support by focusing on immigration, national identity, security and the authority of the nation state. On the left, other movements have sought renewed relevance by emphasizing inequality, wages and the role of government. Their differences are substantial. Yet they share something important: the conviction that the established political order has failed to address a growing sense of insecurity.

In that sense, Europe’s political earthquake is not simply a battle between left and right. It is also a struggle between those who believe the existing system can be repaired and those who believe it has failed so fundamentally that something different must replace it.

France provides one of the clearest examples. For decades, French politics was organized around a contest between two major political blocs. That structure has weakened dramatically. Traditional parties have lost much of their ability to organize political life over the long term, leaving a more fragmented political landscape in which voters move more freely between movements and personalities.

The reasons are familiar but powerful: a sense of economic decline, the widening divide between major cities and peripheral regions, concerns about immigration and growing distrust of political elites. Yet beneath these issues is a more fundamental question. Who speaks for people who believe that the political system has stopped speaking to them?

That question is not uniquely French. It is one of the defining questions of European politics. A democracy can survive political disagreement. It has much more difficulty surviving the belief that political institutions no longer represent ordinary citizens.

Germany faces a different version of the same problem. For decades, its economic success was built on a powerful combination of manufacturing strength, relatively affordable energy, massive exports and political stability. The model was so successful that it became one of the foundations of Europe’s prosperity.

But the assumptions supporting that model have changed. Chinese competition has intensified. The energy transition is altering industrial costs. The automobile industry is being transformed by electrification and digital technology. At the same time, companies face pressure to invest in new technologies while navigating an increasingly uncertain global economy.

Germany’s dilemma is therefore Europe’s dilemma. If the continent’s largest industrial economy struggles to reinvent itself, the consequences will not stop at the German border. Europe’s ability to compete globally will depend in part on whether Germany can build a new industrial model rather than simply defend the old one.

Britain offers Europe another warning. Brexit was formally a question about membership in the European Union, but the political forces behind it were much broader. Sovereignty, immigration, globalization and the feeling of political abandonment all played a role. The referendum demonstrated that a rupture once considered almost unthinkable can become possible when a large part of the electorate concludes that the existing political system no longer reflects its expectations.

The lesson of Brexit is not that other countries will necessarily follow Britain. It is that political frustrations accumulated over many years can eventually produce consequences that once seemed unimaginable. The danger for European governments is not necessarily rebellion. It is complacency.

None of these domestic struggles can be understood separately from the transformation of the international system. Europe is not making political choices in isolation. It is doing so at a moment when the balance of global power is being rewritten.

Russia has returned war to the center of European security. China has expanded its industrial and technological reach. The United States is devoting increasing strategic attention to the Indo Pacific. Artificial intelligence is changing the information environment, while control over critical technologies is becoming a central measure of geopolitical power.

This means that European domestic politics and foreign policy can no longer be neatly separated. Energy security is domestic policy and national security at the same time. Semiconductor production is industrial policy and geopolitics. Digital infrastructure is an economic asset and a strategic vulnerability. Supply chains are no longer simply matters for corporate executives. They have become matters of national resilience.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine made this new reality impossible to ignore. For years, many Europeans believed that major war had been relegated to history. The invasion destroyed that assumption. The continent was forced to rediscover something it had preferred to forget: peace is not simply the absence of war. It is a political and strategic condition that must be maintained.

Europe must now think differently about defense, energy security and resilience. Modern conflict is no longer confined to battlefields. It extends into cyberspace, information networks and critical infrastructure. A country can possess a capable military and still remain vulnerable if its energy grids, communications systems, financial networks or digital infrastructure can be disrupted.

That is a profound change in the meaning of security. The question is no longer simply whether Europe can defend its territory. It is whether European societies can continue functioning under pressure.

China presents an even more complicated challenge because Europe cannot simply choose confrontation. China is simultaneously a major trading partner, an industrial competitor and a strategic power. Its influence rests on enormous manufacturing capacity, growing technological capabilities, international infrastructure and a central role in global supply chains.

Europe therefore faces a difficult balancing act. It must cooperate with China where cooperation serves European interests while avoiding dependencies in sectors that could become critical during a crisis. That means thinking beyond trade. Energy, raw materials, technology, infrastructure and industrial capacity all belong to the same strategic equation.

Taiwan illustrates the problem with unusual clarity. The modern economy depends on advanced semiconductors for automobiles, smartphones, medical equipment, military systems and artificial intelligence. Much of the world’s most advanced production is concentrated in a relatively small number of places. That concentration creates efficiency during normal times and vulnerability during a crisis.

A major disruption around Taiwan would not remain an Asian crisis. It could quickly become an industrial crisis affecting companies and consumers around the world. For Europe, the lesson is not that it should attempt technological autarky. It is that it must reduce dependencies that could become dangerous when geopolitical conditions deteriorate.

That brings Europe to the technology that may ultimately transform politics as profoundly as it transforms business: artificial intelligence.

AI is often discussed as an economic opportunity, and it certainly is one. It could accelerate scientific research, transform medicine, raise productivity and change the organization of work. But it is also becoming a political technology. It can generate convincing synthetic information at enormous scale, amplify disinformation and influence the way citizens understand political events.

The democratic question may therefore become one of the defining questions of this century: how can societies exploit the extraordinary capabilities of artificial intelligence without surrendering control over its political and social consequences?

Europe has responded in significant part through regulation. That is understandable. But regulation alone cannot create technological power. If Europe wants strategic autonomy, it will need computing infrastructure, investment, innovative companies, research capacity and people capable of building the technologies it seeks to regulate. A continent that writes the rules but depends on others for the underlying technology may discover that regulatory power has limits.

This is where Europe’s political debate must become more ambitious. The continent cannot spend the next decade simply managing one crisis after another. It has to decide what kind of power it wants to be.

That choice will not be made in a single election. Elections will matter, perhaps enormously, but they are only expressions of a deeper struggle over Europe’s direction. The real test will be whether European societies can reconcile economic security with technological ambition, national interests with continental cooperation, military preparedness with democratic values and openness to the world with protection against dangerous dependencies.

Europe still has remarkable advantages. It possesses one of the world’s largest markets, a diversified economy, substantial scientific expertise, advanced infrastructure, strong institutions and enormous regulatory influence. It remains capable of shaping international standards and attracting talent, investment and ideas.

But advantages are not strategies. They become strategic power only when they are organized around a common purpose.

That is the challenge facing Europe now. Political divisions can weaken collective action. Strategic dependencies can limit freedom of choice. Global competition can erode industrial strength. And declining trust can make even sensible policies politically impossible. Europe cannot assume that its historic achievements will protect it from a future that is changing faster than its institutions.

The next phase of European politics will therefore be about more than managing crises. It will be about deciding what Europe wants to become in a world where economic power, military capability, technology, industrial resilience and democratic legitimacy are increasingly inseparable.

Europe can choose to remain a major actor in history. It has the resources to do so. It has the institutions, the talent, the market and the experience. What it needs now is the political confidence to turn those assets into a strategy.

The alternative is not necessarily sudden collapse. It may be something quieter and more dangerous: a gradual loss of influence, a growing dependence on decisions made elsewhere and an increasing inability to determine the conditions under which Europeans will live.

That is why the choice confronting Europe is larger than the next election, larger than any individual government and larger than the arguments currently dominating national politics. Europe is deciding whether it will remain a power capable of shaping events or become a prosperous region increasingly forced to react to decisions made by others.

The world that is emerging will not resemble the world that followed the Cold War. Power will increasingly belong to those who can combine technology with industrial capacity, economic resilience with military strength and national interests with strategic alliances. Above all, it will belong to societies whose citizens still believe that their political institutions are capable of defending their interests and improving their future.

Europe can still make that choice.

But history rarely waits for those who cannot make up their minds. If Europe refuses to choose its future, others will choose it for Europe.

Thierry De Clemensat

French journalist Based in Austin, Texas, Writes on Jazz, Culture and Global Society