Strategic turn of the European Union. The new European Commission, whose presidency and composition will begin to be negotiated after the June elections, will have defense spending and a relaxation of environmental regulations as new priorities. More powerful armies within the framework of NATO, with an eye toward Eastern Europe. Relaxation of environmental regulations to temper farmers’ protests and provide guarantees of food supply in the event of a global crisis. Castling in the face of a very uncertain world.
Russia is concerned, the Middle East is concerned and the stability of the great naval routes that connect China with Europe is concerned. More priorities: strengthening economic competitiveness at a time when large European industries are tempted to migrate to the United States attracted by its tax credits. Accelerate the development of renewable energies to avoid falling back into dependence on Russian gas. These are the main lines of the draft of the strategic agenda for the period 2025-2029, a document in the discussion phase, advanced yesterday by La Vanguardia’s correspondent in Brussels, Beatriz Navarro, a brilliant journalist with great experience in the circuits of the Union.
Portrait of a Europe on the defensive, worried about the uncertain outcome of the war in Ukraine, about the future integrity of the three Baltic republics, about the structural Polish nervousness, and about the restlessness, which to one degree or another, runs through all the European countries that were part of the Soviet bloc. Also concerned about the future stability of the democratic consensus in Germany and the results of the French presidential elections in 2027. Concerned about the security of the trade routes with the East, a security today threatened in the Red Sea. Concerned, obviously, about the direction that the United States may take after the presidential elections next November. A Europe today very conditioned by the electoral rise of the extreme right and necessarily on guard against industrial relocations to the other side of the Atlantic, whether Joe Biden wins or Donald Trump wins, as former Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta, in charge, has been denouncing of a report on the future European single market.
The leadership of this defensive Europe has come to the conclusion that they must invest more in defense and express their fear of the social disaffection generated by the accumulation of new environmental demands. They fear for the stability of the classical conservative forces, former repositories of the agrarian vote. Have stronger armies and calm farmers and all those sectors of society that feel greatly harmed by the acceleration of changes. These are the lines of the new strategic agenda. The prime moment of the green agenda seems to be eclipsed. There will be huge discussions. There will be combat. There will be protests in big cities.
There are times when changes in focus coagulate into two or three ideas. There are times when a good report in a newspaper summarizes the situation better than a hundred reports from specialists. There is a time when a four-column headline warns that a buoy turn is approaching. “The European Union will prioritize defense and soften its environmental policy,” headlined La Vanguardia this Friday. There it is all summarized. Last Sunday we reported on the presence of senior officers of the EU General Staff at the biannual meeting of the European railway corridors (a total of nine long-distance transnational axes) with a slogan: priority for military mobility, streamlining connections European gauge railways with all the ports where troops and material can be disembarked.
Sometimes a newspaper summarizes a change in the situation better than a hundred reports. In the same edition on Friday, the correspondents of La Vanguardia in Germany (María Paz López), the United Kingdom (Rafael Ramos), France (Eusebio Val) and Italy (Anna Buj), signed a joint report on the cutting of expenses in culture in the four most populated European countries. Little more can be added.
More notes from Brussels. The continuity of Ursula von der Leyen as president of the Commission does not seem as assured as it was a few weeks ago. She does not have all the support she would like in the European People’s Party and given the magnitude of the problems that lie ahead, the hypothesis of a presidency above the parties and with a clear technocratic profile is beginning to emerge. There is talk of Christine Lagarde, current president of the European Central Bank, linked to the French republican right. There is talk of the return of Mario Draghi, former president of the ECB and former prime minister of Italy. (Georgia Meloni is excited about that possibility, since Draghi would definitively become Lord Protector of his mandate.) And there is also talk of Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, of Bulgarian nationality.
Spain before the European buoy turn. Pedro Sánchez has been a prominent protagonist of the 2020-2024 agenda based on resilience and reconstruction after the pandemic. Spain had a special role in forging the reconstruction pacts during the most critical moment of the epidemic, when many were betting on a vertical decline in the economy. Sánchez continues to lead the Government thanks to that pact and the funds that came later. There are the macroeconomic data: Spain is growing clearly above the European average.
Spain today has the only left-wing coalition government among the main countries of the Union. A left-wing government supported by a parliamentary majority more fragile than that of the previous legislature, conditioned by Junts per Catalunya, the formation of Carles Puigdemont, a group partly inherited from the nationalist movement founded by Jordi Pujol in 1974, which has not even said Thank you for the amnesty law, for fear of losing support among Catalan independentists who feel deceived by their leaders. The complex Spanish legislature is approaching Cape Horn. What’s coming is more serious than a simple buoy turn. The underlying question is the following: will this left-wing Spanish government be able to adapt to the new European strategic agenda based on increased military spending and a slowdown in the ecological transition? That is the main key for the coming months in a country in which many things seem to happen every week and in which it is difficult to discern the fundamental from the secondary. Pedro Sánchez tries not to be left out of the game, opening his own lane: at the moment he is traveling through various European countries trying to gather support for the recognition of the Palestinian state.
The new European agenda could change the magnetic field of Spanish politics, provoking within a few months what seems completely impossible today: a certain entente between the two main parties while they fight each other with very thick words. The pact and the fury.
