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“I don’t see how it could get any worse”: the words of Jean-Claude Juncker, former prime minister of Luxembourg and former president of the EU Commission. Coming from someone who spoke with Donald Trump at the time of his first term and violent Euro-American arguments, it is to be believed.
Yet, this time the earthquake for Europe could prove more devastating. First of all because Trump revived, more than ever, we want a radical president but with stronger and more articulated convictions, a clear project, the means and men to carry it out. Thanks to a clear electoral victory that also gave him control of Congress and the Supreme Court, the nerve centers of federal power.
And then America First, the doctrine of protectionism and unilateralism now entrusted to a handful of loyal “hawks”, chosen more for loyalty than competence, in strategic positions in the Administration to carry out the leader’s directives.
The end of bipartisan political culture, therefore, and perhaps also of the principle of checks and balances, of the division of powers, which has always been a strong point of US democracy. Four years later, however, Europe appears weaker than ever. The Ukrainian war on the borders, Putin’s imperialism hungry for territorial revenge also in Georgia and Moldova, the end of Biden’s pro-Atlantic America and the encore of Trump’s introverted, isolationist and anti-NATO America. Tottering governments in France and Germany, at the mercy of right-wing and left-wing extremism. Common institutions, Commission and European Parliament, paralyzed by the erosion of the old centrist balance shaken by the advance of the right more or less everywhere. In short, a divided Europe, politically at risk of acephaly in Brussels, in the face of the oncoming cyclone.
An economy losing competitiveness and per capita wealth, tested by the halt to low-cost Russian oil, by Chinese double-dealing, by the fleeting certainties of the American shield in NATO. From the German crisis and that of its entire industry extorted by EU hyper-regulation and the ideological blunders of the Green Deal. Marching towards greener, digital, high tech and military development for now without the necessary mega-investments. If we do not decide to act and soon, in this Europe with high taxation, excessive rules and suffocating bureaucracy, energy prices that are five times those of the USA, in this Europe which after Covid and the Ukrainian war has increased pharmaceutical dependence, energy, technological, financial and military from the United States, Trump’s arrival risks dealing the final blow. Or, on the contrary, the unexpected coup.
