State of the Union 2026 — 16 September 2026

Ursula von der Leyen opened her State of the Union address quoting Dickens, the best of times and the worst of times, and then said something worth agreeing with: the state of our Union is the strongest it has ever been, and at the same time it can also feel as precarious as it has ever been.

This spring's Eurobarometer shows a clear majority of citizens recognising they need more Europe. 75% now see the Union as an island of stability, up 8 points in a few months; 89% want member states more united against global threats; 86% want a more decisive European role; 73% say more European resources are needed. And the security they are asking for is broadly defined; disasters made worse by climate change worry 66% of Europeans. Citizens can see, more clearly than their institutions, where at least part of the answer to their anxiety about an uncertain future actually lies.

Meanwhile the far right, with Jordan Bardella leading the charge, hammers away at Europe's weaknesses so relentlessly that, read carelessly, it sounds like a call for more Europe: more capacity to defend itself, more trade weight, more protection. Then the prescription turns out to be more nationalism, more power back to the states, exactly what produced those weaknesses in the first place.

But at this point, an accurate diagnosis is no longer enough.

Take defence. European spending has risen 80% in five years and passed €381 billion, yet one elementary answer went missing: how much of that money improves our common security, and how much finances 27 separate armies and American industry? Between February 2022 and mid-2023, 78% of member states' military acquisitions went to non-European suppliers, 63% to the United States alone; even in 2024, after some correction, almost half still went outside the Union, with $76 billion spent on American weapons. Joint procurement remains below 20% against a 35% target agreed back in 2007, and European military research is worth €13 billion a year against America's €140 billion. Spending more without spending together is, in effect, shooting ourselves in the foot.

On energy, the President uses the formula of technological neutrality to place nuclear power on the same footing as renewables, as though it were just another low-carbon answer to the climate crisis. It is not: it costs too much, arrives far too late for the climate's timetable, and is vulnerable to drought and extreme weather. Above all it diverts capital from renewables, batteries and efficiency, technologies that deliver capacity in a much shorter time and at a fraction of the cost.

And what is missing entirely is a concrete roadmap out of fossil fuels, the one complement to the Green Deal capable of making the commitments to its targets credible, in the face of constant attempts to weaken its regulatory and financial framework. Doubling the electrification target to 46% by 2040 is the right goal, but it depends on grids, storage and permits  investment and planning, not a deregulation nobody has ever shown produces competitiveness. On this, von der Leyen cultivates an ambiguity with a clear direction: not disturbing the fossil and energy-intensive lobbies, German ones first.

And here is the real problem with the Green Deal: apart from the commitment to the targets, the action stays cautious and wavering, one foot on each side of the fence. Targets confirmed in words, deadlines postponed in practice, revisions announced before the rules have even been applied, settled files reopened every six months. A company deciding today on a ten-year investment cannot know which rules will still apply in two. Also, nature and pollution were entirely absent from the speech too, and the sharpest line of the day came from the European Environmental Bureau: you can simplify paperwork, but you cannot simplify away a drought or a flood. The unspoken test is the ETS review, where the Council is openly split between Italy, Poland and the Czech Republic pushing for flexibility and Spain and the Nordics wanting it kept intact and it will be von der Leyen who decides at the end, eventually, which side the Commission actually stands on.

Von der Leyen claims €17 billion a year in administrative burden saved through the omnibus packages, and she is right to call for simplification at national level too. But those billions remain, for now, ambitious estimates rather than a measured saving. The first package has already produced a concrete effect, and the opposite one: cutting roughly 80% of companies out of sustainability reporting penalised those that had already invested, and because member states had not transposed the directive or did it unevenly, those companies often face a patchwork of national rules instead of one European rule. As the Draghi and Letta reports both argue, in a single market, simplification that fragments is a cost, not a saving: uncertainty is the real tax we are imposing on European industry, and precisely on its most innovative, most rule-abiding part.

Then there is a heatwave plan, a climate insurance alliance, a Care Deal, a water initiative: sensible proposals, all impossible on a threadbare budget, while net contributors keep pushing for cuts. Von der Leyen admitted that an ambitious budget requires own resources, and on that she deserves support, as she does on strengthening the Commission's staff. With the workload it carries, the Union needs a European public service that is large, competent and well paid. But her own action needs to be far bolder and more effective, not least with Germany under siege from the AfD. Chasing the far right with slightly milder versions of its own policies is not a strategy; both the President and Manfred Weber's EPP should instead be loyal to the pro-European majority that actually elected her.

What is missing altogether is any commitment to genuine democratic reform. Announcing a Congress of Europe for the 70th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome matters, and precisely for that reason it cannot become another elite initiative, or a gathering of agreeable intellectuals and experts. We cannot repeat the fiasco of the Conference on the Future of Europe, which closed in May 2022 with 49 proposals and 326 measures, months of work and thousands of citizens involved, only for the European Council to dispose of it with a small ceremony while the Commission stayed largely inert, squandering a real opportunity for legitimacy and visible participation in reforming the Union.

An institutional route does exist, and it already has a shape. On 9 September the European Movement in Italy, chaired by Pier Virgilio Dastoli, launched “Objective 1000” at Sapienza University: a hundred civil society representatives and exactly one thousand days from now to the European elections of 6-9 June 2029, with the explicit aim of bringing Europe's founding political cultures Christian universalism, socialist internationalism, liberal cosmopolitanism and transnational environmentalism onto a shared platform for the 2029 manifestos. It is the opposite of a vague conference: a precise calendar, a verifiable method, a constituent mandate as the destination. If the Congress of Europe were grafted onto that process instead of onto solemn speeches, it would mean something. Otherwise it will be one more missed opportunity.

There is also something von der Leyen failed to claim with the force it deserves: the pro-European majority that elected her. In this Parliament the EPP picks whichever majority suits it, file by file, and on migration, climate and deregulation it increasingly finds that majority with the conservatives and the far right. Weber's group denounces the extremists and then adopts their positions, which is how the ground was cleared in Germany for the AfD, fresh from its win in Saxony-Anhalt. A Commission President who owes her mandate to Christian democrats, socialists, liberals and greens has a duty to say so, and to refuse the shortcuts. Playing footsie with her friend Giorgia Meloni means legitimising the very people who want that majority dismantled.

Also, the contrast between the two hardest foreign-policy files is telling. On Ukraine, the Commission relaunched its push just days ago, on 11 September, to unlock the €200 billion in frozen Russian assets, with a new structure designed to get around Belgium's veto, backed by 122 MEPs and Kyiv's own finance minister: people are still trying. On Gaza, nothing comparable. A year ago von der Leyen proposed suspending trade provisions with Israel and freezing bilateral support; the Council approved only the sanctions on violent settlers and let the rest die for lack of a majority. She has not returned to it since.

This week supplied the proof. On Wednesday a building already damaged by earlier strikes collapsed in Gaza City, killing at least 21 people in their sleep, eleven of them children, while Israel continues to refuse entry to the heavy machinery needed to dig through the rubble, in a territory where 80% of structures are now damaged or destroyed. And inside Israel, a country that markets itself as the region's only democracy, the documentary “NAZA,” by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor and awarded a special jury prize in Venice a week ago, has triggered accusations of treason, calls to strip its makers of their citizenship, and legal threats the Committee to Protect Journalists has called unacceptable. A year on, with the situation worse on both fronts, von der Leyen's silence is no longer caution. It is surrender.

Finally the silences on the Union's own doorstep, and they are just as grave. In late July some 70,000 people tried to enter Ceuta, the Spanish enclave on Moroccan territory; almost all were returned to Morocco within hours, and over 120 died trying to reach the coast by swimming. Not one of them entered the Schengen area, and it was Commissioner Magnus Brunner himself who said so. Italy nonetheless suspended Schengen with Spain and has just extended the controls by another 15 days; Madrid responded in kind until 21 September. One of the Union's most positive achievements is therefore suspended in the absence of any danger whatsoever, and the Commission washes its hands of it, in breach of its own mandate as guardian of the Treaties. It should have said plainly that Italy is breaching the rules, common sense and good faith. That Pilate-like posture has fuelled a pointless quarrel between two member states; and Madrid would do well not to sink to the same level.

On migration, the speech announced an emergency framework for mass arrivals, and in plenary Commissioner Brunner took credit for falling arrivals and returns approaching 30%. But here too, a guilty silence: not one word on the deaths in the Mediterranean. In the first five months of this year at least 824 people died or disappeared in the central Mediterranean alone, against 475 in the same period of 2025 over 70% more. Fewer arrivals and more deaths means deadlier routes, and one of the reasons has a name. Since January 2023 Italian authorities have issued detention orders against 41 humanitarian rescue vessels, for a combined 1,075 days: nearly three years of search and rescue prevented on the deadliest stretch of water in the world. The Italian government presses on with its war against NGOs, the Union and Frontex mount no rescue operation of their own, and this morning's speech contained not one line on how lives are saved at sea, or on the integration of migrants, only congratulations for fewer arrivals.

So if the state of the Union really is the strongest and the most fragile it has ever been, its strength clearly comes from its citizens, and its fragility comes mostly from within its own institutions and national governments: a budget too small for the ambitions announced, an ecological transition managed in fits and starts, democratic reform postponed, silence on Schengen and on the dead at sea, and inaction on Gaza and the West Bank too. Above all, uncertainty about which direction to take, and hesitation about calling citizens in. They are asking for a Union that works, and are willing to pay for it. Those who lead the institutions have less courage.

Von der Leyen, and every speaker after her, gave a warm welcome to Mark Carney, the Canadian Prime Minister and guest of honour, who, unlike von der Leyen's EU, Meloni or Merz, has managed to stand up to Donald Trump. His presence shows that Europe can still be a reference point for those looking for reliable allies. But that responsibility has to be seized with resolve: by telling Meloni that Schengen is not to be suspended for electoral convenience; by putting up a fight with the frugal countries that without own resources none of this morning's policies exist; by telling fossil and slow-moving industry, and the right that shields it, that the Green Deal's rules will not be reopened again; and by telling citizens that the Congress of Europe will be the start of a constituent process, not another fine conference. Otherwise, a year from now, we will be listening to the same accurate diagnosis and the same insufficient answers, while those who want to dismantle Europe keep growing. And then it will not only be the worst of times. It will be time culpably wasted.