The EU’s Authoritarian Backlash

The great Professor Thomas Fazi writes:

The European Union is about to enter what could prove to be the most ominous phase in its troubled history. In a few weeks, Ursula von der Leyen’s new European Commission will officially take office, at which point she will have almost unfettered control over the bloc’s politics.

When von der Leyen introduced the new Commission’s lineup and organisational structure last month, even the typically Brussels-friendly mainstream media was forced to admit that what she had pulled off was nothing short of a coup. By placing loyalists in strategic roles, marginalising her critics, and establishing a complicated web of dependencies and overlapping duties that prevent any individual from gaining excessive influence, the Commission President has set the stage for an unprecedented supranational “power grab” that will further centralise authority in Brussels — specifically in the hands of von der Leyen herself.

She is busy transforming the Commission “from a collegial body into a presidential office”, noted Alberto Alemanno, EU law professor at HEC Paris. But this is the culmination of a longstanding process. The Commission has been stealthily expanding its powers for a long time, evolving from technical body into full-blooded political actor, resulting in a major transfer of sovereignty from the national to the supranational level at the expense of democratic control and accountability. But this “Commissionisation” is now being taken to a whole new level.

Consider the bloc’s foreign policy, and its defence and security policy in particular. It has gone relatively unnoticed that von der Leyen has used the Ukraine crisis to push for an expansion of the Commission’s top-down executive powers, leading to a de facto supranationalisation of the EU’s foreign policy (despite the fact that the Commission has no formal competence over such matters), while ensuring the bloc’s alignment with (or, rather, subordination to) the US-Nato strategy.

A signal aspect of this move has been the appointment to key defence and foreign policy roles of representatives from the Baltic States (total population: a bit more than 6 million), which have now been bumped up the political food chain because they share von der Leyen’s über-hawkish stance toward Russia. One particularly important figure is Andrius Kubilius, former Prime Minister of Lithuania, who, if confirmed, will take on the role of the EU’s first Commissioner for Defence. Kubilius, known for his close ties to US-funded NGOs and think tanks, will be responsible for the European defence industry and is expected to push for greater integration of military-industrial production. Furthermore, Kubilius served on the advisory board of the International Republican Institute and is a former member of the Atlantic Council’s EuroGrowth Initiative — two Atlanticist organisations whose primary objective is to promote US corporate and geopolitical interests around the world.

Kubilius’s nomination comes alongside that of Kaja Kallas, former Prime Minister of Estonia, to the role of European foreign and security policy chief; of Finland’s Henna Virkkunen to the role of executive vice-president and Commissioner for Technology; and of Latvia’s Valdis Dombrovskis, to Commissioner for Economy and Productivity.

It should come as no surprise that the Atlantic Council, which has distinguished itself for its very hawkish approach to the Russia-Ukraine conflict, has welcomed the formation of this “Baltic squad”, seeing it as a signal that the EU considers Russia to be its “primary threat”, and that the bloc will remain in lockstep with America on Ukraine and other key geopolitical issues, such as China.

In addition to reshaping the EU’s foreign policy, von der Leyen is also seeking to centralise the Union’s budget process — a move that would further consolidate her power. Under the current system, around two-thirds of the EU’s structural funds are covered by the bloc’s regional or social cohesion policy, whereby the money is given directly to regions, and largely managed by them, for the implementation of EU-approved projects. But von der Leyen now plans to radically upend the system.

The new budget plan for the period 2028-2034 proposes the creation of a single national pot for each member state, which will determine spending in sectors ranging from farm subsidies to social housing. Under von der Leyen’s proposed model, the money would no longer be given to local bodies but to national governments, conditional — and this is key — upon the implementation of reforms dictated by Brussels. This would essentially create an institutionalised system of financial blackmail, offering the Commission a powerful tool to pressure countries to conform to the EU’s agenda by withholding funds in case of non-compliance. Critics also argue that this is a smokescreen to cut existing programs and divert money towards new priorities, such as defence and industrial build-up.

The plan further calls for an ad hoc steering group that will handle the budget process. This group will comprise von der Leyen herself, the budget department, and the Secretariat General, which operates under the President’s direct authority. This centralisation will shift power away from regions, which often have a more conservative political leaning, and other Commission departments, into the hands of von der Leyen.

The President’s increasingly authoritarian approach was obvious during a confrontation at the European Parliament with Viktor Orbán, when von der Leyen broke diplomatic protocol to deliver a scathing attack on the Hungarian Prime Minister. She lambasted Orbán for maintaining diplomatic and economic relations with Russia, calling him “a security risk for everyone”, and implicitly criticised his attempts to try to broker a peace deal with Vladimir Putin. Orbán pushed back, calling out the catastrophic failure of the EU’s Ukraine strategy, and arguing that the European Commission should be “neutral” and a “guardian of the treaties”, and that von der Leyen was instead acting in an inappropriately political manner.

“Europe is not in Brussels, not in Strasbourg”, Orbán said. “Europe is in Rome, Berlin, Prague, Budapest, Vienna, Paris. It is an alliance of nation-states”. In substantive terms, Orbán is, of course, right: European nations and their peoples are the repositories of Europe’s cultural, civilisational and, dare I say, spiritual capital. In a fundamental sense they are “Europe”. But the truth is that the EU stopped being “an alliance of nation-states” a long time ago.

Over the past 15 years, the Commission has exploited Europe’s “permacrisis” to radically, yet surreptitiously, increase its influence over areas of competence that were previously deemed to be the preserve of national governments — from financial budgets and health policy to foreign affairs and defence. As a result, the EU, through the Commission, has effectively become a quasi-dictatorial sovereign power with the authority to impose its agenda on member states and their citizens, regardless of their democratic aspirations. This “competence coup” reached new heights under the first presidency of Ursula von der Leyen (2019-2024), in response to the Covid-19 and Ukraine crises — and is now on the verge of being institutionalised with her second term.

In many respects, the feeling is that the EU has definitively entered its late-Soviet stage. Faced with the bloc’s societal and economic breakdown, escalating geopolitical crises, collapsing democratic legitimacy and mounting “populist” uprisings, Europe’s political-economic elites have chosen to declare all-out war on what is left of democracy and national sovereignties. The bolts of the EU’s techno-authoritarian regime are being screwed tighter and tighter. For a glimmer of hope, we might turn to the history of the Soviet Union itself: 30 years ago, the authoritarian backlash to the crisis of the Soviet system simply accelerated the regime’s demise. Will the same prove true for the EU as well?