The EU is already struggling with how to get its largest-ever budget agreed, plug a massive financial hole for Ukraine and navigate geopolitical pressure from the U.S. and China. Now, it also faces being paralyzed by domestic political strife in the countries that collectively make up around 60% of its GDP and population.

“Everybody used to understand that we need to finish … a political agreement by the end of the year,” Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides told POLITICO in an interview on the sidelines of last week’s European Council, referring to the bloc’s fraught budget negotiations.

But the Spanish election means that will no longer be possible, he said. And next year, “it’s going to be France, Italy” and others going to the polls, Christodoulides added, predicting even more complications for the bloc.

The EU is facing an unprecedented dilemma: Its four biggest economies are all heading into elections or political upheaval, potentially hamstringing the bloc’s ability to get anything done.

Spain will go to the polls next month, with the center right and far right on track to take power. France is changing presidents in April, with polls favoring far-right figurehead Marine Le Pen. The Alternative for Germany is ascendant, putting Friedrich Merz’s chancellorship in doubt. And Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s unusually long-serving government is also heading to an election in 2027.

The consequences are already becoming clear.

The bloc’s latest summit offered an early taste of what lies ahead: After two days of talks, leaders failed to make headway on the €2 trillion budget and instead became embroiled in an unexpectedly bitter row on energy policy. The summit’s conclusions notably omitted any mention of finding consensus on the budget before the end of the year, with member countries resisting a push by European Council President Antonio Costa for an end-2026 deadline, although there are summits scheduled for November and December.

If those meetings fail to produce a deal, then the already fractious talks will spill over into 2027, when electoral battles are likely to loom even larger over negotiations — and governments may be increasingly reluctant to make the compromises needed to reach agreement.

Triple assault

The paralysis Brussels fears as Europe’s election cycle gathers pace is already beginning to take hold, with last week’s summit exposing how difficult it is becoming to forge the compromises the bloc needs.

Rather than strike any big deals (a Franco-German accord on cars was the one exception), the leaders used the gathering to dig in on entrenched positions and seek tactical advantages over rival camps.

The pessimism was palpable, according to six diplomats and officials POLITICO spoke to, with several warning the EU faces sharp headwinds in the coming months. All were granted anonymity to speak freely.

“Next year, it will be worse,” said one senior EU diplomat.

“It’s true, because of this calendar for the elections … in the next year it’ll be much more difficult in the member states and inside the [European] Parliament,” said Carla Tavares, a senior MEP with the Socialists and Democrats and co-lead on budget negotiations.

The bloc’s internal malaise could hardly come at a worse time.

From U.S. President Donald Trump’s undermining of the transatlantic alliance to an ever-widening trade imbalance with China, the EU is facing mounting geopolitical and economic pressures on multiple fronts.

“They seek our division. They want our division,” Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever told reporters at a late-night briefing during the summit, not mentioning names but referring to countries to the east and west of Brussels. “And they have, of course, points where they can hurt us.”

Former Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis, now a visiting fellow at Stanford University, was less circumspect. “Now we are under assault from three sides: from the U.S., Russia and China,” he said.

Washington is questioning the old alliances that have underpinned European security for generations. Moscow is waging a shadow war across Europe, from cyberattacks and sabotage to an attempted drone attack at Leipzig airport that Berlin blamed on the Kremlin. Beijing is tightening its grip on critical supply chains and flooding European markets with cheap exports.

Then there’s the Ukraine problem. The country is facing a budget shortfall of $30 billion to $35 billion next year, according to the IMF, with Russia battering its energy infrastructure ahead of a brutal winter. That’s despite the €90 billion the EU already agreed to stump up last year.

Landsbergis said the coming months are looking “extremely dire” for Kyiv. “Everything falls on European shoulders,” he said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy sounded a grim note at last week’s summit, telling reporters that if Ukraine falls, 20 million Ukrainians will flood into the EU. “Russia is killing us,” he said. “They don’t want to stop.”

One solution to Ukraine’s funding woes could be the €200 billion in Russian assets that have been immobilized indefinitely in Brussels-based financial depository Euroclear. But there is no sign of the EU finding common ground on that front either, with Belgium, which vetoed previous efforts to use the assets to help Ukraine, still refusing to budge.

“Nothing has changed,” Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said as he exited last week’s summit early.

Other potential solutions, such as issuing more joint debt, will require messy compromises — just as Brussels finds itself with even less room to maneuver.

Who you gonna call?

The EU’s problems go beyond its budget or individual policy files. With the political futures of several of Europe’s most powerful leaders in question, Brussels risks losing the stable alliances and long-serving national heavyweights needed to broker compromises.

“We now have Europe with no obvious leader,” another EU diplomat argued. Commission President Ursula “von der Leyen is powerful. But we do not have a Merkel or Mitterrand.”

French President Emmanuel Macron cannot constitutionally serve a third consecutive term and will have to find new digs in Paris after leaving the Élysée Palace in April. During a closed-door discussion at last week’s summit, Macron admitted he wouldn’t have a political mandate to sign a deal on the budget in his final months in power, four European diplomats said.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez is on track for defeat after eight years in power, according to polls. Spaniards will vote on Nov. 29, meaning Sanchez will be in full election mode during EU leaders’ meetings on Nov. 13 and Nov. 26.

Costa, who has stressed the need to reach an agreement on the EU’s budget by the end of 2026 to make sure it’s ready to go by 2028, waved off fears that the bloc’s next spate of elections could get in the way.

“We are living in 27 democracies,” he said on Friday. “More or less every month we have one election. If it’s about elections, we never could approve a new budget.” 

Regardless of the result, Madrid is not expected to form a government until January, which could derail the budget talks, according to two EU diplomats.

It’s anyone’s guess how long German Chancellor Merz has left in office. While the next federal election is not scheduled until 2029, the AfD’s growing strength and his own nosediving popularity complicate how much Merz might be willing to compromise.

Italy, too, is set for elections in October 2027. Another EU diplomat said they did not expect Meloni to wait that long, arguing she could call a vote much earlier.

There could be a sweet spot in January to get the budget over the line, a senior EU official suggested. It may be the last chance to strike a deal before Europe’s political upheaval makes compromise even harder to come by.

So far, the EU’s leaders have simply been “too slow,” said Siegfried Mureșan, the European People’s Party’s co-lead on the budget. “Time is running out.”

Nicholas Vinocur contributed reporting.

BRUSSELS — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned Friday that as many as 20 million Ukrainians could be forced to flee to Europe if his country falls to Russia.

“Russia is killing us,” Zelenskyy told reporters at a press conference on Friday during a summit of European Union leaders, adding Ukrainians were being “pushed” out of their country. “They [Russia] don’t want to stop.”

In the early days of Russia’s full-scale invasion, millions of Ukrainians fled their homes in Europe’s fastest and largest refugee crisis since World War II. Today, over 4 million Ukrainians live in EU countries under temporary protection status, with the largest populations in Germany, Poland and Czechia, according to Eurostat. 

Zelenskyy’s stark warning comes as Ukraine heads into a brutal fifth wartime winter under Russian bombardment. Kyiv faces a budget shortfall of $30 to $35 million next year, according to projections from the International Monetary Fund — even accounting for a €90 billion loan Brussels agreed to provide last year. 

The Ukrainian president traveled to Brussels to meet with European leaders and shore up financial support for his embattled country. While the EU is Ukraine’s staunchest backer, the bloc’s list of priorities is stacked with rising energy costs, looming elections, geopolitical crises and an impasse over its €2 trillion budget. 

BRUSSELS ― The EU should consider approving a three or four-year budget instead of trying to plan the bloc’s financial needs for seven years, the president of Cyprus told POLITICO.

“We’re discussing the budget in 2034 and now we’re in 2026,” Nikos Christodoulides said in an interview on the sidelines of Thursday’s summit of EU leaders in Brussels.

A three or four-year budget might be “easier” for some member countries to swallow, he suggested. “Why not open the political discussion?”

“You don’t know what’s going to be the situation in 2030, 2031,” he added. “I mean, look what happened with Covid, with the Ukrainian war … It’s not possible to declare all your priorities today.”

The EU’s seven-year, roughly €2 trillion budget has to be agreed by all 27 member countries but has two deeply entrenched camps on either side: The so-called frugals, comprised of Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and others who want a smaller budget, and the friends of cohesion, a loose grouping of 17 countries that do not want major cuts to agriculture and regional funds.

An EU official close to the budget negotiations said the idea of a shorter timeframe was weird.

EU law allows a budget of “at least five years,” though every budget has been seven years since 1993.

The odds of the budget being approved by the end of the year are increasingly slim, with an election in Spain in November, which polls indicate Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez will lose to the center-right and far-right, potentially blowing out the timeline for consensus to 2027.

“Everybody used to understand that we need to finish … a political agreement by the end of the year,” Christodoulides said. “Now, with the situation in Spain, elections there,” that is less likely to happen.

Christodoulides also said he expected the budget to be cut by around a 10th compared to the budget proposed by the European Commission. Last week, the Irish government proposed an 8% cut compared to the Commission’s proposal.

“I think we may end up on 10% or 11%,” he said. “Double digits.”

Zoya Sheftalovich contributed reporting.

BRUSSELS — European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen wrote to European leaders urging a series of measures to respond to illegal migration ahead of this week’s summit in Brussels.

Among the measures von der Leyen called for were establishing an emergency response framework when migration has been weaponized, expanding the powers of the EU’s border agency Frontex, and increasing the bloc’s deportation rate. The letter follows a migration crisis in the Spanish exclave of Ceuta over the summer, which saw around 70,000 migrants arrive from Morocco.

“We must prevent such threats and make clear that we will never compromise the protection of our external borders: no state or non-state actor will be allowed to exploit our rules or our values to destabilise the Union,” von der Leyen wrote.

The letter, sent to all 27 leaders of EU member countries, will inform a discussion about migration scheduled for Friday, the second day of this week’s European Council summit.

The EU approved its biggest package of sanctions against Russia since the start of Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, targeting the Kremlin’s ability to make missiles.

The bloc’s foreign ministers approved the package during a meeting in Luxembourg, adding 1,600 new listings “targeting Russia’s military-industrial complex,” the EU’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas said on X.

“This is the single largest expansion of our sanctions list since Russia started its war,” she added. “More than half are connected to the production chain for ballistic missiles.”

The new listings follow the removal of Alisher Usmanov and Mikhail Fridman, two of Russia’s wealthiest men, from the sanctions list last month after heated, down-to-the-wire talks between EU capitals.

Monday’s approval was a formality after EU countries agreed on the sanctions list in earlier talks.

“We are making it significantly harder, slower and more expensive for Russia to produce the weapons it uses to kill Ukrainians,” Kallas said.

The sanctions list will last for three years before it needs to be renewed.

European governments rebuked U.S. President Donald Trump’s plan to import hundreds of thousands of tons of Russian diesel, and vowed to keep isolating Moscow and supporting Ukraine as it heads into a brutal wartime winter.

Trump said over the weekend he would import 300,000 tons of Russian diesel, weeks ahead of U.S. midterm elections in which the Republicans are polling badly and in which energy prices and cost-of-living concerns are expected to play a major role.

But his announcement — which included a claim that Russia and Ukraine had agreed an “energy ceasefire” and a call for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to step down — drew skepticism and scorn from European capitals and the EU.

“This deal doesn’t help neither the price of oil products nor the unity of the transatlantic community,” Lithuanian Foreign Minister Kęstutis Budrys said at a gathering of the bloc’s foreign ministers on Monday morning, adding “it is not the European way.”

Irish Foreign Minister Helen McEntee called Trump’s announcement of a deal with Moscow “concerning,” while German Minister of State for Europe Gunther Krichbaum said every dollar spent on Russian energy funded the purchase of weapons used against Kyiv.

The EU’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, reminded Washington that “Russia has started this war. We should not forget this.”

On Monday, Zelenskyy suggested that Washington had other motives for pursuing an energy agreement with Moscow, arguing that the Russian fuel involved would make little difference to global supplies.

Speaking at the Warsaw Security Forum, Zelenskyy said proposed Russian diesel deliveries were insignificant compared with global monthly consumption of roughly 120 million tons.

“I don’t think that this will have a tangible impact,” Zelenskyy said. “I believe that there are different rationales behind this decision.”

Zelenskyy also suggested Washington should consider an alternative arrangement with Kyiv. “Why doesn’t America then conclude a diesel deal with Ukraine?” he asked. “Let’s propose a diesel deal with Ukraine.”

He also revealed that Kyiv had not been informed beforehand of Trump’s announcement that he had secured an energy ceasefire. “No, we did not know about that,” Zelenskyy said. “We’ve learned that from the media as well.”

On their way into their meeting, the EU’s foreign ministers remained united in their insistence that increasing pressure on Moscow was the only way forward.

“Obviously our position has not changed — pressure on Russia, sanctions, support to Ukraine, Russia’s isolation is the way to peace,” Latvian Foreign Minister Baiba Braže said.

The British Foreign Office’s minister of state Stephen Doughty said London was “not planning to follow suit with” purchasing Russian energy and would ratchet up “economic pressure” on Moscow.

“Pressure, pressure, pressure on Russia,” Lithuania’s Budrys said.

What ceasefire?

Trump’s claim that Ukraine and Russia had agreed to an “energy ceasefire” drew confusion from Kyiv and its allies over the weekend, with Zelenskyy saying the truce and its terms were “news” to him but that he would support it nonetheless — provided Moscow followed suit.

Just hours after Trump’s announcement, however, Russian bombs fell on Ukrainian power plants, causing widespread blackouts.

Kyiv is bracing for its fifth winter since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, which Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said last month could prove “tragically critical” for Ukraine due to Russia’s near-constant strikes on infrastructure.

At the opening session of the Warsaw Security Forum on Monday, Tusk slammed “anyone who is trying to introduce any symmetries, who suggests it is Ukraine responsible for the war,” saying doing so “gives a valuable present, gift, to the aggressor, to Putin.”

Kallas said any ceasefire shouldn’t “only apply to the refineries, where Ukraine has one and Russia has plenty,” adding that would “definitely [be] in the benefit of the Russians.”

She also called on Washington to join Brussels and London in imposing harsh sanctions on Russia. “Of course the U.S. is our biggest ally,” she said, “but our message is clear: If we want to end this war, the only way we can do this is putting more pressure on Russia.”

Ukraine’s financial needs are set to come up at a meeting of European heads of state and government on Thursday in Brussels. The IMF estimated that Kyiv will face a financing gap of $30 billion to $35 billion next year.

“Ukraine will be front and center at this week’s European Council,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a statement Sunday night after a phone call with Zelenskyy, adding the war was entering a “new, grimmer phase.”

Zoya Sheftalovich contributed reporting from Brussels. Nick Vinocur contributed reporting from Warsaw.

BRUSSELS ― EU governments expect the proposed size of the bloc’s next seven-year budget to be slashed by €100 billion to €200 billion from the previous plan announced in June, 12 EU diplomats told POLITICO.

Ireland, which holds the presidency of the Council of the EU and is steering the talks, will unveil the proposal on Saturday, setting the scene for fraught discussions among EU leaders at their summit next week.

The bloc is split between so-called frugal countries — Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and others — that want to slash several hundred billion euros from the nearly €2 trillion proposal on the table, and a rival coalition of southern and eastern countries, the Friends of Cohesion, that opposes the cuts.

Dublin is expected to cut the budget by between €100 billion and €200 billion as a goodwill gesture to the German camp, the diplomats said. However, the Irish plan to shield agriculture and regional spending from major cuts as a concession to the Friends of Cohesion.

At next week’s summit, EU leaders will react to the latest numbers, known as the “negobox” because it gives governments something to negotiate on, and signal early whether an agreement is possible by the end of the year.

Governments are rushing to secure a deal among themselves before national elections in France, Poland and Italy in 2027 threaten to derail the negotiations.

As a neutral broker in the discussions, Ireland hasn’t publicly disclosed its intentions on the negotiating document. 

Dublin’s European Affairs Minister of State Thomas Byrne told the European Parliament earlier this week that EU member countries have made “substantial progress” toward an agreement. But he warned: “we cannot satisfy everybody.”

Germany and its allies criticized the previous Cyprus Council presidency for cutting only €32 billion in the last negobox in June.

Ireland’s looming cuts

The frugals’ calls for budget savings have ignited fears among the Friends of Cohesion. 

The 17 countries — including heavyweights Italy, Spain and Poland — issued a joint statement last week opposing cuts to agriculture and cohesion. 

In a concession to this camp, Ireland is expected to propose budget savings in other policy areas. Governments are bracing for major reductions to the Global Europe fund, the EU’s €200 billion pot of development aid and external relations cash, and the €410 billion European Competitiveness Fund to boost the bloc’s industrial capacity. 

Cuts to administrative costs, with €118 billion earmarked for the EU’s institutions and staff, are also popular among EU governments, though they will yield fewer savings.

However, frugals have warned against shielding agriculture and cohesion from a smaller budget. They argue instead that more money should be steered away from traditional priorities towards new challenges such as defense and competitiveness.

“We are very concerned that Ireland would decide to smash funding for research and external action, which is a major issue for development, our economic interests and migration,” said one EU diplomat, granted anonymity like others in this article to speak frankly about their expectations for the sensitive negotiations.

Tax game

Another sensitive issue is EU-wide taxes — known as “own resources” — to finance the budget and reduce national contributions.

In 2025, the European Commission proposed five new levies that are expected to generate €66 billion per year. During negotiations, governments opposed levies that would overwhelmingly affect their economies.

Several European governments lobbied Ireland to remove a corporate tax, known as CORE, that is unpopular across the bloc. But Dublin is expected to refrain from doing so, and keep the Commission’s five levies in the negobox.

To make CORE more palatable, Dublin might exempt small and medium enterprises from the scope of the levy. It could also make tweaks to a tobacco levy that is opposed by many.

Instead, the European Parliament’s proposed taxes on digital levies, online gambling and crypto firms are expected to be left out entirely from the negobox.  

An EU diplomat criticized these incremental changes as “disappointing and minimal.”