BRUSSELS — Germany, France and at least six other EU countries are pushing against “associate membership” as the name for closer EU ties with Canada, six diplomats involved in the negotiations said.
The label is one of the main sticking points in talks over a joint declaration setting areas of deeper cooperation between Brussels and Ottawa ahead of the EU-Canada summit in Montreal on Oct. 29-30, the six diplomats and two EU officials told POLITICO. They were granted anonymity to discuss the sensitive negotiations.
The diplomats said the objections center on the wording of “associate membership,” not the broader goal of closer ties.
Five weeks after European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen first proposed Canada becoming an “associate member” of the EU in her State of the Union speech — to the surprise of both Ottawa and EU capitals — and one week out from the summit itself, the disagreements show the term remains a political and messaging hurdle.
The EU “is really keen to have close cooperation with Canada,” said Bernd Lange, chair of the European Parliament’s trade committee. But, he added, he too would avoid using the term “associate membership,” as it leaves too much room for confusion with other forms of EU partnerships, such as association agreements.
Germany is pushing hardest to remove the label from the draft declaration, five of the EU diplomats said, while France, Italy and Belgium were among those expressing skepticism about the phrasing.
The central concern among the capitals that object to the term is that the EU is labeling the relationship before agreeing what it would mean. They argue the name should have been defined before negotiations with Canada began, four diplomats said, with two others adding that the objecting capitals are annoyed that von der Leyen proposed the label without first consulting national governments.
“We’ve definitely put the cart before the horse,” one diplomat said. “We’re announcing something and then figuring out how to flesh it out.”
A representative for the German Permanent Representation to the EU declined to comment.
The European Commission will engage with skeptical capitals and work on acceptable language, an EU official said, adding that they believe the countries’ doubts stem from not yet understanding what the proposal means in concrete terms.
There is no disagreement over the aim of strengthening an already close relationship, including economic and defense cooperation, international engagement and institutional links, the official stressed. “What matters is what we do, not what we call it.”
What’s in a name?
The label aims to describe the EU-Canada relationship as closer than Brussels’ partnerships with other countries, without making Canada a member of the bloc, one of the diplomats said. Canada cannot become a formal member, as the EU’s founding documents limit that status geographically to Europe.
The distinction matters because existing arrangements with European neighbors, including the U.K., Switzerland and countries in the European Economic Area, center largely on access to the EU’s internal market. Canada, on another continent, is not seeking the same model or the four freedoms of movement, the diplomat said.
The idea is to identify practical areas for cooperation first, then decide whether new treaties or formal negotiations are needed, the same diplomat said.
Work on six priority areas is expected to begin after the summit, with progress reviewed after six months and then a proper stock-take one year later at the next EU-Canada summit, which will be held in Europe.
The stock-take would consider whether Canada has moved closer to the EU by becoming a full member of Horizon Europe and Erasmus, is building undersea cables and stockpiling critical raw materials with the EU, and is exploring pension-fund investment. If Canada meets those criteria, it could become the EU’s first associate member, the diplomat said.
The diplomat described the idea as an experiment, adding that “Canada might be the only one” to ever get associate membership of the EU.
The plan reflects changing calculations on both sides. Canada has long depended heavily on trade with the United States, but tariffs and political pressure from Washington have sharpened concerns about that reliance. Prime Minister Mark Carney wants to diversify trade and modernize the country’s infrastructure, including energy links that largely run north to south.
For the EU, a closer partnership with Canada is part of a broader effort to build relationships as pressure from the United States, China and Russia grows. The summit is intended to give the partnership a more distinctive political framework.
The declaration is still being revised, with EU ambassadors due to discuss it again on Monday. One of the EU officials cautioned that several parts of the declaration still had comments outstanding.
Another controversial element concerns energy cooperation, with Austria pushing back against any mention of deepening nuclear ties, while France, Romania, Slovakia and some other countries support its inclusion.
A spokesperson from the Canadian mission to the EU did not respond to POLITICO’s request for comment.
ROME — Former paratrooper General Roberto Vannacci portrays himself on social media as a Roman legionary and charioteer. He has declared he prefers women “without skirts” and posted an AI-generated image of a female junior minister with exaggerated cleavage.
None of these projections of masculinity and anti-woke culture are clumsy gaffes. The insurgent far-right star of Italian politics is making a deliberate play to the so-called manosphere to transform himself from an internet provocateur into a heavyweight political force.
For Italy’s first female prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, Vannacci now poses a serious problem as she needs to decide whether he is an asset or a liability. With elections expected next spring, his National Future party is polling at about 8%, making him a potentially crucial factor in building a right-wing coalition.
“It is disgusting to think you can manipulate the image of a woman for such deplorable propaganda,” the center-right junior minister in Meloni’s coalition whose image was manipulated, Matilde Siracusano, told POLITICO. “I don’t think we have ever sunk this low, especially from someone aspiring to be a national political leader.”
Vannacci’s provocations may look like familiar trolling from a politician who has built his reputation on saying the unsayable. But behind them lies a broader political project, tapping into the grievances of young men who feel alienated by feminism and progressive culture.
Emanuele Pozzolo, a National Future parliamentarian who defected from Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, believes young men have become increasingly constrained in their relationships with women.
“I think young Western men are very often almost castrated in their instinct for dealing with women,” he said, arguing that even legitimate romantic approaches risk being treated as aggression.
“The cultural problem is that sometimes everything seems to be harassment, everything abuse, everything violence,” he added, while stressing that genuine abuse must be punished.
Mediterranean patriarchy
Vannacci combines inflammatory online messaging and an alpha-male persona with a political program that promises to restore traditional roles for men and women. National Future even has a name for its preferred social order: “Mediterranean patriarchy.”
Its political program calls for the formation of “strong men” capable of controlling their emotions and passions, protecting women and sacrificing themselves for society. It opposes the recently introduced crime of femicide, condemns feminism, and declares the defense of life “from conception to natural death” and the “natural family” among its non-negotiable values.
The architect of this vision and principal author of the program is Lorenzo Gasperini, a conservative Catholic philosophy teacher from Tuscany, who has opposed vaccines and abortion rights on social media and blamed feminism for violence against women.
The result is a political offering that combines different traditions: conservative Catholic ideas about family and sexuality, older Italian ideas of virility and the much newer online politics of male grievance.
Giorgia Meloni speaks at a press conference in Prague on Sept. 29, 2026. | Milan Kammermayer/AFP via Getty Images
The manifesto seeks to put traditional family values into practice with proposals to pay parents who leave work to raise children, and reward parents of large families with tax exemption and public sector jobs.
Some proposals echo Benito Mussolini’s fascist-era “Battle for Births,” which offered similar incentives while promoting motherhood as a patriotic duty.
Luca Sforzini, a former Vannacci ideologue who has since broken with him, said the Mediterranean label was a clever piece of marketing.
“It’s like talking about the Mediterranean diet,” he told POLITICO. “You think of Italian food, mozzarella, tomatoes, olive oil.” The result, he said, was to conceal a patriarchal model with men above women behind “bucolic, positive images. It’s monstrous,” he said.
Pozzolo rejected the suggestion that the program advocates for male supremacy.
“It is exactly the opposite,” he said. “When we talk about Mediterranean patriarchy, the main idea is to recover, preserve and pass on the responsibilities of being a man within the family and society.” Men, he argued, had a duty to show women respect, love and protection, while rejecting violence or coercive control.
He defended the “without skirts” remark as “extremely funny” — picking up on a reference to Deputy Prime Minister Antonio Tajani advocating long skirts — and not remotely offensive, comparing Vannacci’s ability to connect with ordinary Italians to Silvio Berlusconi’s.
At a recent rally in the Umbrian city of Orvieto, Vannacci defended the Mediterranean patriarchy concept as not “oppression and possession” but “duty, fidelity, sacrifice,” and said it was the family model that had allowed “us to prevail over the last 2,000 years.”
Elisa Ercoli, president of the women’s rights organization Differenza Donna, condemned the program as “a return to the supremacy of the white, cisgender alpha male, and the woman as his handmaiden.”
Appealing to alphas
Vannacci, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, became a media sensation in 2023 with the self-published book “The World Upside Down,” a broadside against immigration, feminism and homosexuality. In it, he told gay people: “You are not normal, get over it.”
Lionized by fans as a defender of common sense against progressive politics, he received more than half a million votes as a candidate for the anti-immigration League in the 2024 European elections, before founding National Future in February.
Polling analysis suggests that about 62% of National Future’s prospective voters are male, including strong support among manual workers and the unemployed.
Vannacci speaks during the National Future’s constituent assembly in Rome on June 14, 2026. | Filippo Monteforte/AFP via Getty Images
Pozzolo denied National Future was deliberately targeting male voters, insisting the party’s ambition was to reach Italians of all backgrounds who felt unrepresented.
Federica Formato, a lecturer at Brighton University in the U.K., who studies gender and the far right, said Vannacci was “testing the waters” to see whether he can reach a younger male audience, tapping into what she described as the “aggrieved entitlement” of young men.
A career soldier, he has repeatedly portrayed himself through images of physical strength, competition and military prowess. On social media, AI-generated versions proliferate of Vannacci as an ancient Roman in scenes recalling the Ridley Scott epic Gladiator.
For Formato, the Roman imagery projects “virility and hyper-masculinity,” while Vannacci’s army background itself helps construct the image of an “alpha male.”
Humor, memes and deliberate provocation are particularly effective with a younger online audience, Formato said, allowing relatively complex ideological messages to be reduced to instantly comprehensible images. “He is not naive,” she said. “He says things to provoke and get more attention.”
That presents Meloni with a headache. Vannacci’s party is drawing voters from her Brothers of Italy and Matteo Salvini’s League, while offering a more uncompromising platform on immigration, social issues and foreign policy.
Yet Vannacci has opened the door to an alliance with Meloni if she needs his votes. He has described National Future as a natural partner for the center-right, while insisting that any deal must respect his party’s principles. With Italy’s new electoral law offering a parliamentary majority bonus to coalitions winning at least 42 percent of the vote, those votes could matter.
That presents Meloni with an uncomfortable choice: Keep Vannacci outside the coalition, or bring into her government a movement whose appeal rests partly on the grievances of men who believe feminism has gone too far.
For Formato, Vannacci is exploiting a space in Italian politics that has so far lacked a figure capable of turning those grievances into an organized political constituency.
Vannacci, with his promises to restore traditional masculinity, appears determined to occupy it.
BRUSSELS — Preparations are underway to hold a March 2027 meeting of EU leaders in Rome, before Italian elections due next year.
“Preparations in view of holding the March 2027 EUCO in Rome are ongoing,” an EU official, granted anonymity to speak about the plan, confirmed on Monday.
The plan, first reported by Italian newspaper La Stampa, would see EU leaders gather in the Italian capital to mark the 70th anniversary of the signing of the Treaties of Rome in 1957.
The plan was put forward by European Council President António Costa, two EU officials said.
Hosting EU leaders in Rome would put Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in the international spotlight in an election year, although no date has been set for the ballot.
The Italian government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The move would be exceptional, as formal European Councils are held in Brussels. Under the European Council’s rules, relocating a summit requires unanimous agreement among member states at ministerial or ambassadorial level, meaning a single country could block the move. No final decision has yet been announced.
EU leaders gathered in Rome in March 2017 to mark the 60th anniversary of the treaties, but that was a commemorative meeting rather than a formal European Council summit. A regular summit that month took place in Brussels.
When Donald Trump returned to the White House in 2025, he seemed like the leader, or at least the dominant figure, of a globalized version of the MAGA movement, a worldwide network of far-right parties sometimes described as the “nationalist international.” We can make a long list, starting with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France, the not-quite-neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany, or AfD, and Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, along with other previously-fringe parties now creeping toward the mainstream in many different places.
If it strikes you that the term “nationalist international” contains its own contradiction, by the way, you’re miles ahead of JD Vance and Stephen Miller and the rest of the Trumpian pseudo-intellectuals, who still haven’t figured that out.
That vision of a MAGA-centric new world order was always an illusion, although it began with some fragments of plausibility and was enormously amplified by the Trump distortion effect, meaning our president’s uncanny ability to soak up media attention and make himself the main character of every narrative. Now that illusion has melted away like an ice cube in Europe’s catastrophic summer (where I personally experienced a 104℉/40℃ day in Berlin, the highest recorded temperature in that city’s history).
Indeed, the world now faces another apparent contradiction, or at least a historical irony. If Trump still looms over the American landscape like an unkillable ogre in a third-rate AI fairytale, he is all but finished as a political force. He has done more damage to his own country than anyone since Jefferson Davis, his disillusioned supporters are deserting him, he is universally despised around the world and he’s headed for a potentially historic electoral defeat in November.
Europe’s far right, on the other hand, is doing fine without him. It’s about a 50/50 proposition that by the end of this decade the four largest nations in Europe will be governed by right-wing populist parties. All of them at some time sought inspiration and financial support from Trump and his Mar-a-Lago hangers-on, and pretty nearly all of them have now ghosted him entirely, and pretend they never really knew the guy: “Neues Handy, wer bist du?”
Trump’s second term began with a triumphal sense that a hard-right “vibe shift” was transforming not just America but the world (which Americans are always ready to perceive as a picturesque but unreliable subsidiary). Those early months of 2025 were undeniably terrifying and inordinately destructive, but they were also ridiculous. In retrospect, from half a tick into the future, those guys were immeasurably high on their own supply, based on a narrow electoral victory over incompetent and disorganized opposition.
Early in Trump’s second term, Vance, Marco Rubio, Elon Musk and others were dispatched to various world capitals to urge support for right-wing candidates or to deliver preposterous blood-and-soil history lessons straight out of wingnut “Great Books” podcasts.
As part of that extended touchdown dance, Vance, Marco Rubio, Elon Musk and others were dispatched to various world capitals to urge support for right-wing causes and candidates, or to deliver preposterous blood-and-soil history lessons straight out of wingnut “Great Books” podcasts. That tendency culminated in the now-legendary 2025 National Security Strategy, a document that offers most presidential administrations a chance to deliver boilerplate language about shared values, human rights and democracy.
Not this time. As I wrote last year, the NSS featured a poisonous combination of “Great Replacement-fueled fanboy enthusiasm for far-right parties” and “unhinged and unconcealed racist panic.” Europe was losing its cultural identity, the document warned, and faced the “stark prospect of civilizational erasure” as well as the (entirely imaginary) possibility that “certain NATO members will become majority non-European.”
That was one of many vainglorious MAGA failures to read the room, on an international scale. Right-wing European politicians traffic in similar rhetoric, to be sure. But nobody on that continent, of any dispensation, enjoys receiving arrogant lectures on history and civilization from Americans, and even extremist parties like Reform UK or the AfD prefer to cloak the bigotry in layers of euphemisms and some degree of plausible deniability.
In a long and painful video interview with Economist editor Zanny Minton Beddoes published this past week, for instance, AfD co-leader Alice Weidel professed horror and amazement when asked whether her party contains overtly racist or proto-fascist elements. As Weidel took pains to point out, she is married to a Swiss woman of Sri Lankan ancestry, which presumably cleanses her of any bad intentions when she rejects “gender theory” or insists that all the Syrians and Afghans now living in Germany must leave.
That interview is an instructive experience in other ways. Beddoes repeatedly asks Weidel why she can’t just be a normal budget-cutting conservative, of a variety less frightening to readers of The Economist. Oh, but she absolutely is, Weidel insists, lulling her interlocutor for a while with prodigiously dull business-school chatter before returning to her central theme: Germany’s financial woes will be cured, somehow, by expelling the Muslims.
To return to our main theme, Weidel mentions Trump only twice, with evident distaste, in that hour-long conversation. That’s not exactly news at this point. By the time the above-mentioned NSS was published last December, Europe’s far-right populists had already reached the conclusion that Trump was a loser. Or, in the more delicate phrasing of Armida van Rij in the newsletter Strategic Europe, that “Trump’s repeated threats to invade Greenland, his attacks on the pope and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, and his trade war on the EU have made the friendship electorally costly.”
That became obvious to the entire world last April, when MAGA darling Viktor Orbán was routed in Hungary’s election after JD Vance’s campaign visit provided the “political kiss of death,” in the words of Daniel Hegedüs of the Institute for European Policy in Berlin. That was the same month, as it happens, when Meloni publicly broke with Trump over the latter’s criticisms of Pope Leo XIV.
But Marc Bassets of the Spanish newspaper El País identifies the real turning point a full year earlier, in the Canadian elections of April 2025, when Trump’s threats and mockery drove mainstream liberal Mark Carney to an unexpected victory over a MAGA-friendly opponent who seemed to hold the advantage.
That result, coming just three months into Trump’s term, “became an example closely watched in Europe,” Bassets writes, which was replayed in several subsequent elections. Then came Trump’s threatened annexation of Greenland, his raid on Venezuela and his disastrous war with Iran, all of which were blatant violations of national sovereignty, the core principle of Europe’s new right.
Like Trump’s capricious tariff war and his public feuds with Meloni and the pope, this reflected the president’s profound ignorance about the world and a fundamental mismatch between the grandiose neo-imperialism of MAGA foreign policy and a European far right that “increasingly presents itself as a rebellion against Americanization” and wants no part of world maps plastered with the Stars and Stripes or arbitrarily renamed bodies of water.
All of this reflects a fundamental mismatch between the grandiose neo-imperialism of MAGA foreign policy and a European far right that “increasingly presents itself as a rebellion against Americanization” and wants no part of world maps plastered with the Stars and Stripes.
That quotation comes from Robert Benson of the centrist think tank Center for American Progress, who argues that the Trump administration “has mistaken cultural affinity for strategic alignment” in empowering political parties like the AfD that may “share mutual enemies” with MAGA — such as multiculturalism, racial justice, LGBTQ rights and climate policy — but “do not share American interests, or even the interests of this administration.”
As Europe’s far-right leaders draw closer to holding power (or already do, as in Meloni’s case), Trump’s support “appears almost as a liability,” as Dominique Moïsi of the Paris think tank Institut Montaigne tells El País. Trump has long been massively unpopular among European voters across the political spectrum, and his approval ratings cratered to new lows after the Iran war drove energy prices into the stratosphere. Across Europe, the U.S. is now viewed less favorably than either Russia or China, a remarkable accomplishment whose long-term effects are impossible to calculate.
In France, Marine Le Pen is focused on winning next year’s presidential election and has conspicuously avoided saying Trump’s name throughout his second term. She leaves that to her deputy and potential future prime minister, Jordan Bardella, who has repeatedly castigated Trump’s “totally erratic” war with Iran: “No one can say what the ideological backbone of this war is, a war whose end seems nowhere in sight.”
Meloni recently became the longest-serving Italian prime minister since World War II — an extraordinary fact in itself — and over her four years in office has gone from “Trump whisperer” to the evident conclusion that Trump is a “toxic asset,” in Bassets’ phrase. (The “Trump whisperer” label has also been affixed to former British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and current German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, with dire political consequences.)
Even the AfD, despite its aforementioned “cultural affinity” with MAGA and a mutual eagerness to throw Ukraine overboard and make nice with Vladimir Putin, has evidently concluded that glowing endorsements from the likes of Musk, Vance and Rubio are a mixed blessing when the U.S. “has become so unpopular in Europe that being close to Trump is not a source of legitimacy,” in Moïsi’s words. Weidel has reportedly described the Iran war as a “catastrophe” in private meetings, while Björn Höcke, the most inflammatory figure on the AfD’s right flank, has mocked mainstream politicians as “German-speaking Americans” and demanded the withdrawal of U.S. troops from German soil.
All of this points us toward the inescapable conclusion that Donald Trump was never the leader of anything. He was an empty vessel into which hundreds of millions of people in America and around the world poured their confusion, rage and desire. He became a global symbol of the failure of liberal democracy, but was not the reason for it. As he fades from the scene, the global crisis he came to represent is more urgent than ever.
Donald Trump was never the leader of anything. He was an empty vessel into which hundreds of millions of people in America and around the world poured their confusion, rage and desire. He was a global symbol of the failure of liberal democracy, not the reason for it.
As Italian journalist Mattia Ferraresi recently observed in a New York Times panel discussion, “Mainstream liberal politics, in both its left- and right-wing versions, failed to deliver on its promises, not only in terms of welfare and economic growth but also in the more complex realm of identity and meaning.” What we see around the world today, in the ascendant far right and in a newly radicalized generation of young people from Paris to New York, are “expressions of the same disillusionment with liberalism and its policies.”
It has become almost irresistible to compare this era to the 1930s, when “bourgeois democracy” collapsed in Europe, plunging the world into murderous darkness. If the parallels are clear enough, the world is a very different place in this century and the outcome does not have to be the same. The future remains unwritten, and Donald Trump will not be its author.
PARIS — President Emmanuel Macron promised that rioters who “destroyed” things will face consequences as he addressed the nation on Sunday after a weekend of massive unrest across France.
Hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets nationwide on Saturday, with students joining trade unions and members of the public to protest the cost of living. While thousands protested peacefully, footage of mayhem including public buildings being set on fire, stores being looted and clashes with riot police drew widespread condemnation in France and abroad.
“Those who destroyed must pay; those who looted must reimburse,” Macron said.
The French government has been accused of mismanaging and underestimating the protests, with calls for Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez to resign emerging both on the left and the far right.
According to the latest figures from the French interior ministry, some 2,000 people were arrested during the turmoil. Police, firefighters and demonstrators suffered injuries as the situation unraveled.
Serge Papin, France’s minister for small business, will meet with company reps at the Ministry of Economy tomorrow to assess the damage and suggest assistance for businesses that were affected.
Macron said he was awaiting “clear answers” on why the protests turned violent. The French president accused “troublemakers from far-left splinter groups, joined by numerous delinquents” of engaging in “unbridled violence.”
With six months to go before next year’s presidential election in France, the events of Saturday quickly took on a political dimension.
Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu also accused the “ultra-left” of fomenting the violence, alleging that the France Unbowed movement and its presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon had played an “important role” within a “far-left network” driving the unrest.
Mélenchon, along with left-wing representatives from several other parties, joined Saturday’s protests and encouraged his supporters to attend, although condemning looting and violence. He said accusations that he was responsible for the mayhem were aimed at weakening his presidential bid, and accused Macron of “letting the situation deteriorate” without offering solutions to appease the anger.
Mélenchon is currently in a close race with center-left candidate Raphaël Glucksmann and center-right candidate Edouard Philippe to clinch second place behind far-right frontrunner Marine Le Pen in next year’s election. The top two candidates in the election move to a runoff if no candidate wins a majority of votes in the first round.
“At stake, too, are France’s image, its credibility, and its influence around the world,” Philippe said ahead of Macron’s statement. “These images of violence have consequences that extend far beyond our borders.”
Le Pen and her far-right National Rally have brandished the violent footage to pitch herself as the candidate of an “appeased France.” The National Rally accused Macron and his government of being the “party of chaos,” and Mélenchon’s France Unbowed of “legitimizing violence.”
The protesters had “legitimate social demands,” Le Pen said. “The French people are fed up with being caught between the government’s austerity measures and heavy-handed taxation, and the insurrection activists.”
With the U.S. midterms around the corner on Nov. 3, President Donald Trump seized on the violence to blame migration. “France is burning! The immigration of people from an entirely different world, people with hatred in their hearts, has shattered that once great country,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform Sunday afternoon.
BRUSSELS — There is “no logic” to U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent moves to take Russia’s side in the Ukraine war, and he should remember his true allies lie in Europe, Finland’s prime minister said Thursday.
In an exclusive interview with POLITICO, Petteri Orpo summed up the shock and dismay among Ukraine’s allies after Trump announced a diesel deal with Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, and reportedly imposed limits on Kyiv’s access to the military intelligence and technology needed to counter Russian attacks.
“My message to him [Trump] is that we are allies,” Orpo said on the sidelines of the European Council summit in Brussels. “We are in NATO. And what is the biggest threat against NATO? It’s Russia — and that is why there is no logic. I don’t have answers. I have many questions.”
Trump alarmed European leaders and horrified Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy this week by announcing a deal to release Russian diesel onto the market, apparently in an attempt to lower fuel costs for American consumers. Ukraine’s allies fear the move will boost Russia’s revenue from fuel sales, giving it more money to spend on war.
Finland is an influential voice among Ukraine’s European allies: The country has the EU’s longest land border with Russia, at 1,300 km, and its president, Alexander Stubb — a talented sportsman — won Trump’s respect on the golf course, giving him leeway to try to influence White House policy.
Orpo said if he were in Trump’s position “I would not trust Putin.” Zelenskyy has said he fears Ukraine is losing the U.S. to Russia’s side in the war, warning the Americans and their president are on “the wrong side of history”. Orpo said he agreed: “I think he is, and they are.”
Ukraine now faces grave danger, he said. “The sky is open for Russia, there are missiles. They need more military support, air defense,” Orpo said. “Also, the situation is dangerous because of the latest deal between Trump and Putin.”
Midterms move
One possible reason Trump turned against Ukraine with that diesel deal is the U.S. midterm elections on Nov. 3. “I think it is because of domestic reasons — elections are coming,” Orpo said. “But we need to get them back.” Nonetheless, he said the amount of Russian diesel that could be sold to the U.S. is too small to make much of a difference for American consumers.
Whatever happens, EU leaders must equip Ukraine with weapons and cash, whether or not they can rely on the U.S., he said. “Today, we need to find a solution [on] how to support Ukraine, how to finance Ukraine in this winter, but also in next year,” Orpo said. “It’s crucial.”
Finland and Sweden are among the countries pushing the European Commission to reopen the fractious debate over how to use Russia’s financial assets currently frozen in European banks, especially in Belgium, which blocked a deal to raid the funds last year over legal concerns.
“The best solution would be that we will have a solution on how to use frozen assets,” he said. “We have to try again,” Orpo said.
Finland has asked the Commission “to continue work with Belgium, and the other member states, to find a solution.” He said he hoped to hear an update from the Commission during the summit. “It’s a better solution than using our own money.”
Budget blues
European leaders are arguing this week over their long-term budget, which Brussels officials want to finalize by the end of the year. Many diplomats do not expect a deal this year, and some leaders say they’re in no hurry.
But others want the budget, worth around €2 trillion, signed off by December because they fear next year’s European elections — especially if far-right leader Marine Le Pen wins the French presidency — will derail negotiations.
The longer budget negotiations last, the “more difficulties we will have,” Orpo said. “So we have to work to find a solution this year. I understand very well that it is difficult, a huge challenge, but I cannot see how it would be easier next year, because in France elections are coming, for example.”
Finland also has an election coming up in April 2027. Orpo’s center-right National Coalition Party is struggling in the polls. “This time has been very difficult,” he said. “But, finally, our economy is growing.”
Orpo’s Swedish sister party, the Moderates, mounted a late surge in last month’s election. Although that seems unlikely to keep them in office, Sweden’s Moderates still have a slim chance, even though many commentators had written them off long before the vote.
“They did excellent campaign work, and in the end of the day, people vote Moderates, not populist or socialist,” Orpo said. “I would like the same in Finland.”
PARIS — Jean-Luc Mélenchon pointed to Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez as proof that greater public spending can boost the French economy and repair its strained public finances.
“Ever since Spain adopted a budget focused on ecological and social growth, it has experienced steady growth and a decline in its debt,” said Mélenchon, the leading left-wing candidate for next year’s presidential election in France.
In a press conference focused on the budget on Wednesday, the 75-year-old radical doubled down on his calls for a positive demand shock driven by billions in new state spending. He also reiterated his proposal to write off billions of euros in French debt held by the European Central Bank, which has drawn strong criticism, including from ECB President Christine Lagarde.
Polls show Mélenchon neck and neck with center-right candidate Édouard Philippe in the race to qualify for a second-round runoff against Marine Le Pen, the far-right frontrunner who presented her own budget plans last week.
Under Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, Spain has significantly reduced its budget deficit, while public debt is projected to fall below 100% of GDP in 2026. His government has raised the minimum wage and supported investment in green energy, alongside other sectors. Although inflation is a major concern and economic growth is expected to moderate in 2027, Spain remains one of Europe’s fastest-growing major economies, with the IMF on Tuesday forecasting 2.5% growth in 2026.
Spanish deficit fell significantly under Sánchez, and became one of the Eurozone’s fastest-growing economies after the pandemic.
Spain’s debt-to-GDP ratio dropped below 100% — while France’s raised to 119% — as the government invested heavily in sectors such as green energy and raised the minimum wage. But the cost of living remains a major concern in the country, particularly housing — one of the issues that led Sánchez to call a snap election earlier this month.
More money, less problems?
Mélenchon wants to boost growth by increasing purchasing power through higher salaries — including a higher minimum wage, a 10% raise for public-sector workers and a nationwide round of collective bargaining — as well as higher benefits for welfare recipients and a monthly payment of €1,337 for every French student intended to lift them above the poverty line.
Together, these measures form what his campaign calls an €82 billion “emergency spending” package.
Eric Coquerel, a Mélenchon ally who heads the French National Assembly’s powerful finance committee, argued in the same press conference that the new spending would drive GDP growth and increase tax revenue.
He also outlined ways to fund it, including a 2% wealth tax on households worth more than €100 million, popularized by French economist Gabriel Zucman, and higher taxes on large inheritances, which would be capped at €12 million under a Mélenchon presidency.
Fiscally conservative think tanks such as Institut Montaigne have argued that Mélenchon significantly underestimated the cost of his proposed spending and the potential tax revenue in previous campaigns. Critics also warn of capital flight if he is elected president, as occurred after his political mentor François Mitterrand was elected in 1981 on a platform of mass nationalizations.
Mélenchon blamed the current state of France’s finances on President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to cut several taxes early in his presidency, a move Macron said was intended to attract more investment.
“There are no other causes [of the deficit] than the systematic depletion of the state orchestrated by Macronism,” Mélenchon said.
“We are pitting the virtuous cycle of ecological and social recovery… against the vicious cycle of Macronist budgets and the dismantling of the state,” he added.
Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu’s government has presented a budget with €43 billion in spending cuts, aiming to reduce France’s deficit to 5% of GDP without raising taxes. This year’s deficit is expected to reach 5.4% of GDP, missing the initial 5% target.
The counter-proposal from Mélenchon’s France Unbowed includes €106.4 billion in additional revenue and €81.7 billion in further spending, according to Coquerel, leaving about €25 billion to reduce the deficit.
France’s current center-right government is expected to pass its budget through the country’s hung parliament either by invoking a constitutional mechanism that allows the executive to pass legislation without a vote or by executive order. Mélenchon said his first order of business if elected in May would be to draft a new budget, which he hopes to pass in summer 2027.
France Unbowed advocates for a reduction of France’s contribution to the European Union, which presidential frontrunner Le Pen also wants to cut by €11 billion, though Coquerel clarified that he had not included a potential rebate in his economic forecasts.
Mélenchon intends to use the contribution as leverage to push for revised EU treaties, including scrapping the 3% deficit target for member countries and allowing national governments to adopt protectionist policies.
Critics, including Lagarde, said Mélenchon’s debt proposal was “dangerous” and potentially illegal because it could amount to direct financing of member countries by the ECB, which is prohibited by European treaties.
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