According to Chinese constitutionalists, one of the causes of instability in the European political system is linked to the proliferation of local, regional, national and European elections, the results of which often change the balance of power at the state level or, for what it is worth in European decision-making mechanisms, at the community level.
In fact, the European system of liberal and representative democracy is a far from the Chinese autocracy, where the President of the People’s Republic, Xi Jinping, has been in power since 2008 and, barring unforeseeable internal upheavals, is destined to remain president for life.
The same is true of Vladimir Putin, who is at the head of the Russian Federation in various capacities since 1998 and is considered a new “tsar”.
This makes it difficult to bridge the gap between our limited constitutional guarantees and the totally illiberal regimes that govern – with varying degrees of anti-democratic centralism – the two-thirds of the world’s states that are overwhelming the representative and liberal democracy par excellence that has governed Washington since the end of British colonialism and is transforming itself into an autocratic regime of one man in command if the antibodies do not prevail in the mid-term elections on 3 November 2026 and then in the presidential elections on 7 November 2028.
For reasons that are not formal but substantial, these autocracies are considered systemic rivals to the liberal and representative democracies of Western and Central Europe that have characterised our constitutional systems in much of Western Europe since the end of the Second World War and in Central Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
We know that democracy in general, and representative democracy in particular, as a human building, is by its very nature fragile, just as autarchic systems should also be fragile, even if they appear more stable, albeit more unjust and incapable of guaranteeing shared prosperity among their citizens.
Until the European elections, which will take place in June 2029, involving more than 300 million voters for the eleventh time, all European countries will go to the polls in the next 40 months to renew their national parliaments or presidents of republics with mid-term regional and local elections and stress tests of representative democracy.
In 2026, there will be elections to renew the national parliaments in at least five EU Member States, three presidents will be elected, the governments of six Laender in Germany and many municipal councils will be renewed, putting the cordon sanitaire against the AFD to the test, while votes will be held in all French municipalities, testing the influence of the Rassemblement National and the cohesion of the centre-left opposition.
Outside the European Union, among other things, there will be elections to renew the Knesset to see whether Israeli society will decide to get rid of Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been convicted of war crimes by the International Criminal Court, handing over power to the instigators of the violence of the Zionist settlers in the West Bank or resuming the path of peace taken in the past by Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Perez and Peace Now.
As we wrote above, the mid-term elections on 3 November 2026 for the Congress and Senate in the United States will tell us whether Donald Trump’s new authoritarian imperialism will be curbed by the US system of checks and balances, whether there will be new democratic leadership in the run-up to the 2028 presidential elections, and whether the internal cohesion of the Republican Party will break down after some tentative internal rifts.
Even more important for the European political balance will be the legislative elections in the Member States in 2027, because voters in Germany, Italy and Spain will be called upon to renew their parliaments, as will French voters after electing the ninth president of the Fifth Republic.
These elections could give us some useful indications as to whether a majority of innovators and progressives or a majority of conservatives and nationalists will prevail in the next European Parliament and help to change the course of the European Union towards greater supranational integration, as demanded by federalist organisations, or towards a “regime change” in a more confederal sense, as desired by the network of think tanks funded by the US Republican Party to subvert the European Union with the hypocritical slogan of “returning to the roots of community integration”, i.e. giving all powers back to the Europe of Nations.
As we know, and as even the stones of the European Quarter in Brussels know, the political conditions do not exist for a change of course to take place with a revision of the treaties before the end of this legislative term and, moreover, the think tanks financed by the Republicans across the Atlantic intend to act to ensure that the change of course takes place without any revision of the treaties.
So Europe, or rather the European Union – to quote Jürgen Habermas – will have to temporarily equip itself to “dance alone” internally and in international relations.
There were some tentative signs of this willingness when the European Union reacted to the pandemic emergency and then to its economic and social consequences with the SURE and Next Generation EU programmes, but the willingness to dance alone appeared more confused in the aid to Ukraine accompanied by seventeen packages of sanctions against Russia and, most recently, in the decisions of the European Council on 18 December, which created new European public debt and continued to freeze Russian assets.
The signs were stronger in the twin environmental and digital transitions, which, however, risk being disrupted by the prevalence of destructive ideologies, while the blocking of economic aid to Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia for violations of the rule of law did not eliminate these violations but nevertheless forced Orban, Fico and now Babis to allow the constraints of unanimous voting to be overcome.
This capacity for reaction has not been present in the area of common defence or European deterrence because the European Peace Facility was created in 2021, a year before Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, and not to “orchestrate aid to Kiev”, the so-called “Defence Readiness” – the successor to the ill-fated announcement of “RearmEurope” imagined by Ursula von der Leyen, Kaja Kallas and Andrius Kubilius – is fortunately still on paper, partly because the European Parliament has brought the SAFE plan before the Court of Justice for violation of democratic principles.
European projects proposed by the European Commission, such as the European anti-drone defence initiative, the European air shield, the European space shield and the eastern flank surveillance system are far from being launched.
What is more serious is the inaction of the European Union and the signal that the European system is incapable of acting, i.e. of dancing on its own.
Added to this is the fact that the so-called strategic partnerships with various areas of the world are, for now, theoretical agreements and that nationalist tendencies prevail, as is the case in migration policy.
With a view to building a majority of innovators and progressives in the next European Parliament – which will require decisive action over the next 40 months until the European elections in June 2029, including during national, regional and local election campaigns – the strongest signal of a change of course could be given by decisions on the 2028-2032 five-year financial framework and the resulting legislative acts to guarantee European public goods and a fair and solidarity-based fiscal policy.
Rome, 26 January 2026