Will the new Trump presidency be a “beneficial shock” for the EU? – Probably not

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By Manuel Müller

Look who is back: Unfortunately, it is rather unlikely that Donald Trump will bring fresh impetus for reform to Ursula von der Leyen’s second term in office.

Donald Trump (Rep./IDU) has been re-elected President of the USA. For the governments in Europe, which are meeting today and tomorrow in Budapest in the framework of the European Political Community, this is a problem in many respects: Trump could stop American support for Ukraine in the defence war against Russia, abandon NATO (and Taiwan anyway), fuel the Middle East conflict, reduce the American contribution to climate protection, start new trade wars and foster global far-right discourses, for example on asylum or gender policy.

A beneficial shock?

But could there be a good side to all this? Last week, Politico quoted six anonymous EU officials who described a possible Trump presidency as bitter, but ultimately potentially healing medicine for the EU.

This was followed on Tuesday by an opinion piece by Mujtaba Rahman, head of the consulting firm Eurasia Group’s Europe practice: According to him, Europe is suffering from a political “malaise” as it is unable to come together on key issues such as defence, migration and fiscal policy. The French and German governments, in particular, are unwilling to lead because of their domestic weaknesses. A second Trump presidency, however, could have a “galvanising effect”. If EU member states realised that they could no longer rely on the US, they would be more willing to push through the necessary reforms: a more modern budget geared towards investments rather than agricultural subsidies, joint bonds to finance defence spending, joint investments to strengthen European industry. As problematic as Donald Trump’s victory would be, it could be “just the shock needed to prevent the EU from falling into a long, and possibly terminal, decline.”

There is no lack of ideas, but of political will

What is behind this narrative of a beneficial shock? Could it really be that the second Trump presidency, while bringing liberal democracy in the US to the brink of the abyss, is the very thing that EU member states need to pull together more resolutely than before, to put aside petty national misgivings and concerns, and to take joint responsibility for defending their political values?

Three arguments make this argument at least superficially plausible. The first, and perhaps most important, is that it is actually quite clear what the EU needs now. In terms of constitutional policy, there is a plethora of reform proposals on the table that would make the European institutions more efficient and more democratic, and the European Parliament itself has already drafted a whole new EU treaty. In foreign policy, approaches like “strategic autonomy” have been discussed for many years. On fiscal policy, NextGenerationEU is already a successful blueprint for what common EU bonds could look like. The Letta, Draghi and Niinistö reports have proposed further steps for key policy areas. So there is no lack of ideas, but rather a lack of political will to implement them.

Crises can prompt member states to act

Second, there have indeed been several historical cases in which external shocks and crises have prompted the EU to muster the political will to make progress on reforms. In political science, this is known as “failing forward”: As member states are reluctant to cede national sovereignty to the EU, they generally do not implement necessary reforms preventively – but only when a crisis becomes so urgent that they see no other way out.

Concerns about German reunification led to the Maastricht Treaty, the Covid pandemic gave rise to NextGenerationEU, the Russian invasion of Ukraine strengthened the EU as a security actor and set in motion a new enlargement dynamic. Could the new Trump presidency have a similar effect?

A new political leadership

Third, the reshuffle of the EU leadership following the European elections in June is almost complete. The hearings of the new EU commissioners in the European Parliament have so far gone without any major upsets. If this continues, Ursula von der Leyen (CDU/EPP) could start her second term on 1 December in a strengthened position. Similarly, the new President of the European Council, António Costa (PS/PES), is likely to be an improvement on his unpopular predecessor Charles Michel (MR/ALDE) in terms of leadership quality.

In addition, several member state governments stressed the importance of the EU in their initial reactions to Trump’s election. While the votes were still being counted in the US, Olaf Scholz (SPD/PES) and Emmanuel Macron (RE/–) spoke on the phone and subsequently announced that they would work even more closely in the future “for a more united, stronger, more sovereign Europe in the new context”. Some smaller member states reacted similarly. Finland’s Petteri Orpo (Kok/EPP), for example, called for “Europe to play a greater role”. Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala (ODS/ECR) expressed a similar view.

For some in the EU, Trump’s victory is cause for celebration

But this is where the optimism ends, because all the long-discussed reforms needed to make the EU more efficient and democratic require not only a political majority but a unanimous consensus among member states. This applies not only to treaty and electoral changes, but also to decisions on common foreign policy or the long-term EU budget.

This unanimity requirement gives each individual member state a veto in the Council – and there are some European leaders for whom Donald Trump’s election was a cause for celebration above all else. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán (Fidesz/P), for example, was delighted about the “beautiful victory” on election night. Slovakia’s Robert Fico (Smer/–) had sent a message of solidarity to Trump already in July, alleging that they both had been the victims of smear campaigns and an assassination attempt by their political opponents. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni (FdI/ECR) was more circumspect during the campaign, but she too has long maintained good relations with American far-right activists, appearing as a special guest at the CPAC conference in 2019 and 2022.

Orbán and Fico won’t change their European policy

It is illusory to expect that Trump’s victory will in any way motivate these politicians to rethink their European policies. On the contrary, they are likely to feel emboldened by it: With regard to Ukraine, Orbán declared a few days ago that the EU must “realise that if there will be a pro-peace president in America […], then Europe cannot remain pro-war”.

Fico, for his part, described Trump’s victory as a “defeat for liberal and progressive ideas” and as a testimony to the fact that “the media always have a tendency to lie”. His deputy Tomáš Taraba (SNS/close to P) praised Trump as the “best candidate” to solve “problems” such as the war in Ukraine. Fico and Taraba also recognised that Trump poses challenges for Europe. But when it comes to the particularly pressing issue of Ukraine – and relatedly, the EU’s defence policy and its financing –, the US election result will widen rather than narrow divisions in the European Council.

Can the vetoes of Trump’s allies be bypassed?

The only scenario in which a Trump victory could really lead to a new reform dynamic in the EU would be if a majority of member states decided to disregard such voices and systematically circumvent the veto rights of Trump allies in the Council. This would be possible with more differentiated integration, in which a group of member states decides on and implements reforms only among themselves. But it also poses a number of constitutional and political challenges.

In constitutional terms, because the instrument of “enhanced cooperation” (Art. 20 TEU) provided for in the EU treaty for such cases must not be at the expense of the non-participating member states, which makes it very difficult to issue common EU bonds on this basis. Circumventing vetoes would therefore often only be possible with the help of complicated legal constructs – or in the form of “supplementary treaties” outside the EU treaty framework, such as the 2012 fiscal compact that bypassed a UK-Czech veto during the euro crisis.

The challenges of differentiated integration

Politically, differentiation is rather unpopular with the supranational EU institutions, especially the European Parliament, because it fundamentally weakens European legal unity and, in the worst case, threatens to turn the EU into an incoherent system of intergovernmental coalitions of the willing. Instead of a “variable geometry” with many individual agreements, it would therefore be better to have a single comprehensive “core Europe” treaty.

Then again, such a “core Europe” or “concentric circles” model would raise other questions that have been discussed without any answers for many years: Which states would belong to the inner circle? What new institutions would be created? Which policies would be pursued within the new framework and which within the EU-27?

No new reform dynamics without confrontation

These questions harbour great potential for conflict between the member states: The risk of being excluded from the inner circle could motivate unwilling governments to make major concessions – but also to attempt to derail the negotiations altogether. This is one of the reasons why the big member states Germany and France have so far shied away from such an approach in the ongoing reform debates and are instead focussing on minimum compromises that would keep all 27 governments on board.

It seems highly doubtful that Trump’s electoral success will lead Germany and France to adopt a more confrontational stance in the European Council – especially as both of them are under strong domestic pressure. And a new European reform dynamic will not be possible without confronting Trump’s allies. As welcome as a beneficial shock would be, for now it seems more likely that the EU will continue to muddle through as it has for the past 15 years of polycrisis.

Picture: The White House from Washington, DC [Public Domain], via Wikimedia Commons.