EU leaders meet this week in a 16th-century castle to navigate a geopolitical landscape that forces them to make some of the most consequential strategic decisions since the Cold War.
As the gates of the castle close on this high-stakes summit, one question remains outside: what role, if any, should EU citizens play in shaping this new era?
In the name of ‘necessity’ and ‘urgency’, choices about defence, industry, trade, and strategic autonomy are being made at a break-neck speed, often with minimal debate and limited scrutiny.
Public participation is incresingly assumed rather than sought. Organised civil society is shut out. Several successful European Citizens’ Initiatives have gone unfollowed. And Europeans’ elected representatives, in both Parliament and Commission, are sidelined, while corporate lobbyists increasingly dominate the EU political agenda.
The pattern is visible this very week.
EU leaders are expected to double down on the deregulation agenda prescribed by the Draghi report, pushing through competitiveness measures that will substantially lower EU standards of protection for citizens, workers, and the environment — with growing demand to dilute Europe’s carbon price.
The private ‘pre-summit summit’ with corporate lobbyists
The commission president meeting with Cefic and industry chiefs on the council’s eve is just another example of how they are effectively granting corporate lobbyists a private summit to finalise the EU’s industrial blueprints before a single elected representative has even entered the room.
Likewise, in the Sustainability Omnibus, reporting requirements designed to hold corporations accountable for environmental harm were gutted, with corporate lobbyists drafting the replacement text.
In the Digital Omnibus, Commission officials held 150 meetings with tech companies, compared with 30 with civil society groups.
EU leaders are expected to meet on Thursday at the 16th-century castle Alden Biesen (Photo: Wikimedia)
And now national governments want the commission to institutionalise this method, by systematically bypassing public consultations and impact assessments — the basic procedural safeguards that give democratic governance its substance — to advance that agenda.
The EU–US deal, which was supinely accepted by the commission under national governments’ demand too afraid to confront Donald Trump, tells the same story from a different angle.
Despite public concern and parliamentary resistance, national leaders have framed it as unavoidable, invoking urgency to compress debate and limit amendments.
They are not merely sidelining parliament; they are instructing it to fall in line.
Formally, the European Parliament retains consent powers. Substantively, its role risks shifting from co-author to rubber stamp.
Citizens, in turn, are left with the impression that even when they mobilise, and even when their representatives object, strategic decisions are taken regardless.
The choices now confronting Europe, defence integration, industrial restructuring, technology controls, trade retaliation, and deeper fiscal coordination, will reshape how Europeans live and work for decades.
They involve higher costs, uneven distributional effects, and real losses for some communities. Such choices cannot be sustained through administrative efficiency alone, however compelling the promise of competitiveness.
They require public consent.
Yet consent is precisely what is being bypassed. Decisions are no longer driven by the commission as guarantor of the EU public interest, endorsed by a directly elected EU parliament, and enriched by civil society’s input, but imposed from the top by national governments sitting in the European Council.
Europe’s democratic winter
This is Europe’s democratic winter: a quiet retreat from the participatory and representative experiments that once defined the EU as a transnational democratic project.
Democracy has not collapsed, it has been cooled. Civic participation, parliamentary voice, and institutional transparency are treated as luxuries to be suspended until calmer times.
This is a profound misdiagnosis. The EU does not face a trade-off between democratic legitimacy and strategic autonomy. It faces a requirement for both.
Not long ago, democratisation was central to European integration. The European Parliament consolidated its role as co-legislator, embodying the promise that EU transnational governance could be both effective and representative.
The Conference on the Future of Europe brought together hundreds of citizens selected by lot to deliberate on the EU’s direction. Since then citizens’ panels have informed policymaking on climate, health, and digital transformation. That dual transnational democratic experiment — participatory and parliamentary — now appears to be ending.
But the failure runs even deeper than that.
By imposing a democratic winter on Europe, national leaders are squandering a once-in-a-generation opportunity to put citizens in the driving seat of EU integration.
They assume that European independence — from American unpredictability, from Chinese leverage — can be engineered from above. It cannot. True strategic autonomy requires something no summit communiqué can manufacture: a European public that wants it, that demands it, and that is willing to bear its costs.
Informed Europeans are far more likely to champion independence than to obstruct it. From citizen mobilisations against the transatlantic capitulation, to parliamentary resistance to omnibus deregulation, the public appetite has never been greater than today.
We need a European Spring, where citizens shape European independence, rather than having it imposed on them. Democracy should be the engine to run this new era, not its casualty.
Europe’s leaders are right about the stakes but wrong about leaving people behind. A Europe whose citizens are mobilised behind independence is incomparably stronger than one whose leaders merely declare it.
But mobilisation requires voice — and with each closed-door decision, that voice diminishes. The window for a European spring will not stay open indefinitely.