Europe Under the Sun

Record heat is only the visible face of a continent that is overheating. Berlin discovers instability, Rome and Madrid play with Schengen, and Paris looks to the past for its future. Europe’s problem is no longer simply the rise of the extremes. It is the growing fragility of the centre.

Europe is hot.

A stubborn, almost political heat. The kind that slows cities down, shortens tempers and makes September feel much farther away than the calendar suggests.

Temperatures have climbed above forty degrees in several parts of the continent, while fires have once again hit France and Spain. Yet perhaps the most interesting fact is not meteorological:

extreme heat is increasingly an economic problem too, with France, Italy, Germany and Spain among the European economies most exposed to its consequences.

Curiously, these are the same four countries where the political temperature also appears to have risen this August.

Perhaps it is only a coincidence. But in politics, coincidences can sometimes help us see things more clearly.

As Brussels slows down, offices empty and institutional Europe enters its traditional summer pause, something far less reassuring is happening beneath the surface.

Several of the political pillars on which the Union has built its balance are beginning to crack at the same time.

The most surprising case comes from the country where, until recently, such a sentence would have sounded almost like an oxymoron: Germany.

In Berlin, one word now says more than many analyses: Kanzlertausch. A change of chancellor.

Friedrich Merz has been in office for little more than a year, yet within the CDU there is already discussion – at least behind the scenes – about the possibility of replacing him. The reason is not merely his collapsing popularity. It is what is happening to his right.

The AfD approaches September’s crucial regional elections with a real chance of prevailing in some Länder. Figures of this kind would be worrying anywhere. In Germany, they mean something more.

For decades Berlin represented the opposite of European instability. Italian governments changed, French governments fell, Madrid went through its convulsions, London consumed prime ministers.

Germany remained there: predictable, slow, sometimes exasperating, but stable.

Today it is discussing replacing a chancellor after barely a year. That is a small cultural earthquake before it is even a political one.

Above all, it shows that the problem posed by the AfD no longer concerns only the AfD. When an anti-system force grows large enough, it does not necessarily need to govern in order to change the system. It only needs to force everyone else to change their behaviour.

The CDU must decide how far it can maintain the Brandmauer, the political firewall against any cooperation with the far right, while a growing part of the conservative electorate seems to find that firewall increasingly difficult to understand.

Suddenly the question is no longer whether the AfD will enter the perimeter of German politics. The question is how far that perimeter will have to move in order to contain it.

Then there is Italy. Which, in one of history’s ironies, now looks in some respects more stable than Germany.

Giorgia Meloni has governed for almost four years. Measured against Italian political tradition, that is beginning to look anomalous. But it would be superficial to confuse government stability with system stability.

Meloni has built much of her political strength by occupying two spaces at once: the space of the identity-driven right at home and that of the pragmatic interlocutor abroad. Rome and Brussels.

Washington and Europe. The language of sovereignty and the practice of compromise.

It has probably been her most important political success. But that balancing act is becoming harder because Europe itself is moving.

The extraordinary clash now unfolding between Italy and Spain makes the point. Rome temporarily suspends Schengen following the migration crisis in Ceuta. Madrid responds with controls on connections arriving from Italy. Palazzo Chigi calls the response disproportionate and rejects what it sees as blackmail. Behind the diplomatic confrontation is also an Italian conviction that Pedro Sánchez is using the European dispute to answer domestic political difficulties.

And here lies the point. Two major countries in the Union’s political balance are using one of the most powerful symbols of European integration as an instrument of pressure against each other.

Schengen. In August. Between Italy and Spain.

It is worth stopping for a moment to appreciate how politically absurd the image is. Italians checked at Spanish airports. Spaniards and travellers arriving from Spain subjected to Italian controls. Two governments steadily raising the tone while millions of Europeans cross the Mediterranean for their holidays.

It is almost a caricature of Europe. Yet dismissing it as a summer quarrel between Meloni and Sánchez would be a mistake.

Domestic politics is devouring European politics. Meloni must show that she will not retreat on borders. Sánchez must show that Madrid will not take lessons from Rome. Formally, each government is speaking to the other. Politically, both are speaking above all to their own voters.

For years, we imagined that the Union existed precisely to neutralise this dynamic – or at least to contain it. Increasingly, the opposite is happening: Europe is becoming the stage on which national conflicts are performed.

Berlin fights the AfD by hardening its domestic debate. Rome and Madrid turn Schengen into a political duel. And while all this happens, Paris is already looking towards 2027.

Ten years ago Emmanuel Macron won the Élysée promising to sweep away France’s old political world. In 2027, that old world may return en masse to claim his inheritance.

Édouard Philippe, Gabriel Attal, Bernard Cazeneuve, Dominique de Villepin. François Hollande watching the game. Xavier Bertrand. Bruno Le Maire. Ségolène Royal. Even the possibility of Thierry Breton.

The word suddenly back in fashion is expérience. Experience.

Ten years after the election of the youngest president of the Fifth Republic, many would-be occupants of the Élysée are now presenting themselves through precisely what Macron turned into a disadvantage in 2017: having already been there.

When a society is uneasy, it first searches for something new. When the new no longer reassures it, it looks for someone who at least knows where the switches are.

France is not simply choosing Macron’s successor. It is trying to understand what comes after Macronism, while the Rassemblement National remains potentially capable of winning the Élysée and the political centre, deprived of the man who invented it, must prove that it can exist without him.

This is where Berlin, Rome, Madrid and Paris stop being four separate stories. They become the same story.

For a long time we described Europe’s crisis through an easily readable political and geographical divide: centre versus periphery, pro-Europeans versus Eurosceptics, moderates versus populists, responsibility versus protest.

It was a convenient picture. It is probably no longer the right one.

Because today fragility does not come only from the forces challenging the system. It has entered the system itself.

Germany must question the resilience of its own leadership while the AfD grows. France approaches the succession to Macron with a fragmented political system. Italy and Spain, rather than jointly embodying the Union’s Mediterranean centre of gravity, have managed to turn a migration crisis at Europe’s gates into a test of strength against one another.

Meanwhile Brussels continues to ask European governments to think strategically: common defence, competitiveness, energy autonomy, investment, Ukraine, relations with Washington and Beijing, enlargement.

All of these require strong political leadership, political capital and, above all, the ability to think beyond the next opinion poll. Those are precisely the three resources becoming scarcer.

Never has Europe needed politics as much as it does today. And rarely has European politics seemed so captive to national fragilities.

Once, it was mainly politically unstable countries that sought protection in European stability. Now the major countries that are supposed to produce that stability are bringing their own anxieties into Europe.

Germany is no longer immune to instability. France does not yet know what comes after Macron.

Italy is stable but increasingly assertive. Spain is under political pressure.

And the Franco-German engine – an expression we may continue to use more out of nostalgia than as a description of reality – can hardly function when one driver is looking at regional elections and the other at a presidential race.

Outside Europe, meanwhile, the world is not waiting. Trump is not waiting. Putin is not waiting.

Beijing is not waiting. Markets are not waiting. Nor, certainly, is the climate, which this summer is offering Europe an almost too-perfect metaphor for its condition.

When the temperature rises too far, the problem is not only the heat. It is the materials.

They expand. Infrastructure gives way. Systems designed to function under normal conditions begin to behave differently.

That is true of railways. It is true of power grids. And perhaps it is true of politics too.

Over the past seventy years Europe has built an extraordinarily sophisticated system for managing differences among its states. But that system rested on one condition: at decisive moments, Europe’s principal capitals had enough internal stability to produce external compromises.

That is the condition we can no longer take for granted.

So perhaps the question of the European summer is not who will win in Germany, who will succeed Macron, or who is right between Meloni and Sánchez.

It is much simpler.

How much more heat can Europe withstand before it is no longer merely its policies that begin to warp, but its balance itself?