Over the past decade, the EU’s institutional balance has already tilted heavily toward the Commission, which has extended its reach into areas once considered the preserve of national governments — from fiscal policy and public health to foreign affairs and defense. The mechanism has been consistent: each crisis — the sovereign debt crisis, Brexit, the Covid-19 pandemic, the Ukraine war — has served as a pretext for the Commission to assume more authority, make “emergency” decisions and lock in permanent changes to the exercise of EU power. None of this has required formal treaty changes. It has occurred surreptitiously, outside the arena of democratic debate, through what scholars have called “integration by stealth”. The result has been a creeping “Commissionization” and supranationalization of European decision-making, with a corresponding erosion of national sovereignty and democratic accountability. 

Now the Commission is using negotiations over the EU’s next seven-year budget — the aforementioned Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) for 2028-2034 — to push this process further still. And precisely for this reason it is keen to wrap up a deal by the end of the year. Brussels insiders are acutely aware that the French presidential election of April 2027 could produce a government led by Jordan Bardella of the National Rally — a party hostile to the integrationist agenda underpinning the new MFF. Since the framework requires unanimous approval in the Council, a Eurosceptic France could strangle the budget at birth. The unstated but operative goal is to seal the deal before that risk appears. That this is never said openly only underscores the contempt for democratic deliberation that now pervades the process. 

What, then, is the package that the Commission is so keen to sign into law? It is a framework totaling almost €2 trillion, equivalent to around 1.26% of EU gross national income (GNI) over the seven-year period. The European Parliament, never shy about spending other people’s money, wants to push that to 1.38% of GNI. But neither institution really admits the structural tensions buried in the figures. The EU must service roughly €750 billion in bloc pandemic debt, the repayment of which is now being permanently integrated into the regular EU budget. The Commission’s own proposal earmarks €149.3 billion for repaying the so-called “NextGenerationEU Recovery” and “Resilience Facility” funds — a sum that amounts to nearly 10% of total MFF commitments.

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This matters because of what it reveals about the true nature of NextGenerationEU (NGEU). What was sold to European publics as an exceptional, one-off response to the Covid crisis is now the fiscal template for the Union’s future. The pandemic fund set the precedent: the EU can borrow on capital markets, distribute grants to member states, and then embed the repayment into the general budget for decades to come — all without anything resembling a proper democratic mandate. This is arguably what the “unprecedented” EU fiscal response to the pandemic was always about: normalizing common debt as a mechanism for tilting the institutional balance of power decisively in favor of the Commission, downgrading member states and locking in a structural shift in European integration. Indeed, the EU has since repeated the trick with a €90 billion package for Ukraine, again funded through joint debt backed by the common budget. The “historical exception” has quietly become the norm. 

To repay its vast debts, the Commission has proposed a package of five “new own resources”: a corporate levy on companies with annual turnover above €100 million; taxes on tobacco and electronic waste; and adjustments to revenues from the EU Emissions Trading System and the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. Together, these are projected to generate roughly €60 billion a year. This projection, however, should be treated with skepticism: for many of the proposals, revenue estimates are rough at best, and the actual yield will depend heavily on (unresolved) questions of implementation. More fundamentally, adopting “new own” resources requires unanimous agreement among member states and ratification through national constitutions, a high bar that previous Commission attempts at revenue reform consistently failed to clear. 

If the new taxes fall short, the fallback is a compulsory levy on member states. The existing “Own Resources Decision” — another wonderful piece of EU lexicon — already empowers the Commission to call on national governments for additional GNI-based contributions to cover NGEU repayments, on top of regular program spending. In other words, if the new revenue streams underperform, the bill lands automatically on national treasuries, decided not by sovereign parliaments, but by the remorseless logic of the EU’s debt repayment. At any rate, EU debt now functions as a de facto tax on member states, bypassing the normal channels of democratic budgetary control. The tension between net contributors and debtors is already producing open fractures: Sweden’s European Affairs minister has flatly stated that the budget’s size “must come down significantly” and that there is “no such thing as free money”, even as several southern and eastern member states — including Italy, Spain and Poland — have suggested postponing part of the debt repayment plan. 

The structural changes to the budget architecture compound this problem. The Commission hopes to reduce the budget’s headings from seven to four, collapsing 52 separate programs into just 16. This is presented as “simplification”. Politically, though, it’s something else entirely: centralizing fiscal control and stripping away the granular program categories whose very specificity constrained the Commission’s ability to reallocate funds on a whim. The old system’s structure, dense and bureaucratic as it was, functioned as a form of democratic constraint: money earmarked for a specific purpose is harder to redirect than money pooled under a broad heading. 

Fewer programs and broader headings mean more executive flexibility and less parliamentary oversight. Nowhere is this power shift more visible than in the proposed National and Regional Partnership Plans (NRPPs). Under this model, cohesion policy, agriculture, fisheries, migration and border management would all be merged into single bilateral frameworks negotiated directly between the Commission and each member states, as opposed to the current system of separate programs, each with its own rules and oversight structures. Regional and local authorities — who currently have a formal role in overseeing the existing programs — would invariably be marginalized. The Parliament would be sidelined. The Commission, meanwhile, would gain a uniquely powerful position, exercising conditionality over each national plan through the so-called rule-of-law mechanism, set to become a structural feature of the bloc’s budget. If the Commission deems a government non-compliant with the rule of law — as understood, of course, by Brussels — funds cannot simply be frozen; they can be redirected to civil-society organizations and “European values” programs approved by the Commission itself. This amounts to the creation of a system of permanent EU-managed political pressure. 

Then there is the question of where the EU budget money actually flows. The new AgoraEU program — a merger of the Creative Europe and CERV (Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values) programs — is allocated €8.6 billion: more than double the combined budgets of its predecessors. The CERV strand alone, now rebranded CERV+, sees its budget grow from €1.55 billion to €3.6 billion, even as it remains under direct Commission management. This is the funding stream from which hundreds of NGOs, operating in the fields of “democratic values”, civil society advocacy and media support, draw their operating grants. It goes without saying that these organizations are, by design, institutionally dependent on Brussels and reliably aligned with its agenda. In a recent book, I show how European programs and funds have been progressively oriented towards the diffusion of so-called “European values” — and very often towards the promotion of the EU and the integrationist project as such — through the direct funding of NGOs, think tanks, academic institutions, media outlets and educational projects, to the tune of hundreds of millions each year, with the effect of blurring the boundary between support for civil society, institutional communication and outright political propaganda. And now this EU-funded propaganda complex is poised to grow even more powerful. 

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The two areas where European citizens most directly feel the EU’s presence — the common agricultural policy and cohesion funds for structurally weak regions — are the budget’s biggest losers. This has received surprisingly little public attention, with the debate still largely confined to the technocratic language of net contributions and distribution keys. That framing obscures what is really going on: the construction of a European fiscal executive. For decades, the German-led integration model held that political deepening should proceed without genuine fiscal union. The Maastricht criteria, the Stability and Growth Pact and the no-bailout clause were expressions of this philosophy: prompting integration through common rules, not through common debt or centralized budget policy. That order, however, is now being dismantled, one “exceptional” instrument at a time. The reality is that the Commission no longer treats the budget as a limited distribution instrument but as a strategic policy-making tool for expanding its control over key policy areas — and, increasingly, for imposing its will on recalcitrant member states. 

The stakes become clearer when you consider what the Commission has actually done with the powers it has already accumulated. During the pandemic, it ran a €71 billion vaccine procurement program behind closed doors, signed contracts that handed pharmaceutical companies full intellectual property rights and blanket indemnity against legal claims, likely overpaid by tens of billions of euros, and then stonewalled every attempt by MEPs, auditors and the European Ombudsman to scrutinize the contracts — while the EU’s own Public Prosecutor opened a corruption investigation that remains ongoing. In the ongoing Ukraine war, it has devised and imposed sweeping sanctions packages with minimal consultation of member states and committed the EU to an open-ended maximalist war strategy — including the provision of lethal weapons through a repurposed “peace facility” — that no European parliament ever voted on. It threatened incoming elected governments it disliked with financial consequences. It used “disinformation” as a pretext to build a censorship architecture — the Digital Services Act — that gives Brussels effective leverage over what European citizens can read and say online. And it has consistently used financial conditionality to penalize governments whose domestic politics it disapproves of, redirecting funds away from citizens and toward Brussels-approved “civil society” organizations when it judges a government non-compliant. The new MFF doesn’t just continue this pattern, it institutionalizes and permanently funds it.

All this is especially frustrating given Europe’s weak geopolitical position. It is technically true, after all, that a geopolitically capable, strategically autonomous Europe requires a centralized fiscal capacity. But the EU is not a democratic federation capable of exercising such capacity accountably. It is a structure in which an unelected Commission holds agenda-setting power; the Council operates behind closed doors; and the Parliament has no power to initiate legislation. Handing this structure even greater fiscal autonomy doesn’t solve the EU’s democratic deficit: it deepens it. It is time to acknowledge that the EU’s failures are inherent to the supranational model itself. Attempts to address these shortcomings within the current framework, typically by pursuing “more Europe”, will only make things worse — with grim consequences for European governments and their citizens.

As you may have noticed, the above is a slightly modified excerpt from the 1848 Communist Manifesto. Then, as now, the political establishment was faced with an external threat; and then, as now, they didn’t entirely succeed in exorcising it. Populism continues to haunt European politics. Populist governments in Hungary and Poland retain their grip. And far from fading away, populist movements elsewhere are still making breakthroughs. Only this week, Spain’s Vox party made it into Catalan parliament for the first time.

And yet, earlier fears of a wholesale populist takeover were wildly exaggerated. 2016 — the year of the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump — was not the end of days after all. Instead, the political establishment has adapted.

In Greece, the power of the European Central Bank proved more than equal to that of the Syriza government. In France, a centrist movement — En Marche — emerged out of nowhere to see off the hard Left and the hard Right. In Ireland, Sinn Féin has surged in popularity — only for Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil to put aside their historic differences and form their first coalition. In America, the country’s democratic institutions weathered an attempt by a bad loser President to overturn an election result. And in Italy, the populist government elected in 2018 has been replaced by a technical government headed by Mario Draghi, the ultimate establishment fixer.

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The establishment has not killed off populism, but it is learning to live with it. There’s a parallel here with the situation in post-war western Europe, when the main challenge wasn’t populism, but homegrown communism. We forget it now, but there were times in the 1940s and 50s when the French Communist Party was the biggest party in the National Assembly. The Italian Communist Party was another major force — peaking in 1976 with more than a third of the vote.

Despite the scale of the challenge, the communists of free Europe were tolerated — though also deliberately excluded from power, in some parts of Italy with the help of the Mafia. Today’s establishment will hope to do the same in regard to the populists; and, so far, they’re succeeding.

But what if the real enemy isn’t who they think it is?

External threats are visible: the barbarian at the gate, the invading army, the rampaging mob. Only last month, in Washington DC, there was a very literal example of what can happen when the gates aren’t adequately guarded. But not every enemy is to be found outside the city walls — indeed sometimes the threat is from within.

I’m not talking about a fifth column, but rather when a ruling establishment is captured by one of its own — and subsequently remade in the new leader’s image.

The classic example is that of Julius Caesar and the fall of the Roman Republic. Here we see the quintessential features of the internal authoritarian takeover. Firstly, Caesar was a man of action — conqueror of Gaul, invader of Britannia. Secondly, he was already in a senior position of leadership — as part of the first Triumvirate (along with Pompey and Crassus). Thirdly, he posed as the champion of the people — even though the system he would establish was even less democratic than the one it replaced. Fourthly, the new system masqueraded as a continuation of the old. The Roman Republic was not formally overthrown; there was no return to the Roman monarchy and Julius’s successors did not style themselves “emperor” , but rather as princeps — “first among equals”. And finally, once securely established in power, Julius’s heir — Augustus — posed, hypocritically, as a conservative: a champion of stability and of old-fashioned Roman virtue, while ending the republic.

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Joseph Stalin’s takeover of the Soviet Union followed a similar pattern. He was one of the leading revolutionaries — and one among a number of senior figures vying for influence after Lenin’s death. Stalin won that power struggle — not least by presenting himself as a true man of the people against the Bolshevik intellectuals. Once his rivals had been crushed, he maintained and secured the outward forms of the USSR, while remaking it from within.

Given the horrors he unleashed, I hesitate to call him any sort of conservative, but there’s no denying that his totalitarian system was overtly patriotic in character. It was also, in some respects, socially conservative — earlier revolutionary attempts to redefine fundamentals like the family were dispensed with. To bolster morale in the Second World War, Stalin even co-opted what remained of the Orthodox Church. At the same time, just as Augustus expanded the borders of Rome, so in Stalin’s Russia industrialisation took place on a massive scale and Moscow’s rule was extended far beyond the borders of the old Russian empire.

A third example of the Caesarist phenomenon — and the one most relevant to Europe today — is the career of Napoleon Bonaparte. Again, we see a man of action, a supremely gifted and successful military commander. Again, we see that the regime he loyally served was unstable — power shifting back and forth between different factions and individuals. Again, we see a man of the people acting in the name of the people to restore order — and in the process grabbing all the power for himself. Again, there’s no return to the ancien regime, but rather the establishment of a quasi-monarchy with himself as monarch. And again, there’s a weird, but effective, mixture of conservatism and ruthless modernism. While Napoleon had no time for the Jacobin excesses of the early revolution, he also saw it as his mission to cleanse Europe of feudalism and other unenlightened remnants of the past.

The reason Napoleon seems particularly relevant today is because of the parallels between Revolutionary France in the late 18th century and the European Union in the early 21st. Note that I say parallels and not convergences. Obviously, we don’t have guillotines slicing up and down in public squares. Those who fall foul of today’s progressive orthodoxies may find themselves consigned to a “basket of deplorables”, but not to a basket of severed heads.

However, if you take away the violence and focus instead on the underlying power structures — the parallels between Napoleon’s time and our own become apparent. To begin with, the European project is revolutionary in nature — it seeks to replace a long-established system of government (the nation-state) with a jarringly different system (a federal superstate). “Ever closer Union” is not just a slogan, it is a political programme of world-changing significance.

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Admittedly, as revolutions go this is a slow one. But, from time-to-time, it takes another lurch forward. The creation of the single currency is the most important development so far. Other lurches include the last year’s decision to empower the European Commission to borrow hundreds of billions of euros, and the transformation of the Frontex agency into a quasi-military border force.

A further example is the vaccine procurement strategy. That this has gone so badly wrong doesn’t just expose the administrative weaknesses of the EU, but also its democratic deficit. Ursula von der Leyen and has not been held democratically accountable for the very good reason that she doesn’t have a democratic mandate. She doesn’t even have regular, EU-wide approval ratings to worry about — after all, what would be the point?

In any case, we shouldn’t forget that she’s not the head of government (to the extent that that EU even has a government). Infamously, the EU doesn’t have one President, but five (of the European Commission, the European Parliament, the European Council, the Council of the European Union and the European Central Bank). Even without the complications of incomplete integration, authority within the EU is divided — and thus any hope of clear accountability frustrated.

Coincidentally, the governing body that Napoleon usurped in 1799 — the Directory — also had five members. Only weakly accountable to the elected legislature and divided among themselves, the Directors were in a poor position to cope with the foreign and domestic threats to the revolutionary state. It became clear that authority would have to be placed in the hands of an effective leader or the revolution would collapse — with the restoration of monarchy as the most likely outcome.

Currently, the EU has more room for manoeuvre. Its member-states still retain sovereign control over most policy areas. But the further Europe goes down the path of integration, the harder it will be to retreat to national competences. Crisis situations will have to be dealt with at a federal level — the actions of decision-makers facilitated by untested institutions.

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The EU’s future will not be an easy one. The vaccine fiasco is still far from sorted, and there’s the post-Covid economic recovery to navigate — and the impact of “long lockdown” restrictions on international travel. Populism has not been defeated and will feed on the economic hardships that lie ahead of us. A renewed migration crisis cannot be ruled out — only this time inflamed by fears of coronavirus variants from outside the EU. On immigration and other issues, the challenge from the Hungarian and Polish governments has not been resolved — and indeed could multiply if the hard-Right advances in western European countries like Italy or France.

And, underlying everything, there’s the fact that the engine of EU integration — the single currency — is also a ticking time bomb. We’ve already seen that the EU will do “whatever it takes” to stop the eurozone from collapsing. It is a reminder that, beyond a certain point, integration passes a point of no return.

Okay, but can we really imagine a Brussels Bonaparte taking control of the EU’s evolving federal structures? It needn’t be anything so dramatic as a military coup — and, assuming the continuing absence of a European Army, it couldn’t be. But a consolidation of power within a democratically dubious system of crisis government? That certainly can be envisaged. Indeed, it’s happening in Italy right now.

So a technocrat, then, not a soldier — but a technocrat with broad popular appeal built on a record of “getting things done”.

Would the EU establishment tolerate such a figure — and indeed facilitate the centralisation of authority around a single, undisputed leader? It all depends on the alternative. If the other choices are a chaotic meltdown of the entire system starting with the single currency — or a hostile takeover by a Viktor Orbán-style populist, then a Brussels Bonaparte would be the least worst option.

And that’s the trouble with constructing a novel and weakly democratic system of government. Sooner or later, the question of “whatever it takes” boils down to “whoever it takes”.

Of course, the cause of these misfortunes is Covid-19, not Brexit. And thus the main event of the last few years has become a sideshow in 2020. As a result, the anti-Brexiteers have struggled to promote their narrative. However, with the Brexit negotiations coming to a head, one of their talking points is now bound to be heard — which is that, deal or no deal, we’re leaving the EU at the worst possible time. Who needs an extra set of complications when we’ve got a pandemic to deal with?

It’s a reasonable argument, but one that overlooks the counterfactual. Had the referendum gone the other way our continuing membership of the EU would have caused a different set of complications. Indeed, we’d be in a worse situation than we are now.

If Remain had won in 2016, it’s hard to say who’d be Prime Minister in 2020, but whoever the lucky person, he or she would have had a European nightmare to deal with. Not Brexit, but Britain’s involvement in the EU’s Covid rescue plan.

Consider what actually happened in Europe this year. While every country has suffered, some have suffered more than others. Those trapped by the constraints of the eurozone are in a particular bind — because they can’t devalue their currency or print money. Therefore they need help from their fellow member states.

Just what sort of help (and how much) was the subject of a high-stakes drama back in the spring and summer. Though we barely paid attention to it on this side of the Channel, it was a showdown between the “frugal four” nations (the Netherlands, Austria, Denmark and Sweden) and the Covid-racked countries of Southern Europe, especially Italy.

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Even before the virus, Italy was in dire straits, condemned to stagnation thanks to the eurozone. Covid turned that crisis into an emergency, so something had to be done. The Dutch and their allies, however, were not happy about having to bail out the southerners again — and certainly not in the midst of their own national emergencies. In the end, the French and Germans forced a compromise, but not before Mark Rutte — the Dutch PM — was painted as the cold-hearted villain of the piece.

Now, let’s replay these events — only this time with Britain still in the EU. The frugal four would have been a frugal five — and the chief villain would have been the British PM. Indeed, if we’d been part of these negotiations, an already bitter dispute would have become something much worse — because the Franco-German proposal would have been impossible for Britain to accept.

The actual rescue package consists of €750 billion in grants and loans. The necessary funds are to be borrowed by the European Commission from the money markets, with the liability shared among all EU member states. Thus, assuming a similar package in the no-Brexit scenario, there’d have been two poison pills for the UK.

Firstly, money: we’d be paying tens of billions towards a “recovery fund” whose ultimate purpose is to bail out the eurozone. British eurosceptics have long warned that monetary union is inherently fragile to asymmetric shocks; that’s why everyone from Gordon Brown to Nigel Farage fought so hard to keep us out of the single currency. Yet, without Brexit, there we’d be, paying to prop it up anyway.

The second poison pill is about power: allowing the Commission to borrow hundreds of billions of Euros is a massive step towards fiscal integration, and hence a fully-fledged superstate. Of course, because of Brexit, that’s the EU’s business, not ours. But what if Brexit hadn’t happened and it was our business?

Back in 2016, the Government promised us that the “UK will not be part of a further European political integration” and that no “UK powers can be transferred to the EU in the future without a referendum”. Well, giving Brussels the ability to borrow vast sums of money is about as political as it gets, involving the transfer of national powers to the EU because agreeing to underwrite someone else’s borrowing reduces how much you can borrow in your own name. Thus, had we stayed in, the promise would have been broken — a nation of reluctant Remainers betrayed.

A Conservative Prime Minister would have faced a full-scale party revolt — including Cabinet resignations and backbench defections. Therefore, he or she would have no choice but to block the deal. There’d also be overwhelming pressure from the EU to let the deal through, and as the Greeks can tell you, the masters of the eurozone will do “whatever it takes” to save the single currency. All blackmail options would have been on the table — including an end to Britain’s budgetary rebate.

In other words, an irresistible force would have met an immovable object. And whenever that happens, something breaks — most likely the British Government. In the middle of a pandemic.

Back in the real world, we need to ask whether the rescue package is enough to keep the Italians and others afloat through the brutal recovery period that lies ahead. The answer is probably not — and, in fact, the cracks are beginning to show. In the run-up to this week’s EU summit, Poland and Hungary are threatening to veto the recovery fund and the entire EU budget. Even if that’s just brinksmanship, there’s a deeper problem.

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While the recipient countries are happy to help themselves to the grant component of the fund, they’re not so keen on the loans — because these come with onerous conditions. Instead, the recipients have been borrowing the money they need on the open market, thus circumventing the conditions they object to. They’re able to do this at a low interest rate because of the European Central Bank buying up debt issued by eurozone member states. And so the weaker economies have been filling their boots, which is the sort of thing that got the eurozone into trouble before. The ECB could crack down by cutting off bond purchases. However, this could trigger the sovereign debt crisis the Bank is so desperate to avoid.

It would be easier for Brussels and Frankfurt to keep things under control if any extra money required over-and-above the €750 billion were also to be borrowed and doled out by the European Commission. There’s no immediate proposal for this to happen, but having crossed the fiscal Rubicon once already, the next trip to the money markets will be much easier — and the trip after that. I wouldn’t want to bet my house on this summer’s rescue package being a one-time deal.

Covid has taken all the old imbalances and fragilities in the eurozone and made them worse. Further bail-outs are all but inevitable. Given the new model for raising emergency funds, it’s just as well we’re no longer on the hook.

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The words “post-Brexit Britain” conjure up an unfamiliar environment fraught with danger. By voting to leave, we’ve supposedly condemned ourselves to a future full of uncertainty, while our neighbours remain secure within the European Union. But as we’ve seen, the post-Covid world means risk and uncertainty for all.

The only way that any nation can prevail in such circumstances is to stay adaptable. We must react with speed and agility to the risks that we can manage, while reducing our exposure to those that we can’t. Remaining in the EU would have compromised our freedom of action on both counts.

It is not that the EU is completely paralysed. As the recovery fund demonstrates, it is capable of changes of direction — albeit after a protracted period of wrangling. However, when the breakthrough does come it is always in the direction of further integration, of further compromises to national sovereignty. In voting to leave we did not just leave the EU as it was in 2016, but also the EU as it is now becoming.

As a result, we still have the opportunity to make the wise and timely decisions on which our future depends. Of course, that does not mean that we will — because that requires a competent, visionary government.

But at least we will be responsible for our own failings, instead of being made responsible for those of others.