By Solomon "Customs" Bridges
There is a particular kind of speech European Commission presidents give once a year, half accounting, half sermon. Ursula von der Leyen gave hers Tuesday, and the sermon part won out.
Her message, delivered to the European Parliament, was not subtle. Europe faces a choice, she said, between "an independent Europe that stands up for its values in this world" and "letting divisions and dependencies hold us back."
"Do we want to rally around our European idea that together we can decide our own destiny?" she asked. "Or do we let our democracies be undermined by the proxies and puppets of authoritarians?"
She did not shy from naming the threat as she sees it, or rather threats, plural, with a shared aim. "Whether it is the ultra nationalist or the anti-European, whether it's Russian interference or disinformation, the names may be different, but their goal is the same," she said. She pointed to "the rise of the extreme and the decline of nuance, even in the way that we relate to each other" — concerns, she argued, that are being "weaponised to drive a wedge between us, sometimes from the outside, but too often from the inside."
Her conclusion was a pledge rather than a policy: "the fate of Europe must remain in the hands of Europeans."
What von der Leyen did not offer, at least in the portion of the speech available to this desk, was a detailed accounting of budgets, defense spending targets, or enlargement timelines — the kind of specifics that turn a rallying cry into a governing plan. That is worth watching for as the full text and the parliamentary reaction come in over the coming days.
For towns from Lisbon to Tallinn, the speech matters less as rhetoric than as a signal of where Brussels intends to spend political capital next: on cohesion against outside pressure, and on the harder, messier work of holding twenty-seven governments to one story about who they are.
Nothing happens 'over there' anymore.
— Compiled from reporting by The Guardian.
The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."