Alone together, without a voice: Europe in the spring of 2026
For the first time in living memory, Europe is truly alone together. Two former leaders hold the credibility Europe needs. Neither holds the power to act.
There is something almost theatrical about Aachen. A city of roughly 260,000 residents, it sits at Germany’s western edge, so close to Belgium and the Netherlands that on clear days you sense three countries breathing the same air. It is one of Europe’s many Dreiländerecke: those corners where three countries meet, where identities overlap and borders lose their certainty.
Aachen is a city with three names. The Germans call it Aachen. The French, Aix-la-Chapelle. The Dutch, Aken. But there is a fourth name, in old Latin, that says something the others do not: Aquisgrana. The name of an empire thet dominate Europe in the Middle Age.
Before Charlemagne, Frankish kings had no fixed capital. They moved constantly from one royal estate to another, governing on the move. What drew Charles the Great to this particular corner of the continent was, by some accounts, almost prosaic: rich hunting grounds, and natural hot springs that eased his chronic joint pain. Around 794 AD, he decided to stop wandering. He built a permanent palace complex here, and Aquisgrana became, effectively, the administrative, cultural and religious capital of an empire that stretched across what is now France, Germany, Italy, and the Low Countries.
After Charlemagne’s death and the fracturing of his empire, the city retained an authority that outlasted the man. In 936 AD, King Otto I insisted on being crowned in Aquisgrana specifically to tie his lineage to Charlemagne’s legacy. He set a precedent that held for six centuries: thirty-one German kings and Holy Roman Emperors made the journey to this city to be crowned, ascending the steps to sit upon Charlemagne’s plain stone throne in the cathedral’s upper gallery.
The centres of Carolingian power — Maastricht, Brussels, Strasbourg — are the seats of European institutions today.
Aachen is something else: the city where Europe comes to remember why it built those institutions in the first place. Geography and myth determined the fate of this place.
Charlemagne is a convenient symbol for Germany, and Germany knows it. Unlike Italy, which can point to Dante and the Renaissance, or Austria to the Habsburgs and their multi-ethnic empire, Germany must travel twelve centuries back to find a figure of continental stature untainted by what came after. But the historical Charlemagne was, as the medieval historian Jacques Le Goff observed, a “false start”: a king who unified Western Europe through military force and whose empire did not outlast him, a king who did not think of himself as European.
Yet every year in the Coronation Hall of Aachen’s town hall, Europe awards a prize in his name. Every great historical project feeds on myth as much as on fact.
The Charlemagne Prize, in German the Karlspreis, has been awarded since 1950 to those who have worked to build European unity. Its list of laureates traces a map of postwar European conscience: Konrad Adenauer, Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman, François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl together in 1988, Angela Merkel in 2008, Emmanuel Macron, Volodymyr Zelensky, Ursula von der Leyen. Also, three Belarusian women of extraordinary courage: Maria Kalesnikava, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, and Veronika Tsepkalo.
On 14 May 2026, the prize went to Mario Draghi.
I want to go back to that moment — and use it to look ahead.
The Aachen ceremony mixes music and speeches, but the speeches dominate. Greece’s prime minister, Mitsotakis, spoke. Chancellor Merz spoke. Finally, Mario Draghi spoke. Yet by the time the applause died down in Aachen, the multifaceted story of that week was unfolding also elsewhere.
On the same day, 14 May, Donald Trump was in Beijing with America’s top CEOs. While Europe was awarding a prize for past service, America was trying to make deals for the future. As the German commentator Gabor Steingart put it with characteristic bluntness: Europa macht sich Sorgen, Amerika macht Geschäfte. Europe worries. America does business.
Four days later, on 18 May, Angela Merkel appeared at the re:publica conference in Berlin. The hall was full more than an hour before she arrived. Outside, people who hadn’t made it in stood at the doors.
Her session was titled “Trotz allem: Hoffnung Europa?” Despite everything: hope for Europe? The question itself was a bridge between Aachen and Berlin, between the political leaders who had listened to Draghi’s diagnosis in the Coronation Hall and the younger generation in a Berlin conference centre who still believe in the power of politics, and are worried for exactly the same reasons.
In Aachen, Draghi had put Europe’s leaders in front of the continent’s limits and vulnerabilities. In Berlin, Merkel did something subtler: she acknowledged her own. About Europe’s diplomatic potential going to waste. About the mistake of leaving only Trump in contact with Moscow. About the fact that underestimating Putin would be an error, but so would underestimating Europe’s own capabilities.
“Wir sind ja auch wer, als Europäer,” she said.
We Europeans are somebody too.
The next day, 19 May, Merkel was in Strasbourg, where the European Parliament awarded her the newly created European Order of Merit: she is the first recipient of the prize, established to mark the 75th anniversary of the Schuman Declaration. Zelensky received it in the same ceremony.
Meanwhile, something else was taking shape. On 20 May, the Financial Times reported that EU governments were mulling whether Merkel or Draghi could serve as Europe’s envoy, a “Putin whisperer,” in the paper’s phrase, in potential negotiations over Ukraine. No name had been confirmed. No mandate had been given. But no alternative was offered.
In the space of seven days, two former leaders had received prizes, given speeches about European purpose, and become the centre of the continent’s most urgent diplomatic question. Neither of them holds power. Both of them, it seems, hold something Europe cannot quite replace.
Let us take the time machine: back to 26 July 2012.
Mario Draghi was at Lancaster House in London, speaking at an investment conference. He had been president of the European Central Bank for less than a year. The eurozone was under existential pressure: markets were betting on the collapse of the currency, borrowing costs for Italy and Spain were at crisis levels, and the question being asked in every financial capital was not whether the euro would survive but when it would break apart.
By that time I was living in Austria, where many were asking themselves if entering Europe in 1995 was a right decision and the Euro monetary system in 2002 a colossal mistake.
Draghi said: “Within our mandate, the ECB is ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro. And believe me, it will be enough.”
The markets stabilised almost immediately. The bond-buying programme he announced was never even activated. The announcement alone was sufficient. The euro survived.
In Aachen, fourteen years later, Draghi came with no power but that of 383 recommendations: his Competitiveness Report, commissioned by the European Commission, presented in September 2024, and implemented, as of 2026, at a rate of barely eleven percent.
What he had instead was words. Used with the tone of a doctor who does not shy away from the diagnosis he must deliver to his patient. And the diagnosis is tough.
“Growth is therefore the precondition for everything Europe says it must do today: financing the energy transition, defending its continent, building the industries of the digital age and supporting ageing societies.
And the world that once helped Europe generate prosperity no longer exists. It has become harder, more fragmented and more mercantilist.
Across the Atlantic, we can no longer take it for granted that the guardians of the post-war order remain committed to preserving it. Decisions with far-reaching consequences for European economies are increasingly being taken unilaterally, ignoring the rules that the United States once championed. And for the first time since 1949, Europeans are facing the possibility that the United States will no longer guarantee our security on the terms we once took for granted.”
The European governance itself, said Draghi, was born with the best of intentions, but now resembles a straitjacket:
“The European project was built, deliberately and wisely, to prevent the concentration of power. After the catastrophes of the first half of the 20th century, Europeans determined that no one member state would dominate over the others.”
But the very mechanisms designed to prevent that domination are now what make any concerted action so difficult to adopt:
“Externally, we dismantled trade barriers, embraced global supply chains and built the most open of the world’s great economies. Internally, however, we have never fully practised the openness we preached: we have left the single market unfinished, capital markets fragmented, energy systems insufficiently connected, and large parts of our economy entangled in layers of regulation.”
“There is irony in all this. Europe relied on the markets to do a job that the common political authority was not in a position to do. We denied those markets the continental scale they needed to succeed. The result was not a true market economy, but an asymmetric economy. And from this asymmetry stem many of the vulnerabilities that Europe faces today.”
The numbers Draghi cited in Aachen were not mentioned often in the post-event reports. Numbers are boring. But they deserve to be read. Europe needs an additional €1.2 trillion per year in strategic investment: nearly four times the Marshall Plan relative to GDP. The United States is on track to spend five times more than Europe on artificial intelligence infrastructure by 2030. European defence R&D stands at barely a tenth of American levels, and the failure to pool arms procurement wastes an estimated €60 billion a year. There is more: half the capital invested through European funds flows back to the United States, where risks and returns are higher.
A continent that opened itself to the world without completing its internal market; that became strategically dependent while believing it was strategically autonomous; that outsourced the most difficult decisions - on power, on security, on democratic legitimacy - to institutions deliberately designed to avoid making them.
And now?
Welcome to the central paradox of European politics in the spring of 2026.
The man who delivered this diagnosis and the recommendations that, if implemented, could put Europe back in the global competition, holds no institutional power. The woman who spent the same week reminding Europe of its diplomatic potential has been out of office for nearly five years.
For Merkel, the Swiss Basler Zeitung summarised the dilemma in what may be the most precise sentence written about this situation: the person best suited to the task is precisely the woman who does not want to do it, and whose legacy is most contested exactly where Europe’s fear of Russia is greatest.
Merz, from the Aachen stage, had said firmly that Europeans would decide who speaks for them: “Wir Europäer entscheiden selbst, wer für uns spricht. Niemand anderes.” Nobody else. Seven days later, the candidates being discussed were the man he had just awarded a prize, and the former chancellor with whom he maintains a frosty relationship. It is good that Europe must decide who speaks for it. It would be better if it also took the decision.
None of this would be complete without acknowledging that both figures carry enemies as well as admirers. The same qualities that make Draghi and Merkel credible in Brussels and Kyiv make them targets for a large and vocal part of European politics.
For the continent’s populist right, Draghi is the archetype of everything they oppose: an unelected technocrat who makes decisions of democratic consequence without a mandate from any electorate. His enemies are structurally diverse but ideologically convergent.
The AfD was, in its foundational moment, a direct response to Draghi. The party was established in early 2013 by a group of German economists and conservative politicians: it was a Professorenpartei, an academic political party, that opposed the eurozone rescue policies and, specifically, the ECB’s monetary policy under Draghi’s leadership.
His “whatever it takes” speech of 2012, and the policy of negative interest rates that followed, were experienced by some German savers as expropriation: their savings earning nothing, to finance what the AfD described as the bailout of irresponsible southern European governments.
The party’s very name, Alternative für Deutschland, was a direct counter to Angela Merkel’s repeated claim that her euro rescue policy was alternativlos: without alternative. She and Draghi were the twin targets.
In Italy, Draghi’s own country, Matteo Salvini called him in 2017 the “complice del massacro economico dell’Italia”: the accomplice of the economic massacre of Italy. By 2021, with more than €200 billion from the EU’s pandemic recovery fund at stake, Salvini’s Lega had little choice but to support Draghi’s government in Rome. In 2022, when the moment was right, Lega withdrew its support and brought the government down. Now, four years later, most economists agree: the €200 billion programme in Italy has failed almost completely to deliver the expected outcome. Because once they got rid of Draghi, there was no one able to administer those investments savvily.
Nemo propheta in Patria, they say in Latin: nobody is listened to by his own fellow citizens. In the case of Draghi, not in Italy - nor, so far, in Europe. And Merkel? Gone are the days when entire buildings in Berlin were covered with giant billboards reading “Danke, Mutti!” Now it seems she is held responsible for everything that no longer works in the country.
But the hostility toward Draghi, or toward Merkel, is not really about them. It never was.
They are proxies for a deeper refusal: the refusal to accept that Europe, as a political project, requires something from its member states and their citizens. It requires the partial surrender of sovereignty. It requires solidarity with countries you did not choose as neighbours. It requires, above all, a shared memory of why the project was necessary in the first place.
That memory, today, is contested. In Italy, in Germany, in France and beyond, there are powerful political forces that would prefer to treat the catastrophes of the twentieth century as distant history, properly archived, no longer instructive. The Erinnerungskultur — the culture of remembrance that Germany built so painstakingly over decades — is under pressure even in Germany. Elsewhere it barely took root.
And without that memory, without the visceral understanding of what national sovereignty unchecked by any common framework actually produced, the European project looks not like a hard-won answer but like an imposition.
Yet Europe, with all its contradictions, has established itself in the minds of Europeans. Published in the very same days when Draghi was speaking in Aachen and Merkel in Berlin, the latest Eurobarometer survey tells a story that often gets lost in the noise of political crisis: nearly three quarters of Europeans say their country has benefited from EU membership.
Three quarters feel they are citizens of the EU: it is the highest level ever recorded.
Record numbers back a common European defence and security policy. And 76 percent of respondents agree that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a threat to the security of the EU.
Europeans exist. And they know what they stand to lose.
They make Europe what Timothy Garton Ash, the British historian of European liberty who received the Charlemagne Prize in 2017, called a kaleidotapestry: a weaving together of languages, traditions, symbols, and myths: not a single thing, but many things sharing enough to constitute a whole. Rich, diverse, irreducible to any single national identity.
It is a beautiful image. It is also, as Draghi implicitly argues, insufficient on its own.
A tapestry needs a frame. A kaleidoscope without structure shatters. The cultural argument for Europe and the political argument for deeper integration are not separate things: each depends on the other.
The beauty of what Europe is cannot survive without the architecture of what Europe chooses to do. Especially now, when Europeans, in Draghi’s words:
“…for the first time in living memory, we are truly alone together. Europe is responding to this new reality. But it is responding within a system that was not designed for challenges of this magnitude.”
We do not have time to redesign the system from scratch. Or maybe we can, but we need someone who stands to act, and lets the others move.
We need a new, bolder, definitive “whatever it takes.”
But who can say today “whatever it takes” for the European project and be believed? The honest answer, for now, is: not quite anyone.
The people with institutional authority are constrained by domestic politics, coalition arithmetic, and the weight of their own electorates. You see the spectacle playing out these days across Berlin, Rome, Paris, Madrid. Desolating. The people with power do not have credibility.
The people with credibility - Draghi, Merkel - lack the institutional power that Merkel herself identified as the precondition for any serious negotiation. “Man braucht diese Macht.” You need this power. To make things happen.
Who can now say the “whatever it takes” we desperately need in 2026? Because only “whatever it takes” can complement and expand Draghi’s observation: he could not add, because he is not entitled to say it,
“we are alone together, therefore
we must do whatever it takes
to save our Europe.”
He could not say that.
But he told the people in power listening to him in Aachen:
“The task now is to respond with courage
and show that Europe can once again
turn crisis into union.”
Mario Draghi, Aachen, 14 May 2026
A very thoughtful update. As an American deeply committed to Europe, I wonder though, whether prizes, conferences, speeches and policies have gradually become an obstacle to European unity. A substitute for the decisive action required in the face of three greedy and uncomprehending powers (including my own country) which are now looking at Europe more in terms of spoils. Has Europe become a new Holy Roman Empire, flaundering in technicalities and different ethnic groups while the world around it has utterly changed?