Are the European leaders playing the long game?

[DFW]

7. They can't afford the time.

Elections, both national and purely parliamentary (vaguely akin to our midterms) will be held in many EU countries well before 2029. Macron looks like he’ll be out by then, probably replaced by someone FAR worse. France hates leaders with common sense almost as much as we do. The last one they had lost the 1981 election, and he (Giscard) saw his best friend, Germany’s Social Democratic Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, get tossed out by actions of his own party just a year later. Germany, to its credit, did elect Angela Merkel to four terms later on, but she owed that in part to the Social Democrats’ abandoning common sense, and nominating faceless, sloganeering bureaucrats for chancellor, and after decades of stagnation under crushing rule of uncaring all-powerful bureaucrats, it’s no wonder the SPD, which once won the Chancellorship, now polls at under 20% (!!!!) much of the time.

So, the EU (and GB) is unlikely to speak with one voice when local issues take up so much of their time. That goes out the window if Putin gets more aggressive, or Trump moves against a NATO ally. They will not lose sight of either. Sure, train strikes in France, Belgium and Germany can and will make life for working people (including me) miserable short term, but one can’t compare that to Putin sending 125 bombing drones per night into your city. My nephew, who just returned from over 3 years in the Ukraine, gave us a first hand account of what that was like.