Who Speaks for Europe? It’s a UK-French Axis With Dash of Meloni

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(Bloomberg) — The UK and France, friends and enemies over centuries, appear to have cast aside their post-Brexit squabbles over issues like fish and are emerging as a surprisingly united front, standing up for Ukraine and for Europe.

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British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron tag-teamed last week to the US capital to meet with Donald Trump, before Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s calamitous encounter with the US leader in the Oval Office left US military and financial aid in peril.

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Starmer brought part of the European group back together in London with urgency afterward. He and Macron have more or less appointed themselves to lead the charge after committing to deploy troops to Ukraine if needed to ensure any peace with Russia holds.

Still, the question remains – who speaks for Europe when it comes to Donald Trump? And who can in this tricky time? 

That nagging doubt harks back to a famous saying attributed to Henry Kissinger and is one that has always dogged the European Union since its inception. In the past, Germany and France generally occupied that role even with various European Commission presidents vying for center stage and the UK seeking its own direct line to Washington.

“Right now there are too many phone numbers,” Finland’s President Alexander Stubb told Bloomberg TV in an interview on Sunday. “If it was up to me, I think we actually need a European special envoy. It can be one, two, or three people — I don’t care. We probably need to have the big states here. So I think it’s good that France and the UK are taking leadership here.”

Finland knows a thing or two about the stakes. It joined the NATO military alliance a year after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and shares a 830-mile border with Russia. But for a while there, Finland’s previous president had Vladimir Putin’s ear.

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So can Starmer and Macron break through with Trump? Newcomer Starmer brought to the US president a personal invitation from King Charles to visit the UK. Macron, who has shown previously his ability to build a report with Trump, already enticed the then-president elect to Paris for the reopening of the Notre-Dame Cathedral.

Their combined armies, nuclear power and intelligence capabilities means the Anglo-French double act supplants the Franco-German axis when it comes to who speaks for a continent that is confronted with very real prospect of having to stop Russia from taking Ukraine and testing the boundaries of NATO allies.

Still, it will take a “coalition of the willing” — a loaded term used by George W. Bush to rally European support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein — and one knowingly chosen by Starmer as he gathered traditional Western allies, including Canada’s Justin Trudeau in his last weeks in power, to London with a sense of Churchillian urgency.

And while gestures matter, personal charm can only get you so far in Trump’s world unless you have some hard power to back it up. The overnight vanishing of USAID — one of the lifelines to Ukraine — was a reminder of that. 

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“I do think the United Kingdom should step up and lead,” Starmer said at a news conference on Sunday. “We have done that historically as a nation, and we need to do it again, and that is why we’re moving forward on this.”

As a Labour leader he broke the mold by bringing a leftist party out of the political wilderness during a time the far right was on the ascent. He came in on a pledge to end more than a decade of fiscal austerity under Conservatives. He wasn’t banking on having to work out how to juice up defense spending when his is one of the slowest-growing economies out of the Group of Seven. 

Macron has his own domestic challenges. He can’t run again in the 2027 presidential election under French term limits, so he has until then to stop far-right leader Marine Le Pen from finally ascending. 

He’s been ahead of the curve in diagnosing the problem that NATO is “brain-dead” and Europe needs far greater self reliance — but he’s not always backed that up with cash.

The French president understands the UK has a special role to play for historic reasons in relations with the US and Starmer indeed might be the better positioned to help mend ties between Trump and Zelenskiy, according to an official familiar with his thinking, who spoke on condition of anonymity. 

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The contours of a potential coalition are coming into focus. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni is likely to be in the tent as one of a handful of so-called Trump whisperers. While Hungary’s Viktor Orban demonstrably has Trump’s ear, too, he’s got close ties to Russia and has had a prickly relationship with other countries in the EU.

Meloni also has a long-standing rapport with Elon Musk, a key player in the White House. Case in point, she was at the inauguration and most recently headlined an annual gathering of conservatives with Trump in attendance.

Yet Meloni herself has been taken aback by the turn of events and potentially caught in the crosshairs. When asked in London about the Oval office rupture between Trump and Zelenskiy, Meloni simply said that foreign policy required “more depth.”  

Officials close to her, speaking on condition of anonymity, describe her unease about Trump’s contempt for Zelenskiy. She has one of the trickiest needles to thread in having a coalition partner who wants her job and is pro-Russia while also heading a country that doesn’t even meet the criteria of defense spending that NATO requires — never mind what Trump is demanding.

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The country that has been left out in the cold in all this is Germany, Europe’s economic motor and the lender of last resort on many a crisis, from the Greek-triggered euro one to the pandemic. Its military is weak by design in the aftermath of World War II and it has a fundamental financial — not just psychological — obstacle to ramping up defense spending in the form of a debt brake enshrined in the constitution.

Germany’s politics are currently in flux at the worst possible time. Chancellor Olaf Scholz is on the way out and successor Friedrich Merz isn’t likely to take office for some weeks – potentially even longer – and will most likely need to work with Scholz’s Social Democrats in a coalition.

“I’m also hopefully glad to see Germany with skin in the game at some stage,” said Finland’s Stubb in the interview in London. “So many different possibilities.”

How Starmer and Macron work it out will be key, as in the past it was Germany’s Angela Merkel who was the undisputed “Queen of Europe.” She loomed large over relations with Putin. 

Her experience, one European diplomat mused, is why it might be tempting to bring her out of retirement but her legacy — including never weaning Germany off its dependence on Russia gas and helping to negotiate Ukraine’s last peace accords after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 — has since come under intense scrutiny. Some critics have said she only emboldened Putin.

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Another person potentially in the mix is Ursula von der Leyen. She was defense minister in Germany before being elevated to the top job in the EU. She had forged very close ties with Joe Biden and his administration, but with the Democrats losing office her ties to DC are weaker. 

Trump also doesn’t like the EU. A looming tariffs war, where VDL — as she’s popularly known — is in charge of the bloc’s response, would likely seep into and sour their relationship. VDL’s contribution will likely be figuring out how the EU can find the hundreds of billions of euros it needs to ramp up its defense spending and trying to herd the bloc around whatever she proposes.

The immediate challenge is to try and paper over the dispute between Trump and Zelenskiy. The Trump camp dug in on the weekend, demanding Zelenskiy apologize for the White House blow-up. 

One avenue might indeed be the British monarch. Trump was famously taken with the late Queen Elizabeth II and now has the prospect of an audience with her son. And Zelenskiy already got there first, with a warm weekend welcome at the King’s rural retreat.

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Even as some European leaders gathered in the UK under Starmer’s watch, French officials believe Macron is uniquely positioned to be Trump’s top interlocutor. The two men have known each other for a long time given their respective terms have overlapped and are in regular contact. 

Macron has also been making arguments for years about the need for the EU to be more autonomous, the officials point out. But not everyone sees Macron taking the lead, unsure if his interests always align with theirs.

And all the jostling to be the key voice in the room with Trump may leave little room for the proposal for a special envoy, a topic that will be discussed when EU leaders meet in Brussels on Thursday. 

That’s leaving some smaller countries in the bloc — and NATO — feeling cast aside. The leaders of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were not invited to London, although Starmer spoke with them on the phone.

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte or even superstars like Mario Draghi, credited with saving the euro, have been floated as potential interlocutors, although they also lack the hard power of being the leader of a country. 

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As European allies are forced to think of ways to reduce their reliance on Washington to defend the continent, Turkey is willing to offer the second-largest NATO army — for a price.

And that is where President Recep Tayyip Erdogan makes his own, potentially critical cameo by re-floating the idea of full membership into the European club. He commands a battle-hardened army of more than 400,000 men.

As Erdogan put it: “Only Turkey’s full membership in the bloc can save the European Union from the impasse it has fallen into, from economy to defense, from politics to international reputation.”

—With assistance from Kati Pohjanpalo, Selcan Hacaoglu, Piotr Skolimowski, Ania Nussbaum, Daryna Krasnolutska, Francine Lacqua and Andrea Dudik.

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