European leaders converge on Budapest Thursday for two days of high-level talks that will seek to rise to the challenges posed by Donald Trump’s return to the White House — but also risk exposing the continent’s fault lines.
The leaders of the European Union will be joined by others from the United Kingdom to Turkey, as well as NATO chief Mark Rutte and Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky, for Thursday’s meeting of the European Political Community.
On the agenda: Europe’s security challenges, chief among them Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as well as conflict in the Middle East, migration, global trade and economic security — issues all thrown into sharp relief by the prospect of a disruptive second Trump presidency.
“The Europeans really have a knife at their throat,” said political analyst Sebastien Maillard, of the Jacques Delors Institute. “The election result forces the EU to open its eyes. Maybe it’s in situations like these that things can actually happen.”
Most urgent among the threats posed by Trump’s return are the fear he could upend European security and pull the plug on support for Ukraine, while simultaneously unleashing a trade war with steep tariffs on European goods.
Thursday’s talks lead immediately into an EU leaders’ summit on Friday focused on addressing the risk of Europe’s economy falling dangerously behind major rivals the United States and China — highlighted in a key report by former Italian leader Mario Draghi.
But whether the continent’s leaders are ready to come together around common priorities — such as vitally needed new funding tools for defence and economic innovation, both seen as critical to ensuring European sovereignty — remains to be seen.
“I don’t think they really prepared for this,” said Guntram Wolff of the Bruegel think tank. “There is no fully discussed plan on what to do now — at the EU level, but also at the Franco-German level.”
Powerhouse Germany is in the throes of a standoff that has torpedoed the coalition of Chancellor Olaf Scholz, while in France President Emmanuel Macron is limping into the final years of his presidency weakened by a protracted political crisis at home.
“Without those two, the rest will find it extremely difficult to really advance on anything,” Wolff predicted.
Add the fact this week’s meetings will be hosted by Hungary’s hard-right leader Viktor Orban — a Trump ally who enthusiastically cheered his re-election, as did Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan — and the chances of a united European message towards the United States look ever slimmer.
The highest-profile among a rising cohort of nationalist European politicians friendly to Trump, Orban even styled the motto for the Hungarian EU presidency — “Make Europe Great Again” — on Trump’s rallying cry.
On paper, a leaders’ dinner on Thursday will be devoted to the issue of transatlantic relations.
“There could be a kind of anodyne statement of congratulations, on willingness to work with the new administration,” predicted Ian Lesser, vice president at the German Marshall Fund of the United States think tank.
Beyond that, he said, “it will be very difficult for European leaders to produce a coherent reaction.”
Instead, Lesser expected there to be a “considerable divergence of view” on display among the leaders in Budapest — perhaps presaging the shape of things to come when it comes to Europe-US relations.
Although American presidents are “going to have to talk to France and Germany,” he noted Trump feels more “affinity” with the likes of Orban or Slovakia’s Robert Fico — who has rallied behind his vow to swiftly end the war in Ukraine, even if it implies tough concessions from Kyiv.
And once in power, he expects a new Trump administration will have “every incentive… to engage very closely with leaders they feel are congenial and to hold at arm’s length those that they don’t value in the same way.”
