There is a sentence one cannot shake off once one has formulated it this way: All the EU's contacts with the base are second-hand. And these second hands are increasingly preoccupied with their own problems.
This is not the familiar critique of Brussels. The familiar critique says: the EU is aloof, citizens do not feel represented, the Commission decides over the heads of nations. That critique is old and has worn thin. What the sentence above describes is something else. It is the description of a structural failure of feedback — and the failure does not happen in Brussels but in the institutions that should stand between Brussels and the citizens.
I. A metaphor that has become precise
The image of Spaceship Berlin has been around for twenty years. It describes a political class that lives in its own atmosphere, in a capital milieu of ministries, association headquarters, press clubs, talk shows, and hotel bars — and that maintains contact with actual society only through opinion polls and pre-filtered citizen delegations. The image was meant polemically and was used polemically. But it was accurate, and it has remained accurate.
What has changed: Spaceship Berlin has by now landed. Not elegantly, not by design, not amicably. For months the AfD has led the polls and now stands ahead of the CDU/CSU, which governs. With that, the basic assumption of German politics over the last thirty years has tipped — the assumption that the political consensus was so deeply anchored that it could be disturbed only temporarily by fringe phenomena. It is not deeply anchored. It has grown thin, and the AfD numbers are merely the most visible sign of that. Add to this the economic erosion: the automotive industry in existential crisis, deindustrialisation in pulses, energy prices at a level that compels structural relocations, a Bundeswehr in a state which the army inspector, on the day of the Russian attack on Ukraine, described as blank. The Berlin spaceship's landing was not the consequence of an insight. It was the consequence of impact realities that could no longer be moderated away.
Brussels does not have this impact. Not yet. The reasons are structural, and they are interesting.
II. Why Brussels floats higher
Nation-states land because they have direct feedback mechanisms. Elections every four years. Parliamentary question hours. A chancellor who must stand before the television news and answer for failed policies. The press asks follow-up questions, the opposition presses, the trade associations protest, citizens write letters to the editor, take to the streets, vote differently. The system is loud, full of contradictions, sometimes overwhelmed — but it has a direct return channel.
Brussels does not have this return channel. Not because European integration sought to prevent it, but because a supranational system of 27 peoples structurally cannot have such a channel. There is no European people calling the Commission to account. There are 27 publics in 24 languages, each calling their own national governments to account — and these governments are then supposed to represent their citizens' interests in Brussels.
That was the design principle. It worked for a long time, because the national governments were strong enough to shape Brussels, and because they could translate the return flow from their own societies into European policy. The Commission was surrounded by a belt of national governments that functioned as dampers, as correctives, and as reality signals.
This belt has become defective.
III. The parliament that does not parliament
Before I continue the defect diagnosis, I must answer a question that imposes itself. The EU does have a parliament. 720 directly elected members from all 27 member states. The largest transnational parliament in the world. Why does this parliament not provide the feedback that would be needed between citizens and Commission?
The answer has two levels, one institutional and one mundane.
Institutionally: the European Parliament is not a parliament in the classical sense. It cannot initiate legislation — the right of initiative lies solely with the Commission. It cannot directly elect the Commission President — she is proposed by the European Council and only confirmed by Parliament. It cannot bring down a government, because there is no government in the classical sense it could bring down. It has a motion of censure against the Commission, which in seventy years of history advanced only once to the point that a Commission resigned — and only because the Commission pre-empted the vote by self-dismissal. The parliament can thus help shape policy, but it cannot make policy. It is an enlarged Bundesrat, not an enlarged Bundestag.
From this follows the mundane phenomenon: members are far from their voters, because between voter and member there is no political event by which one could measure the member's position. Who knows their constituency member in the Bundestag? Roughly 30 percent of voters, depending on the survey. Who knows their constituency member in the European Parliament? Empirically: single-digit percentages. That is not a character failure of the members and not an educational failure of the citizens. It is the consequence of there being no political event between them that connects both sides.
Whoever appears on television is not representative — they are precisely not representative, but exceptional. Strack-Zimmermann, a few other prominent figures, perhaps two dozen names regularly visible on national talk shows. The remaining 720 minus 24 disappear into an apparatus that conducts neither constituency politics in the classical sense nor governmental politics. They sit in committees, negotiate trilogues with Council and Commission, produce reports. This work is not worthless. It is merely invisible — and therefore politically ineffective in the sense of feedback. What remains invisible cannot feed back.
The consequence: the only functioning feedback channel between the European level and the member states runs on the executive track. The Commission negotiates with national governments. Directorates-General with Permanent Representations. Commissioners with national specialist ministers. This is politics between executives, in which the people figure only as statistical background noise. Elections are decided at the national level, not at the European level. What citizens criticise about Brussels goes via their national politicians to the Commission — if it gets through at all. What the Commission wants to communicate to citizens goes via national politicians — who, however, profile themselves mostly on national topics and often use Brussels as a convenient scapegoat.
This is the configuration in which the multi-level system functions only if both tracks — the parliamentary and the executive — are robust. The parliamentary one is structurally weak. The executive one was long robust, but is no longer.
IV. The second hands
The national governments have not disappeared. They are overloaded. That is a different state, and the difference is decisive.
Take Germany. The present federal government has been operating in permanent crisis mode since taking office. AfD consolidation at 25 to 27 percent, ahead of the governing Union. Budget gaps in the two-digit billion range. Automotive crisis. Steel crisis. Ford facing the end in Saarlouis. Volkswagen in existential transformation. Deutsche Bahn in daily disintegration. Bundeswehr procurement that has not functioned for three governments. Migration debates that challenge coalition arithmetic anew each week. Pension financing that demographically can no longer be represented. And alongside this the normal cases — education, care, housing, digitalisation — each of which would be a generational task on its own.
Who in this government has capacity to engage in depth with the European position on supply chain legislation, on AI regulation, on the renegotiation of Mercosur, on the EU budget from 2028? The answer is: a few civil servants at mid-level, all of whom handle three further dossiers at the same time. At the political level, practically no one with full attention. European policy in Germany has been done systematically on the side for about five years.
The same applies to other key capitals to equal or greater degree. France has been in an institutional permanent crisis since Macron's parliamentary dissolution in 2024, unresolved to this day. Italy is carried by a Meloni government whose attention must be split between domestic consolidation and European involvement. The Netherlands have not managed stable government formation since Wilders' electoral success. Spain is led by a minority government that must work daily on separatist coalition questions. Austria has the FPÖ as its strongest party. These are not fringe phenomena. These are the central actors from whom Brussels would have to receive its reality signals.
The intermediaries are not malicious, not unwilling, not incompetent. They are exhausted. That is a different state, and it has different consequences.
V. The distortion is worse than the silence
It would be the smaller problem if the overloaded national governments simply delivered less input to Brussels. Then the consequence would be inactivity, and Brussels could react on its own initiative. The greater problem: the overloaded intermediaries do not filter less, but differently.
What they pass upward is what has become urgent in their own national crisis situation — that is, the crisis signals of their daily politics, not the structural long-term questions that will decide Europe. The federal government carries to Brussels the worry about the automotive industry, migration numbers, defence procurement. The French government, the worry about energy prices, farmer protests, sovereign debt. The Dutch government, the worry about nitrogen regulation, migration numbers. These are all legitimate concerns. But what no longer rises to the top are the questions that, in a functioning Union, would have to be worked on jointly between national governments and Commission.
What is Europe's strategic position in a world in which the United States is no longer a reliable partner? How do we organise ourselves toward a China that is simultaneously trading partner and systemic rival? What does European sovereignty mean concretely in energy, defence, technology, finance? How do we shape enlargement by six to ten countries without destroying capacity to act? How do we survive the demographic transformation without losing social cohesion?
These questions demand resources, time, deep reflection, intellectual bandwidth at the highest level. They also demand a capacity for contradiction toward the Commission — the ability to tell Brussels you see this wrong, and to back it with one's own analyses. The overloaded national governments have neither resources nor capacity for contradiction. They nod through what is nod-throughable, and fight only where domestic politics compels them.
VI. The Commission does not become more powerful — it becomes lonelier
One might think: if the national governments are weak, the Commission's power grows. That is the surface reading. It is only half right.
The Commission retains its formal power. But it loses its reality control. A strong European system is not one in which the Commission rules unchallenged. It is one in which national governments substantively contradict the Commission — on the basis of deep analyses of their own — and in which from this contradiction common European policy emerges. The conflict is the production condition of quality.
What is happening now: the Commission designs policy, the national governments are too exhausted for substantive contradiction, the policy is enacted, encounters reality, and fails — or produces consequences no one foresaw. Then surprise is great, then internally a search begins for who is to blame, then adjustments are made, rolled back, defused, softened.
The supply chain law was such a case. Conceived as a breakthrough, bureaucratically so overloaded that the economy could no longer bear it and the Commission itself had to gut it. The pesticide regulation: withdrawn after farmer protests had moved through Europe. Parts of the Green Deal: softened under pressure from industry, which suddenly grew louder in Brussels than in the capitals. Parts of the AI Act will be next, because the practical implementation will generate resistances no one foresaw.
The Commission notices this late, because its feedback mechanism — the national governments — is defective. And it does not learn from it fundamentally, because such learning would consist in engagement with its own structure — and for that it itself has no time. The Commission is as overloaded as the capitals, only differently.
VII. The cascade
From the opening sentence of this essay follows a further mechanism I want to make explicit. If the national governments are overloaded, so are their ministries. If the ministries are overloaded, so are the national parliaments. If the parliaments are overloaded, so are the media that should observe them. If the media are overloaded, so are the citizens who orient themselves by them.
A cascade of attention impoverishment emerges. Each level has ever less capacity to observe and correct the level above it. The system's capacity for self-regulation declines simultaneously on all levels.
This is the real crisis. It is not the crisis of an institution. It is the crisis of the observation and correction capacity of a multi-level system. And it is especially dangerous because it advances without visible failure. There is no moment at which someone says: now the feedback has collapsed. It collapses slowly, on millions of small levels simultaneously, and becomes visible only when a great deal has already broken.
VIII. Two impact scenarios
The conventional reading says: Brussels lands when three or four central capitals are taken over by EU-sceptic governments. Paris after 2027. Rome after Meloni's second term. The Hague with Wilders participation. Berlin at some point, when the AfD has become coalition-capable. Then the physics tips, then Brussels must fundamentally change, then comes the landing.
This is the institutional reading, and it is possibly too optimistic. Because it presupposes that the intermediaries are still functional, even if EU-sceptic.
The more realistic reading is the one the opening sentence of this essay suggests: Brussels does not have to wait until the capitals tip. Brussels will become sidelined much earlier, because it produces policy that receives no real feedback anywhere — and that then fails in reality, without Brussels knowing why.
That is a different impact scenario. Not the great bang of a political revolt. But the slow fading of effectiveness. The Union is not overthrown. It becomes irrelevant. Politics happens, but it no longer happens where it is formally decided. National governments increasingly act unilaterally, because the European process has become too slow. Citizens no longer direct their expectations toward Brussels, because Brussels plays no role in their perception. The Commission continues to draft roadmaps, but no one reads them anymore except those who must do so professionally.
This is the more depressing version. It has the advantage of having no moment of violence. And the disadvantage of allowing no correction, because the corrective moment never arrives.
IX. What is missing
If this finding is right — and much speaks for it — then the most important question of the next years is not who governs Brussels and how. But rather: where does the new observation capacity emerge that the European system needs? Because the old one — national governments as intermediaries — no longer works.
Several possibilities would be conceivable, and one of them is obvious: strengthening the European Parliament. Right of initiative for legislation. Direct election of the Commission President by European citizens. A motion of censure with real consequences. An electoral system that makes the connection between voter and member politically tangible — through real European campaigns with European themes, not through 27 national campaigns that mention the building in Strasbourg only in passing. That would be the most obvious reform, because it would make Parliament what its name already claims. It has been failing for decades because it would shift the weight between Commission, Council, and Parliament in favour of Parliament — and neither Commission nor Council has an interest in that.
If parliamentary reform fails to happen, other possibilities would be conceivable. European citizens' councils at the actual decision-making level, not as consultative playgrounds but as institutions with formal competences in feedback and correction. Independent European observation bodies with mandate and resources, below the national governments but above individual NGOs. New forms of journalistic observation that no longer live in the Brussels bubble and that are not fed by the same PR agencies that also serve the Commission.
Or — and this is the darker possibility — the new observation capacity does not emerge at all. Then European capacity to act erodes further, until an external force washes away the fragments. That can be a major geopolitical shock. That can be an energy or economic crisis the EU can no longer process. That can also simply be a long grey slackening that no longer agitates anyone, because no one has enough bandwidth left to be agitated.
X. The appearance that confirms the diagnosis
On 19 April 2026, Ursula von der Leyen appeared in Hamburg at the anniversary celebration 80 Years of Die Zeit at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus. The questions had been submitted by readers — eighty questions, one for each year of the newspaper. The moderator was the editor-in-chief of Die Zeit, Giovanni di Lorenzo, an old friend of Ursula von der Leyen from their Hannover days, who has long called her by her first name. The atmosphere was warm, the reactions friendly, the applause at the right places.
What did not take place in that hall: serious objection. The toughest follow-up of the evening concerned the possible construction flaw of the EU — whether there really was none she would change. Twice deflected, friendly, firm, and the moderator let it pass. That is the third stage of the cascade in action: the media that should observe the political institutions produce formats that, in the form of observation, suspend observation. It looks like dialogue, it feels like dialogue, it is presented in the media as dialogue. But it is the simulation of dialogue in a lounge in which no one risks power.
Three statements from that evening stand for themselves. The first: »The voice of Europe must be audible. Too often, Europe has lately not spoken.« That is a diagnosis of one's own speechlessness, delivered in a form that is itself part of the problem — for what speaks here is not the voice of Europe, but a voice from the inner circle of the Brussels class, formulated toward the in-house audience of Die Zeit. The second: »We must succeed in completing the European continent, so that it is not influenced by Russia, Turkey, or China. We must think bigger and geopolitically.« That is the enlargement thesis in its most current form — and no one in the hall asked how completion is compatible with the capacity to act of a Union that already, with 27 members, suffers from consensus blockages. The third: »Not in the European Council, but in the Council of Foreign Ministers, we should move to majority voting.« That is a technocratic proposal that touches the institutional deep structure — and that was not further questioned in the format, although it reaches further than most of the topics treated that evening in the eighty questions.
Beside these three statements sits a fourth, known from earlier appearances, that returned that evening in a similar form: that the European business model had rested on three pillars no longer in existence — cheap energy from Russia, cheap labour from China, cheap defence from the United States. That is a devastating diagnosis of German and European policy of the last twenty years. But it was not pursued. Who made this business model possible? Who defended it for decades? Who was, during this time, Federal Defence Minister in Germany? These questions were not asked. They could have been asked, they would have been fair, they would not have unduly pressed the President. They were not asked because the format does not provide for them.
That is the pattern. A politician who competently finds the right words. A moderation that competently avoids the inconvenient consequences. An audience that competently stays in the role of the critically informed citizen, without that role demanding anything. A press release the next day describing the event as a deep exchange with the citizens.
No one in that hall intended to deceive. All participants acted in good faith. That is not exoneration, but a sharpening of the diagnosis.
XI. What remains
Brussels is still living on an isle of the blessed. An isle of the blessed is not an isle of the wicked. It is an isle of the unknowing, who no longer notice their unknowing, because the other inhabitants all do not know the same things. That is not the diagnosis of a person. It is the diagnosis of a structure that can no longer repair its feedback mechanisms, because to do so it would need the feedback mechanisms it lacks.
The conventional answer to this diagnosis is the call for more democracy, more citizen proximity, more transparency. That is not wrong, but it is not precise enough. What is missing is not democracy in general, but a functioning sensor between the system and its environment. A sensor that is not overloaded, that does not filter like an exhausted state secretary, that does not simulate like an evening event with newspaper subscribers.
Building such a sensor is engineering work, not rhetoric of appeal. It is the kind of work that designs structures that function independently of the good intentions of their users. It is the kind of work for which the present political class is not trained, because it has lived for too long in a world in which feedback was simply there.
Perhaps this is the most important task of the next ten years. Not reform of the Commission. Not treaty change. Not enlargement or non-enlargement. But the construction of new observation organs for a system that has lost its old eyes. Whether these organs will be built, and in time, is open. That they must be built, if the spaceship is not to be lost in space, is no longer opinion. It is finding.