EU Parliament, Strasbourg, P10 CRE-REV(2026)05-19(2-0150-0000).
Mr. President, history teaches us something important: political systems tend to become more bureaucratic when confidence in their political leadership dwindles. Once democratic trust declines, institutions attempt to compensate through procedures, frameworks and mechanisms. Bureaucracy, however, must not ever replace legitimacy. As Hannah Arendt warned, bureaucracy easily becomes the rule of nobody, a system in which decisions are made everywhere, while responsibility is nowhere to be found.
An EU without the veto right of Member States would slide down a very dangerous slippery slope, which we are actually seeing already. A Union that struggles to build democratic consent falls back on permanent crisis, government governance and an ever-increasing institutional expansion, while gradually hacking away at the very roots on which it rests – the sovereignty of its Member States.
But Europe does not need a permanent machinery of governance, nor does it need a foreign policy detached from its nations and peoples. It needs democratic legitimacy, and it needs accountability, and it needs leaders capable of building consensus between sovereign nations. Because once unanimity disappears, the EU ceases to be a union of equal nations, cooperating freely. It becomes something fundamentally different, a union subjecting sovereign nations to its rule – a foreign rule. History has seen such systems before – Rome, the Soviet Union. Hit the books, read up on it and draw the lessons.
