Michael McDowell: Migration is the Achilles heel of centrist Europe and Trump is ready to exploit it

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

64% : In a world where EU-China trade remains of great importance, the EU has to look, Janus-like, east and west at the same time.
64% : The centre parties and centrist governments across the EU have the chance to collectively retrieve the situation before it tears the Union apart, to the pleasure of Washington and Moscow.
61% : Outside the EU, Nigel Farage's Reform UK performed well in recent local elections and is gaining in popularity according to the polls.
54% : Combined with the growth of populism in Hungary and Slovakia, there are signs of movement in the tectonic plates of EU democracies.
53% : As I predicted here recently, the Tory press is now loud in its condemnation of Starmer's deals with the US and the EU.
49% : It offers hope that Trumpism can be resisted by centre democrats in the member states of the EU.
43% : Could the Democrats derail Trump and Trumpism in the next midterm or presidential elections?
40% : Likewise, we now look to a Polish presidential run-off election which has perhaps less extreme, but in some ways similar, potential consequences for the future of the EU.
39% : Picking up the pieces after the disaster of Brexit was never going to be easy.
36% : Giving the EU at central level legal "competence" in this area - when it utterly lacks the collective will, political competence and means to deal with it - has brought a fundamentally destabilising element into the affairs of the continent.
35% : The single point of maximum vulnerability for the EU is its abject failure to deal with mass migration into Europe.
31% : Is the US going to come to some early rapprochement with the EU or will Trump continue his hostile, opportunist strategy of weakening the EU by backing the Farages, Orbans, Bardellas, AFDs, Simions and Chegas in the hope of wholesale dismantling of the EU's economic power and Europe's model of enlightened liberal democracy?
28% : Does Donald Trump seem likely to extract any game-changing concessions from the EU that he has not obtained from the UK?
27% : [ Aid allowed in Gaza a 'drop in the ocean', EU foreign chief saysOpens in new window ] [ UN warns thousands of babies in Gaza could die in next 48 hours without aid as Israeli air strikes kill at least 50 peopleOpens in new window ] A lot now depends on the outcome of the US-EU tariff issues.
22% : The possibility that Romania would turn away from the EU and towards some engagement with Trumpism, Orbanism and Putinism would have spelt extreme danger for the future of the EU.

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