Europe’s biggest strategic risk right now isn’t Russia. It’s a divided house in it’s nucleus.
Its two largest powers are governing week to week, at the exact moment the stakes have never been higher. A few thoughts on why paralysis in Paris and Berlin is the continent’s biggest strategic risk.
Europe is currently navigating the most treacherous geopolitical waters since the Second World War. The two great powerhouses of the European Union, France and Germany, have entered a state of paralysis that should be laid out plainly.
France has no parliamentary majority nor an approved 2026 budget. Furthermore, President Macron has run through five prime ministers since his 2022 re-election. The decision to dissolve the National Assembly in 2024 left the country split between a surging National Rally, a fractured centre and a divided left. Neither bloc is willing to own unpopular spending cuts ahead of the 2027 presidential race. Meanwhile Germany’s coalition collapsed in 2024 amid recession, leaving Chancellor Merz leading from a weakened position after his election.
These fractures are not accidental. Across Europe the political centre has been hollowing out over the last decade, and the pattern is consistent. Economic discontent has punished the traditional centre-left and centre-right, while the far right advances through its opponents’ fragmentation rather than any majority of its own.
The internal weaknesses arrived just as the external ones peaked: a war in Ukraine alongside an antagonistic Russia, and a United States openly interested in Europe’s weakening. The Franco-German engine is what historically drives European strategic decisions, and paralysis in these countries has ripple effects throughout the continent. Joint initiatives, from the Franco-German Defense and Security Council to major European industrial programs like the Future Combat Air System, risk stagnating not because the will is absent but because one half of the partnership can’t commit.
There are counterarguments worth stating, however. Europe has weathered the storm before, the eurozone crisis, Brexit and the pandemic, which proved Europe was able to act when the call came. The 2026 agreements on foreign investment screening and migration, reached despite the fracture, suggest the machine still works when the stakes are high enough.
Functioning under acute pressure, however, is a different capability from functioning under chronic strain. Unfortunately, chronic strain is what the current trajectory points to. The continent can only force a decision when a crisis becomes evident. It is far less evident that it can sustain a coherent defense and foreign policy over years while its two largest members govern week to week. Really, the question one should be asking is not whether Europe holds together, but whether it can still decide quickly enough to matter.