Migrants return to Morocco from the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, Friday, July 31, 2026. [AP]
Europe is facing a string of massive, almost existential, threats. Where to start? Illegal immigration is growing out of control, as recent events in Spain showed us. Even left-wing politicians are pivoting on the issue because they see a very real problem that will come at a high cost for them. This is what happened to the Democrats in the United States in the 2024 elections, when they failed to understand the toll of their indifferent attitude to developments on the country’s southern borders. My mind keeps going back to the prediction of a top EU leader, who, in a closed-door conversation in 2008, said that the day would come when European militaries would have to raise a wall against the waves of migration, using “whatever means necessary.”
There is no denying that Europe is also a continent that is aging and urgently needs to do something about the shortage of labor. It is extremely difficult, however, to convince voters of the need for organized, legal migration without triggering aggressive reflexes that are only magnified by social media.
Europe is also going through a forced and violent geopolitical coming-of-age. It is dealing with an unpredictable Donald Trump in the White House who never misses an opportunity to mock it, an equally unpredictable Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin and chaos in the Middle East. And it is having to deal with all this without a unified military, intelligence service and robust decision-making mechanism. What’s more, it has also managed to destroy a large part of its industry through a suicidal energy policy. And let’s not forget climate change and its shocking impact on France and Spain, which found Europe unprepared and tangled up in so much red tape it could not put together a proper firefighting fleet.
