When Steve Witkoff flew to Moscow this month to propose a summit between Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Europe faced an urgent question: who could credibly speak for the continent in any negotiations? The names floated so far—Czech President Petr Pavel and Finland's Alexander Stubb—both derive their authority from direct national elections. That is no coincidence.
The scramble for a European interlocutor exposes a structural weakness. In the United States, politicians rise by winning over the public. In Europe, mainstream leaders typically rise by persuading party hierarchies. The result is a continent run by competent managers who struggle to articulate a compelling vision at home or abroad, while insurgents who have mastered direct communication dominate the political stage.
Closed lists and party loyalty
The problem begins with electoral systems. Even Giorgia Meloni, Italy's right-wing prime minister, could not persuade her own coalition to let voters choose their MPs. The electoral law passed on October 8, after she threatened to resign, allows voters to pick some names, but the top of every list remains locked. Across the EU's 27 member states, most formally permit preference voting, but in practice voters can only reorder candidates the party has already selected—and rarely overturn the list order.
In Belgium, just 3.4% of Flemish national MPs elected between 1987 and 2014 won their seats by overturning their party's list. In the Netherlands, only one candidate in the 2023 election secured a seat through preference votes alone. In Poland, where voters must choose an individual candidate, nearly 82% of seats in 2015 went to those placed at the top of party lists. The pattern extends to European Parliament elections: six member states, including Germany, France, and Spain, use closed lists. Loyalty to the party hierarchy becomes a more reliable route to office than public appeal.
Insurgents play by different rules. A mainstream party can rely on a loyal base to carry its top candidates into parliament. An insurgent party has no such guarantee—its list is worthless until someone persuades enough voters to clear the threshold. So these parties build their campaigns around one or two charismatic faces. In 2024, the AfD named a chancellor candidate, Alice Weidel, for the first time; the National Rally ran its European campaign around Jordan Bardella, the most-followed MEP on TikTok. In last year's Dutch election, nearly 95% of Geert Wilders' voters cast their ballot for Wilders himself, compared with 68% for the D66 leader and less than half for the leaders of the Liberals and the Labour-Green alliance. A study covering ten West European democracies found that leader ratings matter more to far-right voters than to any other group.
Two exceptions that prove the rule
Emmanuel Macron and Pedro Sánchez are the rare mainstream leaders who rose by appealing directly to voters. Macron bypassed France's established parties, built his own movement, and won the presidency. Sánchez, ousted by his Socialist Party's leadership in 2016, toured the country, mobilised ordinary members, and reclaimed the party leadership in a 2017 primary. Now Sánchez faces a snap election on November 29, with polls suggesting the conservative Popular Party and far-right Vox could secure a majority. With Macron at the end of his term, if Sánchez loses, Europe will have lost both of its few mainstream leaders who earned their mandate from the people, not party bosses.
The second obstacle lies in Brussels, where the distance between voters and leaders grows even wider. Even politicians with strong personal mandates at home cannot obtain an equivalent mandate at the European level. The EU's most powerful executive positions are allocated through negotiations among national governments, with voters having little or no influence. Donald Tusk became European Council president in 2014 through a decision by national leaders, not a European electoral contest. Ursula von der Leyen is the clearest product of this unaccountable process. She ran for the Bundestag in a Hannover constituency three times—2009, 2013, and 2017—and lost every time. Her party's state list kept her in parliament anyway. She was a federal minister four years before entering the Bundestag, and she became Commission president in 2019 without having stood as a candidate in that year's European election.
These appointments followed the EU's rules. That is precisely the problem: the system treats popular legitimacy as an afterthought. As long as Europe's leaders are chosen by party insiders and backroom deals, those best at winning public support will remain the EU's opponents. The continent cannot lead—at home or on the world stage—until it finds a way to let voters choose its leaders directly.
