STRASBOURG, September 16 — Mark Carney was in the European Parliament on Wednesday as Ursula von der Leyen’s special guest, and she used the occasion to say she wanted Canada to become “the first associate member of the EU.” The Commission president said she wanted to bring the relationship “to the highest possible level.”
She added that the partnership was “not against anyone else.” Politico noted that Canada is locked in an even more bitter trade dispute with Washington than the EU is, so the plan sets Brussels at odds with the White House whatever the wording.
A speech about independence
Von der Leyen spoke for well over an hour, longer and with more feeling than the Parliament is used to. Her argument ran through one word, “independence”: economic, military and technological. “Europe has chosen to forge its own path,” she said, calling the present a “complex age of great possibilities and great perils.”
India Today reported that she tied this to American tariffs and to the Trump administration’s criticism of the bloc’s migration policies, which carried a warning of “civilizational erasure.” Her reply was blunt. “Europe is in a fight,” she said. “A fight for our values and our democracies.”
Politico read the address as less a list of policies than an appeal to Europeans about what kind of place they want to live in. Her examples of solidarity were Ukraine and Greenland, neither inside the EU. Russia and the United States went unnamed.
Heat, water and machines
Climate got concrete promises. “Europe is warming at double the global rate,” she said, after a summer of heat waves, wildfires and record-breaking drought. The Commission will bring forward a European Heatwave Plan covering early-warning systems and health preparedness, plus a “Water Initiative” aimed at scarcity and at water risk in farming. She urged the bloc to “stay the course on our climate targets.”
On artificial intelligence she called herself an “AI optimist” and then warned that the technology “will soon be in the hands of adversaries who see the world very differently to us.” She wants it moved into hospital wards, energy grids, precision agriculture and defence. She will invite frontier AI labs for talks on how the EU can help industry “pace the frontier,” a phrase Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei had used the weekend before.
A ritual for insiders
The annual address is modelled on the State of the Union speeches US presidents give to Congress. Hardly anyone watches it. Few of the EU’s 450 million citizens across 27 member countries were expected to tune in, and the lawmakers in the hall tend to applaud. India Today described it as a carefully planned communications exercise that EU insiders follow most closely. Von der Leyen closed, as usual, with “Long Live Europe.”
Critics said again that the themes were aspirational and thin on detail. Eric Maurice of the European Policy Centre had cautioned beforehand against using the speech “to placate political groups” or to widen the Commission’s own reach. “The EU is facing the crumbling of all the premises on which it was built,” he said.
Politico placed the speech against a harder domestic backdrop. Nationalist far-right parties are gaining in the EU’s biggest countries, with the Alternative for Germany winning its first German state election and the National Rally, by Politico’s account, on track to put Marine Le Pen in the French presidency next year. Von der Leyen, 67 and in her seventh year at the Commission’s head, answered by pitching to the centre ground.
Sources
- Von der Leyen tries to stem tide on global threats ― from Trump to AI and climate – POLITICO
- Von der Leyen pitches Canada ties and Ukraine backing in EU agenda – India Today
