Where Next? EU Policy Between Now and 2035

The European Union and its 27 member states have come through a turbulent five years. With Donald Trump in the White House, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and rising competition from Chinese companies, the EU has been forced to rethink its priorities more radically than at any time since perhaps the oil crisis of the 1970s.

In our new report, “Where Next? EU Policy Between Now and 2035”, BPI’s consultants in Brussels predict what the Union’s policy priorities will look like nine years from now. In 2035, the President of the European Commission who follows Ursula von der Leyen will have finished their first term and the EU’s 2028-2034 budget will be over.

Between von der Leyen’s first term, which started in 2019, and her second, which began in 2024, the EU’s priorities shifted dramatically from the dual transformations of the EU’s economy, the Green Deal and digitalisation, in response to a more hostile global environment.

As von der Leyen put it in her State of the European Union speech in September: “The state of our Union is the strongest it has ever been. The state of our Union can also feel as precarious as it has ever been.”

In 2024, the new direction was becoming clear. Two reports from Mario Draghi, a former President of the European Central Bank and a former prime minister of Italy, and Enrico Letta, another former prime minister, set out what needed to be done to boost the EU’s competitiveness and complete the single market. Competitiveness duly became the overriding priority of her second term as Commission President. 

As BPI Group’s CEO Europe Jeremy Galbraith writes in the foreword: “Europe is clearly falling behind the rest of the world when it comes to competitiveness. There is no question about it. Mario Draghi said it in his report. EU leaders and the European Commission know what needs to be done. Now is the time to do it.”

So, what will EU policy look like ten years from now? One of the biggest potential drivers of change may happen next May if Marine Le Pen is elected President of France. Le Pen has dropped the threat of Rassemblement National (RN) to leave the EU or reintroduce the French franc. But Jordan Bardella, the party’s president and a likely prime minister if the RN is the biggest party in the Assemblée Nationale next year, has said he wants to slash what France pays into the EU’s budget.

This prospect gives EU leaders an even greater incentive to agree the Union’s multi-annual budget for 2028-2034 by the end of this year. The RN is also climate sceptic so may challenge some of the EU’s policies on decarbonisation.

The impact of President Le Pen in the Elysée Palace is harder to predict. It may be that once in power, she shifts to the centre ground of politics as Giorgia Meloni has done in Italy.

There will also be general elections in Spain by the end of August at the latest. Current Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is likely to lose to the centre-right Partido Popular (PP). The PP remains a mainstream pro-European political party and is a member of the biggest political group in the European Parliament, the centre-right European People’s Party.  

So if the PP’s candidate, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, wins the election, it is unlikely to bring about major changes in EU policy. A lot will depend on whether the PP forms a coalition with the right-wing Vox party and what influence that has.

One question that the report engages with is whether is whether the EU’s priorities might change again between 2029 and 2035, as they did between von der Leyen’s first and second terms.

As this report outlines in more detail, the EU is unlikely to change course again as radically as it did in the run-up to von der Leyen’s second term. The global and domestic challenges that drove that shift will only grow stronger and require a more robust and united response from the Union and its members.

There are some clear factors that will continue to shape EU policymaking.

• Russia will continue to be a potential aggressor even if the conflict with Ukraine has ended.

• EU-based businesses will need to find reliable and affordable energy supplies; the cost of domestically produced energy will rise as the Union nears its 2040 target to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by 90%.

• Chinese companies and technology will be even stronger rivals, both on EU and global markets.

• The Union will have to find a form of membership for Ukraine to safeguard the country’s independence from Russian aggression.

• AI’s role as a dominant digital technology will continue to grow.

The EU’s progress in a large number of areas covered by the report has been slow, even where extending the single market, such as financial services, has been a priority for decades. This is true for the EU’s reliance on foreign-owned tech, and especially AI and the computing power needed to run it at scale.

It also applies to security and defense. The need for the EU to develop a stronger and less fragmented arms industry is more pressing than it has ever been as the traditional reliance on the US and NATO is no longer there. In addition, Ukraine’s ability to secure the military equipment it needs will determine the outcome of the conflict with Russia.

The priorities agreed by EU leaders in 2024 will remain in place until 2035 and probably beyond.

To view BPI’s report, “Where Next? EU Policy Between Now and 2035″, click here.