With This Personnel — No Chance

I. A Term, a Name, a Process

In March 2026 an essay appeared on beyond-decay.org under the title The Coronation, presenting the following finding: Europe’s apparatus selects its leaders according to qualities that serve the solving of problems less well than the administering of problems, and it reproduces itself by systematically sparing the people so selected the consequences of their actions. The Coronation developed this with due care. Out of politeness or caution, it left the conclusion open. It reads: with this personnel, nothing about this situation will change.

The protagonist of the Coronation — at the time we called her Lushi van Ishing — is in real life called Ursula von der Leyen, is President of the European Commission and will be referred to in what follows in this text, in the diction of the treaties that are her métier, as the Consultocrat. The term does not come from the dictionary of political abuse but from that of sober observation: it describes the person whose style of government has placed outsourcing to consultants, communication outside the archives and the inconsequentiality of failure at its centre. That was the programme in the Federal Ministry of Defence of the Federal Republic of Germany between 2013 and 2019, and it has been the programme in the European Commission since 2019. It is, in other words, the personal constant in a career whose other variables have changed.

II. The Little Chronicle of Inconsequence

It belongs to the method of this essay to name the events soberly, because they speak for themselves. In 2020 a committee of inquiry of the German Bundestag uncovered systematic violations of procurement law in the Federal Ministry of Defence — consultancy contracts worth hundreds of millions, a state secretary’s post filled with a former McKinsey consultant, contracts that went without tender to the firms of her old companions. The three official mobile phones that the committee requested as evidence were, as the report puts it, wiped before they were handed over — through the carelessness of an official whose carelessness took effect three times over. The minister stated that she had learned of the deletion from the newspaper. The coalition majority exonerated her. She became President of the European Commission.

In the spring of 2021 she personally negotiated, by text message, with the chief executive of a pharmaceutical group a contract for 1.8 billion vaccine doses with an estimated volume of 35 billion euros. The New York Times asked the Commission for access to the text messages. The Commission replied that it had none; text messages were not archived; formal decisions were not taken by text message. The European Ombudsman found maladministration. In May 2025 the General Court of the European Union ruled that the Commission had not plausibly explained why the messages were not in its possession; its statements were imprecise, changeable, hypothetical. By then the Consultocrat had already been confirmed for a second term with the votes of a coalition of the EPP, Social Democrats, Liberals and Greens — on the strength of a lead candidacy whose actual decision, as already in 2019, was taken in the back rooms of the Council.

There is an old rule according to which one mistake is a mistake, two mistakes a pattern and three mistakes a system. If one looks at the consultancy affair, the text-message affair and the appointment twice negotiated by the Council together, one has the system. It says: what is not archived did not happen; what happened was not relevant; what was relevant lay outside one’s remit; and whoever bears no consequences rises. The Coronation described this system. What is added at this point is the question of what it achieves today — that is, in May 2026, in a situation in which this system would have to answer the most important defence question facing the continent.

III. Singapore, Saint-Cloud, Manching

On 31 May 2025 the American Secretary of Defense gave a speech at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore in which he described the threat situation in the Indo-Pacific more clearly than any American Secretary of Defense had done at that venue before. The President of the People’s Republic of China, he said, had instructed his military to be capable of attacking Taiwan by 2027; the threat was real, it could be imminent. In the same breath the Secretary praised the European allies for finally doing more for their defence — even Germany.

While these sentences were being spoken in Singapore, the most important European armaments project, which should have answered such a situation, was in the state that German industry described in May 2026 in a remarkably cautious sentence: it would continue, said the head of Airbus Defence, in some form. The Future Combat Air System — planned volume around a hundred billion euros, earliest entry into service 2040, a joint effort of Germany, France and Spain — had at that point been paralysed for months by the dispute between two corporations — Dassault demanded an eighty per cent workshare in the fighter aircraft, Airbus rejected this — and in March the French chief executive had publicly declared the project, as he put it, as good as dead. In February the German industry association BDLI and the IG Metall union had, in a contribution to the Handelsblatt, in effect called for withdrawal and proposed a two-aircraft approach. A decision by the governments was due in April. It did not come. In May Airbus said it would continue in some form.

In some form. This is the key sentence from which the diagnosis can be read. It is not a lie, it is not appeasement, it is not even optimism. It is the sober description of what happens when an apparatus ought to make a decision and nothing happens that would be a decision. It continues — in some form — because apparatuses continue as long as nobody switches them off. They administer their own motion. Whether the motion leads to an aircraft that flies in 2040, or to two aircraft that never come, or to nothing — that is not a question that can be decided within the motion itself. It is decided elsewhere, and elsewhere nobody decides.

IV. The Spokeswoman of the Hour

In this situation the Consultocrat gives speeches. She gives them in a language that has taken on a life of its own. It is the language of the geopolitical hour, of strategic autonomy, of digital sovereignty, of resilience, of the Zeitenwende, of multi-level mobilisation, of the hybrid response. It has the advantage that every sentence formulated in it can be read both as a profession of faith and as a programme, without committing to anything. The language demands nothing. It announces. What it announces is declared done by the act of announcing.

It is worth looking briefly at the relationship between this language and the events in Saint-Cloud, Munich, Manching. The language speaks of a defence union. The events are an industrial dispute in which two corporations and three governments have for months failed to settle the workshare question of an aircraft they jointly decided to build. The language speaks of strategic autonomy. The events are a dependence of the Ukrainian army on a private American satellite network whose owner switches the system off at will. The language speaks of technological sovereignty. The events are that Europe’s critical timing infrastructure runs on an American military system, although Europe has had one of its own for ten years. The language of the speeches and the language of the events do not contradict each other. They have no common language. They are spoken in different rooms, and the room in which the speeches are given has no door to the room in which the events take place.

The Consultocrat is the ideal spokeswoman of the hour because she commands the language of the hour. She would also be the ideal spokeswoman of any other hour, because her language refers not to the hour but to the act of speaking. That is not her personal defect. It is the requirement of the position she occupies. A person who wanted to lead Brussels differently would not reach Brussels. The apparatus selects whom it can tolerate; and it tolerates whoever does not disturb it.

V. The Argument That Was Already on the Table

The argument has thus arrived at a point where what matters is not to repeat oneself. Since March 2026 the essay What Europe Can Do Now has been available on beyond-decay.org. It lists eight measures that could be implemented without new treaties, without new institutions and without unanimity — Galileo as mandatory infrastructure, the Blocking Statute with teeth, the digital euro as a wholesale instrument, the Hybrid Fusion Cell with a public mandate, IRIS² as an emergency project, a European sanctions authority, a labelling requirement for AI-generated political content, conditional market access. Each of these measures is described, each is justified, each lies within the range of what is feasible in the short term. The closing sentence of that essay reads: The tools exist. What is lacking is the will to use them.

This is the point at which the two March essays come together. The Coronation showed why this personnel is not the type that reaches for the tools. What Europe Can Do Now showed what would need to be done if the personnel were different. Between the two essays there is a gap in which, in May 2026, all remains as silent as before. None of the eight measures has been tackled since March. The President of the Commission has made none of them her cause. Whoever shares the finding of The Coronation sees no surprise in this. Whoever does not share it should ask what else could be the reason why eight such precisely described tools remain so completely unused.

VI. With This Personnel

We have thus reached the conclusion, and it remains to draw it soberly. With the personnel that this apparatus produces and protects, Europe will not find its way out of its situation. This is neither despair nor lament. It is the description of a selection whose logic is known, whose results are visible and whose self-preservation feeds on precisely those qualities that prevent its correction. It continues in some form. It will continue in some form. The only question is in what form, and whether this form takes the country, the continent, society along with it, or whether it rolls over them and leaves them behind.

Whatever more there would be to say does not belong in this essay. It belongs in a series of texts on the reform and reorganisation of the European Union that is in preparation on beyond-decay.org and that is not content to repeat the eight immediate tools from What Europe Can Do Now, but asks what an apparatus would have to look like that no longer depended on its top personnel being selected for qualities that run counter to its task. This essay is not the place where this reform is presented. It is the place where what makes it necessary is recorded: that the tools that lie ready are not taken up by the hand that would have to take them up — and that this is the reliably predictable consequence of how this hand was chosen.

There is a small, almost consoling twist to this situation. It is so obvious that it does not even need to be hidden. The Consultocrat goes on giving speeches. The tools go on lying on the table. FCAS goes on in some form. Nobody conceals any of this. It is all known, documented, established by the courts, publicly deplored by trade unions and industry associations. Nothing happens nevertheless. That is not the secret of power. It is the proof of its nature.