The warning sounded a little like déjà vu. A few days ahead of an American presidential election that Europe has been waiting for like a stunned deer in the headlights, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk called on the Old Continent to pull itself together. It's time "Europe finally grows up and believes in its own strength," he wrote on X on Saturday, November 2. "Whatever the outcome, the era of geopolitical outsourcing is over."
Seven years ago, then-German chancellor Angela Merkel drew a similar conclusion during a particularly harrowing first summit with the brand-new President Donald Trump. "We Europeans truly have to take our fate into our own hands," she said gloomily on May 28, 2017. "We have to know that we Europeans must fight for our own future and destiny." And then what? And then nothing. Germany's military spending rose from 1.15% of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2016 to... 1.33% in 2021, even though NATO had set a minimum of 2% back in 2014.
Seven years have passed, war is raging in Ukraine, 10,000 North Korean troops are due to be deployed to the front, Trump could be returning to power and Europe is still not ready. In a sign of the times, it's now a Pole who's sounding the alarm – Merkel's successor, Olaf Scholz, is currently in pretty bad shape, busy trying to save a government coalition that constantly appears to be on the verge of collapse.
Why a Pole? Because, if Ukraine collapses, his country will be on the front line and Tusk doesn't want to relive the traumas of previous generations. At the cost of a remarkable budgetary effort, Poland is spending 4.1% of its GDP in 2024 on arms procurement to strengthen its defense: This share is set to rise to 4.7% in 2025. But does it buy in Europe? No. Tanks and aircraft are mainly ordered from the US and South Korea. Even for Poland, which is so determined to put an end to the "era of subcontracting," this is not an easy task.
Playing into Moscow's hands
Solidarity will certainly not come from Poland's Central European neighbors. On October 31, Peter Szijjarto, Hungary's foreign minister, was in Minsk to take part in a conference organized by Europe's most terrible regime, that of Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko. No European official has visited Minsk since the crackdown in 2020, but this did not deter the Hungarian, who took the opportunity to criticize European sanctions against Belarus and Russia. In Minsk, he met his Russian colleague Sergei Lavrov, with whom he maintains regular contacts, as regular as those of his head of government, Viktor Orban, with Vladimir Putin. On October 28 and 29, Orban made an official visit to Georgia to support a regime in the throes of a democratic retreat, in the wake of flawed elections.
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