Analysing the US-EU trade deal, the European Policy Centre concluded (‘Dead on arrival: Why von der Leyen’s deal must be undone’ 6 August 2025): “Today, von der Leyen runs Brussels with a strong presidential hand and has largely done away with internal checks and balances inside the Commission. That is her prerogative and her style, but the upshot should not be weak, ineffective, and unprincipled dealings on Europe’s major geopolitical challenges, from Trump to Gaza.”
Those who have first hand experience of how she runs the Commission say Ursula von der Leyen micro-manages the Commission. During her second term she is trying increasingly to micromanage even the governments of the member states.
Without a mandate, she has taken decisions that are a prerogative of governments of the member states. She has committed the EU to purchase €650bn worth of US liquified natural gas and nuclear fuel over three years. She has promised that the EU will invest £519 billion in the US economy and that EU countries will buy hundreds of billions of euros of US weaponry.
Last September German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius sharply criticized von der Leyen for announcing the deployment of EU troops to Ukraine: “the European Union has no jurisdiction or competence whatsoever when it comes to the deployment of troops – regardless of for whom or for what…” That is up to the governments of EU member states to decide.
Recently she declared that she would ensure Belgium, which is the Euroclear security depositary, did not bear the risk alone of using illegally Russian frozen sovereign assets to finance more weapons for Ukraine in 2006 and 2007. She wants all the members states to pay the fines that might be imposed on the EU if it goes ahead and breaks international law by using the interest from the Russian frozen assets.
In Copenhagen Belgian Prime Minister Bart de Wever told his colleagues that he does not want to expose Belgium to Russian retaliation: “There’s no free money. There are always consequences… I want their signature saying: ‘If we take the Russian money, we use it, we’re all going to be responsible if it goes wrong’.”
The EU Council President Antonio di Costa has joined von der Leyen in undermining further the sovereignty of EU member states by wanting to override Hungary’s decision to veto Ukraine’s EU membership bid. So far every member state has the right to veto all EU membership bids at every step. Costa said that the EU leadership wants formal accession talks to begin following approval by a qualified majority of leaders, rather than by unanimous consent as is currently required.
Veto equals sovereignty
‘POLITICO’ has reported that this “plan faces pushback from several EU countries, including France, the Netherlands and Greece, and is unlikely to get wide approval in Denmark …”
Whether they admit it openly or not, heads of member states agree that their membership veto is deeply tied up with national sovereignty. They know that they can veto the loss of their vetoing power as changing the decision-making process has to be decided via unanimity. In order to change the rules, all 27 member countries have to be in agreement.
So ultimately it is up to the member states if they want to transfer all their sovereignty away from their countries to Brussels.
Sharing our sovereignty with the EU must not mean that we lose our sovereignty completely. We need to ensure that our national interests are safeguarded in EU decision making. If we do not influence decisions enough to also express our national interests, such EU decisions will not only be shaped without us but also against us.
We must work and align ourselves with those who want to stop the EU from becoming a top-down hegemonic bloc, increasingly usurping the sovereignty of its members, homogenising them and ignoring the specific realities of its diverse members. The EU leadership must not be allowed to continue disempowering the citizens of EU countries and to make hollow declarations of meaningful democracy and sovereignty in them. The EU is putting the whole EU project at risk as it is turning itself increasingly into a house built from the roof down. Houses that are built from the roof down will someday collapse and injure the many people living in them.
We will make ourselves smaller and more insignificant if we do not work to safeguard and promote our national interests within the EU. We must work with other member states to resist the pressure to weaken the influence of national governments by promoting qualified majority voting to abolish unanimity voting on key issues. We must make sure that any rule changes do not endanger our sovereignty turning us into colonies.
Our millennial history of colonialism provides us with enough lessons of what happens to us when we lose all say in decision making. Our size and scarce natural resources have made it crucial for us to manage well our interdependence with the rest of the world. We have suffered every time major decisions about us were taken without us and away from our islands.
Even the settler colonialism of the Order of St John in Malta was much better than the colonialism we had before and after them. For 268 years, they had a vested interest in developing these islands as their headquarters and devoted vital resources to ensure Malta’s viability. They did all they could not to let the Pope or other Kings on the European continent usurp their power totally.
All the same they still considered their own interests first and whether those benefited the Maltese too was incidental. Whenever we have been consigned to the periphery, even as significant naval and military bases, our national interests have come last.
If we were to collapse 8,500 years of human presence on these islands to 24 hours, we have been independent for the last 10 minutes. They have been the best period for our people.
Times of Malta 24 October
