BRUSSELS ― Europe’s leaders are in the fight of their lives. For the first time, the summit they hold this week will zero in on topics aimed at reclaiming turf from the far right.

Mainstream politicians ― center-right, center-left and liberal alike ― have been in power in Europe since World War II but are watching their control ebb away. They hope Thursday’s European Council will show that the EU cares about issues that have left voters feeling disaffected. In the bloc’s biggest capitals, from Paris to Rome, Amsterdam and Berlin, nationalist and even pro-Russia forces are either already in government or at the gates, having shown themselves adept at harnessing populist anger.

“Defending the European project today means more than investing in our militaries — it also means delivering on the social promise that holds Europe together,” said Hannah Neumann, a Greens MEP who sits on the Parliament’s Security and Defense Committee. “One of Putin’s main tactics is to divide our societies.”

The summit agenda is dominated by themes that leaders associate with a fundamental challenge: preventing a scenario in which four or five far-right leaders who may even reject the EU’s very existence are sitting around the European Council table a few years from now. It’s an outcome that would raise huge questions about the West’s military might and the future of the bloc itself.

An early draft of the summit conclusions, seen by POLITICO, which national diplomats work on before submitting it to their leaders, reflects this underlying concern. Leaders will discuss housing, defense, competitiveness, the green and digital transitions and migration — all issues that officials from European governments see as critical to containing the far right.

The gathering in Brussels this week is “a European Council that is looking for a new EU identity,” said an EU diplomat involved in the preparations who spoke on condition of anonymity because the deliberations are confidential. “There is a very difficult search, with a very painful internal process, to find answers to the questions that the EU has so far failed to grasp.”

Social crisis

In particular, putting housing on the agenda would have seemed unthinkable barely a few years ago. But the price of homes is now driving politics across the bloc — and propelling the far right to major wins.

In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders and his far-right Party for Freedom won the 2023 national vote campaigning on a housing shortage he said was exacerbated by migrants and asylum seekers. Portugal’s Chega party surged to become the country’s leading opposition this year by railing against the failure of establishment parties to tackle soaring home prices. 

The European Council is coming late to the issue. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has described the housing shortage as a social crisis for over a year and created a designated housing commissioner ― Denmark’s Dan Jørgensen ― who will present the bloc’s first-ever Affordable Housing Plan in December and has vowed to clamp down on short-term rentals in 2026. The European Parliament launched a special committee on the crisis at the beginning of this year.

European Council President António Costa has long said the housing crisis is a challenge as pressing as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “The only way we strengthen citizens’ trust in the European project is by showing that we have the capacity to take on housing and the concrete problems that affect them personally,” he told POLITICO last year.

Until now, house and rental prices haven’t been seen as a topic that the EU can tackle. While the housing crisis is a bloc-wide problem, there is no consensus on how to address it. National leaders are split along political lines and are likely to be at loggerheads when it comes to tackling real estate speculation, short-term rentals, or the expansion of public housing schemes.

The divisions are evident in the draft summit conclusions, where leaders see the crisis as “pressing” but limit themselves to asking that the Commission present its plan as scheduled.

On the rise

The march of the populists is already very real. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Slovakia’s Robert Fico sit at the European Council table, at times making it difficult or impossible to reach decisions by unanimity, which is often necessary. Czechia could soon join their camp, with right-wing populist Andrej Babiš having won elections earlier this month. In Slovenia, ultraconservative former Prime Minister Janez Janša’s party leads in the polls, according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls.

In the EU’s two biggest and most powerful countries, France and Germany, the far right is also ascendent. Opinion polls repeatedly show Jordan Bardella of the National Rally out in front for France’s presidential elections in 2027. The Alternative for Germany (AfD) came second in parliamentary elections last year.

Defense is another topic on which the EU’s mainstream hopes to fight back.

The EU’s defense commissioner estimates that when national defense budgets and EU funds are totted up, the bloc will plow in €2.4 trillion over four years — a staggering figure compared with previous investments. This defense boom could, in theory, replace Europe’s struggling car industry, which provides nearly 14 million jobs, or about 6 percent of EU employment.

 The topic is set to feature at the summit, with Slovakia’s Fico linking his support for new sanctions against Russia to aid for the car sector, given Slovakia’s status as the world’s top car producer per capita.

“Defense is just key to preventing a far-right surge — it creates jobs,” said a second EU diplomat.

Another front in the effort to stem the far-right tide is social media regulation. The EU finds itself in a battle with Washington over rules affecting U.S. tech giants like Meta and X — the latter owned by Elon Musk, who has used the platform to amplify far-right voices such as Germany’s AfD during the country’s last election. TikTok was blamed by the EU for playing a significant role in boosting far-right messaging during recent elections in Romania.

“In the face of geopolitical shifts … it is crucial to advance Europe’s digital transformation, reinforce its sovereignty, and strengthen its open digital ecosystem,” reads the current draft of the leaders’ statement.

Concrete solutions remain elusive, however. “What are we supposed to do — set up our own European social media platform to counter this malign influence?” a third diplomat asked.

Watering down

Europe’s diplomats can already feel the ground shifting beneath their feet.

A discussion among EU ambassadors last week on “simplification” ― the current EU buzzword for slashing red tape ― turned into a broader push by some governments for U.S.-style deregulation. One ambassador intervened to clarify that deregulation should mean addressing bureaucratic bottlenecks rather than getting rid of EU rules altogether, according to two diplomats who were present.

The green agenda, too, has been watered down under far-right pressure, with leaders set to discuss rolling back the bloc’s 2040 emissions targets.

One of the clearest examples of the mainstream staking out far-right turf is migration. The once-taboo idea of processing asylum applications outside EU borders — in closed and “protected” centers — is now regularly debated, with even socialist leaders like Denmark’s  Mette Frederiksen pushing for it. In doing so she echoes calls from far-right Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who made it part of his so-called Schengen 2.0 plan back in 2016.

In the end, some of these topics may get short shrift on Thursday. The agenda is packed, and the conversation will likely be dominated by more pressing geopolitical questions such as how to boost support for Ukraine.

And then there are the deep divisions that remain between the center-right European People’s Party, which dominates the EU’s main institutions, and the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats.

But it’s a start.