Europe is undergoing true revolution.
New leaders are coming to office. They are young, pragmatic, less ideological, they are open and modern. Leo Varadkar, 38, the new Irish Prime Minister, Juri Ratas, 38, the Estonian Prime Minister, Emmanuel Macron 39, the French President, Charles Michel 41, Prime Minister of Belgium, Matteo Renzi 42, back in office in Italy, Xavier Bettel, 44, the Prime Minister of Luxembourg and even the new centre-right leader of Austria, the ÷VP's Sebastian Kurz, 30, are overturning European politics and are bringing with them a new political class.
This is the optimistic generation. Pro-European, undogmatic liberals, open, with a thirst for positive opportunities, they are giving Europe a new face unlike that of the traditional leaders of the Anglo-Saxon world, who are bogged down in the old ways of the 20th century.
Donald Trump and Theresa May embody countries which until now contributed positively to international relations - they provided solutions to world and regional issues. They are now the source of new problems. By accelerating America's withdrawal from world affairs D. Trump is highlighting the USA's failures in Iraq, Afghanistan and in the Middle East. The world's leading military power is no longer winning wars - it is now unable to bring peace. By approving the Brexit Theresa May is endangering her country's national interests and especially, out of arrogance or residual nostalgia, she could not give a damn about the additional problems she is causing her partners.
This isolationism, typified by failed attempts at migratory policies that are contrary to the history and the values of their countries, by the American withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement or the challenge made to the European Court of Human Rights, is a gross relinquishment of everything their countries aimed to embody: freedom, human rights, solidarity between States, world stability.
Succumbing electorally alone to a kind of populism of the crudest nature, the figureheads of Freedom have become the champions of Withdrawal.
It is dangerous to auction off democratic values like this. It is now Europe's role to pick up the gauntlet!
It can succeed if it settles rapidly its internal contradictions by launching new, concrete, credible projects in terms of security, defence, economic governance and immigration. To do this we now have to give up the strategic Anglo-Saxon lingua franca. Interesting things will now happen in Brussels. Europe has every asset at its fingertips to think and act autonomously. Its institutions might even stop insulting Shakespeare one day and give up thinking and communicating in the language of those which have decide to leave it!
