- We would like Ukraine and Moldova to join the European Union.

If we want to send the clearest of messages that our neighborhood, what is happening there, that Ukrainians are fighting for us, if we don't do that, where are we gonna go?

(gentle music) - Hello, and welcome to "GZERO World."

I'm Ian Bremmer, and today we are looking across the pond to the future of Europe, no small topic, with the woman in charge of its largest legislative body, European Parliament president Roberta Metsola.

Between Brexit and the rise of nationalist movements, the European Union has no shortage of challenges these years.

The block is also dealing with Russia's war in Ukraine, a migrant crisis, economic slowdown, and an increasingly adversarial relationship between the United States and China.

There's a lot at stake, and they're not at risk of falling apart.

But can the European Union hold it all together?

Don't worry, I've also got your "Puppet Regime."

- Russian president Vladimir Putin is turning to some Trumpian tactics to raise cash for his own war effort.

- But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

- [Narrator 1] Funding for "GZERO World" is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis, - [Narrator 2] Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains with a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com - [Narrator 1] And by... Cox Enterprises is proud to support "GZERO."

Cox is working to create an impact in areas like sustainable agriculture, clean tech, healthcare, and more.

Cox, A Family of Businesses.

Additional funding provided by Jerre and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and... (bright music) (dramatic music) - How does the European Union work, exactly?

It's a system that confuses even seasoned diplomats.

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once asked, "Who do I call if I wanna call Europe?"

Nigel Farage, architect of Brexit, put it to the European Council President a little more bluntly.

- The question that I wanna ask, that we're all gonna ask is, who are you?

I've never heard of you.

Who voted for you?

- First, the EU is not the 51 countries in Europe.

It's not the Schengen Area, the 29 European countries that allow passport-free travel.

It's not the eurozone, 20 countries that use the Euro.

It's definitely not Eurovision, the annual Song Contest, thank God.

The EU is an economic and political union of 27 countries that try to agree on everything from trade policy to the right way to make cheese.

- [Broadcaster] An historic meeting takes place in Rome City Hall.

Long a dream, the common European market takes its first step forward.

- What started as an economic partnership in the aftermath of two World Wars officially became the EU in 1993.

And there is no single leader of the EU.

Instead, its responsibilities are spread across seven different institutions.

At top of the executive branch is the European Council, where heads of state and government, your Macrons, your Schulzs, your Maloneys, come together to set the overall political direction and big picture policy goals.

But that body isn't involved in day-to-day decision-making.

That's where the European Commission comes in.

It proposes new laws and enforces treaties.

Its president, currently Ursula von der Leyen, represents the EU globally, while commissioners from each country oversee policy areas like trade and agriculture.

The legislative branch has two houses.

First, the Parliament, the EU's only directly elected body.

Roberta Metsola of Malta, its current president, has the unenviable task of finding common ground among its 720 members, representing some 450 million people.

The Parliament debates, amends, and votes on laws in partnership with the Council of the European Union, which, stay with me here, is different from the European Council.

I told you, it's a little confusing.

The Council of the EU represents the 27 EU member governments.

Each country pushes its own interests, but in most cases, any law proposed by the commission needs majority approval in both legislative houses to pass.

There's also the Court of Justice, which interprets the law; Court of Auditors, which reviews the budget; and the European Central Bank, which sets Euro's own monetary policy.

So yes, EU is complicated, it's bureaucratic, but it's also the world's largest trading block.

And even more importantly, it's the world's most ambitious effort at supernational governance, a political experiment that's turned a historically fractious continent, though sometimes still dysfunctional.

- You have the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk.

- Into a unified hole.

And in an era where global cooperation is increasingly rare, that's worth paying attention to.

My guest today is someone who understands Europe's complexities better than anyone.

She sits at the heart of the European Union government and firmly believes in a unified approach to solving global challenges.

European Parliament president Roberta Metsola.

Here is our conversation.

President Roberta Metsola, welcome to "GZERO World."

- Happy to be here, thank you.

- So, so many things to talk about with Europe this year.

Maybe I wanna start with the fact that we've come out of really big elections.

First thing, from an American perspective, as well, they held elections, didn't seem to be very controversial.

Center seemed to do pretty well.

Why is an election across the world's largest economic block easier to run than the United States?

- I'll take a little bit of credit for that.

No, I'm, I think it's, it was one where we were worried that the extremist rise, both on the right and the left, would have a bigger bearing.

And we tried very hard to push back against that by arguing for the so-called center, not with big words, but going down to the very heart of what people had in terms of problems.

I went from one country to another.

I was running in one of them.

I had colleagues from all over other 26 member states.

We somehow managed.

But of course, there's a difference between the result of an election and doing your mandate.

So we have five years to deliver, because otherwise the same won't happen in 2029 when people come back and we ask them to vote for us again.

- But for now, when we talk about who's governing Europe, we're not, right, we're not really talking about the right or the left.

We are actually talking about sort of a consensus group on the big regulatory issues, at least in terms of the European Union.

Is that that true, is that fair?

- It's fair, it's fair.

It's more difficult to manage than it used to be.

You know, I come, I form part of that center, if you will.

And I would also call it, like, a constructive majority that wants us to move, that we agree that looking back with some sort of misplaced nostalgia for a Europe that we thought was is not the way to go, is not the way to convince the new voters, is not to convince our minorities, people who feel isolated, people who live in rural areas and say, "All of this is being done in Brussels, "in cities across our countries."

And I think that was a result of our realization that if we did not tackle that, we would be taking our voters for granted.

And as we've seen in some elections in some of these countries where we held the elections is that people just stopped voting.

And that is what we all worked for.

You don't question how people vote or who they vote for.

Your responsibility is to convince them to vote for you, but by actually walking to the polling booth and casting their vote.

I would say that's an even bigger challenge than what the outcome of elections is.

Because there is a sense of cynicism.

People think all politicians are the same.

People think, no matter who's making the decisions, you are not getting anything out of it, and we have to change that.

And to a certain extent, I think we managed.

- Are you managing it in part because the EU, as an organization, is getting stronger?

Does the EU matter more to the average Europeans' lives than it did five years ago, 10 years ago?

Is that true?

- [Roberta] Yes, it's true.

- [Ian] How is that operationalized?

How do people sense that?

- That when you ask your citizens, your people, to say, how or who do you think can solve migration, who can give you better access to health, more access to housing, cheaper electricity, we realized that, because we have been facing crisis after crisis, and I like to say that we work better when in crisis when we're not-- - Oh, who doesn't?

- Than when we're not.

- Yeah, yeah.

- Is that the answer was unequivocally Europe.

People sometimes tend to lose trust in their national governments but think that Europe can come in.

That they say, "Look, we come from a country "that is so small that, alone, we won't manage," or "that is so big that our countries "are no longer going to be able to rely on us, "or our movement from one country to another is in jeopardy "because our national government, "we need Europe to come in."

And that was unequivocally a message that we had, especially after the pandemic, when people suddenly realized that governments were shutting down national borders.

Something that we've been working on for decades, to give people the right to move, as though we thought a virus would stop at a national border, physical border.

We realized that the day after Russia invaded Ukraine.

90% dependence on Russian gas.

How long had we been postponing?

- Two years ago, two years ago.

- Two years ago.

- And we're talking about the EU.

- The European Union.

- That's right.

- Having postponed year after year, if not decade after a decade, the realization that if we don't get our act together, we have countries, some of whom were 100% dependent on Russian gas, that they could be switched off from one day to another.

But nobody wanted to tackle that.

Why?

'Cause it was cheaper, it was easier.

Infrastructure wasn't there, even though old.

That's a reality that we've had to overcome.

And, in fact, in 2024, for the first time ever, our energy sources from renewables has overcome our dependence on fossil fuel.

First time ever.

And that's, I would say, because we came out of a crisis stronger.

- Now, of course, there are a lot of countries that are still very interested in joining Europe, and the one that is gaining the most international attention right now is Ukraine.

It's a country of almost 50 million people.

It's a reasonably significant in terms of land, but also immense in terms of economic need.

And at least my understanding is, under the current rule set, if Ukraine were to join, every other country of the EU would suddenly become a net contributor to the budget.

How do you deal with that?

- So, broad stroke, I am unequivocally of the belief that enlargement is a win-win.

We had the same concerns when Poland joined.

I remember these kind of arguments being made when Romania and Bulgaria joined.

Would we not agree today that the European Union and those countries are stronger and better because they joined?

- Oh, Poland's had one of the best trajectories in the past decades of any country - Economic boom, but also the European Union has benefited from Poland being a part.

So I start with that.

Now, is it easy?

Of course not.

Would Ukraine have been on an enlargement path if Russia had not invaded it?

I don't think so.

- No, no.

- Would it have been much more difficult to find the unanimity, like every single prime minister of every country saying, "Yes, I want be (indistinct)."

- You had 27 votes.

- 27 votes.

- You even had Viktor Orban from Hungary.

I have no idea how you got him, but you got him, fair enough.

- Well, we like to say, you know, the European Parliament actually took a position immediately days after and said, "We would like Ukraine and Moldova "to join the European Union."

The message from Europe is clear.

We will stand up.

We will not look away when those fighting in the streets for our values face down Putin's massive war machine.

We welcome, Mr. President, Ukraine's application for candidate status, and we will work towards that goal.

Many people at the time said, "Oh my goodness, that's too early.

"Why would you say that?"

We're like, if we want to send the clearest of messages that our neighborhoods, what is happening there, that Ukrainians are fighting for us, if we don't do that, where are we gonna go?

We can't rely on NATO alone.

We have a defense union that is far away from being completed.

We have still a lot to do.

We have corruption inside.

We have backsliding inside the European Union.

But ultimately, a larger, more structured European Union is better than one that is not.

- So let me put Europe in broader context.

Conventional wisdom here in the States is that the Americans are the most powerful country in the world, they're just not sure how much they wanna lead.

The Chinese are becoming more powerful over time.

The Indians are becoming more powerful over time.

The Japanese are becoming less so, and the EU is becoming less so.

I suspect you don't agree with that conventional wisdom.

And I'd like you to tell me how Americans should think about the EU going forward.

- I don't disagree.

You know, we talk a lot about strategic autonomy.

You've come to Europe and you ask, "What do you mean by strategic autonomy?"

You'll get 27 different replies.

We're not yet coherent.

We mentioned crisis before.

We work well in crisis.

When we're not in crisis, we get redivided, north, south, east, west, who's in government, who's in election mode, who has a strong coalition, who doesn't.

How do we deal with our neighborhood, immediate neighborhood?

I come from the south of Europe.

How do we talk to Africa?

How have we talked to Africa over the past 10, 20 years?

But when we're gonna look at China, and we're gonna look at India, how are our relations with them?

When we talk to our African partners, do we only talk to them about migration, that they need to take migrants from their own nationals back?

We've had, for so long, debates where we look at our partners as though we need to talk at them and not talk with them.

We wait until Spain holds the rotating presidency of the European Union to hold summits with Latin America.

We talk about neighborhood policy and development as though they were completely isolated subjects from each other.

That's what we've done for too long.

And I think that, inevitably, we've also weakened ourselves by being a cacophony of what we think we want.

We still have not, as a European Union, become better as a whole than individual countries.

And here, I miss the United Kingdom and the European Union.

You know, at the time, you'd have the United Kingdom leading these debates.

We miss that.

To be clear, I miss that.

And I miss that because you have countries that have a responsibility and have shown us how you can be better, how you can create partnerships, but by bringing everybody up.

And, you know, we have a lot of countries who tell us, "Listen, you're telling us what to do.

"Have a look in your own backyard, "in your own countries."

We make it so difficult, we're talking about Ukraine before, for countries to join the European Union, but they will let the countries that are inside European Union do whatever they like.

We don't have rules to make sure that our basic tenets, fundaments, of democracy work, that elections are proper, that judiciary is protected, that minorities are protected.

We still don't do that, and that's a problem.

- So when you talked before about strategic autonomy and that there are 27 different ideas about what that should mean, one of the biggest debates between the United States and Europe right now is how much of policy towards the rest of the world should be seen principally through a national security lens as opposed to principally through an economic and commercial lens.

On China, that's a very active debate.

You know, I see in the United States, Democrats and Republicans agree on what they should do.

And I see the Europeans having a harder time responding to what feels like really big industrial policy, the Americans telling you what to do.

What should the European path towards China be in that debate?

- Not look away.

I think for far too long we were waiting for what the United States would do from a security point of view, from a technology point of view.

If you think about how industry leads, I mean, we sort of forgot that, you know, China is a big importer, big exporter.

That when we talk about China, it is not only, I would say a dumping of cheaper products in an industry where the European Union has already lost out.

Reasonably so, talking about, as we would say de-risking and not decoupling.

Do we know what that means?

How will we do it if we don't talk to them?

If China does not talk to us, then we're not talking about anything.

And the only time we're discussing China is when we're investigating electric vehicles that are being placed on our markets at 20, 25% lower than domestic rate production.

When we have European industries who are telling us, "Listen, we rely on the Chinese market."

When we have people who tell us, in countries who tell us, "Listen, expertise that comes out of China "is something we need."

Of course a country that is brought up with an extremely different value set, democratic concerns, things that should not be taken off the table, but they need to be on the table.

And for far too long, I don't think the European Union looked at that.

And as a result, are we being squeezed?

Do we just watch the United States and the Chinese sort of trade politically, diplomatically, economically, while we are doing what?

- It's fair to say that European policy towards China has largely been reactive.

- Or even absent, or even absent, to a certain extent because, of course, you have bilateral relations between national member states.

Biggest problem is, we have not been coherent.

You know, people still ask, "What's the European position?"

And you know, we produce swathes of documents with unintelligible language.

I mean, I'm being self-critical here.

I'm partly responsible for that.

But if the United States is looking at us, in the current administration, the next administration, if we look at who's talking to the Chinese and what the Chinese think about what we're doing, are we a competitor?

Are we innovating?

Should we be legitimately concerned about TikTok, for example?

These are things that we should reasonably and properly be talking about.

- So last question.

I haven't brought up migration, which seems implausible for a conversation in Europe right now.

It seems to be an issue that is now bringing European governments more together than not, that they're aligning more on it.

Is that a positive development in your view?

Are you happy with the direction of travel, that migration policy is heading in Europe right now?

- It has been an emotional topic for a very, very long time.

And so you have political movements that were created and are still extremely strong based on very anti-migrant rhetoric.

You have governments collapsing over disagreements.

What do we do?

Do we close our borders?

Do we open our borders?

You have countries, never thought I would see this, blaming their immediate neighbors for not being tough enough at the external border.

So it's multifaceted.

And we were faced with a choice about one year ago, do we legislate or do we not?

We decided to go down the legislation route years after failure, but we realized we had no choice.

If you don't legislate, our citizens will not think that the European Union, because no one thinks a country can solve it alone, would be able to address their real concerns.

How do we reconcile that by, we have a duty to protect.

We have a duty to welcome those who desperately need a new life, who have no choice.

So I can go into details what is meant by a refugee, et cetera.

But I would say that what we need to prevent is national government, so directional travel, as you mentioned, see that they have no choice but to close their borders.

The best part of the European Union is movement.

You can go from one country to another to work, to travel, to find a better life.

The minute we close up, we become inward-looking.

That worries me.

And I'm hoping that the legislation we actually adopted will alleviate the concerns that would span, you know, an electoral campaign.

- So this is a critical issue where the European Union is getting stronger.

- I would say so, but it requires a lot of work, commitment, and lack of, I would say, blaming of your immediate neighbor.

That is not what Europe should be, and that is what we should avoid.

- President Roberta Metsola, thanks so much for joining us today.

- Thank you.

(gentle music) - And now it's time to hear from another leader who has strong feelings about Europe's future.

Let's just say when EU sanctions bite, the Kremlin gets creative.

Roll that tape.

- With Ukraine continuing to get money from the US and Europe, Russian president Vladimir Putin is turning to some Trumpian tactics to raise cash for his own war effort.

Let's take a look.

- Hi, welcome to KSM, Kremlin Shopping Network.

For items to get, come to nyet.

Okay, today we have some wonderful stuff ready for selling to you, exclusive.

First up, did any of your friends buy pieces of suit Donald Trump wore to his debate with Joe Biden?

Well, wait till you see their loser faces when you show up with piece of shoe I was wearing when I visited (indistinct) Siberian sausage and crankshaft factory.

Now, that's a real piece of history.

And now, the piece de resistance.

With holidays coming up, we're all preparing for awkward meals with relatives we'd rather not see.

Don't suffer in silence.

Brew yourself some excitement with special Kremlin edition tea set.

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It's like Russian roulette that every unhappy family can enjoy in its own way.

Operators are standing by to take payment.

We can't accept credit cards, wire transfers, cash apps, dollars, euros, yen, or most money.

But if you have some North Korean won burning hole in pocket, let's rock it.

We'll also accept actual North Korean rockets.

Order now, and we'll throw in bonus bottle of trace minerals, featuring magnesium, zinc, cooper, novichok, and polonium.

Just a tincture, and they're out of picture.

♪ Puppet Regime ♪ - That's our show this week.

Come back next week.

And if you like what you've seen, or even if you don't and you're kind of sick of Europeans but you like other countries that you can pick on, why don't you check us out?

It's gzeromedia.com.

(energetic music) (energetic music continues) (energetic music continues) (soft music) - [Narrator 1] Funding for "GZERO World" is provided by our lead sponsor.

Prologis, - [Narrator 2] Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains with a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com - [Narrator 1] And by... Cox Enterprises is proud to support "GZERO."

Cox is working to create an impact in areas like sustainable agriculture, clean tech, healthcare, and more.

Cox, A Family of Businesses.

A additional funding provided by Jerre and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and... (bright music) (upbeat music)