The Daily Populous Thursday December 25th, 2025 morning edition
Authored by politico.eu and submitted by AlertTangerine

In the face of withering attacks from U.S. President Donald Trump, who called European leaders “weak” in an interview with POLITICO, as well as anti-EU tirades from X owner Elon Musk, such pro-EU memes are flowing thicker and faster than ever.

Its mainstays are Soviet-style propaganda posters featuring the EU’s ring of stars emblem, video montages with soaring drone shots of European monuments and memes where the EU’s strengths — from its laid-back work culture to rich cultural heritage — are favorably compared to other parts of the world, namely Donald Trump’s America.

Scrolling through these posts, it can be tempting to shrug off the entire trend as meaningless “AI slopaganda” (AI-generated content does loom large). Indeed the hyper-confident Europe envisioned by accounts with names like “European propagandist” or “Ave Europa” bears little resemblance to the actual EU, where leaders remain divided over everything from how to finance Ukraine’s war next year to what reforms should be undertaken to reverse a long trend of economic decline.

But for the people behind these accounts, the point isn’t to stick too closely to the day-to-day reality of EU politics. It’s to generate a sense of agency, vision and possibility at a time when bullying from Trump, expansionism from Russia and competition between U.S. and China have left young Europeans feeling powerless. POLITICO reached out to 11 of the users behind the accounts and learned that they were real people with widely differing political views ranging from left-wing to the hard-right, and used different terms to describe where they stood on Europe. Some called their beliefs “Eurofed,” short for European federalist. Others described themselves as pan-European imperialist, emphasizing the notion of a European “civilization” to defend rather than any existing political setup.

One thing they all had in common: They were under the age of 35. “People are looking to escape powerlessness… to regain action and sovereignty and act on things,” said Christelle Savall, former president of the Young European Federalists Association, a non-profit advocacy group that has existed since 1972 but has recently seen a surge in membership

For years, Europe’s dominant political narrative has been that the far right is ascendant and the only question is how much further it will rise and how much more it will corrode the eighty-year-old project that grew out of the ashes of World War II to become the European Union. These online warriors believe that is flat-out wrong and that the future lies with a stronger Europe, a view reflected in a growing swell of opinion in the real world. Just as the MAGA online movement mirrored and fueled the rise of Trump before the 2016 presidential election, Europe’s online glowup is reflected in polls showing support for the EU at an all-time high.

bunchalingo on December 24th, 2025 at 13:01 UTC »

I don’t know how this got passed off and green lit by an editor at Politico. In the face of everything that the Trump Admin is trying to pull with NATO, targeting EU countries, sending mixed signals to Ukraine, articles like this do more harm than good and are simply planting seeds for dissent.

A ‘United States of Europe’ is exactly how you destroy the EU and ensure there’s never ending power vacuums.

vivaldibot on December 24th, 2025 at 12:55 UTC »

Of all the possible names, a United States of Europe is possibly the worst. We're not a mirror image of the USA nor do we aspire to be so. We're an own entity with our own interests and identity.

oren0 on December 24th, 2025 at 12:42 UTC »

This entire article is based on a few accounts on X and Reddit posting about this and then interviewing the owners of those accounts. Almost no evidence is presented that this idea is actually popular other than amongst a small group of the terminally online and a group holding a handful of EU Parliament seats. The article does mention single poll supporting the creation of an EU army but a true single country would be much more than that.

Is there polling that suggests that a significant number of French, German, Italian, Spanish, etc. citizens actually support a movement that would eliminate their national sovereignty? Or is this just Politico trying to pretend that a few online accounts are a full grassroots movement?