COPENHAGEN — French President Emmanuel Macron’s much ballyhooed European Political Community is becoming a glorified meet-and-greet.
While more than 40 leaders from across Europe are planning to attend the seventh edition of the event in Copenhagen Thursday, expectations for concrete deliverables are low.
Diplomats and analysts, some of whom were granted anonymity either to freely criticize the event or because they were not authorized to speak to the media, told POLITICO that what Macron had sold three years ago as “a new space for political cooperation” has turned into little more than a diplomatic side show — especially considering Thursday’s meeting comes on the heels of a high-stakes summit in the Danish capital.
The picture they painted was of an event where no real business gets done, but instead is used by leaders to catch up with the peers they haven’t seen in a while or showcase policy initiatives in front of a prestigious audience.
One diplomat from a non-EU country compared the EPC to speed dating because of the big number of meetings and their short length, which leaves little room to get into details of complicated issues.
The French president launched the EPC three years ago in the aftermath of Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine also to give Europeans countries vying for EU membership a seat at a new table. That the event hasn’t lived up to the hype is somewhat of a surprise given Macron’s reputation as a geopolitical force, especially compared with his checkered domestic record.
The last EPC, held in Albania in May, yielded few high-profile deliverables. Most people remember the event because of a video that featured bizarre, artificial intelligence-generated baby versions of the leaders present.
“I can’t think of a concrete, tangible result from the formal part of the EPC,” said an EU diplomat.
Part of the issue is the EPC is summit redundancy. European Union leaders already get together at European Councils, both formal and informal. The Group of Seven and the Group of 20 offer members and nonmembers alike the opportunity to meet on the sidelines of those summits. NATO members have the alliance’s annual summit to discuss defense issues too. And the United Nations General Assembly
“There is a risk that the EPC becomes just another multilateral platform for sideline meetings, and we have many of them,” said Bojana Zorić, a policy analyst at the EU Institute for Security Studies.
“We had bigger expectations,” she said, though she acknowledged that informal talks can prove useful.
While the gathering hasn’t lived up to the hype set by Macron, most of those who spoke to POLITICO said it would be wrong to consider it a failure. Dialogue doesn’t hurt anyone, after all.
Sylvain Kahn, a professor of European history at Sciences Po in Paris, said it’s important to remember that the EPC’s goals were vague from the start despite the lofty language used by Macron. The initiative, he said provides an opportunity to bring “all the countries that don’t support the invasion of Ukraine on the same boat, which is piloted by the EU. That’s smart.”
A third diplomat, this one from another EU country, praised the EPC as “a good framework for cooperation, which mostly allows for some publicity and consensus-building at home.”
France and Moldova used a previous meeting to unveil an initiative to combat disinformation, and on Thursday Macron and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni will present a new joint effort to combat drug trafficking.
Macron’s office believes the initiative’s staying power has proved its worth. When asked about the EPC’s evolution at a briefing, an Elysée official told reporters that the format remains beneficial because it “allows for informal strategic conversations or debates at the leadership level.”
But few besides the French seem married to the format.
“As long as it’s useful, we keep it there,” said the first diplomat. “If at some point in the future we determine that it has run its course, it’s shown its worth, but now it’s no longer that. I don’t think anybody would have hard feelings saying goodbye to it.”
Jacopo Barigazzi contributed to this report.
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