OUR ANSWER IS NO
An open letter in response to the 2026 State of the Union Address
Madam President,
In your State of the Union address, you asked whether we want a stronger, more independent Europe, with greater power to act. You told us that “only Europe can provide true sovereignty to Europeans.” You called for new European security structures and greater economic integration.
You asked Europeans for an answer.
Our answer is NO.
Not because we reject Europe. Europe is our home.
But we reject your claim that only Europe can give Europeans true sovereignty. Sovereignty is not something the European Union can give us.
All political power originates with the people. Its source is not the state, the government or the European Union.
Because people are sovereign, the state exists to serve them and to carry out their will. Its authority comes from the people, not the other way around.
The European Union stands one step further removed. It exists to serve its Member States and to carry out their will, exercising only those powers they have agreed to entrust to it.
The European Union is not a sovereign state and cannot give sovereignty to Europeans.
WE DID NOT GIVE YOU THIS MANDATE
The countries that joined the EU in 2004 — many only recently freed from totalitarian rule — joined the Union established by the treaties then in force.
Soon afterwards came the proposed European Constitution.
When people were actually asked, France said NO. The Netherlands said NO.
Much of that project subsequently returned through the Lisbon Treaty. It expanded majority voting and European-level powers, yet almost no European population was permitted to vote directly on it. Ireland was the exception: its people initially rejected Lisbon and were subsequently asked to vote again after guarantees were negotiated.
The European Union that exists today has therefore developed far beyond what millions of Central and Eastern Europeans originally voted to join. This is an important fact when you now speak of European sovereignty.
EUROPE'S HISTORY IS BLOODY
After the fragmentation of Roman authority in Western Europe, Charlemagne united much of the continent under an imperial crown. The European integration movement still invokes his legacy.
But the centuries that followed were marked by repeated struggles for continental supremacy among rulers and dynasties centred in the territories that became France, the German kingdoms and the British Isles.
Different centuries. Different rulers. Different causes.
But one pattern returned again and again. Rulers sought ever greater territories, more resources and more people over whom they could exercise power and from whom they could raise revenue. Their ambitions grew; ordinary Europeans paid the price.
They supplied the taxes. They supplied the labour. They supplied the soldiers. They buried their children.
Kingdoms, empires and governments rose and fell. Borders moved. Flags changed. But generation after generation, ordinary people were asked to finance ambitions that were not their own and to die in wars over who would determine the political order of Europe.
Eighty-one years after Europe's last catastrophic war, we increasingly see signs of the European Union preparing Europe for another great confrontation with Russia, which for centuries has regarded itself as the heir to the Eastern Roman Empire.
The ancient division between Western and Eastern Rome may have disappeared from our political vocabulary, but its inheritance is still very much alive. A few years ago, Ukraine outlawed the Russian Orthodox Church and is severing centuries-old religious ties with Moscow.
Twice in little more than two centuries, a continental European power that had brought much of Europe under its control turned east against Russia — Napoleon in 1812 and Hitler in 1941. Both campaigns ended in catastrophe on an unimaginable scale.
We will not allow Europe to be organised for the same purpose a third time. We will no longer play useful idiots in wars conceived by others, financed with our money and fought with our children.
Europe must never again be united for the purpose of war.
Europe's bloody history gives no European institution a moral mandate to turn the nations of Europe into a single continental power.
For centuries, attempts to concentrate power over this continent ended again and again in rivalry, domination and war. We therefore reject the idea that the unification of Europe should end in another war with Russia or another great power.
We do not want another European empire.
We want sovereign European nations: peaceful, prosperous and free to cooperate with one another and with the rest of the world.
No capital has the right to rule Europe. Not Paris. Not Berlin. Not London. Not Moscow. Not Brussels.
AND WE REJECT YOUR RECORD
YOU FAILED TO UPHOLD THE RIGHTS AND ACCOUNTABILITY YOU PREACH.
The EU still has not acceded to the European Convention on Human Rights despite its treaty obligation to do so, while your own Commission was condemned over its handling of requests for your Pfizer communications.
YOU UNDERMINED THE EUROPEAN UNION'S ECONOMY.
European companies face energy prices far above major competitors and Europe has only four of the world's fifty largest technology companies — while Brussels increasingly regulates the smallest details of economic life.
YOU FAILED TO PROTECT EUROPE'S BORDERS.
Decades of uncontrolled migration and failed enforcement have placed growing pressure on housing, schools, public services and national budgets, while undermining public confidence in governments' ability to control who enters and remains in their countries.
And your priorities are visible in your own budget: the European Union allocated more than €13 billion to its own administration in 2026, but only around €5 billion to migration and border management.
And we reject the political idea that mass immigration can be used to weaken national identity. People arriving from outside Europe naturally do not share the same inherited attachment to our national histories, institutions and states. A population with weaker common historical ties may be easier to persuade that those nations are obsolete and should give way to a single supranational European state.
YOU REPLACED PRAGMATISM WITH IDEOLOGY.
Through the Green Deal, carbon pricing and binding European rules, Member States are required to impose costs on their own people in order to fulfil priorities decided at European level. More and more of what Europeans earn is being redirected towards political objectives they never chose through a direct vote.
YOU REPLACED DIPLOMACY WITH CONFRONTATION.
Relations with Russia are largely frozen, while relations with China and even the United States have become increasingly confrontational. Europe should be capable of maintaining workable relations with great powers even when we disagree with them.
YOU FAILED TO RESPECT YOUR OWN PRINCIPLES.
The EU promises subsidiarity — decisions taken as closely as possible to people — while power, regulation and administration continue accumulating at European level.
YOU FAILED TO DEFEND FREE SPEECH, PRIVACY AND POLITICAL DISSENT.
Private communications face increasing regulatory surveillance, EU institutions intervene ever more deeply in the online political information space, and concerns have even arisen over people losing banking services because of political or philosophical beliefs.
And your answer to these failures is more power for Brussels?!
Ours is NO.
EUROPE IS NOT THE EUROPEAN UNION
Throughout your speech, you repeatedly spoke as though Europe and the European Union were the same thing.
They are not.
Europe is older than the EU and infinitely greater than its institutions.
A Czech demanding Czech sovereignty is European. A Frenchman demanding French sovereignty is European. A Dutch voter saying NO to further integration is European.
Opposition to your political project is not opposition to Europe.
After almost seven years under your presidency, you described the European Union's crises, divisions, economic difficulties, security threats and loss of confidence — yet nowhere did you seriously ask what responsibility your own Commission bears for the state of the Union you lead.
Leadership requires responsibility.
You ask us for still more powers and the authority to make decisions.
Our answer is not merely that we will give you no more.
We take back the powers that were transferred in the past from us and our states to the European Union.
Sovereignty belongs to the people. Power flows from them — not from Brussels. What the people have entrusted, the people can also take back.
We therefore reject any further transfer of political authority from Europe's nations to the European Union, and we reclaim powers already transferred to the level where sovereignty belongs: the people and their states.
You asked Europeans for an answer.
Our answer is NO.
You wanted to know whether you still have our hearts.
You do not.
You ask for more power.
We refuse.
And we take ours back.
After almost seven years as President of the European Commission, the State of the Union is also the result of your leadership.
Under the EU treaties, the European Parliament has the power to dismiss the European Commission.
It has failed to exercise that responsibility.
Political authority ultimately belongs to the people. When their representatives fail to hold those in power accountable, the people must speak for themselves.
So we do.
You have lost our confidence.
You have lost our respect.
And in the eyes of the people whose work and taxes sustain the institutions you lead, you have lost all the political authority you ever had.
We have heard your assessment.
We have seen your record.
Our conclusion is: