# The Eurofederalist Metagame Uniting Europe is one of the single most important challenges of the 21st century. Much hinges on its success, within Europe and far beyond — not least the stabilisation of a rule-based global order that is the backbone of peace and prosperity. Yet our diverse and pluralistic Europe cannot and will not be unified by any single movement, party, or leader. It will be unified — if at all — by different groups and individuals coming together and winning the metagame of European federalisation. # The 27 National Interests Problem The current structure of the European Union is a monument of fragmentation along national lines. Today there are 27 memberstates in the European Union and thus there are 27 heads of national governments in the European Council. But not only that. There are also 27 foreign ministers in the Foreign Affairs Council. 27 defence ministers in its defence configuration. 27 finance ministers in ECOFIN. 27 justice and home affairs ministers. 27 for agriculture, environment, and so on across the ten Council configurations: one seat per member state, every time. 27 judges at the Court of Justice of the European Union and 54 judges, two per state, in the separate General Court. 27 members of the European Court of Auditors. 329 members of the European Committee of the Regions, another 329 in the European Economic and Social Committee. At the European Central Bank, the Governing Council seats 27.... and so and so on. # More divided than the Weimar Republic Even the **European Parliament** is a kaleidoscope of local interests: 207 national parties are currently packed into a single chamber, making it more politically fractured than the Weimar Republic. The Weimar Reichstag — a byword for parliamentary chaos — never seated more than 14 parties. To contrast: The USA have in their federal chambers House and Senate only 2 political parties bickering - the Republicans and Democrats; which is arguably not enough to represent the plurality of the American people aedequatly, yet it allows effective governing where both parties come to agreement. The two quasi-chambers of the European Union - European Council and European Parliament - have on the contrast 27 and 207 parties bickering respectively. The result is predictable: consensus-building in Europe is slow, and ends in compromises so diluted across hundreds of positions that they satisfy no one. And when something goes wrong, national politicians cheerfully use the EU as a scapegoat for their own failures. One might object that the europarties — Renew, S&D, EPP, ESN, the Greens, the Left — already function as factions inside the EP. But these are not, in any meaningful sense, parties. They are thin coordinating layers laid atop national parties whose careers, donors, electorates, and incentives still run nationally — and therefore push hard against federalisation. **As we wrote in the manifesto of [Astra Europa:](https://astraeuropa.eu/)** _A united Europe will not be built by those whose careers depend on its absence. Twenty-seven foreign ministers, twenty-seven defence ministers, twenty-seven heads of government, and the apparatus around each of them hold twenty-seven fragments of European power._ _This is the structural problem. And no amount of treaty engineering will fix it on its own, because the agents asked to vote on any such reform are the very people whose power depends on the fragmentation continuing._ If we want to unite Europe, we must overcome this fragmentation — and this is the hardest problem of European federalism. We cannot expect members of national parties, who are both the agents and the beneficiaries of the current arrangement, to vote for their own obsolescence. They must be bypassed, and ultimately replaced, by paneuropean parties whose incentives and structures are European by design. # Shifting the frame The first move in winning the meta-game is to change the terms of engagement. We must shift the public debate from **whether** we want a united Europe to **how** that united Europe should look. As long as a “United Europe” is treated as a hypothetical, every election remains a referendum on the Union’s existence. This pits federalists against nationalists, while the default winner remains the status quo: **endless intergovernmental drift and impotent squabbles.** When the question shifts to the “how,” the battlefield changes. Federalism ceases to be an optional “extra” and becomes the assumed terrain. The contest moves from the _existence_ of the state to the _content_ of its policy. However, this shift requires **institutional embodiment.** A citizen entering a voting booth must see federalist options across the entire political spectrum. Today, they do not. # We need Four to Five Volts Today Volt Europa is the only paneuropean party with real organisational depth. But Volt sits on the centre-left, progressive, green ground — and so comes packaged with commitments on climate, migration, and economics that a federalist conservative, socialist, or libertarian will variously find alien. Most Europeans support deeper integration in polls and surveys; far fewer support Volt. A voter who agrees with it on Europe but disagrees on everything else has nowhere to go, and her vote will most likely end up with a national party. The solution is not to dilute Volt into a catch-all party — European preferences are too divergent for that, and democracy works best when a plurality of parties represents the existing plurality of voters. The answer is to build four or five Volts: each tailored to a different segment of the spectrum, each genuinely paneuropean in structure, each treating European federation as the floor of its programme rather than the ceiling. European Federalist should not worry about splitting the Eurofed vote, but instead about how they can grow the Eurofed ecosystem and spread Eurofederalism across the entire political spectrum. We will need, even if we disagree with their policies beyond the federalism: A federalist far left. A federalist centre-left. A federalist centre-right. A federalist far right that channels nationalist energies into European rather than national sovereignty. Possibly a federalist green, distinct from the centre-left. All within the scope of democratic pluralism, all competing fiercely on policy, all agreeing on the constitutional question — that Europe must be united — and all operating transnationally. Once that structure exists, the 207 national parties in the European Parliament can be replaced by perhaps half a dozen genuinely paneuropean ones, and the Council can be confronted by governments elected on paneuropean platforms rather than national mandates. The europarties cease to be coordination shells and become real political organisations with their own members, discipline, and continental electorate. Only when this structure is in place, genuine paneuropean democracy will even be possible. The first steps to replacing the parties of old and copying the Volt-model across the political spectrum are already happening: DiEM25 attempted to build a paneuropean party on the populist to far left, though it largely failed to consolidate. Ave Europa, if it survives its infighting and drift toward the fringes, may yet become a paneuropean far-right party. Astra Europa is now emerging as a liberal, centrist alternative. This is a good sign and a good start, but not good enough yet. All these movements, while on a superficial level being competitors, need to become way more successfull and grow the entire pro-European ecosystem together to replace the current national one. In the coming years, more such movements using Volt as a blue print must emerge and grow. These new paneuropean movements will have to grow and expand in numbers and reach, while absorbing the electorate of old national parties, spreading the europeanisation of our political discourse across the continent. # The game above the game This is the metagame: build paneuropean parties across the political spectrum; replace national party lists with transnational ones; replace national parties with paneuropean ones; replace politicians who serve national interests with politicians who serve European ones first. Replace the old national structures with european ones; make democracy work across the entire continent. The metagame that will win us European Unification is the slow, deliberate construction of the political infrastructure that a federal, democratic Europe will need to function. Treaties will follow. Institutions will follow. Symbols and ceremonies will follow. But none of it will hold unless the underlying party system has already been Europeanised — unless, by the time the constitutional moment arrives, there are organised paneuropean forces on every side of every argument, ready to govern the federation democratically and representing the plurality of voters along ideological lines only and not along both national and ideological lines. That is the work: To unite Europe democratically, we have first to unite the political parties that underpin European democracy.