Von der Leyen’s 2025 State of the Union, read closely

A strong opening, a story at each end, and a list between them.

The order of the speech

1. Opening. “Europe is in a fight.” Then “Europe’s Independence Moment”, then a question to Parliament: does Europe have the stomach for it?
2. Security. Sasha’s story, Ukraine, European defence, enlargement.
3. Gaza.
4. Economy. Competitiveness, the Single Market, AI and clean tech, climate.
5. Cost of living, through four examples: energy, housing, cars, food.
6. Trade and the world. The US trade deal, China, other partners, science and health.
7. Democracy. Rule of law, disinformation, the press, children on social media, migration.
8. Close. Wildfires, the Greek rangers, institutional reform, Europe’s history of fighting for freedom.

What works

• The opening does a lot in a few paragraphs. It sets the stakes, explains why she chose hard words, and describes what citizens feel. Then it states the thesis, asks the question and makes the ask, which is unity.
• A human story sits at each end of the policy. Sasha, near the start, shows Europe under threat. The Greek rangers, near the end, show Europeans helping each other.
• One word, “independence”, links very different topics. She comes back to it at each turn: “Europe’s independence will depend on its ability to compete.”
• The order follows urgency: war first, then household costs, then democracy.
• She tells listeners where they are: “four telling examples”, “First… Second… Thirdly”, “two imperatives”.

What doesn’t

• The middle is a list. There are about forty named plans, acts, funds, packages and summits. No listener remembers more than a handful. The “fight” of the opening vanishes for most of the speech.
• The US trade deal is in the wrong place. It defends a disputed decision, and it sits between farmers and science. It belongs near the start, where she already talks about other powers using Europe’s dependence on them as a weapon. Which raises the question: does Europe really have the stomach for the fight? Had she addressed this more honestly, like Mark Carney did a few months later at Davos, the speech could have been electric.
• Gaza lurches in tone at both ends. She moves from “the next reunification of Europe” straight to starving children, then straight to competitiveness.
• The cost-of-living list loses count. She says “the first”, skips “second”, then says “the third” and “the final”. Cars are also a poor example of living costs; that passage is really about industry.
• The ending sags after its high point. The tribute to the rangers and “This is the Europe that I love” are the emotional peak. She then turns to the Framework Agreement and qualified majority voting before building back up to history.
• She never answers her own question. “Does Europe have the stomach for this fight?” comes near the start and does not come back at the end.

Built for the ear. Then the jargon arrives.

What works

• It is written to be heard. Short sentences and fragments (“Trapped. Threatened. Forced to deny their identities.”) suit a speech delivered in several languages and heard through interpreters.
• Repeated openings build pressure: “A fight for…”, “They can feel…”, “Unity between…”, “The freedom to decide. To speak out… To vote. To love. To pray.”
• Several lines are built to be quoted. “This is Russia’s war. And it is Russia that should pay.” “2030 is tomorrow. So Europe must get ready today.” “Ukraine has the ingenuity. What it needs now is scale.” “Parents, not algorithms” and “parents, not profits”. “If it matters to Europeans, it matters to Europe.”
• Numbers are made concrete. Internal trade barriers are “equivalent to a 45% tariff on goods”. The burned land is “around a third of the size of Belgium”.
• The housing passage is the best-built stretch. It moves from an image (“not just four walls and a roof”) to two numbers, then the people affected (nurses, teachers, firemen), then the plan, and ends on the value: “Housing is about dignity.”
• She uses her own background where it fits: doctor on health disinformation, mother of seven on social media, friend of Israel before she criticises its government.

What doesn’t

• Unexplained Brussels jargon: omnibuses, the 28th regime, the fifth freedom, lead markets, MFF, CAP, SAFE, the ERA loan, CPTPP, a European Defence Semester. The speech opens by speaking to ordinary Europeans, and most of them will not know these terms.
• Worn phrases, mostly in the policy sections: “make no mistake”, “all hell broke loose”, “moved mountains”, “headwinds” (twice), “crystal clear” (twice), “double down”, “the jury is still out”, “stay the course”, “backbone of any democracy”, “shackles of unanimity”.
• Overused intensifiers. “Urgent”, “urgently” or “urgency” about ten times, “simply” five times, “massively” three times. When everything is urgent, nothing sounds urgent.
• One mixed image: parents “drowning against the tsunami of Big Tech flooding their family homes”.
• The E-car slogan feels committee-made. “Environmental, economical, European” sticks, but it sounds like marketing.
• The published text has typos. “There can never by any place for Hamas”, “a ‘made in Europe’ criteria”, “as clear I can”. Small, but this is the official record.

One excellent story, a good second one, and a middle with none.

The overall arc

The speech moves through six stages:

1. The threat
2. A call for independence
3. Proof that Europe has done hard things before
4. The policy programme
5. Europe as one community
6. A history of Europeans fighting for freedom

The best link in the speech runs from the opening to the close. At the start she admits that talk of fighting sits uneasily, “because our Union is fundamentally a peace project”. At the end she resolves this with 1945, the underground press, the Forest Brothers and the Berlin Wall: the peace project was always a fight for freedom. The close answers a tension the opening raised, which is more than a callback.

Sasha: the strongest passage in the speech

The story has every beat:

• An ordinary moment: going out for food.
• The attack, with one physical detail: “felt his face burning”.
• The attempt to erase who he is: “A Russian passport. A Russian name.”
• A turning point in one line of dialogue: “Baba, just take me home.”
• A journey: his grandmother crosses Poland, the Baltics and Russia while friends call her crazy.
• The rescue.
• An ending left open: his mother is still missing.

That open ending leads straight into the policy ask: tens of thousands of children, and a summit. Then the guests stand up in the chamber. The weak spots are the cliché at the key moment (“all hell broke loose”) and the sudden jump to “The images in Alaska were not easy to digest”.

The Greek rangers

The arc is clear. Fire breaks out, Spain calls for help, Greece answers, the rangers fight for five days and save the village, and their leader is thanked in Greek. It also echoes Sasha: Sasha calls his grandmother, and Spain calls Greece. It is weaker than Sasha’s story because it follows a group, with no single moment or line of dialogue, and the leader is named only at the end.

Smaller arcs that work

• Drones. Ukraine had none before the war, and now its drones cause over two-thirds of Russian equipment losses. Russia catches up through mass production and sends 800 in one night. Europe offers the manufacturing scale.
• The US deal. She concedes (“I understand the initial reactions”), rebuts, then offers a contrasting picture: China flanked by Russia and North Korea.

Where the story stops

• The long middle has no story.
• “Fight” drops out between Ukraine and the close.
• There are too many villains: Putin, Hamas, extremist Israeli ministers, smugglers, algorithms, Big Tech, unanimity, division. The one that ties them together, “dependencies”, is too abstract to drive a story.

Aimed well at her coalition. Too scattered to leave one demand.

Who she was speaking to

She faced a divided Parliament two months after surviving a censure vote. She was also speaking to 27 governments, and to Moscow, Washington and Beijing.

She built it as a coalition speech. She keeps repeating “pro-European democratic majority”, which marks out the groups she wants to govern with and warns her own centre-right against working with the far right. Then each group in that majority gets something:

• Centre-right: returning rejected asylum seekers, sanctions on smugglers, less red tape, “technology neutrality” on car rules, farmers.
• Centre-left: a Quality Jobs Act, an anti-poverty strategy, housing, the Gaza measures.
• Greens: “stay the course” on climate, the 2040 target.
• Liberals: the Single Market, rule of law, press freedom, an end to unanimity.

That is shrewd, and it is why the speech is so long.

What works

• It felt current. Russian drones had entered Polish airspace only hours before, and she used it. She also referred to Alaska, China’s parade “just last week” and 700 days of hostages.
• She answers objections before critics can raise them: on the US deal, on Gaza (“too much for some. Too little for others”), on climate costs, on migration (“humane, but we must not be naïve”).
• Admitting failure made her more believable. She says her Gaza proposal is “stuck without a majority”, and that Europe’s failure to agree is painful.
• The Gaza package was a real shift. Sanctions on Israeli ministers and a partial trade suspension made the headlines.
• She handled hecklers well. When far-right MEPs shouted, she told them they would first have to listen.

What doesn’t

• No single clear demand. The opening asks for unity. The close asks for majority voting and a framework agreement, then ends on “Long live Europe”. Listeners leave with a feeling, not a task.
• The US section contradicts her opening. She promised not to “varnish over the difficulties”, then claims “we have the best agreement. Without any doubt.” She says “Tariffs are taxes” while defending a deal that accepted a 15% US tariff on most EU goods. These are claims without evidence.
• Truth is powerful. Yet the speech is not candid in parts. Take housing. The Affordable Housing Plan is announced as Europe coming to help. What she does not say is why housing needs a European plan at all. Housing is local, and much of the reason Brussels must act is its own state aid rules, the rules that limit what a government may spend to help its own people and industries, so that no member gets an unfair edge. She lists “revise our State aid rules” as one item among several, rather than as the reason the plan exists. That silence hides a larger question about the European project. China, and to an extent the United States, thrive on competition between their states and provinces; the Union restrains it by design, and what it gains in fairness between members it loses in speed, planning, innovation and growth. China and the US as unitary states can spread the bounty. Europe cannot. She shies away from an opportunity to explain Europe’s misconceived architecture.
• Her central question exposes her weakness. She asks everyone else for unity, and her own Gaza section shows that unity is missing.
• The close shifts the weight back to herself. She asks every MEP to answer the question, then ends on “this is what I will strive for”.