Ave Europa and the Renaissance Europe Needs

S aving Europe will not be comfortable. Let us be honest about that from the outset. It is far beyond any reasonable expectation to think that European civilisation is self-sustaining in its current form, that a few wholesome policy adjustments and a renewed commitment to dialogue will arrest what is visibly in motion. What is required is something immense, painful, and without recent precedent. Decisions will have to be made that no serious politician currently in office is willing to make. Someone has to make them. I hope it will be Europeans who do. I also hope, and this is the more personal admission, that Ave Europa is part of how that happens. I joined the movement in late May 2025, before I held any formal role within it, drawn by something I had not encountered anywhere else in the European federalist landscape: a willingness to say true things plainly, even when those things were uncomfortable for the people who most loudly claim to love Europe. I write this as a member who has watched this movement from the inside, through its best moments and its most difficult ones, and as someone who has come to regard several of its core members as close friends, forged in the way that only shared adversity produces. I believe in what Ave Europa is trying to do. I also believe it is necessary to say so openly, because the alternative, pretending to a detachment I do not possess, would be its own form of the dishonesty I am writing against.

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The Script
There is a recognisable pattern to civilisational decline, and it is not obscure. You can read it in the historical record of every empire that has gone before. An empire begins to fail when its people start questioning the institutions that built it: the structures of government, the churches, the schools. They reject the foundations of their own inheritance because those foundations have become associated, in the minds of a prosperous and guilty elite, with everything that must be transcended. The emperors begin to believe they are gods. The people grow so wealthy that everyone believes they are an emperor too, and too sophisticated to perform the work that built the empire in the first place. So they outsource that work. They open the borders and call it a labour shortage. They allow desperate people from elsewhere to fill the roles the native population considers itself too comfortable, too educated, too morally evolved to perform. Then comes the guilt for the wealth, even as the empire still thrives on it. Everyone questions their inheritance. They reject everything that built what they now enjoy. They destroy their own symbols, attack themselves like a cancer, attack the people who protect the civilisation. Everything that makes the empire genuinely special is declared outdated, in need of being "enriched." And then the wolves come. This is not poetry. This is the operational script of the contemporary West, and Europe is living it in every single line. The question, the only question that actually matters, is whether Europe is capable of being the first civilisation in history to recognise the pattern before completing the cycle. To learn from it rather than sleepwalking into the slaughter. That recognition is why European federalism is not a bureaucratic fantasy. It is the only realistic answer to civilisational entropy. One strong, sovereign European polity that remembers who it is, protects its own people, and refuses the guilt ritual that is currently hollowing out its foundations. The new empire rises from those foundations, or it does not rise at all.

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The Politicians Who Will Not Save Us

I cannot listen to the sterile centre anymore. It is always the same. A Merz, a Sánchez, a Macron: managerial, risk-averse, constitutionally incapable of naming a true thing if it carries any political cost. The Friedrich Merzes and Pedro Sánchezes of European politics are not traitors. What they are is something almost more damaging: politicians whose political moment has passed, who sense this on some level, and who are clinging to their positions with a ferocity that is slowly making meaningful reform impossible. Their paralysis is not innocent. Every careerist in Brussels who defends the status quo because it is comfortable is a silent facilitator of the forces that wish to destroy what he claims to be protecting.
And then there is Keir Starmer, who has become something of a totemic figure for a certain strain of European federalist. I have watched people who describe themselves as representing the moral high ground of European politics produce admiring edits of him online, as though he represents some kind of answer. He does not. Starmer is the personification of European failure: managed decline dressed up as competence, the absence of conviction presented as seriousness. If he is the highest point European politics can reach, if that is the epilogue to the European project, then this civilisation deserves what is coming to it. Every civilisation has the ruler it deserves. Every nation gets the chancellor or president it has earned. That is why America is in decline. Not because Americans are evil, but because they became lazy. They forgot where they came from. Europeans are doing the same, and faster.

In most European countries, between twenty-five and forty per cent of the electorate is now voting for anti-European dissident right factions. That is not a protest. That is a structural realignment, and it will not be reversed by the people who caused it. But the more interesting development, and the one that has been underreported in its full significance, is what just happened in Hungary. Péter Magyar's landslide victory there, ending sixteen years of Orbán with a two-thirds supermajority, is significant not because it offers a template to be copied wholesale, but because of what it demonstrates is possible. Here is a politician who is unapologetically pro-European, centre-right, and anti-authoritarian, who did not feel the need to play the games of the Von der Leyens or perform the rituals of Brussels cosmopolitanism to win. You do not have to be a Brussels bubble shill to be pro-European. You do not have to choose between loving Europe and speaking honestly about what is wrong with it. Magyar showed there is a path away from the Russian-bought parties, away from the MAGA-hyping right-wingers, away from the Americanised centrists, and away from a left so detached from lived reality that it has become a purely self-referential cultural exercise. He will not be the saviour of Europe. But if he governs as he has promised, he offers proof of concept for something that does not yet exist at continental scale: a first wave of genuinely pro-European politics that is also genuinely new, something not currently on the market, something that has no interest in the culture war precisely because it is too busy trying to save the actual continent.

That, in considerably more modest and nascent form, is also what Ave Europa is trying to be. We do not enter the culture war. We want to save Europe. The distinction, obvious as it sounds, is one that the existing political landscape has almost entirely lost sight of. We are ashamed of who we are for things we have never personally done. We have planted the idea, deliberately and systematically, that everything which makes Europe genuinely special is outdated and in need of being "enriched." That is not an accident. It is the outcome of a decades-long psychological programme that is now approaching its conclusion. And we can see Europeans waking up from it, from all sides, which is both the most hopeful and the most dangerous sign of the moment we are in. Hopeful, because the waking is real. Dangerous, because the people waiting to capture that awakening are not, for the most part, the people who should be trusted with it. What foreign powers grasped before most European politicians did is that popular frustration is a strategic resource. Russia, China, and America do not fund Eurosceptic movements because they believe in those movements' programmes. They fund them because a Europe whose discontented citizens have nowhere productive to go is a Europe that cannot act coherently against external pressure. The mechanism does not require invented stories or fabricated crises. It requires only a spotlight aimed at genuine failures that the mainstream refuses to name. Every year that Brussels responds to migration concerns with procedural reassurance rather than policy is another year of free oxygen for parties that will never fix anything but are at least willing to describe the problem out loud. There is a class dimension to this failure that rarely gets named honestly. The people who set European migration policy, who defend it on panels, who dismiss concern about it as unsophisticated, do not, on the whole, live with its consequences. Their experience of cultural diversity is curated by wealth: the top fraction of a percent of any incoming population, self-selected through elite education and professional networks, largely indistinguishable in manner and outlook from their European peers. That is a genuinely different phenomenon from what someone in Liverpool or Duisburg or Marseille experiences, and pretending otherwise is not cosmopolitanism. It is wilful blindness dressed up as virtue.

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What Ave Europa Actually Is

Ave Europa was founded in approximately March 2025. What struck me first, and what continues to matter to me, was one particular fact about the movement's origins. Its charter, the foundational document laying out its principles and its vision for Europe, was written in part by pro-Ukrainian soldiers from across the continent. Some of those passages were drafted in the trenches of Ukraine, by men and women who had chosen to fight for a European future rather than simply argue about one from the comfort of a conference room in Brussels. That is not a detail for a press release. It is a description of what this movement, at its best, actually is. Think of Ave Europa, if you like, as an island glimpsed on the horizon, something solid emerging from a great deal of open water. Something that everyone scattered across a fragmenting political landscape can look towards and recognise as real. A safe haven, not from difficulty, but from the dishonesty that has made every existing option inadequate. That is what Ave Europa has to be: a movement that gives Europeans hope and a sense of belonging back, without repeating the catastrophic mistakes of the right that came before it.
Ave Europa is not trying to protect the interests of Brussels lobbyists and the professionally comfortable. It is trying to protect every pebble of every old ruin. Every piece of European architectural heritage. Every regional and local identity that makes this continent genuinely plural rather than homogeneously managed. It seeks to combine that inheritance with the prosperity of the market, with freedom as its anchor and individualism as its highest expression, within a high-trust society that can only be built by a movement that takes civilisational continuity seriously.
The core of what Ave Europa argues deserves to be stated without distortion. Europe can only be saved by a credible, charismatic, centre-right to right political force capable of uniting millions of Europeans behind a genuinely pro-European programme. Not a force that is right-wing out of habit or resentment, but one that has understood something the existing right has failed to grasp: that the politics of European identity and civilisational continuity belongs to the pro-European camp, if the pro-Europeans are willing to claim it honestly. The old right is trapped in national smallness. The new right is compromised by foreign influence and civilisational pessimism dressed up as strength. The left has been captured by an identity politics so detached from lived experience that it has effectively ceded the working class to its opponents. None of them can offer what Europe actually needs.

On migration, the position should be stated plainly. Ave Europa does not oppose immigration as such. It opposes accelerated mass migration that outpaces any society's capacity to integrate new arrivals, that changes the character of communities faster than those communities can adapt, and that generates social friction which the political mainstream manages privately while refusing to acknowledge publicly. In thirty years, Europe should still be recognisably European. Genuine assimilation should be expected rather than merely performed bureaucratically. These are not extreme positions. They represent a political common sense that the establishment abandoned, leaving it to be picked up by people who hold it for considerably less constructive reasons. Ave Europa has been equally explicit about what it rejects. It fights against the dissident and failed far right. It fights the unapologetically pro-Russian. But it fights far more passionately for Europe than against anything, which is a distinction that matters enormously and that its critics have consistently refused to engage with honestly. It has positioned itself unambiguously against anti-European forces, including the AfD, which several of those critics have conspicuously failed to denounce with anything like the same clarity.

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The Fight for the Movement's Soul

Seriousness of purpose offers no protection against the ordinary human dynamics that tear young political organisations apart. What happened inside Ave Europa over the course of 2025 and into 2026 was not ordinary tension or productive disagreement. It was something considerably more deliberate, and it is worth describing honestly, not because the internal history of a young movement is inherently important, but because what Ave Europa survived tells you something meaningful about what it is. From very early on, a fault line emerged within the movement that had less to do with ideology than with purpose. On one side stood those who had founded and joined Ave Europa as a genuinely political project, a movement that would build a mass constituency and create a real political home for Europeans who felt abandoned by every existing option. On the other side stood a smaller faction that had developed, over time, a rather different sense of what Ave Europa could be made to serve.
This faction's orientation was not towards building something politically durable. It was towards making something institutionally fundable. What this requires in practice is the progressive softening of precisely the positions that make Ave Europa distinct. The honest language about migration becomes a liability. The willingness to engage with cultural identity becomes a reputational risk. The unapologetic commitment to a politics that speaks to ordinary Europeans gets quietly replaced with the sterile, bubble-tested centrism that Brussels produces in abundance and that European voters have been declining in ever-greater numbers for a decade. The strategic thinking on display within this faction, when it surfaced, illustrated the gap between its self-presentation and its actual instincts rather vividly. One proposal circulating seriously among its members involved securing institutional legitimacy through financial inducement of a sitting EU member state's head of government. It was not treated as the absurdity it was. In private chat groups, members of this faction described colleagues in terms that invoked Nazi imagery, targeted individuals in ways that had nothing to do with their actual views and everything to do with eliminating them as internal obstacles. The people most consistently responsible for this conduct were, almost without exception, the self-styled professionals, the presentation-conscious, institutionally oriented voices who insisted they were the movement's responsible wing. The people most worried about Ave Europa's reputation were the ones most actively damaging it, in private, in ways they presumably believed would remain invisible.

They did not remain invisible. Those private chat groups were leaked. What they contained was not ambiguous. The charter-holding core used what emerged to do what had long been necessary: a systematic process of formal exclusions that proceeded over several months and extended into 2026. This was not a purge in any ideological sense. It was the opposite: a defence of the founding ideology against those who had been working to dilute it. We also went further than internal housekeeping. Working with pro-European voices inside the AfD itself, people who had fought in Ukraine, who were actively exposing the party's Russian entanglements from within, we attempted to weaponise that dissident current, to turn the AfD's own internal contradictions against it and accelerate the exodus of its genuinely pro-European members towards something better. It was an unconventional approach. It was also the right one.

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The Coalition of the Self-Discredited

What followed was the most genuinely peculiar chapter of Ave Europa's early history. Those who had been removed, whether voluntarily or formally, coalesced into a loose external coalition, appearing in podcasts, on social media, and in the background of at least one attempted approach to mainstream media, offering accounts of Ave Europa's internal life that bore a carefully selective relationship to what had actually occurred.
The self-delegitimising quality of this campaign deserves to be named precisely. The charter has not changed, not a word, not a comma, since the movement's founding. The migration position paper now being denounced in certain quarters as beyond the pale was praised publicly, and at length, by the very people denouncing it, for months, while they were inside the organisation and believed themselves to be on a trajectory towards shaping its direction. One prominent former member who has since taken Ave Europa's positions to journalists as evidence of extremism co-authored significant portions of those positions. The positions did not change. The person's relationship to institutional power within Ave Europa did.
The class dimension surfaces here too, and in a form that is almost too convenient to be coincidental. One of the more vocal critics of Ave Europa's migration politics, a product of elite British private education formed in an environment where non-European classmates were drawn exclusively from the wealthiest and most culturally assimilated stratum of their societies, recently relocated from a culturally mixed part of London to a considerably more homogeneous and considerably more expensive neighbourhood. The migration politics advocated in public are not, apparently, the neighbourhood conditions chosen for one's own family. That gap between the performed position and the private choice is, in miniature, exactly the species of dishonesty that Ave Europa was founded to name and to end.

Those now positioning themselves as moral authorities on Ave Europa's culture are, without exception, either the people most responsible for that culture's worst elements, or the people most directly victimised by them. Several of them know from direct personal experience what their current allies were saying about them in those private channels. That they have nonetheless made common cause tells you what is actually driving this campaign. It is not principle. It is the specific resentment of people who believed they were going to determine the direction of something and discovered they were not.

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Why It Matters

Europe has approximately fifteen years. You feel it in prices. You feel it in the way cities and villages have changed, in ways that are real and that no one in institutional authority will describe accurately. People who grew up in towns they knew completely now move through those same streets with a dissonance they cannot fully articulate and that no mainstream institution will validate. That dissonance is not imagined. It is not manufactured by bad actors. It is the product of changes that were real, were accelerated, and were systematically misrepresented by the people responsible for managing them.
If Europe reaches that inflection point without having produced a credible, honest, mass pro-European politics, the scenario on the other side is not difficult to see. A Europe led by those who were willing to name the problems but constitutionally incapable of solving them, because they were never seriously interested in solving them. A Europe governed by the resentful and the cynical rather than the genuinely committed. It is a fallacy to think that if Europe simply continues as it is, prosperity and stability will follow. Continuity, in the current configuration, does not produce a better future. It produces a longer runway for the Le Pens, the AfDs, and the Orbáns of Europe, people who have built entire careers on the premise that the centre will never actually fix anything. They are, so far, correct. The task is to make them wrong.
Ave Europa is young, imperfect, and it has survived a fight for its own soul that most comparable organisations would not have survived. The movement emerged from its most recent wave of attacks, following a prominent former member's public attempt to brand it a neo-Nazi organisation sympathetic to the anti-European AfD, stronger than before. The Dutch chapter, whose three gatekeeping board members departed in the process, continues to grow.
The organisation as a whole is more coherent, more aligned, and more purposeful than at any point in its short history. What Ave Europa accomplished, turning radical Eurosceptics into committed pro-European federalists, pulling people away from petty nationalism towards a shared European vision, demonstrating that the AfD and its kin have nothing to offer their voters except protest, is not a small thing. It is precisely the formula that European politics has been missing: the synthesis of the centre and the right, achieved not through triangulation but through honesty.

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A Personal Note
I stepped down from the Ave Europa Board in early April 2026. Later the same month, also from all public appearing and the german board. I want to be direct about why, because the alternative, allowing the reasons to be invented by people with an interest in inventing them, is not something I am willing to accept. I did not leave because Ave Europa became too extreme. That claim, which has already been floated in certain quarters, is straightforwardly false, and false in a way that anyone who has read this essay carefully will understand. The movement's charter has not changed. Its positions have not shifted. If anything, Ave Europa is more coherent and more purposeful now than at any point since its founding. I left because I have a family, and because a former prominent member, in an act that requires no further editorial commentary, passed my personal details to far-left extremists. I have nothing to hide. But I am not alone, and I am not willing to place the people closest to me in the path of that kind of politics.
Everything I did inside Ave Europa I did to the best of my ability and in what I genuinely believed were the movement's best interests. We identified and removed the people who wanted to corrupt it. We defended it from those who wanted to hijack it for their own institutional purposes. We even tried to work with pro-European dissidents inside the AfD, people who had actually fought in Ukraine and who were exposing the party's Russian submergion from the inside, to try to pull that current away from a party that had nothing real to offer it. We built something that, by any honest measure, should not have survived what it went through, and it did survive, and it is stronger for having done so. I know what Ave Europa is capable of. I know the drive that sits at its core and the clarity that the people who came through this process together now possess. I know that the synthesis it is attempting, between a genuine right-wing politics and an uncompromising pro-European vision, is not just possible but necessary, and that there is currently nothing else on the European political market that is even attempting it seriously. The formula worked. It will keep working. Europe does not have long. But it has Ave Europa. And that, for now, is more than it had before.