Daniel DePetris

How the EU is fighting back against populism

There aren’t many EU politicians with a high profile, but Federica Mogherini, the former Italian foreign minister and, since 2014, the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs, is one of the exceptions. 

Mogherini’s five-year term is up next year. Where she will go after her time expires – back to a fractious and circus-like Italian political scene, or somewhere else in the EU structure – is anyone’s guess. But if her address at yesterday’s EU Ambassador’s Conference is anything to go on, she intends to use the twilight of her tenure as Europe’s top foreign policy official to drill home a central point: multilateralism is not a dead or dying concept worth discarding.  

Mogherini, like many establishment European politicians of her generation, believes with conviction that the world is far better off embracing globalisation, supra-regional institutions, and multiculturalism than by reinvesting in the nationalist concepts espoused by Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, Vladimir Putin, and Matteo Salvini.

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