European Council President António Costa intends to summon EU leaders to an informal retreat in rural Belgium next February to discuss Europe’s competitiveness. The meeting of the bloc’s heads of state and government will take place on Feb. 12 at Alden Biesen Castle, a XVI century moated complex in the eastern Belgian region of Limburg, Costa said in an interview with Portuguese daily Expresso. The informal summit on competitiveness will take place just a few months after the leaders debated the European Commission’s proposal to foster a pan-European industrial revival by merging cash for research, defense and innovation in the EU’s 2028-2035 budget. Shortly before taking office a year ago, the Council president said he wanted to organize periodic, informal meetings of EU leaders where they could discuss broad, strategic topics without the need to reach definitive conclusions. The objective was to create space for the kinds of debates that regularly derailed official summits chaired by Costa’s predecessor, Charles Michel. Although Costa wanted to hold the retreats outside the Belgian capital, security concerns obliged him to hold the first of these events in Brussels’ central Egmont Palace last February. During that session, EU leaders discussed issues related to the wider topic of European defense. Last week the bloc’s leaders attended an informal meeting in Luanda, Angola, where talks focused on the ongoing efforts to secure a lasting peace in Ukraine. During the wide-ranging interview with Expresso, which marked his first year in the Council presidency, Costa said the greatest challenge he has faced was that of stabilizing relations between the EU and U.S. President Donald Trump. That goal, he said, had been achieved, but he acknowledged that the dynamics between Brussels and Washington are “different” than they once were. Costa said it was essential for the EU to “remain calm, serene, and continue to strive to be constructive” when dealing with Trump, and noted that the relationship between Brussels and Washington is not “between equals.” The EU, he noted, is made up of 27 member countries “each with its own policies and interests,” while the U.S. operates as a single, federal entity.

Five months ago, Portugal’s snap national election saw the far-right Chega party become the second-largest force in the country’s parliament. On Sunday, 9.3 million Lusitanian voters are headed back to the polls, this time for nationwide local elections. The race is set to be a nail-biter, with the top candidates in the big cities of Lisbon and Porto tied in the polls. Meanwhile, the far right is poised to make major advances in the country’s neglected southern and interior regions, where voters are increasingly backing the party’s antiestablishment and anti-immigrant rhetoric. Though boasting lawmakers in both the Portuguese and European parliaments, Chega has yet to conquer any city halls. Sunday’s elections could be decisive in expanding the far-right party’s presence beyond Lisbon and Brussels. They may also underscore a European trend of extremist forces consolidating power, campaigning on mainstream politicians’ inability to tackle issues like the bloc-wide housing crisis. IT’S THE HOUSING CRISIS, STUPID Indeed, the top issue in every Portuguese city — no matter its size or location — is the high cost of housing. The problem is particularly critical in Lisbon, where average home prices have shot up by nearly 80 percent over the last five years and are currently hovering at €5,769 per square meter. Incumbent Mayor Carlos Moedas — a former European commissioner — has sought to justify his tenure by drawing attention to the 2,881 families his administration provided with new homes, but unimpressed critics estimate 150,000 homes are needed. Moedas has also been criticized for not doing enough to stop locals from being displaced by wealthy tourists. His challenger, Socialist Party candidate Alexandra Leitão, has made tackling excessive tourism a top priority, and is promising to crack down on short-term rentals and impose a moratorium on new hotels until the city can devise a plan to deal with the challenge.  The two are currently neck and neck in the polls, but one issue that could break the tie is discontent over the mayor’s handling of last month’s deadly funicular disaster. This week, victims’ families complained that no one from City Hall had reached out to them since the catastrophe, and Moedas is under fire for his controversial decision to delay any hearings regarding the accident until after the elections. In Portugal’s second-largest city, Sunday’s election marks the first time center-right Mayor Rui Moreira won’t be on the ballot in 12 years. | Pool photo by Estela Silva/EPA Even if he isn’t punished by voters, the crash could still complicate his path to a second term: The mayor isn’t expected to secure a governing majority, and his ability to form either a minority or coalition government will hinge on Chega’s support. Given that the far-right party’s lead candidate Bruno Mascarenhas brought an unsuccessful censure motion against Moedas for his response to the disaster, negotiations could prove tricky. MEANWHILE, IN PORTO … In Portugal’s second-largest city, Sunday’s election marks the first time center-right Mayor Rui Moreira won’t be on the ballot in 12 years. Instead, conservative Pedro Duarte is and former Member of the European Parliament and Socialist Party candidate Manuel Pizarro are locked in a tight race that is similarly dominated by the housing crisis. Duarte wants to use tax breaks to goad the owners of the city’s 20,000 vacant homes to rent them out at affordable prices, but Pizarro argues his own plan to build 5,000 affordable homes on municipal land could be implemented much faster. Duarte also has a radical proposal to raise the tourist tax to make public transport free for all city residents — but Pizarro’s counterplan to slash the speed limit on Porto’s innermost ring road could prove more controversial. With neither candidate expected to secure a governing majority, Chega may ultimately determine the winning vision. BEYOND THE BIGGEST CITIES As the most-voted party in 60 cities in last May’s snap national election, Chega’s candidates are now poised to enjoy similar success in many of those municipalities. Polls indicate far-right influencer and MP Rita Matias is in a three-way tie to govern Sintra, Portugal’s second-most populous municipality, where housing prices are increasing due to growing demand from displaced Lisbon residents. Chega’s candidates have even greater odds of winning Elvas, a former fortress city on the Spanish border, and semirural communities like Viana do Alentejo and Benavente. The problem is particularly critical in Lisbon, where average home prices have shot up by nearly 80 percent over the last five years and are currently hovering at €5,769 per square meter. | Jorge Castellanos/Getty Images But the far-right party is most focused on the Algarve region, where locals are struggling to balance the country’s lowest average wages with a steadily increasing cost of living due to the presence of foreign tourists and retirees. By promoting the narrative that seasonal migrants are to blame for local woes, Chega has gained traction among southern electors who feel abandoned by the hyper-centralized Portuguese state. And while the latest polls still suggest conventional parties will stave off Chega’s bid to take Faro, the far right could win in other southern cities and gain enough council seats to make some municipalities virtually ungovernable.  Polls will close on the Portuguese mainland at 8 p.m. GMT, with exit poll projections published an hour later, when voting ends in the Azores archipelago. The country’s electoral system is remarkably efficient, so a final tally is expected before midnight.

Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor and a foreign affairs columnist at POLITICO Europe. “I don’t know what happened,” said French economist Jean Pisani-Ferry recently, lamenting President Emmanuel Macron’s unraveling grand centrist project. His bewilderment is shared by disoriented centrists across the continent, all wondering how the ground has yielded under their feet as the tectonic plates of European politics continue to relentlessly shift, throwing the familiar into disarray. But could this be the point of no return? The first of the latest tremors was the political comeback of Czech populist billionaire Andrej Babiš, a self-proclaimed Trumpist and Euroskeptic agitator. His ANO party grabbed 35 percent of the vote in the country’s parliamentary elections last Sunday, leaving Petr Fiala’s pro-Western coalition behind at 23 percent. Though falling short of an overall majority, Babiš — who lambasted the current center-right government for giving “Czech mothers nothing, and Ukrainians everything” — will no doubt relish teaming up with Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and the far-right parties of the Patriots for Europe group in the European Parliament to disrupt any centrist “more Europe” policies. And seeking to tug the country away from supporting Ukraine, he has already pledged to scrap Czech ammunition supplies to Kyiv. Then, on Monday, French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu resigned just hours after appointing a cabinet, plunging the country deeper into a political quagmire with its fractious parliament and lame-duck president in a political system designed by Charles de Gaulle for a powerful head of state. Macron has appointed and lost five prime ministers in two years and is still floundering. Could we be seeing the death throes of the Fifth Republic? At the end of the week, there will likely be more bad news for centrists in Portugal as well. Chega, the party of “God, fatherland and family” that in May became the official opposition, is set to do well in the country’s local elections — a harbinger of things to come. These are indeed heady, giddy times for national-conservative populists — and they’re celebrating as their rivals remain confounded. The outcome of the Czech election prompted the top populist leaders from across the continent to take to social media — including Orbán, Denmark’s Anders Vistisen, the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders, Austria’s Harald Vilimsky, France’s Marine Le Pen and Italy’s Matteo Salvini. “All across Europe, patriotic parties are being called to power by the people, who long to reclaim their freedom and prosperity!” Le Pen posted on X. But how did we get here? In the summer of 2024, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen had crowed the “center is holding.” Following European Parliament elections that saw right-wing populists and national conservatives make serious inroads but fall short of the huge surge they were expecting, it seemed voters still largely backed centrists. The first of the latest tremors was the political comeback of Czech populist billionaire Andrej Babiš, a self-proclaimed Trumpist and Euroskeptic agitator. | Martin Divisek/EPA But von der Leyen was being complacent — a common characteristic of mainstream centrists from both the left and right since Brexit and U.S. President Donald Trump’s first election in 2016. Centrists were too quick to dismiss both Brexit and Trump’s first term as aberrations. The world would right itself, they said. Even as late as 2023, the Global Progress Action Summit in Montreal — a gathering of center-left politicians — saw boisterous talk of another possible “progressive moment,” with the Third Way politics shaped by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and former U.S. President Bill Clinton a quarter-century ago cited as an example. But since those first populist shifts, the centrist crack-up has grown more apparent to everyone else. The British Labour Party’s general election win in 2024 was an outlier — testimony to the unpopularity of the Conservatives rather than an embrace of Prime Minister Keir Starmer or an indication of a political trend. And U.S. President Joe Biden’s 2020 win seemed more like a pause in the crumbling of the ancien régime. Meanwhile, centrists on both the left and right have made too many excuses, without nearly enough rigorous self-analysis or readiness to challenge group-think or shibboleths. Instead, they’ve muttered about “deplorables” and blamed their setbacks on populists weaponizing issues like net zero, immigration, cultural disorientation, identity anxieties and the cost-of-living squeeze. They’ve easily reached for Russian disinformation and demagogic manipulation to explain away their misfortunes — talking almost as though the here-and-now challenges and fears faced by ordinary families are made up or overblown. And they haven’t been able to ease the nagging widespread sense that the West is in a doom-loop of structural decline and lacks the political will to correct. Centrists have consistently failed to understand that the jolts taking place under their feet were forewarnings of even bigger political earthquakes to come as the world changed. Now demoralized, either too laggardly to rethink policies or too quick to dress themselves in populist clothes — as Starmer’s Labour government is now trying to do with tougher immigration rules — more cracks are surely to come. Why vote for copycats when you can vote for the real thing? In Germany, for example, Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s asylum crackdown has done nothing to stem the rising popularity of the hard-right Alternative for Germany party — at least in opinion polls. Merz’s approval ratings are dismal this month, with 70 percent of Germans unhappy with his performance. So are national conservatives now unstoppable? Maybe so, until the tectonic plates settle. Or at least until they’re exposed as having no real answers to the immense challenges of Europe’s anemic economic growth, poor competitiveness and massive public debt.

In a bid to force Lisbon Mayor Carlos Moedas to step down after last week’s deadly funicular disaster, Portuguese lawmakers are using the politician’s own words against him. Sixteen people died when the iconic Glória Funicular’s suspension cable snapped last Wednesday, causing one of its tram cars to plummet down a steep slope and smash into a building. Following the catastrophe, leading politicians are claiming the city failed to adequately maintain its 140-year old railway system, and are evoking Moedas’ past statements in an attempt to push for his resignation. In 2021, Moedas’ predecessor Fernando Medina came under fire when his administration admitted to giving Russian authorities the personal information of at least three Lisbon-based Russian dissidents. Moedas — at the time a former European commissioner running as the center-right candidate in the local elections — had slammed the incumbent mayor, saying he had to take responsibility for the scandal. “City hall put these people in mortal danger,” he told POLITICO. “There have to be political consequences: Medina has to resign.” Now, with less than a month before Lisbon’s local elections, Moedas’ political opponents are citing his words from four years ago and demanding he take responsibility for the funicular disaster. “What would the Moedas of 2021 say to the Moedas of 2025?” asked André Ventura, leader of the far-right Chega party. “Serious politicians do not hide in times of crisis and do not shirk their responsibility: They assume it.” On the opposite side of the political spectrum, Secretary-General of the Portuguese Communist Party Paulo Raimundo also said Moedas’ own standards mean he’s no longer qualified to lead the city. The Socialist Party’s parliamentary leader Eurico Brilhante Dias similarly called for the mayor to be “coherent.” In an interview with POLITICO, Moedas insisted the funicular disaster couldn’t be compared to the scandal that embroiled his predecessor. While Medina had “direct responsibility” over the municipal employees who shared dissidents’ personal information, he argued last week’s accident wasn’t “attributable to a decision made by the mayor.” ASSIGNING BLAME A preliminary report released by Portugal’s transit safety authority this weekend attributes the crash to mechanical failure and rejects the possibility that human error played a role in the tragedy. Moedas’ critics say the findings raise serious questions about the historic funicular’s upkeep. In the aftermath of the disaster, employees of Lisbon’s Carris public transit authority said they spent years raising concerns about the funicular’s maintenance, which is subcontracted to private companies. They argued experienced in-house municipal engineers are better equipped to deal with the city’s aged infrastructure. Moedas told POLITICO the companies overseeing the maintenance have to “meet very strict specifications” and are monitored by Carris technicians who “reviewed and adapted all maintenance plans in accordance with necessary developments and changing realities.” He also declined to take responsibility for the outsourcing, which was decided in 2006, and insisted his administration hadn’t cut Carris’ operating budget. Moedas’ assertions don’t appear to have swayed Chega’s mayoral candidate Bruno Mascarenhas though, who is set to present a censure motion against the mayor on Tuesday. “The maximum representative of Carris, [the mayor] has to take responsibility,” Mascarenhas declared. Carlos Moedas insisted the funicular disaster couldn’t be compared to the scandal that embroiled his predecessor. | Horacio Villabos/Getty Images The mayor dismissed the censure motion as grandstanding ahead of the local elections. “This case has brought out the worst in politics and political exploitation,” he said, noting that the proposed motion would be nonbinding. Wary of being seen as playing politics with the tragedy, Socialist candidate Alexandra Leitão — who is polling neck and neck with Moedas — has yet to call for her rival’s resignation, insisting that it’s “premature” to make a political assessment. But on Monday, she urged Moedas to be more transparent about what went wrong. “The preliminary report shows that the safety system was insufficient, and that the technical inspections failed to detect the problems that eventually occurred,” she told supporters. “Something needs to change.”