Seventy years of outcomes, one persistent misdiagnosis, and why better Instagram accounts make the gap more visible, not less.
The European Union has a persistent difficulty connecting with young Europeans under 35. This is the generation that did not grow up watching the Berlin Wall come down or the map of Europe redraw itself in real time. The institutions keep assuming this is a communications problem. It is not. It is a substance problem. The distinction matters — because misdiagnosing it means spending the next decade producing sharper Instagram content for an audience that has already decided the conversation is not about them.
The counter-argument deserves to be stated plainly before it is answered. The EU delivered seventy years of peace on a continent that had spent the previous century industrialising the act of destroying itself. It built a single market that allows a graduate from Kraków to work in Lisbon without a visa, a permit, or a phone call to a ministry. It produced food safety standards, environmental protections, and consumer rights now quietly, invisibly present in the daily life of 450 million people. Young Europeans who take all of this for granted are, from one angle, simply the intended result — the generation for whom the project worked so well it became invisible.
This is true. It is also almost perfectly calibrated to miss the point.
The Questions That Actually Animate Young Europeans in 2026
The questions animating European life for people in their twenties and early thirties are not abstract. Can they afford to rent a flat in the city they were educated in? Will the labour market still have room for them in fifteen years, or will it have rearranged itself around skills they do not yet have? Is the climate their children will inherit a manageable inconvenience or a structural catastrophe? Do the institutions that govern their lives have any serious answer to any of this — or are those institutions primarily occupied with the concerns of the people who have already arranged their lives?
The EU’s answer has been, with honourable exceptions, to acknowledge these questions in the preamble and address them in the appendix. The housing crisis has no serious European response. The climate transition proceeds at a pace determined politically rather than scientifically. The precarity of young European labour is a topic for working groups. The gap between the urgency of the questions and the tempo of the institutional answers is not, therefore, a communications problem. It is a priority problem. Because better Instagram accounts do not close priority gaps. They illuminate them.
This is the kind of argument Opinions, Held Firmly exists to make — stated plainly, defended with reasons, and not apologised for.
What the EU Could Actually Do for Young Europeans
One specific thing the EU could do — without a treaty change, without a grand summit, without a new acronym — is make the European Housing Initiative a visible, named, measurable commitment. The initiative is already agreed in principle. It is already partially funded through the European Investment Bank. What it lacks is annual public reporting on units built, cities reached, and waiting lists shortened. Not a strategy document. A number, updated every twelve months, in plain language, on a page anyone can find. The generation that grew up with real-time data on everything from air quality to package delivery is entirely capable of following this. However, what they are not capable of doing is caring about an institution that cannot tell them, concretely, what it has actually built.
The EU earned its legitimacy once through outcomes. It will only earn it again the same way.
The next time someone under 35 says the EU is irrelevant to their life: don’t argue with the sentiment. Ask which question they most need answered. Then look up whether the EU has a policy on it. The gap between those two things is the work.
