Simon Gros

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The Rome joint press conference featuring Giorgia Meloni and Friedrich Merz, staged as the public terminus of bilateral government consultations, offers a compact but unusually legible specimen of contemporary European executive reasoning: it is an event in which competitiveness, security, and sovereignty are treated less as separate policy domains than as mutually conditioning registers of justification. The occasion’s value as an object of study lies in how it binds technocratic motifs (simplification, procurement harmonization, market integration) to strategic motifs (NATO’s European pillar, Arctic attention, resilience against hybrid threats) while continuously managing the problem of audience plurality: domestic electorates, EU institutions, allied governments, and journalists whose questions attempt to force explicit hierarchies among priorities. The recording shows a sustained effort to stabilize a shared grammar of European agency under pressure from trade conflict, war, and institutional procedure.

The event’s compositional frame is itself part of its argument. It is presented as a “full” press conference after Italian–German government consultations at Villa Doria Pamphili, with the surrounding channel description and titles functioning as paratext that pre-orients the viewer toward a cluster of themes—EU defense, trade, sovereignty, “Arctic strategy,” migration, industrial competitiveness—before any determinate utterance is heard. Within the video, the opening begins mid-utterance, already inside Meloni’s justificatory cadence, which has the effect of situating the audience as latecomers to an already-constituted problem-space. This matters because it places the press conference in the role of a public ratification of prior deliberation: the speakers do not primarily discover positions here; they authorize them, display their internal consistency, and distribute responsibility across documents, meetings, and institutions. The repeatedly invoked artifacts—the “non-paper” for upcoming EU summits, the “plan of action” elaborated by both governments, the defense/security/resilience document, the arms-export agreement—appear as layers of authored text standing behind the spoken performance. The spoken word, accordingly, functions as an interface between bureaucratic writing and public intelligibility, and the event’s unity is produced by that interfacing activity.

Meloni’s initial segment exemplifies this interface. She begins from an evaluative diagnosis of the “ideological” handling of the green transition, asserted as evident to anyone intellectually honest. In the event’s economy, this is a striking epistemic move: a political thesis is placed under the sign of intellectual integrity rather than party doctrine. The phrase does not merely insult opponents; it attempts to convert a contested policy interpretation into a quasi-cognitive obligation. Yet the presentation shows that Meloni immediately ties that moralized epistemic claim to a causal schema: an ideological vision has “put our industries on their knees,” has “handed Europe to new and dangerous strategic dependencies,” and has failed to “really” affect global environmental protection. Three functions are braided: industrial harm (economic capacity), strategic dependency (sovereign latitude), and environmental ineffectiveness (teleological failure). The argumentative burden is distributed so that no single metric can defeat the diagnosis. If one disputes the industrial harm, strategic dependency remains; if one disputes dependency, environmental ineffectiveness remains; if one disputes environmental ineffectiveness, industrial harm remains. The effect is a resilient indictment that does not rely on a single falsifiable premise, and this resilience is itself a rhetorical-argumentative form: a multi-pronged warrant that anticipates selective rebuttal.

From this diagnosis, Meloni’s prescription is framed in terms of correction and courage. The key is how “correction” is made compatible with continuity: the event does not announce abandonment of the green transition; it announces the possibility of “margins” to correct “errors” and prevent industrial decline. In this way the discourse performs a delicate operation on temporal modality. It treats the past as error-laden, the future as salvageable, and the present as the site of decisive steering. The phrase about “pushing the accelerator” intensifies that temporal posture: the leaders present themselves as agents of acceleration, yet the goal is a kind of braking and steering at once—accelerating the corrective agenda, decelerating the industrial decline. This internal tension is not resolved by explicit conceptual clarification; it is resolved performatively by the introduction of concrete instruments: the forthcoming informal summit in Brussels on 12 February, the subsequent March summit, and the “common non-paper” focused on priorities described as non-deferrable.

The “non-paper” operates in the video as more than a policy memo. It functions as an objectification of bilateral convergence: an intersubjective agreement that becomes a textual thing, portable to the Commission, the President of the European Council, and “all the other leaders” in discussion. In Meloni’s segment, the EU appears as a space whose center of gravity is contested: the Commission and the European Council leadership are addressees, yet the “other leaders” remain decisive interlocutors. The bilateral axis seeks to shape the agenda by providing a pre-formulated priority set: simplification, cutting European bureaucracy, strengthening the single market, relaunching the automotive industry under “technological neutrality,” and an ambitious trade policy based on shared rules and level conditions. Each item is itself a condensed theory of Europe’s predicament. “Simplification” and “cutting bureaucracy” imply an institutional diagnosis: European regulation has drifted into self-burdening complexity. “Strengthening the single market” implies fragmentation within the purported unity. “Automotive relaunch” selects a symbolic-industrial sector as the site where transition politics, industrial base, and technological sovereignty collide. “Technological neutrality” is invoked as a norm that can reconcile climate policy with industrial survival by refusing mandated technology pathways; it is a methodological rule for governance, presented as if it were a neutral principle rather than a contested policy choice. “Ambitious trade policy” suggests that Europe must externalize its internal rationalization through rule-based trade. In aggregate, the list constitutes an implicit anthropology of the EU as a regulatory entity that must re-learn industrial realism without surrendering its normative self-image.

Meloni then transitions to defense, security, and resilience, explicitly marking a third signed document. Here, a central structural motif of the event emerges: industrial excellence is repeatedly presented as the hinge that links domestic economic policy to geopolitical posture. Defense cooperation is legitimated by reference to “realities” of industrial excellence producing high value added. This is a nontrivial gesture: it reframes defense spending and cooperation as an extension of industrial policy and value creation, not merely as reaction to threat. The “European pillar” of NATO is invoked as something long “invoked” without corresponding action. The presentation thus casts prior European discourse as performative failure: saying the right thing without instituting the right structures. The new documents are presented as the transition from invocation to action, and the leaders’ authority is partly constituted by their capacity to convert invocations into signed agreements.

A particularly determinate claim appears when Meloni states that she communicated Italy’s decision to adhere to an existing multilateral agreement among Germany, France, Spain, and Great Britain on arms exports. Within the event, this functions as a concrete indicator of alignment with a pre-existing European sub-architecture of defense-industrial governance. The fact that the agreement already exists among specific states also indicates a prior differentiation within Europe: an inner arrangement from which Italy had been absent. Italy’s accession thus performs a reconfiguration of European defense cooperation’s geometry. The mention is not elaborated with legal detail; instead, it is positioned as a sign of seriousness and as a tool for building a “solid” European pillar within NATO. The event thereby treats institutional layering—multilateral pacts inside wider alliances—as a practical answer to Europe’s chronic problem of collective action.

Meloni’s remarks extend the defense-security frame into foreign policy coordination, naming Ukraine and the Middle East as “main international dossiers,” and describing the countries’ “strong” and historically persistent alignment. The statement “we will continue to do our part” for a “just and lasting” peace in Ukraine and for a stable security and prosperity framework in the Middle East is a normative commitment. Yet the press conference’s form avoids specifying concrete steps at this stage, which suggests the press conference is functioning as a legitimating layer above ongoing operational coordination, including the “two plus two” meeting of foreign and defense ministers referenced earlier. Here, the event creates a hierarchy of levels: ministers coordinate dossiers; leaders authorize the unity and present it publicly. The significance lies in how agency is distributed through levels so that responsibility is shared yet also insulated: detailed commitments remain below, while the public commitment is made at the top.

Meloni then broadens the cooperation frame into energy and infrastructure interconnections, naming strategic initiatives—South Corridor, Medlink, ELMEC, IMEC, Elmed—while even correcting herself mid-list (“chiedo scusa”), which reveals the performative strain of technical enumeration in a public setting. The inclusion of IMEC as a corridor linking India, the Middle East, and Europe places bilateral cooperation within a larger imagined geography of connectivity. The move is methodologically consistent with the earlier insistence that industrial competitiveness cannot be separated from external dependencies. Interconnections are described as “increasingly decisive for this epoch,” a phrase that performs epochalization without offering historical argument: the epoch is asserted by the necessity of infrastructure. The press conference here treats infrastructures as strategic forms: they are both economic arteries and geopolitical alignments. The listing of projects functions as an argument by exemplification, but it also risks becoming a mere recital. The presentation mitigates that risk by embedding the list inside a larger claim about the breadth of the work and the decision to strengthen partnership “at every level,” working side by side on challenges “crucial for our time.”

The conclusion of Meloni’s opening segment contains a reflexive awareness of commentary around the bilateral axis—some observers predicting 2026 as “the year of Italy and Germany.” Meloni refuses to guarantee the prediction, yet affirms intent to “do our part” to consolidate a strategic friendship for Europe. This is a rhetorical operation that converts external speculation into an occasion for modesty while still accepting the underlying premise: that the bilateral axis carries European significance. The refusal to endorse the prediction stabilizes the leaders’ ethos as non-triumphal, while the affirmation of effort preserves the ambition.

Merz’s segment begins by explicitly reciprocating the interpersonal frame—addressing Meloni by name and speaking “also in the name” of colleagues and ministers—again marking the event as the public face of a collective governmental apparatus. He emphasizes the cordiality of reception and the thorough preparation over weeks, then notes that consultations will conclude with an entrepreneurs’ meeting. This detail is not incidental; it inscribes economic actors into the event’s institutional horizon. The press conference thus appears as one node in a chain: governmental consultation, ministerial coordination, business meeting, and then European summits. This chain is part of the event’s argument about competitiveness: it presents governance as multi-stakeholder orchestration.

Merz introduces commemorative temporality: 75 years of diplomatic relations celebrated in 2026, and the foundational status of both countries as founders of the European Community with treaties signed in Rome. The invocation of the Rome Treaties’ location in Rome is a spatial legitimation of European integration, aligning the present event’s locale with Europe’s institutional origin myth. Yet Merz does not remain in celebration; he uses commemoration to ground a claim that presuppositions for “even more partnership” cooperation exist. He frames 2026 as a year of “opportunities” and “decisions,” again binding temporality to agency: opportunities demand decisions, decisions actualize opportunities. The structure positions leadership as the capacity to transform contingency into commitment.

Merz claims a “natural” alignment in assessing challenges across democracies and within the EU. The word “natural” is loaded: it suggests that convergence is grounded in objective circumstances and shared values/interests, not merely constructed coalition. This supports the event’s overall attempt to render bilateral convergence as rational necessity rather than opportunistic politics. He then references having returned from Brussels and participated in an extraordinary European summit, where they represented their positions with strong convergence. This supplies a warrant for the claim of convergence: it is not asserted in abstraction; it is anchored in a recent institutional encounter. Even so, the video does not provide the summit’s determinate decisions; it uses its occurrence as an evidentiary token of shared stance.

Merz then articulates two “important tasks”: competitiveness of industries and doing more for security. The pairing has the function of an organizing dyad for the entire event. Yet Merz’s phrasing subtly changes the relation: competitiveness is something “we understood,” security is something “we must do more for.” Competitiveness is posed as recognition, security as obligation. This difference in modality suggests a division of the epistemic and normative: competitiveness is a diagnosed necessity, security is an enacted duty. The event thereby structures itself as a movement from understanding to doing, a movement already present in Meloni’s contrast between long-invoked European defense pillar and actual steps.

Merz recalls his first meeting in Rome after taking office, emphasizing intensive exchange and convergence across dossiers. This personal recollection serves as a narrative thread that binds early interpersonal contact to present institutional consolidation. He then describes a desired Europe that “must now concentrate on essential questions.” The notion of the “essential” functions as a regulative ideal of prioritization, implicitly critiquing EU attention dispersion. Yet the presentation leaves “essential” underdetermined until it is filled by subsequent themes: Ukraine, NATO, Greenland/Arctic security, bureaucracy reduction, trade policy, defense procurement, migration, internal security.

Ukraine appears as the object of continued efforts for peace, and Merz adds a personal note about increasing aid to Kyiv during the hard winter days of war, especially for energy supply, while also supporting negotiations. Here, the event makes a careful triadic arrangement: aid, especially energy aid, and support for negotiation. The combination presents support as both material and diplomatic. Merz’s “personal” emphasis is significant: it marks a shift from institutional voice to personal witness, which lends moral seriousness while maintaining restraint.

The presentation then introduces a theme that becomes central under questioning: Greenland and the Arctic. Merz notes nearly daily contact in a “turbulent week” regarding Greenland and Denmark, and that together with Emmanuel Macron, Donald Tusk, and other European neighbors they affirmed that Europe must do more for Arctic security in common transatlantic interest. This is an important conceptual transformation: Arctic security is framed neither as a purely European project nor as a purely American one, but as a shared interest that remains transatlantic. Merz says Germany will strengthen its engagement and that Italy has adopted a new strategy to which “we” can essentially adhere. He affirms solidarity with Denmark and Greenland’s population on the basis of sovereignty and territorial integrity, and supports talks among Denmark, Greenland, and the United States if necessary and possible only by common agreement. The logic here is procedural as much as substantive: the event frames conflict management through dialogue under consent, under the norm of territorial integrity. The repeated references to sovereignty and integrity function as the normative grammar that makes support for talks compatible with resistance to coercion. The event thereby tries to convert the Greenland issue from a bilateral U.S.–Denmark tension into a NATO-relevant, EU-considered domain governed by principles.

Merz then articulates a broader diagnosis: Europe is in a new era of great powers and must be sovereign and firm. He calls NATO trust “precious,” and asserts that this trust is a decisive competitive advantage also for the United States. This move is structurally central: it frames NATO not merely as a security pact but as a trust-based institution that yields strategic advantage. The implicit argument is that undermining trust undermines the alliance’s function and harms all parties, including the stronger one. The discourse thus attempts to discipline transatlantic power asymmetry by articulating a mutual dependence on institutional confidence.

Merz then draws a contrast between emergency diplomacy and agenda-setting. He claims they did not only engage in emergency diplomacy; they “literally” set the agenda for a year of opportunities. They signed an Italian–German action plan elaborated in recent weeks for competitiveness, a new bilateral dynamic in defense industry, and a European-oriented migration policy. The phrase “literally set the agenda” is a performative self-attribution of political initiative. Yet the event’s internal evidence for agenda-setting is again textual: the signed plan. The plan thereby functions as the event’s warrant for claims of agency. Merz then introduces an empirical-sounding claim: since the early 1980s, the EU growth gap relative to the U.S. and China has increased, harming Europe’s capacity to act and its sovereignty. This provides a macroeconomic scaffold for why competitiveness is a sovereignty issue. It is notable that the press conference uses this broad historical-economic narrative without statistical detail, which indicates that the function is justificatory orientation rather than empirical demonstration. The claim’s role is to authorize the focus on bureaucracy dismantling and competitiveness as matters of political autonomy.

The February 12 Brussels meeting reappears in Merz’s remarks as the site where they want to dismantle bureaucracy. The repetition of the date across both leaders’ remarks is itself a unity mechanism: it aligns their temporal orientation. Merz then endorses an ambitious EU trade policy and cites the EU–Mercosur agreement as an “important turning point,” with the Council already deciding it should enter into force, followed by other agreements, especially with India, Australia, and Asian countries. This is an outward-facing economic sovereignty narrative: Europe’s agency is to be realized through trade agreements. Yet the Mercosur topic becomes a principal site of friction under questioning. The press conference initially frames it as straightforward progress; later questions introduce democratic and legal contestation. The event thus exhibits definitional drift: “turning point” becomes “subject to parliamentary procedure and legal verification.”

Merz then shifts to security and defense policy, stating that they signed an agreement strengthening cooperation and harmonizing military procurement. “Harmonizing procurement” is a technocratic phrase, yet in this context it functions as a political solution to European redundancy. Merz underscores coordination in security policy and notes new formats of ministerial meetings. He then extends the security frame to internal security and migration, claiming particularly close coordination in European migration policy and noting that this collaboration made it possible to reform the common European asylum system in Brussels. He mentions a bilateral police agreement and a cooperation agreement in matters of confidentiality, and highlights that Italy is the only non-neighbor country to have such an agreement with Germany. This detail is symbolically important: it exhibits exceptional bilateral trust and institutional intimacy. It also suggests that migration and internal security are treated as cross-border issues that justify bilateral instruments beyond simple geographical adjacency. Here, the event reveals a deeper architecture: bilateral cooperation is a method for producing European outcomes.

Merz then introduces a cultural commemoration: the 240th anniversary of Goethe’s journey to Italy, described playfully as perhaps the best Italian tourism campaign of all time, and an agreed cultural itinerary retracing the journey. This segment functions as more than relief. It performs the theme that strategic partnership has cultural depth and historical continuity. Yet it also modulates the press conference’s register, demonstrating the leaders’ capacity to shift from security and trade to cultural symbolism without dissolving the event’s unity. Philosophically, the cultural itinerary serves as an allegory of partnership: a journey that retraces a path, implying that modern cooperation retraces foundational European cultural exchange. Merz frames it as an expression of friendship, then opens to questions.

The Q&A segment is where the event’s earlier framings are tested and re-specified. The first question asks whether the strengthening of the Italy–Germany axis is a defensive response to Donald Trump’s aggressive or hostile attitudes toward Europe. This question attempts to impose an external causal explanation onto the bilateral agenda: it wants the axis to be interpreted as reaction formation. Meloni’s response refuses that framing by asserting that the will to cooperate with the United States remains firm, emphasizing historically privileged relations with the U.S. grounded in trade, reciprocal investment, and the presence of American bases. She then introduces a methodological norm: a pragmatic, non-instinctive approach to U.S. relations. The phrase “non-instinctive” is an epistemic discipline: it seeks to regulate affective reaction and replace it with calculated engagement. Yet Meloni’s decisive move is to reframe Europe’s “main debate” as what Europe can do for itself, linking that to the competitiveness document and to the effort to strengthen Europe’s strategic capacity, economic strength, and credible international presence. The question’s attempt to center Trump becomes an opportunity for Meloni to center European self-agency. This is a recurring pattern: external provocations are used as occasions to justify internal consolidation. The event thereby turns reactive contexts into proactive agendas.

Merz agrees and adds another aspect: from a European NATO perspective, Europe should do more for defense and has decided this at The Hague NATO summit. He then offers a diagnosis of European defense procurement complexity: systems are built too complexly, there are too many parallel systems developed and paid for in parallel, and reciprocal support is needed. He articulates guiding lines: simplification, reducing the number, scaling. Merz connects simplification and cooperation in defense industry to budget rationality and effectiveness. He broadens “threats” to include cyber activities and misinformation, thereby extending defense beyond conventional military threats. The concept of security becomes “as broad as possible,” including intelligence and police cooperation to make democracy more resistant to threats from outside and inside. This segment performs a conceptual expansion: defense is not merely defense; it is societal resilience. It also reveals an implicit wager: that the legitimacy of defense spending and cooperation increases when framed as democracy-protection against hybrid threats.

The next question, attributed to Reuters (Andreas Rink), raises Mercosur implementation and democratic legitimacy, and introduces a political-interpretive provocation about Italy’s role in Europe, hinting at substitution for French leadership. The question thus tries to produce a hierarchy among European states and to situate Merz and Meloni within a leadership competition. Meloni answers first on Mercosur. She claims credit for Italy’s work to make the agreement more balanced, especially regarding agricultural sector imbalances. She describes close work with the Commission and partners, obtaining responses to reassure and defend agriculture as a fundamental asset of the European economy. She then says the agreement became balanced and Italy gave the green light for signing. She notes European Parliament intervention that could delay entry into force by a year, a year and a half, up to two years, and that the Commission is evaluating provisional application, which is Commission competence. The event here reveals its internal model of EU legitimacy: Commission competence, parliamentary intervention, potential provisional application, and the national executive’s evaluation of balance. Meloni’s role is to demonstrate that national executive action within the EU is justified by sectoral protection and negotiation. The normative logic is defensive: trade liberalization is acceptable when it protects key sectors and produces balance.

On the second part, Meloni rejects the substitution framing, saying she never reads politics that way. She asserts Italy’s fundamental status, stability, strength, concreteness, courage to raise issues just for the continent’s future even when inconvenient, gaining respect. She expresses personal commitment to dialogue among Europe’s big nations on big challenges, and warns against “infantilisms” in foreign policy interpretation. This is an important meta-level moment: the event explicitly thematizes the method of reading international politics, condemning simplified, childish interpretive frames. The press conference thus demands from its audience a certain interpretive competence: seriousness, attention to complexity, resistance to sensational hierarchies.

Merz then comments on Mercosur. He notes it took 25 years of effort and expresses regret that the European Parliament, at a moment when the world expects EU capacity to act, took a decision. He characterizes it as a request for verification by a court regarding compatibility with European law. He acknowledges that for some it was a motive to prevent the treaty, but asserts legitimacy is beyond doubt because it was a decision taken with qualified majority in the Council of Ministers. The press conference here performs a direct contest over legitimacy sources: parliamentary action versus Council qualified majority; legal verification versus political mandate. Merz’s framing tries to stabilize legitimacy through procedural majoritarianism in the Council, while acknowledging the judicial layer. This is a sophisticated institutional picture: legitimacy is produced by a distribution of competences and majorities, and the press conference attempts to teach this picture to the audience as the correct method of evaluation.

Merz then expands to a more general claim about economic policy and readiness to defend. He references “what was threatened” by the American president and suggests that because of European unity and rapid reaction, it was not done. He cites EU–Canada trade as an example of agreement long discussed and then applied provisionally, with provisional application as a valuable instrument. Again, the event’s conceptual pattern repeats: provisionality becomes a tool for agency under institutional constraint. The capacity to act is partially the capacity to use interim legal instruments while awaiting full ratification.

A further question (Michael Fisher) is structurally dense: it links Trump, Greenland, participation in a “board of peace” or “council of peace,” Abu Dhabi talks where Europe is absent, and asks Merz about Italy–France relations relative to Germany–France, and about a friendship treaty analogous to Greenland. The question attempts to fuse disparate issues—Arctic crisis, Middle East peace initiatives, intra-European bilateral hierarchies—into a single evaluative frame about leadership and trustworthiness. It tries to force the leaders to place Europe’s role in U.S.-led initiatives and to name hierarchies among European partners.

Meloni responds first by repeating what she said about the Greenland crisis: the U.S., with methods that are “discussable” and assertive, raises a strategic question that exists concerning the Arctic. She calls the Arctic one of the great strategic domains of the twentieth century—a temporal marker that seems internally strained, given the topic’s contemporary salience; yet in the presentation’s logic, the purpose is not historical accuracy but epochal classification: the Arctic is a domain of great-power strategy. She then enumerates reasons: security, future maritime routes with melting ice, rich raw materials, privileged position for missile and air defense. This enumeration constitutes an implicit causal chain: climate change alters routes; routes alter strategic competition; resources intensify interest; defense geometry intensifies military significance. She insists the issue must be seriously addressed within NATO. She frames it as not only a U.S. problem and calls for U.S. involvement in addressing it. She remains optimistic about bringing everyone back to the real question: how NATO together increases attention, presence, and coordination in a strategic territory. This is again a method claim: redirect from personality and tactics to structural strategic domain.

On the peace board, Meloni reiterates Italy’s openness and interest, and asserts that Italy and Germany can play leading roles in stabilizing the Middle East. She describes the work needed to consolidate a complex fragile truce and transform it into a long-term solution up to the two-state proposal, requiring European involvement. She then introduces a constraint: there are problems in how the initiative is configured, even constitutional in character; the statute sent would be unconstitutional and incompatible with Italian order. She says she communicated this to the U.S., asking whether there is availability to reopen configuration to meet necessities not only Italian but also other European countries. She argues against self-exclusion a priori; in this time, presence of countries like theirs can make a difference. This segment is significant because it shows constitutional form as a limit on geopolitical participation. The event frames participation in international initiatives as mediated by domestic constitutional compatibility. It therefore treats sovereignty as legal-institutional structure, not mere political will.

Merz then addresses the peace council. He says weeks earlier he told President Trump he personally would be willing to join if it is an organism that, as initially planned, accompanies the Gaza peace process in a second phase not yet begun, “unfortunately,” to disarm Hamas. He then says as it is now, governance structures cannot be accepted for constitutional law reasons, yet they are willing to talk about new forms of cooperation with the U.S. If it is to find a new format that guarantees and brings peace closer in different regions—Gaza, Middle East, Ukraine—then this is their intention and has been agreed with America. He references planned discussions in Paris and past plans for agreement among Ukraine, America, and Europeans. He says they accompany the process constructively with desire for steps toward peace. He notes security guarantees as a topic and indicates that Zelenskyy had a definitive agreement with Americans regarding guarantees. The presentation here is partly compressed, yet the structure is clear: willingness to participate is conditional on governance design and constitutional compatibility; format matters; Europe seeks inclusion; peace is treated as process with phases; disarmament of Hamas is presented as part of the envisioned second phase.

Merz then answers on Germany–Italy bilateral relation versus France. He says there is no hierarchy; every country is respected; partnerships exist with France and Italy; all are part of the EU; common objectives are more defense and competitiveness; contributions come from all sides, with the Commission working. He expresses happiness about concrete foundation: stable 75-year relationship, solid and concrete, demonstrated today. He defines cooperation as partnership among autonomous states that support each other. He references personal-human meetings with colleagues, asserting this drives Europe. This is an explicit articulation of a conception of Europe as a system of sovereign states whose unity is not a fusion but a supportive network. The event thus presents its own implicit political ontology: Europe as an association of autonomous agents coordinated through trust, documents, meetings, and shared objectives.

A final question introduces a highly loaded theme: debate in the U.S. about Trump’s mental health, alleged mocking of European leaders, claims about Nobel peace prize, and asks whether Trump remains trustworthy and whether they agree to give him the Nobel. This question attempts to drag the press conference into psychologizing and moral condemnation. Meloni’s response rejects the seriousness of that approach, calling it not a serious way to address international politics. She asserts Trump is the elected president, notes similar discourses were heard about Biden before him, and even about herself when she was ill. She insists one must reckon with democracy and leaders chosen by citizens, with whom one interfaces because “we” do not choose other nations’ governments. On the Nobel, she expresses hope that one day they can give Trump the Nobel and says if he makes a difference toward a just and lasting peace for Ukraine, then they can nominate him. Merz says he could not respond better. This exchange performs a culminating methodological gesture: the event resists psychologizing, insists on institutional legitimacy of elections, and redirects evaluation toward outcomes in peace. The Nobel question is converted from personal vanity to conditional recognition of peace achievement.

Across these segments, the event’s internal architecture can be described as a system of recurring operations: external pressures are acknowledged and then subordinated to a project of European self-capacity; legitimacy challenges are answered by reference to institutional procedure and constitutional constraints; economic competitiveness is repeatedly linked to sovereignty and security; defense cooperation is repeatedly linked to industrial policy and simplification; and interpersonal cordiality is repeatedly used to symbolize institutional trust. The press conference’s unity is maintained by the constant recirculation of a few core terms—competitiveness, simplification, sovereignty, security, partnership, Europe’s capacity to act—each time with additional determinations added from new thematic zones: green transition, automotive neutrality, trade agreements, defense procurement, migration police cooperation, Arctic strategy, peace council governance.

At the same time, the discussion exhibits internal frictions that the event does not eliminate. One friction concerns the status of “technological neutrality” and “ambitious trade policy” as solutions: they are invoked as self-evidently rational, yet their distributive consequences and political contestations are only indirectly visible through the Mercosur debate and the stress on agriculture. Another friction concerns sovereignty’s meaning: it oscillates between territorial integrity (Greenland, Denmark), constitutional compatibility (peace council governance), economic capacity (growth gap), and strategic agency (NATO pillar, Arctic presence). The event stabilizes this multiplicity by treating sovereignty as a family of capacities rather than a single essence, but the multiplicity remains. A further friction concerns the balance between transatlantic solidarity and European self-reliance: the leaders affirm privileged relations with the U.S. and NATO trust while insisting Europe must do more for itself and react firmly when necessary. The discourse manages this by framing European strengthening as beneficial to the transatlantic interest, yet the underlying tension remains as a structural condition rather than a resolved contradiction.

The event’s internal coherence becomes more visible when one treats the opening and the Q&A as a single argumentative movement rather than as two adjacent blocks. In the opening statements, the leaders largely control the inferential direction: they define the predicates that matter, distribute causal weight, and decide what counts as an admissible transition from diagnosis to prescription. In the questions, journalists attempt to re-code the same predicates under different explanatory keys—reaction to Trump, leadership substitution, democratic legitimacy deficits, psychological trustworthiness—and thereby attempt to shift the burden of proof onto the speakers. What is striking in the video is how consistently Meloni and Merz respond by re-institutionalizing the question: the reply repeatedly returns the matter to procedure, competence, constitutional form, alliance architecture, or macro-historical trends that purportedly explain why a certain framing is inadequate. This is a distinct rhetorical-argumentative form: the press conference performs a pedagogy of seriousness, where “serious” means institutionally articulate, procedurally literate, and strategically domain-focused.

A further compositional layer intensifies this pedagogy: the video itself displays mediation artifacts—cross-language segments, occasional garbling, small self-corrections, and points where an interpreter’s or automated system’s choices leak into the record. This is not a mere technical nuisance; it affects how authority is staged. The event is multilingual in substance: Meloni speaks Italian; Merz’s contributions appear in German and then in an Italian rendering within the recording; several questions are framed in Italian, with Reuters attributed in a hybridized form, and there is a moment where Merz explicitly switches into English for “simplification.” The presentation thereby presents a European scene in which linguistic plurality is part of governance’s public face. Yet the video also demonstrates how linguistic plurality introduces a distinct kind of fragility: meaning is carried across languages with varying precision, and this very act of transfer becomes a site where categories can drift. The event’s aspiration to conceptual discipline is thus pursued under conditions that structurally invite slippage. Philosophically, this creates an instructive tension between the leaders’ insistence on seriousness and the mediated, sometimes imperfect, vehicle through which seriousness must appear.

This tension is already implicit in Meloni’s initial epistemic claim about “intellectual honesty.” The phrase is designed to function as a universal criterion, a standard that ought to transcend factionalism. Yet the content it secures remains politically and technically complex: “a certain ideological vision” of the green transition, industrial decline, strategic dependencies, global environmental effectiveness. Such matters typically demand empirical and policy-specific argument. By appealing to intellectual honesty, Meloni attempts to place the listener in a pre-argumentative stance of assent. The event’s critical interest lies in what happens next: she does not remain at that level. She immediately supplies a programmatic response, framed as a common European agenda item. The “non-paper” is introduced as the vehicle that can translate the diagnosis into a shared European discussion. In this way, the moralized epistemic criterion is transmuted into bureaucratic instrumentality. The press conference thus illustrates a mode of executive reason that uses a quasi-philosophical appeal to honesty to clear the space for an institutional move. One could say the event treats honesty as the subjective condition for accepting a reorientation of policy priorities, while the non-paper is the objective form in which that reorientation is meant to be realized.

The non-paper’s content also deserves further attention as a miniature theory of European governance. “Simplification” and “cutting bureaucracy” are stated as priorities, yet the recording presents them in the idiom of urgency: “non-deferrable.” This is more than emphasis; it is a temporal claim about the cost of delay. The press conference’s logic is that Europe has already delayed too long, and that the present moment is characterized by narrowing margins. The repeated reference to “margins” for correction suggests that Europe’s policy space is shrinking under external competition and strategic dependencies. Competitiveness is thereby framed as a struggle against the erosion of optionality. When Merz later invokes a growth gap widening since the early 1980s, he supplies a long-range temporal narrative that supports the same idea: Europe has been drifting in a direction that reduces its capacity for action. In the event’s conceptual economy, “capacity for action” is almost synonymous with sovereignty. Sovereignty is thus rendered as a derivative of economic dynamism, institutional streamlining, and strategic coordination. This is a specific conception of sovereignty, far from the romantic idea of absolute independence. It is a sovereignty of competence and throughput, of decision-speed and resource mobilization, rather than sovereignty as mere juridical status.

“Technological neutrality,” inserted in relation to the automotive industry, illustrates how the event uses methodological principles to avoid political conflicts that would otherwise demand explicit adjudication. To declare technological neutrality is to claim that governance will define goals and constraints while leaving room for technical pathways. Yet in the context of industrial policy and climate transition, neutrality is itself a choice: it implies resistance to mandates that privilege specific technologies, and it implies openness to multiple industrial strategies. The press conference does not debate the merits; it presents neutrality as an obvious requirement for relaunching the sector. This has two effects. It makes the policy appear reasonable and non-dogmatic. It also shifts contestation away from the executive level and toward later stages where technical implementation and regulatory detail will decide what “neutrality” practically means. In that sense, the event stages neutrality as a principle that stabilizes coalition at the level of heads of government, leaving downstream actors to fight over its operationalization. The principle thus performs unity while postponing conflict.

The defense segment works analogously, though with a different register of necessity. Meloni speaks of defense, security, and resilience as areas where both countries have industrial excellence and high value added. Merz speaks of procurement harmonization, reduction of parallel systems, and budget rationality. Both treat complexity as a central pathology. Yet complexity is not merely an administrative inconvenience in this discourse; it is represented as a strategic vulnerability. Merz’s complaint that systems are too complex and parallel systems have been developed and paid for in parallel implies wasted resources and reduced interoperability. The guiding lines he names—simplification, reduction in number, scaling—are presented as rational principles that would yield a more “reasonable” budget and a more effective defense. This is a form of economic rationality applied to security. The event thereby suggests that Europe’s defense weakness has an industrial-organizational origin: too many systems, too little standardization, too little coordination. The remedy is not initially framed as increased spending, though increased effort is mentioned; it is framed as better structure. In this way, the press conference offers a critique of European defense culture: a continent that speaks of autonomy yet tolerates internal duplication that undermines autonomy. The promise of the signed defense agreement and Italy’s accession to a multilateral arms-export arrangement function as symbols that structure, coordination, and governance reform are now being pursued.

The event’s handling of threats further expands security’s domain. Merz explicitly includes cyber activities and misinformation, and then speaks of a broad concept of security, including intelligence and police cooperation to render democracy more resistant to threats from outside and inside. This is a pivotal conceptual expansion, because it blurs the boundary between foreign threat and internal vulnerability. In this discourse, defense becomes a protection of democratic form, and internal security instruments become part of the security architecture. The press conference thereby participates in a contemporary tendency to treat informational integrity and social cohesion as security goods. Yet it is also careful, at least in its explicit language, to preserve legitimacy constraints: cooperation is framed as institutional coordination rather than as extraordinary measures that suspend normal law. The mention of confidentiality agreements and police cooperation indicates deeper integration, but the press conference does not articulate the civil liberties implications. It treats these instruments as signs of trust and practical seriousness. This is an internal tension the event leaves implicit: the more security is broadened to include internal threats, the more governance risks shifting into domains where democratic contestation intensifies. The press conference’s rhetoric of seriousness invites an audience competence that can perceive this implicit tension even when it remains unspoken.

The Greenland and Arctic segment is where the event’s conception of sovereignty becomes explicitly territorial and alliance-centered. Merz’s insistence that Denmark and Greenland can count on solidarity on the basis of sovereignty and territorial integrity is a norm-affirmation, and it is also a boundary-setting move: it establishes what kinds of external pressure are unacceptable. Yet Merz immediately couples this with support for talks among Denmark, Greenland, and the United States, if necessary and possible only by common agreement. Sovereignty here is not the refusal of dialogue; it is the insistence on consent as the condition of dialogue. This is an alliance-friendly, procedure-oriented conception of sovereignty. Meloni’s later elaboration of the Arctic as a strategic domain adds another dimension: sovereignty is also the capacity to participate in domain governance. If the Arctic is strategically decisive due to routes, resources, and defense geometry, then sovereignty for European states includes the capacity to be present in that domain’s strategic deliberations within NATO. The press conference thus frames Arctic sovereignty as an institutionalized attention within the alliance: an increase of focus, presence, coordination. The event’s aim is to redirect attention from the rhetorical drama of U.S. methods toward the structural reality of the domain. This redirection is instructive: it shows a method of coping with aggressive tactics by interpreting them as symptoms of a genuine strategic issue that must be handled in proper institutional form.

The peace council or “board of peace” theme introduces a different kind of sovereignty constraint: constitutional compatibility. Both leaders express willingness to participate in principle, but both insist that the governance structure as presently configured is unacceptable for constitutional law reasons. Meloni says the statute sent would be unconstitutional and incompatible with Italy’s order, and she indicates that this problem is shared by other European countries. Merz similarly says governance structures cannot be accepted and suggests discussing new formats. The press conference thereby introduces a model of European participation in U.S.-initiated global governance: European executives may be politically willing, yet they are constrained by constitutional form and domestic legal order. This model is significant because it frames sovereignty as a legal-constitutional structure that even executives cannot override. At the same time, the leaders use constitutional constraint as a negotiating instrument: it becomes a reason to request redesign of the initiative. Constitutional law thus appears as both limit and leverage.

Merz’s mention of the peace council accompanying the Gaza peace process in a second phase to disarm Hamas adds a substantive determination that anchors the otherwise abstract “peace council” concept. Within the event, this serves two purposes. It portrays the council as a mechanism with a concrete function—accompaniment of process and disarmament objective—thereby giving it seriousness. It also implies that the council’s legitimacy depends on its integration into a phased peace architecture. Merz’s repeated expressions of desire for steps toward peace and his mention of security guarantees for Ukraine likewise indicate that the press conference tries to connect institutional designs with substantive outcomes. The leaders refuse self-exclusion and insist on constructive accompaniment. Yet they keep the commitments in a modality of willingness rather than a modality of undertaking, precisely because governance and inclusion remain unsettled. This is a disciplined cautiousness, and it aligns with the event’s wider preference for procedural articulation over speculative forecasting.

The press conference also repeatedly manages the temptation to impose a hierarchy among European partners. Questions try to position Italy as a substitute for France, or to compare Italy–Germany partnership with Germany–France. Merz explicitly denies hierarchy, insisting on respect for all countries and partnerships with France and Italy. This denial functions as an intra-European normative commitment: Europe’s unity is undermined by leadership rivalry narratives. Yet the event’s very staging of a strong bilateral axis inevitably raises the question of internal European geometry. The leaders attempt to resolve this by presenting bilateralism as a contribution to collective goals rather than as a competing center. The signed documents, the action plan, the non-paper, and the defense agreements are presented as instruments that can be shared with EU institutions and other leaders. Bilateral initiative is legitimized by its portability into European frameworks. This is a crucial architectural feature: bilateralism becomes acceptable when it externalizes itself into EU procedure rather than hoarding decisions in an exclusive dyad. The event’s coherence depends on sustaining that claim.

The cultural Goethe itinerary is a subtle component of this architectural claim. It provides a symbolic register of partnership that is not reducible to strategic necessity. Yet its placement after substantial policy content and before questions gives it a structural function: it modulates the register, humanizes the partnership, and anchors it in a longer historical continuity. Merz’s playful remark about tourism marketing functions as a moment of lightness, yet it also communicates an idea: cultural ties can be mobilized as part of diplomatic architecture. The itinerary is a document-like plan, akin to the policy documents, though in a different domain. It thereby reinforces the event’s broader motif that cooperation is realized through planned itineraries, signed texts, and shared projects. The difference is that cultural projects carry less immediate conflict and thus serve as a symbolic surplus of unity.

The questions about Trump’s alleged mental state and mocking of European leaders are the sharpest attempt to pull the press conference into personalization and moral condemnation. Meloni’s response is methodologically consistent with her earlier insistence on seriousness and avoidance of “infantilisms.” She frames such talk as unserious, insists on dealing with democratic choices, and recalls that similar claims were made about Biden and even about herself. She thereby universalizes the phenomenon: psychologizing leaders is a recurring rhetorical tactic. The correct response, in her view, is to interface with elected leaders because one does not choose them. This expresses a realist institutionalism: legitimacy derives from electoral procedure, and international relations must operate under that fact. The Nobel question is then handled with a conditional optimism: if Trump contributes to a just and lasting peace in Ukraine, then recognition becomes conceivable. This conditionality is important; it shifts the evaluation from personality to outcome. Merz’s endorsement of her response indicates alignment on method. The press conference thus closes the Q&A excerpt with a reaffirmation of procedural seriousness and outcome-based evaluation.

To treat the event as an articulated act of thinking, one must track how its core concepts repeatedly reappear with altered determination. Competitiveness begins as a response to ideological error in the green transition and ends as a macro-historical necessity grounded in growth divergence from the U.S. and China. Security begins as defense-industrial cooperation and ends as a broadened resilience concept including misinformation and internal threats. Sovereignty begins as a critique of strategic dependency and ends as territorial integrity for Denmark and Greenland, constitutional compatibility for international initiatives, and European firmness in a great-power era. Europe begins as a site threatened by industrial decline and ends as a procedural actor capable of convening extraordinary councils, reacting in real time, and concluding trade agreements. These transformations are not the product of a single continuous argument in the strict philosophical sense. They are the product of a press conference logic where each segment must connect to the previous one while adapting to new prompts. The unity is therefore dynamic, maintained by recurring terms whose referents shift under pressure.

The event also displays a characteristic executive strategy of evidential posture. When making claims about industrial harm from ideological transition, the leaders speak in broad causal language without adducing specific numbers. When discussing EU growth divergence, Merz provides a historical trend claim without statistical substantiation. When discussing defense procurement complexity, Merz offers qualitative diagnosis and system-level critique rather than data. When discussing Mercosur, both leaders refer to procedural facts—Council qualified majority, parliamentary intervention, potential court verification, Commission competence for provisional application. Here, the evidential posture becomes more specific, because the domain is institutional legality and procedure, where discrete facts are more readily asserted in a press setting. When discussing Greenland, the leaders emphasize normative principles and procedural conditions for talks, again reflecting a domain where the press conference can assert norms without exposing operational details. This suggests a pattern: the more contested and technico-economic the empirical substrate, the more the discourse relies on general trends and shared impressions; the more juridical and procedural the substrate, the more it asserts determinate procedural facts. This pattern is itself a method of public reasoning: it seeks precision where precision is less risky and leaves empirical contestation largely implicit where precision might invite immediate dispute.

The interplay between diagnosis and prescription is similarly patterned. Meloni’s critique of the green transition’s ideological vision functions as diagnosis; the non-paper priorities function as prescription. Yet the prescription is itself primarily procedural: it is a plan to present a document at a summit to begin discussion toward a later summit. That is, even the prescription is mediated by institutional time. Merz’s diagnosis of defense complexity similarly yields a prescription of simplification and reduction, yet the immediate action is again procedural: signing agreements, harmonizing procurement, creating new formats of ministerial meetings. The event thus embodies a governance rationality in which prescriptions are primarily the creation of procedural and documentary pathways rather than immediate policy outcomes. The press conference itself becomes part of the pathway: it publicly commits the leaders to a trajectory that future institutional steps must honor.

This documentary and procedural rationality is also how the event manages legitimacy. Under the Mercosur question, Merz insists legitimacy is beyond doubt because of Council qualified majority; the European Parliament’s action is framed as regrettable, possibly motivated, and channeled into legal verification. Meloni frames Italy’s support as conditional on balancing agriculture interests and securing reassurances. Both thereby locate legitimacy in a combination of democratic procedure and substantive sectoral fairness. Yet they avoid treating parliamentary contestation as an ultimate veto on executive judgment; rather, it is another institutional layer to be navigated. This reveals a conception of legitimacy as plural and layered, where no single institutional voice exhausts the legitimacy question. The press conference asks the audience to accept this layered model as serious politics, and to reject simplistic framings that treat legitimacy as a single binary property.

One can also observe how rhetorical modality is preserved rather than “cleaned up,” as the video includes moments of hedging, personal notes, and lightness. Merz marks some claims as personal, especially regarding Ukraine. Meloni admits the U.S. methods are “discussable” and assertive, acknowledging ambivalence without moral escalation. Both leaders emphasize willingness and openness regarding the peace council while foregrounding constitutional problems. These modalities are important because they perform the event’s central balancing act: firmness on principles and interests, flexibility on format and process, restraint on personalization, and openness to cooperation. The press conference thus produces a posture of disciplined agency that is meant to appear neither submissive nor belligerent.

In this posture, the recurring appeal to “seriousness” plays a regulative role. Meloni explicitly condemns certain modes of foreign-policy reading as unserious and infantile. She uses this to refuse questions that seek to interpret European politics as personality rivalry or to psychologize foreign leaders. Yet seriousness here is also a strategic resource: it allows the leaders to decline engagement with provocation while presenting themselves as responsible actors. This is a common executive technique, but in this recording it is unusually explicit and legible. Seriousness is treated as a virtue of method: attention to structural issues, respect for democratic procedures, refusal of simplistic narratives, and prioritization of Europe’s self-capacity.

The event’s concluding stability, within the excerpt provided, rests on a set of equilibria rather than on final resolutions. The Greenland issue is stabilized at the level of principles and process, without resolving substantive conflict. Mercosur is stabilized at the level of legitimacy claims and procedural pathways, without resolving political contestation. The peace council is stabilized at the level of willingness and constitutional constraint, without resolving governance redesign. The relationship to Trump is stabilized at the level of pragmatic engagement and democratic respect, without resolving policy disagreements. These are deliberate stabilizations appropriate to the press conference as a genre: it is an event designed to maintain alignment and public confidence under uncertainty, rather than to settle disputes. Its interest lies in how it makes uncertainty governable by translating it into institutional pathways and norms.