Workers, trade unions, and social protections are today being swept off the European Union’s agenda. The wind of unbridled capitalism is blowing in from Donald Trump’s White House — but it’s also stirring up impulses that were already present in the European establishment. During her second term as European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen has erased even the notion of workers’ interests from EU policies — and from the public sphere in general.

“It is the first time in years that the Commission’s work program — its legislative roadmap — does not contain any new social legislation,” the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) reports. Brussels’s plan instead includes numerous initiatives for deregulation, as has been loudly demanded not only by the commission itself but also by national leaders such as Friedrich Merz, Emmanuel Macron, Donald Tusk, and Giorgia Meloni. “There is a growing chill wind coming from America towards Europe, which is that solutions for working people are no longer guaranteed in laws,” argues ETUC general secretary Esther Lynch.

While the ETUC complains that it’s not even being consulted on policy dossiers that impact workers, von der Leyen copy-pastes demands from corporate lobby groups — and even claims credit for doing so. In this upside-down world, instead of reducing the imbalance between workers and their employers, supposedly democratic institutions conspire in favor of the richest. All this in a context where the plan to increase Europe’s military spending is going to hurt social spending, as the NATO secretary general has explicitly admitted.