The Europeans Europe Ignores

Five days before Europe Day, 40 heads of state met in Yerevan to defend the democratic institutions of three million Armenians against foreign interference. European Council President António Costa called it historic. NATO sent its Secretary General. The European Union created a civilian mission. This is what Europe does when it decides a constituency matters. Europe's institutions are capable of acting. The question is always for whom.

On Europe Day itself, Europe will commemorate the Schuman Declaration and the founding commitments of the European project. It will not, on that day, do anything equivalent for the 12 million Roma in Europe. This is not an oversight. The European Commission has the data. The Fundamental Rights Agency has the surveys. The Council of Europe has the monitoring reports. What is in question is not knowledge but will.

The European project was built after a catastrophe that targeted Roma at industrial scale. Roma fought in the Allied and partisan forces that liberated Europe while their families were being murdered by the regimes those forces were defeating. That catastrophe not only claimed lives—it destroyed the social and economic structure of Roma across the continent: professionals, property, businesses and intergenerational capital.

The postwar European order established principles designed to prevent exactly such outcomes. But in the case of Roma, those principles were not applied. Property was not restored. Compensation was not paid. For decades, the persecution of Roma was officially framed as the targeting of “asocials” rather than as racial genocide—delaying recognition and avoiding the legal consequences that recognition would have required. The socioeconomic position Roma occupy today follows directly from those decisions.

Europe knows this. The pattern has been documented. And Europe has kept choosing it. It has been an affordable mistake.

Roma have lived on this continent for over a millennium. They are present in every EU member state and candidate country. They speak the languages, know the institutions and operate within the political systems of each. They have served in European armies, built European economies, and contributed to public life. They are also one of the EU’s youngest populations, and among those most committed to democratic values. And they are not passive. Roma political agency is operating now—in European elections, in ways that are already affecting outcomes.

And yet the pattern continues. In November 2025, the Slovenian centre-left authorised the designation of Roma neighbourhoods as security zones. In Hungary, a decade after the European Commission opened infringement proceedings over segregated education, the segregation of Roma children continues. In 2022, Ukrainian refugees received Temporary Protection within days; Roma fleeing the same war were segregated and excluded from protection. Before Hungary’s April 2026 parliamentary election, when Roma candidates were announced, coordinated counter-narratives surged dramatically within a single day—bearing the hallmarks of foreign information manipulation, but produced domestically. No European instrument for protecting democracy registered it.

The cost is now visible in electoral terms.

Italy’s centre-left has been out of power since 2022. Germany’s SPD finished third in February 2025. Renew Europe and the Greens each lost roughly a quarter of their seats in 2024. The margin for absorbing political losses is narrowing.

At the same time, Roma agency is delivering outcomes.

In Romania’s May 2025 presidential runoff, Roma voter mobilisation in 144 municipalities contributed at least 15 per cent of the winning margin against a far-right, pro-Russian challenger. In Hungary’s April 2026 parliamentary election, the opposition won 36 of 44 constituencies with high concentrations of Roma. In Bulgaria’s April 2026 election, longstanding vote-control systems were rejected by Roma voters, who shifted decisively toward pro-European candidates and away from the far right.

These outcomes were not produced by mainstream party strategy. They were produced by Roma operating independently of it.

Europe has yet to acknowledge this. It has instead been offering “inclusion”. Over two decades, the EU has invested billions in “Roma inclusion”, but conditions for Roma on the ground have not improved. It has produced programmes, reporting and intermediaries, but has not altered the underlying decisions shaping outcomes for Roma.

Inclusion mitigates consequences. It does not change what is being decided.

Europe is therefore misdiagnosing its own problem. The systems being built to defend European democracy are aimed at external threats, while the same dynamics are already operating internally, unregistered, against Roma. 

The answer will not be found in what Europe commemorates on Europe Day, but in whether it is prepared to stop betraying its founding principles.