Sometimes there’s no pizza. Some toppings are just too divisive: try to get Italy to support pineapple.
Eventually, decisions do get made. But what they all agree on – slowly – is a basic, boring Margherita: cheese and tomato sauce. Nothing dramatic or ambitious.
“It's great that we have a system that ensures there is consensus and everybody can sign up to the final agreement. But we all end up going for the lowest common denominator when what is needed is bold leadership and ambitious decisions, because the challenges we’re facing are enormous,” said Petros Fassoulas, secretary general of the European Movement International, an organisation that campaigns for more European integration.
Everyone gets a veto
The European Union started as a peacetime project, born out of the ashes of two wars and aimed at bringing former enemies together.
One basic principle was that member states should never be outvoted on issues essential to them. This matters most to small EU states who fear being overruled by larger neighbours.
Each state gets a veto over key issues that blocks any further movement. Foreign policy and taxation have been the biggest sticking points.
On the world stage, this makes the EU slow to act, if it acts at all. The EU has struggled to agree on harsher sanctions against Russia over its war against Ukraine – largely due to Viktor Orbán pro-Russian government in Hungary – and EU governments are divided over whether or how far to sanction Israel for its war on Gaza.
The veto has been used 48 times since 2011, 21 of those by Hungary under Orbán.
Even when the veto isn’t used, its existence means that any proposal opposed by just one government can’t progress.
This is the case for the capital markets union, a planned overhaul of financial markets that could channel personal pensions into investment in the European economy. It was first proposed in 2015, later rebranded as the savings and investment union. While many governments agree that it's needed, some are reluctant to let an EU authority take over some financial supervision.
This isn't the only proposal to be stalled for years. It took nearly 10 years to agree on an update to rules on social security for EU citizens moving from one EU country to another. Most laws are otherwise agreed in under two years.
The European Onion
Former president of the European Central Bank Mario Draghi suggested ditching the veto in more key areas or using workarounds where the countries that do agree can move ahead without others.
Ending the veto and moving to qualified majority voting for one issue is possible if governments agree unanimously. They never have.
Instead, they are increasingly using workarounds to get things done; Orbán briefly walked out of a December 2023 meeting of EU leaders to allow them to agree unanimously to open EU membership talks with Ukraine. Orbán could then claim he hadn't voted for it.
EU governments also have the possibility of “enhanced cooperation“ where at least nine of them can go ahead with a new legal regime that won't apply across the entire bloc. This has been used for divorce and patent law.
Its most meaningful use so far was for EU governments to agree the €90 billion loan for Ukraine in December 2025 despite objections from Hungary, Czechia, and Slovakia. However, this was initially held up when Hungary then wielded a veto, only lifted after Orbán lost power in April 2026.
The risk of using these workarounds is that the EU becomes a complicated patchwork where laws apply to different combinations of countries.
Bart De Wever, Belgium's prime minister, said “this is exactly what Europe needs to become, an onion of multi-layers.”
“We need to enlarge, but that can only happen in the onion model with an outer layer“ for new members, while “at the core of the onion, we need to functionally integrate much faster,“ starting with the Benelux group of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg.
Those three countries, plus France, Germany, and Italy, were the founding members of the European Economic Community in 1957, which has now become the 27-strong EU.
A bigger club
There's a long list of would-be members of the pizza club: nine official candidates plus several other potential candidates, including Iceland, which will hold a referendum on EU membership later this year.
Making decisions with more than 30 countries is going to be even more difficult.
Size matters when it comes to how EU governments take most of their decisions for issues that don't require a veto.
They use a system called qualified majority voting. At least 55% of member states, or 15 out of the 27, must vote in favour. The countries in favour must represent at least 65% of the total EU population.
In practice, this means that big states and small states must work together to get a proposal through. When it comes to inviting in new members, a small country like Montenegro, with 620,000 people, won't disrupt this system.
A large state like Ukraine, however, risks shifting the current balance, as it would become the EU's fourth-largest state. A war-ravaged country where average salaries are low will have very different interests than larger, richer western states.
German chancellor Friedrich Merz pitched one possible solution: “associate membership“ where Ukraine and others wouldn’t immediately get voting rights. They could take part in talks and would still be able to get many – but not all – of the benefits of EU membership.
Ukraine rejected the idea, saying it wanted to be a full EU member.
Charles Grant, the director of the Centre for European Reform think tank, warned that associate membership might be the best that Ukraine and other countries could hope for if they want to join the EU in the near future.
“One of the reasons why enlargement is likely not going to happen is because of the difficulties of changing the voting rules,“ he said. “Because of that, a lot of countries do not want enlargement because they think it'll produce some deadlock in decision-making.“
Arguably, there already is some deadlock when proposals don't move or only move after a decade of debate.
Grant said decision-making procedures aren't to blame: “The fundamental problem is that the member states don't agree. There's no consensus on a lot of areas, whether it's what to do with Israel or the capital markets union,” he said.
Solving that needs “strong leaders who can knock heads together and build a consensus.” The two most natural choices would be the EU's largest states, France and Germany, but Grant sees France's Emmanuel Macron as “on the way out in less than a year,” and Merz as “not good at building coalitions.”
Making the best possible pizza
Convincing others and building support is the real fix the EU needs.
“I’ve always been a bit sceptical of the idea that if you have majority voting in foreign policy that suddenly you will be effective and efficient,” Grant said.
Outvote a country on something important and “there’s a danger that people just ignore the votes and don’t do what they’re supposed to do,” he said, citing Poland and others who simply refused to resettle their quotas of asylum seekers agreed in 2015.
“For the most important issues, for the big strategic choices, the EU needs to reach a consensus, and all the efforts in the world should go into making people find and accept a consensus,” he said.
This is what actually happens for policies like trade where there is majority voting, according to Nicolai von Ondarza, head of EU research at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.
Most of the time, everyone agrees. His 2024 analysis of more than 1,000 public votes among EU governments “show an astonishingly high consensus rate” of almost 83% of votes.
France, the EU’s second biggest state, is rarely outvoted, he told me. France is your charming and diplomatic friend who talks up the value of goat cheese, a drizzle of honey, and a scattering of thyme. He's so convincing that the whole group swings toward the new option.
One recent example where it was on the losing side, however, was the Mercosur trade deal, where European farmers worry about more South American competition. Even there, von Ondarza said other states “went quite far in trying to address” its concerns.
This speaks to France's soft power in the EU and its good relationships with other member states. It is often one of the first countries to suggest policies, like the recent ban on children's use of social media, that get picked up by others.
It's not good to be the friend who's always objecting to what others want. The UK tended to be in the minority of EU votes before it quit the bloc, most notably when the EU moved to curb banker bonuses after the financial crisis.
Since then, the contrarians have been Hungary, followed by Poland. Both have had right-wing governments that often held contrary positions to other states.
Von Ondarza said the immediate concern is to address decisions blocked by “these blackmail vetoes that we’ve had over the last couple of years.”
He has some solutions to encourage more qualified majority voting, including making votes between EU governments anonymous or changing the current thresholds for a majority.
Putting it to a vote
All of these suggestions avoid a radical reform of the way the EU works. That's deliberate – making major changes to the EU treaties would mean doing what many government leaders and EU officials are extremely reluctant to do: ask the people to decide.
The people don't always agree with their political leaders. EU governments drew up an EU constitution in 2004, just after they accepted 10 new members.
Among other things, the constitution wanted to move from unanimity to qualified majority voting for asylum policies, public health, and trade.
Public votes in both France and the Netherlands, two of the EU's core founding members, rejected the constitution. This was a shock for both governments and the move towards EU integration.
Some of the constitution's elements were later repackaged in the Lisbon Treaty, which only required a public vote in Ireland.
The Irish voted no in 2008. After some minor changes to the treaty to address Irish concerns, they voted again in 2009, this time with a clear majority.
Fassoulas of the European Movement said the lingering fear of putting big changes to the vote 20 years later is “because we haven't involved people in the process” which he said would create “a better chance of persuading them to vote in favour of such an outcome.”
He said opinion polls show that most Europeans “do appreciate the value of European cooperation,” particularly when the EU is facing security, economic, and environmental threats.
Hunger is the best sauce, even for pizza.