The State of the European Union. The European Parliament faces its most important elections yet

9 The European Union (EU) is a unique political project in the history of humankind. It is a process of supranational integration, of pooling of sov- ereignty to reach a series of goals, one which a state enters into voluntar- ily and which has put an end to the wars on our continent. The EU is not an international organisation in the usual sense of the term, governed by a principle of voluntary cooperation. Quite the oppo- site, Europe has equipped itself with representative institutions, such as the European Parliament and the Council, which pass a good part of European laws by majority vote. Furthermore, the EU has contributed to decades of prosperity thanks to the establishment of the internal market, the biggest in the world with 500 million consumers, but also as a result of regional and cohesion policy, or exchange programmes such as Erasmus or the European Voluntary Service, which have enriched our young people culturally and have helped to start to forge a sense of belonging to the common European home. However, the euro crisis as of 2010 highlighted the fact that our mon- etary union is incomplete. The policies of fiscal adjustment at any cost in- creased unemployment and have left a legacy of inequality. The countries of Europe split into creditors and debtors. Later, in 2015, came the refugee crisis, which split the continent into countries that showed solidarity and those that did not, just as the Commission made the Stability and Growth Pact more flexible so that fis- cal adjustment did not harm economic growth and the Investment Plan for Europe was launched, partly moving beyond the paradigm of the procycli- cal polices pursued as of spring 2010. In 2016 came the hammer blow of Brexit, though time has shown that the one that it plunged into an existential crisis is actually the United Kingdom, while the citizens, institutions and states have rallied round the Union. Prologue. The future of Europe