Across in Asia, UN talks to curb the plastic blight poisoning the planet ground to a stalemate. For a Commission committed to a green revolution at home and worldwide, it added to the frustrations of a weak climate deal at the UN COP talks in Baku a week earlier and to foreboding at the return of climate-skeptic Trump in Washington.

And then, of course, there’s Georgia. Amid talk of Moscow-backed vote-rigging and influence buying, the newly elected government in Tbilisi has announced a postponement of EU membership talks, to the fury of the Georgian president and thousands in the streets.

Internal strife

Within the European Union’s borders, those hostile to the closer alignment of Europe’s governance through coordination in Brussels—and generally also hostile to EU ideals of individual liberty, tolerance and diversity—seem to be in the ascendant. Look no further back than a week ago, when Cǎlin Georgescu came from nowhere to win the first round of Romania’s presidential election on a platform of bashing Brussels, NATO, liberals and modern life in general—a result seen as another victory for the Kremlin (albeit now in doubt as judges review claims of Russian meddling).

View events in Georgia, Romania and Ukraine through a glass tinted by the mounting share of votes for radical nationalists in Western Europe (not to mention the departure of the U.K. from the bloc) and it can be tempting to think that von der Leyen and the 26 other commissioners may oversee the twilight of the EU.

An ill wind

Yet, as Saint Paul said of our understanding of God, in politics, we see through a glass, darkly. Peering out from the commissioners’ eyrie on the 13th floor of Brussels’ Berlaymont building, they may spot some glimmers of light on the horizon.

An American retreat from its role as the world’s sole superpower is certainly costly and unsettling for Europeans. But as many a beleaguered EU policymaker has said in times past, never waste a good crisis; seize the opportunity. Echoed by many of the bloc’s national leaders, von der Leyen is calling for major investments in defense and security spending to ward off threats and make up for a U.S. retreat from NATO commitments.

Such investment will only work if made together. NATO still has a role to play. But the Commission, which has long managed common budgets, is the rising player, with new powers to raise and dole out cash (thanks to its actions in the COVID-19 crisis).

By the same token, it is an ill wind indeed that blows no one any good; the travails of the leaders of the bloc’s founders, France and Germany, would normally be bad news for Brussels. Beset by anti-EU critics, not to mention shaky finances, neither French President Emmanuel Macron nor the seemingly election-doomed German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is in a position to call many shots. And yet some believe that this very weakness in Paris and Berlin could be a moment of opportunity for Brussels.

Confidence man

One man who seems to think so is António Costa. He also started a new job in the EU capital on Sunday, though across the road from von der Leyen. The former prime minister of Portugal will be chairing summits of his former colleagues, the leaders of the member states in the European Council.

Taking office, Costa said that, having spoken to them all in recent weeks, he was confident of finding collective responses to the many challenges Europe faces—not because of a sudden fit of unanimity among the nations but, he said, because all 27 of them seem to get how urgent it is to find compromises and work together. Costa built a reputation among his peers as an unflappably smiling optimist. But he is far from naive, and he has a track record of delivering when the odds have looked grim.

A man of the left and the south, he brought Portugal through the euro-zone debt crisis and a painful economic reform program in ways that won admiration from fiscal conservatives in the north. His youthful experience of dictatorship, of what it’s like to not live in a liberal democracy, resonates with Europeans in the east. If Costa can help deliver the Council’s powerful support to a von der Leyen Commission that shows it can deliver tangible benefits to European voters, we might one day look back on these testing days not as the beginning of the end but as a coming-of-age moment for Europe.

Vox populi

Now, there will be many who see that as wishful thinking. Look at what the people are saying; look at the election results. Von der Leyen had to bob and weave through months of partisan bickering to get her team approved in a European Parliament where traditional pro-EU parties barely have a majority after June’s elections. In France, Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally came first with a third of the vote. Germany’s AfD has pushed Scholz’s Social Democrats into third place in polls ahead of a vote in February.

That millions of Europeans feel fearful and angry is clear. However, there are also signs that a knee-jerk, nationalist response is not most people’s preference. A poll before the EU vote found that von der Leyen is far better known than Commission presidents before her, recognized by 70% of EU citizens, mostly somewhat favorably. Another, last month, found a clear majority now ready to go it alone on defense without U.S. might.

Striking, too, was the Commission’s own half-yearly sounding of the popular mood. The Eurobarometer survey last week reported the highest levels of trust in the EU since 2007. That 51% say they trust the EU may seem lukewarm. But many fewer give their own national authorities such support and it chimes with a trend in which only 17% of people have a negative view of the European institutions.

There are clearly votes to be won in promises of national renewal and casting off obligations to neighbors. But—quietly—it seems most Europeans still place some hope in working together through Brussels.

Familiarity may have cooled their ardor for that idea, but the blue EU flags being waved with passion in Tbilisi by Georgians desperate to share their security and prosperity—scenes that recall those in Kyiv a decade ago—are a reminder of its power. And reason perhaps to see the new Commission’s glass of welcome in Brussels, well, as half full.