DiEM25? That still a thing? Brother, the days of puff pieces about Yanis and his motorcycle are long gone. My hunch has always been that the real pan-European politics are the kind that politely stops and turns back "naturalised" African-Ukrainian citizens at the Polish border.
I think you're dead right about some other stuff, though, the EU finds itself in a contradictory halfway position, it might fracture further, or it might fundamentally change and expand its institutional foundations as well as its demands on member nations. The questions that came up during the debt crisis are being revisited against the backdrop of a war on the EU's periphery.
Like I said, I haven't been following EU politics as feverishly as I did during the "migrant crisis" for many years, but I wouldn't bet against a system of direct transfers via the ECB or similar eventually being a thing, and I think present conditions favour it in relative terms ... so I guess Macron's brand of that will continue to have a certain currency.
I'm sure I've posted about this a few times on here because it's a kitchen pot I've been banging for years, but the emotion-laden politics of populism that usually circulate on the far right are serviced by the rollout of faux-universalist and increasingly authoritarian technocracy from the ostensibly liberal centre. This happens within the parliamentary politics of most OECD nations currently and the EU gives us a chance to see a similar principle grinding along at this multinational scale.
