What Time Is It? The Geopolitics of the New Year’s Address

At the start of the new year, leaders have an opportunity to capture and shape the geopolitical mood of the moment from their country’s point of view.

In contrast to the Christmas address, in which religiously imbued themes of compassion, charity or solidarity tend to dominate, the speeches made at the threshold of the New Year are deeply political. Consciously marking the passing of time, they offer an occasion for retrospection and anticipation, to ask where we, as a society, are coming from and where we are headed. With millions of citizens in front of their screens poised for midnight celebrations, as the first 25 years of the new millennium transition into the next, leaders across the world had a unique moment to connect the past, present and future of their country. 

The temporal horizon emerging from the New Year’s speeches from across the continent is that the past is understood in terms of Europe’s wars, the present is war in Ukraine, whereas the future that is claimed by everyone, including Putin, is a road to peace.

As the leader of a nation at war, president Volodymyr Zelensky praised Ukrainians for their courage and unity in 2024, the year in which their ordeal passed ‘1,000 days’, and promised for 2025 a ‘just peace … achieved by the strong’. He thanked partners, allies and friends for their support – acknowledging the Czech shells initiative and the Danish arms purchasing model – and shared the prospect of a ‘European Ukraine’, asserting that the country ‘will be in the European Union’ and ‘one day … in NATO’. Essentially, however, the war determines Ukraine’s temporal order, as encapsulated in Zelensky’s favourite anecdote of an elderly Ukrainian gentleman who was asked by Russian soldiers, ‘What time is it?’. The old man’s answer, as repeated by the president: ‘Time to get off our land.’

From Moscow, in a brief televised address minutes before midnight, Russian president Vladimir Putin, with a Kremlin belltower in the background, attempted to convey optimism: ‘We are sure that everything will be fine, that we will move forward’. Seeking a temporal anchor in the great victory of 1945, he declared that 2025 would be ‘the Year of the Defender of the Fatherland’ and that ‘we are the children and grandchildren of those who defeated Nazism’. Mention of Ukraine was notably absent.

In reference to his warring Black Sea neighbours, Turkey’s president Erdogan expressed his hope for ‘a new period [to] start in our North in 2025’ thanks to ‘the termination of the war … with a just peace’. To the east, he noted the recent ‘sparkles of a new era in Syria’, which could ease ‘the voluntary return of … refugees’. Looking at his country’s own future, Erdogan repeated his notion of ‘the Century of Turkey’, first coined as part of the 2023 centennial of the Republic’s founding by Atatürk.

The Second World War still looms large over Europeans’ consciousness, not just Russia’s. The 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings was mentioned by both the UK’s King Charles III (in his Christmas speech) and French president Macron (in his New Year address). As Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen put it, ‘This year marks the 80th anniversary of the Liberation. Europe is more challenged than we have been since [those] five cursed years. And when Europe is under pressure, so is Denmark.’

‘How does Germany move on from here?’, was the poignant question Chancellor Olaf Scholz sought to answer in response to a more recent event. With the country in a state of shock over the Christmas market attack in Magdeburg (five people died and almost three hundred were injured on 20 December), Scholz’s New Year’s address consoled victims and families, thanked doctors, police officers and volunteers, and drew inspiration from the ‘cohesion’ or ‘togetherness’ (Zusammenhalt) the public had demonstrated. The past was briefly invoked by the Chancellor through reference to the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent German reunification, whereas allusions to the future were left open. ‘It is for you to decide’, he said. With parliamentary elections on 23 February and the end of his mandate in sight, Scholz did not project very far ahead, probably for fear of being accused of political campaigning.

In Warsaw, Polish president Andrej Duda, whose mandate likewise ends soon, in the spring, had no such qualms. In his New Year’s address on national broadcaster TVP, the president openly criticized the government led by Donald Tusk, accusing it of ‘causing chaos’ and ‘deepening divisions’. Tusk, for his part, resorted to social media that evening to wish Poles ‘faith in yourself, hope stronger than doubt and love stronger than evil’. With Poland taking up the presidency of the EU Council this semester, the prime minister seized the opportunity of the inaugural gala in the National Theatre in Warsaw on 1 January to stress, ‘If Europe is powerless, it will not survive.’

A similar note was struck by Emmanuel Macron, who did not rest on the laurels of the ‘historic’ 2024 Paris Olympics and the restoration of Notre Dame cathedral. Although the main domestic takeaway of the president’s address was his apology for having dissolved the French Parliament all too hastily in June, he had a message for the rest of Europe too. Without mentioning the United States, Macron asserted that Europe can no longer ‘delegate its security and defence to other powers’. France will continue to ‘invest in its military rearmament’, while ‘Europe must accelerate and take in hand its defence, its security, its borders’.

In all these public speeches, the leader to name US president elect Donald Trump most distinctly was Zelensky. For Ukraine, the incoming Washington administration is of acute importance: it will determine what the future brings in terms of war and peace.

For other European nations, the stakes are less immediate but just as high. The era of US security protection, which began at the close of the Second World War and continued after 1989, may well soon end for Europe. To prepare for what comes next, leaders must look further ahead than a year or two, or an electoral cycle; they need to think and act in terms of decades.