It’s 2 a.m. on November 7, 2040. In rainy Berlin, the streets are empty late into the night of the 51st US presidential election. As the first results from the East Coast states start coming in, a push notification appears on the holoscreen in the German chancellor’s office. With a smile, she recalls the excited “Key Race Alerts” from iconic CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer on election nights back in the 2010s and 2020s. The 2016 election night, for example, which sent political Berlin into a state of shock. Or in 2020, when Joe Biden was elected and everyone thought: Now it’ll all finally be okay again.
Over the past 25 years, the United States has been marked by massive internal crises. Three MAGA presidencies have taken their toll on the country – and, with it, the global order. In response, since the mid-2020s, left-wing and grassroots democratic movements had gained strength in America. However, even these movements didn’t feel responsible for Europe’s fate and they were certainly no fans of NATO. Thus, Europe and Germany came to understand that their future lay in their own hands.
In 2040, Europe remains among the world’s five largest economies, and Germany ranks in the top 10. But of course, by 2040, no one measures success solely by gross domestic product anymore. On the OECD Better Life Index, Germany has moved up from 14th to 7th place. In 2040, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe is a European. The European Union’s 37 member states now provide the necessary capabilities: reconnaissance satellites, long-range weapons, and a European airlift network capable of seamlessly transporting troops from Rotterdam to Romania. Armenia is in the process of finalizing the last chapters of its EU accession negotiations.
To that end, the chancellor sends one last message to Brussels before leaving her office. Time to go home. Tomorrow, the world will look different, but she’s prepared. Anyone born in 2040 will experience their warmest years early in life. Although the Earth is 1.7 degrees Celsius warmer than it was before industrialization, global warming is slowing down for the first time since records began. Lab-grown meat is cheaper – and more appetizing – than meat from Category 2 livestock facilities. As a result, industrial cattle farming and methane emissions are declining. Methane, which for a long time was illegally released into the air or burned during extraction, has been measured globally by satellites since 2031, attributed to the operator, and subject to heavy fines.
One third of land and sea is protected, as nations pledged in Kunming and Montreal in 2022. In Germany, 94 percent of energy comes from renewable sources – up from less than two thirds in 2026 – and includes long-term storage solutions for the grid. The air over New Delhi and Jakarta is as clean as it has been over London since the 1970s, after coal burning was phased out there. This is a success similar to that achieved with the hole in the ozone layer, where a single agreement in 1987 was enough to eliminate a global threat.
Malaria and tuberculosis have disappeared from the African continent, and children no longer die from a disease that we already knew how to prevent as early as 2026. This is funded by small levies on business-class airline tickets, private jets, oil drilling, and stock trading – which 120 countries now collect jointly – as well as by a pledge made by the largest technology companies in 2028 to donate one tenth of their profits should they ever become as wealthy as they had hoped.
All over the world, and especially in war zones, professional psychological care for people who have experienced violence is taken for granted. Governments and aid organizations understand that trauma spanning multiple generations cannot be resolved in a single funding cycle. That is why trauma treatment is becoming a basic necessity, like water, food, and vaccinations – so that cycles of violence within families and societies can be broken once and for all.
The World Trade Organization can once again mediate disputes after its members agreed in 2031 to appoint judges by majority vote rather than requiring the consent of every single country. And no single country can prevent the UN Security Council from sanctioning a war. To do so, three of the most powerful members would now have to jointly raise an objection.
In 2040, the security services in Germany communicate with the public about current and future threats, as well as solutions and countermeasures. When electricity, water, and internet connections fail, every household knows what to do and where to go. In every neighborhood, there is a designated location that serves as a gym, school, or underground parking garage in everyday life and becomes a shelter, a source of warmth, and a gathering point in an emergency. Neighbors who have been trained for this purpose maintain lists of people in the area who require care and follow protocols for emergency power. Preparedness is no longer an exceptional measure, and for buildings above a certain size, a shelter is as much a part of the building as a stairwell.
Anyone who sabotages a railroad line, cuts a submarine cable, or sends an explosive-laden drone to an airport will be apprehended. And that doesn’t even require monitoring millions of people and their digital communications. Investigators consistently track criminal money flows across national borders and equip critical infrastructure with sensors that monitor machines rather than people. This is only logical, since by 2040, hardly anything will function without machines.
High-performance synthetic systems – including those that were still enthusiastically referred to as “artificial intelligence” as recently as 2026 – must be tested for safety before they are brought to market, just like pharmaceuticals. No company is allowed to launch an AI system that is more powerful than the previous generation without first demonstrating its safety to an international regulatory authority – just as was done with new drugs and nuclear reactors as early as the last century.
In 2040, the world’s population sees its future on this planet and acts accordingly. One thing is clear: Earth will remain habitable and worth living on only if cooperation on the global stage curbs the abuse of power. Progress is both desired and necessary, but it must remain humane. Thanks to the implementation of a blueprint for taxing ultra-high wealth and combating tax avoidance – which the Brazilian G20 presidency had already presented in 2024 – tax evasion is a thing of the past.
No single individual controls the digital infrastructure on which billions of people depend. This is because people have lost respect for irresponsibility – at the latest since children started taking their own lives due to unregulated AI chatbots, as in the 2025 case of 16-year-old American Adam Raine. As a result, fewer and fewer people fell for the propaganda that minimal regulation of the activities of the ultra-wealthy – whether as entrepreneurs or private individuals – would hinder innovations vital to humanity’s survival. Anyone running a company in 2040 that knowingly puts human lives at risk will be held liable.
The constitutions of a dozen major democracies, including the United States and Germany, include an age limit for their highest political and public offices. This is just as self-evident as the fact that most of them have always had a minimum age requirement, or that constitutional courts have long restricted the age for holding judicial office.
In every European Union member state, a high-ranking, politically appointed official advocates for the interests of future generations. This is similar to the Future Generations Commissioner introduced in Wales as early as 2016, but with greater powers. They can take a government to court, suspend political decisions while their long-term costs are publicly reviewed, and force a parliamentary vote on any project whose negative effects will not be felt until the politicians who approved it are no longer in office. Since 2034, the law has also required that every national budget disclose the cost to those people who will have to pay for it 30 years from now. As a result, three highways, two airport expansions, and a pension agreement have already been scrapped.
Inspired by the 2024 UN Pact for the Future – which attracted hardly any interest at the time – countries finally introduced a program developed by UNESCO in 2028 to teach future-oriented skills in schools, businesses, associations, and government agencies. The program teaches, for example, that a positive future becomes more plausible simply by envisioning it in detail. And that the feeling of powerlessness in the face of even the most threatening futures diminishes once you have imagined a version of that future in which you actively solve problems rather than merely observing them.
In the late 2020s, democratic parties in Germany and Europe recognized the crisis of imagination. They remembered that they are the ones who must articulate a future worth striving for and, when in government, consistently work toward it – rather than leaving the description of a desirable future to tech elites or think tanks of the New Right.
Every constituency event and local council meeting became a vision lab. Instead of a publicity-driven “citizen participation” industry, problems were listened to, limitations were explained, solutions were developed, and the cynicism filter was cast aside. In an expanding European Union, democracy was celebrated once again. The “Europhoria” that this unleashed fueled citizen initiatives, start-ups, innovation programs, and alliances.
At the time, many were inspired by the traveling exhibition from the Nobel Peace Prize Museum in Oslo, which told stories of the heroes and heroines of the democratic renaissance in town squares around the world: Ukrainian soldiers, the so-called “cockroach movement” in India, Albanian students marching against the sellout of their country, the women of the Sudanese revolutions, and South Korean lawmakers who, in 2024, barricaded the parliament with tables and chairs to protest the abuse of martial law. Even in these times, the future was already here; it just hadn’t arrived everywhere yet.
Parliaments and lawmakers became guardians of democracy and the future, regardless of electoral cycles. Political parties began – initially in municipal and state legislatures – to cooperate across party lines to initiate groundbreaking reforms. The scale of the political challenges necessitated taking greater political risks, and these were finally rewarded. Those with a vision were no longer dismissed as crackpots.
In Germany, in return, the governing coalition established a new Bundestag committee for the Chancellery. This was long overdue: If the government centralizes its decisions in one place, parliament must also be able to scrutinize these decisions in one place for strategic coherence and long-term sustainability. The head of the Chancellery now appears before the Chancellery committee at least four times a year, and the chancellor at least twice a year, to explain the government’s strategic actions and their long-term implications.
As had already been the case in Finland since 2026, the German government is now required to submit a regular foresight report to the committee, on the basis of which the future viability of government actions is debated. This ensures that policy no longer consists of isolated technocratic solutions, but rather that systemic effects across policy areas are strategically considered together. No ministry, no agency – not even a department or division – has operated since then without a strategy based on strategic foresight. The government’s minister for the future is no longer coincidentally also the minister for European affairs at the German Foreign Office, but rather the Minister for Research, Technology, Development, and the Future. The National Agency for the Future advises the government on building future-oriented competencies in science, politics, and society. The National Security Council submits an annual report, the core of which is made public.
By 2040, hardly anyone in Germany still considers fundamental administrative reform necessary. In 2023, that figure was 91 percent. Since 2032, the finance ministry has finally begun to ask what has been achieved with the money spent. Instead of merely checking whether expenditures were accounted for correctly and economically, the new National Evaluation Office reviews this. Each ministry has one person whose sole task is to honestly evaluate programs, and who reports not to the ministry but to the Bundestag.
In 2026, Germany ranked 30th out of 31 countries in an InterNations survey on the satisfaction of foreign workers, in which respondents cited bureaucratic hurdles, a lack of digitalization, difficulties finding housing, language barriers, a high cost of living, and challenges with social integration. In an OECD study on attractiveness to skilled workers, Germany had slipped from 12th to 15th place among the 38 OECD countries between 2019 and 2023, again citing low social acceptance and slow digitalization. In 2040, these figures seem like something from another world. Germany ranks third on both lists. In hospitals, nursing homes, start-ups, schools, and on construction sites across the country, people proudly adjust their “Team Germany” and “Team Europe” pins and smile, full of enthusiasm. Of course, there were always people who considered all of this naive, starry-eyed, and impossible. They thought that an election across the Atlantic would forever be the central driver of their future. They believed that if they just waited until the crisis got even bigger, someone would eventually do something. And they only trusted in a positive future if the path to it was spelled out in every detail and deemed likely by predictive models.
However, as the British activist and author Rob Hopkins wrote back in 2025 during one of his imagined time travels to the year 2030: No one remembers those people today. Just as no one remembers the people who, over a century ago, called the women’s suffrage movement unrealistic and hysterical. A better future was never a naive utopia, but rather a work
in progress. And it still is today.
This essay was originally published in Internationale Politik on October 26, 2026.
