>The EU is handicapped by its very diversity on this.

Thousands of years of cultural heritage can't be bulldozed over and turned into a faceless economic zone similar to the US, just because the business class elites see it as a disadvantage to advancing their WEF globalist agenda where every person on the planet is to be an identical blank slate in an excel sheet and there's no borders, no religion, no identity, and no intellectual, educational, cultural and behavioral differences and all everyone just compete to be cattle in a race to the bottom for their corporate and real estate empires. This will always get pushback, mostly via voting far right.

If you want to convince people to freely give up their culture and identity in the name of EU economic advancement, you need to give them an incentive, a big economic one, and the EU sucks at this, and ambitious people looking for money go to the US, Dubai, etc. Money in the EU is still gatekept based on where you live and what nationality you have. EU will never go anywhere if still keeps this caste system where western/northern europeans are the noble gentry and eastern/southern europe the cheap labor peasants without any skin the game as they just become mercenaries who will sell their talent to US, China, etc anyone how will pay them better than Europeans.

>it's ultimately a party for English-speaking, basically well-off, educated, currently left-leaning, young people, which is nothing that one can build a deep movement on

Out-of-touch theater kids from upper class families who never did any hard labor jobs and spent their lives in an eternal Erasmus travel and party program, aren't gonna be popular with anyone but their own bubble as nobody who's struggling to pay bills, deal with unemployment from layoffs or lack of safety in public spaces due to migration, will ever empathize with them. It's the same posh European nobility cohort the hugely unpopular and equally out of touch Ursula von der Leyen comes from, where she grew up living abroad, traveling, partying and studying surrounded by private security, and then lectures the working class on "difficult decisions". We would guillotine people like that for less.