Europe has endured major angst these last 12 months, and many would say that the year 2016 was among the Continent’s most unlovely since the Balkan civil war. As we tiptoe into 2017, there’s no reason to believe that things will take a striking turn for the better.

So in this spirit of gloom, POLITICO brings you a dozen characters who will make you want to stay in bed — with the covers pulled firmly over your trembling head.

These aren’t the most obvious villains or potential wreckers of joy. So Russian President Vladimir Putin isn’t on this list. Nor is Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan or U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, nor even the U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May or the National Front leader Marine Le Pen, doughty depressants all: We can take it for granted that they will make us miserable in 2017, almost certainly on numerous occasions.

Instead, we give you a list of some of the other spoilers, a supporting cast of whom the best that we might wish is that they have a relatively quiet year.

The dozen follow, in alphabetical order.

1. British tabloid editors

If the most pungent thing in France is its cheese, the equivalent across the Channel is the tabloid newspaper. The Sun, the Daily Mail, and the Daily Express have a robust hold on British popular opinion and regard Brexit as the greatest thing to have happened to Britain since the Normans arrived in 1066.

Do not underestimate the tabloids’ ability to poison ongoing negotiations to such an extent that Prime Minister May is left with no option other than the hardest of “hard Brexits,” good neither for Britain nor the EU.

Their coverage of Europe’s refugee crisis has been hysterical, making a compromise with the EU on free movement a non-starter, and they would likely recoil at any deal that has the U.K. pay "too much" into the EU budget or lengthen the transition. The British tabloids also have a perverse hold on the imagination of officials in Brussels — and every anti-European front page will only harden the resolve of Michel Barnier, the European Commission's Brexit negotiator, to be as unyielding to Britain as possible.

2. China's soccer league bosses

Soccer is the closest that Godless Europe gets to religion, so it should be a source of some distress to devotees across the Continent that China’s Super League has embarked on what sports analysts are calling “obscene spending” in an attempt to poach talent from European leagues. “The Chinese market is a danger for all,” said Chelsea’s manager, Antonio Conte, before heading home for a grumpy Christmas.

While teams like Guangzhou Evergrande are a long way from being household names in Europe, Conte and others are bracing themselves for a giant sucking sound in 2017, as Chinese agents with cash descend on European clubs saying, “Go East, young man.”

China’s stature as a world soccer pygmy is a personal embarrassment to President Xi Jinping, and the spending spree is said to have his blessing.

3. Michael Flynn

This retired U.S. Army lieutenant general is President-elect Trump’s pick for his national security adviser. If there’s anyone in Trump’s likely cabinet who embodies to perfection the European stereotype of an Ugly American, it’s Flynn, a man so politically incorrect he can make his boss seem like a Boy Scout.

Flynn subscribes to the view that the U.S. is in conflict with an “Enemy Alliance,” comprising North Korea, China, Syria, Cuba, Bolivia, Venezuela and Nicaragua. He also has close ties to Putin and the Kremlin-controlled RT television network. Most alarmingly for Europe, he has a record of incendiary utterances on Muslims, including a tweet that said: “Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL.”

The next time an incident of Islamist terrorism occurs in France, Germany or Belgium, do we really need a White House consigliere to amp up the discordant rhetoric?

4. Beppe Grillo

The founder of Italy’s 5Star Movement, Grillo has been a notable political innovator since his institution of Vaffa-Day (or F**k Off-Day) in 2007, in which he and his fellow-travelers named and shamed all the politicians who were in office in spite of being indicted for corruption. Although they became a trifle repetitive, these V-Days were a highly satisfying political stunt in a land of endemic venality.

In the years since, Grillo has raised his mutinous spiel to maximum volume, assembled a loyal army of activists, and managed to get two young women elected mayor, in Rome and Turin. So far, he has basked in the role of Absolute Opposition to Power, claiming for himself a certain unsullied purity.

But Grillo’s Robespierre-like rants are getting increasingly unfunny, and suggest that Europe will have reason to be afraid should he ever acquire a proper position of authority. How will that play out in a crashing economy and feeble democracy?

5. Jarosław Kaczyński

The leader of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party, Kaczyński is arguably the most powerful anti-European politician in the EU. He has attacked Brussels’ “horrible bureaucracy” and “institutionalized undermining of the nation-state,” phrases that would make Nigel Farage proud.

A former prime minister, he was described recently by Lech Wałesa as “dangerous and irresponsible” (words that should strike most observers as apt, even allowing for Wałesa's crankiness).

Kaczyński is tearing Poland apart, undermining the rule of law and the freedom of the press, and could destabilize the finely tuned power-sharing agreements in Brussels if he campaigns against his country’s own leader at the European Council, Donald Tusk.

Poland was the golden child among new EU member countries. It’s become the new basket case thanks to Kaczyński.

6. Carles Puigdemont

Catalonia, the prosperous and, some would say, solipsistic region in the country’s northeast, is Spain’s rift that keeps on giving. Carles Puigdemont, the president of the Catalan regional government, is trying to hold a referendum on independence from Spain next year.

Both the Spanish government and the country’s constitutional court are adamant that such a move would be legally impermissible, since matters affecting all Spaniards can only be decided by all Spaniards and not merely by some of them.

So the Catalan drive for “self-determination” — as separatist politicians see it — puts the government in Madrid and the Catalan administration on a collision course as spectacular as any faceoff between Real Madrid and Barcelona. And that will force European institutions and other European governments to take sides.

Given the many separatist wannabes across the Continent, it’s doubtful any member country would take the Catalan side. But in truth, most would rather not be asked.

7. Wilbur Ross

Ross is Trump’s nominee for commerce secretary, and has had much less of the analytical spotlight since his nomination than the president-elect’s other eye-catching pick from the private sector, Rex Tillerson.

To be sure, Ross is going to be much scarier for China than he is, immediately, for Europe. He comes out of the steel industry, and steel is overwhelmingly a “China problem.” But Ross has spoken out in favor of doing bilateral agreements rather than regional ones.

This bodes poorly for the prospects of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TTIP, and the death of TTIP would weaken Europe’s hand in the Brexit negotiations. To the extent that Ross talks up a free-trade agreement with a post-Brexit U.K. — which Trump already has — that would be a boost for the hard-Brexiteers.

Ross also has a mercantilist approach to trade that could grate with Europe. As the Wall Street Journal has written, “He believes that good trade policy yields a national trade surplus, while bad deals produce trade deficits — as if every country in the world could run a trade surplus.”

8. Russian hackers

The year 2016 saw the ramping up of state-sponsored Russian hackers as a malign force in international relations, their efforts to undermine the American presidential election being a breathtaking new form of 21st century warfare.

Hackers, by definition, derive their efficacy by operating from a closed society against an open one, a species of cyber-sniper sowing chaos through disinformation.

After Trump’s election, it is inevitable that Russia’s hackers will deploy their battle-tested methods in the European electoral arena, where they will aim to subvert European citizens’ faith in free speech and democracy.

As if the EU didn’t have enough survival anxieties after Brexit, its citizens now await the prospect of hacker-marred elections in Germany and France. Along with that will come retaliation and counter-retaliation. None of it will be pretty; all of it will be profoundly disconcerting.

9. Nicolas Sarkozy

It may seem eccentric to have an apparent has-been on this list of Europe’s bogey-persons for 2017, but there’s a reason to keep a defensive eye on the former French president: He’s not on the presidential ballot, but being essentially unscrupulous and irrepressible, he’s likely to bounce back after the election to occupy the “respectable” anti-Europe space in France. (Sarkozy was at his best when he opposed Europe as a populist and energetic finance minister to save Alstom, the engineering giant, from bankruptcy.)

With the center-right François Fillon arguably too boring, the centrist Emmanuel Macron too wealthy and privileged, the populist Le Pen marginalized and trapped in family cat-fights, and the leftists politically dead, there’s a post-election path back to power for Sarko.

His scenario: Le Pen flames out in round one, leaving either Fillon or Macron to become president; whoever wins will surely disappoint France, giving Sarkozy the opportunity to offer a more acceptable and mainstream “Frexit” platform than Le Pen ever could.

Europe should shudder: He is a cowardly leader who let Putin intimidate him, and would not be elected but for the peculiar vagaries of the French system.

10. Martin Selmayr

Selmayr, the cabinet chief of the European Commission president, is widely accepted as the power behind — and right beside — the Juncker throne. The antithesis of the docile functionary, he has shown a willingness to confront and mock national ministers and leaders, as seen in his interactions with German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble and former Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, respectively.

He is known to block files he doesn’t support from moving forward, even when whole teams of commissioners disagree: complaints by Uber and Airbnb are examples. But the Selmayr Strongarm is starting to annoy commissioners and officials. One, Kristalina Georgieva, the Bulgarian vice president of the European Commission, left her job in October to join the World Bank. She considered Selmayr to be a “poisonous” influence on the Commission. Others may follow her.

It is no secret that Selmayr wants nothing more than a stronger, federal Europe. The question is: Will he wreck the EU we’ve got in his determination to make the new one?

(Let’s call it Selmayrstan.)

11. Margrethe Vestager

Something of a heroine on the anti-big business left in Europe, Vestager, the European commissioner for competition from Denmark, might seem a contrarian choice for this list. But she could make life difficult this year for people on the old continent if she is too gung-ho with the most politically explosive cases. How will a big tax claw-back against Amazon go down with the new nationalist Trump administration? Or the colossal fines against Google, whose CEO is a member of Trump’s new circle of techie buddies?

A tough decision against Google might be welcomed with dancing in the streets in some European cities, but an “America First” Washington could be incensed. And unless she is careful, her state aid probes into the deal the U.K. offered Nissan or the tax affairs of Gibraltar could poison already tense EU-U.K. relations. Cases against French national champions like EDF or Areva could also feed anti-EU sentiment in France during an election year.

12. Geert Wilders

Wilders, leader of the Dutch Freedom Party, is the OTHER intemperate white male politician with a blonde bouffant. He plies his trade in the Netherlands, a liberal, tolerant country that grows less liberal and tolerant by the day, thanks to his tireless efforts.

Unlike Le Pen in France, or other far-right politicians in Europe, he is not a crude nativist or anti-Semite. Instead, he directs his ire almost exclusively at Islam, while purporting to be a defender of Western values. One might be tempted to call him a “Western-civ” fundamentalist if one could be sure that he would be tolerant of those Arab immigrants who integrated more fully within Europe.

But since he has called for a banning of the Koran and a closure of all mosques in the Netherlands, there is clearly no place in Wilders’ society for even the most moderate Muslim.

As Europe confronts a refugee crisis without apparent end, his style of Manichean confrontation offers a recipe for civil war in Europe’s midst.

Tunku Varadarajan, a contributing editor at POLITICO, is the Virginia Hobbs Carpenter Research Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

Correction: This article has been updated to correct the location of Catalonia in Spain.