[en] The progress made in fusion research in the past 10 years, or even 20 years, is likely to judged in very different ways by those who are involved in this research and by those who look at it from the outside. From the point of view of the fusion community there is little doubt that great progress has been achieved. Outsiders, on the other hand, tend to judge progress not so much in terms of what has been achieved, but rather in terms of what remains to be done; in this respect, the final goal of obtaining commercial energy from nuclear fusion appears today to be 40 or 50 years away, more distance in the future than it was thought to be 10 or 20 years ago. The present article tries to consider both points of view, and, as far as possible, to reconcile them. The authors concentrate on what we consider key issues, rather than attempting a complete coverage of the subject. Most of the article discuss the magnetic confinement approach to fusion, since this is closer to the direct experience of the authors, and it represents the overwhelming majority of the fusion research effort in Europe. In the United States, expenditures on inertial-confinement fusion research are about as large as those of magnetic confinement, but most of the inertial-confinement work is funded out of the military budget for this relevance to nuclear-weapon physics and, consequently, is not published in the open literature. Only a short mention of the inertial confinement approach is made there; this does not necessarily means that its prospects forth future are considered less interesting than those of the magnetic confinement approach