We give a general construction of extremal Kähler metrics on the total space of certain holomorphic submersions, extending results of Dervan-Sektnan, Fine, and Hong. We consider submersions whose fibres admit a degeneration to Kähler manifolds with constant scalar curvature, in a way that is compatible with the fibration structure. Thus we allow fibres that are K-semistable, rather than K-polystable; this is crucial to moduli theory. On these fibrations we phrase a partial differential equation whose solutions, called optimal symplectic connections, represent a canonical choice of a relatively Kähler metric. We expect this to be the most general construction of a canonical relatively Kähler metric provided all input is smooth. We use the notion of an optimal symplectic connection and the geometry related to it to construct Kähler metrics with constant scalar curvature and extremal metrics on the total space, in adiabatic classes.
