two months earlier than the elections, Macron's nice ambitions for Europe | EUROtoday

“Europe can die”, hammered Emmanuel Macron, stay from the big amphitheater of the Sorbonne, Thursday April 25, the place he returned, seven years after his first speech on this enclosure, to ship his imaginative and prescient of the European Union (EU). Not hesitating to dramatize the problems, the president described an outdated continent underneath assault on its fundamentals, whereas the warfare in Ukraine is going down on its border, the rivalry between the United States and China dangers marginalizing it, and the transitions ecological and digital are sharpening rivalries on the earth and that “attacks on our liberal democracies” multiply.

“To enable Europe not to disappearcontinued Emmanuel Macron, we must respond with power, prosperity and humanism. » For two hours, in a mixture of emphasis and concrete proposals, which we will have to see if they one day become reality, he tried to illustrate his point. A way to enter the campaign in your own way, while pretending to ignore the electoral issues, while the opinion polls for the European vote of June 9 are alarming for the presidential majority.

The head of state nevertheless made an allusion to the French extreme right, leading the polls, which would threaten Europe from within. Since Brexit, he pointed out, “no one dares to propose exits anymore, neither from Europe nor from the euro.” From now on, the National Rally (RN) and its nationalist palss have one other program, which Viktor Orban, the Hungarian Prime Minister, summarizes as follows: “Occupy Brussels” with a view to deliver “Ourselves change in the European Union”. Therefore, warned Emmanuel Macron, “Europe can die of its own accord, through a sort of trick of History”.

A “great European loan” for armaments

After'“Sovereign Europe” in 2017, the pinnacle of state now pleads loudly for a “Power Europe” – an idea thought of till now very French among the many Twenty-Seven. He suggests to “bring out a credible defense of the continent”based mostly each on “the European pillar of NATO that we are building”but additionally on “a European defense framework”. To do that, Mr. Macron proposes “a European defense initiative” with a view to develop within the coming months a “common strategy” to then outline the weapons with which the Union should equip itself.

Incidentally, the president as soon as once more suggests making French nuclear weapons obtainable to the Twenty-Seven, whose dissuasive capability “is therefore an essential element in the defense of the European continent”, he stated, with out going as far as to suggest sharing the facility to set off nuclear fireplace. It additionally opens the door to a continental anti-missile protect, which Paris forcefully rejected when Berlin proposed it inside the framework of NATO, shortly after the beginning of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

You have 66.96% of this text left to learn. The relaxation is reserved for subscribers.