The Future of the European Union
| Autor | Guy Verhofstadt |
| Páginas | 35-42 |
Page 35
First of all, I want to thank EuroBasque for the invitation to be here, at this conference. A conference that fortunately is organised this year. Thankfully I was not invited last year, because if I was invited last year, that should be a very depressive moment. You remember, more or less one year ago, there was a very, I should say, negative feeling in the European Union about the future of the European Union. One year ago, after the Brexit referendum, everybody was saying, ‘This is only the start of a process of the disintegration of the Union. After the Brexit there will be a Nexit, the Dutch going out; there will be a Frexit, the French going out’, and so on, and so on. So everybody, last year, predicted that the Brexit was the start of what I call a domino effect: it will be the first of a number of exits. And I have to tell you, it is better that you invited me this year because what we have seen since the Brexit is quite the opposite. That is, the Brexit has not created a domino effect, but has in fact been the start of a reversed domino effect. And what we have seen since the Brexit is that in many countries it is not the Eurosceptics or the populists who have won the elections, but the pro-European forces who have won the elections.
I’ll give you three examples: the Austrian elections. Van der Bellen against Hofer, the extreme right candidate. The reason why in this last round –because they had to do this election two times– the reason why 300,000 votes went from one candidate to the other, from Hofer to Van der Bellen, is because Hofer had said ‘Maybe Austria will go out of the Euro’. And what happened was that 300,000 people who voted for him went to Van der Bellen, who was the pro-European candidate.
Then, a few months later, the Dutch elections. Everybody was talking: ‘The next to exit will be the Dutch after their national elections’. And what we have seen is quite the opposite: the big winners in the Dutch election were two pro-European parties, D66 and the Green Party. Together they won 17 seats, while the extreme right-wing party of Wilders won 13%, exactly the same as the Greens, exactly the same as the D66 Party. So, the pro-European parties gained four times more seats than the extreme right-wing party, who wanted a Nexit.
And then we have the third example, the last elections in France, where we got, for the first time, a candidate for the French presidency saying that European sovereignty
Page 36
is more important than French sovereignty. Normally, if you say that as a candidate in France, it’s over. And a candidate who has got a very pro-European programme –Europe was also in the heart of the debates in France, which has never happened in the past– in the second round he got 66%, two thirds of the votes.
So, what we have seen is that since the Brexit –that doesn’t mean that people are now very happy about the European Union. They’re not. That doesn’t mean that they no longer have criticism towards the European Union –but what people don’t want is the uncertainty of leaving the European Union. They’re saying that we need to reform the European Union, not destroy it. And I think that is the message since Brexit that we see in almost in every country. We see it also in opinion polls: for the first time support for the European Union is going up again, which was not the case, I should say, in the last, more or less, ten years.
So in a certain way, there are people who were a little bit cynical saying that if the Brexit hadn’t happened, we would have had to invent it. Unfortunately, we did not have to invent it, because the reality is, naturally, that this Brexit referendum is a failure, a failure for everybody, a difficult problem and a difficult moment for everybody. When a big country like the UK is leaving the European Union, you can only say it’s a failure, it’s weakening the European Union. It’s weakening the European Union economically, but it’s also certainly weakening the European Union geopolitically. And these Brexit negotiations will be very difficult, naturally. They will only start on Monday –as everybody’s noticed, it’s already more than a year after the referendum, and we still have not started the negotiations. The negotiations will really start next week on Monday and it will be a very difficult exercise because the European Union can never accept that they can have a status outside the European Union that is better than being a member of the Union. There always has to be a difference: you cannot expect that someone who is going to go out of the European Union can then have an agreement with the European Union with exactly all the same advantages. That is not possible. Otherwise, we give the impression to all the other member states that being a member or not being a member is exactly the same. It’s not the same. The fact that you are in the European Union means that you have an internal market, that you are...
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