04 April 2014

Rutte: National parliaments have greater legitimacy than EP

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said in a speech to the German liberal FDP party that national parliaments should deal at an earlier stage and also more intensely with decision making in and from Brussels.

As reported by Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten, ahead of the European elections in May, both Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte and the former Italian Premier Enrico Letta have criticised the current state of the EU. 

In his speech to the German Liberal Party (FDP), Rutte said:

"A lot of people in Europe are angry at the EU. Angry at those who sat at the controls in Brussels during recent years. Our common project of peace becomes, if we don't recognise this on time, a project of discontent.

We won't restore the future and the belief in a functioning Europe with European elections or with European top candidates. The ball is now in the court of national parliaments. Their legitimacy is greater than that of the European Parliament. So they should deal at an earlier stage and also more intensely with decision making in and from Brussels.

The European Commission should be given four core tasks: to strengthen the single market, to stimulate international trade, to apply more strictly agreements made and only to regulate in Brussels what really must be dealt with at the European level. All too often agreements regarding the budget or the democratic rule of law haven't been respected...Europe is more and more being associated with an anonymous, formal and impersonal layer of government where national sovereignty is being replaced by normative rules 'from Brussels'."

Video of full speech (in German)

Meanwhile former Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta said that Brussels has become in the eyes of citizens "a Moloch, a symbol of all that is bureaucracy, awkwardness of political decisions". He emphasised that it was important to show to European citizens that the EU is not Brussels, adding that the former system of holding summits in the capitals holding the rotating presidency of the Union was better than the current system of having all summits take place in Brussels.