02 December 2017

POLITICO: Dutch prime minister says more EU integration ‘not the answer’

A “federal Europe” and “more integration” is not the answer to the EU’s problems, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said in a speech, challenging French President Emmanuel Macron’s vision of a more integrated Europe.

The Dutch prime minister — who was speaking at the annual congress of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) — did not name Macron in the speech but at one point indicated his skepticism for the idea of “democratic conventions” that was “coming from France.”

Taken together, the speech is a strong rebuff to Macron’s ambitious and detailed reform agenda, which includes a wide range of policies from introducing a new class of transnational MEPs to the creation of a common budget for the Eurozone.

“The EU needs to solve problems that we – as individual member states – cannot solve alone,” Rutte told the ALDE congress in Amsterdam. “A federal Europe is not the answer to those problems, and neither is a politics based on symbolism.”

Rutte, who is a liberal like Macron, added that pushing for more European integration cannot be a goal in itself. “Integration for integration’s sake will only harm public support for the European Union. So before we develop new policy, before we set up new agencies, before we think up new rules and regulations, we need to ask ourselves: what problem does this truly solve?”

On Macron’s idea of “democratic conventions” — public debates in member countries aimed at giving citizens a greater say in what happens in the EU — Rutte was unenthusiastic.

“My worry is that you would force countries to organize these conventions, that you will start to pontificate, to tell people why Europe is important,” He said, adding that, “[we should not be] expanding the tasks of the European Union but trying to get it more focused.” [...]

“But on the other hand, we want to strengthen the fiscal responsibility of every member state of the union. There is a conflict zone in the coalition talks with CDU [Merkel’s party] and the greens…we disagree with similar ideas of EU fiscal recipes, we don’t need them, we need more public sector investment in technologies, and we need more competitiveness but we don’t need any further fiscal capacity. And this is not a Euroscpetical position,” he said. [...]

Full article on POLITICO

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