Emmanuel Macron warned his EU partners this Thursday that “Europe can die” if quick decisions are not taken to guarantee its sovereignty in multiple areas, from defense to the high-tech industry, and to preserve its political model and social, which is threatened.
The French president gave a long speech, lasting almost two hours, at the Sorbonne University, in the same setting where he spoke seven years ago, in 2017, a few months after entering the Elysée.
“Our Europe is mortal,” said Macron. “Europe can die. It depends on us.” It was the central phrase of his speech, followed by some 500 guests, concepts that he repeated several times with the rhetorical and almost theatrical skill that characterizes the French head of state in this type of event.
According to Macron, events in recent years such as the pandemic and the war in Ukraine have changed the rules of the game. The European Union reacted well to these crises, with measures such as joint debt, until then a taboo, to boost economic recovery, or the common purchase of vaccines, but it must do much more.
The speech has been highly criticized by the opposition and part of the press for considering that it is an electoral maneuver by the president, who would try to get fully involved in the campaign for the European elections on June 9 to try to reverse a very unfavorable. According to polls, the Macronist list, headed by MEP Valérie Hayer, is between 12 and 15 percentage points behind the National Regroupment (extreme right). Elysée sources have denied this political intention, although the explanations have not been very convincing.
The event at the Sorbonne has also been controversial because French MEPs were invited, without taking into account that today there was the last plenary session of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, with important votes.
Macron has touched on a multitude of topics, from agriculture to semiconductors. The common denominator has been to warn that Europe runs a very serious risk of being weakened and relegated in the global context if it does not defend itself together and invest massively. For the French president, the crises of recent years have shown that the EU cannot depend on Russia for its energy, on China for certain strategic industrial supplies, or on the United States for its defense.
According to Macron, the maintenance of a highly valued social protection model and an unparalleled system of freedoms also depends on economic and defense sovereignty. The president has warned of the threats that liberal democracies suffer
Europe must provide itself with the instruments to be a “power”, maintain “prosperity” and preserve its “humanism”. These three ideas have been emphasized by the speaker. In the power section he has highlighted the need to improve its autonomous defense, even with a common loan to invest massively, and to develop an immigration and asylum policy that truly enforces borders. Macron has made it quite clear that the French nuclear deterrent capacity – the only independent one within the EU – “is an unavoidable element” of European defense and also covers the continent’s partners and allies, a statement that is not always so obvious. . According to the president, Europe should also have an anti-missile shield.
Regarding Ukraine, Macron recalled the usual line and stated that “the main danger for European security is the war in Ukraine; the sine qua non for our security is that Russia does not win this war of aggression.”
Regarding Brexit, the president admitted that it has been one of the most serious crises, with the consequence that “no one today dares to propose exits, neither from Europe nor from the euro.”
