After Donald Trump's victory, Europe can no longer be content with declarations of intent: it must urgently pull itself together and regain control over world affairs, without having any illusions about what will come from the United States.
However, the central point is that it is impossible to face the socio-economic, climatic and geopolitical challenges that are shaking the planet, as long as the European Union (EU) takes its decisions unanimously by the twenty-seven member states, which is unfortunately currently the case for all important decisions, particularly for all those having a budgetary or financial impact.
The only way to break the deadlock is for a hard core of countries, led by France and Germany, to finally put on the table concrete proposals allowing us to move forward both on the budgetary and institutional levels, without wait for unanimous agreement from other countries. This hypothesis of a hard core making it possible to overcome the blockages of unanimity has been mentioned many times in the past, most recently in the Draghi report proposing a massive investment plan to Europe.
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Today it is time to give it substance and really move forward. To do this, three conditions must be met: this hard core must be given solid institutional and democratic foundations; it is essential that Germany benefits from this, particularly on a budgetary level, and not just France, Italy or Spain; it is necessary that within each country, and at the European level as a whole, several political visions, from the right as well as the left, can find material to express themselves and to flourish.
Strengthened parliamentary union
Let's start with the first point. To constitute a hard core country capable of making important budgetary and financial decisions with all the necessary democratic legitimacy, it is important to base it on a solid institutional and political framework.
The most logical would be to start from the Franco-German Parliamentary Assembly (APFA), set up in 2019 as part of the renewal of the Franco-German bilateral treaty. A young and little-known institution, made up of one hundred deputies from all the parliamentary groups of the National Assembly and the Bundestag, the APFA has met between two and three times a year since its creation, and has until now been confined to a primarily advisory role.
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