“Europe can die”, hammered Emmanuel Macron, live from the large amphitheater of the Sorbonne, Thursday April 25, where he returned, seven years after his first speech in this enclosure, to deliver his vision of the European Union (EU). Not hesitating to dramatize the issues, the president described an old continent under attack on its fundamentals, while the war in Ukraine is taking place on its border, the rivalry between the United States and China risks marginalizing it, and the transitions ecological and digital are sharpening rivalries in the world and that “attacks on our liberal democracies” multiply.
“To enable Europe not to disappearcontinued Emmanuel Macron, we must respond with power, prosperity and humanism. » For two hours, in a mixture of emphasis and concrete proposals, which we will have to see if they one day become reality, he tried to illustrate his point. A way to enter the campaign in your own way, while pretending to ignore the electoral issues, while the opinion polls for the European vote of June 9 are alarming for the presidential majority.
The head of state nevertheless made an allusion to the French extreme right, leading the polls, which would threaten Europe from within. Since Brexit, he pointed out, “no one dares to propose exits anymore, neither from Europe nor from the euro.” From now on, the National Rally (RN) and its nationalist friendss have another program, which Viktor Orban, the Hungarian Prime Minister, summarizes as follows: “Occupy Brussels” in order to bring “Ourselves change in the European Union”. Therefore, warned Emmanuel Macron, “Europe can die of its own accord, through a sort of trick of History”.
A “great European loan” for armaments
After’“Sovereign Europe” in 2017, the head of state now pleads loudly for a “Power Europe” – a concept considered until now very French among the Twenty-Seven. He suggests to “bring out a credible defense of the continent”based both on “the European pillar of NATO that we are building”but also on “a European defense framework”. To do this, Mr. Macron proposes “a European defense initiative” in order to develop in the coming months a “common strategy” to then define the weapons with which the Union must equip itself.
Incidentally, the president once again suggests making French nuclear weapons available to the Twenty-Seven, whose dissuasive capacity “is therefore an essential element in the defense of the European continent”, he said, without going so far as to propose sharing the power to trigger nuclear fire. It also opens the door to a continental anti-missile shield, which Paris forcefully rejected when Berlin proposed it within the framework of NATO, shortly after the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
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