EU has lost favour with citizens, commission president warns
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Version 0 of 1. Europe’s citizens are increasingly abandoning the European project because the EU has interfered too much with their lives, the commission president has warned. Jean-Claude Juncker told a meeting of the Council of Europe – not an EU body – in Strasbourg that people were “stepping away” from the EU, which he said had “lost a part of its attractiveness”. Juncker said one of the reasons EU citizens were losing faith in the union was because “we are interfering in too many areas of their private lives, and in too many areas where member states are better placed to act”. European commissions had been “wrong to over-regulate and interfere too much in the lives of our citizens”, he said, stressing that the EU’s current executive was trying to cut new legislation to a minimum. The comments were Juncker’s sharpest since his inaugural state of the union speech in September last year, when he warned the EU was “not in a good place” and that it needed to move far beyond business as usual to address the daunting political challenges facing the bloc. He told the Council of Europe on Tuesday that EU officials were not very popular at home when they pleaded the European cause, and “no longer respected” when they said the EU had to be given priority. Juncker warned that a slowing birthrate and shrinking economic potential meant Europe faced losing respect on the world stage. Europe made up 20% of the world population a century ago, but by the end of this century will account for barely 4%, he said. “We are losing economic clout in a very visible way,” the commission president said, adding that the combination of long-term decline and more immediate crises such as the refugee crisis and Islamist terror attacks left the EU facing “very tough times”. The risk, he warned, was that: “We will eventually end up with the ruins of this ideal; people who want more national things at the expense of European principles and … find themselves defenceless.” Separately, Juncker said on Tuesday that Turkey would have to meet all criteria for visa-free travel with Europe before Brussels would consider easing restrictions as part of a controversial migration deal. Ankara earlier threatened to walk away from the agreement, under which it gets more EU funding for refugees in Turkey, the revival of EU accession talks and quicker visa liberalisation. But Juncker said Turkey must fulfil all remaining conditions for visa liberalisation. “The criteria will not be watered down in the case of Turkey,” he said. A visa waiver for Turkey’s 75 million citizens is highly controversial in many EU states because of fears it would open a path to more Muslim migration. |