Verhofstadt: we need a European Commission able to govern

“Too little, too late”: no doubts this is the way Guy Verhofstadt judges the European policy as we saw it lately. And the crucial reason is clear: the European Commission hasn’t really governed. The next Commission, to which the ALDE president is a candidate for the presidency, needs to get back the role it deserves, to become the institution “leading Europe and imposing its idea of future.” This is one of the main points expressed in the electoral program presented by the Liberal leader, supported in Italy by the list “Scelta Europea”, has presented earlier last week.

“What we’ve seen in the last year,” attacked Verhofstadt, “is not a European policy, that is far from that.” The Commission is forgetting to “use its right of initiative” while waiting for the approval of Member States. And this behaviour is making it disappear. The next Commission, insisted the ALDE president, must “abandon the disastrous ‘Barroso-method’ of preventive negotiations,” using all of its power. The Liberal candidate has imagined an entire system for reforming the Commission and making it more effective. The idea is to create four big areas of competences: “energy, climate and innovation,” “foreign affairs,” “justice and fundamental rights,” and “economic, financial and monetary affairs.” In the middle, with the role of coordinator, the President of the Commission. In the reorganization of the EU institutions, it will be necessary to create a single seat for the European Parliament, which would lead to a €200m in savings, said Verhofstadt.

The basic idea on which we need to fund the future European system, according to the candidate, is ‘obvious’: growth can come only from an increased integration of our markets and our policies. If the rest of the world is growing at a 4/5 percent pace, while Europe continues sinking, the cause has to be found into an excessive debt and into the lack of integration. A public debt exceeding 100 percent, underlined Verhofstadt, is not acceptable, while it is becoming “common” in several Member States. “Socialists think we can exit the crisis denying the problem,” criticized the Liberal leader, “but piling debt on debt is just a recipe for another disaster.” An the nationalists’ position is inconceivable as well – they think they can get back growth excluding themselves from the European market, the biggest worldwide. According to Verhofstadt, we need to act in the opposite way. Without incrementing public debt, it is necessary to use an improved European integration as the engine of growth, as it was in the ’90s. This is the only way to get real growth, that is more than 2 percent, far from the current 1 percent which someone calls “growth” today, but that is just “stagnation.”

An increased integration which should involve all aspects, from the acceleration of the banking union, to the unification of markets, to the creation “as soon as possible” of a single energy market allowing us to cut our energy dependence and to diversify our imports. “This is not because of the Ukrainian crisis,” pointed out Verhofstadt, “this is because we need to be competitive, to cut drastically the price of energy both for citizens and for enterprises.” Furthermore, we need to create a real digital market, to fix shared parameters for economic governance, dismissing the idea of Single Member contractual arrangements. Than, creating a single European defence system, launching a scheme to encourage workers’ mobility into the Union – making the country of origin offer a six-month coverage to counteract the fears of the hosting countries’ welfare systems.

According to Verhofstadt, the next European Commission will have to act swiftly on reinforcing civil liberties. Privacy shall be guaranteed totally, as per the right to oblivion. It is necessary to reinforce the possibility of persecuting cross-border crimes, we need an anti-discrimination European law and a shared policy on immigration – the best way for fighting illegal interests and human trafficking.