“Relaunch, power, belonging.” Emmanuel Macron described, Monday evening, December 6, the three axes of the French presidency of the EU, during a debate for the 25 years of the Jacques Delors Institute, before his press conference on this subject Thursday. After quoting “the need for recovery in response to the crisis”, the Head of State defended at length “the need to take responsibility for this Europe and always call it our”.
The French President stressed that this feeling of European belonging “withered away” in France as in other EU countries. “No one is ignoring the public debate in our country at the moment”, he continued in front of the members of the institute gathered at the Odeon-Theater of Europe, “when the going gets tough, we say it’s Europe’s fault”.
As for the need to “power”, he called to consolidate “a Europe which will be able to make its own choices, military, technological, cultural, of values”. “We have provincial debates, where the real issues are what we want to become in relation to the Chinese model, to the American model.”
The vaccination of Europeans is the best example of the effectiveness of Europe, he insisted. “Be nationalists, you Hungarians, be Polish or French nationalists, you would not be vaccinated, or imperfectly. Maybe you would have had your Russian friends to give you the [vaccin] Sputnik which is still not approved by the WHO? Good luck !”, he quipped. “You are only vaccinated with the best vaccines in the world because you are European.”
On the other hand, “Europe which comes to explain to people what should be the words to say or not to say is not a Europe to which I fully adhere, it is a bit of rubbish”, he said. This is an allusion to a draft directive for European officials recommending them to ban expressions like “Christmas period” or “Ladies and Gentlemen” in favor of neutral terms. The Commission gave up after the start of a controversy.