Schinas: A Trump win will accelerate European integration
Europe needs a stable leadership in a world full of insecurities, European Commission Vice-President Margaritis Schinas said at a conference on the island of Nisyros Saturday.
“With two wars in our neighborhood, with geopolitical insecurities, with a thousand risks, the opening of a new crisis of leadership at the heart of the European political system will have significant implications for Europe,” warned Schinas during a dialogue with Tom Ellis, editor-in-chief of Kathimerini English Edition.
Schinas was referring to the – remote, but not non-existent – possibility of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen losing a vote of confidence in the European Parliament.
“If President von der Leyen doesn’t get a vote of confidence in two weeks, Europe will be in turmoil,” Schinas said.
The three groups backing von der Leyen’s candidacy for a second term at the helm of the Commission – the center-right European People’s Party (EPP), the center-left Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D) and the centrist Renew – won 401 seats in the 720-seat assembly in the June 9 European election.
In a speech earlier Saturday evening, a review of the 2019-24 Commission’s work, Schinas talked about the lessons learned by Europe, pointing out – among other things – that this period marked the end of the era of innocence but also the importance of resilience.
“We used to think we could forever buy cheap energy from Russia or import masks when needed from China. We were wrong,” Schinas said. He noted that the “electric shocks” that Europe has experienced led to its awakening but also to its maturation, highlighting the importance of open strategic autonomy and economic security.
Schinas, asked by Ellis whether the European elites were also responsible for the rise of the extreme right in the recent European elections, sought to downplay the extreme right’s performance.
“I do not believe that we are experiencing a tsunami of extreme right and populism, as predicted. We are living a new European Parliament, which will be more kaleidoscopic, will have more colors, more diversity, but a parliament in which there is a clear majority of political forces that want to take Europe forward,” he responded.
Schinas also tried to put a positive spin on a likely Donald Trump victory in the US presidential election in November.
A Trump election, he said, “will act as an accelerator of European integration.” “I have no doubt that the election Trump will ring all the right bells to push Europe into [becoming] a Europe of action.” Europe, Schinas said, has already given examples of rallying when action was needed, citing the anti-Covid Vaccines and the Recovery and Resilience Fund.
The main challenges for a more pro-active Europe are a more robust defense and security arrangement and, “secondarily, the competitiveness and resilience of the European economy.” “Europe cannot remain inactive in this eventuality. We have to arrange the affairs of our house,” Schinas added.
Asked about how Europe will come up with the money, Schinas noted that “if today we Europeans spend a total of 400 billion euros a year on defense and we do not have a common defense, we can have two or three common defense initiatives with €80-100 billion.”
The Nisyros Dialogues, an annual event, was organized by the “Georgios M. Michalos” Foundation, under the auspices of the President of the Republic Katerina Sakellaropoulou and Ecumenical Patriarch Vartholomaios.
[AMNA/Kathimerini]
