Brexit Is Making the Euro Popular, EU Commissioner Vestager Says

(Bloomberg) -- The U.K.’s departure from the European Union is boosting the euro’s popularity by depriving detractors of the common currency of the gravitational pull provided by the bloc’s second-largest economy.

“Non-euro members will have no natural center once Britain leaves. That’s likely to increase the number of euro members over the next 10 years,” Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s Competition Commissioner and a former economy minister from Denmark, said in an interview in Copenhagen.

A liberal and staunch pro-European, Vestager said Brexit had acted as a catalyst for a debate on greater integration in the region, as evinced by French President Emmanuel Macron’s September speech at the Sorbonne University and EU President Jean-Claude Juncker’s March white paper on the future of the union.

“The euro will be different. There will be much less talk about euro and non-euro states, and much more about the European Union and it’s currency, the euro,” Vestager said during a visit to her native country on Monday.

Her comments come as EU finance ministers meet in Brussels to discuss the creation of a European Monetary Fund, a development cited by Vestager as evidence of a “greater appetite” for EU unity.

Denmark’s insistence on opting out of the common currency means it may eventually be one of the few EU members left outside the euro area, she said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Peter Levring in Copenhagen at plevring1@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jonas Bergman at jbergman@bloomberg.net, Nick Rigillo

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