Macron Says Europe Is Missing the Point With Fight Over Budget
Macron Says Europe Is Missing the Point With Fight Over Budget
(Bloomberg) -- French President Emmanuel Macron urged his European Union partners, and Germany in particular, not to let the debate over the bloc’s budget distract them from their real challenges.
The EU needs to help its middle classes rediscover their “appetite for the future” after they paid the price of tackling the financial crisis and then were left exposed by a massive influx of migrants in 2015, Macron told delegates at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday.
To achieve that, he called on the EU to step up investment in the technologies that will allow the continent to keep control of its destiny in the future –- 5G networks, cloud-computing and artificial intelligence.
EU leaders are set for a marathon summit battle next week over whether their next seven-year budget should be 1% or 1.1% of the bloc’s annual economic output.
“That’s not up to the level of what we have to do,” Macron said, railing against policies which have restricted investment in the EU. “This policy mix is mad in an environment in which borrowing costs are essentially zero,” he said.
EU Council President Charles Michel proposed on Friday that governments commit 1.095 trillion euros ($1.2 trillion) to a joint pot for the period between 2021 and 2027, which corresponds to 1.074% of the bloc’s GDP.
Diplomats from both the countries in favor of more spending and those who want an austere budget said they were unhappy with the proposal and that a deal at the summit beginning Feb. 20 is unlikely because the two sides are still far apart.
Macron was asked particularly about the frustrations of working with Germany, where Chancellor Angela Merkel has refused to embrace his calls for wide-ranging measures to reinforce the EU’s economic, diplomatic and military power.
“I’m not frustrated, I’m impatient, because I think that today it’s a question of the speed of our reaction and of the clarity of the response that we give our citizens,” he said. “If the Franco-German couple cannot define a clear response to this challenge of giving the middle classes a perspective for the future -- and bring all their European partners with them -- we will be making an historic mistake.”
He pointed to a series of joint initiatives on military aircraft, batteries and cooperation between universities as evidence that the two countries can work together. But insisted that they need to move faster.
“We need to create a new dynamic for the European adventure,” he said.
To contact the reporter on this story: Ben Sills in Munich at bsills@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Flavia Krause-Jackson at fjackson@bloomberg.net, Iain Rogers
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