Among the strong words that emerged from the tumult of the colorful and mirrored glasses Davos economic forum, there is one that went under the radar and yet is of major importance. That of German Chancellor Friedrich Merz castigating the excess of bureaucracy and regulation of the European Union. “The single market was created at the time to form the most competitive economic market in the world, instead we have become the champions of over-regulation. This has to stop”he chanted. We would have liked it to come from a French leader concerned about the fate of his fellow citizens rather than his international image. Alas, when it comes to overtransposition of rules and normative madness, we have become unbeatable. Our businesses, our farmers, our communities which are suffocating a little more every day can testify to this. “Champion my brother! »
Germany, once the champion of budgetary rigor, has decided to go beyond its main principles to revive its arms industry and increase its power as Europe’s leading economy. For its part, France is struggling to provide itself with a budget and continues to sell off entire sections of its sovereignty, whether in industrial or legal matters since now European judges and commissioners are the masters aboard the France ship. We have also given free rein to the President of the European Commission, Mrs. Ursula von der Leyen, who assumes rights over the most regal sector of all, that is to say defense. To everyone’s amazement, she proposed at the Copenhagen summit at the beginning of October, the creation of a “multinational force made up of tens of thousands of soldiers”, as a security guarantee for kyiv.
A sleeping Europe
We see where the inspiration came from for a French president no doubt dreaming of one day following in his footsteps. Can we reconcile national sovereignty and European sovereignty as Emmanuel Macron says? No since the first implies putting the interests of the French nation before all others, which is contradicted by the second. Sovereignty is the people. If there is a French people, there does not exist in the literal sense of a European people. The “Europeanists” project was to achieve a vast commercial zone without borders and basically without any real capacity to resist foreign competition. The Union no longer provides strength. Donald Trump with his blows came to sound the awakening of a Europe lazily asleep under the American umbrella.
It is time to put an end to the deregulatory ideology that has been rampant since the Treaty of Maastricht in 1992, as Philippe de Villiers and Michel Onfray insist. Chancellor Merz, seeing France’s internal and budgetary difficulties and the decline of a President Macron at the end of his term, set out in search of a strong partner. He turned to the Italian Giorgia Meloni by signing on January 23, under the sparkling sun of Rome, a partnership to revive European competitiveness and sign around ten bilateral agreements in the defense sectors, energy cooperation and the fight against illegal immigration. The Rome-Berlin axis is a response to the disintegration of the Franco-German relationship. It’s called realpolitik.
