The European Union (EU) must bring an end to national sovereignty over finance with the creation of a “eurozone budget” in order to kill off populist politics within the euro region, according to the Commission.
Economic affairs chief of the EU’s unelected executive arm, Pierre Moscovici, said that “more progress in European integration” is required to head off populism, which he described as “a major threat for our democracies, for liberal democracies, for the rule of law and for European values”.
“Having a eurozone budget is absolutely decisive if we want to address the populist challenge, the burning question of inequalities,” he told an interview with Euractiv.
Speaking after a talk at New York’s European American Chamber of Commerce, Moscovici said: “The European crisis is no more an economic crisis. It is an inequality crisis. It is a political crisis. It is a crisis of delivery. We need to deliver more. That is what eurozone reform is about. It is not technical. It is highly political.”
Turning to talk of Italy, where citizens elected a coalition between the Eurosceptic, anti-establishment Five Star Movement and the anti-mass migration League earlier this year, Moscovici warned against the government’s defiance of EU diktats demanding a steep curb to public spending.
The Paris-born Commissioner, who began his political career in France’s Revolutionary Communist League, stated: “My message is that their interest, not only their duty but their interest, is to reduce the structural deficit” and in turn their public debt so they can develop investment in the economy.”
During another attack on Italy earlier this month over the government’s failure to propose what he would accept as a “credible budget”, Moscovici lashed out at populism in Europe, speaking of “little Mussolinis” and “a climate that looks a lot like the 1930s”.
In 2015, when Italy was governed by unelected technocrats, the then Economy Minister Pier Carlo Padoan — a globalist former IMF for Italy boss who serves as OECD deputy secretary-general — urged deeper eurozone integration to ensure that no country could ever leave the single currency.
French President Emmanuel Macron is one of the major proponents of this, having demanded a “profound transformation” of the eurozone which would see its 19 members locked together with a joint finance minister, budget, and parliament.
According to Euractiv, the arch-globalist French leader and his domestic economy team have been “ramping up the pressure” this year to move forward with irreversible convergence before European Parliament elections take place next year, fearing the rise of pro-sovereignty movements would endanger the “project” of a federal EU superstate.
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