The internal structure of the European Union needs a major overhaul to accommodate newcomers after the next wave of enlargement, European Parliament president Roberta Metsola stressed in Warsaw after meeting Polish prime minister Donald Tusk on Wednesday, August 28th. Critics fear her words signal yet another power grab by Brussels.
Metsola arrived in Poland after traveling to Moldova to attend the country’s Independence Day celebrations where she delivered a strong message in support of Moldova’s eventual EU accession.
“Europe is your family, and it is your right to choose the destiny of your country,” she told attendees at the event titled ‘A European Moldova.’ “And Europe will welcome you with open arms and open hearts.”
Stopping in Warsaw on her way back to Brussels, Metsola described EU enlargement as the bloc’s “strongest geopolitical tool” against Russia and its war in Ukraine, which remain “a constant threat to EU security, its democratic system, its stability, its values, and the European way of life.”
However, she underlined that enlargement cannot happen without parallel structural reforms—which, in EU lingo, always means deeper integration with more centralized power given Brussels and less sovereignty to the member states.
What’s more, Eurocrats like to portray the process of further integration as an inevitability, inherent to the European Union from the beginning. It is not surprising that Metsola chose the same angle here.
“Our Union is a constantly changing project which requires constant adjusting,” she said. “We have to understand that the current structure of the EU will not be appropriate anymore in a Union counting 32, 33 or 35 members.”
Among other things, Metsola called for the strengthening of Europe’s security architecture, ramping up support for Ukraine, improving the bloc’s competitiveness, alleviating the cost of living crisis, creating jobs, and promoting sustainable development as immediate priorities for the near future.
EU leaders often call for “reforms” when talking about enlargement, but rarely go into details of what they truly mean.
Last year, the European Parliament adopted several sets of proposals containing concrete reform ideas and submitted them for Council deliberation. The most comprehensive package was written by the so-called ‘Verhofstadt Group,’ a circle of MEPs led by the infamously Eurofederalist Guy Verhofstadt from the liberal Renew group, whose long-standing dream has always been turning Europe into some kind of federation with little to no independence left for member states.
Among these proposals, the plenary already endorsed restricting the Council’s—and therefore, the member states’—legislative powers, scrapping its rotating presidency model, and stripping member states of their veto rights while strengthening the Parliament itself.
Furthermore, the Verhofstadt package also included the transfer of ten policy areas that have so far belonged to the member states under partial or complete EU competence. Two (climate and environment) would be exclusive to Brussels, while eight others (including public health, external border control, foreign affairs, and defense policy) would be “shared competencies” with the Union having priority in exercising them.
The document also envisaged giving voting rights to mobile and stateless EU citizens through a new “European citizenship”; lowering the voting age to 16; introducing Europe-wide referendums; and creating an entirely new, advisory body made of randomly selected individuals—all in the name of giving “democracy an update … permanently, by means of treaty change.”
“The European Union as a community of sovereign states is being abolished and a superstate is being created without any consent of the people, … where a political oligarchy will rule unaccountably and escape the democratic control of citizens,” said Polish MEP Jacek Saryusz-Wolski. He is shadow rapporteur for the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group and therefore has an intimate knowledge of what is in the file.
The EU elections momentarily pushed this project into the background, but as Metsola’s remarks also show, EU reforms are still on the table. That is why the one true priority for conservative EU politicians must always be safeguarding sovereignty, as Spanish MEP Hermann Tertsch of the right-wing Vox party stressed in an exclusive interview with The European Conservative right before the elections.
National sovereignty is the most important “precondition” for effectively tackling any and all of Europe’s current challenges, Tertsch said. Therefore, instead of further centralization, the long-term goal must be some form of “devolution,” he stressed, because “otherwise, Brussels will persist in its deleterious encroachment on our national competences, until the train wreck becomes inevitable.”
