French President Emmanuel Macron has urged Europe to assert itself on the world stage, saying it is time to start acting like a power.
In the face of growing threats from China, Russia, and now the US, he told a group of European newspapers that the continent faced a wake-up call.
Are we ready to become a power? This is the question in the field of economy and finance, in defence and security, and in our democratic systems, he stated ahead of an EU summit in Brussels.
Macron repeated his call for EU-wide mutualised loans to raise the hundreds of billions of euros needed for industrial investment.
He stated, The time has come to launch a shared debt capacity to fund our future expense - eurobonds for the future. We need big European programmes to finance the best projects.
His previous calls for mutualised loans were met with skepticism from Germany and other countries, who feel France seeks to use Europe to take on a financial burden it cannot shoulder alone.
Despite acknowledging France's need for reform - unlike the economies in the north which have a stronger fiscal responsibility - he pointed out that there's a growing demand in financial markets for mutualised European debt.
According to Macron, the EU needs €1.2 trillion a year to invest in crucial sectors like security, defense, clean energy, and artificial intelligence, warning that the EU must protect its industries amid competition from global powers.
He expressed that Europe is currently the most open market worldwide and cautioned against setting rules that impose undue burdens on European producers without applying similar standards to non-European entities.
In Macron's view, climate change and the unpredictability of US alliances underline the urgency for a unified European approach, stating, Today, we Europeans are on our own. But we have each other. We are 450 million people. It's huge.
He concluded by emphasizing, We came together to stop war, we came together to build a market. But we always forbade ourselves to think of power.
