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Emilio Lamo de Espinosa (centre), with Ana Palacio, Joaquín Almunia and the report’s coordinators, Carlos Closa and Ignacio Molina, during the presentation./ Photo: Elcano Royal Institute

The Diplomat. 11/07/2018

Elcano Royal Institute presented yesterday a report in which it has worked for the last two years under the name ‘The future of the European Union’, in which it advocates creating a “pan-European” constituency for the European elections that means, at least, 5% of the 751 seats of the European Parliament.

The next European election of May 2019 was very present in the debate of the report, since the director of Elcano, Emilio Lamo Espinosa, warned about the risk of getting a European Parliament with a “xenophobic” majority for the first time in the history of this European institution.

Along the same lines, Ignacio Molina, one of the project’s coordinators, emphasized that half of the population of the European population is now under the Eurosceptic or where this type of forces significantly influence the management of the Executive. In all, 14 of the 28 current governments of the EU are critical with the community institutions in one way or another.

The report includes about twenty recommendations for the future of the EU, standing out among them the bet on recovering the political trust among the States and democratically legitimating the governance of the euro before starting the reform of the EMU, or the creation of an Erasmus for workers that lose their employment with the purpose of recycling them.

One of those recommendations is the proposal of the EU to create a system of “differentiated integration” for the countries that want to move forward in the discussion of their asylum policies and border protection and, also, create mechanisms to expel the countries that fragrantly violate their values.

The document proposes that the EU creates a system of annual or biannual scrutiny to assess how the member States follow the values of article 2 of the Treaty of the EU -freedom, human dignity, democracy, equality, rule of law and respect for the human rights- as well as to detect violations in an incipient moment and without accusations of unequal treatment.

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Palacio and Almunia agreed on the importance of the values in the European project

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Among those participating in the presentation were the former Foreign Minister Ana Palacio and the former deputy president of the European Commission Joaquín Almunia, and both of them agreed on the importance of the values in the European project. “We took them for granted, conquered and armored, and, however, we are seeing serious problems in democratic countries where democracy is deteriorating”, Almunia warned.

Palacio, for her part, was convinced that there will be strengthened cooperation in immigration and also in defense. The Brexit monopolized part of the debate and the former minister of PP pointed out the convenience of reviewing the mandate of the European negotiator, Michel Barnier. Meanwhile, Almunia warned that if the British Government falls that could extend the negotiation beyond the end of 2018. Delaying the Brexit until after March 29, 2019, would require unanimity and that, he pointed out, is very complicated.