Talking Europe hosts former Spanish foreign minister Arancha Gonzalez Laya, who is now dean of one of the top international relations schools in the world – the Paris School of International Affairs. We delve into the EU election campaign, EU competitiveness, transatlantic relations and the fragile political situation in Spain amid rising tensions over the Catalan issue.
Asked about the upcoming European elections, Gonzalez Laya points to polls suggesting that only 44 percent of French people will go to the polls.
"We should be asking ourselves, why is it that 60 percent of the French citizens will not go to vote? Bearing in mind that in the last election in 2019, we managed to increase the participation of French citizens by eight percentage points to reach 50 percent."
Whereas last time climate change was a big factor in people turning out to vote, Gonzalez Laya says that this time "we are debating wokeism and demography. We are debating migration. But we are not debating the economy. We are not debating climate change. We are not debating security and defence issues. We are not."
The former Spanish foreign minister has co-authored an op-ed in Foreign Affairs entitled "Trump-proofing Europe: How the continent can prepare for American abandonment." But will "Trump-proofing" come too late for Ukraine?
"In the longer term the US is becoming more isolationist," Gonzalez Laya responds, "which is one of the reasons why Europe needs to take its destiny into its own hands. That starts with Ukraine, which is a war on European soil. In the short term, we have to meet Ukraine's needs, both economic and military. But we have to do that while we also invest longer-term in the security and in the defence capabilities of Europe."
We then turn to the "new European competitiveness deal" that the April 17-18 EU summit has been calling for. "This matters a lot to businesses across the European Union. It matters a lot to businesses in France," Gonzalez Laya insists.
"There are three areas where the EU is less competitive than its big rivals in the US or China, and this is because Europeans are less integrated. Firstly, energy is too expensive in Europe compared to the US and other jurisdictions. Second is capital markets; our ability to invest the wealth that Europe has. It is not that we don't have wealth, it is that this wealth is invested in the US as opposed to being invested in the European Union. And the third area is technology. We have fragmented technology markets in the EU. So Europe is strong when Europe is integrated. Europe is weak when Europe is too fragmented into little national markets."
