Political vision then and now

A French-speaking voter asks:

“I’d like to know why we get the impression these days that there’s less political vision — about Europe in any case — than when building up Europe began after the Second World War.”

The response:

“I’m Piotr Maciej Kaczynski, Research Fellow at the Centre for European Policy Studies. Today, we live in a time where the current political leaders of Europe do not have a project that could unite them all. They are all limited by their national domestic environments. If you take President Sarkozy, who was extremely visible as President of the European Council when France had the presidency of the EU, the moment he stopped being head of the EU, he started to play French politics, raising issues that would undermine the single market, and the issue of protectionism came up. So, the problem here is that there is no one vision that could unite them all, and another problem is the EU of 27, where we do lack coherence.”

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tags: European elections, Politics