The European Union could easily become a victim of the coronavirus, according to two world-famous politicians who rarely agree on much.
Both French President Emmanuel Macron and Nigel Farage, the leader of the successful campaign for British withdrawal from the EU known as Brexit, suggested on Friday that the EU is in trouble — albeit in very different terms.
In an interview with the Financial Times, the French president said that richer EU members have a special responsibility in the way they deal with the coronavirus crisis.
Macron called on the richer EU members — Germany and the Netherlands, specifically — to show solidarity and support southern European nations who have been hit hard by COVID-19 — Spain and Italy, specifically.
“We are at a moment of truth, which is to decide whether the European Union is a political project or just a market project,” Macron told the Times. “I think it’s a political project …We need financial transfers and solidarity, if only so that Europe holds on.”
Failure to make these things happen will threaten both the EU and the Euro, he told the Times' Victor Mallet and Roula Khalaf.
The UK’s Farage already saw the EU as a floundering project.
“The EU has proved to be useless and irrelevant in this crisis,” Farage told Newsmax. “Macron’s call for northern European taxpayers to bail out the stricken south won’t happen.”
He went on to predict that “the end of the EU is near and inevitable.”
John Gizzi is chief political columnist and White House correspondent for Newsmax. For more of his reports, Go Here Now.
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