The economy, climate change and Europe’s security will be at the heart of the campaign by European liberals at next June’s European elections, according to leading party officials.
The liberal ALDE party gathered in Stockholm last weekend for its annual congress, the last such gathering before next June’s European elections, and has been putting together its policy platform ahead of the opening of the polls.
“We actually started last year already with questionnaires of citizens to learn where the problems are. And this was actually our starting point,” Svenja Hahn, the Vice-President of ALDE who has been tasked with preparing the common manifesto, told EURACTIV.
The manifesto is set to be formally completed at a pre-election party congress in early 2024.
“We’re going to have a strong focus on boosting the economy, that will certainly have a strong focus on free trade, for example. But we’re also connecting it with combating climate change, because it’s also clear that there cannot be a strong future for the European Union, if there is no safe environment,” she added.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was one of the liberal leaders to deliver a video message to delegates in Stockholm, and the war and its impact on the EU was one of the main topics among delegates. Last June, four Ukrainian parties, including Zelenskyy’s Servants of the People and the Golos party led by Kira Rudik, now a Vice-President of ALDE, formally joined the pan-European liberal family.
“The conflict of our time is autocracy versus democracy,” said Hahn, adding that her party wants to define what it believes the EU’s role should be in this battle.
“I went into the elections with my party in 2019, campaigning for a European army, and people were, like, why? What do we need that for? And now no one is asking that question. They see that defence and security is a topic that we can only address together,” said Hahn
“We don’t need to create a European army tomorrow. But we’re taking the first steps right now. And having a closer defence unit,” she added.
In the meantime, some questions about the campaign are unanswered, one of them being whether the ALDE party will hold primaries to elect a Spitzenkandidat as its nominee for the European Commission presidency.
Ahead of the 2019 elections, the liberal family picked a team of seven lead candidates rather than an individual. However, the initiative, which was used to select Jean-Claude Juncker as the Commission President in 2014 was ignored by EU leaders following the 2019 elections and is increasingly unlikely to be a factor in 2024.
“This is something that is too early to call yet,” Hahn, a first term MEP from the German Free Democrat Party, told EURACTIV.
For her part, Margrethe Vestager, Vice President of the EU executive, and one of the seven liberal candidates in 2019, repeated to EURACTIV her ambivalence about the Spitzenkandidat process.
“I think people who run for the European Parliament, should run for the parliament because they want to seat in the parliament. And not because they want another job,” said Vestager.
[Edited by Nathalie Weatherald]
Read more with EURACTIV
Unintended victims of Europe’s war on disinformation
Source: euractiv.com
