Deux experts ont déclaré à Euronews que l'UE devait se préparer à s’opposer à la belligérance du nouveau régime de Donald Trump.
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00:30Welcome to the Europe Conversation. I'm joined in studio by Guntram Wolff, Professor of Economics at ULB and a Senior Fellow at Bruegel and Georg Grecheles, Associate Director at the European Policy Centre.
00:50Thank you very much for joining us. We have a lot to look forward to in 2025.
00:54A much more aggressive Trump White House, you might agree. I might just start with you, Guntram, because we've seen, before Christmas and very much into January, what looks like potential interference in the German elections by Elon Musk.
01:09As a German yourself, how do you feel about this? Do you think it's overplayed?
01:14Well, I would start, I think we were all taken aback by how aggressive both Musk and Donald Trump have been in this first half of January, really not attacking Russia or China, but really attacking allies, verbally, but with big announcements.
01:31Elon Musk has had a huge campaign against the UK, current sitting government, and that has raised alarm bells all across Europe. And of course, yes, he has been involved in Germany.
01:42He has had an interview with Alice Weidel, the top candidate from the Alternative für Deutschland, the far-right party.
01:53Now, is that undue or overextended interference? I would say the interview as such is fine. I don't think the interview is really a problem. What is a problem is if the algorithm of X gets manipulated to really drive far-right content.
02:12But Georg, Europe has the tools there, has the Digital Services Act when it comes to, as what Guntram talked about, the algorithms. Is there a political will to act? Because we also saw, just before Christmas, J.D. Vance, the vice-president, saying that if there was any sort of interference from Europe to try to restrict what Elon Musk or X or social media are doing, that he would force the US administration to maybe reduce support for NATO. I mean, it's very complex.
02:40We need a political will to act. This is dead serious. This is about fundamental threats to our democracies. It is about destructuring of our public space, the promotion of lies, of extreme content, which will make the exercise of democracy progressively more difficult or impossible.
03:01Like Guntram is saying, the problem is not an interview with the IFJ, that's freedom of expression. The problem is if these platforms have algorithms that are used to amplify lies. And that's not an acceptable period. We have not had rules against this in Europe for a long time, for too long, but now we do. It's called the Digital Services Act.
03:23It's really complex though, because do we risk US support at NATO for Ukraine, which is existential? But at the same time, we have to defend the rules that are necessary when it comes to disinformation, which impacts democracy.
03:37Well, I would say you always have to stand up to bullying. If you give in immediately, the demands will only increase. And there's no guarantee whatsoever that if you don't stand up to X and bullying on X, that then all of a sudden all security problems will be solved. I mean, so let's be realistic here.
03:58This is quite a systematic confrontation of Europe and key European values. And it comes from, I think, a very unprecedented situation, one where the richest person on the planet has also direct access to the US president, meaning he has also full political support from the most powerful person on the planet.
04:22And on top of it, he has control of a major media outlet, right? So we have, I think, a combination of concentration of power in media, in business and in politics in one person. And if you leave that unaddressed, you basically accept that an outside billionaire with all these three powers massively intervenes into Europe and starts setting the agenda and shapes politics well beyond anything that we've had before.
04:53So my view is we have to invest in security ourselves. We have to invest in security of Ukraine very rapidly.
05:00What do you think is the game here? I just listened to an interview from Steve Bannon, the former Trump advisor, who said, Musk just spent a quarter of a billion dollars to elect Trump. If he puts the same amount of money into all of Europe that he put behind Trump, he'll flip every nation to a populist agenda.
05:18It is certainly very worrying. I think this is not about left versus right anymore in any way, really. This is about, like Guntram was saying, an agenda that has nothing to do with the respect for democracy, the respect for the rule of law and very, very strong intent of intervention into the functioning of our society.
05:44And what we're seeing in the international sphere, the relations between countries, the big power games, which now are all about might is right. Well, this is the same thing we see in the economic sphere, in the media sphere represented by Musk. And this is what one needs to stand up to.
06:03A, he should have been preparing for that after the first Trump presidency. But B, I mean, he's in two days time going to be in power and we still will be relying on support through NATO for him not to apply tariffs in the way that he has. I mean, is Europe really just totally vulnerable now?
06:21Well, Europe hasn't sit idly since the first election of Donald Trump. When Donald Trump was first elected, collective European spending on defence was 1.3% of GDP. We are now above 2%. So we've seen quite a turnaround on defence spending. It's still not sufficient. We're going to have to increase that further.
06:41But the truth is that the US is our biggest ally and the whole European construction has been extremely centred on a transatlantic relation. And if that relation goes sour, the European Union and all the member states really have a big problem.
07:00And the degree of policy response will have to be an order of magnitude bigger than it has been so far. And that will be a big challenge. And my biggest fear is that our domestic political systems, national political systems, they're actually far away from really getting to do the kind of things we are talking about here.
07:23Like what? What would you say?
07:24Well, we have an election in Germany and the German debate is about do we support 3 billion for Ukraine, yes or no, which is ridiculous. Of course we should. It's a ridiculous amount of money compared to the size of the German economy. So yes, Germany has been a big supporter of Ukraine, but it's by far not big enough. And the same in France. We have a political situation that is very fragile.
07:48We are undoing a pension reform that is really important for the sustainability, long-term sustainability of French public finances. So we have really very deep political divisions within our societies and that makes the implementation of an appropriate policy response really difficult.
08:08When you say policy response, what do you mean though?
08:11Well, I mean, we need more defence spending, we need to prioritise defence.
08:15You mean economic defence against tariffs. Should the EU respond likewise?
08:18Well, in tariffs we have to be prepared to have retaliatory tariffs against the US, absolutely.
08:25Gerhard, one of the things that we discussed before was Timothy Schneider, who is the professor and expert in totalitarianism, and he said that the language around invading Greenland, Canada becoming the 51st state, the Panama Canal is the language of Putin in 2013. I mean, that might be over-egging it a bit, but it still is an imperialistic language coming from the White House before they even take over.
08:53I think he's right and I think it's important that he says so and that we are clear about this. What we're hearing from Trump Jr., from a lot of the MAGA crowd, is language with respect to, like you said, Canada, Greenland, Panama, which is about suggesting that borders don't matter.
09:18I don't want to put Russia and the US and the future US administration on an equal footing, but this is very dangerous to start going down that road in terms of the norms we defend. So yes, I think Timothy Schneider is very, very right in pointing this out.
09:34But do you think therefore there's lacking of leadership here in Brussels and across the EU then? Because really the language over the past few months since Trump became president-elect has been, we'll wait and see.
09:46I think the European institutions have shown more leadership on issues such as Ukraine than most of the national leaders. So I think at the end of the day we have a leadership vacuum in Germany.
10:00The German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who's up for election and who failed his traffic light coalition just last year, has been showing insufficient leadership, clearly. I mean Germany has not shown the kind of leadership that the biggest country in the center of Europe in a situation of war has to show.
10:22So I think Germany is a big issue, but also France is an issue with the very divided politics at the moment. So I would really think it's more at the national level.
10:31And then of course you've got member states like Slovakia, Hungary, who are not supportive of Ukraine, potentially Austria as well. So you don't have the unity within the EU either.
10:42Absolutely. There has been a clear element of lack of leadership. I mean if you think back to the beginning of the Ukraine war or the Brussels aggression on Ukraine, the question was whether we could send helmets almost.
10:54So this we have not been able to react to quickly enough. We've put too much effort or thought into thinking that sanctions would solve it and too little effort into gearing up weapon support.
11:07So these are very clear elements. What sort of gives me hope at the beginning of this year is seeing, for instance, the prime minister of Denmark, Mette Frederiksen, who used to be, well Denmark used to be one of the frugals, saying no more money to the EU budget.
11:23And Finch also talked about defense bonds as well.
11:27Exactly. What Mette Frederiksen is saying this beginning of the year is no taboos anymore. And I think that's the kind of discourse we need to have coming out of Berlin, coming out of Paris and the capacity to act from Madrid, from Rome and so on and so forth, if we want to hold the future in our own hands.
11:44OK, well, Gunther Wolff, Professor of Economics at ULB and Senior Fellow at Bruegel and Georg Rakeles, Associate Director at the European Policy Centre, thank you very much for joining us on The Europe Conversation.
11:54Thank you so much.
11:55Thank you for having us.