Former ECB president says EU saw commercial power "evaporate"

"For years, the EU believed that its economic size, with 450 million consumers, gave it geopolitical power in international trade relations. This year will be remembered as the year in which that perception evaporated," said Mario Draghi at the "Meeting for Friendship among Peoples" forum in Rimini, northern Italy.

Economist and former Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi lamented that the EU "has had to resign itself to the tariffs imposed by its main and oldest ally," the United States.

The former president stressed that the EU was "pressured" to increase military spending for its defense and that it played a minor role in the peace negotiations for the war in Ukraine, which began in 2022.

"Despite having made the largest financial contribution to the war in Ukraine and having a crucial interest in a just peace, the European Union has so far played a limited role in the peace negotiations," said Mario Draghi.

The economist also warned that China "openly supported Russia's war effort" in invading Ukrainian territory and "expanded its industrial capacity" to "recover excess production in Europe," especially now that the North American market is "limited" by Donald Trump's tariffs.

"Europe was also a spectator when Iranian nuclear facilities were bombed and when the massacre in Gaza intensified," denounced Mario Draghi.

The former ECB president said that the EU's "economic size" alone will not guarantee geopolitical strength, warning of growing skepticism among citizens.

"It's not surprising that skepticism about Europe has reached new heights. But it's important to consider the reasons for this," said Mario Draghi.

The economist pointed out that Europeans do not doubt the values ​​on which the EU was founded, such as democracy, peace, freedom or independence, stressing that growing European skepticism stems from the EU's alleged inability to firmly protect them.

For Mário Draghi, models of political organization, especially supranational ones, emerge to solve current problems, but when they change, it is necessary to evolve.

"When these (models) change so much that they make the pre-existing organization fragile and vulnerable, it needs to evolve," said the economist.

The former ECB president stated that the EU was created after the Second World War because, in the first half of the 20th century, the models of political organization, the nation-state, in many countries, "completely failed in their duty to defend their values."

"The European Union represented an evolution that responded to the most pressing problem of the time: Europe's tendency to descend into conflict. And it is unsustainable to argue that we would be better off without it," he concluded.

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