Debate: Inauguration of the new President of the United States and the current political situation
Date: WEDNESDAY, 20 JANUARY 2021
Speaker: Manfred Weber
Political group: PPE
Country: Austria
Language: EN

The first message, while still having the pictures of the Congress and the Senate in America in mind; the unbelievable pictures from the office of Nancy Pelosi or the plenary of the Senate. The main message for me, is first of all, that as a Member of a Parliament, the European Parliament, as elected Members of a Parliament, we are close to our colleagues in Washington. We are together defending the institutions, the Parliament, as a heart of democracy – we will always fight for it. I think it would be arrogant in these times to try to give our American friends any kind of lesson. We are facing similar – even the same – challenges. The first was already expressed by our Commission President: social media, the digital world. I think the new way of communication has made these things possible. It is a fact that compromise is boring in a social media feed and an extreme position of provocation is attractive, it is re-tweeted. That is a reality, and this has a lot of impact in our daily life, as politicians in our political life. The big tech giants need clear rules, and the business of the big tech giants must be to serve societies and not destroy our European way of life. A second consideration for me is that more than 70 million people still voted for Donald Trump. Around half of American society. That is the real challenge: how to win them back to serious centre—based politics. I think it would be wrong to attack them as populistic voters. I think we have to take their concerns seriously.  To ask for a strict control of the border is not radical, to ask for regulation of the globalisation, with regard to China, is not radical and to defend American jobs is also not radical. We have to take their concerns seriously. The third point I want to mention is – yes – we will have a restart of the transatlantic relationship with Joe Biden in office, and President Michel if you will allow, I think it would be great to have Joe Biden in a Council meeting; but the better option for having Joe Biden in Europe to present his ideas for the future of the transatlantic relationship would be to have him make a speech in the European Parliament, probably in Strasbourg, because he’s aware of Europe’s history. That could be a really great place to restart. But, this restart also means for us as Europeans to be prepared, and there I have some thoughts, for example, on security, about NATO cooperation. Are we really ready to build up our European defence pillar; are we really ready to give in and to invest more?  On trade, I still have the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) discussions in mind. We have to learn from the mistakes we made about transparency, for example, on the TTIP debate eight years ago. In the TTIP debate, there were a lot of anti—European arguments on the table as well. Are we really prepared for a restart? That is what we have to reflect upon. The last point I want to mention is, having the developments in America in mind, we together have to define a clear red line as to what extremism is all about and to fight against violence in politics. We did it in the European Parliament last year with the rule of law mechanism to establish a binding mechanism where we defend the values of the European way of life and defend our institutions. The European Union is about being united in diversity, that is our main message and the same message could also be for our American transatlantic relationship: ‘united in diversity’. Let’s defend our common values and our institutions.