Le Pen says Dutch can decide their EU future as ‘Brits did’

9 months ago 36

Dutch people should have a say on their EU future as the British did several years ago via a referendum, France’s far-right politician Marine Le Pen said on Thursday following the victory of Geert Wilders’ Party of Freedom (PVV, Identity and Democracy) in the Dutch elections.

Wilders’ election platform suggested organising a referendum on Dutch EU membership, which Le Pen welcomed.

“A good piece of news is when people can express themselves. The bad news is when, as in 2005, a treaty is imposed upon them. It’s up to the Dutch people to choose their destiny, as the British people did”, she told FranceInter radio in an interview.

According to Le Pen, Wilders’ victory demonstrates that Europeans are “contesting the functioning of the EU” and wish to “control immigration”.

Le Pen lashed out at EU institutions, saying they need a complete overhaul, clarifying that Europe should not fall apart and France should keep the Euro currency.

For the EU institutions to change, she called on French voters to put President Emmanuel Macron’s Renew party and “his allies” in a minority position at the next European Parliament elections in June.

Recent polls suggest that Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) would get 28% of the votes, against 20% for Macron’s Renew, while no other party exceeded 9% of the votes.

“[The EU] is a technocratic structure which progresses through punishments, threats and sanctions”, she said, suggesting building instead a “Union of European nations” that would work on “major projects to collectively accomplish what we cannot do alone”.

She also stated her opposition to Guy Verhofstadt’s European Parliament report for an amendment of the Treaties, saying it would “strip nations of almost all of their sovereignty”.

Building on the year-long participative democracy experiment of the Conference on the Future of Europe, EU citizens, randomly elected across the bloc, had a chance to contribute to the EU policy-making which drafted the aforementioned report.

Since the Parliament’s favourable vote on 21 November, the report has landed on the agenda of the European Council – which is set to cast a vote during their next meeting in mid-December to decide whether to open a convention to reform the EU Treaties.

Several EU leaders have already reacted against a potential EU Treaty change, with the most resounding being that of pro-EU and recent Polish election winner Donald Tusk.

(Théophane Hartmann | Euractiv.fr – Edited by Sarantis Michalopoulos | Euractiv.com)