Interview Siegfried Mureșan, member of the European Parliament – European People’s Party (EPP), Romania.
Q. As the vice-chair of EPP, you are in a delicate leadership position: you are a young voice in an older party, you have always been vocally pro-European and pro-democracy, but at the same time you have had to manage antidemocratic developments outside the European Union, within its borders and sometimes even within your European party. What do you feel is your greatest challenge at this point as an EPP leader in trying to keep at bay antidemocratic developments within the European Union?
What we have to do is first and foremost keep our house in order. At a national and European level, we have to promote democratic values, a balance of power and strong, resilient institutions including the judiciary.
There is no better news for authoritarians around the world than a European Union that is not strong in defending its values. As it often goes in life, there is first the disease and then you find the vaccine or the medicine. We have seen developments that we could not anticipate: Brexit in 2016 and the rise of extremism and populism in some member states of the European Union. We all saw the negative consequences of Brexit and these days we are just witnessing the figures, UK exports to the EU are collapsing.
Read the full interview on the website of Eastern Focus.
