Listen to the audio version of the article
Enrico Letta, along the lines of Mario Draghi, lashes Europe. Faced with the enormous challenges it faces, the Union must make a qualitative leap without which it is destined to succumb to powers such as the United States and China. This is his message on the eve of the presentation of the‘long-awaited report on the future of the single market. The former Prime Minister targets two strategic sectors in which he identifies serious weaknesses in the European structure: defense and telecommunications.
«The dependence on foreign countries in defense is a shame»
«We need – says Letta while meeting the press together with the President of the European Council Charles Michel – for defense to expand on the industrial side, there is a big topic on an industrial scale and we must finance the needs» EU. “If we are not able to grow, we will continue with this shame of 80% or more precisely 78% of non-European military supplies that we purchased as Europeans.”
«A European industrial disaster on telecommunications»
A new broadside on telecommunications. In the European Union there are “27 different systems” in telecommunications, with one hundred active operators, while in the USA there are three. Between these two extremes, “I think we can find a compromise that gives European consumers good satisfaction, but at the same time without this industrial disaster that is the telecommunications system in Europe.” «In the 1980s and 1990s – he continues – the technological revolution in telecommunications was under European leadership. And it was also because of the size and innovation. Today we are in a scenario in which we are behind and are marginalized”, he concludes.
Last window
Letta then moves on to the broader theme of global competition with other great economic and military powers. Compared to the United States but also to China, “the gap is such that we are faced with the last opportunity to act, the last window is opening and we must exploit it”.
The President of the European Council Charles Michel agrees: «We must be lucid and clear both on the analysis of the situation and on the choices to be made while our competitors deploy policies to support their companies: we need to prepare the European strategic agenda, guiding for action in the next legislature after the EU vote, the time to decide which direction to take is now.”