The President of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, stated this Wednesday at the Forum Europa in Brussels that “today all Member States understand that Europe must assume responsibility for its own defense”.
Roberta Metsola stated this at a briefing organised by New Economy Forum in the EU capital, where she analysed the current geostrategic landscape and the need for the European Union to take responsibility for its security, since “a more secure Europe means taking charge of our destiny”.
Metsola asserted that for “too long” the EU has relied on others to protect us, but considered that “Russia's brutal war in Ukraine made it clear that those days are over”.
“Today all Member States understand that Europe must assume responsibility for its own defense”, she maintained. This also means “redoubling our support for Ukraine and our efforts for a just, real, and lasting peace”.
The President of the European Parliament insisted on the idea that the EU must admit that “we have not spent enough on defense”, and that Member States “have benefited from the so-called peace dividend for decades, hoping that nothing would go wrong”, and that if something did go wrong, “someone else would come and solve our problems”.
Along the same lines, she recalled that a decade ago, Parliament had already warned that if the geopolitical situation went south, “we would be on our own”. In the current context, she noted that what Member States say they spend on defense “is enormously different”, something she didn't know whether to attribute to the way each country calculates that spending, or whether some include cybersecurity as a fundamental component.
