The President of the Jacques Delors Institute and former Prime Minister of Italy, Enrico Letta, said this Wednesday at the Forum Europa in Brussels that the European Union must seek the integration of telecommunications, energy, banking and financial services companies in order to compete in the global market.
Letta said this at an informative meeting organised by the New Economy Forum in the capital of the EU, during which he also pointed out that the latest results of the Austrian elections, with the victory of the extreme right, “and other important signals that we are receiving” indicate that Europe “is plunged into political chaos everywhere”.
For Letta, both his report on the EU Common Market, which he presented in April, fulfilling the request made by the European Council, and the ‘Draghi report’, have managed to leave the message that “we need a wake-up call on the real, concrete, true situation of the European economy”.
The former Prime Minister of Italy acknowledged that it is not a problem of the last 12 months of figures on industrial results or other aspects, but that “it is clear that there is a downward trend”. He argued that this decline is the consequence “of decisions that we have taken or have not taken in the last 30 years”.
Letta recalled the progress that the single currency represented and explained that while we all have the same currency in our wallets, people are not aware that there are 27 national supervisory authorities of the financial markets.
For this reason, he considered that the main problem today is not precisely a problem of global consensus among the population, “it is above all a problem of the political establishment” at a national level.
He stressed that the integration of the Euro has been a success, but warned that “the fatigue” generated by integrating the rest of the technical aspects is showing that the main problem lies in the political classes of each of the EU members.
NATIONAL CHAMPIONS
In this regard, he stated that, at a political level, “we need to take control at a national level of the national champions, in telecommunications, energy, banks and financial services”.
The current leaders within the EU “are making some of the social classes happy”, but they are creating a feeling of clear decline throughout Europe, he reflected.
Along the same lines, he believed that the EU is losing ground in competitiveness by keeping the aforementioned three markets unintegrated. That “is making Wall Street, the Chinese, the Indians, all of our competitors happy”, he added.
During the meeting, the director of the Telefónica Office in Brussels, Cristina Vela, took the floor to thank Letta for his report and his work, “which reflects his ability and his willingness to listen to all economic sectors and to translate the challenges we have ahead into a vision”.
A vision, she added, “with special attention to electronic communications, energy, financial markets, as sectors of special strategic importance that need a stronger single market”.
In his response, Letta said that he had two mobile phones in his pocket, one with the number +39, another with the number +33, and “in the next few months I will have a +34 because I will go to Spain to work”.
In his opinion, it is “madness” that each country within the EU maintains a national prefix, and he advocated a common European prefix. “The Americans kept the number one, so we have to decide whether to take the number zero or accept the number two”, he said amid laughter from those present.
In his opinion, this would be something that would benefit consumers and competition, and in a room full of business leaders and community institutions, he concluded that this idea “could be a win-win” for everyone.
