Macron urges Europe to start acting like world power
French President, Emmanuel Macron, has urged Europe to assert itself on the world stage, saying it is time to start acting like a "power".
In the face of growing threats from China, Russia and now the US, he told a group of European newspapers that the continent faced a "wake-up call".
"Are we ready to become a power? This is the question in the field of economy and finance, in defence and security and in our democratic systems.
"In another era, we might have said it is the moment to 'assume our majority'," he said ahead of an EU summit in Brussels later this week.
Macron repeated his call for EU-wide mutualised loans in order to raise hundreds of billions of euros needed for industrial investment.
"The time has come to launch a shared debt capacity to fund our future expenses — eurobonds for the future. We need big European programmes to finance the best projects," he said.
Similar calls in the past have met scepticism from Germany and other countries, who feel France wants to use Europe to bear a financial burden which it alone, because it failed to reform, is unable to take up.
Macron admitted that France "has never had a balanced model, unlike certain economies of the north, which are built more on a sense of responsibility.
