Alice Weidel, the co-leader of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, has presented her party’s proposals for a European Union that she said was “in severe need of reform” during a visit to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, saying they rested on three core pillars.
“We would like to rebuild and reform the European Union,” she said. “We would like to found the European Union on three major principles: the first one is subsidiarity, the second one is responsibility, and the third one is sovereignty.”
On subsidiarity — the idea that power should reside as close to the grassroots level as possible as much as possible — she said it was important to put the “competences” on the “lowest level of decision-making,” saying “we don’t want the state, or the [European] Commission — that is not elected — to intrude and disturb your private life in decision-making.”
“I’m an economist, and for me, the European Union is not a group of sovereign states any more,” Weidel said. She said that in sovereign states’ parliaments, leaders were elected, “and so the decision-making on the sovereign level should be made in the national parliaments and not here, to be very clear.”
This is already the case in the vast majority of core EU public policy areas. National governments decide foreign and defense issues, finance and health policy, education policy and much more. The notable exceptions Weidel objects to are fiscal policy and the primacy of EU law, but only after sovereign member states agree to them.
She said the European Commission was not elected but had a “legislative right of initiative,” saying this was a “huge disturbance of checks and balances” and of a “democratic decision-making process.”
Weidel accused the EU of failing to follow its own rules, for instance on sovereign debt and whether the European Central Bank should or can guarantee it, citing issues like this as questions of responsibility.
Finally, she reiterated her desire for “sovereign states to protect their borders,” saying that “if the European Union is not capable of protecting our borders, the outer borders … then it is a decision of the sovereign states to protect our national borders.”
“If Schengen is over, if Schengen doesn’t work, then we need to get out of Schengen and protect our borders,” she said of the open-border zone within much of the EU.
She said that if the EU fails to protect the bloc’s external borders, “we should have a veto right to opt out of this chaos.”
While the EU maintains a border management agency, Frontex, national authorities are responsible for the external borders of the Schengen zone and the EU.