Europe ‘in most difficult and dangerous situation since second world war,’ Danish PM warns – Europe live | World news

in Brussels

Ahead of the European summit, several EU leaders have been meeting business leaders in Copenhagen.

The main message was to speed up efforts to cut red tape, but each intervention had a particular national flavour.

In remarks that ranged widely over the economic agenda, French president Emmanuel Macron highlighted France’s longstanding goal of prioritising European companies.

“European preference… was still recently an awful word, totally impossible to be pronounced in a business meeting. But this is a necessity because we are the unique crazy place where we don’t protect our domestic players. In the US, you have a US agenda. In China, it’s no more Chinese preference, it is a Chinese exclusivity sometimes.”

He said Europe was “the only place where you put regulations on your players, but at the same time you negotiate the lifting of barriers with non-European players with a double standard”. This is almost certainly a reference to the EU trade deal with Mercosur, which France argues disadvantages European farmers.

Poland’s prime minister Donald Tusk, who has argued for a review of some Green Deal regulations, said the EU should be easing demands on companies to allow them to compete with more lightly regulated competitors elsewhere in the world.

He recounted his “blunt” exchanges with Polish steel companies, who he said wanted deregulation, rather than simply state aid, i.e. subsidies or tax breaks.

“This is why we have to think about our real acceleration when it comes to the deregulation process. Our ambitions cannot mean that we continue to impose new burdens on companies, it cannot mean that because of Europe, companies lose competitiveness vis-à-vis the world.

Look at the world around us: we Europe are responsible for only 6% of the world’s emissions, we cannot constantly be the ones who reduce emissions at the pace that no company can bear. We cannot constantly increase our ambition when others do not.”

While the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen highlighted that she had made six proposals to cut red tape in different areas, the so-called omnibuses, which she claimed added up to an €8bn reduction in bureaucracy for business.

She highlighted that none had been agreed by the EU’s co-legislators, i.e. the Council of Ministers and European parliament. And in a not-so-subtle dig at where she saw the blockage, she said she wished MEPs had been at the business summit in Copenhagen.

“I would like to see the European parliament here too because we need them also to move the whole ship forward.”