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Germany Proposes Directly Elected European President

July 7, 2000

The German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, stepped up pressure for a debate on a federal Europe on Thursday and fleshed out his own vision for the continent headed by a directly elected president, according to a Reuters report.

''We will have to embark on this discussion very soon after 2002 and take decisions because otherwise Europe is heading for a major crisis in our view,'' Fischer told the constitutional affairs committee of the European Parliament.

Fischer repeated many ideas he first sketched out in a speech in Berlin in May that reignited a debate on Europe's long-term future as the EU negotiates to bring in new members from Central and Eastern Europe.

But he was clearer on his own preference for a European government - favoring one modeled on the European Commission with a directly elected president, rather than the development of the current Council of Ministers from the EU's governments.

He suggested that the president could be chosen on the basis of electoral colleges of the kind that exist in the United States and with the broad support of the majority of member states.

''What one does not want is a weak president,'' or ''a figurehead,'' Fischer said.

He added that the president - as in the United States - should have the power to pick a cabinet whose members would have to be confirmed by Parliament.

Conscious of the impact of his controversial ideas in Euroskeptic countries such as Britain and Denmark, Fischer said that nation states could not be replaced but that Europe needed clear rules setting out their relationship with the center. ''The basic constitutional axis will be relations between the nations and Europe,'' Fischer said.

He said that even Germany, the largest EU country in terms of its economic strength and population, could not go it alone in the world economy and Europe's single currency was the ''first step to a federation.''

Fischer said that he did not believe a formal debate on his ideas could start for some time, noting the electoral calendar in Europe over the next two to three years was already crowded.

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