The State of the Union Address (SOTEU) was introduced by the Lisbon Treaty. José Manuel Barroso delivered the first SOTEU in 2010. His successor as Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, will deliver her fourth address on September 13. The speech marks the rentrée into EU politics after the summer break.
In the days leading up to the first Strasbourg week, von der Leyen is meeting and coordinating with politicians and diplomats. On Friday, she met with the permanent representatives of the 27 member states as well as with the EPP party and group leader Manfred Weber. In an interview with Table.Media, Weber clarifies which priorities the Commission President and presumptive frontrunner of the Christian Democrats in the European Parliament should set at the start of the election campaign.
Since the election period is well advanced, von der Leyen will likely announce only one or two legislative initiatives. It is rumored that she will focus on climate policy and the competitiveness of European industry. In addition, she will probably take a look into the future and deal with the accession prospects of Ukraine, Moldova and the remaining Balkan states. The need for reform in the community of states is also expected to play a role. We’ll have to be patient for another week.
Mr. Weber, competitiveness and migration – are these the EPP’s themes in the election campaign?
Yes. Concerns about the future of jobs and the rising numbers of irregular migration – these are the two issues occupying the minds of EU citizens. And the EPP will also clearly address these two issues in the election campaign.
Migration numbers across the Mediterranean are high, the Tunisia deal does not seem to be working, Frontex expansion is stalling. What is the EPP’s message on migration policy?
There is no miracle key, we have to work pragmatically on these issues. The EPP is the political force that is doing just that. On the one hand, we have the right-wing radicals scaring people. Politically, they live on the fact that the problem of illegal migration is not solved. And on the other side, we have left-wing moralists. They explain to us every day what is not right. And in the middle is the EPP, working out solutions.
You were just in Tunisia. Did the president make any promises to you?
The country is in a challenging situation. We can help by improving the conditions for investment by European companies on the ground. Tunisia needs an economic future. Young people need jobs. Respectful interaction with our neighbors – that is a prerequisite for developing a partnership on the migration issue. In Tunis, I clarified: There will only be money if the refugee numbers fall. And that must happen soon.
What signals did you get?
The President, the Foreign Minister, as well as the Interior Ministers and the Speaker of the House, have all made clear that they stand by the Memorandum of Understanding.
The European Parliament also has to decide on migration issues …
The German Greens and the German Social Democrats must finally get moving here. For the most part, they lack a sense of reality when it comes to migration. German local politicians from the Greens and SPD, like local politicians from the CDU and CSU, are sending cries for help to Brussels and Berlin. But in the European Parliament, the members of the Greens and SPD do not want to hear them. Instead, they continue with their ideology-driven migration policy. I call on the German Chancellor and Interior Minister Nancy Faeser: Get your party friends in Brussels to pass the migration pact in Parliament as it was concluded. We need realism and a Social Democratic as well as a Green group that is willing to raise its hand for this reasonable compromise.
Keyword deindustrialization: is the Commission doing enough against it?
In recent decades, European unification, the creation of the single market and the euro have been prerequisites for Germany’s economic success. Without these achievements, Germany would not be the world’s export champion. Now Europe is called upon to take the following steps. For the EPP, it is clear that securing prosperity must be the top priority in the coming years. The alarm bells are ringing. Not only in Germany but throughout the EU, industry is in danger of losing touch. Europe, but also the German government, must speed up now.
Do you expect any announcements on this from the Commission President at SOTEU?
We need to have less bureaucracy. Dealing with administrative enforcement issues is a burden. We need a moratorium on reporting requirements and regulations. Here, I expect Ursula von der Leyen to make clear announcements in Parliament next week. We also need innovations. We need to see whether we can reallocate funds in the EU budget to invest even more in research and sustainable products. And thirdly, we need a trade policy that opens up markets. A clear yes to Mercosur and other upcoming trade agreements.
Has the Commission done enough for rural people and farmers?
Given the high food prices, I expect the situation of farmers to feature in the SOTEU speech. The EPP is the farmers’ party of Europe. For agriculture, the EU is a stable anchor. It provides a lot of money through the CAP so that agriculture is competitive. However: The challenges are significant. Now, the task must be to allow farmers to produce food.
What does that mean?
The decided set-aside must also be lifted for 2024. The four percent set-aside imposed by the CAP must be temporarily suspended. Why? Inflation is now driven by food prices. We need to allow more production on the land to help combat inflation. This is also a social issue.
Will the EPP oppose the planned pesticide regulation?
We want fewer pesticides to be applied. However, I would like to clarify: The current text for the pesticide regulation cannot be approved as it stands. Particularly given the massive rise in food prices, the proposal must be amended in Committee to align it with reality. We will see whether the other groups will go along with this. That will determine whether we vote in favor in the end.
How long can the EPP wait for Ursula von der Leyen to announce whether she wants to be the top candidate?
We have a Commission President who is doing an excellent job. If Ursula von der Leyen wants to run, she is in pole position for the EPP’s top candidacy. The ball is in her court. But we also have no time pressure.
What is the EPP party leader’s priority now?
In the next few weeks, I will focus on the programmatic profile of the EPP. We have to structure and formulate our offer to the voters. The basic message is: We need a Europe with the strength to protect the European way of life. We must be able to offer people this protection in a fundamentally changing world.
Do you stand by the top candidate principle?
We know that the last European election was a setback for European democracy with the failure to implement the top-candidate process. But I believe in democratic Europe. That is the only future we have. The EPP wants to make the winning top candidate the president of the Commission. The citizen must know: My vote counts, I can help decide the future of Europe.
You can’t promise that the top candidate will also be chief executive …
That’s right. Last time, it was the Council that was not prepared to implement the citizens’ decision. I am working to increase understanding in the other institutions, especially in the Council, of the democratic principle. The Council and Parliament should agree on a mechanism for the way a democratic appointment should be made after the European elections.
The development, technology, training and operation of artificial intelligence devour enormous sums of money. Earlier this year, estimates circulated that Open AI was spending $700,000 per day just to operate ChatGPT. Training ChatGPT4 is said to have cost about $63 million. That makes investments in AI a bet with extremely high stakes. Microsoft has already invested billions in Open AI.
Startups in Europe can only dream of such sums. The question is whether the upcoming AI Act – the first comprehensive regulation of artificial intelligence worldwide – will make investors in Europe even more reluctant to invest than they already are.
“Of course, you have to admit that compared to the US, Germany and Europe tend to struggle with funding, especially with scaling startups,” says Polina Khubbeeva, Digitalization and Innovation Officer at BDI. By comparison: In the first half of 2023, there were 1129 deals in AI and machine learning in the US, with venture capitalists investing $30.8 billion in AI startups. In Europe, there were just 646 deals with a total volume of $3.7 billion in the period, as Handelsblatt reported, citing figures from Pitchbook.
But competition also exists within Europe: Unlike Germany, France is also pursuing an industrial policy in AI. In mid-June, President Emmanuel Macron declared that his country wanted to take a leading role and announced new funding of no less than €500 million for the creation of AI champions. Shortly thereafter, Mistral AI raised the impressive sum of €105 million.
Mistral wants to develop a language model similar to ChatGPT for companies but does not even have a product yet. However, Macron is said to have ordered the administration to use Mistral’s future product, which would turn the young company into a kind of money-printing machine. Poolside AI also received funding of more than €100 million in August and is now moving from the US to Paris equipped with French investor money.
Policymakers should pay much more attention to AI startups in Germany, demands Khubbeeva from the BDI. Funding is only one – crucial- aspect of closing the financing gap, which is serious for AI startups. Compared to other business models, AI startups take longer to break even and generate returns. “That’s why you should find ways to bridge this slightly longer period of consolidation financially.”
Apart from financing, there are other ways to make Germany more attractive as a location. “Usage models for data and the computing infrastructure still need to be significantly expanded at the site,” says Khubbeeva. “These things contribute decisively to success and are therefore also decisive for the decision whether to start up here or somewhere else.”
The issue of regulation is an additional complicating factor. Many regulations in the AI Act are impossible for startups and SMEs without a large compliance department to manage. “We welcome the introduction of real labs, but even those are designed to be so bureaucratic in some cases that it’s a deterrent,” Khubbeeva explains.
Overall, many regulations are far removed from industrial reality. This also applies to the proposals to integrate foundation models such as ChatGPT into legislation, she said. “We can’t leave it like this; it would be disastrous for the financial viability of European AI startups. This way, we don’t build American-style AI models in Germany and Europe.”
At any rate, there is a great deal of uncertainty among investors at the moment, says Andreas Goeldi, a partner at b2venture. The European venture capitalist invests in young technology companies at a very early stage, including in 2009 in DeepL, one of Germany’s most successful AI companies. “There is a lot of zeal to regulate a technology that is just emerging,” Goeldi criticizes. He understands that dynamic development is scary for many people. “But we are trying to regulate things in great detail now that will probably be obsolete in three to four years.”
Investors are concerned that regulation will overshoot the mark and stifle the industry’s development. “You can see a similar trend in the crypto industry in recent years – but more in the US than in Europe,” Goeldi explains. In the US, he says, regulation has “effectively killed” the crypto scene. Given fraud cases, this is not entirely undeserved, he notes. Interestingly, the situation was different in Switzerland, which moved ahead relatively early, but set a very liberal framework.
“Our fear as investors is that today’s promising startup will become tomorrow’s toxic waste because regulation will make it impossible to do business successfully,” Goeldi says. And right now, he says, uncertainty is especially high. “Also in the US, by the way.” While people in Europe are discussing this openly, it’s taking place in back rooms in the US. “I think the European approach is much healthier,” Goeldi says. Categorizing AI into risk classes is also plausible, he adds, but it is just not easy to classify them with foresight.
“I find risk classification justified in the abstract but borderline naive in implementation,” Goeldi says. One example, he says, is social scoring. That is on the banned list in the AI Act. However, almost every social media platform or search engine classifies its users and their behavior according to certain criteria – as a form of filtering relevant information.
“The regulatory uncertainty is absolutely catastrophic for the industry,” says Goeldi. “If the EU manages to put a reasonable framework in place relatively soon that is perhaps deliberately a bit open at the beginning and also allows to see further development first, then that would be a locational advantage. Absolutely.”
Goeldi also does not think much of the French way of pumping a lot of state money into the scene. It is more sensible to create strong ecosystems, he says. As a positive example, the investor cites the AI Innovation Park (Ipai) in Heilbronn, which has just been opened by Digital Minister Wissing.
The digital association Bitkom also does not advocate the French approach of pouring a lot of government money into the sector. “From a business perspective, this is initially a disadvantage for German startups,” says Kai Pascal Beerlink, Artificial Intelligence Officer at Bitkom. “But if you look at the market as a whole, such political influences also carry a certain risk. They distort the market mechanisms.” And there is a risk of the bubble bursting, he said. “When companies face the market, they also have the innovation pressure they need to survive.”
Beerlink is convinced that focusing on AI applications for the manufacturing industry could be a niche “that we can occupy in Europe and especially in Germany.” Here, he says, security, trustworthiness and transparency are particularly important.
As for what else the state could do, “It would be desirable for the federal government to get involved in the AI Act negotiations to promote innovation – and to do so in a coordinated way,” Beerlink says. “That’s more important than the government promoting individual companies.”
The story of Hans-Gert Pöttering’s life actually begins before his life has even begun. In February 1945, in the last weeks of the Second World War, his father died as a soldier in Pomerania, in what is now Poland. Six months later, in September 1945, Hans-Gert Pöttering was born near Osnabrück. This event still determines his thinking today. “This experience of having lost my father in a war, of not knowing him, was psychologically the motivation for the thought that we must work for peace and for the unification of Europe.“
This aspiration captured Pöttering as a young man when he joined the Junge Union and the CDU and has not left him today, at the age of 77. Our interview quickly turns into a passionate plea for the European Union and the values it stands for.
After all, it is the EU that has strongly influenced and shaped his life and career. From 2007 to 2009, for example, Pöttering was the twelfth president of the European Parliament, and in this role, he also initiated the creation of the House of European History in Brussels. “That was the most difficult thing I have done in my political life,” he says in retrospect. Today, he is still Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the House of European History.
From 2010 to 2017, he was Chairman of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, where he still serves as an honorary Europe officer. He is also a co-founder of the European Charlemagne Youth Prize, a lecturer at the University of Osnabrück with a course on European unification, and a member of the board of directors of the Charlemagne Prize of Aachen.
He mentions in passing that the Dalai Lama has invited him for his birthday and that he will accept this invitation.
Some political developments in the EU member states worry Pöttering. But he also knows: there have always been setbacks and defeats in the history of the European Union. For example, the failure of the EU Constitutional Treaty in 2005. “The biggest disappointment of my political life was Brexit,” says Pöttering. “I say that so we do not lose heart with the challenges we have at the moment, also with populist developments in some countries of the European Union, but that we have to counter, that we have to defend our values, human dignity, freedom, justice, peace.”
His political experience teaches Pöttering that these values will prevail as long as there are people who believe in them. He sees this, especially in the younger generations. For example, he tells of schoolchildren in his home region who demonstrated against Russia’s war and showed solidarity with the people in Ukraine. At the action, he was invited to speak. “In my speech, I also encouraged young people to get involved, in parties that have the unification of Europe as their cause,” Pöttering explains.
In his free time, Hans-Gert Pöttering enjoys sports: he likes swimming, skiing and cycling. With students, Pöttering also often shares a story of personal failure – namely, that he had to repeat the seventh grade because of an F in German because his spelling was too bad. In this way, he wants to motivate them that failure is also part of life. If something goes wrong, just get up, dust yourself off and move on. That also applies to the EU. Sarah Tekath
The State of the Union Address (SOTEU) was introduced by the Lisbon Treaty. José Manuel Barroso delivered the first SOTEU in 2010. His successor as Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, will deliver her fourth address on September 13. The speech marks the rentrée into EU politics after the summer break.
In the days leading up to the first Strasbourg week, von der Leyen is meeting and coordinating with politicians and diplomats. On Friday, she met with the permanent representatives of the 27 member states as well as with the EPP party and group leader Manfred Weber. In an interview with Table.Media, Weber clarifies which priorities the Commission President and presumptive frontrunner of the Christian Democrats in the European Parliament should set at the start of the election campaign.
Since the election period is well advanced, von der Leyen will likely announce only one or two legislative initiatives. It is rumored that she will focus on climate policy and the competitiveness of European industry. In addition, she will probably take a look into the future and deal with the accession prospects of Ukraine, Moldova and the remaining Balkan states. The need for reform in the community of states is also expected to play a role. We’ll have to be patient for another week.
Mr. Weber, competitiveness and migration – are these the EPP’s themes in the election campaign?
Yes. Concerns about the future of jobs and the rising numbers of irregular migration – these are the two issues occupying the minds of EU citizens. And the EPP will also clearly address these two issues in the election campaign.
Migration numbers across the Mediterranean are high, the Tunisia deal does not seem to be working, Frontex expansion is stalling. What is the EPP’s message on migration policy?
There is no miracle key, we have to work pragmatically on these issues. The EPP is the political force that is doing just that. On the one hand, we have the right-wing radicals scaring people. Politically, they live on the fact that the problem of illegal migration is not solved. And on the other side, we have left-wing moralists. They explain to us every day what is not right. And in the middle is the EPP, working out solutions.
You were just in Tunisia. Did the president make any promises to you?
The country is in a challenging situation. We can help by improving the conditions for investment by European companies on the ground. Tunisia needs an economic future. Young people need jobs. Respectful interaction with our neighbors – that is a prerequisite for developing a partnership on the migration issue. In Tunis, I clarified: There will only be money if the refugee numbers fall. And that must happen soon.
What signals did you get?
The President, the Foreign Minister, as well as the Interior Ministers and the Speaker of the House, have all made clear that they stand by the Memorandum of Understanding.
The European Parliament also has to decide on migration issues …
The German Greens and the German Social Democrats must finally get moving here. For the most part, they lack a sense of reality when it comes to migration. German local politicians from the Greens and SPD, like local politicians from the CDU and CSU, are sending cries for help to Brussels and Berlin. But in the European Parliament, the members of the Greens and SPD do not want to hear them. Instead, they continue with their ideology-driven migration policy. I call on the German Chancellor and Interior Minister Nancy Faeser: Get your party friends in Brussels to pass the migration pact in Parliament as it was concluded. We need realism and a Social Democratic as well as a Green group that is willing to raise its hand for this reasonable compromise.
Keyword deindustrialization: is the Commission doing enough against it?
In recent decades, European unification, the creation of the single market and the euro have been prerequisites for Germany’s economic success. Without these achievements, Germany would not be the world’s export champion. Now Europe is called upon to take the following steps. For the EPP, it is clear that securing prosperity must be the top priority in the coming years. The alarm bells are ringing. Not only in Germany but throughout the EU, industry is in danger of losing touch. Europe, but also the German government, must speed up now.
Do you expect any announcements on this from the Commission President at SOTEU?
We need to have less bureaucracy. Dealing with administrative enforcement issues is a burden. We need a moratorium on reporting requirements and regulations. Here, I expect Ursula von der Leyen to make clear announcements in Parliament next week. We also need innovations. We need to see whether we can reallocate funds in the EU budget to invest even more in research and sustainable products. And thirdly, we need a trade policy that opens up markets. A clear yes to Mercosur and other upcoming trade agreements.
Has the Commission done enough for rural people and farmers?
Given the high food prices, I expect the situation of farmers to feature in the SOTEU speech. The EPP is the farmers’ party of Europe. For agriculture, the EU is a stable anchor. It provides a lot of money through the CAP so that agriculture is competitive. However: The challenges are significant. Now, the task must be to allow farmers to produce food.
What does that mean?
The decided set-aside must also be lifted for 2024. The four percent set-aside imposed by the CAP must be temporarily suspended. Why? Inflation is now driven by food prices. We need to allow more production on the land to help combat inflation. This is also a social issue.
Will the EPP oppose the planned pesticide regulation?
We want fewer pesticides to be applied. However, I would like to clarify: The current text for the pesticide regulation cannot be approved as it stands. Particularly given the massive rise in food prices, the proposal must be amended in Committee to align it with reality. We will see whether the other groups will go along with this. That will determine whether we vote in favor in the end.
How long can the EPP wait for Ursula von der Leyen to announce whether she wants to be the top candidate?
We have a Commission President who is doing an excellent job. If Ursula von der Leyen wants to run, she is in pole position for the EPP’s top candidacy. The ball is in her court. But we also have no time pressure.
What is the EPP party leader’s priority now?
In the next few weeks, I will focus on the programmatic profile of the EPP. We have to structure and formulate our offer to the voters. The basic message is: We need a Europe with the strength to protect the European way of life. We must be able to offer people this protection in a fundamentally changing world.
Do you stand by the top candidate principle?
We know that the last European election was a setback for European democracy with the failure to implement the top-candidate process. But I believe in democratic Europe. That is the only future we have. The EPP wants to make the winning top candidate the president of the Commission. The citizen must know: My vote counts, I can help decide the future of Europe.
You can’t promise that the top candidate will also be chief executive …
That’s right. Last time, it was the Council that was not prepared to implement the citizens’ decision. I am working to increase understanding in the other institutions, especially in the Council, of the democratic principle. The Council and Parliament should agree on a mechanism for the way a democratic appointment should be made after the European elections.
The development, technology, training and operation of artificial intelligence devour enormous sums of money. Earlier this year, estimates circulated that Open AI was spending $700,000 per day just to operate ChatGPT. Training ChatGPT4 is said to have cost about $63 million. That makes investments in AI a bet with extremely high stakes. Microsoft has already invested billions in Open AI.
Startups in Europe can only dream of such sums. The question is whether the upcoming AI Act – the first comprehensive regulation of artificial intelligence worldwide – will make investors in Europe even more reluctant to invest than they already are.
“Of course, you have to admit that compared to the US, Germany and Europe tend to struggle with funding, especially with scaling startups,” says Polina Khubbeeva, Digitalization and Innovation Officer at BDI. By comparison: In the first half of 2023, there were 1129 deals in AI and machine learning in the US, with venture capitalists investing $30.8 billion in AI startups. In Europe, there were just 646 deals with a total volume of $3.7 billion in the period, as Handelsblatt reported, citing figures from Pitchbook.
But competition also exists within Europe: Unlike Germany, France is also pursuing an industrial policy in AI. In mid-June, President Emmanuel Macron declared that his country wanted to take a leading role and announced new funding of no less than €500 million for the creation of AI champions. Shortly thereafter, Mistral AI raised the impressive sum of €105 million.
Mistral wants to develop a language model similar to ChatGPT for companies but does not even have a product yet. However, Macron is said to have ordered the administration to use Mistral’s future product, which would turn the young company into a kind of money-printing machine. Poolside AI also received funding of more than €100 million in August and is now moving from the US to Paris equipped with French investor money.
Policymakers should pay much more attention to AI startups in Germany, demands Khubbeeva from the BDI. Funding is only one – crucial- aspect of closing the financing gap, which is serious for AI startups. Compared to other business models, AI startups take longer to break even and generate returns. “That’s why you should find ways to bridge this slightly longer period of consolidation financially.”
Apart from financing, there are other ways to make Germany more attractive as a location. “Usage models for data and the computing infrastructure still need to be significantly expanded at the site,” says Khubbeeva. “These things contribute decisively to success and are therefore also decisive for the decision whether to start up here or somewhere else.”
The issue of regulation is an additional complicating factor. Many regulations in the AI Act are impossible for startups and SMEs without a large compliance department to manage. “We welcome the introduction of real labs, but even those are designed to be so bureaucratic in some cases that it’s a deterrent,” Khubbeeva explains.
Overall, many regulations are far removed from industrial reality. This also applies to the proposals to integrate foundation models such as ChatGPT into legislation, she said. “We can’t leave it like this; it would be disastrous for the financial viability of European AI startups. This way, we don’t build American-style AI models in Germany and Europe.”
At any rate, there is a great deal of uncertainty among investors at the moment, says Andreas Goeldi, a partner at b2venture. The European venture capitalist invests in young technology companies at a very early stage, including in 2009 in DeepL, one of Germany’s most successful AI companies. “There is a lot of zeal to regulate a technology that is just emerging,” Goeldi criticizes. He understands that dynamic development is scary for many people. “But we are trying to regulate things in great detail now that will probably be obsolete in three to four years.”
Investors are concerned that regulation will overshoot the mark and stifle the industry’s development. “You can see a similar trend in the crypto industry in recent years – but more in the US than in Europe,” Goeldi explains. In the US, he says, regulation has “effectively killed” the crypto scene. Given fraud cases, this is not entirely undeserved, he notes. Interestingly, the situation was different in Switzerland, which moved ahead relatively early, but set a very liberal framework.
“Our fear as investors is that today’s promising startup will become tomorrow’s toxic waste because regulation will make it impossible to do business successfully,” Goeldi says. And right now, he says, uncertainty is especially high. “Also in the US, by the way.” While people in Europe are discussing this openly, it’s taking place in back rooms in the US. “I think the European approach is much healthier,” Goeldi says. Categorizing AI into risk classes is also plausible, he adds, but it is just not easy to classify them with foresight.
“I find risk classification justified in the abstract but borderline naive in implementation,” Goeldi says. One example, he says, is social scoring. That is on the banned list in the AI Act. However, almost every social media platform or search engine classifies its users and their behavior according to certain criteria – as a form of filtering relevant information.
“The regulatory uncertainty is absolutely catastrophic for the industry,” says Goeldi. “If the EU manages to put a reasonable framework in place relatively soon that is perhaps deliberately a bit open at the beginning and also allows to see further development first, then that would be a locational advantage. Absolutely.”
Goeldi also does not think much of the French way of pumping a lot of state money into the scene. It is more sensible to create strong ecosystems, he says. As a positive example, the investor cites the AI Innovation Park (Ipai) in Heilbronn, which has just been opened by Digital Minister Wissing.
The digital association Bitkom also does not advocate the French approach of pouring a lot of government money into the sector. “From a business perspective, this is initially a disadvantage for German startups,” says Kai Pascal Beerlink, Artificial Intelligence Officer at Bitkom. “But if you look at the market as a whole, such political influences also carry a certain risk. They distort the market mechanisms.” And there is a risk of the bubble bursting, he said. “When companies face the market, they also have the innovation pressure they need to survive.”
Beerlink is convinced that focusing on AI applications for the manufacturing industry could be a niche “that we can occupy in Europe and especially in Germany.” Here, he says, security, trustworthiness and transparency are particularly important.
As for what else the state could do, “It would be desirable for the federal government to get involved in the AI Act negotiations to promote innovation – and to do so in a coordinated way,” Beerlink says. “That’s more important than the government promoting individual companies.”
The story of Hans-Gert Pöttering’s life actually begins before his life has even begun. In February 1945, in the last weeks of the Second World War, his father died as a soldier in Pomerania, in what is now Poland. Six months later, in September 1945, Hans-Gert Pöttering was born near Osnabrück. This event still determines his thinking today. “This experience of having lost my father in a war, of not knowing him, was psychologically the motivation for the thought that we must work for peace and for the unification of Europe.“
This aspiration captured Pöttering as a young man when he joined the Junge Union and the CDU and has not left him today, at the age of 77. Our interview quickly turns into a passionate plea for the European Union and the values it stands for.
After all, it is the EU that has strongly influenced and shaped his life and career. From 2007 to 2009, for example, Pöttering was the twelfth president of the European Parliament, and in this role, he also initiated the creation of the House of European History in Brussels. “That was the most difficult thing I have done in my political life,” he says in retrospect. Today, he is still Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the House of European History.
From 2010 to 2017, he was Chairman of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, where he still serves as an honorary Europe officer. He is also a co-founder of the European Charlemagne Youth Prize, a lecturer at the University of Osnabrück with a course on European unification, and a member of the board of directors of the Charlemagne Prize of Aachen.
He mentions in passing that the Dalai Lama has invited him for his birthday and that he will accept this invitation.
Some political developments in the EU member states worry Pöttering. But he also knows: there have always been setbacks and defeats in the history of the European Union. For example, the failure of the EU Constitutional Treaty in 2005. “The biggest disappointment of my political life was Brexit,” says Pöttering. “I say that so we do not lose heart with the challenges we have at the moment, also with populist developments in some countries of the European Union, but that we have to counter, that we have to defend our values, human dignity, freedom, justice, peace.”
His political experience teaches Pöttering that these values will prevail as long as there are people who believe in them. He sees this, especially in the younger generations. For example, he tells of schoolchildren in his home region who demonstrated against Russia’s war and showed solidarity with the people in Ukraine. At the action, he was invited to speak. “In my speech, I also encouraged young people to get involved, in parties that have the unification of Europe as their cause,” Pöttering explains.
In his free time, Hans-Gert Pöttering enjoys sports: he likes swimming, skiing and cycling. With students, Pöttering also often shares a story of personal failure – namely, that he had to repeat the seventh grade because of an F in German because his spelling was too bad. In this way, he wants to motivate them that failure is also part of life. If something goes wrong, just get up, dust yourself off and move on. That also applies to the EU. Sarah Tekath
