Tear up EU and start again as mega-state, says Draghi

THE European Union should become a single mega-state as it is not working in its current form, according to a former prime minister of Italy.

Mario Draghi, who led the European Central Bank (ECB) and served as a technocrat prime minister during the pandemic, said the EU was mired in “functional paralysis” and faced “a critical moment”.

The former premier said it made no sense to have 27 separate national armed forces and 27 separate drug control agencies. The only hope, he said, would be to have “greater political integration and a true common parliament”.

Mr Draghi, who was prime minister of Italy from February 2021 until October 2022, has hopes of becoming the next president of the European Council, according to Italian media reports.

“By expanding the European Union to 28 members [prior to Brexit] we made a colossal error: to think that it could work with the rules put in place when there were just 12 members,” Mr Draghi said in a speech in Rome.

For the EU to have a future in a multicentric world dominated by big powers such as the US and China “it should become a state”, Mr Draghi said.

He added: “Let’s hope that those founding values that brought us together will hold us together. Today, the growth model has dissolved and we need to reinvent a way of growing, but to do this, we need to become a state.”

He compared the EU with ancient Rome, lamenting that it has no common foreign policy or single army.