Teresa Freixes, academician of the RAED, reflects on the challenges facing Europe with the reappearance of populism
Teresa Freixes, professor of Constitutional Law at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, founder and president of the Civic Concord platform and full academician of the Royal European Academy of Doctors-Barcelona 1914 (RAED), has published the article “Quo Vadis Europa”, where she reflects on the short term challenges facing Europe with signs of resurgent populism which seems to have definitively renounced its constituent process.
“Europe has been ‘abducted’ by populisms, the crisis, the misrepresentation of concepts or, among others, the dissolution of the old certainties in the stormy waters of processes such as Brexit, the failed constitutional referendum in Italy, the boom of the extreme right in Holland and Germany, the resistance of the Visegrad Group to the common European position in relation to the immigration” begins Dr Freixes’ article-. “We are facing a real European problem. What does Europe want to be? A Europe that can face new challenges? Or a Europe where those who want to destroy it (secessionist and populist nationalists) can obtain huge advantages?”.
For this academician, the motto of the recent acts of celebration in Rome for the 60 years of European integration was very clear: “No to nationalisms, no to populisms”. From there, Dr Freixes considers that Europe has to be rethought. The professor, firm defender of a Europe at various speeds, denounces that economic interests and the effects of the crisis have ended up having effects that have transcended the political dimension and that have not always been approached correctly from the States with the most political and economic weight of the European Union.
Dr Teresa Freixes
Likewise, she considers that the enlargement of the Union has been approached with more voluntarism than planning, without taking into account the consequences that it has ended up having, with Brexit as a paradigmatic effect.
Convinced that the Union can only function with the guarantees of security and defense of Human Rights that already regulate its laws and treaties, Dr Freixes urges us to deploy all the mechanisms that Europe has been equipped to face, without complexes, the problems which it faces, from the aforementioned populisms to the refugee crisis, without exclusively focusing on the economic aspects.
“We need more Europe, we need to raise favourable voices to resume the European pulse. We need to really implement European citizenship so that those who are in the representative institutions are truly representatives of European citizens and not transmission belts of their respective national parties. We need to hear the voice of those represented, any distraction in this regard only hinders the exercise of citizenship rights”, concludes Dr Freixes.
