Will Warsaw and Rome find common ground on opposing the EU?
ADVERTISEMENTThe panel on Raw Politics has been debating the possibility of an anti-EU alliance forming between Italy and Poland.
Matteo Salvini, Italy’s deputy prime minister, and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who heads up Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party, met in Warsaw on Wednesday.
On the agenda was the forming of an alliance to oppose Brussels ahead of European Parliament elections in May.
Austrian MEP Georg Mayer, from the Europe of Nations and Freedom Group, said he did not like the term “anti-EU alliance”.
“We want to change some things in the institutions and in the European Union,” he told Raw Politics.
“Britain is leaving [the EU] and still they [the European Commission] want more money from the member states.
“We don’t want to support more money to the European Union,” he added. “There should be some kind of cost-cutting [at EU level].
“For me, it’s not so much about the money, it’s how it is spent,” said Irish MEP Marian Harkin.
“The money doesn’t belong to the European Union or the member states, it belongs to the citizens who pay the taxes.”
But one of the key issues where Poland and Italy may struggle to reach a deal on an anti-EU alliance is migration, according to Euronews’ political editor Darren McCaffrey.
“Italy and Poland are on two different pages [on migration],” he said. “Italy essentially wants to see a quota system across the EU and Poland doesn’t want to take part in that at all. That is the biggest potential issue in Europe today and there is very little unity on that.”
Watch the full debate on the anti-EU alliance in the video player, above