The leader of the Liberal Initiative in the European Parliament said on Tuesday that Europe must grow economically to respond to challenges, from expansion to changing energy sources, and to provide better opportunities for people.
At the end of lunch in Lisbon, the only campaign rally of the day, Joao Cotrim de Figueiredo said Europe must address Ukraine, changing energy sources and society’s adaptation to technology, “all very important, complex and costly challenges.”
Therefore, if Europe is to have a chance of successfully dealing with these problems, it must be able to generate financial resources.
“It is economic growth that creates opportunities so that we can effectively pay Europeans and, of course, our youth, who are entering the labor market better and better,” he realized.
Economic growth gives people the opportunity to earn higher wages and better living conditions, he added.
The Liberal candidate said Europe “has no serious difficulty in providing adequate compensation to Europeans who want to remain in Europe.”
Stressing that economic growth is not an economic problem but a political one, Joao Cotrim de Figueiredo noted that it is easy to return to growth with a more comprehensive vision and the removal of obstacles.
“Europe has already grown a lot and grown a lot at a time when it was much more integrated, or starting to be more integrated, than it was in the past. The fact of integrating markets, procedures, ways of doing things and removing obstacles causes growth,” fired.
He said it would be “relatively easy to resume this growth path” and overcome the setback that is now “obvious” in terms of innovation, talent attraction and investment.
“Our goal in this whole campaign was to return Europe to where it once was, not out of nostalgia, but almost out of futurism,” he stressed.
João Cotrim de Figueiredo stressed that the goal is that in the future someone will be able to say that Europe is “an area of peace, freedom and prosperity.”
And one of the measures, in his opinion, involves deepening the single market, which today has “more obstacles to the circulation of some goods” than 40 years ago.
“There are more challenges, more rules, more bureaucracy, more technical standards to meet, all of which are preventing more sustainable economic growth,” he said.
The single market can no longer be a market not only for the movement of people, goods, services and capital, but also for the free movement of knowledge.
According to the head of the list, it is necessary to return to giving the single market a central role in European politics.