Prodi: 'We are servants in the face of Trump, indecisive in the face of the Chinese'

"We act like servants in front of Donald Trump and don't know how to behave in front of the Chinese. Europe should have a united capacity to act. It would take European reformism'.

At the Trento Festival of Economics, former Prime Minister and former President of the EU Commission Romano Prodi, interviewed by the editor-in-chief of Sole 24 ore Fabio Tamburini, confirms his pessimistic outlook on the global scenario and Europe's weakness. A pessimism well portrayed by the quote from Thucydides that he chooses, almost as if the world had returned to that of over two thousand years ago: "On the part of Israel and the US there is an extraordinary strategic capacity but a political incapacity that I have never understood. The real quote from Thucydides to quote is 'the world is made this way, the powerful do what they want and the weak suffer what they can'. Trump has put it into practice."

A pessimism that has, however, faded somewhat in recent days on the Middle East front, Prodi confides, because 'on the one hand Israel has in fact been sidelined and on the other both the US and Iran need to bring the conflict to a swift end and arrive at peace, or rather a truce'.

There remains the problem of Europe, the shard pot among the iron pots (Russia, but above all the US and China), which is struggling to overcome its historical divisions and eliminate the suicidal mechanism of unanimous voting in order to play its rightful role on the international stage. The Professor reiterates that in the current state of affairs, with the tycoon at the helm overseas, it is all the more essential to look to the East rather than the West: "If we do not conclude something strong with China, we will no longer be able to export anything. We Europeans still have an extraordinary industrial capacity, a gross product that is almost equal to that of the US if we include Switzerland, Norway and Great Britain'. As a former EU president, Prodi recalled Angela Merkel's attempt in 2020 with the Eu-China Comprehensive agreement on investment, an agreement on rules between China and Europe, but then the United States 'prevented this and there was later the quarrel between China and the European Parliament and nothing was concluded'. Now, after six years, Germany and Europe have changed skin, with the strong German rearmament worrying because it 'changes the European structure': 'Now that Germany has invested in a single day, with the government not yet in place, a thousand billion in its army, France must understand: we need an EU defence'.

And if, with the return of nationalism and protectionism, France and Germany, the founding countries, "are friends but no longer brothers as in the past", the role, also historical, of Italia becomes even more important: "It is the Italian function that is missing, that of the glue", he says, accusing the government led by Giorgia Meloni of only looking at the duration of the executive ("what does duration count for, for the mere counting of days or to do something for the future?").