‘Era of government stability is over,’ says EU Parliament President

“Extremely flimsy” EU governments are crippling the bloc’s unity as its economy races to catch up with the US, European Parliament President Roberta Metsola warned on Thursday.

Metsola, a Maltese centre-right MEP, questioned landmark new laws on artificial intelligence, saying the bloc’s overenthusiasm for regulation could endanger creativity.

The “long era of government stability is over,” Metsola said, citing Angela Merkel’s departure after 16 years in charge of Germany, and EU prime ministers in “extremely flimsy coalitions”.

Recent European elections saw a rise in support for the extremes, and a number of European leaders – including France’s Emmanuel Macron and the Netherlands’ Dick Schoof – are now explicitly or tacitly supported by parties in the far right.

Politicians in the centre ground “spent far to long … thinking our voters no matter what are going to vote for us anyway,” she said, adding: “We learned that the hard way they didn’t … they just want to protest.”

Europe could regain its strength by overcoming its political differences – irrespective of who’s in the White House, she suggested.

“No matter what happens on Tuesday we will have a new [US] president in January … that matters,” she said, adding: “We should not be naive into thinking that the last four years were perfect for the EU … fragmentation at home is also something we need to deal with.”

Metsola, who chairs sessions of the Parliament’s 720-strong MEPs, also called for a pause on a packed EU legislative agenda which some fear could be constraining competitiveness.

“For us it is clear, and this is not only in the financial and economic sector, that we need to stop and take stock,” she said, addressing a banking conference in Madrid.

The “jury’s still out on whether we found this balance” in regulating artificial intelligence, she said of a pioneering, but not yet implemented, law that seeks to control the technology. 

The AI Act aims to regulate systems according to the risk they pose to society. It entered into force early August, and takes effect between one and three years later.

“Can something that it is still essentially growing, that is going to take over a big chunk of our lives, to take over the way the world works, be regulated or not?” she asked.

“My concern is that we could have the first ever piece of legislation, but if that is going to stifle innovation and creativity … then we are restricting ourselves,” she said.

She also set out a positive European regulatory agenda, saying that continuing restrictions to cross-border loans and differences in fund taxation would only widen Europe’s competitiveness gap with the US.