Starting on 1 July, Germany will take over the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union for the coming six months. The country’s priorities for the presidency are driven by its motto, Together for Europe’s recovery, and they are focused on six main areas, including a sustainable, stronger and fair Europe, among others.

ALDE Party President Hans van Baalen welcomes the German EU Presidency as an honest broker between those who support the European Commission Recovery Plan as proposed and those who want to safeguard how the money is to be spent:

“We all want solidarity but grants and loans should strengthen the European economies and make them shock-proof by structural reform, innovation and digitalisation. Germany and Chancellor Angela Merkel have to, however, not only to find a European compromise on how to stimulate economic recovery, they have to broker a trade treaty with the UK, they have to integrate the Green Deal and the Recovery Plan in a modernised MFF, they have to make the EU asylum and migration policy more effective and they have to be tough on China which does not share our democratic values, oppresses internal minorities and Hong Kong and tries to strangle the democratic Taiwan.”