For decades, a large part of national laws has merely been the servile transposition of community directives, while the Court of Justice extends the reach of its jurisprudence and its abusive interpretation of the treaties. Until now, thanks to the residual right of veto, each member country could, in theory, still reject a policy detrimental to it. However, since the “citizen” conference on the future of Europe, organized in 2022 in a perfectly opaque and pseudo-democratic manner, the elimination of this right has been planned. In May 2023, elected but not mandated French and German leaders declared their intention to reform the EU in this regard. In September 2023, Franco-German experts presented their report. On November 22, 2023, a resolution of the European Parliament proposed amending the treaties to generalize the rule of qualified majority in all areas without exception and to provide for more sanctions against recalcitrant member states. On November 29, the French National Assembly voted on a resolution in favor of a treaty project that relegates our sovereignty and explicitly provides that external borders, civil protection, foreign affairs, common security, defense, industry, and education become “shared competences” of the European Union, meaning states retain only residual competence.

The adoption of this reform, which will transfer to the Union the last elements of the essential conditions for exercising national sovereignty, will realize the dream of some of a federal Europe, governed by a commission officially titled “Executive,” headed by a “President of the European Union.” The end of national sovereignties, and therefore of our democracies, is thus clearly projected. The European peoples have long sensed this dispossession. It dissolves national and popular sovereignty. It undermines democracy. The French, for instance, opposed in 2005 a first attempt at federalization that sealed their political and cultural disappearance, but their hesitations were swept away by leaders converted to the ideology of the “open society.” The popular verdict was disregarded and circumvented by the parliamentary ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, a mere copy of the treaty rejected by the French. This process is currently ongoing. Our leaders are preparing to make a major decision that compromises the fate of our countries, their independence, and their very existence as nations. Leveraging the anxiety triggered by war, they accelerate federalization without ever naming it, and without European populations being able to measure their dispossession.

As far as we are concerned, we reject this drift. We believe that a post-democratic federal system is contrary to the spirit of Europe and to the collective imaginary that produces the common from the diversity of its nations and its own culture. The definitive disconnection between the peoples and the European machinery will conclude the deresponsibilization of national leaders and will multiply nationalist reactions, with the risk of leading us into chaos. Whatever our vision of Europe, and the opinion on the reform and the expansions in preparation, we must demand that such a significant qualitative leap into the unknown of a supranational system, which undermines the identity of the peoples, the existence of the nations, and the experience of the European states, be subjected to a referendum.

It is urgent to open the debate about what is being prepared. The elections in June 2024 must be the occasion to pronounce ourselves, with full knowledge of the facts, on the ongoing federalization project, as well as on the planned expansions. The signatories of this call and the citizens who join ask the candidates of each list at the European elections to clearly position themselves on these projects and commit to submitting them to popular ratification.