Last Thursday 22nd February, the Official Spanish Chamber of Commerce in Belgium and Luxembourg held a new luncheon-debate in the framework of its “Business Circle” tribune, in which Jaume Duch Guillot, Director General of Communication and Spokesperson in the European Parliament, spoke about “European Elections 2024: challenges and opportunities for the next five years”.

The President of the Chamber, Pablo López-Álvarez, opened the event highlighting the professional career of the speaker and the relevance of the next European elections that will take place from 6th to 9th of June and that will be “perhaps the most important in history”.

Jaume Duch then began his speech by contextualising the year 2024 as one in which two major elections will take place that “will shape our near future”: the European elections and the US elections that will take place on November 4th. “The combined effect of both elections will affect our lives more in the coming years than any national or local election,” Duch said.

A context of crisis

This key moment comes after a “turbulent” mandate, marked by crises such as the climate emergency, the inflation crisis and the covid pandemic, a health crisis with which “we discovered the limits of globalisation”.

In this volatile context, “the European Union needs to function as a global player with a certain degree of self-sufficiency if we want to remain a relevant geopolitical actor”. In this sense, Duch pointed out several of the challenges that the Union will have to respond to in the next legislature, such as the Green Deal, the reinforcement of social policies and the culmination of the capital markets union.

“Polls show that European citizens perceive the positive impact of the EU’s response to crises that affect their lives,” he said, adding that “six out of ten have a good opinion” of the EU. Even so, Duch explained that it will be vitally important to get the message across to the European public that voting is the best way to protect democracy.

At the end of the speech, there was a round of Q&A in which the role of the capital markets union in the election campaign and the question of how to protect the EU’s credibility were raised.

The Chamber would like to thank all the participants for making the luncheon-debate a success, as well as Bodegas Castaño for sponsoring the wine at the event.