Читать книгу My Secret Brexit Diary - Michel Barnier - Страница 27

From The Hague we head straight for Bucharest. In the Romanian capital I meet my friend Dacian Cioloș, now Prime Minister of this great country, set to become the sixth largest economy in the EU once the UK has left.

A longstanding relationship has bound us together since the time when, as a young civil servant in the Romanian Ministry of Agriculture, Dacian was in charge of monitoring the decentralized development cooperation project in the Argeș region, which I had launched in 1996 as President of the General Council of Savoie.

In 2007, we both ended up, as agriculture ministers for our respective countries, tasked with securing a reform of the Common Agricultural Policy which would only be concluded in the early hours of a lengthy night of negotiations which the British were trying their best to derail.

Naturally, after this I closely followed Dacian’s candidacy for the post of European Commissioner, and his eventual appointment to the strategic post of agriculture.

Throughout those five years in the Barroso II Commission, our friendship and solidarity remained unwavering. As it did when I, along with Antonio Tajani and others, needed the support of the College to pass regulatory texts that offended the liberal or ultra-liberal sensibilities of certain colleagues and senior officials – which was the case with my proposal to establish access for all to a basic bank account in every country. And indeed, when he himself came up against the same ideological resistance to his 2010 proposal for a mechanism to enable farmers to finally come together to negotiate their prices with industrialists!

Mr Cioloș has invited us to dinner at a Romanian government residence, a former dacha away from the city centre. The ‘technical’ ministers he has gathered around him are politically astute and have good instincts.

The Romanian Minister of Labour, Dragoș Pîslaru, tells me: ‘We will be stronger in this negotiation if we’re really united. And this unity, this coherence, cannot be cemented by reactions or defensiveness alone. The twenty-seven must stand together, with a positive and proactive agenda, moving forward together and regaining the confidence of our citizens.’ At the end of these initial visits, the key elements we need for our negotiations are already falling into place.