Vaccine Fiasco Marks ‘Beginning of End of EU’, Says Farage

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ALAIN JOCARD/AFP via Getty Images
Victoria Friedman

Brexit leader Nigel Farage has said that the European Commission’s disastrous handling of the bloc’s vaccination programme marks “the beginning of the end of the European Union as we know it”.

European media has continued to criticise Commission President Ursula von der Leyen for leading the EU’s failing vaccination programme. Only around three per cent of the EU27’s population is inoculated on average. In contrast, Brexit Britain, which signed contracts with drugs firms such as AstraZeneca months before Brussels, has protected more than 14 per cent of its inhabitants.

Refusing to consider resigning as the head of the bloc’s powerful executive arm, von der Leyen’s management style varies between blaming her suppliers, threatening to impose borders and blocking exports, to alleging that Europe should be proud that it’s months behind the UK in vaccinating vulnerable people, implying that Britain had compromised safety with its own vaccination programme.

Speaking to talkRADIO on Tuesday, Reform UK Party leader Mr Farage said that as well as Brexit, the European Commission’s handling of vaccination procurement is another sign portending the end of the European Project.

“It is not a good thing that tens of millions of people in Europe are not going to get their jabs until several months after people in Britain do. That is not a good thing,” Mr Farage said, condemning the “centralised bureaucracy” that prevented European countries from organising their own vaccination response to the Chinese coronavirus pandemic.

The Brexit leader also mocked the nature of political promotion in the European Union, saying that the Commission is one of those places where national governments send their less talented politicians as it was a “great way of hiding domestic embarrassments”.

The political editor for Germany’s highest-circulating newspaper Bild, Peter Tiede, made a similar observation when he drew parallels between von der Leyen’s vaccine procurement failures as head of the EU to her procurement failures when she was German defence minister.

“Angela Merkel ordered her away to the European Commission. Just as Europe has been doing for decades with its discarded political personnel: disposed of like nuclear waste in the final repository of Brussels,” Mr Tiede wrote.

Mr Farage continued: “Generally, there is quite a long tradition of people who’ve somehow failed in the end in domestic politics who finish up in the European Commission.

“They’re the people who make the big decisions that affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people. You can’t vote for them, and you can’t sack them. You can’t change the decisions that they make.”

“I genuinely think that on something as important as this [the pandemic], the magnitude of this, I really believe this is the beginning of the end of the European Union as we know it,” Mr Farage predicted.

Mr Farage said after the UK finally left the EU’s institutions on New Year’s Day that in a decade, there may be no European Union, with Brexit becoming the template for European countries regaining their independence. Speaking to talkRADIO, he predicted that rather than strongly Eurosceptic, conservative countries like Hungary, Italy could be the next to make a move and vote to leave the bloc.

“There has been zero growth in Italy… why? Because they’re stuck in a German-dominated currency that doesn’t suit their country at all.” Farage said.

“I think this is the beginning of the end — Brexit and now this. We’re going to finish up, I hope, in five or ten years’ time, with a European cooperation where we trade together, work together, agree to be friends and partners together — but not one where you surrender national sovereignty and give it to a bunch of losers in Brussels who make terrible decisions,” the Brexiteer said.

“The days of that are long gone.”

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