Let the next generation speak up for Europe | Timothy Garton Ash

The remote elites of Planet Brussels have had their day. Those who have grown up taking European freedoms for granted must now be heard

“I was mad at you,” says Mario, an Italian student. He was angry about a column I wrote just after the European elections in May arguing that to choose Jean-Claude Juncker as president of the European commission was the wrong answer to the continent-wide discontent those elections revealed.

Well, as the commission president, Juncker, proposes a prestidigitated investment package to boost the European economy, and the former Polish prime minister Donald Tusk prepares to chair his first summit of EU heads of government, it’s worth asking again who is going to save the European project. My answer: it will not be saved without the more active engagement of Mario and his contemporaries – the Erasmus and easyJet generation.

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