Former London mayor Boris Johnson, who is leading the “Out” campaign ahead of Britain’s EU membership referendum, said in an interview that the bloc was following the path of former German leader Adolf Hitler and former French leader Napoleon Bonaparte by trying to create a European superstate.
Johnson told the Sunday Telegraph newspaper that the EU lacks democracy and a unifying authority, and is doomed to fail.
“Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this out, and it ends tragically,” Johnson was quoted as saying in an interview.
Photo: AP
“The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods, but, fundamentally, what is lacking is the eternal problem, which is that there is no underlying loyalty to the idea of Europe,” he said. “There is no single authority that anybody respects or understands. That is causing this massive democratic void.”
Johnson, who is a frontrunner to succeed British Prime Minister David Cameron, has emerged as the most important voice in the “Out” camp ahead of the June 23 referendum.
Cameron, who is leading the “In” campaign, has said that Britain’s membership of the EU makes the nation more secure, more influential and more prosperous.
He also said Britain, which is not part of the single-currency eurozone, would not be dragged into ever-closer union among the EU’s member states.
However, an opinion poll published earlier on Saturday suggested that twice the number of voters believed Johnson was more likely to tell the truth about the EU than Cameron.
With less than six weeks to go until the referendum, voters are evenly split between wanting to remain in the EU and preferring to leave, other opinion polls have shown.
In his interview, Johnson said he wants the British people to be “the heroes of Europe” again, creating echoes of the language used by former British prime minister Winston Churchill, the Sunday Telegraph said.
It also quoted him as saying that tensions between EU member states have allowed Germany to grow in power within the bloc, “take over” the Italian economy and “destroy” Greece.
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