2023-12-15 17:03:00
Historic, victorious… Friday morning, there was no shortage of superlatives in the European press to describe the way in which the negotiations had been carried out to get around the Hungarian obstacle and manage to find an agreement for open accession negotiations with Ukraine.
No one really believes that this will quickly bring Ukraine into the private club of the Twenty-Seven, but everyone agrees that the message sent is very strong. And the one who can take credit for the maneuver is Charles Michel.
The President of the European Council has made Ukraine’s accession one of his hobbyhorses. Thursday evening, it was he who announced that the 27 heads of state and government had managed to agree on the issue. Obviously, the numerous media cameras interested in Europe were trained on his person.
“Tonight, we sent a powerful signal to the European citizens,” declared the liberal in front of a wall of booms, cameras and microphones.
“It wasn’t great,” comments an elected official who works in the European institutions. “We might see that his English was having difficulty coming out, probably because of the long night of negotiations that he had in his teeth.”
”Spreek je Nederlands?”: The bilingualism of our ministers under the microscope, find out who has the worst rating
The level of English of the President of the European Council has often been the subject of mockery, especially when the liberal had just taken office. Today, meme pages like Coucou Charles or DG Meme are having a field day.
“His accent gently makes us smile,” we hear from a left-wing MEP. “In a multilingual Europe, one might wonder why he forces himself to always speak English.”
An MP from the Conservative group is a little more cash. “To ensure European representation, you need a minimum mastery of the English language. His level is not catastrophic, but he is a lot of fun in the European bubble. I once even attended a dinner where someone had fun imitating him and it made the whole room laugh.”
“He manages to communicate, that’s the main thing,” adds another European source, before giving him a grade of B2 (operational).
A last elected official contextualizes. “Yes, his very French accent makes you laugh, but he’s not the only one. You have elected officials who come from the Balkans who also have a very marked pronunciation. And he is not the first Belgian to suffer from this problem. We will remember Philippe Busquin (PS) whose English accent was terribly bad.”
Finally, since the use of artificial intelligence is intensively debated within the European institutions, we asked one of them to make Charles Michel speak in more “fluent” English.
1702664818
#Charles #Michel #speaks #broken #English #asked #VIDEO
