France’s Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine has called for more alliances between Union member states to get agreement on key political issues

Date: 27/04/2000

Védrine said more varied coop-eration was needed to make progress in certain areas. 'The Franco-German motor is indispensable but no longer sufficient,' he insisted, adding that there should instead be 'several cores, not always joining the same countries and formed according to issues and programmes'. Védrine said that to make this work, the EU should extend qualified majority voting to cover social affairs and some taxation measures and reweight national votes in the Council of Ministers as part of the ongoing treaty reform talks.