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U.S. President Donald Trump's threats to annex Greenland served as the "epiphany moment" for Europe's six largest economies to form an exclusive club aimed at breaking political deadlocks that have stalled financial market reform for a decade, Spanish Economy Minister Carlos Cuerpo told Politico.
The new group, dubbed "E6" in Brussels, brings together France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Poland to accelerate efforts to create a U.S.-style financial market and prevent Europe's economy from falling further behind the United States and China.
"There are no red lines in the discussions within this group. I think that should be for the benefit of everyone," Cuerpo said.
The goal is to put "politically difficult discussions on the table to be able to unlock files that have been locked so far," said Cuerpo, who has long campaigned to make EU bodies better at delivering concrete policy decisions.
"Building those bridges can then be a good first step towards an overall solution," he added.
The spark that triggered E6's emergence came during a ministerial breakfast in Brussels on a cold January morning, when Cuerpo's frustration over EU inaction boiled over.
His outburst came at an opportune time for the finance ministers of France and Germany.
Finance Minister Roland Lescure and German Vice Chancellor Lars Klingbeil had met just 24 hours earlier to discuss how best to revive stagnant EU economic initiatives.
"Lars and Roland pushed to convene all six of us and that's how it got started," Cuerpo said. Invitations for a virtual meeting arrived within a week.
Critics, including Ireland and Portugal, fear the six-country club could trigger a two-speed Europe in which the biggest nations sideline smaller countries that disagree with E6's agenda—especially on creating a watchdog to supervise the bloc's biggest financiers.
Portugal's finance minister, Joaquim Miranda Sarmento, urged the six countries to respect the EU's treaties during the Eurogroup after Germany's Klingbeil briefed peers on E6 discussions—a transparency pledge that failed to appease all skeptical ministers and their aides, according to Politico's report.
"EU supervision was the elephant in the room," one diplomat who attended the Eurogroup said, adding that, "I'm surprised more people didn't speak up."
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