From The Telegraph:

‘United States of Europe by 2025’: German SPD leader names his price for joining Merkel coalition

Justin Huggler, berlin James Crisp, brussels

7 DECEMBER 2017 • 7:27PM

The man who could be Germany’s vice-chancellor within weeks on Thursday called for the European Union to transform itself into a “United States of Europe”.

Martin Schulz, the leader of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), called for a new federal constitution for the EU by 2025.

Hours before his party voted to open talks on forming a new coalition with the beleaguered Angela Merkel, Mr Schulz made clear he would demand radical EU reform and far deeper integration than previously envisaged as his price for ending weeks of political crisis in Germany.

Under Mr Schulz’s proposals, Brussels would be given power over individual member states’ foreign and domestic policy, as well as taxes.

Countries who refuse to sign up to a new federal Europe should automatically lose their EU membership, he said.

A deal with Mr Schulz’s party is Mrs Merkel’s last chance to prevent new elections after coalition negotiations with smaller parties broke down last month. …

A former president of the European parliament and committed federalist, he appears to have seized on Europe as a new central cause for the SPD after it suffered its worst ever election result in September.

Mr Schulz acknowledged as much in his speech, accusing Poland of “systematically undermining European values”, and saying Hungary was “increasingly isolating itself”.

Once drafted, a new federal constitution would be “presented to the member states, and those countries who are against it will simply leave the EU,” he said — remarks clearly aimed at the reluctant central Europeans.

The EU’s uneasy relationship with Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic sunk to a new low on Thursday as Brussels said it would take them to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) for refusing to accept the bloc’s imposed quotas of migrants.

EU countries agreed to redistribute 120,000 asylum-seekers from Italy and Greece in 2015. The three countries, outvoted over the compulsory law, now face huge, daily fines unless they take their share.