The former President of the EU Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, receives the European Charlemagne Prize from the Sudeten Germans. The award will be presented at this year’s Sudeten German Day on May 18th in Augsburg, as the Sudeten German country team announced on Thursday. The 69-year-old is being honored for his services to a united Europe.
He is an “outstanding statesman who is a Luxembourg patriot and at the same time does not belong to any nation state, but to all Europeans,” said the spokesman for the Sudeten German ethnic group, Bernd Posselt, in justifying the award. Juncker played a key role in European integration, was one of the fathers of the internal market and the euro and pushed forward the EU’s eastward expansion.
Juncker was Prime Minister of Luxembourg for almost two decades from 1995, and he then led the EU Commission as President from 2014 to 2019. The Charlemagne Prize is named after the medieval Emperor Charles IV. The Sudeten Germans, who were expelled from what was then Czechoslovakia after the Second World War and largely found a new home in Bavaria, have been awarding the prize since 1958.
The award is intended for personalities and institutions from politics, intellectual life or business “who have made special contributions to the understanding and cooperation of the peoples and countries of Central Europe.” Previous winners include Ukrainian President Volodimir Selenskij, former Federal President Karl Carstens (CDU) and several Bavarian CSU Prime Ministers.