Days before a crucial EU summit the president of the European Parliament has offered a dire warning over the state of the European Union. Martin Schulz told a German regional newspaper the future of the bloc is at risk. 


Good. May God grant us sufficiently long lives to live to see its end.

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In an interview published in Monday's edition of Bonn's General Anzeiger newspaper, the German politician who was also elected president of the European Parliament in January last year, warned that the EU's survival was "under threat." He added that it had lost a great deal of public support.

"When people turn away from a project or an idea, then at some point it will come to an end," Martin Schulz said.

The British prime minister David Cameron had simply "rubbed salt in an open wound," Schulz said, when he announced a referendum on Britain's future in the EU. If a British exit were to go ahead, he warned, member states would become "playthings for the economic and political interests of other world regions," and would "plunge into insignificance."