Wealth & Money Quote by Guy Verhofstadt

A hard-nosed confession disguised as a democratic pep talk, Verhofstadt’s line strips the romance out of “the will of the people” and replaces it with the real operating system of global politics: leverage. The opening, “Let us face it,” is doing rhetorical triage. It signals impatience with comforting myths and invites the listener into a club of adults who can handle bad news. That move matters because it frames inequality of power not as a scandal to be solved, but as a baseline to be managed.

The key sting is “more powerful arguments.” He’s not just saying money talks; he’s saying it persuades. In this phrasing, influence becomes a debate you lose before it begins if your balance sheet is light. “The number of people you represent” is a deliberately sanitized stand-in for democratic legitimacy. Verhofstadt’s subtext: representation is morally compelling, but markets, capital, and trade dependencies are operationally decisive. In a European context, that reads as both critique and warning: a union built on shared values still negotiates in a world where creditors, energy suppliers, and major economies can set the terms.

Coming from a statesman associated with European integration, the line also functions as a pitch for scale. If economic strength is the argument that wins, then small states and even mid-sized democracies need pooled sovereignty, coordinated industrial policy, and collective bargaining power to avoid being rhetorically right and practically irrelevant. It’s a realist’s slogan for a rules-based order: ideals need muscle, or they become decoration.