And rightly so, there are far more native German speakers in the EU than native English speakers. Even French is mother tongue to more people than English.
And yet half of all members of the EU don't share a common language they're functional in. That's a drastic inefficiency. The logical means of correcting it, is to standardize on English, which would provide a much greater international benefit than any other language already heavily spoken in the EU.
18% of the EU speaks German natively, versus 13% for English. However roughly 50% speak English as a whole, versus 38% for German. There are 360 million native English speakers in the world, and only 89 million German; with a billion English speakers globally, and only 166 million German speakers.
More than half the EU population already speaks english whereas less than one third speaks German [1]. Plus it is a much better choice thinking in global (worldwise) terms.
