Editorials - Page 16 of 20

A less united and less European UK: ¿Brexit and break it?

By Andrés Ortega

Despite the official congratulations, Europe’s conservative-dominated collective leadership would have rather seen Labour’s Ed Miliband entering 10 Downing Street. This might seem a paradox, but it is not. There is little confidence in David Cameron. First he got Scotland into an independence referendum that made much of Europe very jittery. Europe’s leaders will again feel a shudder down their spines once the British referendum (Brexit) on leaving the EU comes up. Although Scottish nationalists only just lost their referendum, thanks to devolution promises Cameron now has to honour, the effect has been a totally SNP-dominated political landscape in Scotland. In last Thursday’s general election the party swept the board, taking 56 of a total of 59 seats, compared with only six in 2010.

POLAND: Duda wins the first round, but Komorowski is aiming for re-election

Pending , Dialogue , Op-ed
12 May, 2015

Analysing what happened last Sunday in the Polish presidential elections and trying to anticipate what might happen in two weeks’ time, there are clearly two different interpretations. On the one hand, the partial victory of Andrzej Duda reveals significant wear and tear in the Civic Platform (PO) currently in power – and of Komorowski as President. Furthermore, the rise of Pawel Kukiz, a musician and non-party independent, as the third most voted option (20%) appear to place Poland fairly and squarely in the European mainstream of new politicians, new discourse, and the desire for change – which is what’s happening in Greece and Spain.

Digital Single Market Strategy: Implications for European audiovisual content

Dialogue , Op-ed
10 May, 2015

By Sally Broughton Micova

There were no real surprises when European Commission Vice-President Andrus Ansip and Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society Günther H.Oettinger stood on the podium together yesterday [6 May] to launch the EC’s Digital Single Market (DSM) strategy. Draft versions and the evidence file had been leaked and commentators have remarked on a radical overhaul of copyright in the EU, but there seems to have been a slight retreat on the issue of territoriality and geo-blocking for content between the leaked and final versions of the document. A bit more caution is wise because there remain significant deficiencies in the evidence base on the incentives for European content production, and particularly the potential implications for the EU’s many smaller linguistic markets.

What-Does-Europe-Want Day

“It’s Europe Day!” my wife called out when I showed her the invitation flier to Kriek & Frites party on May 8-9 at Place Jourdan in Brussels. Neither the flier nor its typically Belgian offer implied any connection with the EU. Given my early school days were spent in the Soviet Union, I associated the dates rather with the end of World War II. So what’s this Europe Day anyway? I distantly remembered that it had something to do with the day on which France and Germany decided to unite their coal and steel industries, hoping that this would prevent them if not from ever again piling up tanks and cannons…

Wiretapping scandal in Macedonia casts doubts on judicial independence

Dialogue , Op-ed
5 May, 2015

By Jasmina Dimitrieva

The political opposition in Macedonia, led by the Social Democratic Union of Macedonia (SDSM), continues to publicly air wiretaps of government officials and other VIPs from the judiciary, the state secret service and the media, which have been obtained from an undisclosed source. The content has been rocking the country for the past three months as it unveils alleged corruption in all areas of public life. It appears that the law enforcement, the judiciary and the prosecutor’s office are being plagued by widespread political coercion and bargaining despite long-standing judicial and security sector reform funded by the EU and the US.

Malpractice in the Mediterranean

Libya is sick. And on 23 April, the European Council effectively wrote a prescription for ibuprofen. The absolute horror currently taking place in the Mediterranean- individuals packed onto a rickety boats like sardines in a can, trapped behind locked doors, drowning slowly as their last hope for a future escapes along with the last bit of air in their lungs- is symptomatic of the utter hell plaguing the failed state. A hell, bear in mind, that the West had a heavy hand in creating after the UNSC invoked the Responsibility to Protect, paving the way for military intervention and the subsequent ousting of Muammar Gaddafi.

The graveyard of toxic waste in Naples

Local mafias illegally control and handle disposal of waste in the region of Campania. Tons of hazardous waste are concentrated into makeshift landfills or burned in bonfires. Brussels has already made itself clear – but what is the Italian State doing about it?

Understanding Romania’s anticorruption hunt

By Vlad Stoicescu

To get a glimpse of what is happening one should understand first the legal mechanisms that put in motion Romania’s anti-corruption framework. The National Anticorruption Directorate was set up in 2002. Back then it was a step towards judicial reform and compliance with European standards in a period in which Bucharest was negotiating the country’s accession to the EU. For a couple of years it was just a “showcase institution”, formally highlighting the political will to combat Romania’s pervasive corruption.

GM crops in Europe: divide and conquer

By Manuel Ruiz Rico

On 13 January, by a large majority, the European Parliament in Strasbourg adopted a regulation that had little impact but which is bound to change the whole picture of GM crops in Europe. The House gave the green light to Member States, empowering them individually to approve or ban the cultivation of GM crops in their national territories, rather than this being decided by the EU. Across the breadth of Europe, due to the broad social rejection of these crops, GM is virtually banned. But everything could change from now on.

More democracy, not technocracy, Mr. Draghi

By Clément Fontan

On 16 March 2015, ECB chairman Mario Draghi delivered a speech at the Süddeutsche Zeitung Finance Day. Eurozone economic governance reforms were the topic of the day. The structural reforms proposed by Mr. Draghi are ideologically loaded and the creation of new institutions might worsen the democratic troubles in Europe rather than solve them. The ECB and other EU institutions have already been exploiting the financial crisis as an opportunity to implement structural reforms in a coercive manner for more than four years. The results have been worrying, to say the least.