European parliament

Thursday

The Spectator

The danger of a Labour supermajority

We are witnessing what could well be the last few weeks of a constrained Labour party. Sir Keir Starmer is saying as little as possible about his agenda and is instead listing what he won’t do (raise income tax, etc). He is rightly fearful that the Conservatives may do better than the opinion polls suggest. That has happened in the past. There may be a ‘shy Tory’ effect in the polls as there was in 1992, 2015 and 2019. Who would admit to voting Conservative in the current climate? Regardless, power now looks certain to come Starmer’s way – perhaps with a majority bigger than that of any modern prime

Thursday

The Spectator

The EU ‘elections’ vindicate Brexit

If Britain had not left the European Union, we would be going to the polls this week as well as on 4 July. The European parliament elections have come round again and it is likely that there will be a mass revolt against the direction of the EU project. Across the continent, voters disillusioned with the EU model of democracy are turning to the Eurosceptic right. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally is on course to become the biggest single party in the European parliament. AfD is polling in second place in Germany. Geert Wilders’s Freedom party is comfortably ahead in the Netherlands. Chega, a new far-right party from Portugal, is

Friday

Frank Furedi

Qatargate and the dubious moral authority of NGOs 

The Qatargate scandal haunting the European Union is not merely about corrupt politicians and officials. The deplorable role of a non-governmental organisation is at the heart of the scandal, which highlights the interlocking of NGOs and EU parliamentarians and decision makers. The most interesting feature of the corruption scandal surrounding the detention of the EU parliament’s vice-president Eva Kaili and politicians and EU apparatchiks is their connection to a supposedly squeaky-clean NGO called Fight Impunity. The current president of the organisation is Pier Antonio Panzeri, 67, a former Italian leftist MEP. He was arrested after €600,000 in bank notes was found in his house in Brussels. He and his wife and daughter are alleged to have received bribes from a Moroccan diplomat. Even more interesting is the revelation that

Wednesday

Andrew Tettenborn

The Putin apologists of the European parliament

Never underestimate Vladimir Putin, and certainly never underestimate his advisers. Well before the first Russian rockets exploded in metropolitan Kiev, he had achieved a major foreign policy success by sabotaging the EU’s ability to present a united front against him. Ever since the days of Gerhard Schroeder, Russia had deftly weaponised German politicians’ commitment to Ostpolitik and German people’s desire for a comfortable bourgeois life, and this undoubtedly paid off. Before the invasion the EU’s paymaster was less than enthusiastic about sanctions when reminded of the sunk costs of Nord Stream 2 and its short-sighted but temporarily lucrative decision to depend both on Russian gas and the profits it made

Wednesday

William Nattrass

Viktor Orbán goes to war on the European parliament

‘Times have changed, and whereas thirty years ago we believed Europe was our future, today we understand that we are Europe’s future’. Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán has never been one to shy away from controversy when it comes to the European Union. But on Hungarian Independence Day on Monday, he went a step further by presenting an alternative vision for the bloc.  Orbán’s plan involves a major restructuring of the European parliament, which he described as a ‘dead-end’ for democracy. He wants to fix the EU’s democratic deficit by building a ‘democracy of democracies based on European nations’.  In practice, this would mean a reformed European parliament consisting of delegates

Thursday

Pieter Cleppe

MEPs have missed their chance to protect human rights

The European Parliament is always eager to lecture the world about human rights. To a degree, this annoys the world’s despots and we should, of course, never underestimate how ‘sunlight is the best disinfectant’. But the Parliament’s overall influence on foreign affairs is still limited. On Tuesday, however, MEPs received an opportunity to actually make a difference when it came to protecting human rights. The European Parliament had to decide whether to lift the immunity of three Catalan nationalist MEPs – former Catalan government leader Carles Puigdemont and former ministers Antoni Comín and Clara Ponsatí – that are facing criminal charges in Spain for their roles in organising an independence