The European Union Refuses to Save Itself

 

"There's no helping some people.

Less than a month ago, Europe got a shock when voters in European Parliament elections turned to parties of the right (some of them newish or insurgent protest parties) to send a message about their exasperation. 

Now in a characteristic non sequitur, European Union grandees are scheming to reappoint the very leaders that voters rebuffed.

At issue is the fate of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. The commission is the EU's powerful bureaucratic apparatus. From their gleaming offices in Brussels, the president, an unwieldy cabinet of 26 other commissioners (each representing an EU member country) and their army of apparatchiks write first drafts of legislation and regulations, enforce antitrust laws and scold national governments over EU budget rules.

Ms. von der Leyen has been the commission's president since 2019, and June's election was in large part a rebuke to her agenda. Although a product of the center-right -- she springs from Germany's Christian Democratic Union, affiliated with the EU-level European People's Party -- she shifted leftward to secure the top EU job five years ago. The signature policy she adopted, the European Green Deal of aggressive climate-change mandates and subsidies, is her only first-term achievement of note. It also is one of two issues about which voters seem most displeased with Brussels. The other is a long-running immigration crisis about which Ms. von der Leyen appears to have few ideas.

Last month's election produced a European Parliament with a larger contingent of lawmakers on the political right and hollowed out Europe's climate-obsessed Green parties in particular. This should be feeding into discussions about Ms. von der Leyen's future since the parliament must approve the president nominated by the heads of the EU's 27 national governments. Instead, EU leaders apparently intend to pretend the election never happened.

Lightning-fast negotiations started within days of the parliamentary election, and national leaders have coalesced behind a plan to back Ms. von der Leyen for a second term. The plan is part of a deal that also elevates leaders from the centrist-technocrat umbrella party Renew and the Socialist bloc to two other top jobs. But Ms. von der Leyen's EPP is the only party group among that old "big three" that managed to gain seats in the election. These negotiations unhelpfully excluded Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, whose European Conservatives and Reformists pan-European group, which is to the right of the EPP, was among the big parliamentary winners.

Now that Ms. von der Leyen's appointment is heading to the newly elected parliament for approval, she's doubling down on the error. She intends to assemble the requisite parliamentary majority for her confirmation primarily from the big three parties (EPP, Renew and the Socialist group), which inevitably will require sacrificing some of her own EPP's winning policy priorities to compromise with the two losing parties.

Then, to inoculate herself against inevitable defections by some lawmakers in those parties who won't support her, Ms. von der Leyen appears to be trying to strike a deal with . . . the Greens. This likely would require her to bow to left-wing priorities on net-zero climate-change targets that voters tried to reject last month. This would turn the EU's biggest losers -- Green parties fell to 54 seats in the new parliament from 71 before -- into its kingmakers.

This election should have been an opportunity for Ms. von der Leyen and her allies on the right to ditch unpopular green pledges made from expedience five years ago in favor of an agenda that a majority of voters might actually support. But Brussels still believes the biggest danger to the European Union -- and to Europe, for that matter -- is what EU bigwigs misleadingly label the "far right." The aim, therefore, is to marginalize parties such as Ms. Meloni's or Marine Le Pen's National Rally in France (another big winner in the EU elections and perhaps soon to form part of a national administration in Paris) by freezing them out of important political decisions in Brussels.

An irony is that these right-wing parties are no longer anti-EU in the way they once were, because they've discovered that's not a majority position among the European public. Think of them instead as "better-EU" movements in that they represent voters' demands that the EU become more effective on matters such as immigration and less interfering and economically destructive on issues such as climate -- and more responsive to voters, period.

But for the new right's de facto reform agenda to work, and for the EU to maintain any sort of popular legitimacy, Brussels has to show it's willing to become better in the ways voters want. That Brussels is refusing to do this yet again, even after such a big electoral rebuke, might make voters start to wonder if the EU really can be saved." [1]

 It will not work to feed local companies that are unable to create modern technologies with tons of money of EU residents, as the European Commission is trying to do now. You will have to buy cheaper than today's technologies and high-quality Chinese originals. Uncontrolled migration to the EU must also be stopped. Time to retire for Mrs von der Leyen.

1. Political Economics: The European Union Refuses to Save Itself. Sternberg, Joseph C.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 05 July 2024: A.15.