Opšti topik o EU (ex kriza Evrozone)

[Prospero]

Irritated French politicians begin backing Brexit

By Aline Robert, Cécile Barbière | EurActiv.fr | Translated By Samuel White
 10. мар 2016. (updated: 10. мар 2016.)

 



The opinion that the UK should be left to go it alone is gaining traction in France.


Most French political parties officially support the United Kingdom’s continued membership of the EU. But cracks in the veneer are beginning to show, as more and more individual French politicians back Brexit. EurActiv France reports.

 

For Karine Berger, a Socialist MP, the way the UK handled the negotiation process caused serious trust issues.

“The discussion has evolved. The debate showed that the United Kingdom was asking for rewards for not respecting the common rules. Under these conditions, I do not think that a Brexit would harm the European Union,” she said.

This personal opinion is not officially shared by the Socialist Party, but according to EurActiv’s sources, it is one that is likely to be aired with increasing frequency in the coming weeks. And among the French members of the European Parliament ― the politicians that should be among the best-informed on the subject ― a majority appears to support Brexit.

In February, EurActiv published an editorial by socialist MEP Virginie Rozière (S&D group), in which she railed against “blackmail by the United Kingdom”, saying the country had “taken 60 years of European construction hostage for the benefit of a short-term domestic electoral agenda”.

“In exposing a view of Europe that is so at odds with the aims of the European project, the United Kingdom has made its eventual separation from continental Europe inevitable, albeit long and slow,” she added.

The political class appears to be reflecting an attitude generally shared by the French population on the subject. Asked how they would feel about seeing their British cousins go it alone, the French seem increasingly supportive of the idea. In a survey published by OpinionWay and LCI in February, 49% of French polled said they believed the effect of a Brexit on the French economy would be neutral, and 39% said they thought it would have no effect on France at all.

 

Britain out for a closer Union

For the most fervent Europhiles, a Brexit offers the promise of a fresh start for the EU, whose integration process has stalled. Dominique Riquet, a centrist MEP from the pro-European Parti Radical-UDI, is leading a campaign to let the British go.

“I hope the English leave!,” Riquet told the newspaper La Voix du Nord on Sunday (6 March). “I have always thought they would be better off outside than inside, so I completely disapprove of the concessions won by Cameron. We need to progress […] and the United Kingdom will do all it can to make sure this doesn’t happen.”

Riquet may have been one of the first MEPs to display his pro-Brexit cards, but many of his fellow Liberal ALDE members in the European Parliament feel the same way. And the feeling is not limited to centrist Europhiles.
“He is not afraid to express what the majority is thinking,” one left-wing lawmaker said.

MEPs from left and right alike regularly complain about the fact that discussions over Brexit are holding up the EU from making progress in other areas. The subject has undeniably pushed other issues dear to the Europhiles off the top of the agenda, including economic and monetary integration and the finalisation of the Banking Union.

“This is exactly what the Brits wanted: to block the progress of the EU. And it’s working!” said an exasperated EU official.

 

Right out of patience

Members of the European Parliament’s right-wing parties no longer even try to hide their irritation with the United Kingdom. The spokesperson for the French Republican delegation in the European Parliament, Philippe Juvin, did not mince his words.

“If they want to leave the EU, let them leave!” Juvin said. The politician wants to use the British referendum to launch a wide-spread myth-busting operation, which, he argues, is a task that should not be left up to the Brits.
For Juvin, inaction will certainly lead to European disintegration. But he also sees Brexit as “a political opportunity to define a two-speed Europe with a hard core, which France should be a part of.”
The same exasperation is also beginning to show with other, usually more moderate politicians.

Alain Lamassoure, the head of the French Republican delegation in the European Parliament, told Les Échos in February, “We are wasting time with domestic British politics”. Lamassoure, a former Europe minister who is a veteran of European institutions, regularly cites Article 50 of theTreaty on European Union, which provides a procedure by which a country can leave the EU if it so chooses. This provision was conceived with the UK in mind.

 

Opposed to a mini-Europe

For Yves Bertoncini, the director of Notre Europe – Jacques Delors Institute, this traditional French position inevitably brings us back to the idea of a “mini-Europe” of around six core states.
But he believes this configuration would make little sense. “The real debates take place between 28 countries! We will not sign a six-country TTIP deal, nor will we negotiate with Russia over Ukraine or manage the crisis in Syria as a group of six,” Bertoncini said.

Pascal Durand, a French Green MEP, understands the pro-Brexit attitude, but supports the United Kingdom’s continued membership of the European Union. “The opinion of the European Green party is that Brexit is a bad development that would send the message that the European Union is no longer a project under construction, but in deconstruction,” he said.

While the opinions of individual members tend to be rather more nuanced, Durand appears to be one of the rare politicians who believes “that the UK’s leaving the EU is the worst possible outcome, as it would signify a nationalist withdrawal”.

 

Brexit followed by Frexit?

On the extreme right, the French National Front (NF) has adopted Brexit as a future national endeavour and announced that France should follow the same route. In February this year, the NF began speaking more clearly about the possibility of “Frexit”.

The party promised to hold a referendum on legislative, territorial, budgetary and monetary sovereignty within six months if Marine Le Pen is elected president in 2017.
“We will negotiate, and depending on the responses we get, we will campaign for one side or the other,” said Gilles Lebreton, a National Front lawmaker.

But even the National Front is divided on the issue. Some members, like Florian Philippot, advocate leaving the EU, while others support more pragmatic action, particularly on issues like the economy. Leaving the euro would be a poor economic decision for France, a fact that even the extreme right party broadly acknowledges.

Bertoncini believes the National Front’s proposal of a referendum has little chance of working.

“We have to distinguish between Euroscepticism, which is very widespread in Europe, and Europhobia, which is a typically British phenomenon. In France people complain, but not to the point of wanting to leave the euro, much less Europe,” the specialist said.

Even as increasing numbers of French public figures declare themselves in favour of Brexit over the coming weeks, this is unlikely to have any noticeable effect on the debate in the UK, whose outlook is more domestic than international.
“If the French want us to leave, that could very well motivate the English to vote to stay,” said a British diplomat.

[Tribun_Populi]

Eh, kad bi smogli snage, te povratili imperijalnu slavu!

 

 

I postali samo još 1 američki nosač aviona :)

 

TT tj. CZ M57

[Dr Arslanagić]

Guido Westerwelle: Former German foreign minister dead at 54

[Marcus Wulffings]

ne bih ni pretpostavio da je umro od leukemije

 

 

 

Guido Westerwelle hatte inständig gehofft, die tückische Krankheit Leukämie überwunden zu haben. In einem langen Gespräch mit dem SPIEGEL hatte er im Herbst 2015 einen Satz gesagt, der jeden Menschen anrühren musste, der zur Empathie fähig ist: "Ich will unbedingt weiterleben."

[Tribun_Populi]

 

Italy calls for common European defence after Brussels attacks

 

[vememah]

Majstore, linkovao si ovu stranicu foruma umesto članka. :)

 

Evo ispravnog linka:

http://www.euractiv.com/section/all/news/italy-calls-for-common-european-defence-after-brussels-attacks/

[Tribun_Populi]

Hehehe, u brzini, zajeb. :D Hvala!

[Prospero]

http://eup.sagepub.com/content/17/1/138.full.pdf+html

 

Responding to growing European Union-skepticism? The stances of political parties toward European integration in Western and Eastern Europe following the financial crisis

 

Robert Rohrschneider The University of Kansas, USA

Stephen Whitefield Oxford University, UK

 

European Union Politics, 2016, Vol. 17(1) 138–161

 

 

 

...

 

Our findings show that extreme parties have become even more opposed to integration in 2013 than they already were in 2007–2008. Moreover, new extreme parties are considerably more EU-skeptic than extreme parties that have been around for some time, especially in the West. In contrast, mainstream parties still remain mostly positive about integration. On balance, the evidence suggests that we have mainly seen an extreme party responsiveness especially in Western Europe (WE) to the growing importance of the issue since 2007–2008.

 

The significance of our argument and findings are at least threefold. First, especially in WE, our results question the current ability of mainstream parties to provide citizens with a choice on an increasingly important public issue where extreme parties tend to own the issue (de Vries and Edwards, 2009; Kriesi, 2007; Schumacher et al., 2013; Tavits, 2008). To explain this stasis, we point to powerful incentives operating on mainstream parties derived from reputational concerns to sustain pro-EU stances that appear to trump incentives derived from spatial mechanisms to become more EU-critical. Second, so far as it is left to extreme parties to represent opposition to the EU, we point to the likelihood that these parties will grow in vote share and in political importance, and possibly affect existing cleavages and party systems, especially in the West. Finally, so far as our findings point to the rise of an extreme-party responsiveness, we raise concerns about the chances for further European integration (Go´ mez-Reino and Llamazares, 2013; Mattila and Raunio, 2012; Thomassen, 2012).

...

 

Our findings point to the conclusion that rising public Euro-skepticism has been met mainly by growth in Euro-skepticism among extreme parties, with only modest evidence that mainstream parties have responded by muting their support for integration. In the aggregate, extreme parties have become distinctly more anti-Europe than they already were in 2007–2008, in part because stable extreme parties are more anti-Europe than they were in 2007–2008, in part because new extreme parties are especially opposed to the EU. In contrast, the position of mainstream parties has only marginally moved toward more restrained support for integration. All told, these patterns point to a clear growth in extreme-party responsiveness over integration, though we find some tentative evidence for the beginnings of mainstream party responsiveness as well (Table 6).

 

Theoretically, the results suggest that we need to consider the confluence of incentives derived from spatial and reputational models in order to understand the behavior of parties. From the perspective of mainstream parties, our findings support the reputational perspective and provide limited evidence for the spatial perspective. However, from the perspective of extreme parties, we see that the spatial incentives created by a more EU-skeptical public reinforce the reputational advantage of extreme parties in the integration domain. In other words, neither a simple spatial nor reputational account alone seems to adequately capture the behavior of mainstream and extreme parties regarding integration. This suggests that future research should systematically examine the interplay of spatial and reputational incentives in understanding the policy choices of parties.

 

Politically, the current reluctance of mainstream West European parties to respond to the changing sentiments among voters becomes understandable from the reputational perspective. For example, mainstream left parties, like Social Democrats, must fear that a Euro-skeptical stance will not favor them but actually prompt Euro-skeptic voters to endorse the more left-leaning camp of extreme parties like SYRIZA in Greece or the Dutch SP which have been critical about integration for some time. In turn, the mainstream right may fear the same— adopting Euro-skepticism may entail that Euro-skeptic extreme parties on the right may become the main beneficiary of such a strategy. In this sense, the move of the British Conservative Party to a more Euro-skeptical position is exactly the exception among mainstream parties that proves the rule: the farther the Conservatives moved to take on the skeptical stance of UKIP, the more UKIP appears to have benefited in terms of electoral support (if not representation). And now the Conservatives must deal with the potential consequences of their promise of an in-out referendum on EU membership that was intended to ‘shoot UKIP’s fox’.

 

The dilemma of mainstream parties to voice skeptical demands about the EU also raises broader issues of representation. Previous research (including our own) is fairly positive about the capacity of mainstream parties to take into account popular preferences over integration (Mattila and Raunio, 2012; Rohrschneider and Whitefield, 2012) and other issues (Dalton et al., 2011). But does this conclusion hold five years into the crisis after the onset of the fiscal crisis struck Europe and pushed integration issues to the fore? The general lack of mainstream party response to date to the changing preferences of mass publics suggests an answer in the negative. This, we observe, has left a clear representational opening for extreme parties to exploit. We may see the beginnings of a more systematic, negative response among mainstream parties in our data but only time will tell whether the continuing crisis over Greece, for example, will prompt a sharper criticism from those parties that in the past have carried the permissive consensus.

 

As is often the case, our analysis points to important differences between Western and Eastern Europe that we see adding support to our theoretical approach more generally. Mainstream and extreme parties in CEE have not diverged over time with respect to their integration stances because, in line with our expectations, Europe has never been the preserve of extreme parties so that mainstream parties can compete on the same ground, and because mainstream parties in CEE have less historical and reputational investment in Europe. Perhaps we see the beginnings of more distinct differences between extreme and governing parties in CEE as governing parties may become associated with pro-EU policies (see Table 5) but our findings are too tentative and our longitudinal perspective too fragile to pursue this possibility in this paper.

 

For the time being, then, our results raise the possibilities of significant change in European party systems where extreme parties win increasing shares of the vote when the issue of Europe is at stake, particularly if Europe takes on increasingly domestic forms via, for example, the issue of immigration.9 This may considerably increase the difficulty in forming and maintaining governments and public policy, including in the EU, as more players with more divergent views operating in a more complex issue space must find ways to agree and compromise. And it brings to the political table parties that are not just extreme in their opposition to the EU but that are often extreme on multiple other aspects of politics as well—in opposition to the market economy, or in support of ethno-nationalist or even racist policies.

[Budja]

Prospero, zasto partije zovu "extreme" a na "fringe"?

Malo mi je "extreme", recimo, za Sirizu suvise judgement obojeno za akademski clanak.

[Prospero]

Ne znam.

 

Nisam siguran ni da je "fringe" odgovarajući termin.

[hazard]

"Fringe" je nešto na margini. Partija koja osvoji 20% glasova na izborima (FN, VB itd.) nikako nije "fringe party".

[Budja]

Netherlands 'rejects' EU-Ukraine partnership deal

 

However, it is not clear if turnout has reached the 30% threshold of eligible voters needed to be valid.

 

The exit polls initially put turnout at 29%, before updating it to 32% with a margin of error of 3%.

[hazard]

Inace, valjda je taj referendum samo konsultativne prirode, ne obavezuje vladu niti parlament.

[Budja]

Inace, valjda je taj referendum samo konsultativne prirode, ne obavezuje vladu niti parlament.

 

Obavezuje na dalju raspravu ako je izlaznost veca od 30%.

 

With 99.8% of the votes counted, 61.1% had said "No", with 38% supporting a deal, media reports said.

Turnout is projected at 32%, above the 30% threshold of voters needed to be valid but within a 3% margin of error.

Prime Minister Mark Rutte said his government may have to reconsider the treaty if the vote is valid.

The Dutch parliament has already ratified the EU agreement and the result of the vote is not binding.

"We will have to wait and see but it is clear that the 'No' voters won convincingly. The question is whether or not the required turnout will be met." Mr Rutte said in a televised reaction.

"My view is that if the turnout is more than 30%, with such a victory for the 'No' camp, ratification cannot go ahead without discussion."

The referendum was triggered by an internet petition begun by Eurosceptic activists that attracted some 450,000 signatures.

[Tribun_Populi]

To su ovi moderni referendumi, zvani bacanje para.