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A rogues’ gallery of the EU’s top 13 eurosceptic parties

May 22, 2014 Kevin Lees 3 Comments

As voters in 28 European countries prepare to head to the polls, beginning on May 22 and running through May 25, no one knows whether Europe’s center-left or center-right will win more seats, and no one knows who will ultimately become the next president of the European Commission.

But the one thing upon which almost everyone agrees is that Europe’s various eurosceptic parties are set for a huge victory — not enough seats to determine the outcomes of EU legislation and policymaker, perhaps, but enough to form a strong, if disunited, bloc of relatively anti-federalist voices. Voters, chiefly in the United Kingdom, France and Italy, are set to cast strong protest votes that could elect more than 100 eurosceptic MEPs.

In some countries, such as Spain, euroscepticism is still a limited force — the center-left opposition Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE, Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party) is tied for the lead with the governing center-right Partido Popular (the PP, or the People’s Party) of prime minister Mariano Rajoy. But Spain is quickly becoming an outlier as eurosceptic parties are springing up in places where unionist sentiment once ran strong.

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Of course, not all eurosceptics are created equally. Some anti-Europe parties have been around for decades, while others weren’t even in existence at the time of the last elections in 2009. Some are virulently xenophobic, far-right or even neo-Nazi in their outlooks, while others are cognizably on the more mainstream conservative / leftist ideological spectrum. Some seek nothing short of their country’s withdrawal from the European Union altogether, while others seek greater controls on immigration. Some are even pro-Europe in the abstract, but oppose eurozone membership. That’s one of the reasons why eurosceptics have had so much trouble uniting across national lines — the mildest eurosceptic parties abhor the xenophobes, for example.

If everyone acknowledges that eurosceptic parties will do well when the votes are all counted on Sunday, no one knows whether that represents a peak of anti-Europe support, given the still tepid economy and high unemployment across the eurozone, or whether it’s part of a trend that will continue to grow in 2019 and 2024.

With 100 seats or so in the European Parliament, eurosceptics can’t cause very many problems. They can make noise, and they stage protests, but they won’t hold up the EU parliamentary agenda. With 200 or even 250 seats, though, they could cause real damage. There’s no rule that says that eurosceptics can’t one day win the largest block of EP seats, especially so long as most European voters ignore Europe-wide elections or treat them as an opportunity to protest unpopular national government.

For now, though, they’re all bound to cause plenty of trouble for their more mainstream rivals at the national level, and in at least five countries, they could wind up with the largest share of the vote. So it’s still worth paying attention to them.

Without further ado, here are the top 13 eurosceptic parties to keep an eye on as the results are announced on Sunday:

Continue reading A rogues’ gallery of the EU’s top 13 eurosceptic parties →

European Union

In Depth: EU Votes

May 22, 2014 Kevin Lees Leave a comment

On the last full weekend of May, European voters in 28 member-states with a population of over 500 million will determine all 751 members of the European Parliament.

The political context of the 2014 parliamentary elections

Since the last elections in June 2009, the European Union has been through a lot of ups and downs, though mostly just downs. After the 2008-09 financial crisis, the eurozone went through its own financial crisis, as bond yields spiked in troubled Mediterranean countries like Greece, Spain, Italy and Portugal with outsized public debt, sclerotic government sectors and economies operating near zero-growth. Eastern European countries, facing sharp downturns themselves, and a corresponding drop in revenues, implemented tough budget cuts and tax increases to mollify bond markets. Ireland, which nationalized its banking sector, faced similar austerity measures. European Central Bank president Mario Draghi’s promise in the summer of 2012 to do ‘whatever it takes’ to maintain the eurozone marked the turning point, ending over two years of speculation that Greece and other countries might have to exit the eurozone. Many countries, however, are still mired in high unemployment and sluggish growth prospects.

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One new member-state joined the European Union, Croatia, in July 2013, bringing the total number to 28, though Iceland, Serbia and Montenegro all became official candidates for future EU membership:

Politically speaking, since the 2009 elections, only two of the leaders in the six largest EU countries are still in power (Polish prime minister Donald Tusk, a centrist, and German chancellor Angela Merkel, a Christian democrat) reflecting a climate that’s been tough on incumbent governments. Spain and the United Kingdom took turns to the political right, and France and Italy took turns to the political left, but none of those governments seems especially popular today — and each of them will face a tough battle in the voting later this month.

Of course, that’s only if voters even bother to turn out. Since the European Parliament’s first elections in 1979, turnout has declined in each subsequent election — to just 43.23% in the latest 2009 elections:

At the European level, the Treaty of Lisbon, a successor to the ill-fated attempt to legislate a European constitution in the mid-2000s, took effect in December 2009, scrambling the relationships among the seven EU institutions.

The elections, which will unfold over four days between May 22 and May 25, are actually about much, much more than just electing the legislators of the European Union’s parliamentary body, which comprises just one of three lawmaking bodies within the European Union.

A primer on the EU institutions

In brief, those seven institutions are as follows:

The European Parliament, first elected in 1979, is the sole institution whose members are elected directly by voters in the European Union. Through subsequent EU treaty negotiations, it has won an increasing amount of power, including budget authority. Today, generally speaking, just about all EU legislation is considered by the parliament, though unlike most national parliaments, it doesn’t have the right of legislative institution, which is reserved solely for the European Commission. The parliament can amend and reject legislation by a simple majority, but it cannot introduce it.

With the Council of the European Union (described below), it forms the entire European parliamentary system. The Lisbon Treaty establishes that almost all EU legislation is now enacted by a process formerly known as the ‘co-decision procedure,’ or the ‘Community method,’ whereby legislation is proposed by the European Commission, and thereafter considered by both the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union.

The European Parliament also has certain oversight powers over the Commission. The Commission president and each of the other commissioners must be approved by a majority, and a two-thirds majority of the European Parliament can force the Commission to resign. This, by the way, isn’t hypothetical — the Commission of former Luxembourg prime minister Jacques Santer (from 1995 to 1999) resigned after EP pressure with respect to corruption allegations.

Though its plenary sessions meet in Strasbourg, France, much of its work takes place in Brussels, where most parliamentary and committee sessions are held. Further administrative offices are located in Luxembourg.

The Council of the European Union, not to be confused with the European Council, is the council of ministers of the 28 nation-states most relevant to a particular piece of EU legislation. For example, if the European Parliament is considering legislation with respect to the environment, the Council is just the group of 28 environmental ministers at the national level. It’s organized on a one-state-one-vote basis. The presidency of the Council rotates every six months among the EU member-states — it’s currently held by Greece, and it will be held by Italy starting July 1.

Like the European Parliament, it cannot introduce legislation, but it can amend or reject it. Unlike the European Union, however, it must adopt legislation by ‘qualified majority voting.’ In a process meant to be simplified by the Lisbon Treaty, however, this has largely been replaced, beginning later in 2014, with ‘double majority voting’ — legislation must win the approval of at least 55% of the member-states, representing at least 65% of the population of the European Union.

The Council, insofar as it includes the 28 member-state foreign ministers, also has responsibility for EU foreign policy, the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), though EU action in foreign policy requires unanimity. Moreover, following the creation of the new high representative position by the Lisbon Treaty, the European Council appoints the chief EU foreign policy official. (Until the Lisbon Treaty, foreign policy was one of three ‘pillars’ of the European Union, joining community/single market matters and justice matters).

The European Council was an informal institution until the Lisbon Treaty, which enshrined it as a formal institution. Like the Council, it’s organized on one-state-one-vote principle, and it’s comprised of the heads of state and/or the heads of government of each of the 28 member-states of the European Union. Unlike the Council, the European Parliament and the Commission, the European Council has no formal role in the legislative process. Instead, it provides high-level strategic guidance from national leaders to the European Union.

Though it’s only recently gained official institutional status, the group of European national leaders has always been responsible for driving the integration processor the past half-century, including:

the 1957 Treaties of Rome, which established the initial European Economic Community;
the 1985 Schengen Treaty that eliminated national borders and provided free movement throughout most of the European Union (excepting the United Kingdom and Ireland, but including non-EU members Norway, Switzerland and Iceland);
the 1986 Single European Act that created the free-trade customs union and single market that Europe knows today;
the 1992 Maastricht Treaty that formed the single currency through the mechanism of economic and monetary union;
the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty and 2001 Nice Treaty thatfurther expanded European integration, particularly with respect to foreign policy, economic and monetary union and justice matters; and
the 2007 Lisbon Treaty that reorganized the EU institutions.

Notably, all EU treaties require unanimity — in 2011, British prime minister David Cameron refused to sign an EU fiscal compact treaty that would have obligated, generally, each EU member-state retain a budget deficit of less than 3% of GDP. After Cameron’s veto, many EU states, particularly eurozone members, entered into the fiscal compact anyway, as an agreement that ranks below the status of an EU treaty.

Meetings of the European Council — ‘summits’ — occur at least four times a year. When it comes to routine decision-making, the European Council also uses qualified majority voting, though it too switches to the 55/65 double majority voting in 2014.

The Lisbon Treaty also gave the European Council the power to elect its own president to serve for a two-and-a-half year term (subject to a one-time renewal), arguably creating for the first time a ‘president of Europe,’ though there remains remains significant and, sometimes, unclear overlap with the role of the European Commission president. The Council elected former Belgian prime minister Herman Van Rompuy (pictured above) as the first Council president.

The Lisbon Treaty and created the position of High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, with the idea of creating one officer responsible for EU-level foreign policy. Former British Labour politician Catherine Ashton (pictured above) was elected the first high representative.

Both positions will fall vacant later this year, and the European Council will decide on their replacements.

In addition, the European Council appoints, also by double majority, the president of the European Central Bank. It has historically appointed the European Commission president as well (with the European Parliament approving the Commission president), though under the Lisbon Treaty, the European Council proposes a European Commission president, and the European Parliament elects the president. Furthermore, the Lisbon Treaty instructs the European Council to ‘take into account’ the parliamentary election results.

No one really knows yet what, in practice, this means, and it’s become a major focus of European debate.

The European Commission is the closest thing that the European Union has to an executive body, and its president, since the era of former Commission president Jacques Delors, has been generally viewed as the chief executive of the European Union (though the introduction of a new European Council president has called that into question).

The Commission functions like a cabinet, with 28 commissioners (one for each member-state) responsible for a given portfolio. The president is proposed by the European Council and elected by the European Parliament, as noted above, and a Commission can be forced to resign in mass by a two-thirds vote of the European Parliament.

Generally, the Commission is responsible for enforcing EU legislation, in league with national governments and a growing bureaucracy and numerous agencies with enforcement powers. When politicians rail against ‘Brussels’ throughout Europe, they usually mean the Commission, which is based in Brussels, and which carries out the day-to-day affairs of the European Union. The Commission is essentially unelected — the president is indirectly elected and the other 27 individual commissioners are named by national governments. That’s given critics of the European Union the opportunity to note the Commission’s lack of democratic accountability. As with the process for enacting treaties, the unelected Commission is one of the main issues when critics speak of the European Union’s democratic deficit.

As noted above, it’s also responsible for proposing new legislation. Generally speaking, the Commission can recommend regulations, laws that are directly applicable to each member-state, and directives, laws that set forth binding standards but otherwise leave member-states free to achieve the standards.

Since 2004, former center-right Portuguese prime minister José Manuel Barroso has served as the Commission president. Within six months of the European parliamentary elections, however, Barroso’s Commission will expire — meaning that the European Council and the European Parliament will have to appoint and approve a new Commission. For the first time in 2014, each major family of European parties has nominated a candidate for Commission president, with the idea that the candidate of the leading group should become the next president. National leaders, including German chancellor Angela Merkel, have pushed back against this idea, refusing to concede that the next Commission president should be the candidate of the leading party/group nor that the next Commission president should even come from among the candidates running in the parliamentary elections.

The European Central Bank, established in 1998 by the Amsterdam Treaty and headquartered in Frankfurt, is the central bank that administers European monetary policy, attempts to maintain price stability, establishes eurozone interest rates and otherwise issues euro banknotes. Its role has featured prominently in the current eurozone sovereign debt crisis, and while it doesn’t have quite the overwhelming authority of a national central bank on the same level as, say, the Bank of England or the US Federal Reserve, it’s grown into a powerful institution that can, with the word of its president, move markets.

As noted, the European Council appoints the ECB president. Under Draghi, its president since November 2011, the ECB has become the central player in the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), designed to provide bailouts to troubled eurozone countries through loans and other instruments and to intervene in primary and secondary debt markets to promote financial stability.

The European Court of Justice, which was established in 1952 and sits in Luxembourg, predates the formal European Economic Community. It’s the ultimate arbiter of interpreting EU law across all 28 member-states, and it’s comprised of 28 judges, one per member-state, though it hears cases in smaller panels (of three, five or 13). Its rulings on EU law are final, and cannot be appealed to national courts (and though final national court decisions cannot be appealed to the ECJ, many national courts routinely refer issues of EU law to the ECJ). Confusingly, perhaps, it is not related to the European Court of Human Rights.

Finally, the European Court of Auditors, was established in 1975 to investigate and audit the other EU institutions. Like the ECJ, it’s composed of one member from each member state.

Confused yet? Here’s a chart from Wikipedia that sets forth the EU political structure:

The parliament’s composition

Each member-state is allotted a certain number of seats in the European Parliament on the basis of population, ranging from 96 (in Germany) to just six in the smallest member-states.

Though each member-state is responsible for the voting system that chooses its representative to the European Parliament, member-states must use proportional representation to award the seats, either by means of party-list or single-transferable-vote, with the electoral threshold, if any, not to exceed 5%.

While national parties fight to win parliamentary seats at the national level, ‘families’ of parties have developed at the supranational level, and the European Parliament is generally divided into blocs that align with those party families.

Here’s the current composition:

The European People’s Party (EPP) currently controls the largest bloc of seats in the European Parliament (265), and it’s been the largest party in the European Parliament since 1998, though polls show it might lose that position after the 2014 vote. Moreover, members of its parties currently control 12 out of 28 national governments in Europe and 13 out of 28 seats in the European Commission.

It’s generally comprised of Europe’s traditional center-right and Christian democratic parties, including the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP), Bulgaria’s Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria (GERB), Estonia’s Pro Patria and Res Publica Union (IRL), France’s Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), Germany’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Greece’s New Democracy (ND), Hungary’s Fidesz, Ireland’s Fine Gael (FG), Luxembourg’s Christian Social People’s Party (CSV), Poland’s Civic Platform (PO), Portugal’s Social Democrats (PSD), Spain’s People’s Party (PP), and Sweden’s Moderate Party.

Its candidate for Commission president is Jean-Claude Juncker (pictured above), the former longtime prime minister of Luxembourg, and the former president of the Eurogroup, an advisory board consisting of the finance ministers of all 18 eurozone states.

Recent polls show that EPP parties will largely lose ground in the elections. Forecasts show that the EPP will win between 197 and 222 seats, meaning that it might still emerge as the largest bloc in the European Parliament.

The Party of European Socialists (PES) currently controls 184 seats, and between 1979 and 1999, it and its predecessors were the dominant political bloc in the European Parliament. In the European Parliament, the PES is known as the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D). Its members hold seven positions in the Commission and control 10 national member-state governments.

Its constituent parties include most of Europe’s tradition center-left and social democratic parties, including Austria’s Social Democrats (SPÖ), Belgium’s Socialists (PS), the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP), the Czech Social Democrats (ČSSD), France’s Socialists (PS), the German Social Democrats (SPD), Greece’s Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK), Ireland’s Labour Party, Italy’s Democratic Party (PD), Luxembourg’s Socialist Workers’ Party (LSAP), Malta’s Labour Party, the Dutch Labour Party (PdvA), Portugal’s Socialists (PS), the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), the Swedish Social Democrats (SAP) and the British Labour Party.

Its Commission presidential candidate is Martin Schulz (pictured above), a German Social Democrat who currently serves as the European Parliament president.

Polls show that, for the first time in over a decade, the PES has a real shot of supplanting the EPP as the largest bloc in the European Parliament, with forecasts of winning between 193 to 226 seats.

The Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe Party (ALDE) is the third-largest bloc, and it features many of Europe’s economically liberal parties. Though it has just 84 seats in the European Parliament, its parties hold eight positions on the European Commission.

Its constituent members include some of the following national parties: Denmark’s Venstre – Liberal Party, the Estonian Reform Party, Germany’s Free Democratic Party (FDP), Ireland’s Fianna Fáil (FF), Lithuania’s Labour Party, Luxembourg’s Democratic Party, both the Democrats 66 and the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) in The Netherlands, Romania’s National Liberal Party (PNL), Sweden’s Centre Party and Liberal People’s Party, and the British Liberal Democrats.

Polls show that, despite the collapse of the FDP in Germany, ALDE should still win between 60 and 86 seats. Its Commission presidential candidate is Guy Verhofstadt (pictured above), the former prime minister of Belgium between 1999 and 2008 — and a contender within the European Council in 2004 to become the Commission president.

The European Green Party (EGP) currently holds 55 seats in the European Parliament, and its members include many of Europe’s leading green parties, such as the Austrian Greens, France’s Europe Ecology/The Greens, Germany’s Alliance ’90/The Greens, Sweden’s Environmental Party/Greens.

Ska Keller, a German green, and José Bové, the French anti-globalization activist, are both running as the Green candidate for Commission president.

Polls show that it may lose support, winning between just 34 and 51 seats.

The Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformists (AECR) currently holds 54 seats, and it’s an alternative group of center-right parties that lean toward more social and economic conservative ideologies and, often, slightly eurosceptic positions. Its members include the Czech Civic Democrats (ODS), Poland’s Law and Justice (PiS), and the British Conservative Party. The AECR, as a party that leans toward the prerogative of national governments, isn’t fielding a Commission presidential candidate.

Polls show that it will win between 35 and 55 seats.

The Party of the European Left (PEL) currently holds just 35 seats, but it includes many of the staunchest anti-austerity leftist and far-left parties in Europe. Its members include the Danish Red-Green Alliance, the French Left Front, Germany’s Left Party, Greece’s SYRIZA, Ireland’s Sinn Féin and Spain’s United Left (IU).

Its presidential candidate is the Greek opposition leader Alexis Tsipras, and its MEPs sit as part of the he European United Left–Nordic Green Left (GUE/NGL) group.

Polls show that it is likely to make gains on the basis of Europe’s stagnant economic growth, with forecasts to win between 47 and 61 seats.

The Movement for a Europe of Liberties and Democracy (MELD), which sits in the European Parliament as Europe of Freedom and Democracy (EFD), is a firmly right-wing eurosceptic group. Its members include the Danish People’s Party, The Finns Party, Italy’s Northern League, and the UK Independence Party (though UKIP holds membership only in EFD, not in MELD).

The EFD parties currently hold 32 seats, and polls forecast they will win between 27 and 40 seats.

The remaining MEPs are referred to as the non-inscrits, because they belong to no supranational bloc, and they include some of the most notorious far-right, xenophobic and eurosceptic parties in Europe, including the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), Belgium’s Flemish Interest, France’s Front national (FN), Hungary’s Jobbik, the Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV), and the British National Party.

Polls show that they will make extraordinary gains — and leaders like the PVV’s Geert Wilders and the FN’s Marine Le Pen have discussed possibly uniting behind a new European-level front after the elections.

Polls show that the number of non-insrcits will rise to anywhere between 79 and 106.

Election dates and seats

Finally, if you’ve kept up this long, here’s a schedule when each member-state will be voting, how many parliamentary representatives it will elect, and how that compares to the distribution of seats for the prior 2009 elections.

May 22

United Kingdom: 73 (+1)
The Netherlands: 26 (+1)

May 23

Czech Republic: 21 (-1)
Ireland: 11 (-1)

May 24

Italy: 73 (+1)
Slovakia: 13 (–)
Lithuania: 11 (-1)
Cyprus: 6 (–)
Malta: 6 (–)

May 25

Germany: 96 (-3)
France: 74 (+2)
Spain: 54 (+4)
Poland: 51 (+1)
Romania: 32 (-1)
Belgium: 21 (-1)
Greece: 21 (-1)
Portugal: 21 (-1)
Hungary: 21 (-1)
Sweden: 20 (+1)
Austria: 18 (+1)
Bulgaria: 17 (–)
Denmark: 13 (–)
Finland: 13 (–)
Croatia: 11 (N/A)
Slovenia: 8 (+1)
Latvia: 8 (–)
Estonia: 6 (–)
Luxembourg: 6 (–)

European Union

The European parliamentary elections are really four contests

May 19, 2014 Kevin Lees Leave a comment

It’s hard to know exactly how to place the European parliamentary elections in the constellation of world politics.

From one perspective, they’re relatively unimportant — a largely apathetic electorate is choosing a body of 751 MEPs in a parliament that has less power within the European Union than most parliamentary bodies have within national governments. The Council of the European Union gives member-states veto power over EU legislation and the European Commission, the regulatory executive of the European Union, has the power to introduce legislation. Voters, since the first direct elections in 1979, have turned out in ever lower proportions with each election cycle. To the extent you talk to European voters who actually care about the elections, they mostly view them as an opportunity for a protest vote.

From another perspective, they’re incredibly important. They represent the one point of genuine democratic participation within the European Union and, given the tumult of the past five years with respect to the eurozone, the European economy and the power of relatively wealthier states to dictate the monetary policy and, increasingly, the fiscal policy of weaker states, the current elections represent a major conversation about the future of EU policy. That’s especially true in the context of the weighty matters that the next European Parliament will face, including a new data privacy directive and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, a potentially game-changing free-trade agreement with the United States.

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So which is the right interpretation?

It can be both — and many things besides — depending on your view. That’s because the European parliamentary elections are really four separate political contests, wrapped up and presented as one set of elections. The relative importance or unimportance that a particular actor places on the ‘European elections’ depends upon which of the four ‘contests’ most resonates.

So what are the four contests simultaneously raging across Europe? Continue reading The European parliamentary elections are really four contests →

Belgium, European Union

Photo of the day: Guy Verhofstadt’s tie

May 15, 2014 Kevin Lees 1 Comment

guy

The five major candidates elected by their respective European parties to become the next president of the European Commission are debating today in a (mostly) English-language debate on the future of the European Union.

It’s jarring enough that a debate among two Germans, a Greek, a Luxembourger and a Belgian on the future of Europe is taking place officially in English. I’ll have some more thoughts in the coming days on the contest among the European Commission presidential contest.

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For now, as I watch the debate, the candidate with the most energy is former almost certainly former Belgian prime minister Guy Verhofstadt. He’s the candidate of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe Party (ALDE), currently the third-largest bloc in the European Parliament, and comprised of many of Europe’s economically and socially liberal parties.

Verhofstadt, who belongs to the Open Flemish Liberals and Democrats (Open VLD, Open Vlaamse Liberalen en Democraten), served as Belgium’s prime minister from 1999 to 2008, and he’s more responsible for orienting Belgium toward a Thatcherite economic orientation than just about anyone else in the past four decades in that country (Belgium will also hold its national elections on May 25, the same day as most countries will vote in the European parliamentary elections).

He’s also the candidate with the best tie, hands-down. Can you imagine a US presidential candidate wearing such a fashion-forward tie on the campaign trail, let alone a presidential debate? Continue reading Photo of the day: Guy Verhofstadt’s tie →

European Union

In Depth: European Parliament

May 15, 2014 Kevin Lees Leave a comment

On the last full weekend of May, European voters in 28 member-states with a population of over 500 million will determine all 751 members of the European Parliament.

The political context of the 2014 parliamentary elections

One new member-state joined the European Union, Croatia, in July 2013, bringing the total number to 28, though Iceland, Serbia and Montenegro all became official candidates for future EU membership:

European Union, United States

How EU regulation led to Oklahoma’s ghastly botched execution

April 30, 2014 Kevin Lees Leave a comment

When the European Union expanded Regulation 1236/2005 in December 2011, its regulators could hardly have known that it would lead, in part, to the excruciating scene of a failed 43-minute execution in McAlester, Oklahoma.

The EU decision expanded an existing ban on the trade of instruments used for torture to include those drugs specifically used by US state correctional facilities to execute prisoners by means of legal injection. It codified at the EU supranational level what had already become a growing practice at the national level in Europe, including in the United Kingdom, arguably the closest international US ally.

it served a laudable goal from the European perspective — making it more difficult for state governments in the United States to import the necessary drugs in the traditional three-drug cocktail used by most states for nearly four decades to execute inmates by lethal injection.

What’s more, that decision is the latest example of how the European Union’s policies are increasingly affecting the United States — from antitrust law to data privacy to trade harmonization, European regulatory standards will continue to shape US policies and outcomes in new and, for some Americans, often frustrating ways.

As a matter of human rights, both the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union and the European Convention on Human Rights denounce and ban the death penalty within the European Union. But the death penalty’s abolition goes beyond the immediate boundaries of the European Union — it’s banned almost universally across Europe, with the single exception of Belarus. Even Russia, which isn’t exactly the best-practices touchstone for human rights, has implemented a moratorium. Russia’s last execution took place in 1996. France’s last execution (yes, by guillotine) took place in 1977. Italy’s last execution (by firing squad) took place in 1949. The last UK execution (by hanging) took place in 1964. The entire era of executions by ‘lethal injection,’ which largely followed the US Supreme Court’s four-year moratorium* on capital punishment over concerns that executions violate the eighth amendment ban on ‘cruel and unusual punishment,’ comes largely after Europe abolished the death penalty. By the time that lethal injections became the standard practice for executions, Europe was largely out of the execution business.

Since 1977, execution by lethal injection in the United States has involved the use of three drugs:

sodium thiopental, an anesthetic that is used to render the convicted person unconscious;
pancuronium bromide, which is used to paralyze the subject and stop breathing, in part for the benefit of the audience observing the execution, because it provides the appearance that the victim isn’t suffering; and
potassium chloride, which stops the heart and, in theory, rapidly leads to death.

Ironically, the two most potent drugs are widely available. It’s sodium thiopental that’s become so difficult for state governments to obtain under the new EU regulations. With sources of sodium thiopental becoming increasingly scarce, correctional facilities are turning to some fairly desperate measures to avoid disruption of their regularly scheduled executions. In some cases, that’s meant sourcing drugs through illegal channels, and in other cases, that’s meant that states, like Oklahoma, have experimented with new combinations of drugs. When Missouri contemplated using propofol instead, European countries started talking about banning that drug’s export, too, which led to a deluge of concern among US health professionals that they would lose access to one of the most important anesthetics in medical use today. Missouri’s governor Jay Nixon quickly moved away from the idea.

As Matt Ford reported for The Atlantic earlier this year, EU efforts won’t necessarily end the death penalty in the United States, but they are certainly complicating its efficacy:

“The EU embargo has slowed down, but not stopped executions,” Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C, told me. “It has made the states seem somewhat desperate and not in control, putting the death penalty in a negative light, with an uncertain future.”

That’s left the United States where it is today. States like Oklahoma, determined to move forward with executions, are left with few good options. Experimenting with new drugs will invariably lead to more botched executions like Tuesday night’s execution of Clayton Derrell Lockett (though it’s worth noting that lethal injections, and all executions, are potentially imperfect from an Eighth Amendment perspective — Ohio learned this in 2009 with the failed execution of Romell Broom).

But the EU decision has also led to more astonishing measures. Oklahoma has taken extraordinary steps to keep secret the contents of its new experimental execution cocktail — if EU member-states discover which drug Oklahoma is using, they could easily ban that drug as well. Notwithstanding the fears that the drugs might cause the kind of 43-minute, tortured death that Lockett actually suffered last night, Oklahoma governor Mary Fallin (pictured above) brought the state to the brink of political crisis over the Oklahoma Supreme Court’s decision to stay the execution earlier this month. Only after some of Fallin’s Republican colleagues in the Oklahoma legislature threatened to impeach the justices did they relent.

Whatever you think of the death penalty and its continued use in the United States, it’s difficult to believe that it’s worth undermining the judiciary’s independence on a matter of life-and-death constitutional rights or that it’s worth turning the penultimate expression of law and order, an irreversible deterrent, into a tortured science experiment.

It’s even harder to believe that in a 21st century liberal democracy with strong freedom-of-information traditions, a state government can legally keep secret the means of executing its own citizens.

If former Illinois Republican governor George Ryan, who placed a moratorium on Illinois’s death penalty in 1999, represents the sober view that the capital punishment is simply too flawed to be effective, Fallin will now become the symbol of the opposite — denying the basics of due process or constitutional rights all in the service of tinkering with the machinery of death, as the late Supreme Court justice Harry Blackmun wrote in a scathing 1994 denunciation of capital punishment. Continue reading How EU regulation led to Oklahoma’s ghastly botched execution →

European Union, United Kingdom

UKIP’s Farage is winning the British debate on Europe

April 2, 2014 Kevin Lees Leave a comment

It’s not hard, watching the two debates over future British membership in the European Union, to see why Nigel Farage, the leader of the euroskeptic United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), is such a successful politician.

In the last of two debates with deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Farage asked voters in his closing remarks to ‘join the people’s army and topple the establishment that got us into this mess.’

British viewers apparently agree — in an instant Guardian poll following the debate, they believed that Farage won the debate by a margin of 69% to 31%. The debate precedes the May 22 elections to determine the United Kingdom’s 73 members in the European Parliament.

If former prime minister Margaret Thatcher was the British answer to US president Ronald Reagan, Farage (pictured above) is its answer to Newt Gingrich in his ability to lead an anti-establishment political revolution. In the same way that Thatcher reshaped the Conservative Party in the anti-government, pro-market mould of the US-style conservatism, Farage is reshaping the way that Britons conceive the debate over EU membership, just as Gingrich rewired the nature of political debate in the United States — by attacking the consensus of a longstanding political elite through a simple, compelling message that scrambles the traditional lines between left and right.

Farage is doing to ‘Brussels’ exactly what Gingrich did to ‘Washington.’

Farage’s performance has been so smooth, it’s tantalizing to wonder just how well he might do in a four-way televised debate in the campaign for the May 2015 parliamentary elections alongside not only Clegg, but also Conservative prime minister David Cameron, and Labour Party leader Ed Miliband — or how effective Farage might be leading the ‘no’ campaign in the pending 2017 EU membership referendum, a vote that Cameron was forced to promise to hold (if reelected next year) largely as a result of UKIP’s rise in popularity over the past two years.

Here are just three examples from Wednesday’s debate that show just how effective Farage can be — he manages to argue against EU membership as a champion of greater globalization, of protecting minorities and the working class, and of greater world peace.

You don’t have to buy what Farage is peddling in order to acknowledge that he’s devastatingly effective in framing the UK-EU debate in uniquely new and powerful ways.

It’s no longer an academic point.

A March 26-27 YouGov poll for The Sun shows a three-way race in the European elections: Labour wins 28%, UKIP wins 26% and the Tories win 24%, leaving the LibDems far behind at 11%. Nearly one in two Conservative voters from 2010, and nearly one in five Labour voters, plans to back UKIP. Among the most likely to vote, UKIP leads with 30%.

Continue reading UKIP’s Farage is winning the British debate on Europe →

Comparative Politics, European Union, United States

Trade blocs form the new borders of the 21st century global order

March 27, 2014 Kevin Lees Leave a comment

The most underreported aspect of the current crisis over the Crimea annexation is the extent to which Russia was willing to go to the brink of international crisis for the goal of a future trade bloc.

Why does Russian president Vladimir Putin care so much about the vaunted Eurasian Union, even though it’s a rewarmed version of the existing economic customs union among Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan?

To turn Michael Corleone’s words on their head, ‘it’s personal, not business.’

Putin hoped that the revamped union could attract a few more stragglers in central Asia, Azerbaijan or Armenia and perhaps Ukraine — until February 22.

There are certainly potential gains from greater free trade, and negotiating multilateral trade blocs seems both more efficient than one-off bilateral agreements and more productive than pushing for greater global integration through the World Trade Organization (WTO) process.

Also unlike bilateral treaties or WTO-based agreements, regional trading blocs are also emerging as strategic geopolitical vehicles for advances regional agendas that have just as much to do with politics as with trade.

Ultimately, it’s same reason that the two South American customs unions, the Mercado Común del Sur (MERCOSUR, Suthern Common Market) and the Comunidad Andina (CAN, Andean Community) joined to form the even larger Unión de Naciones Suramericanas (UNASUR, Union of South American Nations), which came into existence in 2008 and covers the entire South American region.

It’s the same reason that Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta has put so much pressure on Tanzania to choose between the East African Community (EAC) or the Southern African Development Community (SADC) over the past year by accelerating plans for greater political cooperation within the EAC — with or without Tanzania. Or why admitting South Sudan into the EAC back in 2011 could have helped prevent its slide into civil war.

It’s the same reason that defining ‘Europe’ has been such a strategic and existential issue for the European Union and its predecessor, the European Economic Community, since its inception. Does the United Kingdom belong? (In the 1960s, according to French president Charles de Gaulle, it didn’t). How to handle Turkey? (Enter into a customs union with it, then slow-roll accession talks since 1999, apparently). Should Ukraine join? Moldova? Georgia? If Azerbaijan can win the Eurovision contest, why not bring it into the single market? What about, one day, Morocco and Tunisia, which both have association agreements with the European Union?

That’s why it’s worth paying close attention to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), but also the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). TTIP would create a super-free-trade-zone between the United States and the European Union, which together generate between 45% and 60% of global trade.

Continue reading Trade blocs form the new borders of the 21st century global order →

European Union, France, The Netherlands

Le Pen v. Wilders: a tale of two far-right European movements

March 24, 2014 Kevin Lees Leave a comment

The big story from Sunday’s municipal elections in France is the success of Marine Le Pen’s far-right Front national (FN, National Front), overshadowing the marquee Paris mayoral election.

The far-right won the mayoral race in Hénin-Beaumont, a former mining town in the north, in a rare first-round victory, the FN came in second in Marseille, France’s second-largest city, and it led in at least six other locations as France prepares for second-round runoffs on March 30.

The result should certainly boost Le Pen in her efforts to win support in European parliamentary elections in May — and to unite the populist hard right across the continent.

According to preliminary results, the Front national won just 4.65% of the national vote. That’s a big deal because the party was running in just 597 of around 37,000 jurisdictions — it’s a massive increase from the 2008 municipal results, when the FN won around 1% and ran in just 119 constituencies.

The other narrative from Sunday’s vote is the collapse of France’s center-left — president François Hollande’s Parti socialiste (PS, Socialist Party) won 37.74% nationally, while the center-right Union pour un mouvement populaire (UMP, Union for a popular movement) of former president Nicolas Sarkozy won 46.54% nationally. The bright spot for the Socialists remains Paris, where first deputy mayor Anne Hidalgo is the slight favorite to win a runoff against former Sarkozy campaign spokesperson and ecology minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet — but don’t rule out an upset next Sunday there, either.

The success in the 2014 municipal elections is just the latest chapter for Le Pen’s rebranding of the Front national in France as a slightly more moderate alternative than the party her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, led for decades. It’s harder today to target the Front national as a xenophobic, anti-Semitic fringe, because Le Pen has focused on an agenda much heavier on euroskepticism and economic nationalism. While the Front national isn’t exactly immigrant-friendly, its position has largely converged with the UMP’s position since the Sarkozy presidency, which embraced hard-right positions on immigration and law-and-order issues. By shifting rightward, Sarkozy may have sidelined Le Pen during his presidency and co-opted her supporters, but today, Sarkozy is almost as responsible as Le Pen for bringing the Front national within the political mainstream.

With the line blurring between the UMP and the Front national, Le Pen could become the chief voice of the French right in 2017, especially if the UMP succumbs to more infighting between its right-wing leader Jean-François Copé and the more moderate former prime minister François Fillon. The next presidential election is still a long way off, but if Sarkozy doesn’t run for the presidency in 2017, Le Pen stands just as much chance as Copé, Fillon or any other UMP figure of representing the French right in the second round.

More immediately troubling for France’s political elite are the European parliamentary elections in May. Despite its breakthrough performance on Sunday, the Front national isn’t about to overrun the city halls of France. Its victory is more symbolic than substantive. But if it’s one thing to turn over your local government to Marine Le Pen, it’s a far different thing to support the Front national as a protest vote with respect to European Union policy.

Polls show that the Front national and the UMP are competing for first place in the European elections within France — the most recent Opinion Way poll from early March shows the UMP winning 22%, the FN winning 21% and the Socialists just 17%. It wouldn’t be surprising to see a wave of undecided voters support the Front national at the last moment, nor would it be a surprise to learn that polling surveys currently underestimate FN support.

Extremists on both the far left and the far right are gaining strength throughout the entire European Union. That’s perhaps understandable, given the harsh economic conditions that have plagued Europe since the last EU-wide elections in 2009. But the euroskeptic right, in particular, seems poised for a breakthrough. Nigel Farage hopes to lead the anti-EU United Kingdom Independence Party to a breakthrough performance in May, and the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ, the Freedom Party of Austria) is tied for first place in polls in Austria.

But just as Le Pen hits her stride, another standard-bearer of the hard right, Geert Wilders, found himself in free fall last week after pledging to allow fewer Moroccans into the Netherlands, remarks that have launched a cascade of criticism and a handful of defections from his party: Continue reading Le Pen v. Wilders: a tale of two far-right European movements →

European Union, Serbia

The most important EU success story you’ve never heard? Serbia.

March 14, 2014 Kevin Lees 3 Comments

The global media’s attention this weekend will be fixed on Crimea, where a status referendum is almost certainly likely to result in its annexation into the Russian Federation.

But the world’s attention should be on Serbia, which is holding snap elections on March 16 — the same day as the Crimean referendum. Serbia’s parliamentary elections come just two months after formally opening negotiations to join the European Union, a landmark step in what’s been a decade-long push for greater Serbian-EU integration.

When political commentators tell you that Ukraine is the frontier of the European Union, they’re right that European policymakers have both an economic and security interest in Ukraine’s stability.

But the true frontier of the European Union is the Balkans, and no country is more vital to the future political and economic stability of the region than Serbia, home to over 7 million residents, the most populous of the Balkan states.

Polls show that the outcome of Sunday’s election is almost certain — a wider majority for the center-right Serbian Progressive Party (SNS, Српска напредна странка), which as a member of the current coalition government, is working to tackle corruption, liberalize and privatize sectors of the Serbian economy and bring Serbian budget closer to balance — all while the country faces unsteady economic growth and an unemployment rate of 20%.

Notwithstanding the real economic pain today in Serbia, none of that matters as much as the fact of Serbian continuity with respect to European integration. Though Serbia’s formal accession may take up to a decade, Serbia seems certain to become either the 29th member (or the 30th member, following Montenegro) of the European Union. What’s more, the most significant fact of Serbian political life in the past two years has been the durability of the national commitment, across all major political parties and ideologies, to Serbia’s eventual EU membership.

Think back to the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991. Or to the ‘ethnic cleansing’ that marked the civil war among Croats, Bosnian Muslims and Serbs between 1992 and 1995 in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Or to the Serbian aggression over Kosovo that led to NATO military action against Belgrade in 1998-99 and the emergence of the semi-independent Kosovo today. Or to the dictatorship of Serbian strongman Slobodan Milošević from 1987 until 2000, with full-throated support from Moscow.

Though it’s something that we take for granted in the year 2014, it wasn’t always a foregone conclusion that Serbia today would be so united in its push to turn economically and socially toward Europe.

It wasn’t even so clear in 2012.

Nikolić and Dačić: an unlikely pair of EU champions

In the last parliamentary elections in May 2012, the SNS won the greatest number of seats (73) in Serbia’s 250-member National Assembly (Народна скупштина), and the SNS’s Tomislav Nikolić, running for the fifth time, narrowly won the Serbian presidency over incumbent Boris Tadić, whose center-left Democratic Party (Демократска странка / DS) had governed Serbia since 2004. Tadić, throughout the 2000s, laid the groundwork for greater cooperation with the European Union.

When Tadić lost power in July 2012, no one knew whether Nikolić and the Serbian Progressives would pursue EU cooperation with the same zeal as the Democrats had. Nikolić (pictured above, right, with EU foreign affairs high representative Catherine Ashton, middle, and prime minister Ivica Dačić, left) long favored Russia over the European Union, and his first trip abroad as president was to Moscow, where he declared in September 2012, ‘The only thing I love more than Russia is Serbia.’ Continue reading The most important EU success story you’ve never heard? Serbia. →

European Union, Ukraine

Brussels trumps Washington and Moscow over Ukrainian crisis

March 5, 2014 Kevin Lees Leave a comment

Not with a whimper, not with a bang, but with $15 billion in financing.

This is how the acute phase of Ukraine’s political crisis ends — it’s all about bringing the struggling country back on its feet in economic terms, not a geopolitical fantasy in the minds of Cold Warriors in Washington and Moscow.

With the European Union’s decision earlier today to deploy €11 billion ($15 billion) in aid, Ukraine’s treasury will now pull back from the brink of sovereign default — a catastrophe that would, ironically, have harmed Russian banks far greater than European banks (Russian investors have a cumulative exposure of nearly $30 billion to Ukrainian debt). That assistance was almost guaranteed from the moment former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych fled from office after his government unleashed lethal fire on anti-government protesters that had gathered for four months at Maidan Square in central Kiev. Interim president Olexandr Turchinov and interim prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk (pictured above with Catherine Ashton, the EU high representative for foreign affairs) are firmly committed to economic reform and Ukraine’s turn toward Europe.

Accordingly, it’s the European Union — and not the United States and not Russia — that looks both most sensible and most productive in the aftermath of last week’s showdown.

Throughout the entire Ukrainian crisis, American and Russian policymakers have routinely disregard the role of the European Union, including some very undiplomatic language from a top State Department official a month ago.

But stabilizing Europe’s expanding periphery is what the European Union does best — and why it won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012. The earliest iteration of the European Union sutured the wounds among Italy, France and Germany in the 1950s, midwifing the economic expansion of the 1960s. It brought the United Kingdom more closely into Europe in the 1970s, and catalyzed economic reform that transformed Ireland into a high-income country. It smoothed the transitions of Spain, Portugal and Greece from dictatorship to democracy in the 1980s, and its embrace of the former Warsaw Pact states in 2004 anchors economic and political growth from Prague to Tallinn to Warsaw. EU policymakers today are effectively dangling the carrot of EU membership to Serbia in order to bring enduring peace to the Balkans.

Jean Monnet would be overjoyed today to see the European role in ending Ukraine’s crisis, and the promise of extending peace and prosperity more widely beyond the boundaries of Europe’s core. Continue reading Brussels trumps Washington and Moscow over Ukrainian crisis →

14 in 14, Australia, CAR (Centrafrique), Catalonia, DRC / Congo, Eritrea, European Union, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mali, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, South Sudan, Spain, United States, Venezuela, Vietnam

14 potential game-changers for world politics in 2014

January 6, 2014 Kevin Lees 5 Comments

Though I rang in the new year with a list of 14 world elections to watch in the coming year (and 14 more honorable mentions to keep an eye on), I wanted to showcase a few more thoughts about what to watch for in world politics and foreign affairs in 2014.

Accordingly, here are 14 possible game-changers — they’re not predictions per se, but neither are they as far-fetched as they might seem. No one can say with certainty that they will come to pass in 2014. Instead, consider these something between rote predictions (e.g., that violence in Iraq is getting worse) and outrageous fat-tail risks (e.g., the impending breakup of the United States).

There’s an old album of small pieces conducted by the late English conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, a delightfully playful album entitled Lollipops that contains some of the old master’s favorite, most lively short pieces.

Think of these as Suffragio‘s 14 world politics lollipops to watch in 2014.

We start in France… Continue reading 14 potential game-changers for world politics in 2014 →

14 in 14, European Union

14 in 2014: European Union parliamentary elections

December 31, 2013 Kevin Lees 1 Comment

9. European Union parliamentary elections, May 22-25.

If for no other reason, the upcoming elections for the European Parliament will be the most important since direct EP elections began in 1979 because under the new Lisbon Treaty, it will be the European Parliament that decides who will become the next chair of the European Commission, the chief executive organ of the European Union (though German chancellor Angela Merkel has argued that the treaty’s language indicates that the Commission appointment need only ‘take into account’ the EP elections). In any event, it still means that early in 2014, each of the major cross-national party groupings within the European Parliament will designate their nominees to succeed José Manuel Barroso, the former center-right Portuguese prime minister who will step down in November 2014 after a decade heading the Commission.

The eight European Parliament will have 751 members, over 56% of whom will come from just six member-states: Germany (96), France (74), the United Kingdom (73), Italy (73), Spain (54) and Poland (51). Four states, Estonia, Malta, Luxembourg and Cyprus, will elect the minimum number of representatives (six).

Between 1979 and 1999, the Party of European Socialists (PES) and its predecessor was the largest group in the European Parliament. Its members include the major center-left socialist/social democratic parties of Austria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Portugal, Spain and Sweden, and the labour parties of Ireland, Malta, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

Since 1999, however, the European People’s Party (EPP), a group of center-right and Christian democratic parties, have held the largest number of seats. In the most recent 2009 elections, the EPP won 265 seats to just 183 for the PES. The EPP’s members include the major Christian democratic parties in Benelux, the Austrian People’s Party, the French UMP, Germany’s Christian Democratic Union Greece’s New Democracy, Hungary’s Fidesz, Ireland’s centrist Fine Gael, Italy’s Forza Italia, Portugal’s Social Democratic Party, Poland’s Civic Platform, Spain’s People’s Party and Sweden’s Moderate Party.

The third-largest group, the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe Party (ALDE), contains includes most of Europe’s liberal parties, notably Belgium’s Open VLD, the Danish Venestre, Luxembourg’s newly elected Liberals, the Dutch VVD, the British Liberal Democrats, and Ireland’s Fianna Fáil.

Other groups include:

the European Green Party (which includes essentially all of Europe’s green and ecological parties),
the Party of the European Left (whose members include the German Die Linke and Greece’s SYRIZA),
the slightly eurosceptic Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformists (whose members include the Czech Civic Democrats, the UK Conservatives and Poland’s Law and Justice Party),
the Movement for a Europe of Liberties and Democracy, formed in 2009 as another slightly euroskeptic group (whose members includes Italy’s Northern League, the Danish People’s Party and the Finns Party), and
the European Alliance for Freedom, formed in 2010 as a staunchly euroskeptic, far-right group (whose members include the French National Front, the Dutch Party of Freedom, the Flemish Vlaams Belang and Austria’s Freedom Party).

Although the EPP won’t determine its candidate for Commission president until a convention on March 6-7 and ALDE won’t determine its candidate until February 1, the PES has already nominated Martin Schulz, a member of Germany’s Social Democratic Party and president of the European Parliament since 2012. Polish prime minister Donald Tusk, Luxembourg’s Viviane Reding, the Commission’s vice president and current commissioner for justice, former Luxembourgish prime minister and Eurogroup chair Jean-Claude Juncker, former Latvian prime minister Valdis Dombrovskis, Lithuanian president Dalia Grybauskaitė, Swedish prime minister Frederik Reinfeldt and IMF managing director Christine Lagarde of France have all been touted as possible EPP candidates. ALDE will choose between former Belgian prime minister Guy Verhofstadt and Finland’s Olli Rehn, currently commissioner for economic and monetary affairs.

Herman Van Rompuy, former Belgian prime minister and the first president of the European Council, the council of European heads of state/government, will also step down at the end of 2014 after two 2.5-year terms in that position. The first EU high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, Catherine Ashton of the United Kingdom, is also likely to step down.

Given the tumult of the eurozone sovereign debt crisis, almost everyone expects that European voters may use the elections as an opportunity to register dissatisfaction with the direction of European governance. In particular, that could bode well for the stridently leftist MEP candidates — most notably in Greece, where SYRIZA (the Coalition of the Radical Left — Συνασπισμός Ριζοσπαστικής Αριστεράς) of Alexis Tsipras leads EP polls. It could also bode well for euroskeptic candidates — most notably in the United Kingdom, where Nigel Farage (pictured above) and his anti-EU United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) is competing for first place with the Conservative Party and the Labour Party in EP polls, and in France, where Marine Le Pen’s nationalist Front National (FN, National Front) leads EP polls.

Photo credit to Lucas Schifes.

Next: Turkey

European Union, San Marino

Why San Marino (and other microstates) shouldn’t be a member of the European Union

October 22, 2013 Kevin Lees Leave a comment

Voters in San Marino narrowly preferred to pursue an application for membership to the European Union on Sunday in the first referendum of its kind in the tiny Mediterranean republic.

But despite the narrow approval — 50.3% supported EU membership while 49.7% opposed it — supporters did not reach the threshold for a successful referendum (around 32% of all potential voters). That’s just as well, because the European Union is not currently designed to admit microstates like San Marino — or Andorra, Liechtenstein, the Vatican City or Monaco.

San Marino is an independent republic that consists of around 61 square kilometers completely surrounded by Italy. By comparison, San Marino’s population of around 30,000 residents is about 1/22 that of the population of Palermo, the capital of Sicily.

San Marino traces its sovereignty as a republic to the 4th century, and it survived the Napoleonic Wars, papal expansionism, Italian unification and both World Wars (technically neutral in both wars, though its government was controlled from the 1920s until 1943 by the Sammarinese Fascist Party) without being overtaken by the greater Italian state. Its economy is based largely on banking and tourism, and its GDP per capita of around $36,000 provides the ability to fund generous welfare programs.

Proponents of San Marino’s EU membership argue that the tiny country is already subject to so much EU regulation that its membership would give it more at least marginal influence in making European policy in the future. But that’s the same argument that pro-EU Norwegians use to make the case that Norway should join the European Union, and that’s not historically been enough to sway Norwegian voters to embrace membership. It makes more sense in Norway’s case — though the Scandinavian country has just 5 million people, it also has one of the most powerful economies in Europe, and its combination of fiscal discipline and social welfare would make it a touchstone for policymaking decisions. But no one thinks that we’d see an immediate Sammarinese impact on European regulatory matters if San Marino became the 29th EU member tomorrow.

The European Council recently considered the relationships between the European Union and the various microstates in a report issued in 2012 with recommendations for a more standardized approach to what is currently quite a helter-skelter set of arrangements:

Single market / trade. San Marino, like Andorra, Monaco and Turkey, is party to a customs union with the European Union, but other states (like Liechtenstein) are actually part of the European single market, and the recent European Council report recommended that the European Union should work to integrate all of the microstates more fully into the European Economic Area.
Open borders / Schengen. Liechtenstein is the only microstate that’s a full member of the Schengen area. San Marino and the Vatican City have open borders with Italy, just as Monaco has an open border with France, but neither are technically members of the Schengen Agreement. Andorra has neither membership in the Schengen Area or open borders with France and/or Spain, so maintains border checks with the rest of the European Union.
Eurozone / currency. San Marino uses the euro because, like the Vatican, its pre-eurozone currency was tied to the Italian lira, and Monaco has a similar arrangement, given its prior monetary links to the French franc. Liechtenstein uses the Swiss franc, while Andorra has a special agreement for issuance of euro coins with the European Union.

For San Marino, at least, its current relationships with the European Union and Italy mean that it has de facto or de jure access to the single market, benefit of the Schengen free-movement zone and participation in the eurozone. Continue reading Why San Marino (and other microstates) shouldn’t be a member of the European Union →

European Union, Luxembourg

Who is Xavier Bettel? (Maybe Luxembourg’s next prime minister.)

October 18, 2013 Kevin Lees 3 Comments

Xavier Bettel may not win this weekend’s parliamentary elections in Luxembourg, but he’s likely to lead his party to significant gains, putting him in line as the heir apparent to the small European country’s long-time prime minister Jean-Claude Juncker.

Sure, that may not be the most world-shattering event in world politics — with about 538,000 people, Luxembourg has about one-fourteenth the population of Hong Kong. But given the chief role that Juncker has played in steering eurozone policy, it’s worth keeping an eye on the top up-and-coming Luxembourgish leaders — every Luxembourgish prime minister since 1953 has played a crucial role in the European integration process.

So as a new generation of Luxembourgish politicians come to the fore, it’s not difficult to envision that they could play a starring role in European-wide policymaking later this decade and in the 2020s.

Enter Bettel, exit Juncker?

No Luxembourgish politician has emerged quite as forcefully as Bettel (pictured above), who during the campaign has emerged as Juncker’s chief rival.

A 40-year-old openly gay attorney, Bettel joined parliament in 1999, when the Democrats governed as the junior partner of a coalition with Juncker’s CSV. Bettel was also elected to Luxembourg City’s communial council in 1999 and subsequently as mayor in October 2011, becoming the youngest mayor of any European capital, rising quickly to prominence, with a favorability rating higher than Juncker’s.

Bettel and his liberal Demokratesch Partei (DP, Democratic Party) are expected to make gains in Sunday’s election, though perhaps not enough gains to take over government.

Juncker was somewhat tarnished earlier this year with the revelation of abuses committed by the Service de renseignement de l’Etat luxembourgeois (SREL), the secret service and intelligence agency of Luxembourg. The abuses include illegal wiretapping, surveillance of domestic political groups and other crimes that stretch back to the 1980s. Although Juncker isn’t directly implicated in any of the abuses, a parliamentary inquiry found that he shared ‘political responsibility’ for the SREL’s bad behavior by neglecting to oversee the SREL with adequate oversight. Perhaps more damaging than the official scolding is the more unshakeable sense that Juncker is perceived to have spent too much time on eurozone policy and not enough time governing his own country.

Facing a vote of no confidence in Luxembourg’s unicameral parliament, D’Chamber (Chamber of Deputies), Juncker resigned and called early elections for October 20.

The Democrats’ campaign hasn’t been incredibly subtle — it’s running on the platform of a ‘new beginning’ for Luxembourg, with ‘new ideas and new leaders.’ Bettel himself has criticized the slow pace of the Juncker government’s approach to reform.

While there’s not an incredible amount of polling data for Luxembourg, it shows that Junker can expect losses for his dominant center-right Chrëschtlech Sozial Vollekspartei (CSV, Christian Social People’s Party), which has won the greatest share of votes in all but one (1964) postwar Luxembourgish general election.

Juncker’s CSV has governed in coalition for the past decade with the center-left Lëtzebuerger Sozialistesch Arbechterpartei (LSAP, Luxembourg Socialist Workers’ Party), but the LSAP’s refusal to support Juncker over the secret service scandal precipitated this weekend’s early elections. Continue reading Who is Xavier Bettel? (Maybe Luxembourg’s next prime minister.) →

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MAKING WORLD POLITICS LESS FOREIGN