Tag Archives: poland

Belgium, Czech Republic, European Union, Greece, Hungary, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Sweden, The Netherlands

A detailed look at the European parliamentary election results (part 2)

2 Comments

 Across Europe on Monday, officials, voters and everyone else were trying to sort through the consequences of yesterday’s voting, across all 28 member-states, to elect the 751 members of the European Parliament.European_Union

Late Sunday, I began analyzing the results on a state-by-state basis — you can read my take here on what the European election results mean in Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy and Spain.

This post picks up where that left off, however, with a look at some of the results in Europe’s mid-sized member-states.

* * * * *

RELATED: A detailed look at the European parliamentary election results (part 1)

* * * * *

With the count now almost complete, here’s where the Europe-wide parties stand:

EP14

The European People’s Party (EPP), which has been the largest group in the European Parliament since 1999, will continue to be the largest group, but with fewer seats (215) than after any election since 1994.

The second-largest group, the Party of European Socialists (PES) has 188 seats, a slight gain, but not the breakout performance for which it was hoping.

The Alliance of Liberals and Democrats of Europe (ALDE) will remain the third-largest group, notwithstanding the collapse of two of its constituent parties, the Liberal Democrats in the United Kingdom and the Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP, Free Democratic Party) in Germany.

The European Greens have won 53 seats, just two less than before the elections. The Party of the European Left, which had hoped to make strong gains on the strength of its anti-austerity message, gained nine seats to 44.

The Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), a slightly eurosceptic group of conservative parties, including the Conservative Party of the United Kingdom, holds steady at 46 seats — that’s a slight loss of around eight seats. The Movement for a Europe of Liberties and Democracy (MELD) gained six.

The real increase was among the ‘non-inscrits,’ the unaffiliated MEPs, which will rise from around 30 to 104. The bulk of those MEPs include the newly elected eurosceptics that have made such a big splash in the past 24 hours, including Marine Le Pen’s Front national (FN, National Front) in France.

But, in addition to being a pan-European contest with wide-ranging themes that resonate throughout the European Union, the elections are also 28 national contests, and they’ve already claimed resignations of two center-left leaders — Eamon Gilmore, of Ireland’s Labour Party, and Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE, Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party).

Here’s a look at how the European elections are affecting nine more mid-sized counties across the European Union: Poland, Romania, The Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, the Czech Republic, Portugal, Hungary and Sweden.

Continue reading A detailed look at the European parliamentary election results (part 2) →

Kaliningrad, Russia

Should Europe be concerned about the threat of Kaliningrad?

Leave a comment

kalinigrad2

If Russia can get away with annexing Crimea from Ukraine to correct a ‘historical mistake,’ perhaps Germany should be able to retake Kaliningrad? Russia Flag Iconkaliningrad_oblast_russia_flag_round_stickers-rb808e4c40c704821b8d03556a312c426_v9waf_8byvr_152

The Soviet Union took the tiny strip of land, nudged today along the Baltic coast between Poland and Lithuania, in 1944 at the end of World War II from Nazi Germany — just a decade before Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev transferred Crimea  (perhaps in a drunken stupor) from the Russian Soviet republic to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. Previously known as Königsberg, it’s the homeland of one of the world’s most renowned German philosophers, Immanuel Kant.

Today, it’s an exclave separated from the rest of the Russian Federation — but it’s a strategically crucial piece of real estate for Russia.  Kaliningrad gives Russia an ice-free port on the Baltic Sea and territory within the heart of the European Union surrounded by  North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies.

kaliningrad

The city of Königsberg was arguably even more important to Germanic culture and history before Kant was ever born. It was the capital of the State of the Teutonic Order, the crusader state, between 1457 and 1525, when the Teutonic State became the Duchy of Prussia, and Königsberg continued to serve as the Prussian capital until 1701, when Berlin became the capital. Russia occupied the ciy for the first time between 1758 and 1764, during the Seven Years’ War. Like many European cities, it was almost completely destroyed during the Second World War.

* * * * *

RELATED: Forget 1938. Here’s another historical analogy — 1914.

* * * * *

An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a Crimea for a Kaliningrad.

Right?  (In the meanwhile, Karelia, here’s your chance — with Russian president Vladimir Putin’s focus diverted to Ukraine, you’ll never have a better opportunity to make a bolt to Finland). Continue reading Should Europe be concerned about the threat of Kaliningrad? →

Czech Republic

New Czech party hopes to ride anti-corruption momentum to election gains

2 Comments

Wallenstein view

It’s been a tumultuous year in Czech politics — a surveillance scandal involving the prime minister’s love triangle brought down the government, a power-hungry president elected in the first direct presidential election earlier this year is working to claw power away from the parliament, and what’s left of the Czech right boils down to a contest between an eccentric Bohemian aristocrat and a multi-millionaire entrepreneur. czech

Though it sounds like the long-lost plot of a Leoš Janáček opera, it’s the backdrop to this weekend’s parliamentary elections, which should be no less dramatic than the events that shaped them.

What was once expected to be an easy victory for the country’s main center-left party, the Česká strana sociálně demokratická (ČSSD, Czech Social Democratic Party) now looks it will be a less dominant victory — so much that the Social Democrats are no longer considered a lock to lead the next Czech government.  It’s the latest twist in a series of turns that could have major consequences for the economic and political development of the Czech Republic (or ‘Czechia‘ as its current president wants to call it) and its 10.5 million residents, to say nothing of the future expansion of the eurozone within central and eastern Europe. Continue reading New Czech party hopes to ride anti-corruption momentum to election gains →

Poland

WIth referendum call, Tusk gently backs away from eurozone

Leave a comment

tusk

The economic blogosphere is lighting up over reports that Polish prime minister Donald Tusk is now talking about a referendum for his country to join the eurozone.Poland_Flag_Icon

That’s a big deal on the surface — with 40 million people, Poland is the largest European Union member after the United Kingdom not to use the single currency, and it’s one of eastern Europe’s fastest-growing economies.

Paul Krugman at The New York Times and Dylan Matthews at The Washington Post‘s Wonkblog are on the case, with very solid arguments for why Poland is crazy to want to join the eurozone.  Writes Matthews:

It’s fair enough if Poland wants to develop closer ties to its European neighbors. But as [Krugman notes], joining the euro would deprive Poland of the strategy that allowed it to weather the recession so effectively. The key to the Polish miracle was massive currency devaluation.

Krugman and Matthews both highlight that the Polish key to outperforming the rest of Europe has been its ability to devalue the złoty and control its own monetary policy.  It’s also helped that Poland has one of Europe’s lowest public debt loads — around 55% of GDP, compared to Germany’s 80% public debt load or 90% in France.

If you need to look any further for counterfactual proof, take a look at former East Germany, where economic growth still lacks former West Germany — despite the overwhelmingly strong political rationale for Germany reunification, it’s not clear that a currency union with West Germany made economic sense for East Germany, let alone a currency union with France, Belgium and the Netherlands. The Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland have all grown at more rapid rates in the past two decades.

Krugman writes, ‘It really does make you want to bang your head against a wall.’

But they should probably calm down, because Poland is as unlikely as ever to join the eurozone — Tusk isn’t taking a gamble so much as he’s taking a bath on the Polish currency issue by pushing its resolution to sometime ‘at the end of the decade‘ — and far after the next Polish election.

Over two-thirds of Polish voters oppose eurozone membership, and those numbers seem unlikely to change anytime soon, given the chaos we’ve seen in peripheral eurozone countries from Cyprus to Portugal.

Tusk (pictured above with European Council president Herman van Rompuy), who has long been in favor of eurozone membership for Poland, is looking for a way out, not a way in. Facing reelection in 2015 for his liberal center-right Platforma Obywatelska (PO, Civic Platform), Tusk certainly doesn’t want to go to voters with the albatross of eurozone support around his neck. Continue reading WIth referendum call, Tusk gently backs away from eurozone →

European Union

‘La bataille des chiffres’: EU leaders agree new budget deal

Leave a comment

EUbudget

Guest post by Michael J. Geary

European Union leaders reached agreement Friday on the EU budget (the multi-annual financial framework or ‘MFF’) for the period from 2014 to 2020.European_Union  After months of bickering, the 27 member states signed off on a deal totaling €908.4 billion, and the European Parliament will vote on the budget in March.

The budget is geared towards two — some would say conflicting — goals and political constituencies.

On the one hand, politicians argued that spending should be mobilised to support growth, employment, competitiveness and convergence, in line with the Europe 2020 Strategy. At the same time, some EU leaders in the United Kingdom, Germany and in the Netherlands, made clear that ‘as fiscal discipline is reinforced in Europe, it is essential that the future MFF reflects the consolidation efforts being made by Member States to bring deficit and debt onto a more sustainable path.’  The result is a smaller budget than was agreed for the previous budgetary period (2007 to 2013), yet one that is expected to achieve greater results to help pull the EU out of its economic malaise. A ‘spend less, achieve more policy’ strategy in an era when one in four Spaniards are unemployed seems doomed to fail.

The result, however, is not wholly surprising. Over the last four years, austerity and cuts in public spending have become commonplace throughout the EU, so it should come as no shock that the EU institutions should also tighten their belts.

Speaking after the negotiations concluded, German chancellor Angela Merkel said, ‘The agreement is a good agreement as it gives predictability for investors to create growth and jobs.’  José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president, no doubt privately disappointed with the outcome, publicly voiced support for the deal saying the budget was ‘an important catalyst for growth and jobs.’

UK prime minister David Cameron can also be very pleased with the result, given that the agreement marks the first time in the history of the EU that its budget has been scaled back.  Cameron had gone to Brussels threatening to use the veto if leaders failed to make savings in real terms. He singled out the exorbitant salaries paid to some of the EU’s top officials, some of whom earn close to €15,000 per month and are taxed at just 8%. During the last five years, national-level tax increases have been imposed in addition to freezes on public and private sector pay, while officials working in the EU institutions have escaped austerity.  Cameron was determined, during the talks on the budget, to cut administrative costs despite opposition from French and Polish leaders who feared any cuts to the EU budget would affect generous subsidies to farmers and structural and cohesion funds.

Cameron was clearly relieved that his call for budgetary reductions met with friendly ears at least among some EU colleagues.  Over the past twelve months, he had been busy building a coalition among the Dutch, German and Scandinavian member states (the EU’s main paymasters) to reduce the budget in real terms.

Although Cameron and Merkel may well find themselves at odds over the UK’s role in the EU over the next five years, with Cameron determined to ‘renegotiate’ its role and Merkel equally determined to forge ever closer fiscal and political union, budget politics may have been a useful vector to find common ground.  Indeed, Merkel and Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte ultimately became strong supporters of London’s push to force austerity on the EU itself.  The unlikely emergence of the Anglo-German alliance was perhaps the most intriguing element of the negotiations. Continue reading ‘La bataille des chiffres’: EU leaders agree new budget deal →

Poland

Obama slip-up allows Tusk to grasp mantle of Polish nationalism

2 Comments

When U.S. President Barack Obama misspoke at a White House ceremony by referring to “Polish death camps” yesterday, the reaction from Poland’s government was nearly immediate and fierce, and the White House quickly retreated, noting that they “regret this misstatement,” clarifying that Obama meant Nazi concentration camps in German-occupied Poland.

But Polish prime minister Donald Tusk, in a harsh statement at a hastily arranged press conference, called for an even stronger apology that the White House “regret”:

The words uttered yesterday by the President of the United States Barack Obama concerning “Polish death camps” touched all Poles. We always react in the same way when ignorance, lack of knowledge, bad intentions lead to such a distortion of history, so painful for us here in Poland, in a country which suffered like no other in Europe during World War II.

Tusk has been Poland’s centrist prime minister since 2007 and his country is seen as one of the United States’s chief allies in Europe (so much so that it was one of the few European countries to support the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003):

It may seem odd for a moderate prime minister in a very pro-American nation to be picking a fight with the Obama administration over a verbal slip.  It also leaves aside the thorny issue that many Poles collaborated with the Nazis during that war.  But still, the remarks came at a ceremony designed to honor Polish resistance hero Jan Karski, who himself exposed the Nazi genocidal killings of Jews in Poland.  That Tusk is making such a kerfuffle out of Obama’s awkward word choice makes him seem even more touchy and defensive about the issue.

But it also gives Tusk a potent political opportunity to reclaim the mantle of nationalism from his domestic political opponents, who propelled themselves to power in the 2000s on the strength of nationalism to an unusual degree.

That’s because Polish identity, to an unusual degree, is shaped by the centuries-long fight for its own existence, as you might expect from a landlocked country that’s had to deal with Germany on one side and Russia on the other throughout its history.  For many Poles, their country gained its sovereignty just over two decades ago with the fall of the Soviet Union.

Some background is in order. Continue reading Obama slip-up allows Tusk to grasp mantle of Polish nationalism →