European Union

Europe is facing more severe, longer and more frequent heatwaves, droughts, floods, and wildfires this summer, a report from the European Environment Agency has warned. And the wildfire season this year has already started earlier.

The UN refugee agency has registered its largest-ever spike of people displaced by war, persecution, violence and human rights abuses.

Cyprus and Turkey have traded harsh words on their frozen conflict, in a sign that recent elections on both sides changed little.

The centre-right European People's Party (EPP) denied any form of blackmailing — after the chair of the environment committee accused the EPP chair of threatening his own members with political retaliation if they vote for the controversial restoration law.

Lead MEPs of the European Parliament's special Covid-19 committee said that the next EU Commission needs to take on board their massive report on how to be more resilient against future pandemics.

We cannot allow the European People's Party to tank the new opportunities of the Nature Restoration Law.

Cyprus' President Nikos Christodoulides presented to the European Parliament his vision for the future of Europe, focusing on geopolitically-driven challenges.

Source : © European Union, 2023 - EP

Cyprus' President Nikos Christodoulides presented to the European Parliament his vision for the future of Europe, focusing on geopolitically-driven challenges.

Source : © European Union, 2023 - EP

For our weekly ‘Ideas on Europe’ editorial by UACES, the University Association for European Studies, we have the pleasure to welcome again Dr Başak Alpan, from the Middle East Technical University, in Ankara.

 

Listen to the podcast on eu!radio.

 

 

You spoke to us just before the first round of the elections in Turkey, full of hope for change. What is your analysis after the run-off election won by President Erdoğan?

In my previous commentary, you may remember I referred to a recent ad by one of the biggest Rakı brands in Turkey with the title, ‘When that day comes’…

Well, that day came. And it came with the uttermost anxiety and excitement amongst the voters. As you know, the presidential election went to a run-off after none of the candidates reached the 50% threshold for victory.

In the closely contested second round on 28 May, the opposition candidate Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu secured 47.8% of the votes whereas Recep Tayyip Erdoğan obtained 52.1 % and became, again, president of Turkey. Erdoğan was able to keep the electoral block he had claimed for the last 20 years despite the ongoing hyper-inflation and recent earthquake that could not be handled very efficiently by the state authorities.

Nevertheless, in Ankara and İstanbul, which had already passed their local administration to the Republican Party CHP in 2019, the opposition got the lead, with the majority of votes going to Kılıçdaroğlu and only 46.69% and 46% obtained by Erdoğan respectively. The third biggest city, İzmir, had traditionally voted for the opposition anyway. Besides these major cities, support for Kılıçdaroğlu’s presidential bid emerged solidly from all the Kurdish-majority South-Eastern provinces.

 

And still, it was not enough to make change happen.

It seems that the predominant strategy of the second round, which was nationalism, paid off for Erdoğan. He always had a strong influence on the conservative nationalist electorate, in the traditional Central Anatolian regions in particular, which this time, was accompanied by the opposition’s clearly anti-refugee rhetoric.

Since 2011, when the first Syrian refugee arrived in Turkey, migration has become a game-changer in daily Turkish politics for the first time. The CHP revealed its perspective by clearly propagandizing against the number of refugees. In a video, they claimed, “we will not abandon our homeland to this mentality that has introduced 10 million undocumented migrants among us.” On a similar note, the CHP signed a memorandum of understanding with the ultra-nationalist “Victory Party”, which stipulated that the practice of appointing trustees in place of elected mayors, whose “links with terrorism had been judicially proven” could continue, which clearly pointed at the Kurdish municipalities. This memorandum cost Kılıçdaroğlu a bulk of votes in the second round, especially in South-East Turkey, where citizens had long complained about this anti-democratic practice.

 

Where do you think Turkish politics are heading now?

Erdoğan’s first speech after the election already showed the prospective tone of domestic politics. He taunted his opponent’s defeat with the words “Bye, bye, Kemal” and accused the opposition of being ‘pro-LGBT’. It seems that the political polarisation in Turkish society epitomised by the election results will further increase the level of antagonism in daily politics.

Nevertheless, there is one field that cannot be governed by rhetoric alone, and that is the economy. The Turkish economy has been suffering from high inflation and dramatic slumping of the Turkish lira. The anti-popular austerity measures that would alleviate the inflation are not likely to be implemented by Erdoğan in the short-term since there will be local elections in Ankara and Istanbul in 10 months’ time. Erdoğan has won, but he knows that his job will be even more difficult if he fails to win back the municipalities of two big cities.

Is there any silver lining on the horizon? There is, as always. Merve Dizdar, who won the Best Actress Award at the Cannes Film Festival one day before the election, delivered an emotional speech on the struggle of women in Turkey. She said that for her role as a teacher in a remote town in the movie “About Dry Grasses”, she didn’t need to rehearse because she has known how such women feel “by heart since the day I was born”. I am sure that in the coming years, there will be more momentum for grassroots mobilisation and organisation of LGBTs, Kurds, and the working class which is getting poorer every day. And for women, to whom Merve Dizdar dedicated her award with the words “to all my sisters who do not give up hope no matter what the award is, and to all struggling spirits in Turkey who are waiting to experience the good days they deserve”.

 

Thank you very much for having shared twice your personal views on Turkey at election time. I recall that you are an associate professor at the Middle East Technical University.

 

Interview by Laurence Aubron.

 

 

The post Erdoğan’s Pyrrhic Victory appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Over the last fifteen years, EU leaders have frequently resorted to emergency measures in response to periods of crisis. But while these measures may have helped bring order to unstable situations, have they come at a cost for the EU’s legitimacy? Jonathan White argues that instead of bolstering the EU’s fire-fighting capacity, we would be better served by designing a ‘normal’ regime that is able to handle extreme circumstances.

Charles Michel, President of the European Council at the round table of the European Council Summit of 24 June 2021. Source: European Council.

In today’s volatile world, the ambitions attached to the EU have never been higher. French President Emmanuel Macron calls for the construction of ‘European sovereignty’ as a way to preserve European identity, shape the continent’s destiny, and escape the role of ‘mere witness of the dramatic evolution of this world’. Visions of a more assertive and autonomous EU abound in the European Commission too. But the grander the ambitions, the more important the foundations. Does the EU have the legitimate institutions and habits of rule to support this more activist role?

Critical assessment of the EU often centres on its effectiveness – understandably for an organisation created to solve problems. For their economic measures, border management, vaccine procurement or foreign policy, those acting in the EU’s name are judged on their capacity to act.

The risk of assessing something by its outcomes is that one downplays how these are attained. A hallmark of EU politics over the last decade has been leaders’ willingness to overstep legal and political constraints in the name of getting things done. One sees actions exceeding norms and rules, rationalised as necessary responses to exceptional and urgent threats – the template of emergency politics. Sometimes this empowers executives at the supranational level, in the EU institutions or things like the Troika; sometimes it empowers state representatives, in forums such as the Eurogroup or European Council.

Emergency measures have their logic and can bring order to an unstable situation. But they also raise constitutional issues. Power in such moments comes to be concentrated ever further on executive institutions, political and technocratic, at the expense of parliaments, courts and wider publics. It passes to key figures at the apex, often acting informally, opaquely and fast. Who precisely is in control, and what criteria they apply to decision-making, becomes difficult to discern and contest, while decisions may be hard to revise later.

Two structural features of the EU make it especially vulnerable to exceptionalism. The first is its soft constitutional structure. Processes of coordination are based on conventions of consultation rather than codification. This means there is little to deter executive agents, singly or collectively, should they seek to depart from procedure. A second vulnerability lies in the EU’s historically technocratic orientation. For those imbued with a problem-solving ethos, achieving certain outcomes ‘whatever it takes’ is likely to be the prime concern. Ends will typically trump means.

Emergency scripts

In view of the EU’s reliance on improvised and irregular methods, some argue the need to bolster its fire-fighting capacity. What the EU requires in this view is an agreed set of procedures for handling exceptional situations – a temporary boost in the powers of its institutions to protect public health, settle the economy, or respond to an international crisis. The EU needs an emergency script, allowing its representatives to act quickly and efficiently while also maintaining their accountability.

Yet an exceptional mechanism of this kind could potentially make matters worse. Historically, such arrangements have been predicated on the idea that emergencies are short-lived. The ancient Roman institution of ‘dictatorship’, employed mainly in the context of war, assumed the limited duration of the military campaigning season. Exceptional measures were acceptable because the circumstances they addressed were exceptional.

Today’s emergencies, in the EU and more generally, typically emerge from long-term pathologies of politics, capitalism and climate, giving them a much more extended horizon. If there is no natural boundary between normal and abnormal times, the risk is either of short, superficial responses to deep problems, or of a permanent politics of emergency.

The very existence of emergency powers encourages authorities to leave problems to fester. Knowing they can invoke extra powers when the going gets tough, they have less reason to pursue the hard choices and reforms that get to the heart of things. They have a fallback option to rely on. Emergency politics is always in some sense the legacy of policy failure, and when that failure can be mopped up using exceptional measures it is that bit easier to indulge.

Constitutionalising the EU

Instead of devising an emergency script, the task is to design a ‘normal’ regime that is able to handle extreme circumstances – efficiently but also acceptably. One goal should be a simplified structure of power. Abolish the European Council, Eurogroup and the like, and give the Commission the responsibilities of government. A more integrated transnational executive would be less prone to informality and the ad hoc concentration of power. To the extent that it would still lapse into arbitrary or unresponsive methods, it would be a more visible target of critique.

Couple this with strengthening the European Parliament. Embedding executive power in a parliamentary system gives it a stronger basis in public opinion and debate. One of the lessons of Covid-19 is that countries with strong parliamentary systems tended to respond at least as well as the alternatives. The key principle of governing in extreme circumstances should not be speed but consent. Not only is this more democratic, but it increases the prospects of compliance in the short term and can build public support for the structural change needed to ward off crises to come.

Any such transformation of the EU is likely to meet plenty of resistance. But unlike with a supposedly temporary emergency script, the stakes would be clear at the moment of enactment. It would be approved only to the extent its arrangements are acceptable as permanent features rather than as temporary deviations from normality.

Constitutionalisation in this deeper sense would reflect the reality that the policy challenges of the present amount not to a series of passing emergencies, short-lived and exceptional, but to enduring problems of politics, society, climate and economy that should be engaged on a fundamental and open-ended basis. Recent events suggest an EU that aspires to become more militarised and economically assertive – a sovereign actor in world affairs. It needs a constitutional overhaul to match.

For more information, see the author’s accompanying paper at the Journal of Common Market Studies. 

This post has been previously published by the LSE Blog here. 

The post Constitutionalising the EU in an age of emergencies appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

To make cross-border investigations more effective, MEPs voted to adopt new rules on the exchange of electronic evidence by law enforcement authorities.
Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs

Source : © European Union, 2023 - EP

To make cross-border investigations more effective, MEPs voted to adopt new rules on the exchange of electronic evidence by law enforcement authorities.
Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs

Source : © European Union, 2023 - EP

On Tuesday, MEPs adopted a proposal by the Conference of Presidents (EP President Metsola and political group leaders) for Parliament’s 2024 election-year calendar.

Source : © European Union, 2023 - EP

On Tuesday, MEPs adopted a proposal by the Conference of Presidents (EP President Metsola and political group leaders) for Parliament’s 2024 election-year calendar.

Source : © European Union, 2023 - EP

A delegation of AFET Members will travel to Santiago and Valparaíso (Chile) and Brasília (Brazil) from 18 to 23 June 2023. The main goal of this mission is to discuss how to make a qualitative leap in the EU-Latin America strategic bi-regional partnership in view of the CELAC-EU Summit on 17-18 July 2023.
Members will hold meetings with Chilean and Brazilian authorities to discuss global and regional security dynamics against the backdrop of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine and the assertive behaviour of China. The visit will allow to exchange views on the state of bilateral relations in view of the forthcoming ratification of the EU-Chile Advanced Framework Agreement by the European Parliament and reinvigorating the strategic partnership with Brazil.
Source : © European Union, 2023 - EP

Members of the AFET Committee will meet on Monday 26 & Tuesday 27 June 2023 (Antall 2Q2).

Debates:

• Tuesday 27 June: ICM from 9:00 to 12:30
  

The meeting will be webstreamed.

AFET-SEDE-DROI meetings 2023
Meeting documents
Webstreaming
Source : © European Union, 2023 - EP

Tuesday, 13 June

Source : © European Union, 2023 - EP

AMENDMENTS 42 - 281 - Draft opinion Establishing a framework for ensuring a secure and sustainable supply of critical raw materials and amending Regulations (EU) 168/2013, (EU) 2018/858, 2018/1724 and (EU) 2019/1020
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Miriam Lexmann

Source : © European Union, 2023 - EP

Confirming its decision on 22 May, the Bureau modified the conditions of the voluntary pension fund closed in 2009 to put it on a more sustainable path.

Source : © European Union, 2023 - EP

Today's Bureau decision will increase transparency on interest representatives’ participation in some 12 000 events held on Parliament's premises.

Source : © European Union, 2023 - EP