European Union

On Monday afternoon, MEPs discussed the security situation in Europe and beyond as well as defence and EU-NATO cooperation with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte.
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Subcommittee on Security and Defence

Source : © European Union, 2025 - EP

On Monday afternoon, MEPs discussed the security situation in Europe and beyond as well as defence and EU-NATO cooperation with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte.
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Subcommittee on Security and Defence

Source : © European Union, 2025 - EP

European rules aim to promote a culture of repair, and ensure that products are environmentally friendly and that advertising does not mislead consumers.

Source : © European Union, 2025 - EP

AMENDMENTS 26 - 299 - Draft report Establishing the Reform and Growth Facility for the Republic of Moldova
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Committee on Budgets
Siegfried Mureşan, Sven Mikser

Source : © European Union, 2024 - EP

On Monday, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte will make his first official visit to the European Parliament since taking office on 1 October 2024.
Committee on Foreign Affairs

Source : © European Union, 2025 - EP

On Monday, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte will make his first official visit to the European Parliament since taking office on 1 October 2024.
Committee on Foreign Affairs

Source : © European Union, 2025 - EP

On Monday, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte will make his first official visit to the European Parliament since taking office on 1 October 2024.
Committee on Foreign Affairs

Source : © European Union, 2025 - EP

AMENDMENTS 15 - 104 - Draft opinion Macro-financial assistance to the Arab Republic of Egypt
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Tineke Strik

Source : © European Union, 2024 - EP

Mainstream political parties across Europe attempting to see-off far-right political parties by copying them instead of challenging them hasn’t worked. It can’t work. It won’t work.

Or as historian Timothy Garton Ash, Professor of European Studies at Oxford University said on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme:

“There is good evidence that politics of appeasement by mainstream liberal centre-right parties trying to win back voters by adopting some of the more extreme rhetoric and policies doesn’t work.

“Because voters say why should I have the dog whistle when I could have the real dog?”

Today, in seven EU countries, electorates have voted for the “real dog” meaning that their governments include far-right parties. In another four EU countries, “the dog” is close to winning.

In Austria, The Freedom Party (FPÖ) secured almost 29% of the vote in the September 2024 parliamentary elections and is about to form the government, marking Austria’s first far-right-led administration since World War II.

In Italy, The Brothers of Italy, a right-wing nationalist party, leads the government under Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

In Finland, the Finns Party, a right-wing nationalist group, secured 46 seats in the Eduskunta (parliament) during the April 2023 general elections, becoming the second-largest party with 20.07% of the vote.

In Hungary, The Fidesz party, under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, has been in power since 2010. Fidesz is known for its national-conservative and sovereigntist policies.

In Slovakia, The Slovak National Party, a right-wing nationalist party, is part of the governing coalition.

In Sweden, The Sweden Democrats, a nationalist party, have significant influence over the government through a confidence and supply agreement, despite not being formal coalition members.

In The Netherlands, The Party for Freedom (PVV), led by Geert Wilders, has gained substantial support, leading to the formation of a right-wing government.

As of January 2025, several European countries have far-right or right-wing nationalist parties that are gaining significant support and are close to achieving governmental power.

In Romania, Pro-Russian far-right candidate Călin Georgescu is leading in the polls for the upcoming presidential election, with over 40% support.

In Germany, The Alternative for Germany (AfD), a right-wing populist party, has been increasing its vote share in recent elections.

In France, the National Rally (Rassemblement National, RN) led by Marine Le Pen is a far-right party making significant gains and securing Members of the European Parliament (MEPs).

In Spain, Vox Party is one of several far-right and right-wing parties gaining voters.

And in the UK?

In last year’s general election, the far-right Reform UK party (yes, it is far-right) gained 5 seats with just over 14% of the vote share. Its leader, Nigel Farage, is convinced that he will be Britain’s next Prime Minister.

How did this happen?

Because liberal-thinking, middle-of-the-road parties and politicians, who should have known better, let the blame-game grow. The anti-immigration, anti-refugee, anti-EU, pro-Brexit message gained momentum without being properly challenged.

In the process, both the Tories and Labour have transitioned from being pro-EU parties to basically Brexit parties.

I have written multiple articles about this. For example, ‘How freaky hair ‘won’ in the Netherlands and Britain’

Even today, Labour promotes an anti-migrant message, and continues to support Brexit, even though the way ‘Leave’ won the referendum was fraudulent and undemocratic; Brexit is doing huge harm to Britain; it cannot be ‘made to work’, and polls consistently show that most people think it was a mistake.

Instead of attempting to ape the far-right, now is the time all good parties to come to the aid of the people by powerfully exposing the false diagnoses and empty promises promoted by far-right politicians.

YES, people need affordable homes, decent wages, better access to medical care, good education for their children. And NO, it’s not the fault of migrants.

Properly fixing those problems will see off far-right parties that always exploit hardship by wrongly scapegoating others.

Going down the far-right route will simply cause division, hatred, and societal decay, and still won’t give us affordable homes, decent wages, better access to medical care, or good education for our children.

Good politicians everywhere, be brave, be bold.

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• Related article from 2025: ‘The Brexit nose job’

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• Related article from 2023: ‘How freaky hair ‘won’ the Netherlands and Britain’

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• Related article from 2023: ‘Brexit is unfinished business by a long way’

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• Related article from 2021: ‘What they really want – the end of the EU’

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• Related article from 2017: ‘How did we get stuck with Brexit?’

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• Related article from 2016: ‘Tim Faron versus Nigel Farage’

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• Related article from 2015: ‘Nigel Farage: Ban terminally ill migrants’

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• Related article from 2015: ‘Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Farage?’

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• Related article from 2014: ‘Why did UKIP win in Clacton?’

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• Related article from 2013: ‘What Nigel Farage told British expats in Spain’

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• Related video: ‘Rise of the far-right? British newspapers are to blame’

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• Related video: ‘When Nigel Farage was caught out’

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The post Tories and Labour to blame for rise of Farage appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

This study explores the role and enhancement of parliamentary capacities in the European Union (EU) enlargement process, focusing on the EU’s evolving accession methodology and its emphasis on the ‘fundamentals’ approach. It examines the European Commission’s criteria for ‘functioning democratic institutions’ in accession countries and evaluates the effectiveness of support measures from EU institutions, Member States, and international organisations. Based on desk research, mapping, and over 90 expert and stakeholder interviews, the study analyses EU democracy support initiatives for parliaments in 10 enlargement countries, namely Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, Türkiye, Ukraine, and Kosovo. The study highlights best practices and identifies challenges that require increased attention from the European Parliament and the core actors involved in parliamentary capacity-building. While past efforts by the European Parliament, Member States, and international organisations have strengthened parliaments in these countries, ongoing democratic backsliding calls for more coherent and concerted action. The European Parliament and its Democracy Support and Election Coordination Group (DEG) play a crucial role in addressing these challenges.
Source : © European Union, 2025 - EP

Commitments made at the confirmation hearings of the Commissioners-designate 2024-2029
Source : © European Union, 2025 - EP

by Gilles Pittoors (KU Leuven)

To kick off 2025, the JCMS blog is highlighting some of the excellent work published in JCMS in autumn 2024. In this blog, we feature ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once? Introducing a Field-Theoretic Model for Party Politics in the European Union’  which puts forward a new approach to the European political party system.

Much like the debate on EU democracy at large, ideas about the role political parties play in the EU’s political system are caught in a dichotomy. On the one hand, those who think of the EU as a collection of national democracies consider supranational democratic politics unrealistic or even undesirable, instead contemplating the role of national parties in structuring the political debate in Member States and translating this to the European level. From this perspective, European party politics comes down to coordinating often loose networks of like-minded national parties. On the other hand, those who perceive the EU as a kind of proto-federal system put more emphasis on supranational democratic politics, banking on the polity-building capacities of strong ‘Europarties’ and a democratic praxis that will Europeanise national politics.

Both of these models are rooted in the experience of the coherent nation-state and thus neither capture the reality of European politics: the former takes too little account of the structure inherent in European party politics, while the latter creates unrealistically hierarchical expectations for what a European party (system) could be. Therefore, a new model is needed that departs from the nation-state as  ultimate reference point, and instead theorises parties as genuine multilevel actors whose behaviour can only be understood by appreciating the dynamic European context in which they operate.

Beyond the nation-state

I argue that simply applying models from the national context to the EU does not do justice to the complexity of European politics, and therefore introduce the European Multilevel Party Field (EMPF) as a novel concept to study party democracy in the EU. I argue that the EU is a polity characterised by non-domination in which politics occur simultaneously in every direction all the time — it is a situation of ‘everything everywhere all at once’. Fundamentally, the EU is not a state, but “a multi-state, multi-democracy, multi-people political order” that circumscribes Member States without itself being a state. In this messy context, structure is not characterised by constitutional hierarchy or hegemonic domination, but by a form of mutual dependence among actors that need to collaborate across levels and territories. Indeed, actors’ political activities are no longer bound to the neatly delineated territory of nation-states, but extend beyond their familiar borders and across levels of governance.

Despite excellent research on the nature of the EU’s political system and complex party politics, both scholars and practitioners continue to grapple with the question of how to capture and understand the fundamental nature of party politics in the EU. While most scholars would subscribe to Schattschneider’s assertion that “modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of parties”, the impact of European integration on party politics remains difficult to pinpoint. Moreover, in addition to bridging citizens and politics, whose disconnect is at the core of the EU’s democratic deficit, parties in the EU could act as vehicles of cross-level linkage, transnational policy diffusion, and inter-institutional coordination. Such potential is the main motivation behind the EU’s increasing support for Europarties, hoping these would act as “transmission belts” from citizens to ‘Brussels’.

However, it is one thing to say that parties play an important role in European democracy, and quite another to consider whether the prevailing conceptual models underpinning these arguments make sense in the EU context. At the end of the day, parties have a clear task to fulfil: to represent their constituents, a task that spans from the local to the European level in a messy multilevel context that no longer reflects the neatly organised nation-state. The discussion on EU party politics has paid too little attention to this messy nature of EU politics as characterised by non-domination and far-reaching mutual dependence, which is fundamentally different from the politics of the nation-state in which most of our notions of political parties and party systems have emerged.

An alternative model

Building on organisational field theory, the EMPF presents an alternative model that acknowledges both the agency of actors and the structuring framework in which they operate, making it more suitable to capture the cross-level (multilevel) and cross-border (transnational) interactive nature of EU politics. Conceptualising the European party system as a political field and Europarties as inter-organisational alliances, the EMPF asserts that parties in the EU behave in accordance with their position in the field, interpreted in terms of dynamic and relative power relations to other actors. This position is defined by the dominant rules and norms of the field, as well as by the relative capital of each actor.

Parties act based on their interpretation of what is the best thing to do in a given circumstance, whereby the ultimate purpose is to gain competitive advantages over their rivals and achieve their political goals. In turn, each action triggers a reaction across the field, perpetuating a permanent renegotiation of the field’s balance of power, political configuration, and actors’ distribution in it across political levels and national borders. The messy nature of the EU’s political system is thus structured through the bottom-up creation of field-wide alliances that impose jointly defined rules and norms, while enabling parties to influence EU policies in a way that reflects their and their voters’ preferences.

This approach can be used to address a wide range of topics in EU party politics; from the formation and development of Europarties, to the strategic behaviour of individual actors. As such, the EMPF presents an original model that allows for capturing how EU party politics work in real life, without using the nation-state as a reference point. A key task for future research is the operationalisation of the EMPF for application to empirical (case) research: to figure out how the field’s structure can be concretely measured, which specific factors motivate actors, which variables can predict and explain outcomes, and how this has changed over time (particularly in relation to EU enlargement). This would allow for the development of the EMPF into a comprehensive theory of European party politics, enabling researchers to predict political outcomes and offering insights into what kind of policies can and cannot emerge. Furthermore, field theory has previously been used to describe parliamentary, bureaucratic and civil society networks in the EU. Future research should elaborate how the EMPF relates to these approaches, and whether integrating these into a broader field-theory of European integration would be possible.

Finally, the EMPF also opens new perspectives on EU party democracy as characterised by a dynamic and continuous interaction between mutually dependent actors across different levels and political arenas that cannot be disentangled. For instance, connecting to recent research on citizen participation in the EU, a field approach could be used to argue in favour of the bottom-up transnational engagement and socialisation of parties, civil society and individual citizens. Importantly, I do not posit the EMPF as the ultimate democratic model for the EU, but extend an open invitation to future researchers to further elaborate on this field-theoretic approach in the process of making sense of the EU as a democratic polity.

Dr Gilles Pittoors is Lecturer at the KU Leuven’s Department of Political Science and Research Associate at Ghent Univeristy. He has previously worked at the European Parliamentary Research Service, the Université Libre de Bruxelles and the University of Groningen. His research focuses primarily on questions of transnational democratic governance and the Europeanisation of national politics.

The post Introducing: the European Multilevel Party Field appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

The European Charlemagne Youth Prize gives you the chance to gain support for your youth-led EU project. Apply now for the 2025 edition.

Source : © European Union, 2025 - EP

Beevers Kaas
Competition
Competition law and distribution deals: The exclusive distributor must be protected against active sales in its territory by all the supplier’s other buyers

Mousse
Principles of Community law
GDPR and rail transport: a customer’s gender identity is not necessary data for the purchase of a transport ticket

On 13 January, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte will participate in his first exchange of views with Members of AFET and SEDE as well as in association with the Delegation for relations with the NATO PA (DNAT). Discussion topics will include EU-NATO cooperation, efforts to strengthen NATO defence and deterrence, Russia's ongoing war of aggression against Ukraine and its implications for transatlantic relations as well as other regional and global security threats and common challenges.
Source : © European Union, 2025 - EP

On 14 January, Marta Kos, the new Commissioner for Enlargement, will discuss with AFET Members the next steps in EU enlargement and other issues related to her portfolio. There is currently a renewed momentum for enlargement, which represents a historic opportunity with significant socio-economic, political and security advantages for both the EU and the enlargement countries.
Source : © European Union, 2025 - EP

On 13 January, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte will participate in his first exchange of views with Members of AFET and SEDE as well as in association with the Delegation for relations with the NATO PA (DNAT). Discussion topics will include EU-NATO cooperation, efforts to strengthen NATO defence and deterrence, Russia's ongoing war of aggression against Ukraine and its implications for transatlantic relations as well as other regional and global security threats and common challenges.
Meeting agenda and documents (AFET)
Source : © European Union, 2025 - EP

Bindl v Commission
Law governing the institutions
The General Court orders the Commission to pay damages to a visitor to its ‘Conference on the Future of Europe’ website as a result of the transfer of personal data to the United States

13 January 2025:
A joint meeting of the Committee on Foreign Affairs (AFET) and the Subcommittee on Security and Defence (SEDE) - in association with the Delegation for relations with the NATO Parliamentary Assembly (DNAT) - with an exchange of views with NATO Secretary General Mark RUTTE, takes place on Monday, 13 January 2025 from 16:00-17:30 in Brussels (ANTALL 2Q2).

Meeting documents are available here.

27/28 January 2025:
The next meeting of the Subcommittee on Security and Defence (SEDE) is scheduled to take place on Monday, 27 January 2025 from 15:00-18:30 and on Tuesday, 28 January 2025 from 9:00-12:30 and 14:30-18:30 in Brussels (SPINELLI 1G3).

Further information about the meeting can be found here.

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SEDE missions 2024:

• Ukraine - 25-26 October 2024
• United Kingdom - 28-30 October 2024
  

SEDE meetings' calendar 2025
SEDE meetings' calendar 2nd half of 2024 - 10th legislature
EP calendar 2024
Source : © European Union, 2025 - EP