European Union

The Dutch government has announced plans to ban fossil-fuel heating systems from 2026 and subsidise the use of heat pumps. The move also comes against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine and Europe's efforts to end its dependence on fossil energy from Russia. The national press doubts the transition can be implemented so swiftly.

Written by Clare Ferguson and Katarzyna Sochacka.

The highlight of the May II plenary session in Brussels was an address to a formal sitting of Parliament by Maia Sandu, President of the Republic of Moldova, followed by a debate on the Foreign Affairs (AFET) Committee’s annual report on progress to date with implementation of Moldova’s EU Association Agreement. Members then adopted a resolution calling for more strategic support for the country. Russia’s war on Moldova’s neighbour Ukraine again dominated the agenda. Members held two important debates: on the fight against impunity for war crimes in Ukraine, and on European solidarity and energy security in the face of Russia’s invasion and its recent refusal to supply gas to Poland and Bulgaria. Members also debated Council and Commission statements on prosecution of members of the opposition and detention of trade union leaders in Belarus.

2021 Rule of law report

The rule of law is a key element of democracy and is one of the founding values of the EU, binding on all its Member States as well as candidate countries. Parliament debated and adopted a report from the Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) Committee, prepared in response to the European Commission’s 2021 rule of law report, which monitors the situation annually in EU countries. Covering four areas (justice systems, anti-corruption, media pluralism and freedom, and institutional checks and balances), this, the second such report, notes that there have been positive developments, despite the stress that the Covid‑19 pandemic placed on democratic systems. However, the committee repeats its view that the Commission should make country-specific recommendations and monitor their progress. The committee also criticises the latest rule of law report for failing to take account of Parliament’s previous recommendations that it should include monitoring of all key EU values: respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including for minorities.

Reports on North Macedonia and Albania 2021

Members also debated and adopted two AFET committee annual reports on the enlargement process for EU membership candidates North Macedonia and Albania – where the committee regrets the lack of progress within the Council on opening accession negotiations. North Macedonia is the more advanced candidate in terms of its accession process, and the AFET report highlights its positive record in its transition to democracy. However, Bulgaria continues to block the opening of accession negotiations due to a cultural dispute, and the report nevertheless calls for North Macedonia to continue its administrative and political reform. Negotiations on Albania’s EU membership bid have not yet begun. Indeed, Albania’s international standing on corruption has even fallen since its EU application in 2014. The AFET committee’s annual report on Albania‘s progress highlights persisting issues of judicial independence, corruption, freedom of speech and minority rights, and calls on the Albanian authorities to eliminate corruption and criminality in public life.

Minimum level of taxation for multinational groups

Parliament held a debate on a proposal in the areas of taxation of multinational companies in the globalised, digitalised world. In recent years, digitalisation has made it easy for large multinational enterprises to shift their profits to countries with preferential tax regimes, thereby putting their profit before the opportunity to pay fair taxes to the societies that host them. This strips countries of revenue on which they depend to fund social benefits, such as healthcare, and investment. Parliament has long demanded reform in this area, and the Organisation for Economic Co‑operation and Development (OECD) recently agreed a framework for a minimum corporate tax rate. Members adopted an Economic and Monetary Affairs (ECON) Committee report that introduces a clause in the proposals that will allow revision of the proposed minimum tax rate threshold of €750 million a year. Following this consultation of the European Parliament, the proposal to implement the agreement in the EU should now be adopted by the Council, where a unanimous vote is required.

Establishing the European Education Area by 2025

Members also debated the Commission’s and Council’s responses to oral questions on proposals concerning the right to education in the EU. To ensure that people in the EU have access to a quality, inclusive education for personal fulfilment, to enable them to participate fully as citizens, and to boost their employment chances, the Commission proposes to build a European education area by 2025. The aim would be to offer work-based learning to at least 60 % of recent graduates, and learning opportunities for adults up to 65 years old. Further goals should promote learning for a sustainable environment by 2030, such as ensuring a good level of education in mathematics, science and computer skills for all. Members adopted a resolution proposed by the Culture and Education (CULT) Committee supporting the proposals.

Opening of trilogue negotiations

Committee decisions to enter into interinstitutional negotiations were announced: from the Internal Market and Consumer Protection (IMCO) Committee on the proposal for a regulation on machinery products and from the International Trade (INTA) Committee on the proposal for a regulation on applying a generalised scheme of tariff preferences.

Read this ‘at a glance’ on ‘Plenary round-up – May II 2022‘ in the Think Tank pages of the European Parliament.

Welcome to EURACTIV’s Tech Brief, your weekly update on all things digital in the EU.

As Europe struggles to decarbonise its economy and wean itself off Russian oil and gas, one of the world's sunniest and most arid nations is pitching itself to the continent as an answer to its problems.

A delegation from the Internal Market Committee will travel to Silicon Valley to meet with leading tech companies including Google, Meta, Apple, Airbnb, eBay, Paypal and Uber.
Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection

Source : © European Union, 2022 - EP

A delegation from the Internal Market Committee will travel to Silicon Valley to meet with leading tech companies including Google, Meta, Apple, Airbnb, eBay, Paypal and Uber.
Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection

Source : © European Union, 2022 - EP

Alexandra Paulus, Fellow for International Cybersecurity Policy with the German think tank Stiftung Neue Verantwortung, explains what cyber norms are, who shapes them and whether Germany is actually practising what it preaches.

Sharing is caring, they say, and so the EU has set out on a mission to build a common agriculture data space to better aggregate and use key information. But the farming sector’s intergalactic journey to (data) space is long...

Sweden and Finland want to enroll, on Northern Ireland is BoJo playing the troll and to promote wind power leaders go for a stroll.  

The European Union is looking into ways of using the frozen assets of Russian oligarchs to fund the reconstruction of Ukraine after the war, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on Thursday (19 May).

Written by Fearghas O’Beara.

Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia experienced a window of religious pluralism in the Yeltsin era, allowing western Christian missionaries to operate freely. The Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) resented this encroachment into its canonical territory and, when Vladimir Putin took office in 1999, worked closely with him to consolidate its power. Putin valued such close collaboration as a way to exert control over society, eliminate alternative sources of moral authority at home, and extend Russian influence abroad.

The Home Front: Consolidating Russian Orthodox Church dominance

Already in January 2000, Putin’s first National Security Concept as acting Russian President promoted ‘strengthening of society’s moral values, traditions of patriotism’ as part of what he called ‘spiritual’ national interests. During his first two terms, Putin facilitated the ascendancy of the ROC through laws returning properties seized in the Soviet era and introducing religious education in public schools, as well as tax breaks and financial advantages. In return, the ROC used its influence and resources to push Putin’s vision of Orthodox Christian national identity and gave unwavering support for a strong, militarised state, particularly after the election of Kirill as ‘Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia’ in 2009. By 2016, Putin had promulgated the ‘Yarovaya Law’ severely curtailing the activities of non-traditional churches, part of wider Kremlin propaganda efforts portraying the West as decadent and bereft of Christian values and what has been described as the ‘ethnicisation of religion‘. Kirill has proved a vital figure in ensuring support in Russian society for Putin’s invasion. This contrasts with his more neutral position following the annexation of Crimea and invasion of the Donbas in 2014 as he sought to balance his alliance with the Kremlin and his desire for ROC control of the Ukrainian church. As of May 2022, the European Commission proposed adding Kirill to the list of individuals under sanctions in the Putin regime, the EU External Action Service describing him as ‘one of the most prominent supporters of the Russian military aggression against Ukraine’.

The Eastern Campaign: Exercising influence over Orthodox churches

In partnership with the ROC, the Kremlin has sought to spread its influence in predominantly Orthodox countries in eastern Europe, including a number of EU Member States, constituting a complex landscape of autocephalous (self-governing) churches which view either Moscow or Constantinople as pre-eminent. These efforts are coordinated by the ROC’s Department for External Church Relations under Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, working closely with the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Department is responsible for ‘relations of the Russian Orthodox Church with Local Orthodox Churches, non-Orthodox churches and Christian associations, non-Christian religious communities, governmental, parliamentary, public organizations abroad, inter-governmental, religious and public international organizations’.

A February 2021 hearing of the European Parliament’s Special Committee on Foreign Interference in all Democratic Processes in the European Union, including Disinformation (INGE) highlighted how Russia builds links within EU near-neighbourhood countries, through ROC activities stressing religious affinity and shared goals, such as defending persecuted Christians in the Middle East, or preventing the ‘islamisation’ of Europe. Other analysts have identified a ‘highly nation-specific approach‘ to Kremlin propaganda, combining narratives of Orthodox affinity with pan-Slavic brotherhood, defence of ethnic/linguistic minorities, or preservation of Europe’s Christian values, depending on the national context.

The EU country with the largest number of Orthodox believers – 18.7 million – is Romania, followed by Greece and Bulgaria. In the EU’s near neighbourhood, among countries which aspire to EU membership, Ukraine is by far the most populous, with almost 35 million Orthodox Christians, followed by Serbia, Georgia and Moldova. A 2017 Pew Forum survey reveals a majority of Romanians support the view that ‘a strong Russia is necessary to balance the influence of the West’. The Orthodox vs. Western values – ‘freedom vs. morality‘ – narrative was used in the 2018 referendum to ban same-sex marriage, strongly supported by the Romanian church but which failed to reach the required threshold. According to some authors, many Orthodox websites within the EU covering such ‘culture battles’ portray Putin as a defender of Orthodox values. However, the Romanian Orthodox Church is not particularly close to the ROC, and there is evidence that Romanians clearly distinguish between shared Orthodox values and strategic interests, viewing Russia as the biggest threat. In Bulgaria, a key figure seeking to push the country closer to Russia through Orthodox networks was Putin associate and Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeev, founder of the St Basil the Great Charitable Foundation. Malofeev promotes the ‘Orthodoxy vs. the Decadent West’ narrative through his Tsargrad TV channel, which portrays the EU as an imposer of satanist-globalist ideologies aimed at eliminating Christian values, and his Katheon ‘think tank’. However, Malofeev – who has been on the EU sanctions list since 2014 – was ultimately banned from entering Bulgaria for 10 years in 2010 for his involvement in corruption of Bulgarian politicians in an effort to influence that country’s foreign policy.

The nominally autocephalous Orthodox Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia came increasingly under ROC control during the Putin era, leading to scandals in 2012 which revealed the extent of Russian infiltration. Even if the number of Orthodox believers across Czechia and Slovakia is less than 100 000, the Church has been active in seeking to shape public opinion and remains within the ecclesiastic orbit of the Moscow Patriarchate. In this sense, it forms part of a wider network of Kremlin-driven cultural and religious foundations and organisations such as the All-Slavic Union and the Coordinating Council of Russian Compatriots, as well as Putin’s chief ideological vehicle, the Russkiy Mir Foundation.

While the Orthodox Churches of Romania and Bulgaria are autocephalous, and can more easily distance themselves from the ROC, in other EU countries minority Orthodox Churches are directly under Moscow and face a more delicate balancing act. One case in point is the Latvian Orthodox Church, which formally remains under the Russian church, unlike its Estonian counterpart, which split with Moscow in recent years. The Latvian Church leader, Metropolitan Alexander, has tried to maintain that unity while condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine: ‘We Russians in Latvia are not responsible for what other governments do’. Meanwhile, Patriarch Kirill grants this amount of leeway in order to avoid yet another church in the former Soviet sphere following a Western trajectory. Meanwhile, Greece and Cyprus are considered by some observers as vulnerable to Russian influence through both geography and shared cultural and religious histories. Russia has sought to leverage shared religious heritage with mixed results, in part due to the broader struggle for hegemony within Orthodoxy between the Patriarchates of Moscow and Constantinople, the latter based in Istanbul and strongly supported by Greece and Cyprus. Putin and Patriarch Kirill have visited Greek Orthodoxy’s holiest site at Mount Athos on various occasions, transmitting messages of ‘Orthodox values’. When Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras visited Putin in Moscow in 2015, he also met with Kirill. Konstantin Malofeev has cultivated ultra-Orthodox political forces which ultimately failed to make an impact. The Cypriot Orthodox Church resisted ROC pressure and in 2020 recognised the independence of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

The Western Campaign: Building a network of influence in Christian groups

In EU countries with no significant Orthodox presence, the Kremlin strategy has been to infiltrate Western Christian associations and link them to Orthodox ‘allies’ to fight for a common cause to preserve ‘European civilisation’ in what have been termed ‘conservative Christian alliances‘. The agenda of this ‘new ecumenical cooperation’ is about ‘traditional values’, the ‘traditional family’, the ‘sanctity of life’ and ‘religious liberty’. A key NGO coordinating such links is the World Congress of Families, closely linked to the ROC since its creation in 1995. Its congresses are eclectic gatherings of European Christian organisations, Orthodox prelates, US Evangelicals and European political figures such as Italy’s Matteo Salvini and Hungary’s Viktor Orban; the most recent were held in Hungary (2017), Moldova (2018) and Italy (2019). Alliances were thus also built with political parties and leaders on the right who endorse strong ‘Christian values’ narratives, as in the case of Salvini and Orban, as well as Ataka in Bulgaria, or where it fits better with the local context of ‘defending Europe against Islam’, such as with Austria’s Freedom Party. Another ‘new ecumenism’ organisation is the Dialogue of Civilizations Research Institute headed by Putin associate Vladimir Yakunin, former head of Russian Railways. Yakunin’s World Public Forum conferences in Greece brought together Orthodox Church leaders with Western organisations and European politicians on the left such as Austria’s Alfred Gusenbauer and Germany’s Martin Schulz.

Read this ‘at a glance’ on ‘Russia’s war on Ukraine: The Kremlin’s use of religion as a foreign policy instrument‘ in the Think Tank pages of the European Parliament.

Rules against overspending by EU governments will remain suspended through 2023, extending a pandemic-era reprieve because of the war in Ukraine, sources said on Thursday (19 May).

The world's political and business elite will hobnob in Davos next week after a two-year break caused by Covid, with the Ukraine war set to dominate the exclusive Swiss mountain summit.