Dear readers,
Welcome to EU Politics Decoded, where Benjamin Fox and Eleonora Vasques bring you a round-up of the latest political news in Europe and beyond every Thursday.
In this edition, we look at how the fallout from the war in Ukraine has prompted Poland to gradually abandon its status, alongside Hungary, as one of Europe’s problem children.
Editor’s Take: Ukraine war has seen Poland shed its EU ‘problem child’ tag
There’s nothing like an emergency to change the political direction. Case in point is Poland, now at the centre of international attention following the missile attack that killed two people on Tuesday (15 November).
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said the attack was “likely caused by a Ukrainian air defence missile fired to defend Ukrainian territory,” a theory that Poland backs. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said that Ukraine’s forces did not fire the missiles.
Further investigations will provide a clearer picture of what happened and who was responsible, but the reaction of world leaders, all of which expressed solidarity with Poland, points a suspicious finger at Russia.
It is easy to forget that less than a year ago, Poland and Hungary were the ‘problem children’ of the EU, waging a long-running battle with the European Commission on the rule of law and a culture war encompassing migration, abortion and identity.
Just over a year ago, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki’s speech at the European Parliament in Strasbourg accused the EU, particularly the Court of Justice, of a “creeping revolution” that was undermining Polish sovereignty.
That defiance, coupled with the Polish judiciary proclaiming the superiority of its national law over that of the EU, prompted the likes of liberal MEP Guy Verhofstadt to compare Poland’s stance to Brexit.
In January, Belarus became the latest EU neighbourhood state to weaponise migration by driving migrants, many of them from Iraq and Afghanistan, to the border with Poland to enter the EU.
We can contrast the Polish government’s angry and hostile approach to those migrants with the welcome it has given to the 1.4 million people fleeing Ukraine who had registered for Temporary Protection in Poland as of 19 September.
Morawiecki’s administration is no less conservative than it was a year ago – particularly on abortion rights – and its dispute with the EU executive over its judiciary has meant almost €36 billion in post-pandemic recovery funds for Poland remain blocked.
But relations with Brussels are now far warmer, particularly in comparison with Viktor Orbán’s government in Budapest, which continues to publicly blame the EU’s sanctions on Russia for its own economic difficulties.
Commission Vice President Věra Jourová said this week that Warsaw is moving “in the right direction” towards receiving its recovery funds in full following “constructive” talks with Poland’s Europe minister, Szymon Szynkowski vel Sęk.
“We are open to dialogue…[and] compromise,” added Szynkowski vel Sęk. Those words weren’t in Warsaw’s vocabulary at the start of the year.
Charts of the week
This week’s chart is about Poland and the EU. In October 2022, the Pew Research Centre discovered that particularly Polish people are not that hostile towards the EU.
Source: Spring 2022 Global Attitudes Survey Q39a-h [Pew Research Center]
Politics in the spotlight
Welcome to Politics in the spotlight, the audio-visual corner of the Politics Hub.
This week we spoke with Juan Fernando Lopez Aguilar, the Spanish chair of the European Parliament’s influential civil liberties committee, to discuss the progress of the package of EU migration reform laws.
Who’s electioneering?
The Trump revolution revisited? Despite copping much of the flak for the Republican party’s underwhelming performance in last week’s midterm elections, former president Donald Trump has announced his plans to contest the November 2024 presidential elections.
The last handful of congressional seats are still yet to be called, but the GOP has won a narrow majority in the House of Representatives – likely to be 221 to 214 over the Democrats – while failing to make any impression on the Democrats’ control of the Senate.
However, the failure of the expected “red wave” in materialising – and the defeat of many of the candidates which Trump backed, has put him on the back foot. Furthermore, Florida Governor Ron DeSanctis’ triumph has positioned him as a serious rival in the Republican primaries.
Capitals-in-brief
Germany has built a new LNG terminal in record time. Germany will receive Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) from mid-December through a new floating terminal inaugurated on Tuesday (15 November). Germany is one of the EU countries most dependent on Russian gas, and, in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Gazprom halted gas supplies, and the Nord Stream 1 Pipeline was destroyed, leaving Germany missing about 50 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas in yearly deliveries.
A new window opportunity for the Protocol? Maybe not. Foreign Secretary James Cleverly has played down prospects of reaching a deal on the Northern Ireland Protocol just days after UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak stated that there was a new ‘window of opportunity’ to conclude talks.
Inside the institutions
White smoke on the EU budget. MEPs and national governments finally reached agreement on the 2023 EU budget worth €186.6 billion on Monday night (14 November), with the Parliament demanding additional means to address the fallout of the war in Ukraine.
Time to expand Schengen. The European Commission has repeated its call for EU governments to admit Bulgaria, Romania, and Croatia to the bloc’s Schengen area, which allows passport-free movement, at a vote in December.
No green light for glyphosate. Member states have blocked the Commission’s proposal to extend the marketing authorisation of the herbicide glyphosate for another year, but the EU executive is set to still approve an interim renewal before mid-December.
EP’s 70th birthday. The European Parliament will celebrate 70 years of existence on Tuesday (22 November) during the plenary session in Strasbourg.
What we are reading
- Trump’s unsurprising announcement. The Independent covers Donald Trump’s speech at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday evening, announcing his run for the 2024 presidential elections.
- It should not be controversial to say a population of 8 billion will have a grave impact on the climate, writes John Vidal for The Guardian.
- Foreign Policy’s Catherine Osborn explains the ‘Bridgetown Initiative’, which sets out plans to overhaul the financial institutions needed to fund climate adaptation and ‘loss and damage’ projects.
- COP27 puts the spotlight on Egypt’s human rights record, writes The Financial Times Editorial Board.
The next week in politics
- A packed Council agenda. EU agriculture ministers meet, and again, the General Affairs Council takes place (but on cohesion policies this time). In the middle of the week, there is the Eurogroup, while an extraordinary meeting on energy and another foreign affairs Council on trade occurs at the end of next week.
- Back to Strasbourg. EU lawmakers will gather for the routine plenary session at the European Parliament in Strasbourg.
Thanks for reading. If you’d like to contact us for leaks, tips or comments, drop us a line at [email protected] / [email protected] or contact us on Twitter: @EleonorasVasques & @benfox83
[Edited by Alice Taylor]
Source: euractiv.com
