13 June 2024
Between Continuity and a Perforated ‘Cordon Sanitaire’
Fears of a radical right-wing wave dominated the debates leading up to the European Parliament (EP) elections. As the final votes are tallied across the 27 EU Member States, it has become evident that the predictions of pre-election polls have partially come true: Far-right parties secured about a quarter of the popular vote. What are the implications? While the current results likely indicate by-and-large continuity in the European Parliament, including an ongoing shift to the right on contested issues such as migration or climate policy, they had heavily disruptive consequences on the national level, which in France has resulted in snap parliamentary elections. This will have pronounced impact on the balance of power in the (European) Council and on the EU as a whole. Continue reading >>
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19 December 2023
One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
This blogpost unpacks some of the ‘democratic paradoxes’ that come with the ‘Defence of Democracy’ package (DoD package), which the European Commission published on Tuesday, 12th of December. While a Recommendation on promoting civic engagement and citizen participation (Civil Society Recommendation) reflects positive changes in the Commission’s conception of democracy, the ‘Directive establishing harmonised requirements in the internal market on transparency of interest representation carried out on behalf of third countries’ (Foreign Funding Directive) directly contradicts this emphasis on a more citizen-centred model and is illustrative of a broader dilemma: how to defend democracy in the EU’s multi-level constitutional space, while keeping the sensitive legal tools for doing so out of the hands of the enemies of democracy that are already – and for the time being irreversibly – on its inside. Continue reading >>
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19 December 2023
“This Is Not a Foreign Agents Law”
On Tuesday, 12 December 2023, the Commission adopted its long-awaited Defence of Democracy package, which includes a Proposal for a Directive on Transparency of Interest Representation on behalf of Third Countries. Dubravka Šuica, Commissioner for Democracy and Demography seemed eager to clarify what the Directive is not. Šuica emphasised that the Directive “is not a foreign agents law”. But the more a statement is repeated, the less credible it appears. Rather, the opposite appears to be true. And so, the devil is not in the name, it lies in enforcement. Despite the Commission’s assertion that full harmonisation of the Directive prevents Member States from gold-plating or potentially worse activities, the Commission has limited control over how Member States apply and enforce their national laws. This is the biggest risk of the proposal. Continue reading >>14 December 2023
The Future of the Rule of Law in the EU
With systemic threats to and violations of the rule of law not subsiding, notwithstanding the expected end of backsliding in the case of Poland, the future of the rule of law in the EU is likely to be one of retrenchment accompanied by increased gaslighting to mask an increased gap between EU rhetoric and EU action. This means that the Commission’s decision to unlock € 10 bn of EU funding previously frozen on rule of law grounds to “sway Viktor Orbán on Ukraine” should not be seen as a once-off aberration but as prefiguration of a new abnormal normal. Continue reading >>
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18 October 2023
At a Snail’s Pace
By 1 April 2018, member states had to transpose an EU Directive on ‘the strengthening of certain aspects of the presumption of innocence and of the right to be present at the trial in criminal proceedings’. Bulgaria has not fully transposed it to this day, and consistently undermines it. Now, finally, the Commission has launched infringement proceecings. Preceding the announcement, the Commission rejected Rasosveta Vassileva's reasoned complaints on the same issue, as late as 2022. Her odyssey is a concerning tale on how EU institutions handle citizen alerts. Continue reading >>
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12 September 2023
The Price of Transatlantic Friendship
While the citizens of most EU Member States enjoy visa-free travel to the US, citizens of Bulgaria, Romania and Cyprus do not. Following the Commission’s repeated refusal to activate the reciprocity mechanism in EU visa law to remedy this inequality in access to visa-free travel, the European Parliament asked the CJEU whether the Commission was under an obligation to do so. The Court answered in the negative, holding instead that the Commission had wide discretion in this regard. Its reasoning centers the sensitive political nature that visa retaliation vis-á-vis the US implies, while failing to instill a sense of urgency in working towards equal treatment of EU citizens. This threatens to perpetuate a situation in which the advantages of supranational integration in the context of the Schengen acquis are permanently withheld from nationals of Romania, Bulgaria and Cyprus. Continue reading >>05 September 2023
Reinventing a Broken Wheel
On 16 July, the European Commission and the Tunisian government signed a new strategic partnership on migration, sparking outrage by European parliamentarians, researchers and civil society actors given Tunisia’s autocratic turn since 2021 and the recent flaring up of racial and xenophobic violence. The deal is emblematic of the blind spots of trans-Mediterranean migration cooperation over the past decades: First, a growing reliance on informality and symbolic politics at the expense of accountability; and second, a persistently Euro-centrist perspective that overlooks the dynamics South of the Mediterranean, with dire policy consequences. Continue reading >>
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21 August 2023
Team Europe’s Deal
On 16 July 2023, the European Commissioner for Neighbourhood and Enlargement and Tunisia’s Secretary of State of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Migration and Tunisians Abroad signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) on a ‘strategic and global partnership’ between the European Union (EU) and Tunisia. The signing followed a meeting in Tunisia between Tunisian President Kais Saied and ‘Team Europe’ (European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte). The deal is part of the growing trend to externalise migration control. Against this background, this blog post first clarifies what was agreed before explaining why the agreement is problematic both in terms of substance and form. Continue reading >>
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12 June 2023
The Key to Ensure Media Pluralism in the EU? A Unified Framework
Media freedom is one of the necessary conditions for democracies to function. Yet media freedom is currently not guaranteed in all European Union countries. The European Media Freedom Act proposed by the European Commission in 2022 aims to protect and foster media pluralism across the EU block and, while some changes would need to be made to strengthen the proposal’s efficacy, monitoring on the ground shows that a common European framework is indeed needed. While there are already several harmonisation measures that revolve around media – such as the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD) – this is the first text that clearly and specifically addresses the media market in and of itself, which marks a paradigm shift in EU media regulation. Continue reading >>
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01 December 2022
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
The Commission needs to get its message out to Hungarians loud and clear that it is trying to fight corruption in Hungary so that EU money can be used to benefit the Hungarian people and not just Orbán’s circle of cronies. Hungarians would definitely appreciate that if they knew it. But the Commission’s press release today has been drowned out by Orbán’s use of state funds to flood the zone with his message that the Commission doesn’t care about the Hungarian people and is responsible for all of the economic pain they feel. Continue reading >>
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