European Union leaders agree on 1.82 trillion euro ($2.1 trillion) budget and coronavirus recovery fund

As far as I know, the British had some of the best negotiators in EU, before Brexit where many were kicked out or demoralized.I wonder how well they will handle negotiations when Scotland decides to leave UK.

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meanwhile in US Senate

death waivers for corporations! get back to your death jobs! suffer! suffer! make us more money on the stock market!

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Negotiators at a technical level are not difficult to get, you need people that know what they are dealing with and a frame of reference on which to play. The rest is to look at different scenarios to see which one suits your interests best.

What the UE is incredibly good at is to set the political frame of reference first, something the presidents of the member countries can agree on and then leave the details to the bureaucrats. Also they always look for consensus and how to work together. That is why they have been always ahead on the Brexit negotiations, they agreed the basic lines and gave their negotiators a mandate to pursue them.

On the other side the UK could nor agree their initial negotiation position for more than 3 years, with 3 changes of PM and 2 general elections, a parliament paralysed and internal fighting on every political party.

In the end it doesn’t matter if they had good negotiators or not. Their job was sabotaged from day one.

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In this case rules seem to be obeyed only selectively, when it is convenient for political reasons. For example EU is introducing automated internet censorship in the name of copyright protection, which is an infringement of human rights, but it seems that is is fine when EU does it.

It was lowered from 67 years for both genders to 65 for men and 60 for women. This kind of disparity in retirement age in Poland was first introduced by Communist regime in 80’s.
This it typically called affirmative action and is something EU itself engages in:

Norway, Germany and France engage in affirmative action too, but somehow it isn’t criticized by EU, let alone being sanctioned.

Equal treatment for social security issues is not a new thing.
The deadline for this was 1984.

The board member quota was a draft resolution from 2012 that never made the statue books. The Commission cannot pass laws.

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And yet other forms of affirmative action based on gender are encouraged by EU and implemented by member countries like Norway France. (edit: Norway is obviously not an EU Member, thanks @Dire)

It is still an encouragement for member countries to implement such policies.

Norway is not an EU Member.

Member countries blocked the resolution, it has zero weight.

If a country does illegally discriminate its for member citizens/Advocates to take their case to the ECJ for adjudication - See Association belge des Consommateurs Test-Achats ASBL v Conseil des ministres for a good example of how that works.

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Sorry, you’re right about that. But France is, and they have similar law too.

I refer the honourable member to my previous response

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Of course you know this but the majority of those who voted jettisoned us out of the EU, the rest of us had some sense and voted to remain and nothing nothing in the past 4 years has convinced us we made the wrong choice.

Well, 52% of those who bothered to vote.

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Technically, yes, it was 52% of the people that bothered to vote, in reality if people don’t vote, specially on a referendum that is going to affect the rest of their lives and not just the next 4 years it means they accept the result whatever it might be

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Brexiteers love to tell us “remoaners” that we should just shut up and accept the result because we lost but i never will precisely for the reason you state - it’ll affect the rest of my life and our kids lives. I’m in a part of the UK that received the bulk of the EU’s UK funds yet the majority of voters who turned out still voted for this act of self-harm.

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This isn’t about Poland. This is about several member states including Poland dismantling the rule of law. Attributing it to existing xenophobia is just playing into the hands of authoritarian asshats. And, just for the record, especially Austria might find itself at the wrong end of that sadly rather small stick.

That might be the sentiment on the street, but much, much more is at stake here than money. Shared values of freedom and unalienable rights are more important than money. Peace is more important than money. This is what is at stake: the future of the European Union, and the European continent.

This is plainly wrong and very much underplaying what is happening in Poland.

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I agree, but it would really look much better if EU itself wouldn’t try to severely restrict citizens’ freedom by introducing copyright directive with mandatory copyright filters and thus limiting internet to a few companies such as Facebook and Google.

It’s important to mention that crisis began with previous neoliberal ruling party illegally stacking the courts with their people:

I’d say that recent anti-LGBT rhetoric is a far greater problem and will probably result in wave of hate crimes by homophobes and transphobes who will be emboldened by government’s position.

And it seems that PiS then intensified the crisis by stacking the Constitutional Tribunal with their people and changing the rules on how it functioned.

After the Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, PiS) party won the parliamentary election, it made its own appointments to the court, arguing that the previous appointments of the five judges by PO were unconstitutional. In December, PiS changed the court’s decision-making power by prescribing a two-thirds majority vote and mandatory participation of at least 13 of the 15 judges on the Constitutional Tribunal.

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Exactly, they escalated it further.

Not the issue here, and it is a massive difference to createing an authoritarian Gouvernment, circumventing and basically destroying the division of powers. See: Hungary, e.g.

The point is: if it is illegal, at least in theory but often also in practise, the separation of powers can rectify this. If independent justice is no longer guaranteed, all is lost.

Make no mistake: this is not about a single country. Not about Hungary or Poland. Even if the former is on this path for ten years now, and Poland is deep in shit. This can also happen in, say, France. It happened in Germany, and we all know how that went. This must not happen again. And if it happens within the EU, the EU must try to address this.

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You’re right, thank you for explaining this.

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Thanks for discussing with me.

While this BBS has an exceptional community, it is still rare (for me) to get a “you are right” response. Thank you for this, too.

To be clear: your point that there is a xenophobia towards Polish people is correct.

But the point in question here is even larger. Much larger. The EU as an institution could be destroyed from the inside of authoritarian states would prevail destroying the rule of law if the EU continues to have not even the tiniest of levers.

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A friend from Ukraine said that the most important reason that people there wanted to join EU was not possibility of working abroad, but that they believed it could finally bring some accountability to corrupt politicians and officials in their country.

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