Eu politics

Martin Selmayr’s power grab, elevating him to the post of Secretary-General and putting him in charge of 33,000 staff, was a brilliantly-executed Brussels coup. As Jean Quatremer reveals in The Spectator, the double promotion of Juncker’s chief of staff was over in nine minutes flat, and was described by one of those present as an ‘impeccably prepared and audacious power-grab’. So how did he do it? And how can such skullduggery be covered up? On Friday, the European Commission slipped out the minutes for the meeting on February 21st at which Selmayr earned his promotion. Early in the meeting, we learn that the job of Deputy Secretary General was vacant: But then

It’s nice to get an election prediction right. Well, more or less right anyway. The Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S) – the drain-the-swamp-screw-everything protest movement founded by a comedian and run like a Scientology sect – has got many more votes in Sunday’s Italian general elections than opinion polls had suggested. According to exit polls conducted by Italy’s state broadcaster RAI, the M5S has got 31.5 per cent of the vote cast, which makes it, by a long way, the party with the most votes. Before Italy’s required opinion poll black-out two weeks before general election day the M5S remained consistently on 27 per cent. In my last post I predicted this – saying

Theresa May’s response to today’s Brexit developments has been revealing. At PMQs, she called staying in a customs union with the EU a ‘betrayal’ of the referendum result, a definite ramping up of her rhetoric, and said that ‘no UK prime minister could ever agree to what the EU’s draft legal text proposes on Northern Ireland.’ What makes May’s comments so interesting is that many believe, including the Foreign Secretary, that the EU is raising the stakes on the Irish border to try and get the UK, as a whole, to commit to staying in a customs union with the EU. May seems to want to make clear to other

The news that Marion Maréchal-Le Pen will share a stage this week with US conservatives, addressing the annual Conservative Political Action Conference event shortly after vice-president Mike Pence, has caused much excitement within the French right. The 28-year-old Maréchal-Le Pen, niece of Marine, the leader of the National Front, withdrew from political life in June after her party’s disastrous result in the second round of the presidential election. Allegedly disillusioned with the direction the party had taken in the previous months, focusing more on the economy and the EU, than on social conservative issues that are close to her heart, the departure of the golden girl of the National Front dismayed the

Spaniards want a new prime minister. That’s the conclusion to be drawn from the latest opinion poll carried out by Metroscopia for the Spanish daily El Pais, which revealed that 85 per cent of the electorate think someone else should have a go at leading the conservative Popular Party. Long-time supporters of the PP are deserting it too, with 62 per cent of respondents who have previously voted for the party saying Mariano Rajoy should go. Clearly the days when the Conservatives enjoyed a virtually-unchallenged hegemony in the national parliament are gone. Benefiting from Rajoy’s demise is the country’s new centre-right, in the form of Albert Rivera’s party Ciudadanos (‘Citizens’).

If you read Brendan O’Neill’s Coffee House article on Our Future, Our Choice! OFOC! – the campaign group of which I am co-president – you are left with the impression that we are a bunch of young fascists seeking a teenocracy. Brendan seems to believe that Britain’s youth see themselves as Nietzsche’s young warriors, and want to push out the ‘old men’. The ‘cult of youth’ wants to round up the walking-stick brigade, the village church congregations, the ageing Brexiteer army and send them where they belong: ‘peaceful’ correction camps. This is ludicrous. I wholeheartedly believe in ‘one person, one vote’. It goes without saying that we at OFOC! do not

The management principle that in static organisations, people are promoted to their level of incompetence reveals the government’s two most inept politicians to be the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Appearing at Davos last week, Philip Hammond pitched the government into its current – conceivably terminal – Brexit crisis. Thanks to his intervention, the Chancellor’s game plan is now obvious: the softest possible Brexit. Getting away with it involves a softly, softly approach. The politics of being outside the EU but ruled by the EU as a de facto Brussels protectorate require copious doses of political Temazepam. This, one would have thought, would have come naturally to

Viktor Orban, Hungary’s ‘controversial’ (i.e. conservative) prime minister, travels today to Vienna to meet the new premier of Austria, Sebastian Kurz, for their first serious political conversation since the latter’s election. Orban and Kurz are seen in the conventional narrative shared by the international media, the European Left, and most Western European governments as the terrible twins of the populist nationalism now emerging across Europe. Both are better described as nationalist-minded conservatives who draw on populist support—Kurz’s conservatives have the populist Freedom party as their junior coalition partner, Orban’s substantial parliamentary majority is achieved in part by populist votes from the still unrespectable Jobbik party. Both are also known, in this

There are many things to worry about with Brexit, but the terms of the transition should be pretty low down that list. The transition was always going to have to be off-the-shelf (if you could negotiate a bespoke transition, you might as well do the final deal) and as long as it is time-limited, it shouldn’t be a problem. Indeed, it should help smooth out Britain’s exit from the European Union. Bill Cash’s urgent question today was another sign of how some Tory Eurosceptics are becoming more and more concerned about the terms of the transition, and how it will make Britain—in effect—a non-voting member of the EU. Jacob Rees-Mogg’s

Is there anything quite so ponderous as the German political process? It certainly provides a useful illustration of the gulf between the British and German way of doing things. Theresa May took only a few days to hatch a deal with the DUP to stay in power. By contrast, Angela Merkel has been trying to build a new coalition since September, and there’s still no end in sight. The latest chapter in this epic saga was yesterday’s vote by Germany’s Social Democrats, on whether to approve the party’s preliminary coalition talks with Merkel’s Christian Democrats. After much agonised debate, SPD delegates voted in favour. So now, at long last, the

Theresa May hosts Emmanuel Macron at Sandhurst tomorrow, an encounter that is unlikely to paint the British Prime Minister in a flattering light. Their styles of leadership are chalk and fromage, one assertive and confident, the other apologetic and diffident. In particular, May’s growing custom for contrition is eroding her authority. Unless she’s personally responsible for spreading Aussie flu why did May say sorry for the recent NHS crisis? It’s not a Prime Minister’s job to grovel to the public; it’s her ministers. But now she’s set a precedent and so every time something goes wrong her opponents will demand an apology. If she refuses, they’ll say she’s callous. Macron

Oh dear. More than three months since Germans went to the polls, and gave the CDU-SPD government a bloody nose, its politicians have finally emerged from the latest coalition talks – and the result is yet another cosy alliance between the CDU and the SPD. You’ve got to feel for German voters. In the Fatherland it seems no matter who you vote for, the so-called ‘grand coalition’ of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats almost always wins. It wasn’t meant to be this way. In September’s election the CDU and SPD both recorded their worst result since the Second World War – 33 percent for the CDU (down nearly 9 percent)