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European Union Tag

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on January 08, 2019 4 Comments
The leader of the Italian League party, Matteo Salvini, plans to form an electoral alliance with Poland's ruling conservatives in the run-up to the upcoming European Union elections. Salvini is spearheading a campaign to build an anti-establishment alliance ahead of the election. In October, he teamed up with Marine Le Pen's newly-formed French National Rally (NR) to launch the "Freedom Front" coalition. Salvini will meet the leader of Poland’s Law and Justice (PiS) party, Jarosław Kaczyński, on Wednesday to "strike a deal" ahead of the EU parliament elections scheduled for this May, the public broadcaster Radio Poland disclosed.

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on January 03, 2019 33 Comments
Berlin will be lobbying the United Nations to secure a permanent seat at the Security Council for the European Union, German state media said. "Over the next two years, Germany's main concern will be to try and ensure that the European Union as a whole is given a permanent seat," public broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported Tuesday. This year, Germany takes up the non-permanent seat at the Council for a two year term.

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on December 31, 2018 12 Comments
The year began with an ominous warning from the German authorities. A team of researchers commissioned by the Ministry of Family Affairs found a "correlation between the refugee arrivals and violent crimes." Not that anyone needed a report to prove the obvious. The mainstream German media predictably trashed the findings and politicians in Berlin ignored them.

Posted by Mary Chastain on December 23, 2018 9 Comments
This is not Saturday Night Live. This is not The Onion or Babylon Bee. A Dutch animation artist put together a boy band to encourage the United Kingdom to stay in the European Union.  From NME:
“I cannot believe this is the end,” they pine on the song’s opening lines. “I still feel your love inside me. I still sing your words. I make a wish as your star falls.”

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on December 21, 2018 26 Comments
With British Prime Minister Theresa May failing to get parliamentary support for her plan to leave the European Union and only 100 days until the deadline, Britain is veering towards a "no deal" Brexit. In case of a no deal Brexit, the UK will leave the EU without any formal agreement on the future relationship with the 27-member European bloc. This would mean the UK would be "treated as a 'third country' by the EU with commerce governed by World Trade Organisation rules," British tabloid The Sun reported. Currently the UK's trade, customs, and immigration policies are subject to EU laws and regulatory bodies. Under the blueprint agreement presented by May's government and Brussels, the EU courts will continue to have jurisdiction over many aspects of British life.

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on December 12, 2018 27 Comments
Representatives from around 150 countries signed the United Nations migration pact in Morocco on Monday. The Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, as the agreement is formally known, aims to create a legal framework to handle growing migration from impoverished third world countries to the Western world -- overriding the immigration policies of the individual nation states. German Chancellor Merkel, whose open border policies drew millions of asylum seekers from North Africa and the Middle East into Europe in recent years, hailed the signing of the pact as an "important day." It was is about "nothing less than the foundation of our international cooperation," she added. The German leader "received a standing ovation on Monday after an impassioned speech," the UK newspaper The Guardian reported.

Posted by Mary Chastain on December 10, 2018 12 Comments
British Prime Minister Theresa May has told the House of Commons that she will defer the vote tomorrow for her Brexit deal after many within her own party wouldn't support her deal due to the backstop. The Guardian reported that "the backstop is a device intended to ensure that there will not be a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, even if no formal deal can be reached on trade and security arrangements."

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on December 07, 2018 17 Comments

The European Union is in the midst of a political turmoil over the ratification of the United Nations pact on migration. The resistance to the pact is galvanizing in Europe ahead of the December 10 deadline when the representatives from some 180 UN member states will meet in Morocco, a Muslim-majority country in North Africa, to formally adopt the "Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration," as the pact is officially called.

Belgium became the latest EU country to get sucked into the crisis, with its ruling coalition teetering on the brink of collapse over the migration dispute. The country's right-wing New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) broke away from the ruling alliance amid sharp disagreements over the UN pact. The N-VA regards the agreement as an infringement of Belgian sovereignty. "In our democracy, we decide. The sovereignty is with the people," the party said.

Posted by Mary Chastain on November 16, 2018 0 Comments
British Prime Minister Theresa May remains on shaky grounds after two cabinet members resigned a day after she announced that the cabinet backed her proposal on Brexit. She has now lost a total of 12 cabinet members in the last year. From CBS News:
Dominic Raab, the second of May's Brexit secretaries to quit the role in as many years, said the draft agreement reached with Brussels would effectively leave Britain beholden to the rules and regulations of the European Union and even give the EU the power to stop the U.K. from extricating itself down the road. He said he could not "in good conscious support the terms" of the deal he helped to craft.

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on November 16, 2018 15 Comments
The European Union may switch to non-dollar transactions to protect its trade with Iran in the wake of the latest U.S. sanctions, Reuters news agency reports. The news comes as Iran's European trading partners are working to set up a Special Purpose Vehicle, which is a payment clearance house where Iran's proceeds from oil and gas sale could be offset against the country's purchases -- much like a transnational barter system without financial transactions. The move is in response to crippling sanctions imposed by President Donald Trump against Iran's energy, banking, and other sectors earlier this month.

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on November 08, 2018 38 Comments
Doing away with diplomatic niceties, the top European Union officials have welcomed the gains made by the Democrats in the US midterm elections. Vice President of the European Commission Frans Timmermans hailed the electoral results while attacking the Trump administration for its "racism" and "rudeness." "Inspired by voters in the U.S. who chose hope over fear, civility over rudeness, inclusion over racism, equality over discrimination," Timmermans wrote on Twitter. EU Economic Commissioner, Pierre Moscovici, also cheered the Democrats winning the House majority. "The Democrats win the House of Representatives for the first time in eight years despite powerful Republican gerrymandering," Moscovici said.

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on November 06, 2018 6 Comments
Marine Le Pen's right-wing National Rally has overtaken French President Emmanuel Macron's En Marche for the first time ahead of the next year's EU Parliament elections. The latest poll numbers place France's ruling centrist En Marche party at 19 percent, and the newly constituted National Rally -- formerly the Front National -- at 20 percent.

Posted by Mary Chastain on November 05, 2018 2 Comments
President Donald Trump's administration has officially restored sanctions on Iran that went away with the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal. At the same time, SWIFT, a financial messaging service based in Belgium, announced it will suspend "some unspecified Iranian banks’ access to its messaging system in the interest of the stability and integrity of the global financial system," but did not mention the US sanctions.

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on November 02, 2018 13 Comments
Austria has decided to follow the United States and Hungary in pulling out of the United Nations migration pact that is set to be ratified in December. The Austrian government was pulling out of the UN-sponsored pact to "defend its national sovereignty," local news reports say. "Austria rejects the possibility that the migration pact could establish new, customary international law which would be binding on Austria or could be interpreted as such," Heinz-Christan Strache, Austria's Vice Chancellor and head of the Freedom Party, told reporters. The international accord seeks to blur the line between legal and illegal immigration, a statement issued by the government said.

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on October 29, 2018 10 Comments
German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced she will step down as leader of her Christian Democratic party (CDU) after massive losses in Sunday's election in the key German state of Hesse. Germany's ruling CDU suffered a second electoral drubbing in almost a fortnight, after voters in Bavaria and Hesse abandoned the party in droves. Speaking to the media, Merkel also confirmed her decision not to seek another term as Chancellor in the 2021 general elections and ruled out taking a position at the European Union after leaving the office. The four-term German Chancellor was expected to stand for a re-election as leader in the party's conference in December.

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on October 10, 2018 11 Comments
France's nationalist politician Marine Le Pen and Italy's Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini have announced plans to create a "Freedom Front" electoral coalition ahead of next year's European parliamentary vote. Speaking with Le Pen at a press conference on Monday, Salvini called for a "common sense revolution" to defeat EU's political elite in the May 2019 elections. "Europe's enemies are those cut off in the bunker of Brussels," Italy's League party leader Salvini told reporters. "The Junckers, the Moscovicis, who brought insecurity and fear to Europe and refuse to leave their armchairs."

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on September 25, 2018 12 Comments
Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis told the European Union that his country will not take another economic migrant. Refusing to submit to the EU's demand to accept immigrants crossing into European outer borders, the Czech Prime Minister refused to acknowledge any responsibility for foreign migrants. "I went into politics mainly to look after Czech citizens," he said Dubbed by the mainstream media as the "Czech Donald Trump," Babis has joined Hungary's Orban in rejecting the EU-mandated migrant resettlement plan. As part of a massive "migrant resettlement scheme," Brussels wants to relocate hundreds of thousands immigrants crossing into European outer borders. "We have lost four years foolishly debating quotas. In short, the message being sent is that Europe is open and that we have to care for everyone who comes illegally and will disperse them amongst us," the Czech Prime Minister said last month.
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