Slovenia Wants a EU with Strong Central Government, Parliament and Bank Completely conscious that he was jumping too high, the Slovene president managed only in 20 minutes to win and in the same time incite the European Parliament on the eve of a key EU summit at which it was planned another big step to be undertaken in deepening the European integration, but it see ...
IMF Has Betrayed Its European Allies in the Austerity War The IMF has begun admitting mistake after mistake, thus not leaving the European Commission any options to come out dry of the ever more expanding storm around its economic policies. Until recently an ally of the EU in its fight with the debt crisis and the domino of defaults of member states, t ...
How EU Dropped Turkey's Reins (?) Being strongly focused on itself, its future and present, the European Union often in the past decade was making one and the same error - it thought that the world was going round with the same speed as EU did around itself. Alas, the popping up of the Lisbon Treaty after almost 10 years of adju ...
Oresharski 450 - the Freezing Point of Bulgaria's Economy, Society and Politics "All countries can govern themselves very well, if only they listen to the European Commission recommendations". This is what European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said half-jokingly asked by Bulgarian journalist Georgi Gotev to comment on the Gunter Oettinger's statement that Bulgar ...
Тhe Arctic Council: Climate Change’s Butterfly Effect Do we remember the catastrophic consequences of the Hurricane Katrina throughout the United States of America in 2005? Or maybe the tornado outbreak in mid-May 2013, which produced several damaging tornadoes in a row in parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Alabama. All of these devastating e ...
European Commission Wants, But Member States Don't Allow In the middle of the battle between austerians and spenders, which approach is the best to herd economic growth on in the suffering from recession, crises, populist and various social concussions European Union, the leaders of the member states will gather together in the middle of the week ...
Banks' Rescue Will Be in Their Own Hands One of the big lessons from the crisis in Europe that was not spoken of sufficiently is that in the very beginning the wrong approach was chosen - first individual rescue and then seeking a EU solution. Some countries rushed to rescue their collapsing banking sectors, others were pushed to do so ...
Commission and ECB against Eurogroup: There Is a Problem with Decision-Making! "We have to recognise the structural problems of our decision-making in the area of economic and financial affairs. This calls for the completion of the Economic and Monetary Union, which should bring the current inter-governmental arrangements into the Community framework and strengthen the ext ...
It's Not the Austerity, Stupid, It's the Structural Reforms! It is very difficult in an environment of rapidly gaining popularity populists to conduct policy of correcting past mistakes, which usually leads to social discontent and every now and then to early elections as well. Even harder that is in the framework of a very complex organism such as the Eu ...
Too High Expectations with the "Anti-Mafia" Committee in European Parliament The special committee for organised crime, corruption and money laundering started its meeting on April 23rd with turning the spotlight onto an isolated case. The decision of the committee's chairwoman Sonia Alfano (ALDE, Italy) to raise the issue about a signal of an assassination threat for th ...
Populists - What Are They, Who Are They, Where Are They, Why Are They* Populists and extremists are on the rise across Europe. Even Germany is now seeing the rise of a eurosceptic party. The euro crisis is the reason for growing political risk in the eurozone. Or is it? True, populist parties are more important in several euro countries. But the reasons for this ar ...
Croatian media, companies, supermarkets, politicians and analysts are counting the last days remaining to the official accession of Croatia to the EU on July 1st. The entire country is coloured in huge advertisement billboards of big supermarket chains or simply big companies which, aside from a ...
Asymmetry of Competitiveness If it was not for the crisis, hardly there would have been a battle with the tax havens and the impediments to the completion of the EU single market of energy. A remark of the sorts uttered European Council President Herman Van Rompuy after the end of a really odd and short EU summit on Ma ...
Serbia Could Get a Date for EU Accession Negotiations with a Safeguard Clause It will not be certain until the very last moment whether Serbia will get a date to begin accession negotiations with the Union at the EU summit on June 28-29. Currently, Belgrade is a hot destination for diplomats from all over the EU. In the past few weeks, the Serbian capital city was visited ...
The Virus of Euroscepticism No matter that it is organised matter, politics has some permanent objective laws. One is, that when years are tough populist parties flourish. They usually promise easily and more for the national interest, therefore for the ordinary citizen, his household, his pension, business, children, ...
Shale Gas and Tax Havens Are Expected To Dominate EU Summit on May 22 "Don't misunderstand me. I think it is very important to tackle tax evasion, tax fraud and tax havens. But I wonder if putting on paper more conclusions will help us forward. That's simply more of the same. The Council said it already in 2010 and 2011". This is what former Belgian Prime Minister ...
The Bulgarian Elections’ Weathercock Bulgaria held its early parliamentary elections on May 12th 2013. The period during the political campaign was marked by mistrust in the political process, discovery of 350 000 extra illegal ballots and wire-taping scandals. Regardless of the high expectations around this election, it seems that ...
4 Countries Want a Political Troika Where There Are Problems with Rule of Law Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia. Where else? In Hungary, the government of Prime Minister Victor Orban took a course of an overhaul of the Constitution, which raised a great lot of questions about whether Hungary is not scorning the fundamental European values. In Romania, the inter-institu ...
This Year's May 9th Is the Saddest So Far For sure, however, it will not be the last because from a day of unification it has been turning more and more into a day marking how much the division has grown. In the period before the eurozone debt crisis, the EU was the unique project, succeeding to overcome hostilities and wars i ...
Spain and France Get an Extension for the Budget Deficit, but the need of Structural Reforms Remains The European Institutions started to retreat under pressure from the anti-austeritists, but in the same time their voices have become stronger in calling that undertaking structural reforms and reducing budget deficits and public debts are not one and the same thing. And if for some Friday was C ...
The Taming of Serbia "Serbia's progress toward European integration bears huge strategic consequences for the Western Balkans. Simply, without Serbia moving forward onto the next stage, the entire enlargement agenda will be thrown into uncertainty. Not to mention the unfolding of nationalism in Serbia itself", this ...
Adelina Marini Adelina Marini 
