Europe is heading for perilous waters, and its leaders are dozing at the tiller

The Guardian

Ukraine needs more help, the far right is on the rise and the Middle East crisis gets worse. Where is the European Union’s vision? (...)

(Tekst loopt door onder de foto.)

European Union flags fly outside the EU Commission headquarters in Brussels. Photograph: Yves Herman/Reuters.

The way it’s going, 2024 could turn into a nightmare for the 27-country bloc – an all-time annus horribilis. A daunting slew of international and internal challenges is coming to a head. Is the EU ready to meet them? Definitely not.

Take the crisis in the Red Sea. Iran-backed Houthi militants have been attacking shipping there since the Israel-Hamas war began. (...)

The EU has an important stake in this fight. About 40% of its Asia and Middle East trade moves via Suez. But only the Netherlands provided hands-on assistance. (...)

Snoozing at the tiller, Europe is again failing to pair its self-interest and aspirations as a global actor with timely, concrete, joined-up action.

The Gaza war has exploded another illusion ahead of this week’s pivotal EU summit. (...) As Israel’s largest trading partner, they think the EU has leverage. All support a two-state solution. But when Josep Borrell, EU foreign policy chief, outlined a 10-point peace plan for Palestine last week, his VIP guest, Israel Katz, Israel’s foreign minister, ignored it. (...)

Europe’s bottomless capacity for punching below its weight is damaging Ukraine, where two years on from its invasion, Russia appears to be slowly gaining the upper hand. (...)

The failure of some EU countries, notably France, to supply more and better arms, as US deliveries dry up, is also harming Ukraine’s chances – and consequentially, Europe’s hopes of defending its borders from future Russian aggression. That’s especially pertinent given Trump’s prospective return to the White House a year from now. (...)

Trump’s resurrection “would endanger European interests but Europe is not investing in mitigating the risks.” (...)

[T]he geopolitical dangers facing the EU in 2024 are global – and exacerbated by the dithering of its wealthiest member. Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, “is giving no political or strategic leadership to a Europe that is ill-prepared for a possible rupture of the transatlantic relationship.” (...)

“Similarly, neither Germany nor Europe is prepared to withstand the growing influence of regimes that challenge the traditional prominence of the west” – a reference to China, a big trade partner and bigger potential threat. (...)

Germany is also a flashpoint in the main internal political challenge confronting the EU – the rise of the far right. (...)

New polling by the European Council on Foreign Relations suggests populist “anti-European” parties, principally of the right, will make large gains in EU and national elections this year. Migration, broken budgets, energy and climate are other explosive common denominator issues. (...)

Can the EU survive a dangerous, defining year? It will probably muddle through. But the sort of strategic leadership and vision offered by Jacques Delors, the legendary Eurocrat who died last month, is evidently lacking – and urgently required. (...)

Complete article

Tags: #europa #european_union #gaza #israel #palestine #palestinians #houthi #red_sea #germany #france #china #ukraine #russia #putin #far_right #migration #climate #climate_crisis #climate_change #trump #nato #borrell

Trump Allies Plot to Take Over the European Union

The Far Right, the War in Ukraine, and the Future of the Green Deal

Tom Dispatch

It would be funny if it weren’t so potentially tragic — and consequential. No, I’m not thinking about Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign but a related development: the latest decisions from the European Union (EU) about Ukraine.

(Text continues underneath the logo.)

As 2023 ended, European nations failed to agree on a $54-billion package of assistance for Ukraine at a time when that country was desperately trying to stay afloat and continue its fight against Russian occupation forces. Bizarrely, the failure of that proposal coincided with a surprising EU decision to open membership talks with that beleaguered country. (...)

One person, right-wing Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, is largely responsible for that contradictory combo. (...) [H]e expects [European Parliamentary elections in early June of this year] to signal a political sea change, with conservative and far-right forces — think of them as Donald Trump’s allies in Europe — replacing the parliament’s current centrist consensus. (...)

Orbán allowed consensus [on EU-membership for Ukraine] to prevail, but only because he knew he still had plenty of time to pull the plug on Ukraine’s bid. (...)

But even if Orbán’s resistance were to be overcome, a larger challenge looms: the European Union that will make the final determination on Ukraine’s membership may not prove to be the same regional body as at present. (...)

In retrospect, the departure of the United Kingdom from the EU in 2020 may prove to have been just a minor speedbump compared to what Europe faces with the war in Ukraine, the recent success of far-right parties in Italy and the Netherlands, and the prospect that, after the next election, a significantly more conservative European Parliament could at the very least slow the roll-out of the European Green Deal. (...)

Although mainstream European parties had historically been reluctant to form governments with the far right, some have now opportunistically chosen to do so. Far-right parties now serve in governments in Sweden and Finland, while leading coalitions in Italy and Slovakia. (...)

Such gestures toward the center have also characterized the strategy of Giorgia Meloni, the head of the far-right Brothers of Italy party, who downplayed its fascist roots and pledged to support both NATO and the EU to win enough centrist backing to become Italy’s current prime minister.

But what happens if there’s no longer a political center that must be wooed?

That’s been the case in Hungary since Viktor Orbán took over as prime minister in 2010. He has systematically dismantled judicial, legislative, and constitutional checks on his power, while simultaneously marginalizing his political opposition. Nor does he have to compromise with the center, since it’s effectively dropped out of Hungarian politics. and he and his allies are eager to export their Hungarian model to the rest of Europe. Worse yet, they’ve got a strong tailwind. In 2024, the far-right is on track to win elections in both Austria and Belgium, while Marine Le Pen’s far-right party leads the polls in France and the equally intemperate, anti-immigrant Alternative fur Deutschland is running a strong second to the center-right in Germany.

No less ominously, the Identity and Democracy bloc, which includes the major French and German far-right parties, is projected to gain more than two dozen seats in the European parliamentary elections this June. (...)

Russian President Vladimir Putin has long wanted to undercut European unity as part of an effort to divide the West. With that in mind, he forged alliances with far-right political parties like Italy’s Lega and Austria’s Freedom Party to sow havoc in European politics. His careful cultivation of Orbán has made Hungary functionally his country’s European proxy. (...)

[O]n one key issue [Europe’s right wing parties are] now converging. They used to disagree on whether to support leaving the EU, Brexit-style, or staying to fight. Now, they largely favor a take-over-from-within strategy. And to make that happen, they’ve coalesced around two key issues: the strengthening of “Fortress Europe” to keep out those fleeing the Global South and frontally assaulting that cornerstone of recent EU policy, the Green energy transition. (...)

A report from the Center for American Progress concludes that European far-right groups “frame environmental policies as elitist while stoking economic anxiety and nationalism, which erodes trust in democratic institutions and further distracts from genuine environmental concerns.” Researchers from the University of Bergen in Norway are even more pointed: “Populist far-right parties portray fossil fuel phase-out as a threat to traditional family values, regional identity, and national sovereignty.” (...)

Worse yet, the backlash against Europe’s Green turn has expanded to efforts in the European Parliament to block pesticide reduction and weaken legislation on the reduction of packaging. (...)

From Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin to Marine Le Pen at the reactionary barricades in Paris, the far right is fighting over the very future of European ideals. (...)

But Orbán and his allies have a far more radical mission in mind: to transform European identity. (...)

In other words, the EU is still a beacon for progressives around the world (notwithstanding the neoliberal reforms that are regressively remaking its economic space). (...)

Even as the EU contemplates expansion eastward, a revolt from within threatens to bring about the end of Europe itself — the end, that is, of the liberal and tolerant social welfare state, of a collective commitment to economic solidarity, and of its leading role in addressing climate change. The battle between a democratic Ukraine and the autocratic Russian petrostate is, in other words, intimately connected to the conflicts being waged in Brussels. (...)

Without a powerful left defending Europe’s gold-standard social safety nets, libertarians are likely to advance their attempts to eat away at or eliminate the regulatory state. Without Europe’s lead, global efforts to address climate change will grow dangerously more diffuse.

Sound familiar? That’s also the agenda of the far-right in the United States, led by Donald Trump. (...)

Complete article

Tags: #eu #european_union #ukraine #russia #far_right #green_deal #hungary #orban #poland #italy #meloni #germany #france #lepen #netherlands #wilders

The hard right and climate catastrophe are intimately linked. This is how.

The Guardian

As climate policy is weakened, extreme weather intensifies and more refugees are driven from their homes – and the cycle of hatred continues.

Round the cycle turns. As millions are driven from their homes by climate disasters, the extreme right exploits their misery to extend its reach. As the extreme right gains power, climate programmes are shut down, heating accelerates and more people are driven from their homes. If we don’t break this cycle soon, it will become the dominant story of our times. (...)

(Text continues underneath the illustration.)

If governments limited heating to their agreed goal of 1.5C, the numbers [of people] exposed to extreme heat would be reduced fivefold. But if they abandon their climate policies, this would lead to around 4.4C of heating. In this case, by the end of the century around 5.3 billion people would face conditions that ranged from dangerous to impossible. (...)

Culture war entrepreneurs, often funded by billionaires and commercial enterprises, cast even the most innocent attempts to reduce our impacts as a conspiracy to curtail our freedoms. (...)

You cannot propose even the mildest change without a hundred professionally outraged influencers leaping up to announce: “They’re coming for your ...” It’s becoming ever harder, by design, to discuss crucial issues such as SUVs, meat-eating and aviation calmly and rationally.

Climate science denial, which had almost vanished a few years ago, has now returned with a vengeance. Environmental scientists and campaigners are bombarded with claims that they are stooges, shills, communists, murderers and paedophiles. (...)

As the impacts of our consumption kick in thousands of miles away, and people come to our borders desperate for refuge from a crisis they played almost no role in causing – a crisis that might involve real floods and real droughts – the same political forces announce, without a trace of irony, that we are being “flooded” or “sucked dry” by refugees, and millions rally to their call to seal our borders. (...)

[L]egislators in Texas are waging war on renewable energy, while a proposed law in Ohio lists climate policies as a “controversial belief or policy” in which universities are forbidden to “inculcate” their students. (...)

Already, at Europe’s borders, displaced people are pushed back into the sea. They are imprisoned, assaulted and used as scapegoats by the far right, which widens its appeal by blaming them for the ills that in reality are caused by austerity, inequality and the rising power of money in politics. European nations pay governments beyond their borders to stop the refugees who might be heading their way. In Libya, Turkey, Sudan and elsewhere, displaced people are kidnapped, enslaved, tortured, raped and murdered. Walls rise and desperate people are repelled with ever greater violence and impunity. (...)

Already, the manufactured hatred of refugees has helped the far right to gain or share power in Italy, Sweden and Hungary, and has greatly enhanced its prospects in Spain, Austria, France and even Germany. In every case, we can expect success by this faction to be followed by the curtailment of climate policies, with the result that more people will have no choice but to seek refuge in the diminishing zones in which the human climate niche remains open. (...)

The two tasks – preventing Earth systems collapse and preventing the rise of the far right – are not divisible. We have no choice but to fight both forces at once.

Complete article

Tags: #climate #climate_change #climate_crisis #global_warming #extreme_weather #refugees #climate_refugees #pushbacks #border_wall #floods #droughts #far_right #hard-right #climate_denial #consumption #overconsumption