Joe Biden got more done than many anticipated at the beginning of the year. The consequences of Germany’s and the Netherlands’ shortsighted energy policies became obvious with the Russian war in Ukraine. Right-wing Spain waged lawfare against the left-wing government of Pedro Sánchez and its Catalan allies. Farmers’ protests broke out in the Netherlands. Emmanuel Macron lost his parliamentary majority in France. Social democrats lost the election in Italy. Democrats only half-won the election in the United States because Republicans are worse, but the largest group of Americans is disappointed in both parties.
Here are the best Atlantic Sentinel stories of 2022. (more…)
Dairy cows in the Netherlands, September 28, 2016 (Sebastiaan ter Burg)
Dutch agriculture minister Piet Adema is spending €26 million in 2023 and 2024 to speed up the transition to organic farming.
The money falls short of the €35 million per year Dutch farm lobby LTO had asked for. It’s a drop in the bucket compared to the €1 billion in national and EU subsidies Dutch farmers receive each year, half of which goes to the production of dairy and meat.
Adema would funnel 6 percent of EU subsidies into organic farming. Its share is meant to rise from 4 to 15 percent by 2030, when the European Commission’s goal is to have 25 percent organic farming EU-wide. (more…)
American president Joe Biden greets French president Emmanuel Macron during the opening session of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, November 1, 2021 (White House/Adam Schultz)
Europe has no good options to respond to American subsidies for green energy and electric cars.
Politicians are right to worry that the tax breaks and buy-American provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, coupled with high energy prices due to the war in Ukraine, could convince European companies to make the jump across the Atlantic.
But duplicating American protectionism would make things worse. (more…)
Constitutional Court in Madrid, Spain at night (Europa Press)
Conservatives have plunged Spain into what Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez describes as “an unprecedented situation in our democracy” and Catalonia’s El Nacional calls “the biggest institutional challenge between powers in Spain since the attempted coup d’état of 1981.”
“You have silenced parliament,” Sánchez told opposition leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo on Wednesday, who convinced a majority of the Constitutional Court’s justices to block a Senate debate about reforms that would allow Sánchez to replace four of them.
The six justices in the majority were all appointed by Feijóo’s People’s Party. The five progressive justices sided with Sánchez, a social democrat.
According to Germany’s Die Zeit, it is the first time since the return of democracy to Spain that the Constitutional Court has intervened in the legislative process.
Opposition has blocked Sánchez’ nominees
Since Sánchez became prime minister in 2018, the right-wing opposition has vetoed all his judicial nominations, which require supermajorities in both chambers of parliament.
In an attempt to break the deadlock, Sánchez proposed to reduce the required majority for Constitutional Court appointments down from three-fifths.
The proposal passed the lower house with the support of left-wing and Basque and Catalan separatist parties.
The same coalition abolished the crimes for which Catalonia’s leading separatists were prosecuted when the People’s Party was last in power. Sánchez had already pardoned those found guilty of sedition and misuse of public funds by organizing an independence referendum in defiance of the Constitutional Court.
Feijóo on Wednesday accused Sánchez of “perfecting his obedience to the Catalan independence movement.”
Conservatives are alarmed
Catalan nationalism has become the primary motivator of the Spanish right. Whereas Sánchez hopes concessions to the Catalans will convince a majority to remain in Spain, conservatives smell treason and believe the only way to prevent Catalan secession is to crack down.
Conservatives are also alarmed by Sánchez’ expansion of abortion rights, legalization of euthanasia and recognition of transgenders. Some cling to the hope that the Constitutional Court might overturn those reforms.
Judges refuse to recuse
The right may be able to outsmart Sánchez for another year, when elections are due. Polls predict a People’s Party victory. To many Spanish voters, concessions to Catalans are worse than a judicial power grab.
That would require four justices — three conservatives, one progressive — to remain in office for another year. Their mandates expired in June.
The government had asked those justices whose mandates were affected by the reforms to recuse themselves from hearing Feijóo’s challenge but they refused, in effect extending their terms to vote against their replacement.
Bartender in Siena, Italy, August 5, 2020 (Unsplash/Gabriella Clare Marino)
Italy’s new right-wing government has backed away from a plan to let shops refuse card payments under €60.
The country’s previous government, led by former European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi, required companies to accept all card payments in an attempt to fight tax evasion. Businesses that refused were fined €30 per transaction plus 4 percent of the amount.
The policy was one of the EU’s conditions for releasing COVID-19 recovery funds, of which Italy is the largest recipient. (more…)
Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez chairs a meeting of Socialist Workers’ Party lawmakers in Madrid, June 1 (PSOE/Eva Ercolanese)
Spain’s ruling left-wing parties have abolished the crimes for which Catalonia’s independence leaders were imprisoned — and the right has gone berserk. Conservative deputies called the penal reforms an “assault on democracy”. The far right called Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez a “traitor”. (They do so frequently.)
When the reforms came to a vote in Congress, members of the conservative People’s Party (PP) sat on their hands. The center-right Citizens and far-right Vox (Voice) walked out in protest. So much for their commitment to democracy.
Indeed, it was the PP’s disinterest in Catalan democracy that culminated in the imprisonment of half the Catalan government and the suspension of Catalan home rule. Sánchez is doing little more than clean up the mess they made. (more…)
Application center for asylum seekers in Ter Apel, the Netherlands (IND)
Europe is the throes of another asylum crisis. The 27 countries of the EU plus Norway and Switzerland, which have open borders with the bloc, received some 98,000 asylum applications in September, the most in six years. Figures for the first nine months of 2022 suggest that most, and possibly all, member states will match the records of 2015, when 1.3 million people applied for asylum in the EU.
Some 548,000 asylum seekers are waiting for a decision on whether they can stay.
The figures include few Ukrainians, who can remain in the EU for up to three years without applying for asylum.
I’ll take a deep dive into the numbers before looking at how three member states are coping with the high influx: France, Italy and Netherlands. (more…)
The sun rises over the Gran Vía of Madrid, Spain (Unsplash/Arw Zero)
So politicians understand how prices work after all.
Spain, Germany and the Netherlands are capping prices of electricity and heating for consumers. Energy providers are still paying high prices for oil and record prices for natural gas due to Russia’s war in Ukraine, so governments will make up the difference.
The price energy providers charge is based on their costs plus a profit. If they can’t pass higher costs on to consumers, they would either have to cut their own costs, for example by laying off staff; scale up, which isn’t easy in Europe’s heavily regulated energy market; or fail.
Somehow that logic is lost on many when it comes to housing. The same three countries have capped, or are capping, rents, but there is no compensation for landlords. Nor for developers, who can sell fewer rental apartments.
Landlords make up the difference by underinvesting in maintenance. Developments simply don’t happen.
Which are then used as arguments for even more regulation. (more…)
Daycare center in Amsterdam, the Netherlands (Klein & Co)
Dutch child-care providers would pay the price for the government’s failed child-care policy.
The last Dutch government resigned over a scandal in child-care benefits. Thousands of parents were wrongly accused of fraud.
The current government, a coalition of the same four parties (including my own), would replace the benefits to parents with subsidies to child-care providers. Child care would be almost entirely subsidized with parents paying just 4 percent of the costs.
Industry groups expect an increase in demand while the sector is already understaffed.
Experts fear a loss in competition and innovation. All but the most expensive child-care providers would be forced to standardize their programs and their rates in order to qualify for subsidies. (more…)
Republican governor Ron DeSantis of Florida speaks at the Student Action Summit in Tampa, July 22 (Gage Skidmore)
Florida governor Ron DeSantis has become former president Donald Trump’s most likely rival for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 2024.
DeSantis won reelection with almost 60 percent support on Tuesday, up from 50 percent in 2018 and by the widest margin in a Florida gubernatorial election in forty years.
Florida’s members of Congress benefited. Senator Marco Rubio was reelected with 58 percent support, up from 52 percent in 2016. Florida Republicans gained three seats in the House of Representatives.
United States Capitol in Washington DC (Shutterstock/Brandon Bourdages)
The red wave wasn’t, and American journalists blame the polls.
Before the midterm elections on Tuesday, many media predicted a “red wave” of Republican victories that would repudiate Democratic president Joe Biden.
37 House and three Senate elections remain to be decided, but it’s clear the red wave didn’t materialize. Some two dozen out of 435 seats in the House of Representatives changed hands, switching the majority from Democratic to Republican. Control of the Senate is still in the balance. At best, Republicans would net two seats. Even that would make this the most lackluster Republican midterm-election victory since 1962.
Reporters blame the polls for giving them the wrong impression, but they didn’t cite the polls in their stories. They predicted a “red wave” or even a “red tsunami” based on everything from “abortion peaking too soon as a motivating issue” (Axios) to Joe Biden’s absence from the campaign (National Review) to Donald Trump’s analysis (The Wall Street Journal) to Pennsylvania Democrat John Fetterman’s poor debate performance (The Hill) to a moral panic about non-existent fentanyl-flavored Halloween candy (Fox News) to “fundamentals” (CNN) and “momentum” (Washington Examiner) and “growing signs” (The New York Times) to increased Democratic campaign spending in blue districts (NBC).
Tuesday’s midterm elections in the United States could have gone worse for Democrats.
Many states are still counting their votes, but early results suggest Republicans underperformed.
371 of the 435 elections for the House of Representatives have been called: 172 for Democrats and 199 for Republicans. Democrats are still expected to lose their majority of 220 seats.
In the Senate, where 35 out of 100 seats are contested, the parties may swap Pennsylvania and Nevada but keep fifty seats each, which would give Vice President Kamala Harris the deciding vote.
Democrat John Fetterman is projected to win outgoing Republican senator Pat Toomey’s seat in Pennsylvania, defeating Mehmet Oz. Republican challenger Adam Laxalt is ahead of Democratic senator Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada, but only by 22,000 votes with 72 percent of the votes counted.
Democratic incumbents Mark Kelly and Raphael Warnock are leading in Arizona and Georgia. With 99 percent of the votes counted, it looks like Republican senator Ron Johnson will win reelection in Wisconsin by 30,000 votes, a margin of 1 percent. (more…)
Workers clean the steps of the United States Capitol in Washington DC in the early morning of January 8, 2021 (Victoria Pickering)
59 percent of Americans believe Democrats will “open the US-Mexico border” if they win the election on Tuesday. 53 percent worry they will cut police funding.
They won’t. Nor will they step up border enforcement or raise police budgets, and they should: illegal border crossings and violent crime are rising. But only far-left extremists believe in open borders and defunding the police. Few have been nominated by Democrats. Even fewer will win elections.
The other half of the country sees Republicans as the extremists: 56 percent believe a Republican Congress would ban abortion and overturn democratic elections.
There is more justification for those beliefs. Many Republican candidates support a federal ban on abortion. Many were complicit or silent when Donald Trump tried to steal the 2020 election. But the party is divided on both questions.
More than anything, the results of the CBS poll reveal that Democrats and Republicans believe the worst about each other.
What about the 40 percent of Americans who identify with neither party? (more…)
Then-former American vice president Joe Biden gives a speech in Des Moines, Iowa, January 4, 2020 (Phil Roeder)
President Joe Biden would make the same mistake as the Netherlands in regulating independent work.
In 2015, the European country required employers to put freelancers on an open-ended contract after two years of work.
In an attempt to bring more workers into regular employment, a coalition government of the center-left Labor Party and center-right liberals also made it costlier and more time-consuming for companies to fire employees, and it increased severance pay.
The reforms didn’t cause a shift from freelancing to salaried employment. They did destroy some 77,000 — mostly part-time — jobs in child care, hospitality, nursing and other industries, according to an analysis by ABN Amro bank.
After Labor lost the election in 2017, the liberals formed a government with center parties and repealed the reforms. They made it cheaper for companies to hire, and easier to fire, employees. Freelancers were allowed three contracts per employer every three years.
Employment rose. There are more Dutch people in work than ever before. Almost every industry, from construction to schools to the national railway, struggles to fill vacancies. (more…)
