Dutch fishing boat trawling for mussels in the North Sea, April 20, 2020 (Unsplash/Paul Einerhand)
The European Commission is advising member states to tap into EU innovation and rural development funds to compensate fishers who will lose out if bottom trawling is banned.
Virginijus Sinkevičius, the Lithuanian commissioner for oceans and fisheries, has proposed to phase out bottom trawling, also known as dragging, in 30 percent of EU waters.
The better policy would be to reverse a ban on electric pulse fishing, which allows fishers to catch sole and other flatfish without ploughing the seafloor. (more…)
French president Emmanuel Macron and Portuguese prime minister António Costa talk privately during a meeting of European leaders in Brussels, February 9 (European Council)
French president Emmanuel Macron listens to European Council president Ursula von der Leyen during a summit in Prague, Czech Republic, October 6, 2022 (European Council)
77 percent of all state aid approved in the EU last year went to French and German companies, according to figures from the European Commission.
The two countries, which have 40 percent of the European economy between them, benefited from a suspension of antitrust rules first put in place during COVID-19.
France would make the suspension permanent. Two years ago, the European Commission rejected such a French proposal. Now it is more sympathetic.
I have a story in the Netherlands’ Wynia’s Week about what France wants, why the European Commission changed its mind, and how France and Germany were able to take advantage of exemptions to the rules of the single market. Here is a summary for English readers. (more…)
French president Emmanuel Macron confers with his staff in the Elysée Palace in Paris, February 5, 2020 (Elysée/Soazig de la Moissonniere)
Emmanuel Macron’s government has proposed to raise the French pension age from 62 to 64 and abolish early retirement in the public sector.
Pension reform was one of the reasons I endorsed Macron for a second term. French pensions are among the most generous in the world, yet Macron’s predecessors balked at raising the retirement age for fear of protests.
I have an op-ed in EUobserver arguing Macron is doing the right thing. I will summarize my arguments here and also give the arguments against reform. (more…)
Patients wait to see a general practitioner in Westmaas, the Netherlands (LHV)
Rural France is running out of doctors. Politico Europe reports that 7 out of 68 million French citizens don’t have a referring general practitioner. 30 percent live in a region where access to physicians is poor.
France is not alone. Small towns in the Netherlands and the United States are also medically underserved.
Partly the shortage is due to young doctors and nurses preferring to live and work in cities, much like young professionals in general.
Higher-than-usual burnout rates during the pandemic exacerbated the shortage.
But government policy also plays a role. All three countries for years kept the supply of doctors low while demand for health care, as a result of longevity and advances in medicine, went up. (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…)
French president Emmanuel Macron walks through the Elysée Palace in Paris with American vice president Kamala Harris, November 10, 2021 (White House/Lawrence Jackson)
American-French relations have taken a turn for the better. President Joe Biden has invited Emmanuel Macron to a state visit, his first. At a joint news conference with Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the United States “couldn’t ask for a better partner” than France. Blinken praised the “united and unwavering” allied response to Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Compare the kind words to two decades ago, when American lawmakers were so appalled by French opposition to the Iraq War that they changed the name of French fries in their cafeteria to “freedom fries”.
In part, the restored friendship is a consequence of time having passed and two Atlantic powers remembering their shared interests. But the rapprochement was helped by Russia. Some American and French politicians saw Russia as a useful hedge against the other. They were discredited by Russian aggression against its neighbors and Russian meddling in Western politics. (more…)
French president Emmanuel Macron speaks with European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen in the Elysée Palace in Paris, June 3 (European Commission/Christophe Licoppe)
Emmanuel Macron is moving forward with pension reform, and he’s right to.
Macron’s promise to reform pensions was one of the reasons the Atlantic Sentinel endorsed him for a second term. He has asked his government for a bill by Christmas, so the changes could go into effect next year. (more…)
Meat for sale in the San Miguel Market of Madrid, Spain, August 22, 2017 (Unsplash/Victor)
Meat eaters can be thin-skinned.
In the Netherlands, Wakker Dier, an animal-rights charity, discovered that the previous minister of agriculture, Carola Schouten, vetoed the inclusion of eating less meat in a “what you can do to fight climate change” campaign for fear of upsetting carnivores.
That such fears are not unfounded is borne out by the experiences of politicians in France and Spain. (more…)
Coal plant and wind turbines in the Eemshaven of the Netherlands (Kees van de Veen)
European countries spent €280 billion on subsidies and tax cuts in the last year to help businesses and households pay their energy bills.
It may not be enough.
Prices surged when Russia expanded its war in Ukraine in February and European states agreed to reduce their imports of Russian natural gas. The EU as a whole got 40 percent of its gas from Russia in previous years. That is down to 20 percent.
But there are more factors pushing up electricity and gas prices. Here is an overview, including what governments have done to ameliorate the effects. (more…)
Skyline of Paris, France at night, February 9, 2019 (Unsplash/Sabina Fratila)
My hunch was correct after all. Before the French elections, I argued the most likely outcome was Emmanuel Macron winning a second term as president but losing his majority in the National Assembly and being forced into a coalition with the center-right.
After the presidential election, Macron’s liberals moved up in the polls. They also did reasonably well in the opening round of the legislative elections a week ago. It gave this Macronist hope that the president might defend his majority after all.
But no. His alliance, Together, is projected to fall to 234 seats, down from the 350 it won in 2017 and 55 short of a majority.
Night falls on the Bourbon Palace, seat of the French National Assembly, in Paris, June 8, 2007 (J.R. Rosenberg)
The outcome of the first voting round of the legislative elections in France confirms the three-way split I wrote about in April. President Emmanuel Macron’s liberal centrists and the left-wing New Ecologic and Social People’s Union (NUPES, it sounds better in French) took 26 percent support each. The combined far right won 23 percent.
The once-dominant Republicans, who were last in power under Nicolas Sarkozy, divided up the rest with also-rans and regional parties.
The electoral map reveals a geographical divide. Macron’s candidates placed first in the biggest cities and the prosperous western half of the country. The left have their stronghold in the interior of the south. That was once the heartland of the French Communist Party. They also took the low-income suburbs of Paris. The far right got its best results in the deindustrialized north and on the Mediterranean coast, where nationalists have roots going back decades, to when white Algerians settled there after independence. (more…)
French president Emmanuel Macron reviews a Bastille Day parade in Paris, July 14, 2020 (Elysée/Philippe Servent)
A lot can change in politics in six weeks. When I wrote my five French election scenarios in the beginning of April, I didn’t even consider that President Emmanuel Macron might defend his majority in the National Assembly or would have to govern with the left, yet those are now the two most likely outcomes of the legislative elections in June.
I thought Macron would have to do a deal with the center-right. That has become less likely. The Republicans and their allies are projected to win a mere 35 to 70 seats, down from 136 in 2017. (more…)
French president Emmanuel Macron chairs a meeting of the Council of Ministers in the Elysée Palace in Paris, April 13 (Elysée/Soazig de la Moissonniere)
Emmanuel Macron may yet hold on to his majority in the National Assembly. His liberal alliance, renamed Ensemble (Together), won 350 out of 577 seats in 2017. Polls give it between 310 and 378 seats for the elections in June.
Based on their strong performance in last year’s regional elections, and given that Macron’s party has weak grassroots, I expected the center-right Republicans to do better. They still might. Republican voters, who on average are older than Macron’s, are more likely to turn out. But their disappointing performance in the presidential election — Valérie Pécresse got just 5 percent support — may also have demotivated conservatives.
The alliance of the far-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon, left-wing Greens and center-left Socialists — who failed to unite in the presidential election and lost — has a third of French voters, but it could struggle in the decisive second voting rounds. Left-wing candidates would do best against a conservative or far-right opponent. Then they could count on the support of centrists. But where a left-wing candidate qualified against a Macronist, the latter would be preferable to Republicans.
The same dynamic works against the far-right Marine Le Pen. If a candidate of her National Rally makes the runoff, left to moderate-right voters tend to back their opponent.
The two-round voting system makes it difficult to predict the outcome altogether. Divided government, what the French call cohabitation, in which the presidency and National Assembly are held by different parties, is possible.
The Louvre in Paris, France, February 9, 2020 (Unsplash/Louis Paulin)
I once hailed the French voting model as an alternative to America’s. Unlike the first-past-the-post system, which encourages voters to sort into two major parties lest their vote go wasted, France’s two-round voting system encourages temporary, not permanent polarization. Multiple parties thrive in the first round. Voters choose between two finalists in the second.
Until 2017, third parties seldom made the runoffs. But they played an important role by conditioning their support for one of the two major parties on policies or cabinet posts.
Under François Hollande, several members of the Radical Left and Greens served in a Socialist-led government. Nicolas Sarkozy had ministers from small centrist and center-right parties who backed him in the presidential election.
But what if the major parties don’t qualify for the runoffs at all? That has now happened in two presidential elections in a row, and it calls the stabilizing effect of the two-round voting system into question. (more…)
