With Alex Katsiatis we have written a post two years ago about the dysfunctional Greek politics in the context of the Hungarian bailout of  ’08, predicting that the Greek party will lead to a similar hangover.  Very interesting in retrospect. T…

For a long time it was seen as a virtue that the French press was not grilling politician’s private lives. I think that the French public owes a lot to NYC gossip press and NYPD when it was saved from a non-substantial presidential campaign about the…

While national Fidesz, the strongest governing party in Europe, is taking an effort to finish a new constitution for Hungary, its municipal group in Budapest has different ambitions. The party has won over the city council for the first time in October 2010 and it is busy re-arranging the streetmap.

It appears to me that the term ‘lobbying’ is not very clear in Austria. Disgraced former MEP Ernst Strasser boasted that he was both a lobbyist and an MEP. His successor, Hubert Pirker owns a lobbying firm yet he believes that he is not a lobbyist. If the European Parliament wants to avoid more embarrassment, [...]

Reuters reports that Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on Monday condemned violence by Libyan forces against civilians as “unacceptable” and said he was “alarmed” over the situation in the North African state, after he was criticised widely for not speaking up earlier on Libya and saying that he did not want to “disturb” Gaddafi during [...]

The BalkansInsight reports that a poll conducted by Belgrade-based Strategic Marketing shows that 65% of the Serbs would not provide the authorities with information about the whereabouts of the alleged war criminal Rakto Mladic. 14% of the respondents said in December 2008 that they would turn him in, the others did not know what to [...]

During the last days of 2008 Montenegro has submitted a formal application to join the European Union. Montenegro has gained independence in 2006 and signed a pre-accession Stabilisation and Accession Agreement with the EU in October 2007. It’s economy is doing remarkably good although it is highly dependent on Russian investors. EU enlargement commissioner Olli [...]

The V-4 information site has an interesting article on the natural gas dependence of Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary. I think it helps a little bit to explain the controversy along the Nabucco-pipeline, which is supposed to bring Turkmen and Iranian gas into the Union. It also shows that a greatly enlarged EU […] [...]

There are many public policies that go counter other public policies, especially as concerns the environment, but also in other fields. Therefore I propose to create an institution that will investigate conflicting goals of different EU institutions. It will get the relevant actors together and have them work together to find a solution. This post [...]

Every country has slightly different ideas on citizenship and naturalisation. Some have jus sanguinis, others jus soli. Some have short periods required for naturalisation, others longer, some don’t easily allow naturalisation at all. This means that within the supranational space of the EU, there is one rule for some and other rules for the rest [...]

Among the four rights of EU citizens are the rights to work and study anywhere in the EU. There is the ‘Bologna process’, designed to help streamline the educational systems of the member states, but one essential aspect is missing – a universal grading method. Each country still has a different method of classifying the [...]

The Common Agricultural Policy is still a necessity to ensure general food security and rural livelihoods, but its current structure is still badly outdated and it chews up far too much of the EU budget. Why not instead divert a significant proportion of the CAP’s funding structure towards growing biofuels and also biofuel research? 1. [...]