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As ever, elections and external factors are shaping everything that’s happening in Brussels.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel used a CSU election platform in a beer tent in Munich to proclaim that Europe could no longer depend on an alliance with the US last Sunday. While her interactions with Donald Trump last week may have been the prompt, there’s no doubt but that the German electorate was her key audience.
With the German federal election four months way, a new French Government bedding in and approaching legislative elections, and Brexit negotiations on hold pending the Westminster election, a semi-permanent semi-paralysis has set in in Brussels.
Budget day in Brussels isn’t nearly as exciting as it can be in the national capitals. The price of a pint doesn’t go up or down, and neither does the income tax rate.
Set in seven-year “Multiannual Financial Framework” cycles, the room for manoeuvre on an annual basis is limited. So when Budget Commissioner Günther Oettinger made his first budget presentation this week, proposing €160 billion in spending in 2018– a €2 billion increase on 2017 – it didn’t make too big of a splash.
A new €90 million fund for research on defence policy – a nod towards a Europe “which must really take our fate in our own hands” – is a drop in the ocean, but it will give the ‘local’ defence and aerospace industry some encouragement.
But the Common Agricultural Policy, accounting for €55 billion in total spending, remains the big ticket item. A long reform process of the CAP is underway, but forward planning is near impossible until the issue of Britain’s annual €20 billion contribution to the EU budget is resolved.
Oettinger said on Tuesday that proposals and negotiations on the next EU budget cycle (2021-27), scheduled to begin this year, should be delayed until it’s clear how Britain’s financial decoupling from the EU will pan out.
While French and German elections are framing EU debate, the outcome of next Thursday’s vote in the UK seems to matter little in Brussels. A year of brash talk from the British has left sympathies worn thin, and many in Brussels are positively enthused this week at the prospect of PM May returning to the Brexit negotiations with a bloody nose after a poor performance, rather than with the strengthened mandate she had hoped for.
Donald Trump’s whistle-stop tour left a lasting impression – winning a new arms contract from Saudi Arabia, losing an arm-wrestle with Emmanuel Macron, failing to affirm his commitment to NATO’s one-for-all defence policy, and getting home in time to pull the US out of the Paris Climate Agreement.
Trump’s climate announcement, on the eve of an EU-China summit in Brussels, has given Europe the opportunity to display a common front. France, Germany and Italy released a joint statement stating that the Paris agreement cannot be renegotiated, although it’s been reported that the UK declined an invitation to sign. Macron trolled Trump again, with his call to “Make our Planet Great Again”.
In the aftermath of Merkel’s Munich speech, The Economist summed up perfectly the impact Brexit and Trump have had on European politics: “They have made it not just possible but also electorally beneficial for a friendly leader of a crucial partner to bash them in public. And more than that: to do it with sincerity”.