The answer to Henry Kissinger’s age old question of who do I call when I want to call Europe has just got a whole lot easier. In his State of the Union speech, European Commission President, Jean-Claude Juncker, proposed reducing the number of EU presidents from five to three, merging the presidents of the Commission and European Council and adding the role of president of the Eurogroup to the future super Commissioner for the Economy and Finance. The suggestions may well be too radical for national leaders to swallow, especially on top of calls to reduce unanimity requirements in taxation and foreign policy. The speech allowed Juncker to promote his own vision for the future of post-Brexit Europe, a Europe where more countries were helped to adopt the euro, join the Banking Union and become part of the border-free Schengen area. Europe must remain outward looking, he argued, and there must remain a credible enlargement perspective for the Western Balkans. The door though remained firmly shut for Turkey and he received the loudest applause in his hour-long speech when he said “Journalists belong in newsrooms not in prisons. They belong where freedom of expression reigns”.
Brexit ignored in hour-long speech
Juncker’s chief of staff famously said that his boss would spend less than 30 minutes a week on Brexit, which turned out to be significantly more than the 1 minute that he devoted to the issue in his speech. Brexit was relegated to a brief aside towards the end and was described more in terms of sadness than anger, summed up by Juncker’s dismissive line “Brexit isn’t everything”. One of the multitude of questions thrown up by UK’s departure is what to do with the 73 seats in the European Parliament vacated by British MEPs. While some see it as a golden opportunity to make savings and reduce the size of a rather bloated legislature of 751 members, others are eyeing up the seats for themselves or using the opportunity to push for pan-European lists. Juncker supported the latter, claiming it would make EP elections more European and more democratic.
MEPs get creative with preparations for a hard Brexit
The raft of new initiatives announced in the State of the Union speech did not stretch to the environment, an area where green NGOs have complained that this Commission has been particularly silent. However there was one Brexit-related development that has wider implications for the talks ahead. MEPs used a proposal on including the aviation sector in the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) to adopt an amendment that would block British firms from cashing in future free EU pollution permits in the event of the UK not remaining in the EU ETS. The main proponent of the proposal, German Christian Democrat MEP, Peter Liese, argued that this was a “precautionary action” in the case of a hard Brexit “as many of the responsible people in the UK government obviously have unrealistic assumptions”. A sign of things to come?