Within the 5 years because the final European elections, EU nations have suffered three successive and carefully associated shocks: the Covid-19 pandemic; the power disaster; and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which became an all-out warfare within the coronary heart of Europe.
All three shocks produced collective EU responses of unprecedented scale. No matter their effectiveness, these responses made frequent European insurance policies extremely seen within the lives of residents, albeit with big variations from nation to nation and never at all times with a optimistic influence.
Covid-19 vaccines; the Restoration and Resilience Facility; frequent European borrowing; joint LNG orders; electrical energy subsidies; and the arming of Ukraine in opposition to Russia – all may be seen as indicators of a dramatic pattern of “extra Europe” within the lives of 450 million Europeans.
However this “extra Europe” has in flip triggered new crises and, above all, revealed some basic contradictions within the EU’s institutional set-up. Particularly, not one of the EU’s unprecedented responses to the three main shocks would have been attainable with out activating the Stability and Progress Pact’s “basic escape clause”, the security valve that allowed the EU’s fiscal “straitjacket” to be loosened for 4 years.
Given this context, one may anticipate that almost all European residents, and Greeks amongst them, will vote in June’s European elections on the premise of purely European issues. As soon as once more, that won’t occur, at the least not in Greece. The events competing for the votes of some 9 million Greeks (or the …
