The ball is now in the court of the President of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, who can now decide whether to inform the plenary of the outcome of the vote on the report, which is only advisory, during the next plenary session. Once this step has been completed, the Legal Affairs Committee can report its conclusions orally to the plenary. The President now also has the option of bringing an action before the Court of Justice of the European Union on behalf of the Parliament, in accordance with the recommendation of the committee responsible. Metsola may also put the decision to bring an action to a vote in Parliament. If the President intends to depart from the recommendation of the Committee on Legal Affairs, she shall inform the committee and refer the matter to the Conference of Presidents. If the Conference of Presidents also considers that Parliament should not submit observations or intervene before the Court of Justice, the matter may be put to a final vote in plenary.

L'articolo Parliament rebels against its exclusion from the European Commission’s emergency procedure to approve RearmEU. The European Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee (JURI) rejects the idea, arguing that the requirements for urgency are not met proviene da Bubble report.

At the European Council, EU leaders will discuss the strategy to be adopted on Syria. The general principles have been set. The High Representative for Foreign Affairs, Kaja Kallas, has invited a diplomat to Damascus to begin technical talks with the new authorities. It is no longer taboo to talk to Hayat Tarir al Sham, the jihadist group sanctioned by the EU. Its leader, Ahmed al Sharaa, alias al Julani, will be judged by his actions, not his words. “Early signs are encouraging,” say European diplomatic sources. But the list of conditions set by EU foreign ministers is long: territorial integrity and sovereignty of Syria, inclusive government, fight against terrorism, respect for minority and women’s rights. 

Kallas also explained that one of the messages that will be sent to the new leadership in Damascus is that “neither Russia nor Iran has any place in Syria”. The High Representative said he wanted to work with all partners in the region – Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey. The trip to Ankara to discuss Syria, which Ursula von der Leyen announced on her own last week, caused some embarrassment because the commission chief did not coordinate with either Kallas or European Council President Antonio Costa. The visit had been planned for some time, but was to focus solely on bilateral relations and immigration. Von der Leyen avoided missteps in public statements with Erdogan. The EU wants to take the first steps to work on reconstruction. The Syrian people deserve a peaceful transition” that “preserves the territorial integrity and sovereignty of their country,” she said. Turkey’s legitimate security concerns must be taken into account,” von der Leyen said. At the same time, all Syrians, including all minorities, must be able to live in safety. The implicit reference is to the Kurds, who are being bombed by Turkey in northern Syria. If Erdogan opts for a large-scale incursion to expand his borders, von der Leyen’s miscalculation risks hurting the EU. In a letter seen by the Wall Street Journal, Ilham Ahmed, a Syrian Kurdish civil administration official, told President-elect Donald Trump that a Turkish military operation was likely and urged him to pressure Erdogan not to send troops across the border. In any case, Erdogan laid out his conditions for cooperation with the EU: lifting “all restrictions” in bilateral relations, “resuming high-level dialogue,” “upgrading the customs union,” and achieving full visa liberalization for Turkish citizens traveling to Europe. “EU membership remains a strategic goal for Turkey,” Erdogan added. Von der Leyen arrived in Ankara with a billion-euro check to deal with Syrian refugees, following a 2016 deal to halt departures. Since 2011, the EU has provided nearly 10 billion euros to Turkey. “I am very pleased to announce today that an additional billion euros for 2024 is on its way,” von der Leyen said at the press conference with the Turkish president.

The money will be used to support “health care and education for refugees in Turkey” and “migration and border management, including the voluntary repatriation of Syrian refugees”. Von der Leyen assured that the money could be used flexibly by Turkey. “As things develop on the ground, we can adapt this 1 billion euros to new needs that may arise in Syria,” she said. 

L'articolo Von der Leyen’s game with Erdogan, between the Kurdish unknown and the treatment of Syrian refugees. If only the EU had a real common foreign policy, Europeans would have much more influence in the region without being at the mercy of Erdogan’s hegemonic aims. Since 2011, the EU has given Turkey almost 10 billion euros. proviene da Bubble report.

L'articolo The axis works – The European Parliament on Monday rejected, with 319 votes against, a request to debate the consequences of Friday’s Rome court ruling nixing the transfer of the first dozen migrants to a new processing centre in Albania. The request was presented by the Greens group and supported by Liberals and Socialists. But on the other side the Popular-Patriots-ECR axis proved to be stronger than expected proviene da Bubble report.

L'articolo BUBBLEFLASH – Very unfortunate timing – Lady Ursula loses the vaccine case: the court says she did not give sufficient access to contracts with pharmaceutical companies. Criticised, in this case, was the decision to only publish redacted versions of them. A ruling that casts a bad light just 24 hours before the crucial vote in parliament proviene da Bubble report.

Finally, there is a third element that Brussels should take into account. Chinese competition is not addressed by tariffs alone. Certainly they are important, because if we look at the table on the page, we can clearly see that the same car sold in China and Europe travels on completely different price lists. A Dacia Spring costs almost 17,000 euros in Germany. In Beijing it costs less than 9,000 euros. The Bmw IX3 goes from 51,500 euros to 74,000 euros. The serious thing is that the difference applies not only to Chinese cars, but also to European cars produced there. And we Europeans are our own hangmen. Our extremist green policies have helped boost the Chinese economy and made us dependent. So much so that Beijing is now ready to move on to phase two of trade penetration. An electricity market expert who has just returned from two former Soviet countries, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, described a dramatic scenario in the car market. These are two essentially poor economies whose governments have made agreements with China to start a rapid development of charging infrastructure. There are no European cars on the roads. In Tajikistan, all taxis will soon be electric, and in Uzbekistan 99% of the (very common) electric cars are Chinese. In practice, having colonised the technology chain and convinced Europe to become dependent on it, Beijing is now reaping the rewards by betting on poor economies in the hope of seeing them grow. The underlying theme of these hours is to understand how the alliances within the Commission will close. Who will support Ursula von der Leyen and who will take control of the two most sensitive portfolios: Antitrust and Environment. There is a risk. Namely that the pattern of the previous Commission will be cloned and the same path of industrial desertification will be followed. Instead, the CAP should be reviewed and expanded, the Natura law, the packaging regulations and the halt to the heat engine should be called into question. The most sustainable model for our country and the old continent is the one based on biofuels. It allows the development of the circular economy and the seamless integration of both current production platforms and the logistics chain. First choose the technology in which we can excel and then build an industrial project. The rest is ideology.

L'articolo The insanity of electric cars is revealed – nobody buys them in Europe, while in China (which dominates the supply chain) they are mere leverage to make the Central Asian nations dependent. European suicide is thus served. Here, by the way, they tend to cost at least 50 per cent more than in Beijing (where, for example, a Dacia spring costs 9,000 euros compared to 17,000 in Germany). It would serve to call into question the policies of the first Von der Leyen mandate, but this will probably remain just an illusion. Meanwhile, industrial desertification advances… proviene da Bubble report.

AFET – EPP 

DROI – Greens 

SEDE – Renew 

DEVE – Renew 

INTA – S&D 

BUDG – ECR 

CONT – EPP 

ECON – S&D 

FISC – Left 

EMPL – Left 

ENVI – S&D 

SANT – EPP 

ITRE – EPP 

IMCO – Greens 

TRAN – Patriots 

REGI – S&D 

AGRI – EPP 

PECH – EPP 

CULT – Patriots 

JURI – Renew 

LIBE – ECR 

AFCO – EPP 

FEMM- S&D 

PETI – ECR

L'articolo BUBBLEFLASH – Rumour has it that the chairmanships of the parliamentary committees could be divided up like this (see text). After the reform of the Rules of Procedure, BUDG will have a key political role and could go to the ECR, thus making it absolutely crucial in the game that will follow until 2029 proviene da Bubble report.

It was a decision that may have cost PiS the election as analysts say the current centrist coalition rode into power last year partly on a backlash from young and female voters. On Friday, four bills which would overturn the ban were put in front of Poland’s lower house and approved for further legislative work and discussion.

Their passage wouldn’t have been possible without Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s broad-based coalition – but there is likely to be further heated debate on the extent to which abortion should be legalised.

The conservative opposition leader, Jarosław Kaczyński, indicated he would be willing to support softening his own party’s support for a near-total abortion ban. Former Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki has said he thinks the ban was a “mistake”. 

In other abortion U-turn news: fellow conservative Donald Trump said Arizona’s supreme court had gone too far in outlawing abortion and said he wouldn’t support a federal ban – as he has previously indicated he would – ahead of the 2024 election.

L'articolo Sometimes you get what you voted for – Donald Tusk’s Poland seems to have understood all too well Brussels’ desire to include abortion in the Union’s charter of fundamental rights. A parliamentary debate began last week to ease the ‘almost’ ban now in force, quickly followed by a large street protest in Warsaw. Tusk’s road to change the country promises to be an uphill one, but not to difficult to walk proviene da Bubble report.

The overhaul was reached only after overcoming years of tensions and divisions among EU member countries. Once fully adopted, it would come into effect from 2026.

Alongside its passage, the European Union has been striking agreements with several outside countries to try to reduce the number of migrants leaving their territories with the goal of reaching Europe.

The backdrop of the two-pronged approach is a rise in asylum applications in the 27-nation EU, which last year reached 1.14 million, the highest level since 2016.

Irregular migrant entries into the bloc are also increasing, to 380,000 last year according to the EU’s border and coast guard agency Frontex.

The migration and asylum pact has been opposed, for very different reasons, by the far right, the far left and some socialist lawmakers.

“After years of impasse, the new migration rules allow us to regain control over our external borders and reduce pressure on the EU. State authorities, not smugglers, have to decide who enters the European Union,” said Manfred Weber, head of the biggest political group in the European Parliament, the centre-right European People’s Party.

NGOs and migrant charities have come out against the reform, especially its provision creating border facilities to accommodate asylum-seekers and quickly send back those deemed ineligible, which they fear will lead to systematic detentions.

The reform largely retains the basic rule in force under which the first EU country in which an asylum-seeker arrives is responsible for their case.

But it adds a “solidarity mechanism” that requires all EU countries to help front-line states such as Italy and Greece when they come under pressure by either taking in some of the asylum-seekers or providing an equivalent financial contribution.

‘Inflammatory topic’

A French centrist lawmaker in the European Parliament, Fabienne Keller, who shepherded one of the texts, called the pact “very balanced” and “a big improvement over the current situation”.

“There are better checks on flows of irregular migration through the border procedures and more solidarity,” she said.

But she acknowledged it was “a hugely inflammatory topic” and criticised far-right lawmakers for “trying to panic everybody” over the changes.

The parliament’s vote will not be the last step for the pact, as the technical application of its procedures still need to be defined, Keller said. They include how to organise the border centres and supply them with sufficient resources, translators and police officers.

Another controversial point is a provision to send asylum-seekers to “safe” third countries.

A left-wing lawmaker, Raphael Glucksmann of France, said “that would allow asylum-seekers likely to obtain asylum in an EU country to be sent to transit countries”.

He criticised a compromise under which some EU nations would be able to offset their financial obligations under the solidarity mechanism if they helped pay for tougher border security in another EU country.

“That upholds the idea of a ‘safe third country’ which would apply to some countries that are ‘safe’ only by that label,” he said. “It’s another step towards the outsourcing of our borders.”

On the far right, lawmaker Jean-Paul Garraud of France said “the outer borders of the EU are like sieves and nothing has been done to change that”.

One of the few changes the far right favoured was a system to take the biometric data of each arriving asylum-seeker and put it into an EU database called Eurodac, he said, though he argued it would do little to stop mass irregular immigration.

“These mechanisms are just smokescreens,” he said. “They will be ineffective and won’t be able to be applied given the scale of the migration flows.”

L'articolo Elections and migration: always hand in hand – The European Parliament approves the new package of reforms aimed at jointly tackling migratory flows on the continent. But the changes are disliked by many, from the far right (which complains of insufficient efforts) to the far left (which complains of inhumane treatment). The Italians are particularly dissatisfied because they feel that nothing has changed for those who, like them, are and will remain in the front line proviene da Bubble report.

This is not a wrong principle, but it becomes very dangerous when it is done in the absence of even the slightest political project, such as the one that was created in America after the

War of Secession: a currency, an army, a debt. You don’t see Alexander Hamilton (the first US Secretary of the Treasury) around. And Draghi does not have the political and electoral consensus he needs to become a European counterpart. But the time for inaction is coming to a dramatic end, and it can hardly be enough to recite the sacred writings of Spinelli, Monnet, Schumann and Adenauer in the EU bunker while sending arms and money to Zelensky without having a peace plan in the drawer. Europe needs a common way and a common agenda. It must be written before June, before facts prevail over reason, before everyone is dragged onto the ground of conflict. 

At the moment there is no trace of this common path. Suffice it to say that the past week should have been the week of mobilization of Europeans and instead it was the week of misunderstandings. The Paris conference and the pledges to increase military assistance to Kyiv should have been an opportunity to send a pass of resolve and deterrence to Putin. But personal rivalries and Franco-German taboos are having the opposite effect. First there were the words of Macron, who did not rule out putting soldiers on the ground to maintain strategic ambiguity, provoking an immediate denial from Olaf Scholz. Then there was a major strategic faux pas by the German Chancellor, who, in order to justify his opposition to the delivery of his Taurus long-range missiles, revealed intelligence information that put France and Britain at risk. Meanwhile, in Brussels, France and Germany’s differences have made the €5 billion European Peace Facility to finance weapons to Kyiv less rich, less rapid and less effective. Macron and Scholz say they share the same goal: not letting Putin win the war. But for months, the two have been trading accusations. Germany has said that France spends too little on Kyiv. French Defense Minister Sebastien Lecornu has retorted that Berlin has provided tanks that do not work. At the Paris conference, Macron insisted on Taurus for the coalition of medium- and long-range missiles and did not spare indirect criticism of Scholz, recalling that at the beginning of the war, Germany had always said “nein to anything” except sleeping bags and helmets. To defend himself in the face of public opinion, Scholz implied that France and the United Kingdom have military personnel involved in the use of Scalp and Storm Shadow missiles in Ukraine. Military advisors assisting a country at war is nothing new. But to say so publicly is tantamount to denouncing complicity. It is even more serious if Putin interprets this concept broadly to threaten nuclear strikes. Taurus will be absolutely necessary before the summer, when the Scalp and the Strom Shadow are exhausted. Otherwise, Russia can redeploy the Black Sea Fleet to Sevastopol and reimpose a blockade on grain exports. Kearns, a British Conservative MP, added: “Scholz should deliver the Taurus and stop compromising European security. For now, this is the reality of ‘common’ European defense.

L'articolo Bubblereport #16 – From the New Green Deal to the New War Deal: Lady Ursula is planning an EU rearmament strategy but without a political reform that could really lead to a common army (and therefore debt through serious treaty reforms). The EU is chasing events, not dominating them. Proof of this are the barbs between Scholz and Macron over Ukraine, which are cracking European effectiveness. This is not to say that Scholz leaked intelligence information that put France and Britain at risk proviene da Bubble report.

Restoration goals and ecosystems: provisions of the agreement

The Law is groundbreaking as, for the first time, it not only regulates the protection of the most important natural areas, but it introduces regulations to restore nature where it is already degraded. The regulation sets specific and legally binding goals and obligations for restoring nature in specific ecosystems, from farmland and forests to marine, freshwater, and urban ecosystems. Member states must restore at least 30 percent of habitats covered by the new law from a poor to a good condition by 2030, increasing to 60 percent by 2040 and 90 percent by 2050. The legislation thus introduces a roadmap that did not exist and that can be adapted for national specificities so that it is relevant to the local context.

Member states will have to develop national restoration plans, which will be a roadmap for reporting to the European Commission on how they intend to achieve the goals for the good state of natural ecosystems in 2030, 2040, and 2050. Member states will initially have to submit plans to cover the period to June 2032 and, by that date, will have to submit restoration plans for the ten years to 2042 with a strategic overview to 2050 and, by June 2042, plans for the remaining period to 2050.

Farmland and emergency brake

The law also covers farmland. Member States must achieve progress in at least two of the following three indicators: the grassland butterfly index; the share of agricultural land with high-diversity landscape features; and the stock of organic carbon in the cropland mineral soil.  Flexibility is granted to governments to rewet peatlands: the text sets targets to restore 30 percent of drained peatlands to agricultural use by 2030, 40 percent by 2040, and 50 percent by 2050, even though severely affected member states will be able to apply a lower percentage. Measures to improve the condition of forests will be mandatory, particularly by increasing the number of tree species and their resilience to climate change.

Given the concerns of both co-legislators about the effects of the food safety regulation, the final agreement finally provides for an ’emergency brake’ by setting 2033 as the date for the Commission to review and assess the implementation of the regulation and its impact on the agricultural, fisheries and forestry sectors, as well as its broader socioeconomic effects. The text also introduces the possibility of suspending the implementation of the regulation’s provisions related to agricultural ecosystems for up to one year through an implementing act in case of “unforeseeable and exceptional events beyond the control of the EU and with serious Community-wide consequences for food security.”

L'articolo Greenlight for a big Green win – In Strasbourg the ‘nature restoration law’, which requires member states to restore at least 30 percent of specific habitats from ‘poor’ to ‘good’ condition (and 90 percent by 2050), was approved. The vote highlights the divisions within the EPP and Renew: indications of a potential future majority, without the Socialists, but with the ECR now increasingly moderate proviene da Bubble report.