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Between 6-9 July 2024, the 720 members of the European Parliament were elected across 27 Member States. While the elections have not led to a landslide shift to the right, there is a notable consolidation of far-right parties at the European level. Still, the pro-European centre is holding firm and maintains a majority. In this Policy Brief, Jannik Jansen and Thu Nguyen argue that the results likely indicate by-and-large continuity in the European Parliament, including an ongoing shift to the right on contested issues due to a perforated ‘cordon sanitaire’. But the election results had heavily disruptive consequences on the national level, which in France has triggered snap parliamentary elections. This will have pronounced impact on the balance of power in the (European) Council and on the EU as a whole.
At the beginning of the twenty‐first century, the large democracies of Western Europe experienced some of the most prosperous and peaceful decades in human history. Specifically, the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Germany experienced high and stable quality of life, democratic accountability and state capacity between 2000 and 2019, according to the 2022 Berggruen Governance Index. While all four of these countries are among the top performers in the Index, substantial problems lurk beneath the surface. Notably, each failed to capitalise on the low interest rate environment in the decade following the global financial crisis of 2007–2009—albeit in different ways and for different reasons in each country. In particular, low investment in infrastructure and key technologies, the persistence of stubborn regional inequalities, and resulting sluggish GDP growth have prevented the ‘Big Four’ in Western Europe from improving further and future‐proofing their existing gains.
Much of Latin America has experienced a renewed ‘lost decade’, failing to substantially expand quality of life since the late 2000s. While the outcomes of governance performance across the largest countries – including Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina – have discrete causes, common themes like internal conflict, corruption, and overreliance on natural resources plague the entire region. Put more generally, the inability to turn democratic accountability into a state mechanism able to deliver economic growth and public goods in a sustainable manner is a liability affecting all five countries. To explore the difficulties that the large Latin American countries have faced in the twenty‐first century, this article examines results from the 2022 Berggruen Governance Index, and then presents three key issues facing the region: insufficient state capacity, flirtations with authoritarianism, and economic inequality and inflation. While the challenges remain substantial, increased regional integration may offer one way out of the predicament.
AbstractThe United States—often hailed as the ‘oldest democracy in the world’ and the ‘leader of the free world’—has fallen on hard times. In addition to recent headline‐grabbing political events that have highlighted its political dysfunction, data from the 2022 Berggruen Governance Index (BGI) reveal that overall state capacity and democratic accountability have been declining for years. Although public goods provision has remained on a steady course, the US still trails much of the developed world. We find this struggling performance is largely the result of neglecting three types of infrastructure: civic, physical and social. Specifically, we argue that the crisis became particularly pronounced due to an insufficient response to the 2008 global financial crisis. Although some recent political achievements could slow the decline, more drastic action will be required to reverse these troubling trends.
Implementing the EU Green Deal requires annual investments of about €620 billion, most of which will have to be shouldered by the private sector. However, businesses and households are not investing enough as of now. An important lever for greater green investment is reducing uncertainty around such investment. At the start of the next institutional cycle, the EU should hence improve regulatory certainty for green investments, which should be palatable to most parties likely to form a majority in the Parliament. In addition, the EU should adopt concrete tools that reduce cost uncertainty for companies and households in a pragmatic manner. To this end, this policy position recommends using green lead markets and proposes moves to explore two novel mechanisms that cost taxpayers little to nothing but should boost green investments.
Election campaigns are increasingly conducted online. Social media platforms in particular shape political discourse and facilitate new ways of delivering political messages. This was initially considered a boon for democracy, but opaque manipulation tactics quickly turned it into a threat to fair and transparent elections. National regulatory frameworks have often proved to be inadequate for online campaigns and the transnational nature of European elections. The EU has reacted to this with a regulation on political advertising. The initiative facilitates transnational campaigning online and aims to protect the integrity of European elections. The 2024 European elections will be the first time EU rules operate in this area, putting these to the test. This election cycle will indicate whether political actors are striking out for more cross-border campaigns and whether they suffice to protect European elections. Critical here is how online platforms implement the new rules and how transparent they are about campaign-related posts on their sites.
EU enlargement has historically fostered economic growth and political stability. In the Western Balkans, however, the process has stalled for many years due to the myriad crises afflicting the EU and failure to deliver reforms in the Western Balkans. This policy brief examines the evolution of the EU accession process, the challenges faced by candidate countries, and the need for a revitalized approach that builds reforms into the accession process rather than keep them a precondition for kickstarting it. It calls for the EU to remove bilateral disputes from the process and open accession talks with all candidate countries in all areas covered by the acquis, ensuring that all candidate countries have a fair chance based on their merits.
The Court inhabits a ‘political space’ to which it is called upon to respond. This points to its need to develop cooperative relationships not only with courts but also with political actors (such as national governments and the EU legislature) and even to directly address and explain decisions to EU citizens themselves. This book is aimed at answering the question of ‘How does the CJEU position itself as a political as well as a legal actor?’ with a view to better understanding the work of the Court and addressing its contestation. For that purpose, we explore in this introductory chapter what is meant by judicial ‘activism’ and judicial ‘politics’, before examining the different varieties of judicial politics our authors have shown an interest in. This will pave the way to drawing some lessons on the factors to take into account when seeking to address and respond to contestation of the work of the Court.
Addressing the tensions between the political and the legal dimension of European integration as well as intra-institutional dynamics, this insightful book navigates the complex topic of judicial politics. Providing an overview of key topics in the current debate and including an introductory chapter on different conceptions of judicial politics, experts in law and politics interrogate the broader political role of the European Court of Justice.
The first-ever European Defence Industrial Strategy and its financial leg, the European Defence Industrial Programme, saw the light of day in March 2024. The strategy seeks to ameliorate deficiencies in EU defence readiness identified in light of the Russo-Ukrainian war. It offers an ambitious agenda and tailor-made incentives designed to encourage EU member states to invest more, better, together, and European. The Jacques Delors Institute’s Associate Research Fellow Thierry Tardy and the Jacques Delors Centre’s Security Policy Fellow Sascha Ostanina argue that the strategy is a good start to motivate European countries for more action in the defence sector. However, as long as the EU fails to take on a larger defence mandate via treaty change, the strategy success will hinge upon whether the member states, and their respective industrial defence sectors, will be willing to step up to the plate.
In 2019, Ursula von der Leyen promised a geopolitical Commission. Back then, the proclamation was largely derided as empty rhetoric. However, in recent years, a dizzying number of geoeconomic initiatives have come from Brussels, revising and tweaking existing tools and measures, developing new instruments, and announcing a grand new European Economic Security Strategy. This policy brief examines the progress made and outlines the key challenges for the next Commission. While the current Commission expanded the EU‘s geoeconomic toolbox, the incoming Commission must prioritise harmonisation to prevent fragmentation, allocate substantial funds to enhance resilience, and streamline institutional processes to facilitate coherent policymaking at a European level.
Provided it is sufficiently regulated, securitisation can help to fund the economy and share risks within the monetary union. Securitisation combines the advantages of banks in lending and of financial markets in financing. However, a lack of standardisation and legal harmonisation currently prevents the EU from reaping the benefits of this instrument. Weakening the prudential framework will not create a truly European market but may pose new risks to financial stability. Instead, this Policy Brief argues that to scale up securitisation, overcoming the fragmentation in national contract and insolvency laws in the longer term will be key. In the meantime, the European Commission should cut unnecessary red tape and establish an EU-wide standardised securitisation product tailored to an asset class that shows sustainable growth potential. Renovation loans are a promising option.
The notion of a broad green backlash is set to dominate this year's European election campaign. Based on new survey data from more than 15.000 respondents in Germany, France and Poland, we show that it is largely overblown. A majority of voters still wish for a more ambitious climate policy and would support a raft of concrete measures to bring down emissions. However, supporting pivotal voters in the middle will require a stronger focus on green investment and industrial policy and offsetting measures for effective but unpopular policies like carbon pricing. Parties should not waste the coming months outbidding each other over how to cater to imagined climate fatigue but compete over concrete recipes to green the economy.
The Net Zero Industry Act (NZIA) was touted as the EU‘s big response to the US Inflation Reduction Act. After a year of negotiations, it will finally hit the legislative books. In his policy position, Nils Redeker analyses what has become of the EU‘s green industrial policy ambitions, what the NZIA teaches us about Europe‘s role in the clean tech race, and what the next Commission needs to do to formulate a constructive answer to the global return of industrial policy.
To achieve some recent EU priorities, such as boosting clean tech manufacturing, reducing energy prices, or strengthening economic resilience, policy makers are intervening more actively in the economy. Getting these types of policies right requires a thorough understanding of the respective business environment, technologies, and market developments. This policy brief argues that the EU level lacks the data and the analytic capacities that are needed to achieve this understanding. The next EU Commission should address these shortcomings by collecting more data in the narrow areas subject to vertical government intervention, by improving how data gets collected, and by dedicating more staff to data-driven analyses.
In fiscal redistribution negotiations, fiscally weaker sub-units aim to secure more funding but are disempowered by their dependency and lack of bargaining chips. What kind of negotiation strategies do fiscally weak actors rely on to maximize their bargaining positions in redistributive negotiations? The article puts forward a novel strategy of discursive framing whereby relatively powerless actors can reach successful agreements. Two strategies of framing, communitarian and coercive, are observed inductively through a comparative case study analysis of two instances of sub-federal redistribution negotiations in Canada. The findings reveal that ‘more is not always better’: more publicity and aggression can backfire, while communitarian strategies grounded in normative argumentation can prove effective despite their non-confrontational nature. Even a mixed communitarian-coercive strategy can prove effective given that sub-units remain consistent with their initial objectives and apply pressure incrementally. The lessons learned from these Canadian cases have broader implications for studying the dynamics of redistributive negotiations globally.
We analyse the rhetoric and reality of EU digital sovereignty by looking at content control. The control of online content is central to sovereignty because it relates to fundamental freedoms and democratic competition. Our main data source is the unique International Organizations in Global Internet Governance (IO-GIG) dataset which contains internet policy output documents across international institutions and issue areas between 1995 and 2021. By assessing policy output, we show structural trends in content control output in volume, bindingness, and orientation. By analysing policy discourse, we show the evolution of frames on content control over time. We find evidence for a comprehensive but still ongoing trend towards digital sovereignty in policy output and a shift from prioritising free access to the public order in discourse.
The ‘asymmetry thesis’, articulated by Fritz Scharpf, holds that EU governance is characterised by an asymmetry between positive and negative integration. The EU has well-developed capacities for negative integration but only limited capacities for positive integration. The present paper challenges the orthodoxy that this thesis has become in EU law and political science scholarship. It argues that the asymmetry thesis no longer accurately depicts European integration, revisiting its key legal and institutional assumptions. Taking the internal market as the most likely case to test the thesis, we show that negative integration has become weaker, positive integration has gained in strength, and both developments have had an impact on the substance of EU law and policymaking, which is promoting non-economic concerns and market-correcting policies to a greater extent than it used to. These shifts, so we contend, could be even more pronounced in other areas of European integration.
This policy brief delves into the potential of regular migration across diverse skill levels to alleviate labour shortages in the EU. It contends that the EU faces a policy dilemma by attempting to curtail certain migration forms, as seen in the recent Common European Asylum System (CEAS) reform, while concurrently encouraging others through initiatives like the EU Talent Pool. The inconsistent approach to third-country migration poses significant trade-offs, necessitating a comprehensive resolution. The brief advocates for a multi-faceted strategy encompassing (a) diversification, (b) integration, and (c) de-bureaucratization at both EU and member state levels. Addressing potential pitfalls such as brain drains and heightened competition among member states, the brief concludes by highlighting three essential criteria for enhancing talent attraction and mitigating EU labour shortages through both high- and low-skilled migration.
The 2024 European elections could mark a turning point in EU politics: The European Parliament has traditionally been a progressive force in EU policymaking, often pushing for more far-reaching, European solutions than the Council. This dynamic could fundamentally change after the 2024 elections, with the current power balance expected to shift in favour of more right-wing forces. But even without a turn towards a Eurosceptic majority, the outcome will determine the direction of policies decided by the Parliament and shape EU politics over the next five years. This policy brief offers an overview of the need-to-know for this election year. First, it details the institutional timeline until the end of the current legislative cycle. Second, it provides an overview of how European political parties are approaching the election campaign. Third, it discusses election day, possible new majorities in Parliament and inevitable institutional haggling over key positions. Finally, it describes the missed reform opportunities since the 2019 elections and how this may undermine the integrity of the June poll.
The EU is discussing better regulation. The issue is urgent. Nothing less than the competitiveness of European companies and the acceptance of the EU are at stake. But beware – neither symbolic politics nor broad deregulation will help. Instead: here are four concrete measures that could substantially improve the quality of EU regulation.
Energy-intensive industries in the EU are facing two main challenges: high energy prices and transitioning to decarbonised production. However, there is as yet no convincing EU-wide strategy for this sector‘s future. Given that the spectre of ‘deindustrialisation’ has triggered a readiness to act among the member states, there is a window of opportunity for designing such a strategy and putting it on the next Commission‘s agenda. This strategy must go beyond lowering energy prices, and factor in that cost pressures on industry to relocate will persist even in the long run, that the economic and resilience value of domestic production is lower than often portrayed, and that industrial decarbonisation is not just an EU but a global must. This policy brief delves into the economic, resilience and climate dimension of supporting energy-intensive industry, aiming to colour in contours of a potential strategy, and suggesting initial policy steps the EU should take.
Despite a broad consensus in the EU on the necessity of enlargement, it is far from a done deal. Especially the financial implications a Ukraine accession pose uncertainties. In our policy paper, Johannes Lindner, Thu Nguyen and Romy Hansum show that the next enlargement round would have less of an impact on the EU budget than is generally assumed. This is largely because the EU’s multiannual financial framework (MFF) has inherent adaptation mechanisms to mitigate significant fluctuations. At the same time, we stress that is impossible to predict precisely what the EU’s MFF, under which accession will happen, will look like as the rules and allocations are subject to political negotiations. Lastly, enlargement is not the only issue adding pressure on the EU budget in a Union that faces huge challenges.
Europe’s climate and green industrial policies have faced criticism over lack of funding and coordination, but a shortage of skilled workers could be the key stumbling block for meeting the EU’s green ambitions. This policy brief shines a light on the challenges posed by this shortage. First, it provides an overview of the EU’s aspirational clean tech objectives. Second, it seeks to present a more nuanced perspective on the specific skill and labor requirements for producing and deploying key clean technologies, by providing an initial estimate for the workforce needed to meet the Union’s climate and industrial targets by 2030. Finally, it delves into the factors contributing to potential labor market bottlenecks and underscores the urgent need for targeted and coordinated policy actions.
A European Green Deal that can withstand external shocks and navigate the twists and turns of geo-politics rests on diversified sources of critical imports. However, diversification is a matter for corporate decisions on where to find supplies and place investment and European firms, grappling with cost-push inflation, are reluctant to bear the costs these entail. In this policy position, Francesco Findeisen makes three suggestions about how the EU can help its firms achieve economic resilience through conditional industrial policy support and public procurement.
Current security guarantees for Ukraine range from unavailable to ineffective, writes Sascha Ostanina. She proposes a middle-ground solution to provide collective security for Ukraine through a binding self-defence agreement between the EU and Ukraine. Such an agreement would provide Ukraine with access to weapons and ammunition in the event of Russian aggression.
As the most powerful executive actor in the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), the Eurogroup has faced continuous demands to improve its accountability record since the euro crisis. One reform introduced to meet these demands were the Economic Dialogue – a regular exchange of views between the European Parliament and the President of the Eurogroup designed to ‘ensure greater transparency and accountability’ in the EMU. This chapter investigates the practical functioning of the Economic Dialogues with the Eurogroup between 2013 and the 2019 European Parliament elections. Applying the theoretical framework of the introduction, the purpose is to examine the extent to which the Parliament focuses on procedural or substantive accountability when questioning the Eurogroup President. Moreover, the chapter investigates the reasoning of parliamentary questions in line with the four accountability goods identified at the outset (openness, non-arbitrariness, effectiveness, and publicness). The findings show that Members of the European Parliament are eager to question the extent to which Eurogroup decisions are substantively open and effective, and to a lesser extent whether they are arbitrary or protect EU interests more generally. The analysis is based on fourteen transcripts of Economic Dialogues with the Eurogroup President, which took place between 2013 and 2019.
This chapter provides the volumes general conceptual framework. It begins by addressing why new approaches to accountability are needed, arguing that accountability literature has reached a stalemate as a result of an impasse between deductive and inductive approaches to accountability in the EU. It then argues that overcoming the stalemate requires developing a generalised framework of what accountability is for, deriving four accountability goods to be used in subsequent chapters. The chapter argues that each of the goods can be delivered in procedural or substantive ways, focusing either on the process by which decisions are made or the substantive worth of decisions themselves. The chapter concludes by discussing the strengths and weaknesses of both varieties of accountability before mapping out how the concepts will be applied across policy fields and institutions in subsequent chapters.
This chapter serves as the general introduction to the volume. It discusses two major impasses plaguing EMU in the 2020s: the first, a clash between politicization of EMU decisions, on the one hand, and an institutional structure designed to reject political conflict, on the other; the second, a scholarly impasse between those analysing EMU accountability comparatively and those doing so through EMU specific standards. The chapter briefly introduces the core concepts used in the volume as a means of overcoming this impasse: the distinction between procedural and substantive accountability as well as the normative goods framework developed in Chapter 1. It finally provides an overview of the structure and content of the volume, concluding with a plea to focus scholarly attention on EMUs substantive accountability deficits.
Constitutional differentiation is often assumed to match perfectly with reality. We argue, however, that this is often not the case in core state powers. Constitutional differentiation often does not lead to the exclusion of the non-integrated member states (“outs”) from the policies of the integrated member states (“ins”) but to their reintegration by different means. We present a cost-benefit-model which argues that both “outs” and “ins” often have strong functional and political incentives to seek reintegration after an earlier decision for differentiation because the costs of exclusion are too high. We use a novel dataset of reintegration opportunities to map trends and patterns of reintegration across policy fields, reintegration instruments and member states in core state powers. We conclude by arguing that reintegration is a frequent but fragile phenomenon through which “ins” and “outs” cope with the costs of exclusion.
This article examines the development of judicialization literature in the EU arguing that – in spite of the obvious advantages of interdisciplinary collaboration – scholarship on judicialization in law and political science is drafting apart in the 21st Century. While early political science research on the European Courts found theoretical inspiration in legal research, law and political science have increasingly diverging epistemological and methodological starting points. As the article argues, using prominent papers, this results in both disciplines producing partial accounts of judicial change with limited external validity. The article concludes by offering routes to improving the inter-disciplinary foundations of judicialization research.
The EU Military Assistance Mission in Support of Ukraine (EUMAM UA) is designed to support Ukraine’s army in its fight against Russia’s invasion. A two-year mission envisions training 40,000 Ukrainian soldiers on Western weapons systems and aims to maximise the utility of military assistance provided to Ukraine by its international partners. Can EUMAM UA provide Ukraine with a decisive advantage that wins the war? In this policy brief, Sascha Ostanina argues that EUMAM UA requires a longer mandate for Ukrainian troops to overcome real-life constraints. Consequently, the training mission’s cumulative impact can turn EUMAM UA into one of the key components of Ukraine’s battlefield successes. To increase its cumulative impact, the EU should also standardise the content of EUMAM UA courses and merge EUMAM UA with other EU military aid measures set up for Ukraine.
The EU's supply chains for critical raw materials are heavily concentrated in a handful of countries, notably China. This exposes the European Green Deal Agenda to the twists and turns of geopolitics and external shocks, while the net-zero transition will add to global resource requirements. To diversify the sources of its supplies, the EU intends establishing a Critical Raw Materials Club—a forum where resource-hungry and resource-rich countries collaborate in diversifying critical raw materials value chains. This policy brief outlines the challenges the EU faces in setting up such a Club and discusses options for designing an effective model. It concludes that a hybrid version, one that starts with voluntary commitments, minimal structure, and a limited number of members and becomes more ambitious over time, offers the most promising design solution. However, to succeed with this approach, the EU must make a credible upfront funding commitment at the launch of the Club and streamline its fragmented development finance model.
What Europe needs is not a regulatory pause, but better legislation. In record time, the EU has rolled out a comprehensive disclosure regime for sustainable finance. But the nascent regulatory framework is challenging to implement, remains vulnerable to abuse by those seeking to game the system and fails to provide meaningful guidance to investors. Despite detailed legislation, financial market participants differ significantly in their expectations of sustainable investment products and face the risk of greenwashing, where issuers - intentionally or unintentionally - make misleading sustainability claims. To enable private investment to finance Europe’s transition to net zero, this policy brief proposes short-term measures to combat greenwashing plus reforms that should be adopted once the next European Commission has assumed office. For the EU to uphold its status as a global benchmark for sustainable finance, lawmakers and regulators must urgently improve the rules in place and ensure that they are applied consistently across member states.
Die Europäische Union muss sich erweitern, möchte sie ihre unmittelbare Nachbarschaft stabilisieren und dem Einfluss Russlands in der Region vorbeugen. In dieser Policy Position argumentiert Thu Nguyen, dass jedoch sowohl künftige Mitgliedstaaten als auch die EU für die Erweiterung bereit sein müssen. Dazu braucht es Reformen, vor allem in drei Bereichen: Rechtsstaatlichkeit, Handlungsfähigkeit und EU-Haushalt.
The EU struggles to remain internationally competitive, with pressures intensifying since the Russian war in Ukraine. Many factors, most of them long-standing, determine EU competitiveness, such as lack of skilled labour, digitalisation, or quality of infrastructure. A vast literature exists on how to address these issues. This paper takes a narrower approach by focusing on three more recent levers for the EU to ensure its future competitiveness: devising an EU industrial policy, adapting to the changing energy landscape, and positioning the EU in a geopolitically tense environment.
Green growth requires strategy and coordination. The green transition entails important costs and will fail politically if we do not address socio-economic inequalities. In this Policy Position, Cornelia Woll proposes three pathways to a net-zero economy by 2050 that ideally should be combined: (i) correcting market signals through taxonomies and taxation; (ii) developing a European industrial policy that supports green innovation but also rewards successful transition plans; (iii) facilitating the funding for companies and financial institutions lending to those invested in green technology.
Empirically, the poor are more likely to support increases in the level of tax progressivity than the rich. Such income-stratified tax preferences can result from differences in preferences of what should be taxed as argued by previous literature. However, it may also result from income-stratified perceptions of what is taxed. This paper argues that the rich perceive higher levels of tax progressivity than the poor and that tax perceptions affect individuals’ support for progressive taxation. Using data from an Austrian survey experiment, we test this argument in three steps: First, in line with past research, we show that individuals’ income positions are connected to individuals’ tax preferences as a self-interest rationale would predict. However, second, we show that this variation is mainly driven by income-stratified tax perceptions. Third, randomly informing a subset of the sample about actual tax rates, we find that changing tax perceptions causally affects support for redistributive taxation among those who initially overestimated the level of tax progressivity. Our results indicate that tax perceptions are relevant for forming tax preferences and suggest that individuals are more polarized in their perceptions of who pays how much taxes than in their support for who should pay how much tax.
Germany Needs a Europe Pact
(2023)
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz recently presented a new “Germany-Pact” to advance the country, following media reporting that has portrayed Germany as the “sick man of Europe” due to its waning economy. However, as Johannes Lindner and Nils Redeker observe, Europe does not play a big role in this pact. In this op-ed, originally published in Handelsblatt, they explain why Germany should refocus on the EU single market and develop an overall strategy for modernising the country and Europe.
The right of EU citizens to equal treatment with nationals of the host Member State in respect of social assistance has been subject to significant changes on several occasions between the Treaty of Maastricht and now. The CJEU has struggled to establish consistent standards prescribing when economically inactive citizens can claim social protection, and in 2014 its tendency to construe this right broadly suddenly came to an end. It backtracked on one-and-a-half decades of case law by ruling that citizens could lay no claim to social assistance unless the respective conditions set out in secondary legislation were met. This article discusses the relevant law and its evolution over the past decades for a twofold aim. (i) First, to clarify in an accessible manner in what respects the law has changed from 1993 to the present. (ii) Second, to articulate a framework that allows us to evaluate the CJEU judgments rendered during this period. This framework departs from established ways of thinking about this evaluative question. Much of the EU citizenship literature evaluates the case law by the outcome it brings about. I will argue, instead, that this evaluation is a matter of comparative institutional choice. Such a comparative institutional assessment shows that disputes over the right of EU citizens to claim social assistance should be decided in line with what the EU legislature intended. It follows that the application of a principle of judicial deference to legislation in the second period of social assistance case law from 2014 onwards was justified.
The article draws lessons for EU non-discrimination law from the protected grounds of religion and belief through a discussion of the CJEU’s headscarf judgments. The article has two ambitions. First, the judgments are used to draw broader lessons for EU non-discrimination law, in relation to the distinction between and the justification of direct and indirect discrimination, as well as the purpose of protecting against (religious) discrimination. Second, these lessons are used to analyze the headscarf judgments and the criticism directed at them. While there is widespread agreement that the CJEU erred in these judgments, there is little agreement as to what mistakes were made. Through a discussion of these judgments, the article clarifies the difference between direct and indirect discrimination and the justification of both forms of discrimination. It is argued that the headscarf cases correctly distinguished between direct and indirect discrimination, and that the problem lies in the justificatory burden for indirect discriminatory measures, which was set too low by the CJEU.
Despite its increasingly autocratic style of governance, Hungary is set to take over the Presidency of the Council of Ministers in the second half of 2024, Martijn van den Brink (Jacques Delors Centre, Hertie School of Governance) writes in his CEU DI Working Paper.
Since doubts exist about the country’s capacity to exercise the responsibilities that come with this office, different proposals have been put forward to suspend a Hungarian Presidency. This paper offers a legal and political analysis of these proposals.
First, the author argues that the proposals in their current form are inconsistent with the requirement in Article 16(9) TEU that the Presidency of the Council shall be held by the Member States on the basis of equal rotation. It is in line with this provision to delay a Hungarian Presidency for some time, but not to sanction the country for as long as it continues to violate the rule of law.
Secondly, being mindful of these legal constraints, he questions whether delaying a Hungarian Presidency is a smart choice politically. The choice of delaying a Hungarian Council Presidency is something of a gamble. The analysis suggests it might be better to allow Hungary to chair the Council in the second half of 2024 rather than in several years.
The “Franco-German Engine” currently stutters more than in the past, especially on energy topics. At times, this obstructs urgently needed policy making at the EU level. This policy brief attempts to illuminate the differences and commonalities between Germany and France on EU energy policy. First, it provides an overview of the German and French energy landscapes and their future objectives. Second, it describes the German and French positions on four controversial energy policy areas: nuclear energy, grid expansion, electricity market reform and guaranteeing low prices for energy-intensive industry. For each area, it identifies the key Franco-German pain-points and opportunities for the way forward.
Political trust—in terms of trust in political institutions—is an important precondition for the functioning and stability of democracy. One widely studied determinant of political trust is income inequality. While the empirical finding that societies with lower levels of income inequality have higher levels of trust is well established, the exact ways in which income inequality affects political trust remain unclear. Past research has shown that individuals oftentimes have biased perceptions of inequality. Considering potentially biased inequality perceptions, Licia Bobzien argues that individuals compare their perceptions of inequality to their preference for inequality. If they identify a gap between what they perceive and what they prefer (= fairness gap), they consider their attitudes towards inequality unrepresented. This, in turn, reduces trust in political institutions. Using three waves of the ESS and the ISSP in a cross-country perspective, she finds that (1) perceiving a larger fairness gap is associated with lower levels of political trust; (2) the fairness gap mediates the link between actual inequality and political trust; and (3) disaggregating the fairness gap measure, political trust is more strongly linked to variation in inequality perceptions than to variation in inequality preferences. This indicates that inequality perceptions are an important factor shaping trust into political institutions.
In this Article, Martijn van den Brink sheds new light on one of the longest-running debates in the European Union (EU) citizenship literature: the concept of ‘reverse discrimination’ and the question of whether it is justified. Reverse discrimination has divided EU lawyers into roughly two distinct groups. One group believes that it constitutes an unjustified violation of the principle of equality; a second that it is inevitable in a Union governed by the constitutional principle of divided powers. This Article questions this by offering a typology of reverse discrimination. While most scholars assume that reverse discrimination is a singular phenomenon that demands a singular response, this Article shows that it is a variegated phenomenon that demands a variegated response. It distinguishes three types of reverse discrimination and explains that the proper response depends on the type we are considering. Type I is caused by the application of the principle of mutual recognition; Type II by an interaction between domestic federalism and internal discrimination; and Type III by the CJEU’s confusion over the aim of the right to free movement and residence. Through this typology, the Article shows that reverse discrimination is never a corollary of the principle of divided powers, nor is it always incompatible with the principle of equality. Finally, the Article shows that to the extent that reverse discrimination violates the principle of equality, the solution is not to equalise rights upwards but downwards to the lower (national or regional) level of government. This shows that the principle of equality and the principle of divided powers need not collide.