I’m no fan of the Tory Party or indeed any of the parties they are cooperating with in their new political group in the European Parliament, the ECRG – European Conservatives and Reformists Group. Yet even I cannot have imagined how soon things would start to crack, for today Hannu […]
The UK Tories have today announced the formation of the European Conservatives and Reformists Group (ECRG) in the European Parliament. The group will have 55 MEPs – 25 UK Tories, and Jim Nicholson from Northern Ireland, 15 Poles from PiS, 9 Czechs from ODS, and then 1 MEP from each […]
I managed to avoid the milk-farmer chaos in Brussels on Thursday and Friday – hundreds of tractors driving slowly to bring protests about low milk prices to the European Council. But what exactly are the farmers whingeing about, and what should be done about it? This piece from EUObserver has […]
As an alumnus of the College of Europe in Bruges I periodically get e-mails on the student e-mail lists. This one has recently reached me: Dear Alumni, Following the recent elections for the European Parliament, the nomination of the Commission’s President is now on the European Agenda. The European Movement […]
I’m at the final event of the Th!nk About It project in Rotterdam. We havge people from just about all Member States of the EU here, all of them bloggers, and the EP elections are now over. So how about use the knowledge in the room to look at the […]
Britain has ASDA, a rather lousy supermarket chain owned by Wal-Mart. Now Brussels has ASDE, the new name for the Socialist Group in the European Parliament. The name stands for the Alliance of Socialists and Democrats. Which means the name is not too far away from ALDE, the acronym for […]
One of the great things about the Twitter is that it allows you to be rather silly and flippant about serious topics – just look what we managed with @AtheistBus. But this post is about EU politics. For today, in a discussion with @JulienFrisch, @spiller2 and @kosmopolit, I managed to […]
Before the EP elections I wrote a post expressing my exasperation at the PES when they stated they had a nominee for Commission President but would not state the name of that individual. Now Euractiv is reporting that there could be an alliance of the PES, Greens and ALDE to […]
The European Parliament Election results on Sunday were not good for social democratic and labour parties across Europe, polling 3% less than at the elections in 2004. PES President Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, posting at Labourlist, states rather blandly that “We need more PES, not less PES” so as to do […]
Results – all unofficial at the moment – are staring to drift in, and things are looking quite terrible for the left across Europe. So far the left is only up in Malta, Slovakia and Greece (with a decent result also expected in Ireland), and behind elsewhere – poor results […]
So the European Commission is asking The Netherlands for ‘clarification’ of why results from Thursday’s EP poll there have been released already. Supposedly results are only allowed to be released once the polls have closed all over Europe – Sunday evening. I’ve been debating this on Twitter with @julienfrish, @kierancotty, […]
Just a few days before the European Parliament elections in Germany (polling day there is Sunday 7th June) there’s an interesting story brewing about the liberals’ (FDP) lead candidate Silvana Koch-Mehrin – I’ve posted a little about this before. It’s one of those interesting cases where a politician getting things […]
