With Czech President Vaclav Klaus the chief remaining obstacle to final ratification of the European Union’s Lisbon treaty, there has been a fair amount of loose talk about how the Czech Republic could - or should - be punished if Klaus refuses to sign it.  On the one hand, supporters of the treaty say it is intolerable that the EU’s eight-year effort at redesigning its institutions should be sabotaged at the finishing post.  If Klaus carries on his delaying tactics much longer, they warn, the Czechs should be denied a seat in the next European Commission.

On the other hand, opponents of the Lisbon treaty are painting the same scenario for quite different reasons.  Just you watch, they say.  The EU will reveal itself as an intolerant, anti-democratic machine, whipping the Czechs merely because they have the temerity to resist the imposition of a treaty they fear undermines their sovereignty.

Most, if not all, of this is not serious.  Some leaders, especially French President Nicolas Sarkozy, are impatient with Klaus.  But EU governments as a whole are not threatening to punish the Czechs.  After all, the Czech parliament has approved the treaty and the Czech government is in favour of it.  Klaus is more and more isolated.

More importantly, the EU is an organisation whose first instinct is to do things by forging a consensus, not by crushing dissent.  Pace Klaus, it is not the Soviet Union reinvented.  The EU’s culture of consensus is both its weakness and, at times like this, its strength.

The EU learnt a sobering lesson in 2000, when Austria formed a coalition government including the far-right Freedom Party of the late Jörg Haider.  The EU’s other 14 member-states punished Austria by downgrading relations and freezing contacts with Austrian ministers.  It seemed a clever idea at the time.  But it ended up producing the opposite effect to that intended, by making a martyr of the Austrian government and by stiffening the patriotic pride of the Austrian people (not just Austrians on the right, either).

Moreover, the EU contains an awful lot of small and medium-sized countries, especially in central and eastern Europe, which suspect that, if ever the Czech Republic were punished for stepping out of line, their turn would come, sooner or later, over some other issue.

One final point.  Many intemperate calls to punish the Czechs have come from the European Parliament.  And it is indeed true that, if Klaus is still holding out when the parliament conducts hearings for the new European Commission, some MEPs may give the Czech nominee a particularly hard grilling.  In extremis, they could even refuse to give the entire Commission the green light because of the Klaus problem.

If they do, someone should remind them that their legislature just got elected on the smallest and most dismal turnout - 43 per cent - of any European Parliament election in history.

Predictably, the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the second world war provoked a few rhetorical skirmishes this week between Russia, Poland and Poland’s western allies.  It reminded me of an unusual evening that I spent in 1989 in Waldkirchen, a small town in southern Germany near the Czech border, on the 50th anniversary of the war.

I was the guest of a German friend who in her youth, when I was a young boy, had lived as an au pair with my family in the UK.  She had spent months walking me to school, taking me swimming, reading me stories and fixing meals for me.  As we grew up, we stayed in touch, and now I was staying the night with her and her husband in Waldkirchen.

I had never met her husband before, but he seemed pleasant enough - until the conversation turned to the origins of the second world war.  He was adamant that Poland, not Germany, had started the war by launching an attack on a German radio station in the town of Gleiwitz (now Gliwice in Poland).  As is well-known, this incident was a Nazi provocation, involving Germans dressed as Polish saboteurs, that was conceived to provide Hitler with an excuse to invade Poland.

However, my friend’s husband would have none of it.  As the evening progressed, a possible explanation emerged for his stubbornness.  He was an ethnic German from the Polish city of Opole (in pre-war times, the German city of Oppeln) who, along with millions of his fellow-nationals, had been expelled after 1945 from his native land as Poland’s borders were shifted to the west.  The pain, injustice and anger of this searing moment in his childhood had stayed in his soul forever.  It blinded him to the truth about the events of late August and early September 1939.

Some Poles no doubt feel that Vladimir Putin, Russia’s prime minister, adheres to a similarly skewed version of history.  In fact, if you read the whole of his article this week in the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, it is considerably more thoughtful and balanced - in spite of its occasional jabs at Poland and the west - than many news reports have suggested.

As for my night in Waldkirchen, it ended well.  My friend, embarrassed at her husband’s behaviour, packed him off to bed.  Then she and I opened some Champagne, and we reminisced about the bad food and weather of England in the 1960s.

If it were not funny, it would be tragic.  The UK Conservative party’s decision to quit the European People’s Party (EPP), the main centre-right political group in the European Parliament, is backfiring on the Tories in spectacular fashion.  The decision was always daft - a bit like the right wing of the US Republican Party splitting off and forming a minority group in Congress - but it now looks more short-sighted than ever.

On Tuesday the Tories relinquished the leadership of their new “anti-federalist” faction, the so-called European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group, to Michal Tomasz Kaminski, a Polish politician.  They felt obliged to do so after Edward McMillan-Scott, a Tory MEP, refused to respect a deal in which Kaminski had been promised one of the parliament’s prestigious vice-presidency posts.

McMillan-Scott, who instead secured the vice-presidency for himself, has now effectively been kicked out of the ECR, and the Tories are being led by a Pole.  This, to put it mildly, was not in David Cameron’s script when he led his party out of the mainstream EPP group.

There are, in any case, serious doubts over how effective the ECR will be over the legislature’s five-year term.  To meet the requirement that an officially recognised faction should have at least 25 MEPs from seven countries, the ECR has been cobbled together out of 26 Tories, 15 Poles, nine Czechs and a solitary politician each from Belgium, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania and the Netherlands (a Finn was also supposed to be in, but dropped out a couple of weeks ago).  The Tories are bound to spend half their time nursing the egos of the last five individuals, any two of whom could destroy the group by leaving it.

This, however, is far from the whole story.  Perhaps the most important development this week has been the decision of the EPP, the centre-left and the centrist liberals - the assembly’s three largest groups - to form a broad ”pro-European bloc”.  This will reinforce the marginalisation of the Tories, who will find themselves on the fringes of the legislature in the company of French communists, assorted Greens, anti-Islamic populists and extreme rightists such as the British National Party.

And what have the Tories got in exchange?  Well, Malcolm Harbour, a Tory MEP, will chair the parliament’s internal market committee.  Otherwise, it’s a grand old mess, unworthy of one of the world’s great political parties.

There are two ways of looking at the imminent appointment of Jerzy Buzek, a former Polish prime minister, as the next president of the European Parliament.  The first way is to applaud Europe’s politicians for doing the right thing and giving one of the European Union’s top jobs to a man from one of the 10 former communist countries in central and eastern Europe that joined the EU in 2004-2007.  This is the highest honour yet accorded to a public figure from one of the EU’s new member-states.  Poles are justifiably proud.

The second way, however, is to be honest and recognise that the job of parliament president is about the lowest-ranking position someone could be given without its looking like an insult.  Buzek, who belongs to the legislature’s main centre-right group, won’t even hold the job for the assembly’s full five-year term: under a deal with the socialists, he will step down after two and a half years and hand over the reins to a socialist.  The fact is that, by giving this post to Buzek, older and bigger member-states in western Europe are making sure that they will get all the really big jobs when they come up for grabs later this year.

These are the European Commission presidency (already earmarked for Portugal’s José Manuel Barroso, though his reappointment to a second term is running into a few embarrassing difficulties); other top Commission portfolios, such as those covering competition, the internal market and trade; the job of EU foreign policy high representative (shortly to be vacated by Spain’s Javier Solana); and the full-time presidency of the European Council, which represents national governments.  The latter job will be created only if the EU’s Lisbon treaty is ratified by all member-states.  But assuming that it comes into existence, I will eat mon chapeau if it doesn’t go to a western European.

There is an interesting side story to all this.  Buzek’s appointment became a certainty after Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s prime minister, withdrew his candidate, Mario Mauro.  Naturally, Italy wants compensation.  Berlusconi would probably be interested in one of the big Commission jobs for Italy, but Franco Frattini, his foreign minister, has other ideas.  He would like to replace Solana as EU foreign policy chief.

The reaction in certain other EU member-states to Frattini’s ambitions is, to put it mildly, one of incredulity.  No one has forgotten Frattini’s most recent diplomatic coup - a planned visit to Iran in May that went spectacularly wrong.  Frattini had to cancel his trip at the last minute when President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad insisted on meeting him in a city where the Iranians had just announced the successful launch of a medium-range missile capable of hitting Israel.  The visit would in any case have broken the EU’s policy of avoiding high-level contacts with Iran because of its nuclear programme.

So, it’s yes to Buzek - but no, grazie to Frattini.

Mikolaj Dowgielewicz is truly a new Pole.  Not yet even 37 years old, he is a minister (for European Union affairs) in Poland’s centre-right government, speaks fluent English and French, was educated partly in the UK, and has spent more of his life in an independent democratic Poland than in a Soviet-controlled communist Poland.  When I was listening to him speak at a think-tank breakfast in Brussels this morning, it struck me with force that he would have been just a small boy when I first visited Warsaw, Krakow and Gdansk in the summer of 1980 and witnessed the emergence of the free trade union Solidarity.

Now, like other new Poles, Dowgielewicz talks breezily about Poland’s growing weight in the EU, which it joined five years ago, and its prospects for adopting the euro as early as 2012.  Poland doesn’t want or need the eurozone’s entry rules to be bent, he says.  “We’re not proposing any amendments to the entry criteria.  Not that we think they make absolute sense, but it’s not feasible.  You’d have to change the EU treaties.  We think the criteria strengthen the eurozone’s credibility.  It will have to be down to the merits of each individual country.”

Dowgielewicz also doesn’t mince his words when it comes to Poland’s exclusion from the G20, the world body charged with the task of reforming global financial institutions.  Better that the EU should have a single seat than that individual European countries should insist on separate representation, he says.  “It’s completely unacceptable that four, five, six countries go to the G20 thinking they can speak on behalf of the whole EU.”

All in all, one gets the sense that Dowgielewicz sees Poland as a country firmly, indeed irresistibly, on the way up.  “We’re gaining in confidence.  We’re going to be the seventh largest economy in the EU this year.  If the economic crisis continues for several more years, we may even overtake other economies.”

There is no hint here of pride preceding a fall.  Which EU countries, then, does Poland take as its models in achievement and conduct?  “We used to say Ireland was the role model for every new member-state, but now that’s a bit difficult,” he says, alluding to the Irish financial crisis and recession.

Dowgielewicz goes on: “When it comes to EU budget negotiations, we’ll draw lessons from Spain.  When it comes to promoting our own nationals in Brussels, we’ll draw from the British.  And when it comes to Euro-enthusiasm, we’ll draw from the Italians.”

Who were the biggest winners and biggest losers of the European Parliament elections?

Top of the winners’ list are surely Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France.  Merkel’s Christian Democrats destroyed her Social Democrat coalition partners at the polls, and Sarkozy’s UMP party brushed aside the opposition French socialists.  Merkel and Sarkozy will feel vindicated in their approach to the global economic crisis, particularly as regards the need to introduce tougher financial regulation (and to lecture central banks from time to time).

Third place on the winners’ list goes to Prime Minister Donald Tusk of Poland, a moderate centre-right leader who cruised to an easy victory on the back of a resilient economy and practical pro-European policies.  Tusk’s common sense clearly appeals to the Polish electorate more than the cavalry-charging on the world stage of the previous conservative government.

Fourth place goes to Viktor Orban, leader of Hungary’s opposition centre-right Fidesz party, which annihilated the ruling socialists in an election dominated by the national economic debacle.

At the top of the losers’ list is Gordon Brown, the UK’s Labour premier, whose party finished third behind the Conservatives and the anti-EU UK Independence Party.  The disintegration of the Labour government and its seemingly inevitable replacement by a rampantly eurosceptic Tory government is now staring the rest of Europe full in the face.  It’s no exaggeration to say they are horrified.

Second place goes to Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany’s SPD foreign minister.  He led his party to a catastrophic defeat and must now be wondering why he agreed to stand for chancellor against the eternally popular Merkel.  Steinmeier looks more than ever like a man who was just not cut out for electoral politics in the first place.

In third place is Brian Cowen, Ireland’s prime minister, whose Fianna Fáil party has held power for 20 of the past 23 years but received an absolute drubbing at the polls because of the banking system disasters and economic collapse of the past 12 months.

The last big loser is the European Parliament itself.  In the 30 years since direct elections to the legislature were introduced, the assembly had never made a more vigorous effort to lift voter turnout.  It didn’t work.  Turnout touched a record low of 43.1 per cent.  And it wasn’t just because of “ungrateful” new member-states such as Slovakia, which has joined the eurozone but could only manage a turnout of 19.6 per cent.  There were record low turnouts everywhere from France, Greece and Italy to new member-states such as Cyprus and Lithuania.

As Martin Schulz, a prominent German socialist, pointed out, it just can’t carry on like this or the parliament’s legitimacy will one day be called into question.

The closer the European Parliament elections, the sneakier the stratagems of British centre-right politicians and activists in Brussels.

As David Cameron made clear on May 18 when he launched the election campaign of his opposition Conservative party, the Tories are poised to leave the mainstream European People’s Party-European Democrats (EPP-ED) group soon after the vote.  They plan to set up a new centre-right group in the EU legislature that would be strongly opposed to more EU political and economic integration. Continue reading "Pro-EU Tories snipe at Cameron and his “PiS poor policies”"

Among the various headaches keeping European Union leaders awake at night is the prospect of a thumping Conservative victory in the UK’s next general election, which must be held by June 2010. The fear is that the new Tory government would be so anti-EU that it would make the 1979-1997 governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major look like Jacques Delors’s European Commission in its heyday.

The nightmare inched one step closer on Wednesday when the Conservatives confirmed their intention of leaving the European People’s Party (EPP), the European Parliament’s main centre-right political group. This is a club with members from all over the 27-nation bloc. It is the largest group in the parliament, with about 37 per cent of the seats, and it will probably retain that position after June’s European Parliament elections.

But the Tories, fed up with the EPP’s enthusiasm for closer EU integration and its support for the EU’s Lisbon reform treaty, say they plan to establish a separate group in the legislature after the elections.

Predictably, the Conservatives’ opponents in the UK say the Tories, if they went ahead, would be putting themselves on the “lunatic fringe” of European politics. Is this true? Let’s have a look and see who might be the Tories’ bedfellows in a new right-of-centre, pan-European political family.

The most likely candidates are the Czech Civic Democrats (who have a helpful English-language website) and Poland’s Law and Justice party (Polish only, as far as I can tell, but here’s what the party slogan translates as: “Patriotism, solidarity, modernity”). Neither fits neatly into mainstream western European definitions of moderate centre-right politics. Both have earned a reputation for being “difficult” on the EU stage. Like the Tories, however, they are not afraid to challenge conventional wisdom. They should be taken seriously.

Other possible companions for the Conservatives are Italy’s Northern League, which is distinctly more right-wing. The League, I fear, could embarrass the Tories with its hostility to foreigners and rather peculiar version of northern Italian ethnic politics. Then there is the Danish People’s Party, which has a similar brand of conservative, anti-immigrant populism. Finally, there are some minor parties in Belgium, Latvia and Lithuania.

All in all, leaving the EPP does not look like the best way for the Tories to maximise their influence in the European Parliament. But I doubt that bothers them much. If it goes down well with party activists and supporters in the UK, why think twice?