Social Europe articles on politics

GM is worth around $60 billion, and has over 200,000 employees. Its front-line workers earn from $19 to $28.50 an hour, with benefits. Uber is estimated to be worth some $40 billion, and has 850 employees. Uber also has over 163,000 drivers (as of December – the number is expected to double by June), who average $17 an hour in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., […]

Are Europe’s welfare states fit to meet the demands brought on by the financial crisis? In an interview with EUROPP’s Managing Editor Stuart Brown, Tito Boeri discusses the need for a ‘stress test’ of the European welfare state, why citizens in southern European countries have been much more susceptible to poverty during the crisis, and the role […]

As many analysts and observers previously predicted (myself included on Social Europe), the eurozone crisis not only is not over, as some European leaders had boasted, but it has returned in a more virulent form. The possibility of a Greek exit – Grexit – from the eurozone is closer than ever. The current standoff between Greece […]

It was a paragraph hidden away in a Der Spiegel story about European Commission President, Jean-Claude Juncker. During the European election campaign, one read, “the word ‘solidarity’ stood out on Juncker’s posters.” And further down: “Merkel’s CDU was so incensed about Juncker’s slogan that they almost thought about banning him from appearing in Berlin.” So, […]

A number of commentators have written on the extent to which Syriza managed to attract the backing of a wide section of Greek society in its election victory on 25 January. Vasilis Leontitsis writes that one of the key dynamics in the election was the support Syriza received from lower middle class families. He argues that while […]

Greece’s new government, led by the anti-austerity Syriza party, presents the eurozone with a challenge that it has not yet had to face: dealing with national officials who are outside the traditional European mainstream. Syriza is in many ways a radical party, and its views on economic policy are often described as hard left; but […]

The day the Troika came to town was a dark day for the Irish. Troika is a Russian word meaning a sled drawn by three horses or a dance. For the Irish people it was both a dance, but to a grating, dissonant tune, and like being pulled in three directions by the horses. The […]

The message from the Greek election must not be misunderstood. The fact that more than 36% of the country’s voters cast their ballots for Syriza, a far-left political party, does not mean that Greece has suddenly become communist. Rather, the electorate was expressing its indignation, despair, and wounded national pride. Greece’s European partners need to understand […]

Few expressions are more abused among commentators than the description of a pending meeting of European Union heads of government as “a make or break summit.” But given the Greek-Euro area turmoil and the deepening military conflict in eastern Ukraine, the European Council meeting which begins today in Brussels was always likely to be seen […]

Five years after the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis broke out in Greece, the prospect of a SYRIZA victory generated high hopes within Europe and beyond. Its promise to seek a debt write-down for Greece and to reject/ renegotiate the policies dictated by the Troika have been seen as the first real challenge of democratic politics […]

Will Greece default and leave the euro? On this compound-question market opinion has swung back and forth, particularly since last Wednesday’s announcement by the ECB that it would no longer accept Greek Central Bank Bonds as collateral for regular funding replenishments (although the ECB’s more expensive ELA funding window remains open). This was the ‘nuclear […]

In his Critique of Judgment, Immanuel Kant names three maxims for republican thinking to follow collectively: a) thinking for oneself; b) thinking in the manner of the other; c) always be at one with ones own thoughts. The second maxim concerns “an extended way of thinking” or justice and fairness. Right now, the German finance […]