Social Europe articles on politics

The concept of crises engendering opportunities for the “rebirth” of Europe should have died with the Greek experience in the most dramatic phase of which Yanis Varoufakis took an active part. Having worked with former Prime Minister George Papandreou before embarking on his “radical Left” experiment, which nearly cost Greece its place in the Eurozone, Varoufakis should have learned that courting the abyss and generating crises is never a […]

Good afternoon, Eunice, and thank you very much for taking the time to talk to me today about the Portuguese Socialist Party. What would you say is the historic position of social democracy and the Socialist Party of Portugal in the Portuguese political system. Where does it currently stand? Well, the Portuguese Socialist Party has […]

I and many others have argued that the basic EU treaties have flexibility to accommodate most social democratic policies such as those in the 2017 Manifesto of the UK Labour Party. Our argument may soon suffer a decisive blow from the EU parliament. In March 2012 twenty-five EU national governments signed the Treaty on Stability, […]

I would like to nominate the average, everyday EU citizen as the “Hero of the Year.” Europeans have been bombarded for nearly a decade by a media firestorm of “headline schizophrenia” — Brexit, Grexit, eurozone instability, Russia-Ukraine, refugees, terrorism, the rise of populism…each of these a seemingly deadly affliction. About a year ago, France’s Prime Minister Manuel Valls solemnly declared that […]

What are the prospects for the Nordic-Baltic region (5+3) in a decidedly unstable international environment? The situation is radically different from what it looked like in the late 1980s and 90s. It is mostly due to external forces, which are in a flux, rather than due to any outstanding internal failures. When I became personally […]

In-work poverty increased during the economic and financial crisis that hit European shores in 2008. By 2014, ten per cent of European workers were at risk of poverty, up from eight per cent in 2007. Ten per cent is a significant figure: the working poor represent a substantial group that can’t be ignored. Just as […]

Austria’s last parliamentary election in September 2013 resulted in two new parties gaining parliamentary representation, the populist Team Stronach (founded by billionaire Frank Stronach) and the liberal NEOS, while the BZÖ, Jörg Haider’s party which was in government between 2002 and 2006, failed to pass the threshold for parliamentary representation. The governing parties, the Social Democrats (SPÖ) […]

Boris Johnson’s recent article in the Telegraph, ‘My vision for a bold, thriving Britain enabled by Brexit’, raises a host of troubling issues. Not least, Johnson accuses young people he encounters in Britain, who have the twelve stars of the European Union flag “lip-sticked on their faces”, of “beginning to have genuinely split allegiances”. He […]

So, László, thank you very much for being with us to talk about the Hungarian Socialist Party. What is the historical position of the Social Democratic Party in Hungary’s political system and where does it stand now? To analyse the Hungarian situation we need to go back to 1989, because that’s when the Hungarian Socialist […]

The “referendum” on Catalonia’s independence, held on October 1, did not end up well for its promoters. It had been declared illegal by the Spanish Constitutional Court, and the national government did everything in its power to prevent it from happening. In the end, around 43% of citizens entitled to vote turned out, and the […]

In a world more economically integrated than ever before, the need to redistribute growth more equally has increased dramatically. International trade has helped bring more welfare and less poverty, but we also see that inequality has been on the rise in many countries, and between countries and regions as well. Donald Trump is today functioning […]