Social Europe articles on politics

Well, Bo, thank you very much for joining us today to do a SWOT analysis of the Swedish Social Democratic party SAP. What is the historic position of the SAP in the Swedish political system and where does it stand currently? Well, the Swedish Social Democrats have I think forever, at least since back in […]

The pace of migration to Europe has increased significantly in the last two years. Handling the high number of refugees in particular has posed great challenges for many European countries. In this regard, the increasing intermingling of refugee and (voluntary or economic) migration flows produces particular difficulties, with many migrants trying to obtain destination-country residence […]

Where we are At the end of August Britain’s Labour Party formally announced its policy towards future relations with the European Union. The policy document explicitly “accepts the referendum result” and will “build a close new relationship with the EU”. The British media chose to emphasize not EU employment rights or environment protections but Labour’s […]

Over the past two decades, Italy has been one of the strongest and most enduring markets for populist parties in Western Europe. While in other European countries the rise or the emergence of populism is a recent development or has occurred only occasionally, it is a persistent feature of Italian politics. In the sixteen years […]

While public sentiment about the European project has rebounded, Europeans remain largely dissatisfied with whether their voices and concerns count in Brussels. Despite recurrent calls for radically reforming the European Union to ensure a greater involvement of EU citizens, little is expected to change between now and the next 2019 European Parliament (EP) elections. The […]

This might seem easy. The depreciation immediately after Brexit, plus subsequent declines in the number of Euros you can buy with a £, are pushing up import prices which feed into consumer prices (with a lag) which reduce real wages. But real wages depend on nominal wages as well as prices. So why are nominal […]

The British public is coming to realise as the Brexit negotiations unfold that the entire referendum campaign was misleading. It was a deliberate attempt by the Brexit camp to manipulate mendaciously — by repeating a series of untruths — popular understanding of what the UK’s relationship with the EU is about. The economic case for […]

It would be a serious error to interpret the authoritarian drive in Turkey through a cultural/civilizational lens: it is not an extreme move by a power-crazy dictator, still less the finally unveiled predictable outcome of political Islam’s strategy. It is not the result of a ‘clash of civilizations’ between Islam and the secular West, in […]

The crisis has put an end to wage convergence of the poorer Central and Eastern European new EU member states (EU-11, being: Czechia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia (2004), Bulgaria, Romania (2007) and Croatia (2013)) towards wage levels in the West. Figure 1 below shows their share of wages (nominal compensation) in percentage […]

Europe, like the United States, has seen dramatic changes in how people work. Compared to 15 years ago, many more people have part-time, temp or mini-jobs, or are self-employed. While the number of full-time jobs has increased recently as the unemployment rate has slowly declined, far more of Europe‘s employment growth has come from part-time and […]