On a plane with Nicolas Schmit

The lead candidate of the Party of European Socialists sets out his political stall for the European Parliament elections in June.

Sunday morning, April 7th. I bump into Nicolas Schmit, European commissioner for jobs and social rights and Spitzenkandidat of the Party of European Socialists in the coming European Parliament elections, on a morning flight to Charleroi. 

Schmit is returning from a campaign rally in Romania. I am on my way to a European demonstration in Brussels against looming cuts in healthcare, as European Union leaders plan to reinstate the fiscal rules they had suspended during the pandemic.

Schmit is reading a book, 30 idées pour 2030, published by the centre-left, francophone think-tank Confrontations Europe, which calls for a social and democratic European constitution. Around us are a lot of tired Romanian workers on their way home to Belgium—like Dariu next to me, who travelled to Bucharest airport on a minibus through the night after visiting his parents in a village next to the border with Moldova.

Three priorities

I ask Schmit if he is willing to answer some questions about his work. He agrees. I take out my mobile and start: ‘So what are your priorities?’. Schmit replies:

In three words, building a democratic Europe, a social Europe, but also a strong Europe. Economically strong, also politically strong in a totally different geopolitical environment. 

For me it’s very important to strengthen our democracy inside, because democracy is attacked from the outside—the war in Ukraine, Putin and all the authoritarian regimes—but also from the inside, as we know, we have some countries where there is an authoritarian aspiration. But also the way the union has to function has to be further democratised. That’s my first priority.

The second one is about a social Europe obviously, and this means that there has to be a general social clause. We cannot have a climate transition without social justice. We have already started to strengthen the EU’s social dimension with the minimum-wage directive, the platform-work directive and other initiatives. But we must make sure that there is now no social pause. We have to further develop and strengthen the social dimension of the union.

Third, the union must also be more autonomous. Europe has to invest more in its industry and this must always mean good jobs with good wages. Further developing our strategic autonomy means both to strengthen the union internally but also externally, given the security issues we are facing today.

I reply: ‘That sounds all well. But calls for a more democratic and social Europe have been part of EU declarations for many years. However if you look at the anti-social interventions of the EU after the financial crisis in Ireland and elsewhere, and the EU’s shift to a new economic-governance regime after 2008 which bypasses national parliaments and the European Parliament, I wonder if the European Commission and the Council of the EU are also responsible for the current problems of democracy in Europe?’

Schmit responds:

Well, I would say that Europe has fallen into a neoliberal trap. Its policies have been very much inspired by the neoliberal ideology, believing that what was most important were the markets. This total blind trust in the markets had as consequence the financial crisis and so on.

In the last few years, I think we have reached some kind of a turning-point, where we have started to put social demands back high on the agenda. But it’s not sure, you know, what comes next. Turning-points are important but you have to make sure that this work towards more social policies continues, because there is always the possibility to go backwards again. 

So what I’m standing for is that we continue working in this direction. We have really to build up the social dimension in many new areas, because things are changing very rapidly. If you look at the world of work, for instance, algorithms are present everywhere and that’s why we have adopted this platform-work directive, to protect workers in that sector, and we have to continue on that.

A few hours later, I am standing outside the European Parliament. Healthcare trade unionists from across Europe are protesting against the commercialisation of healthcare. The next day, I have been invited into the parliament to present the findings of our European Research Council project on the EU’s new economic-governance interventions and healthcare in Germany, Ireland, Italy and Romania, from the financial crisis to the Covid-19 emergency.

Dramatic context

A Belgian MEP and member of the Left group in the parliament, Marc Botenga, opens the healthcare conference, waving a front-page article from Le Soir that morning: ‘Nouvelles règles budgétaires: la Belgique incapable d’investir suffisamment dans ses écoles et ses hôpitaux’ (New budgetary rules: Belgium incapable of investing enough in its schools and hospitals). The article was based on a new study by the New Economics Foundation and the European Trade Union Confederation, which showed that application of the revised EU fiscal rules would mean that governments representing 90 per cent of Europe’s population would not be able to meet their social and climate targets.

This puts Schmit’s warning about the imminent risk of going ‘backwards’ into a dramatic context. Whether the new rules will lead to a reprise of the harsh austerity cuts and the commodifying restructuring of employment relations and public services, prescribed by the EU’s country-specific new economic-governance interventions after the financial crisis, will indeed depend on the composition of the new commission and thus also of the new European Parliament. The appointments of the commission’s next president and of each commissioner require the parliament’s consent. That is why the June elections are by far the most important elections in Europe this year.

This is part of our series on a progressive ‘manifesto’ for the European elections