International

The European Commission is once again funding a campaign, this time to promote flowers. Apart from the question of whether it’s really necessary for the campaign to be financed from our taxes, it’s also a pretty wrongheaded campaign, one at which many people take offence. Instead of imposing additional taxes on countries like the Netherlands, the Commission would be better cutting its own spending, beginning with support for this stupid flower campaign.

Do you remember? During the campaign for the European elections the SP advocated devising a Plan B for the euro. The structural problems have never been resolved and probably never can be. We predicted at the time that the least sign of adverse weather would plunge the Eurozone into a storm of difficulties. This week one piece of bad news has followed another. The financial markets are again becoming ‘nervous’ and Greece is once more paying 9% interest on new loans. Yet any discussion of a Plan B remains taboo. In my view that’s irresponsible policy. It’s playing with fire.

Dutch candidate-Commissioner Frans Timmermans (photo: Roel Wijnants / CC BY-NC 2.0)

Tuesday the hearing takes place of Dutch Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans, who has been nominated for the European Commission. It’s the last of the series of such hearings, although there could still be supplementary sessions with candidates who haven’t done so well the first time around. Things could be tense for the Dutch candidate: to date he has done everything by the book, and he is well-known on the international stage. Nevertheless, being from the centre-left Dutch Labour Party, he could fall foul of the row between centre-left and centre right, a victim of the political establishment’s scheming. In my role as a Member of the European Parliament I don’t go along with such things. If Timmermans adopts socially progressive policies and puts a distance between himself and the corporate lobby, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.

Beginning on 19th September, Euro-MPs will be getting the measure of the European Commission team proposed by newly-appointed Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker. I doubt that there’s much chance that all candidate-Commissioners will make it over the finishing line; there are too many unsavoury stories about at least two of them. We’ll be reading a great deal about these in the next few days and weeks. But whatever else happens, the Juncker team, possibly with a few substitutes for the rejected nominees, will prove to be just as voracious as its predecessors. A different Europe requires more than the changing of the guard at the Commission.