The pandemic was not long ago. And yet the member states are stepping on the brakes when it comes to learning the lessons from this time. On Thursday, the co-legislators will meet in the informal conciliation procedure (“trilogue”) to put the finishing touches to the Single Market emergency instrument.
It is intended to ensure the functioning of the internal market even in crises such as a pandemic or other state of emergency. Parliament wants to ensure that nurses, technicians for ventilators, or specialists for nuclear power plants can cross the border from one member state to another in the event of a crisis.
In 2020 and 2021, this was sometimes not possible during lockdown phases. At the Franco-German border, nurses and doctors were sometimes unable to report for duty.
Following the last round of voting on the Single Market Emergency Instrument (SMEI) at the ambassador level, it is now feared that the member states will be opposed. They want to stick to their national registration procedures.
Andreas Schwab (CDU), internal market expert and SMEI rapporteur, has no sympathy for this. He warns that Thursday’s trilogue, in which the final hurdles were supposed to be cleared, could fail: “As long as the member states consider their privileges more important than the security of their citizens, this proposal will fail.”
The Mercosur trade agreement is on the brink of collapse. As Table.Media has learned from negotiating circles, the EU Commission no longer sees any chance of announcing an agreement at the Mercosur summit on Dec. 7 in Brazil. Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Brazil’s President Lula did not explicitly declare the agreement a failure at the German-Brazilian government consultations in Berlin yesterday. As the EU Commission is leading the negotiations on the EU side, it would not have been the Chancellor’s responsibility to declare the talks over. However, it was reported in the morning from circles within the EU negotiating delegation that the planned trip to Brazil for the final negotiations and conclusion had been canceled. “There will be no declaration in Rio de Janeiro.“
Commission President Ursula von der Leyen wanted to sign the agreement at a meeting with the Mercosur Group in Rio de Janeiro on Thursday. However, the agreement between the EU on the one hand and Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay on the other, which has been fully negotiated since 2019, failed due to resistance from Argentina as well as a lack of support from France.
The Argentinian government, which will be replaced in a few days, had signaled that it was not prepared to reach an agreement. A spokesperson for the Brazilian foreign ministry had already made it clear at the weekend that the matter would be handed over to the new government in Argentina. The right-wing populist Javier Milei, who describes himself as an anarcho-capitalist, will take office a few days after the Mercosur summit on Dec. 10.
On Saturday, French President Emmanuel Macron made his “no” to the agreement clear at the COP28 climate conference: “I cannot ask our farmers, our industrialists in France and everywhere else in Europe to make an effort to decarbonize, while I suddenly abolish all tariffs to import goods that are not subject to these rules.”
Concerning adjustments made to the text in the meantime, he said: “A few sentences were added at the beginning and end of the text to please France – but that doesn’t work.” Macron is reportedly showing consideration for his country’s farmers. French farmers feared that imports of South American beef would make life difficult for them.
Over the weekend, the negotiating team led by EU Trade Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis tried to save the agreement. As was reported in Brussels, “the negotiators were sitting on packed suitcases”. Brazil’s President Lula, who had helped negotiate the agreement himself, flew directly from the climate conference to the German-Brazilian intergovernmental consultations in Berlin.
In Berlin, Lula tried to continue spreading optimism. “I am Brazilian, I will not give up.” That is why he will travel to the meeting in Rio de Janeiro on Thursday as planned. “I’m going to meetings to convince others”, said Lula. “I hope that the winds are favorable and that people have an open heart.” French President Emmanuel Macron must give up his resistance. According to Lula, he recently gave him the following advice during a phone call: “Talk to your wife.”
Scholz did not want to officially give up hope yet either. He hoped that it would be “finalized quickly”. However, the Chancellor made it clear that there are major obstacles. He asked everyone involved “to be as pragmatic as possible and as willing to compromise as possible”.
Brazil currently holds the presidency of the Mercosur Group. After the Mercosur summit, Paraguay will take over the rotating presidency of the Mercosur group. While Brazil has strongly supported the free trade agreement under Lula, support from the smaller country of Paraguay is not certain. Bernd Lange (SPD), head of the Trade Committee in the European Parliament, assumes that Mercosur will now be on ice for at least a year: “After the European elections and the formation of the new EU Commission, there will hopefully be a new attempt at this important agreement.”
He was convinced that the agreement “would be beneficial for both the EU and the Mercosur countries and would contribute to sustainable development”. The value of the agreement goes beyond individual economic sectors and is of a “geopolitical nature”.
Negotiators from the Mercosur states and the EU Commission, which is responsible for trade agreements, finalized it between 2016 and June 2019. However, it was controversial due to the Bolsonaro government and its disregard for the Paris Climate Agreement. The political agreement covers the areas of customs duties, rules of origin, the elimination of technical barriers to trade, services, public procurement, intellectual property, sustainability, and a chapter on SMEs.
With the agreement, the EU and South America wanted to create the largest trade zone in the world, with more than 720 million consumers. The EU plus Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay would have covered almost 20 percent of the global economy and more than 31 percent of global goods exports.
In 2022, the EU had a slight trade deficit in economic relations with the Mercosur states. The EU’s imports from the Mercosur states comprised goods and services worth a total of €63.1 billion. The EU states exported €55.8 billion. The deficit amounted to €7.3 billion. With Malte Kreutzfeldt
344,132 posts on Telegram, Reddit, YouTube and X (formerly Twitter) were used by the Fundamental Rights Agency for a closer examination. The content was in Bulgarian, Swedish, Italian and German. These languages are considered less well-researched in hate speech research. The researchers also assumed that the selected language areas differed significantly both socially and in terms of regulation before the Digital Services Act came into force.
A good 400 postings classified as probable hate posts per language were examined in more detail. The categories: gender-based discrimination and content directed against people of African origin as well as Jews and Roma.
However, the findings of the report are only part of the picture, warns the EU authority itself: The evaluation had taken place on the basis of what had probably already passed through the platforms’ moderation filters and perhaps even human moderators. Nevertheless, they do provide an insight into what happens on the platforms.
After closer examination, the researchers found elements of hate speech in a good half of the posts examined, according to the report by the Fundamental Rights Agency: 85% of them contained offensive language, 39% slurs and 29% spread negative stereotypes. 59% of the posts belonged to more than one category.
In some cases, particularly in the case of negative stereotypes, offensive language was not necessarily used. The researchers classified nine percent as calls for violence. They found incitement to hatred or discrimination in eight and five percent of the posts examined respectively.
The researchers classified 47 percent of the hate postings identified as harassment against one or more specific people – two-thirds of which were directed at women. Overall, women are three times more likely to be the target of online hate than people of African descent, according to the researchers. At the same time, however, posts directed against this group were particularly hateful – just ahead of posts that discriminated against Jews.
However, hate and hate speech do not appear to meet with broad approval on the platforms. “The 500 most hateful posts on X received an average of one retweet and only just over 1 percent received more than 10 retweets”, the report states. On average, these posts received 2,400 views, according to the report, though this was mainly due to a few outliers at the top. Half of the hate posts were viewed less than 228 times. What is also striking, however, is that calls for violence received a particularly high number of views (over 5,900).
There was little counter-speech for the Fundamental Rights Agency. Only 4 percent of the posts examined had responses that could be classified as such. The largest number of these could be found on X. Germany was somewhat out of the ordinary: Here, as many as 10 percent of posts had received a rebuttal – twice as many as in Sweden, Bulgaria, and Italy. Posts that discriminated against Jews were most frequently countered.
The FRA also commissioned a survey on the extent to which young people with a migration background encounter online hate. Most frequently affected: People with North African ancestry in the Netherlands. 29% of 16-24-year-olds stated that they had encountered such content on Facebook, Instagram, X or TikTok. The second largest group is Germans with roots south of the Sahara (19 percent), followed by those in Finland (18 percent).
The investigation took place before the Digital Services Act came into force. Nevertheless, it should give the enforcement authorities some pointers as to where the platforms need to take a closer look. The Fundamental Rights Agency emphasizes that there is often a fine line between the right to freedom of expression and the rights of those affected. With their distorted databases, which they themselves use to reproduce stereotypes, algorithms are hardly in a position to reliably assess this. Human content moderators are often not sufficiently trained for this task either.
There have been two events in recent weeks that at first glance appear to have nothing to do with each other: The far-right Geert Wilders won the Dutch parliamentary elections with a record result – partly because the conservatives no longer ruled out forging a coalition with him for the first time. At the same time, the EU plant protection regulation for fewer pesticides failed in the European Parliament because the conservatives cooperated with the far right.
What do the two events have in common? They shed light on what threatens to happen after the European elections on June 9: that the firewall to the far right in the European Parliament will fall. And that cooperation between conservatives and right-wing extremists will become normalized. The consequences for the EU’s European unification project would be devastating – especially for its ambitious environmental and climate legislation, the Green Deal. This threatens to come to a complete standstill or even be reversed.
The head of the EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, described the Green Deal as “Europe’s man on the moon moment”. In no less than 30 years, our fossil-based economic system is to be restructured across Europe. The special thing about it: With von der Leyen, a conservative took up the momentum that many voters had set with strong green election results. Fridays For Future had turned the European elections into a climate election, particularly in Germany – and brought the Greens a record result of 20.5 percent.
Von der Leyen’s Green Deal was always controversial in the Council of Member States. What was decisive, however, was that the Conservatives in Parliament always supported the proposed legislation in the end. However, for some months now, the wind has been blowing from a different direction. In times of high energy prices, the mood across Europe is turning against climate protection. Climate policy has entered the waters of a cultural battle. It is perceived by broad sections of the population as a socially unjust elite project that is being forced upon them with bans.
Manfred Weber, leader of the conservative EPP group, is the main figure behind the growing resistance to the Green Deal. He is openly flirting with the right-wing conservative ECR Group. The group to which the fascist Fratelli d’Italia party of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni belongs. The informal Weber-Meloni pact is already having a negative impact: The renaturation law (NRL) as one of the pillars of the Green Deal could only be saved with drastic watering down at the last moment. In the case of the ban on combustion engines from 2035, it was only possible to prevent a complete cut-off, while the EU Plant Health Regulation (SUR) has now failed completely.
The elections threaten a turning point: European polls predict that the Greens will lose half their seats on June 9 and that the ECR parliamentary group and the far-right ID, which includes the AfD, will gain a quarter. That is not enough for an absolute majority. But with the help of dissenters from other parliamentary groups, all other Green Deal bills are at risk of being scrapped. Or even its reversal.
The second emissions trading scheme – for buildings and transport – is due to come into force across Europe in 2027. This is a key lever for gradually replacing combustion cars and oil and gas heating systems with climate-friendly alternatives via market-based price incentives. The price jump will be noticeable at the pumps and on gas bills. It is already clear how the Weber-Meloni Pact will react: Urge the EU Commission by parliamentary majority to suspend the market steering mechanism by means of an emergency regulation.
Europe’s civil society does not yet seem to have recognized the explosive nature of the situation. And certainly not many citizens. We urgently need to change that. By showing them the relevance of their vote and mobilizing the pro-European camp of voters against the impending shift to the right. On the one hand, the focus is on first-time voters. As the voting age has been lowered to 16, this cohort comprises seven age groups. We must no longer leave TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube to the far-right parties. They flooded young people with disinformation and right-wing narratives during the last state elections.
At the same time, we must succeed in addressing “stay-at-home Europeans”. People whose basic attitude is pro-European, but who attach so little relevance to the election that they stay away. Three messages are important for them.
Because despite all the warnings, we need to inspire voters with a vision for Europe. A Europe that dares to introduce climate money for Europeans so that ecology and social issues can go hand in hand. A Europe that dares to introduce a European Inflation Reduction Act so that economic restructuring can be financed as in the USA. That dares to convert the energy supply to 100 percent renewables as quickly as possible.
We need to start building broad civil society alliances now to get all Europeans to vote on June 9. Because there is a lot at stake.
The pandemic was not long ago. And yet the member states are stepping on the brakes when it comes to learning the lessons from this time. On Thursday, the co-legislators will meet in the informal conciliation procedure (“trilogue”) to put the finishing touches to the Single Market emergency instrument.
It is intended to ensure the functioning of the internal market even in crises such as a pandemic or other state of emergency. Parliament wants to ensure that nurses, technicians for ventilators, or specialists for nuclear power plants can cross the border from one member state to another in the event of a crisis.
In 2020 and 2021, this was sometimes not possible during lockdown phases. At the Franco-German border, nurses and doctors were sometimes unable to report for duty.
Following the last round of voting on the Single Market Emergency Instrument (SMEI) at the ambassador level, it is now feared that the member states will be opposed. They want to stick to their national registration procedures.
Andreas Schwab (CDU), internal market expert and SMEI rapporteur, has no sympathy for this. He warns that Thursday’s trilogue, in which the final hurdles were supposed to be cleared, could fail: “As long as the member states consider their privileges more important than the security of their citizens, this proposal will fail.”
The Mercosur trade agreement is on the brink of collapse. As Table.Media has learned from negotiating circles, the EU Commission no longer sees any chance of announcing an agreement at the Mercosur summit on Dec. 7 in Brazil. Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Brazil’s President Lula did not explicitly declare the agreement a failure at the German-Brazilian government consultations in Berlin yesterday. As the EU Commission is leading the negotiations on the EU side, it would not have been the Chancellor’s responsibility to declare the talks over. However, it was reported in the morning from circles within the EU negotiating delegation that the planned trip to Brazil for the final negotiations and conclusion had been canceled. “There will be no declaration in Rio de Janeiro.“
Commission President Ursula von der Leyen wanted to sign the agreement at a meeting with the Mercosur Group in Rio de Janeiro on Thursday. However, the agreement between the EU on the one hand and Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay on the other, which has been fully negotiated since 2019, failed due to resistance from Argentina as well as a lack of support from France.
The Argentinian government, which will be replaced in a few days, had signaled that it was not prepared to reach an agreement. A spokesperson for the Brazilian foreign ministry had already made it clear at the weekend that the matter would be handed over to the new government in Argentina. The right-wing populist Javier Milei, who describes himself as an anarcho-capitalist, will take office a few days after the Mercosur summit on Dec. 10.
On Saturday, French President Emmanuel Macron made his “no” to the agreement clear at the COP28 climate conference: “I cannot ask our farmers, our industrialists in France and everywhere else in Europe to make an effort to decarbonize, while I suddenly abolish all tariffs to import goods that are not subject to these rules.”
Concerning adjustments made to the text in the meantime, he said: “A few sentences were added at the beginning and end of the text to please France – but that doesn’t work.” Macron is reportedly showing consideration for his country’s farmers. French farmers feared that imports of South American beef would make life difficult for them.
Over the weekend, the negotiating team led by EU Trade Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis tried to save the agreement. As was reported in Brussels, “the negotiators were sitting on packed suitcases”. Brazil’s President Lula, who had helped negotiate the agreement himself, flew directly from the climate conference to the German-Brazilian intergovernmental consultations in Berlin.
In Berlin, Lula tried to continue spreading optimism. “I am Brazilian, I will not give up.” That is why he will travel to the meeting in Rio de Janeiro on Thursday as planned. “I’m going to meetings to convince others”, said Lula. “I hope that the winds are favorable and that people have an open heart.” French President Emmanuel Macron must give up his resistance. According to Lula, he recently gave him the following advice during a phone call: “Talk to your wife.”
Scholz did not want to officially give up hope yet either. He hoped that it would be “finalized quickly”. However, the Chancellor made it clear that there are major obstacles. He asked everyone involved “to be as pragmatic as possible and as willing to compromise as possible”.
Brazil currently holds the presidency of the Mercosur Group. After the Mercosur summit, Paraguay will take over the rotating presidency of the Mercosur group. While Brazil has strongly supported the free trade agreement under Lula, support from the smaller country of Paraguay is not certain. Bernd Lange (SPD), head of the Trade Committee in the European Parliament, assumes that Mercosur will now be on ice for at least a year: “After the European elections and the formation of the new EU Commission, there will hopefully be a new attempt at this important agreement.”
He was convinced that the agreement “would be beneficial for both the EU and the Mercosur countries and would contribute to sustainable development”. The value of the agreement goes beyond individual economic sectors and is of a “geopolitical nature”.
Negotiators from the Mercosur states and the EU Commission, which is responsible for trade agreements, finalized it between 2016 and June 2019. However, it was controversial due to the Bolsonaro government and its disregard for the Paris Climate Agreement. The political agreement covers the areas of customs duties, rules of origin, the elimination of technical barriers to trade, services, public procurement, intellectual property, sustainability, and a chapter on SMEs.
With the agreement, the EU and South America wanted to create the largest trade zone in the world, with more than 720 million consumers. The EU plus Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay would have covered almost 20 percent of the global economy and more than 31 percent of global goods exports.
In 2022, the EU had a slight trade deficit in economic relations with the Mercosur states. The EU’s imports from the Mercosur states comprised goods and services worth a total of €63.1 billion. The EU states exported €55.8 billion. The deficit amounted to €7.3 billion. With Malte Kreutzfeldt
344,132 posts on Telegram, Reddit, YouTube and X (formerly Twitter) were used by the Fundamental Rights Agency for a closer examination. The content was in Bulgarian, Swedish, Italian and German. These languages are considered less well-researched in hate speech research. The researchers also assumed that the selected language areas differed significantly both socially and in terms of regulation before the Digital Services Act came into force.
A good 400 postings classified as probable hate posts per language were examined in more detail. The categories: gender-based discrimination and content directed against people of African origin as well as Jews and Roma.
However, the findings of the report are only part of the picture, warns the EU authority itself: The evaluation had taken place on the basis of what had probably already passed through the platforms’ moderation filters and perhaps even human moderators. Nevertheless, they do provide an insight into what happens on the platforms.
After closer examination, the researchers found elements of hate speech in a good half of the posts examined, according to the report by the Fundamental Rights Agency: 85% of them contained offensive language, 39% slurs and 29% spread negative stereotypes. 59% of the posts belonged to more than one category.
In some cases, particularly in the case of negative stereotypes, offensive language was not necessarily used. The researchers classified nine percent as calls for violence. They found incitement to hatred or discrimination in eight and five percent of the posts examined respectively.
The researchers classified 47 percent of the hate postings identified as harassment against one or more specific people – two-thirds of which were directed at women. Overall, women are three times more likely to be the target of online hate than people of African descent, according to the researchers. At the same time, however, posts directed against this group were particularly hateful – just ahead of posts that discriminated against Jews.
However, hate and hate speech do not appear to meet with broad approval on the platforms. “The 500 most hateful posts on X received an average of one retweet and only just over 1 percent received more than 10 retweets”, the report states. On average, these posts received 2,400 views, according to the report, though this was mainly due to a few outliers at the top. Half of the hate posts were viewed less than 228 times. What is also striking, however, is that calls for violence received a particularly high number of views (over 5,900).
There was little counter-speech for the Fundamental Rights Agency. Only 4 percent of the posts examined had responses that could be classified as such. The largest number of these could be found on X. Germany was somewhat out of the ordinary: Here, as many as 10 percent of posts had received a rebuttal – twice as many as in Sweden, Bulgaria, and Italy. Posts that discriminated against Jews were most frequently countered.
The FRA also commissioned a survey on the extent to which young people with a migration background encounter online hate. Most frequently affected: People with North African ancestry in the Netherlands. 29% of 16-24-year-olds stated that they had encountered such content on Facebook, Instagram, X or TikTok. The second largest group is Germans with roots south of the Sahara (19 percent), followed by those in Finland (18 percent).
The investigation took place before the Digital Services Act came into force. Nevertheless, it should give the enforcement authorities some pointers as to where the platforms need to take a closer look. The Fundamental Rights Agency emphasizes that there is often a fine line between the right to freedom of expression and the rights of those affected. With their distorted databases, which they themselves use to reproduce stereotypes, algorithms are hardly in a position to reliably assess this. Human content moderators are often not sufficiently trained for this task either.
There have been two events in recent weeks that at first glance appear to have nothing to do with each other: The far-right Geert Wilders won the Dutch parliamentary elections with a record result – partly because the conservatives no longer ruled out forging a coalition with him for the first time. At the same time, the EU plant protection regulation for fewer pesticides failed in the European Parliament because the conservatives cooperated with the far right.
What do the two events have in common? They shed light on what threatens to happen after the European elections on June 9: that the firewall to the far right in the European Parliament will fall. And that cooperation between conservatives and right-wing extremists will become normalized. The consequences for the EU’s European unification project would be devastating – especially for its ambitious environmental and climate legislation, the Green Deal. This threatens to come to a complete standstill or even be reversed.
The head of the EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, described the Green Deal as “Europe’s man on the moon moment”. In no less than 30 years, our fossil-based economic system is to be restructured across Europe. The special thing about it: With von der Leyen, a conservative took up the momentum that many voters had set with strong green election results. Fridays For Future had turned the European elections into a climate election, particularly in Germany – and brought the Greens a record result of 20.5 percent.
Von der Leyen’s Green Deal was always controversial in the Council of Member States. What was decisive, however, was that the Conservatives in Parliament always supported the proposed legislation in the end. However, for some months now, the wind has been blowing from a different direction. In times of high energy prices, the mood across Europe is turning against climate protection. Climate policy has entered the waters of a cultural battle. It is perceived by broad sections of the population as a socially unjust elite project that is being forced upon them with bans.
Manfred Weber, leader of the conservative EPP group, is the main figure behind the growing resistance to the Green Deal. He is openly flirting with the right-wing conservative ECR Group. The group to which the fascist Fratelli d’Italia party of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni belongs. The informal Weber-Meloni pact is already having a negative impact: The renaturation law (NRL) as one of the pillars of the Green Deal could only be saved with drastic watering down at the last moment. In the case of the ban on combustion engines from 2035, it was only possible to prevent a complete cut-off, while the EU Plant Health Regulation (SUR) has now failed completely.
The elections threaten a turning point: European polls predict that the Greens will lose half their seats on June 9 and that the ECR parliamentary group and the far-right ID, which includes the AfD, will gain a quarter. That is not enough for an absolute majority. But with the help of dissenters from other parliamentary groups, all other Green Deal bills are at risk of being scrapped. Or even its reversal.
The second emissions trading scheme – for buildings and transport – is due to come into force across Europe in 2027. This is a key lever for gradually replacing combustion cars and oil and gas heating systems with climate-friendly alternatives via market-based price incentives. The price jump will be noticeable at the pumps and on gas bills. It is already clear how the Weber-Meloni Pact will react: Urge the EU Commission by parliamentary majority to suspend the market steering mechanism by means of an emergency regulation.
Europe’s civil society does not yet seem to have recognized the explosive nature of the situation. And certainly not many citizens. We urgently need to change that. By showing them the relevance of their vote and mobilizing the pro-European camp of voters against the impending shift to the right. On the one hand, the focus is on first-time voters. As the voting age has been lowered to 16, this cohort comprises seven age groups. We must no longer leave TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube to the far-right parties. They flooded young people with disinformation and right-wing narratives during the last state elections.
At the same time, we must succeed in addressing “stay-at-home Europeans”. People whose basic attitude is pro-European, but who attach so little relevance to the election that they stay away. Three messages are important for them.
Because despite all the warnings, we need to inspire voters with a vision for Europe. A Europe that dares to introduce climate money for Europeans so that ecology and social issues can go hand in hand. A Europe that dares to introduce a European Inflation Reduction Act so that economic restructuring can be financed as in the USA. That dares to convert the energy supply to 100 percent renewables as quickly as possible.
We need to start building broad civil society alliances now to get all Europeans to vote on June 9. Because there is a lot at stake.
