Big crowd in Brussels: More than 50 heads of state and government are expected today and tomorrow, for the summit of EU states with the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC). The first meeting of its kind in eight years (and only the third ever) is the building block of a “new agenda with old friends”, according to a senior EU diplomat. In the future, the two sides plan to meet every two years and remain in close exchange in the interim.
The Europeans have rediscovered the Latin American states after years of political neglect – they are looking for allies in the geopolitical showdown with China, Russia and the USA. At the summit, the EU Commission and member states want to launch 108 projects in the region under the umbrella of Global Gateway; declarations of intent are also to be signed with Chile for the supply of critical raw materials and with Argentina and Uruguay for energy partnerships.
Commission President Ursula von der Leyen will also urge Brazilian President Lula da Silva to press ahead with negotiations on the trade agreement with Mercosur at her bilateral meeting on Monday morning. The EU side has been waiting for more than three months for the other side to take a position on its own demands.
Lula has already publicly rejected this as “unacceptable”, and a breakthrough is not expected at the summit. In the Ukraine war, too, the Latin American states have so far not been fully in line with the West. The war and its global consequences will play a “prominent role”, says a senior diplomat, likely at Tuesday’s luncheon, which will be held without delegations. The summit will also be an opportunity to hear how Latin Americans plan to contribute to ending the war, they said.
I hope you have a wonderful start to the new week!
Pedro Sánchez’s campaign strategy is characterized by three elements: stylizing himself as a victim of the “conservative and right-wing media”, praising his own policies to the skies and demonizing his rival Alberto Nuñez Feijóo, head of the Partido Popular (PP). Since Sánchez called early elections in late May, he has been trying to improve his image. This has suffered from broken promises, political U-turns and the failure of the so-called “only yes is yes” law.
The polls are not exactly in Sánchez’s favor. According to these, the PP would win the election with 34 percent of the vote (between 144 and 147 seats), while Sánchez’s Socialists (PSOE) would receive only 28 percent of the vote (104 to 107 seats).
After the PSOE’s poor showing in the regional elections, after which Sánchez announced new elections, he described 90 percent of the media as conservative and hostile to him. He denounced that “the political right has a dominant power in the mainstream media”. So Sánchez, who has often referred to the opposition as “Trumpists”, is resorting to exactly what Donald Trump did at the time: disqualify media that criticize him.
In interviews with more than a dozen media outlets, Sánchez conveys the same message: that what the political right and the media called “sanchismo” is a bubble of manipulation, of “lies and evil”. He claims that the way the conservative media reports on his government does not correspond to reality.
He describes as “correct and transparent” only those election polls that show positive results for him. For Sánchez, these include those of the PRISA group – with the newspaper El País and the radio station SER. The Prime Minister also considers the election polls of the state institution CIS, which is supposed to act independently but is headed by someone close to the PSOE. In mid-June, the PSOE even reported several newspapers critical of Sánchez to the electoral authority for the way they disseminate polls.
Already in the regional election, Sánchez and his PSOE received their comeuppance for, among other things, numerous broken promises. Among the most sensitive issues is that Sánchez had repeatedly promised never to pact with Bildu (the party that emerged from the terrorist group ETA). He then became head of government in 2020 with Bildu’s support and has passed several reforms this legislative term with Bildu behind him.
In 2019, Sánchez also promised not to lift sentences for Catalan separatists. In 2021, Sánchez not only pardoned them, but later removed the offenses of embezzlement and sedition from the penal code. This reform of the Penal Code was whipped through Congress on Dec. 22 – precisely on the day when the traditional and enormously high-profile Christmas lottery is played in Spain and everyone is preoccupied.
Added to this is the filling of posts: More than 20 public institutions are currently headed by people close to the PSOE. In January 2020, Sánchez appointed his then justice minister to head the Attorney General’s Office, an institution that is actually independent. With the reform of the Constitutional Court earlier this year, Sánchez also succeeded in installing a majority of PSOE-affiliated members on the supervisory body.
Sánchez’s election strategy also includes a series of interviews entitled “The Best Spain” (La mejor España), in which he assumes the role of interviewer for his ministers. They answer the Prime Minister’s questions about their ministerial positions, which leads to a loop of self-praise between interviewee and interviewer. For example, in a recent interview with Sánchez, Economy Minister Nadia Calviño responded that the government in this legislature “has not only saved the Spanish economy, but has also contributed to saving the European economy”.
Although the PP is ahead in the polls, it may need the right-wing Vox party to achieve an absolute majority. Sánchez uses this to spread the narrative that the PP will “bring the ultra-right into government” and has already adopted the “ultra-conservative positions” of Vox.
Branded a liar for his numerous unkept promises, Sánchez is now trying to spread a similar narrative about opposition leader Feijóo at every opportunity. After the TV debate between the two last Monday, in which Feijóo performed better, the PSOE released a video pointing out Feijóo’s inaccuracies in some data. The incorrect data that Sánchez cited in the same debate did not appear in it.
Did EPP leader Manfred Weber dismantle the von der Leyen coalition? In the heated debates on the renaturation law – the Christian Democrats wanted to reject this key Green Deal regulation – Socialists, Greens and Liberals made this accusation. The tone has become rough in Parliament. The European elections in June are casting their first shadows. The common ground between the EPP, S&D and Liberals seems to have been exhausted.
Unlike national parliaments, the European Parliament does not represent the opposition and the government. Therefore, there are no formal coalitions or coalition agreements in the transnational representation of the people. There are, however, informal alliances of the major party families.
The pro-European party families agree, for example, to ensure a majority in the election of the Commission President. Unspoken behind this is also the promise to secure majorities in Parliament for the central legislative proposals. However, since no group leader in the European Parliament can oblige their deputies to vote in a particular way by forcing them to do so, majorities are not formed strictly according to the boundaries of the political groups anyway. The von der Leyen coalition is also an informal alliance without a treaty.
In concrete terms, however, this means little in the day-to-day life of the Parliament: In the last mandate from 2014 to 2019, there was an informal coalition between Socialists and Christian Democrats. At least in the beginning, Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker met every Tuesday with Martin Schulz and Manfred Weber of the S&D and EPP to make sure they had support. Now there are no longer weekly scheduled meetings of the party families that support the Commission with von der Leyen.
There are indeed agreements between the parliamentary groups, but they relate to individual legislative projects or personnel decisions, for example, most recently in the filling of some top jobs in the parliamentary administration. In national parliaments, the coalition is over as soon as it fails to achieve its own majorities in votes. In a loose arrangement, such as the von der Leyen coalition, that was never the criterion.
The von der Leyen coalition was formed in July 2019, when the heads of state and government put together a personnel package on the fringes of a special summit after the European elections. It was agreed that Christian Democrat Ursula von der Leyen would become Commission President, Christine Lagarde would move to head the ECB, Socialist Josep Borrell would become Foreign Affairs Envoy and Liberal Charles Michel would become permanent Council President. The three European party families of Christian Democrats (EPP), Socialists (S&D) and Liberals (Renew) were involved in the deal and wanted to ensure that von der Leyen got the necessary majority in the European Parliament.
She was elected a few days later on July 16. It was close: She needed 374 votes and got 383. The Greens, who criticize Weber most loudly for allegedly breaking the von der Leyen coalition, were not part of the deal. This was despite the fact that von der Leyen wanted to dedicate her mandate to the ecological restructuring of the national economy and courted them fiercely.
The von der Leyen coalition was never fully united. The German Social Democrats voted against her, as did a number of Socialists from France and the Netherlands, and some Christian Democrats, especially from the German group, refused to vote for her. Renew voted for her in a more or less unanimous way. She only managed her narrow majority because she also received votes from deputies from
The deputies of the PIS, the Fidesz and the right-wing radicals have almost never voted for Commission proposals in the last four years. If von der Leyen runs for Commission President again, she will not be able to count on support from the right once more.
There is also a great deal of resentment against her in the EPP. It is conceivable that up to a third of the 177 members from her own party family would refuse to vote for her today. Von der Leyen will have this in mind when deciding whether to run again.
The Commission’s central projects in this mandate are the Fit for 55 legislation to implement the Green Deal. In the parliamentary work, the parties of the von der Leyen coalition, together with the Greens, have been instrumental in determining the negotiating positions for the trilogues. The Social Democrats and the Greens tended to tighten up the Commission’s proposals, while Renew and the EPP tended to dampen them. With the renaturation law, the EPP flat-out rejected a central proposal of the Commission. This has never happened in the history of the EPP.
A closer look at the individual votes paints a more nuanced picture. The von der Leyen coalition did not stand together on these major Green Deal projects:
It happens that the EPP wins a vote even with the votes of the right-wing radicals. This was the case with the resolution on protection for livestock against large carnivores in Europe. However, the EPP, S&D, Renew, Greens as well as the ECR and Left groups assure not to make any agreements with the radical right ID group. Leading representatives of these groups affirm that the firewall stands against the right-wing radicals. Nevertheless, it also happens that the Greens and the ID vote the same way. One may assume, however, that the two factions are guided by different motives.
Unlike in the Bundestag, for example, where the radical right-wing AfD occupies committee posts – in the European Parliament, the firewall stands when it comes to appointments. The radical right-wing ID would have been entitled to two committee chairs in this mandate, according to D’Hondt. The pro-European parties prevented this. The EPP and S&D benefited from this. The right-wing ID group would also have been entitled to a vice-presidency. Here, too, the political groups prevented access.
Romina Plonsker makes no secret of her homeland. In the video interview with her, a plush Hennes, the club mascot of 1. FC Köln – Cologne’s most famous football club -, stands in the background wearing a carnival hat. Next to it hangs an aerial photograph of her hometown of Pulheim. The 34-year-old is serving her second term in the state parliament for the Rhein-Erft-Kreis I district, which is bordered by RWE’s opencast lignite mines. “With the second largest percentage increase in votes after Hendrik Wüst”, she points out. That makes Plonsker a young and female hope of the North Rhine-Westphalian Christian Democrats.
“For me, Europe only exists with open borders and a lived freedom”, Plonsker says. “The border I still experienced was the mobile phone border.” She said she particularly enjoyed experiencing Europe through student exchanges to Poland and Denmark. After school, Plonsker learned at a bank, then studied business administration at the University of Cologne, graduating with a master’s degree. She spent an Erasmus semester at Carlos III University in Madrid.
Her father, with whom she always liked to have passionate discussions at the kitchen table, encouraged her to get involved in politics, she says. One day she said to him: “If I always only discuss things with you, I won’t change anything.” His response: “Then go into politics and get involved.” While still in school, she attended an event of the local ‘Junge Union’ (young union) and became a party member in 2006. Her father also joined the party a few years ago.
When the Rhein-Erft I constituency became vacant, Plonsker ran against the incumbent SPD direct deputy and won. She has been a member of the Economic Affairs Committee since the first legislative term. When Plonsker became the additional spokesperson for Europe and International Affairs of the CDU parliamentary group last year, the war in Ukraine was raging. One of her first official acts was to establish a regional partnership between NRW and the Dnipropetrovsk oblast in eastern Ukraine. “Since then, the state of NRW has supplied generators and medical products, for example, as well as organizing a first reconstruction conference.”
For the past year, Plonsker has also been touring the Dutch and Belgian borders. In the process, she encounters problems that shouldn’t exist in a borderless Europe. “For example, horses abroad need different vaccinations than in Germany”, she explains. But in the Eifel, she says, the borders are floating. If you don’t have all the vaccinations when you go for a ride, there could be penalties.
Another example that sticks with Plonsker: A Dutch woman working in Germany is not allowed to work more than three days a week in a home office, otherwise she falls under Dutch labor law. “Then she has different notice periods, for example. The employing company then has to treat employees differently.” Plonsker wants to cross borders everywhere.
The CDU politician is currently working on a proposal to promote cross-border projects in culture and education. One problem, she said, is that fewer and fewer children speak Dutch, which means that people can only converse in English at the border. “We have asked the state government to facilitate the recognition of ‘native speaker’ Dutch teachers.” Because there is currently a shortage of teachers there, too. Tom Schmidtgen
Big crowd in Brussels: More than 50 heads of state and government are expected today and tomorrow, for the summit of EU states with the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC). The first meeting of its kind in eight years (and only the third ever) is the building block of a “new agenda with old friends”, according to a senior EU diplomat. In the future, the two sides plan to meet every two years and remain in close exchange in the interim.
The Europeans have rediscovered the Latin American states after years of political neglect – they are looking for allies in the geopolitical showdown with China, Russia and the USA. At the summit, the EU Commission and member states want to launch 108 projects in the region under the umbrella of Global Gateway; declarations of intent are also to be signed with Chile for the supply of critical raw materials and with Argentina and Uruguay for energy partnerships.
Commission President Ursula von der Leyen will also urge Brazilian President Lula da Silva to press ahead with negotiations on the trade agreement with Mercosur at her bilateral meeting on Monday morning. The EU side has been waiting for more than three months for the other side to take a position on its own demands.
Lula has already publicly rejected this as “unacceptable”, and a breakthrough is not expected at the summit. In the Ukraine war, too, the Latin American states have so far not been fully in line with the West. The war and its global consequences will play a “prominent role”, says a senior diplomat, likely at Tuesday’s luncheon, which will be held without delegations. The summit will also be an opportunity to hear how Latin Americans plan to contribute to ending the war, they said.
I hope you have a wonderful start to the new week!
Pedro Sánchez’s campaign strategy is characterized by three elements: stylizing himself as a victim of the “conservative and right-wing media”, praising his own policies to the skies and demonizing his rival Alberto Nuñez Feijóo, head of the Partido Popular (PP). Since Sánchez called early elections in late May, he has been trying to improve his image. This has suffered from broken promises, political U-turns and the failure of the so-called “only yes is yes” law.
The polls are not exactly in Sánchez’s favor. According to these, the PP would win the election with 34 percent of the vote (between 144 and 147 seats), while Sánchez’s Socialists (PSOE) would receive only 28 percent of the vote (104 to 107 seats).
After the PSOE’s poor showing in the regional elections, after which Sánchez announced new elections, he described 90 percent of the media as conservative and hostile to him. He denounced that “the political right has a dominant power in the mainstream media”. So Sánchez, who has often referred to the opposition as “Trumpists”, is resorting to exactly what Donald Trump did at the time: disqualify media that criticize him.
In interviews with more than a dozen media outlets, Sánchez conveys the same message: that what the political right and the media called “sanchismo” is a bubble of manipulation, of “lies and evil”. He claims that the way the conservative media reports on his government does not correspond to reality.
He describes as “correct and transparent” only those election polls that show positive results for him. For Sánchez, these include those of the PRISA group – with the newspaper El País and the radio station SER. The Prime Minister also considers the election polls of the state institution CIS, which is supposed to act independently but is headed by someone close to the PSOE. In mid-June, the PSOE even reported several newspapers critical of Sánchez to the electoral authority for the way they disseminate polls.
Already in the regional election, Sánchez and his PSOE received their comeuppance for, among other things, numerous broken promises. Among the most sensitive issues is that Sánchez had repeatedly promised never to pact with Bildu (the party that emerged from the terrorist group ETA). He then became head of government in 2020 with Bildu’s support and has passed several reforms this legislative term with Bildu behind him.
In 2019, Sánchez also promised not to lift sentences for Catalan separatists. In 2021, Sánchez not only pardoned them, but later removed the offenses of embezzlement and sedition from the penal code. This reform of the Penal Code was whipped through Congress on Dec. 22 – precisely on the day when the traditional and enormously high-profile Christmas lottery is played in Spain and everyone is preoccupied.
Added to this is the filling of posts: More than 20 public institutions are currently headed by people close to the PSOE. In January 2020, Sánchez appointed his then justice minister to head the Attorney General’s Office, an institution that is actually independent. With the reform of the Constitutional Court earlier this year, Sánchez also succeeded in installing a majority of PSOE-affiliated members on the supervisory body.
Sánchez’s election strategy also includes a series of interviews entitled “The Best Spain” (La mejor España), in which he assumes the role of interviewer for his ministers. They answer the Prime Minister’s questions about their ministerial positions, which leads to a loop of self-praise between interviewee and interviewer. For example, in a recent interview with Sánchez, Economy Minister Nadia Calviño responded that the government in this legislature “has not only saved the Spanish economy, but has also contributed to saving the European economy”.
Although the PP is ahead in the polls, it may need the right-wing Vox party to achieve an absolute majority. Sánchez uses this to spread the narrative that the PP will “bring the ultra-right into government” and has already adopted the “ultra-conservative positions” of Vox.
Branded a liar for his numerous unkept promises, Sánchez is now trying to spread a similar narrative about opposition leader Feijóo at every opportunity. After the TV debate between the two last Monday, in which Feijóo performed better, the PSOE released a video pointing out Feijóo’s inaccuracies in some data. The incorrect data that Sánchez cited in the same debate did not appear in it.
Did EPP leader Manfred Weber dismantle the von der Leyen coalition? In the heated debates on the renaturation law – the Christian Democrats wanted to reject this key Green Deal regulation – Socialists, Greens and Liberals made this accusation. The tone has become rough in Parliament. The European elections in June are casting their first shadows. The common ground between the EPP, S&D and Liberals seems to have been exhausted.
Unlike national parliaments, the European Parliament does not represent the opposition and the government. Therefore, there are no formal coalitions or coalition agreements in the transnational representation of the people. There are, however, informal alliances of the major party families.
The pro-European party families agree, for example, to ensure a majority in the election of the Commission President. Unspoken behind this is also the promise to secure majorities in Parliament for the central legislative proposals. However, since no group leader in the European Parliament can oblige their deputies to vote in a particular way by forcing them to do so, majorities are not formed strictly according to the boundaries of the political groups anyway. The von der Leyen coalition is also an informal alliance without a treaty.
In concrete terms, however, this means little in the day-to-day life of the Parliament: In the last mandate from 2014 to 2019, there was an informal coalition between Socialists and Christian Democrats. At least in the beginning, Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker met every Tuesday with Martin Schulz and Manfred Weber of the S&D and EPP to make sure they had support. Now there are no longer weekly scheduled meetings of the party families that support the Commission with von der Leyen.
There are indeed agreements between the parliamentary groups, but they relate to individual legislative projects or personnel decisions, for example, most recently in the filling of some top jobs in the parliamentary administration. In national parliaments, the coalition is over as soon as it fails to achieve its own majorities in votes. In a loose arrangement, such as the von der Leyen coalition, that was never the criterion.
The von der Leyen coalition was formed in July 2019, when the heads of state and government put together a personnel package on the fringes of a special summit after the European elections. It was agreed that Christian Democrat Ursula von der Leyen would become Commission President, Christine Lagarde would move to head the ECB, Socialist Josep Borrell would become Foreign Affairs Envoy and Liberal Charles Michel would become permanent Council President. The three European party families of Christian Democrats (EPP), Socialists (S&D) and Liberals (Renew) were involved in the deal and wanted to ensure that von der Leyen got the necessary majority in the European Parliament.
She was elected a few days later on July 16. It was close: She needed 374 votes and got 383. The Greens, who criticize Weber most loudly for allegedly breaking the von der Leyen coalition, were not part of the deal. This was despite the fact that von der Leyen wanted to dedicate her mandate to the ecological restructuring of the national economy and courted them fiercely.
The von der Leyen coalition was never fully united. The German Social Democrats voted against her, as did a number of Socialists from France and the Netherlands, and some Christian Democrats, especially from the German group, refused to vote for her. Renew voted for her in a more or less unanimous way. She only managed her narrow majority because she also received votes from deputies from
The deputies of the PIS, the Fidesz and the right-wing radicals have almost never voted for Commission proposals in the last four years. If von der Leyen runs for Commission President again, she will not be able to count on support from the right once more.
There is also a great deal of resentment against her in the EPP. It is conceivable that up to a third of the 177 members from her own party family would refuse to vote for her today. Von der Leyen will have this in mind when deciding whether to run again.
The Commission’s central projects in this mandate are the Fit for 55 legislation to implement the Green Deal. In the parliamentary work, the parties of the von der Leyen coalition, together with the Greens, have been instrumental in determining the negotiating positions for the trilogues. The Social Democrats and the Greens tended to tighten up the Commission’s proposals, while Renew and the EPP tended to dampen them. With the renaturation law, the EPP flat-out rejected a central proposal of the Commission. This has never happened in the history of the EPP.
A closer look at the individual votes paints a more nuanced picture. The von der Leyen coalition did not stand together on these major Green Deal projects:
It happens that the EPP wins a vote even with the votes of the right-wing radicals. This was the case with the resolution on protection for livestock against large carnivores in Europe. However, the EPP, S&D, Renew, Greens as well as the ECR and Left groups assure not to make any agreements with the radical right ID group. Leading representatives of these groups affirm that the firewall stands against the right-wing radicals. Nevertheless, it also happens that the Greens and the ID vote the same way. One may assume, however, that the two factions are guided by different motives.
Unlike in the Bundestag, for example, where the radical right-wing AfD occupies committee posts – in the European Parliament, the firewall stands when it comes to appointments. The radical right-wing ID would have been entitled to two committee chairs in this mandate, according to D’Hondt. The pro-European parties prevented this. The EPP and S&D benefited from this. The right-wing ID group would also have been entitled to a vice-presidency. Here, too, the political groups prevented access.
Romina Plonsker makes no secret of her homeland. In the video interview with her, a plush Hennes, the club mascot of 1. FC Köln – Cologne’s most famous football club -, stands in the background wearing a carnival hat. Next to it hangs an aerial photograph of her hometown of Pulheim. The 34-year-old is serving her second term in the state parliament for the Rhein-Erft-Kreis I district, which is bordered by RWE’s opencast lignite mines. “With the second largest percentage increase in votes after Hendrik Wüst”, she points out. That makes Plonsker a young and female hope of the North Rhine-Westphalian Christian Democrats.
“For me, Europe only exists with open borders and a lived freedom”, Plonsker says. “The border I still experienced was the mobile phone border.” She said she particularly enjoyed experiencing Europe through student exchanges to Poland and Denmark. After school, Plonsker learned at a bank, then studied business administration at the University of Cologne, graduating with a master’s degree. She spent an Erasmus semester at Carlos III University in Madrid.
Her father, with whom she always liked to have passionate discussions at the kitchen table, encouraged her to get involved in politics, she says. One day she said to him: “If I always only discuss things with you, I won’t change anything.” His response: “Then go into politics and get involved.” While still in school, she attended an event of the local ‘Junge Union’ (young union) and became a party member in 2006. Her father also joined the party a few years ago.
When the Rhein-Erft I constituency became vacant, Plonsker ran against the incumbent SPD direct deputy and won. She has been a member of the Economic Affairs Committee since the first legislative term. When Plonsker became the additional spokesperson for Europe and International Affairs of the CDU parliamentary group last year, the war in Ukraine was raging. One of her first official acts was to establish a regional partnership between NRW and the Dnipropetrovsk oblast in eastern Ukraine. “Since then, the state of NRW has supplied generators and medical products, for example, as well as organizing a first reconstruction conference.”
For the past year, Plonsker has also been touring the Dutch and Belgian borders. In the process, she encounters problems that shouldn’t exist in a borderless Europe. “For example, horses abroad need different vaccinations than in Germany”, she explains. But in the Eifel, she says, the borders are floating. If you don’t have all the vaccinations when you go for a ride, there could be penalties.
Another example that sticks with Plonsker: A Dutch woman working in Germany is not allowed to work more than three days a week in a home office, otherwise she falls under Dutch labor law. “Then she has different notice periods, for example. The employing company then has to treat employees differently.” Plonsker wants to cross borders everywhere.
The CDU politician is currently working on a proposal to promote cross-border projects in culture and education. One problem, she said, is that fewer and fewer children speak Dutch, which means that people can only converse in English at the border. “We have asked the state government to facilitate the recognition of ‘native speaker’ Dutch teachers.” Because there is currently a shortage of teachers there, too. Tom Schmidtgen
