Welcome to Better Europe's weekly update on EU Affairs.  FROM TIRANA TO OTTAWA, WITH LOVE  In 2003, European leaders in Thessaloniki promised that "the future of the Balkans is within the European Union". Fast-forward more than two decades, and six annual visits of President von der Leyen to the region. Against the backdrop of anti-government protests that have been ongoing for four months in Tirana, the Commission chief told Prime Minister Edi Rama that Albania is "among the frontrunners" and "the goal is on the horizon". The goal obviously being full EU membership, as of 2030 or so. The timing is tight: only three negotiation chapters have been closed so far, with 30 more to go by the end of next year. Kosovo, Montenegro, and North Macedonia also got a…

Welcome to Better Europe's weekly update on EU Affairs.  NATIONAL GOVERNMENTS WANT TO PAUSE THE EU SAUSAGE MACHINE "Thanks for the plans for 2027, Ursula. But on second thought, let's not do any EU regulation at all in the coming years". Sounds like a deregulation dream? Well, it's actually reality. This week, Austria and 11 other countries suggested that the Commission should impose a one-year moratorium on new legislation, aka a "regulatory pause". It's nothing new -- the concept has been suggested and applied a few times in the EU's past. Commissioner Charlie McCreevy even insisted on his regulatory pause until May 2008, well after a massive crisis hit the financial sector that he was responsible for. What is different this time, is that pausing the EU's legislative machinery for…

Welcome to Better Europe's weekly update on EU Affairs. FORGET ABOUT SAVING THE CLIMATE, LET’S JUST SAVE OURSELVES Von der Leyen’s State of the Union speech this week confirmed what everyone knew already: Europe is giving up on stopping climate change and is now just trying to survive on a heating planet. The fires, floods and nuclear plant shutdowns we've seen this summer are now simply external factors to live with, or as climate czar Wopke Hoekstra said last month: “we’ve now had enough reality checks that adaptation spending is not a luxury”. Enter the new Climate Insurance Alliance. Not legislation, just a new club of financial market players to ensure that they pay for losses due to extreme weather, and not the taxpayer. Instead of stopping to build houses…

Welcome to Better Europe's weekly update on EU Affairs. BUY EUROPEAN WITH OUR TAXPAYER MONEY PLEASE Long overdue, the EU has finally realised that spending taxpayer's money should be in line with our overall European interests, and not just getting the cheapest low-quality products and services. Commissioner Séjourné finally presented his baby this week: a new Public Procurement Act to modernise and simplify public procurement rules, turning 2 trillion euros of annual spending power into a tool for strategic autonomy, resilience, and sustainability, and not just cost-cutting. The core of the plan? Introduce "European preference" criteria for strategic sectors, mandatory quality criteria including optional environmental and social standards, and a push for digitalisation with a single procurement marketplace. But as always, there is a catch: public authorities can ignore the…

Welcome to Better Europe's weekly update on EU Affairs. GOLD IS GEOPOLITICS This week, the Dutch central bank quietly moved 86 tonnes of gold (worth around €10 billion) from the US and Canada to London, as a consequence of “increasing geopolitical unrest”. Even if the UK isn’t even in the EU anymore, physical proximity seems to matter. The Dutch claim they are concerned about access to their gold tout court — they simply want easier access to potential liquidity in times of crisis. The 32% of Dutch Gold now held in London, they argue, can be traded faster as it has overtaken New York as the world’s top foreign gold storage spot. However, that argument didn’t hold when France sold and re-bought 129 tonnes, moving 5% of its reserves from…

Welcome to Better Europe's weekly update on EU Affairs. LA RENTRÉE -- BRUSSELS VS BERLIN Brussels is finally waking up from its summer snooze, as the Parliamentary recess comes to and end next week and politicians are preparing for "la rentrée". This year's school session is special, as some major decisions on the EU's next seven-year budget are due: the size of the EU's central budget and what we will be spending it on. Interestingly, the leader of the Member State that Commission President Ursula von der Leyen "knows best", had made a bold opening move saying he wants to slash "several hundred billion" from the EU's long-term budget and also block the Commission's request for 2 500 new staff. After all, austerity in Berlin means austerity in Brussels. Chancellor…

Welcome to Better Europe's weekly update on EU Affairs. IT'S GAME OVER FOR TEENS ON TIKTOK The EU’s subsidiarity principle does not mean that policy should be made at the most appropriate level, as many people think. It does mean that Europe should act when its member states cannot address a problem effectively on their own – the burden of proof is on the EU. For kids addicted to social media, we almost seem to be there. Even if addiction is fundamentally a -national- health policy issue, the American drug dealers in this case operate on the internal market. And countries such as France, Denmark, Greece, Austria and Flanders (oh wait) have started to take national measures. So Ursula convened a panel of experts who told her how to protect…

Welcome to Better Europe's weekly update on EU Affairs. PLEASE DO NO SIGNIFICANT HARM WITH MY TAX SPENDING The EU has spent years lecturing the private sector and its member states about the holy principle of Do No Significant Harm (DNSH) – it’s not sustainable to do something good while harming another sustainability objective. Like building a hydropower energy plant that requires some deforestation to build an artificial lake powering the plant. So, the EU’s bible of sustainable finance, the Taxonomy Regulation, tells banks, investors, and companies how to measure the “alignment” of their investments with the EU’s environmental goals. Yet when it comes to the EU’s own budget, the DNSH commandment suddenly becomes optional. The EPP now wants to remove these environmental safeguards from the next EU’s multi-year budget,…