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Within the 5 years for the reason that final European elections, EU international locations have suffered three successive and intently associated shocks: the Covid-19 pandemic; the power disaster; and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which became an all-out conflict within the coronary heart of Europe.
All three shocks produced collective EU responses of unprecedented scale. No matter their effectiveness, these responses made widespread European insurance policies extremely seen within the lives of residents, albeit with enormous variations from nation to nation and never all the time with a optimistic influence.
Covid-19 vaccines; the Restoration and Resilience Facility; widespread European borrowing; joint LNG orders; electrical energy subsidies; and the arming of Ukraine in opposition to Russia – all is likely to be seen as indicators of a dramatic development of “extra Europe” within the lives of 450 million Europeans.
However this “extra Europe” has in flip triggered new crises and, above all, revealed some basic contradictions within the EU’s institutional set-up. Specifically, not one of the EU’s unprecedented responses to the three main shocks would have been doable with out activating the Stability and Progress Pact’s “basic escape clause”, the security valve that allowed the EU’s fiscal “straitjacket” to be loosened for 4 years.
Given this context, one may anticipate that almost all European residents, and Greeks amongst them, will vote in June’s European elections on the premise of purely European issues. As soon as once more, that won’t occur, a minimum of not in Greece. The events competing for the votes of some 9 million Greeks (or the …
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