Correct me if I’m wrong, I didn’t follow EU politics at the time of the last election, but didn’t she campaign on green-deal policies for her first term? I remember reading about this somewhere. So moving away from that and closer to ECR would be quite the shift.

His work in eradicating gang violence was impressive, I get why the few Salvadorians who aren’t behind bars would vote for him. Although I can’t help but wonder about how many people might have gotten unjustly incarcerated because of how much power he’s given to the police.

I see. Well, I for one, think TikTok is definitely worse than Twitter because of its addictive nature, little user agency (you have almost no freedom of picking your own content, you are basically in the algorithm’s hands) and serious privacy concerns.

Twitter is by no means a great platform, it’s just that TikTok is SO BAD that it’s actually hard to beat it in terms of shittiness.

Why would that be weird? Which platform would you have preferred (other than Mastodon, I guess)?

I have read about this procedure yesterday and it was also on twitter, from the account of the Commission.

Correct, but that review process won’t have any votes on it, meaning it also won’t be possible for Hungary (or anyone else) to veto it. Doesn’t seem like that great of an accomplishment on Hungary’s side.

Possible. I’d love it if they actually went through with the article 7 threats, but until then using said threat to have Orban sit down is the next best thing.

News outlet are being extremely vague about Orban’s motives, but it’s clear that no funds have been unfrozen. By the looks of it, it seems Hungary received no grants at all and just changed its mind out of the goodness of her heart, which is weird.

From DW

“From what we are hearing from our sources, they made it very clear to Viktor Orban that he is standing all alone in the EU, blocking this essential aid for Ukraine,” she said, adding that following the message it became clear Orban would finally say yes and so the EU leaders sat together to finalize the deal.

This makes me wonder if anything went on behind those closed doors. We know that yesterday Orban met with Meloni, who according to euronews

[Meloni] has fashioned herself as the most dexterous mediator between Budapest and Brussels. Meloni and Orbán held bilateral talks on Wednesday evening in anticipation of the high-stakes meeting.

All that’s left to hope is that Meloni and other EU leaders succesfully managed to scare off Hungary and that no backroom deals went on.

How is being more virtuous shooting ourselves in the foot, exactly?

Let me clarify. It’s great on an environmental standpoint, it’s quite terrible on an industrial and commercial one. If we are the only ones imposing climate regulation, businesses and industries will move abroad where it’s cheaper to operate. I’m not saying scrapping the green deal laws is a good thing, but I am saying that I can see the logic behind it. And it’s not because of the evil capitalism either, it’s a desperate attempt for European industry to stay relevant on the global stage.

30+ year approach? Where is that coming from? The median construction time for a nuclear reactor is 89 months, or 7,5 years. And it’s not like we are only going to need it now either, our civilization is going to need reliable power sources for the foreseeable future, so why settle with alternatives that can only barely cover our needs now and need to be replaced with fossil fuels when not available, when a much cleaner option (that being nuclear) remains a possibility?

The wind always blows somewhere. Diversification of locations across a country or ideally across Europe minimizes reliability issues.

That somewhere will also need power, though. Not to mention, building interconnections across nations is an arduous task that requires time and financing on its own. According to the European Commission the current objective is reaching a 15% interconnection capacity by 2030 (meaning every member state should be able to export up to 15% of its capacity). And only 16 of 27 countries are on track with that objective. Sure, going forward with this will be great and very much necessary, but we cannot rely solely on interconnections, even when thinking 10 years from now.

Let’s take last night as an example: here are the electricity map data for Germany. At midnight, despite having an enormous renewable capacity installed, the wind was evidently pretty low and of course solar was of little use, so they still had to fire up their coal, gas and biomass generators.

As this was going on, neighbouring Austria and Netherlands were doing great, with respectively 85% and 71% of their grids being powered by renewables, but unfortunately this wasn’t nearly enough for power hungry Germany.
In the meantime, France, despite only using 24% of renewables in its mix, managed to get the 4th lowest carbon intensity on our continent and the 7th worldwide, with a carbon intensity over 10 times better than that of Germany.

The rest can be covered by investment in storage technologies.

Some day, sure. But we need reliable and clean energy now, not in the distant future. So the first step is improving our grids today, then when the technology allows it we can phase out nuclear too, and move to a fully renewable grid. But that simply cannot happen right now.

I am really conflicted about this. On one hand I get that green policies are instrumental in stopping climate change before it’s too late. On the other I know some people who work in the automotive industry and they all agree that we shot ourselves in the foot with this regulation. We ended up being the only committed nation block (whatever) while anyone else (namely China, India and the USA) kept doing little or nothing, token contributions if any, but few long run plans like we did.

Surely there is lots of lobbying from the car industry behind this EPP decision, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was also the genuine intention of many voters. Our industry is already falling behind, being the only ones concerned with green policies isn’t helpful at all, it just allows everyone else to outcompete us.

While renewable sources are awesome, they are still not as reliable as the other solutions. You still need a baseline to keep your grid up at night, when the wind wanes or during droughts (depending on your renewable source of choice). Nuclear is the next best thing. Low CO2, safe and cheap in the long run. If everyone in the EU was as commited to nuclear as countries like France, Finland and Belgium are we could get reliably cheap power everywhere, which would be an amazing asset for our future industrial growth!

YES! That was one of my favourite subs back on Reddit, glad to see it reborn.

Ok hear an European federalist’s (me) take on this:

Yes, ID and ECR are set to gain a pretty substantial amount of seats, especially compared to the results of the previous election, as the Guardian’s infographic clearly highlights:

However, their conclusion:

As a result, the far-right ID group is projected to gain up to 40 more seats, for a total of 98, potentially making it the third political force and opening up the possibility of a “populist right” coalition (EPP, ECR, and ID) with 49% of MEPs in the new parliament

seems a bit of a stretch. While ID is firmly eurosceptic and ECR is… undecisive, EPP is firmly pro Europe. EPP has been the largest party in the European Parliament for over 20 years, and they are the ones who elected names like von der Leyen and Metsola. I wouldn’t call either “Anti-European”.

As the POLITICO “Poll of Polls” clearly highlights, the top groups aren’t set to change all that much. The most notable changes are Renew losing quite a lot of seats and ID replacing it as the 3rd political force, but EPP and S&D mantain a significant lead.

If ECR and ID ever came to building a “populist right coalition”, I doubt EPP would be on their side. I think it’s way more likely that they’d side with other forces like S&D or RE and try to stop them.

In conclusion: yeah it sucks that Renew has lost so many seats, and it also sucks that far right voters seem to prefer the way more extreme ID to the comparatively more sane ECR, but things aren’t nearly as tragic as the media is portraying them to be.

If it did exist (and it doesn’t), it would be an excessive cause of government spending. Money that could otherwise be used to pay for other services like health or pension spending, or subsidize (read as: “cut taxes on”) necessary stuff like food or petrol.

I think their argument per se does make sense, it’s just the initial assumption that is flawed.

Hi, thanks for the lenghty explanation. Sorry, I should have been clearer in my reply, I am aware of what the confederacy was, historically. My concern was more about what they meant when saying that the GOP might have wanted to return to that. I do know a thing or two about American politics, but I just don’t recall ever hearing about them having similar stances.

Make no mistake, I am not defending the Republicans here. From my point of view they are definitely the worst of the two parties and some of their policies are downright evil (including but not limited to: privatizations, opposing welfare, opposing national healthcare, opposing public transport…).

My entire point in this was just saying: I don’t think they are as bad, evil, dangerous or even criminal as the neo nazi parties currently running in Germany, in particular the topic of discussion, NPD.

Can you elaborate on the “the GOP wants to return to the confederacy” thing? As you can probably tell I am not American, don’t really follow your politics that much. Referencing anything in particular? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of it.

Anyway, I feel like you have kinda overlooked my last point, where NPD is openly claiming areas in the borders of their neighbours. That’s a pretty big deal, coming from a neo nazi party in the country that started WW2. And I don’t recall reading about the GOP having similar policies.

I haven’t actually bothered looking at what AfD stands for (obvious disclaimer: I’m not German, I’m allowed to not care lol)

Just wanted to make it even more clear that this party wasn’t the one causing the people in Berlin to storm the streets.

EDIT: I tried opening your article, and aside from the language barrier, which my browser extensions were able to overcome, it looks paywalled.

No you don’t. As bad as the American Republican party might be, they are not THIS bad.

From the NPD wikipedia page:

The Homeland is a neo-Nazi political party. […]

The Homeland argues that NATO fails to represent the interests and needs of European people. The party considers the European Union to be little more than a reorganization of a Soviet-style government of Europe along financial lines. […] The Homeland is strongly anti-Zionist, frequently criticizing the policies and activities of Israel.

The Homeland’s platform asserts that Germany is larger than the present-day Federal Republic, and calls for a return of German territory lost after World War II, a foreign policy position abandoned by the German government in 1990.

Props to OP for making it clear in the post body, but the headline made it a bit more clickbate-y than it should have been. That article is about NPD, a very minor and actual neo nazi party. The anti-right protests that have been happening recently, instead, are about the AfD (alternative for Germany) party, which is set to gain a sizeable 23% of the votes for its far right coalition ID during the next European elections.

In other words yeah they are cutting funds from a far right party, but not from the far right party.

Oh do they? Never heard about that. Guess I’ve learnt something new. I wonder if it would be different for us, given how fewer big companies the EU has compared to the US.

I’m not familiar with the Delaware situation. Is it similar to Ireland’s, then?

Foreign-owned multinationals continue to contribute significantly to Ireland’s economy, making up 14 of the top 20 Irish firms (by turnover), employing 23% of the private sector labour-force, and paying 80% of the collected corporation tax.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Republic_of_Ireland