The Alternate Foreign Minister for European Affairs, Nikos Xydakis, noted during his intervention at the informal meeting of the EU General Affairs Council (GAC) that “the latest developments in the EU and the wider European neighbourhood (UK referendum, attempted coup in Turkey) have increased political instability and created a variety of tension hotspots. We need to read these developments correctly and try to organize a European response, particularly ahead of the new presidential election in Austria and the referendum in Hungary.” He continued, stressing that the new second-round presidential election in Austria holds the risk of an extreme-right president’s being elected, and that the referendum in Hungary, in the case of a positive outcome for the government in Budapest, means that a decision of the European Council can be called into question by a domestic referendum in a single country.
The agenda for the GAC, which met today in Bratisalva, included a) assessment of the implementation of the European Council’s Strategic Agenda (June 2014) and redefining of priorities for acceleration of the implementation of the Agenda’s goals, and b) finding ways to improve the EU’s communication strategy, with the aim of halting euroskepticism and the centrifugal trends observed in the Union and expressed in the result of the British referendum.
During his intervention, Mr. Xydakis talked of the technocratization of EU policy, clarifying that the political problems are reduced to a technical level, with a kind of EU idiolect prevailing – an idiolect that cannot be understood by the wider public – while instead of the problems being solved by the politicians themselves, who have democratic legitimacy, Euro-bureaucrats are trying to solve them.
Favoring the community method over the intergovernmental, he stated that “at such a critical time, the impression is being given that the struggle for convergence, cohesion and solidarity among the EU member states has definitively failed. For this reason, because such struggles must not be definitively lost, we need to persist in the community method and reject inter-governmentalism. We need to continue to strive towards “communitization” of the budget and towards the shifting of surpluses.”
Mr. Xydakis spoke of political instability that is due to the absence of a socially cohesive center in today’s EU, noting that the prevailing image is of social fragmentation, with the exclusion of social strata and with impoverishment.
Mr. Xydakis closed his intervention by making a call for defence of democracy (République) and of the religiously neutral state (État laïque).
July 26, 2016