Europe

Paywall? https://archive.is/X0n8o

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/27727613

https://archive.ph/DVPDp

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/58461212

This is a compelling argument. Is it time we stop considering Europe and Asia as separate continents when they're in fact a single continent and even share the same tectonic plate?

The video illustrates the current issues with the EU and why it is unable to be strong for its member states. NOTE: the video is sponsored by Union of European Federalists

When, in 2011, Marine Le Pen took over as head of the National Front (FN) party he founded four decades earlier, she quickly took steps towards making it electable – rebranding it the National Rally (RN) and cleaning up its image in a policy known as "de-demonisation".

The European Islamophobia Report 2023 found that Israel's ongoing war on Gaza has functioned as a 'geopolitical catalyst of anti-Muslim racism in Europe'.

A report on Saturday has revealed that Israel's ongoing military actions in Gaza have led to a significant increase in Islamophobia across Europe.

The European Islamophobia Report 2023 looked at anti-Muslim sentiment in 28 European countries, finding that the war on the besieged Palestinian enclave had "functioned as a geopolitical catalyst of anti-Muslim racism in Europe".

We call on governments, the EU and African institutions to stop investing in large scale hydrogen production and transport projects that are blocking the construction of a just energy model for communities across Europe and Africa.

It took over two decades and several high-profile ethical scandals, including the shocking Qatargate, for the main EU institutions to finally agree on the establishment of a joint authority to ensure the public integrity of its members. This authority – the Interinstitutional Body for Ethical Standards – aims to “strengthen trust in Union institutions and their democratic legitimacy”. Nevertheless, a year later, this ethics body is nowhere to be found, largely blocked by the reluctance of the largest EU political group in the EU Parliament – the EPP – and hard-right factions (the ECR, Patriots and Sovereigntists).

Very few would have noticed if it were not for yet another public integrity scandal shaking the EU Parliament. This time it is not a third country, but a third-country company – the Chinese tech giant Huawei – that is suspected to have bribed some Members of the EU Parliament and their assistants to advance its commercial interests in the EU.

Contrary to Qatargate, which involved direct cash payments to MEPs, Belgian prosecutors (who have been investigating since 2021) accuse Huawei of more mundane – and fairly conventional – lobbying practices. These include free football tickets, lavish gifts, and even all-expenses-paid trips to China in exchange for favourable treatment. To the extent that all of these types of conduct are governed (and constrained) by existing EU ethical standards applicable to the EU Parliament and its Members, the unfolding scandal provides tangible proof of the inadequacy of the Parliament’s ethical framework, notwithstanding the much-acclaimed post-Qatargate reforms.

As such, this latest debacle exposes the EU Parliament’s significant and ongoing failure to correct two structural flaws in the EU public integrity framework: the contested nature of the ethical standards imposed on MEPs and the lack of an independent authority to enforce them.

U.S. president’s praise for Friedrich Merz’s ‘conservatives’ offers a glimmer of hope after the White House’s brutal criticism of Europe.

Mirror: https://archive.is/2025.01.28-155335/https://www.economist.com/europe/2025/01/27/amid-talk-of-a-ceasefire-ukraines-front-line-is-crumbling

Schweizer was a civil service lawyer and worked as a consultant in the Ministry of Labour. In this year’s federal election, she ran on the Berlin state list for MERA25 and as a direct candidate in Berlin Mitte. The hate campaign that led to Schweizer’s dismissal was triggered by a December 6 post on X in which she accused the Zionist Malca Goldstein-Wolf of waging a “defamation campaign” because she had called the renowned journalist Georg Restle an antisemite for his criticism of Netanyahu’s war.

Goldstein-Wolf apparently researched Schweizer’s occupation and, when she found out that she worked for the Ministry of Labour, made this known on X and initiated a smear campaign against her. Hundreds of Zionist trolls then spread the most vicious slanders against Schweizer and demanded that she be fired.

The media also immediately joined in the smear campaign. On December 11, the tabloid Bild ran with the headline “Heil shocked! Employee spreads vile hatred of Israel” and went so far as to accuse Schweizer of trivialising the Holocaust.

Schweizer was then invited to a staff meeting, then suspended in January and finally dismissed without notice from her job and stripped of her civil servant status in February. At the same time, in the final days of the federal election campaign, her LinkedIn account was blocked without explanation.

I havent seen a post on this topic so I gonna write one by myself.

After our election the conservatives (CDU) and social democrats (SPD(they dont really deserve that naem tbh)) have started working on what would be the base of a coalition. These talks were finished yesterday.

You can find the original german document here but since most of you dont speak german i have translated it with deepl. You can find the document here.

The document is 11 sites long, so its absolutely possible to read this as a whole. However, if you dont want to here is a short summary. Be aware, that this is my interpretation. The document is almost entirely written by the CDU. It is hard to spot anything the SPD claimed they wanted to do. So they basically said "Do what ever the fuck you want if we get our 3 points or so in exchange". For the coming parts I will interpret the parts written with my knowledge of how the CDU spoke and what their goals are.

Finance and taxes:
They want to create a fund of 500b for instastructure and 500b for military spending. This may sound good, but it isnt as good as it sounds like. You can see the whole reasoning here. I created a second post for this because this is quite a complex thing.

• Our districts should be allowed to take on debt in the amount of 0,35% of the GDP (the same amount of the current tax break)
• They want to create a comission for modernising the debt break. However i dont think that this comission will have any positive impact.

Economics: The coalition wants mainly a "Dont change anything" way. They will likely pay the losses of companies to pull them out of the dirt they got themself into. One example is the car industry. They want to be "open to technology", which means, that the manufacturers should bet on combustion engines instead of electric cars. They want to subsidise electric cars to make buying them more attractive. This money will be the amount that the manufacturers make the car more expensive to cash out on this. This leads to manufacturers not really caring about electric engines and falling behind on global competition basically ruining themselves. They also want to dispose for creating CO2 neutral steel. Funny enough, the next point is a lip service about caring about the climate. This is also the only thing they wrote about the climate change

Working and social:

• Working overtime will become tax free meaning, that companies will adjust their payment to make working overtime a necessity.
• People who rely on social security will receive more pressure to force them into a job. Part of this is, that people who deny a job offer multiple times will get all of their social security benefits cut (they will not receive any money). This however is against the constitution, but it will take some time until this gets taken down by our constitutional court.
• They want to establish a minimum wage of 15€/h until 2026. This is also one of the few points the SPD is responsible for.
• They want to stabilise pension and make working, while relying on pension, up to 2000€/month tax free

Migration:

I suggest to you, that you read this yourself because this is literally facist ideology. Anyways, here we go.

• They want to cut down migration as a whole. They dont want to control it, but cut it down. The amount of people who come as work migrant from the west balkan should not higher as 25.000 per year.
• Irregular migration (people wo seek asylum) will become basically illegal, because they want to enforce the Dublin-regulation forcing asylum seekers to make their asylum in the first country they enter, thats part of the EU. People who dont do this will be stopped at the border.
• Giving Asylum for people who normally wouldnt be allowed to get asylum (as example people who worked with the military in Afghanistan) will get cancelled and it will become illegal for people to enter germany since they have a family member in Germany.
• They want to drastically increase the amounts of deportations. They want to expand the list of countrys people can get deported to. This will also include Syria and Afghanistan.
• People who get deported will no longer receive a lawyer to defend them. They also want to give the police to detain immigrants that get deported.

Things that didnt got mentioned:

• Climate change. They did not suggest any ways of batteling climate change. They said that they want to fight it, but they do not say anything more concrete. They also want to introduce policies that actively worsen climate change like not banning combustion engines and also not producing CO2 neutral steel.
• Cannabis: Germany legalised the possesion and growing of weed for adults. The CDU has since than screamed, that they wanted to revert this. There wasnt a single point regarding the legal status of cannabis. It might be possible, that the SPD, who were also responsible for the legalisation, stopped the CDU here, but its more likely, that the CDU realised that this isnt the most important topic and they instead focused on other things.
• Equality and LGBTQ* rights: There is a single policy in which they say, that they want to help women who experience violence. However, they do not mention anything else regarding the equality of all genders and sexualities. It is likely, that the violence against these groups will increase, whic is because of the uprising of the far right, and the state wont care at all.

Conclusion: They want to push towards a facist migration policy and fuck the whole country over. They openly said, that they want to deport immigrants no matter what. We are absolutely fucked.