While never straightforward, discussions at the European Council last week were particularly heated.
Everyone knows the feeling of being passed over for a dinner invitation. How to respond is the tricky part — does one feign indifference or succumb to the temptation of attempting a barbed riposte?
Clearly, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni tends to err on the latter side. Having been benched for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s late-night dinner last week at the Élysée Palace with the leaders of France and Germany, she sparked a fresh row between Rome and Paris by calling the hastily organised soirée “inappropriate”, adding caustically that it undermined European solidarity and was a stunt by French President Emmanuel Macron to deflect from his political woes at home.
Just eight months ago her predecessor, Mario Draghi, shared a train compartment to Kyiv with Macron and Germany’s Olaf Scholz, showcasing European solidarity with Ukraine. Now, Italy’s new leader was absent and seemingly dispensable. Meloni could not conceal her irritation.
Dinner party invitations are, however, not the only thing that Meloni and her other European counterparts are bickering about. While never straightforward, discussions at the European Council last week were particularly heated.
First was the perennially tetchy topic of migration. Asylum applications in the EU exceeded 100,000 in November for the third consecutive month, while irregular arrivals hit their highest last year since 2016. The surging numbers have put EU governments under pressure to deliver a response. Meloni was once again in the midst of the fracas, saying that if movements of migrants across EU borders were banned, Italy would simply become a country of refugees.
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No less animated was the discussion on how to respond to US President Joe Biden’s great green spending splurge. Brussels is essentially unsure as to how to come up with enough cash to compete with the US’s estimated $800-billion green-tech investment package that forms part of the ironically named Inflation Reduction Act. With European corporates being seduced by attractive US subsidies and tax breaks, Europe needs to react. The question is how.
The European Commission’s “Green Deal Industrial Plan” outlines three options. First, increasing investment in green technologies by relaxing state aid rules to let member states subsidise their own industries. Second, spending as yet unused money from existing investment programmes. Or third, the EU could create new jointly funded schemes.
As usual in the EU there is a ...