In 1996 Atletico Madrid won la Liga. I remember this solely because I was in Madrid that night and witnessed what might be termed extensive celebrations, including the riot police at a couple of memorable points. Until now, that’s probably been as close to organised chaos (and I use the term rather euphemistically) as I’ve […]
Read more
During a roundtable discussion on elections last night here at Surrey, I was asked what the impact would be of Hollande’s election on the existing European-level agreements on austerity. After some metaphorical beating around the bush, I replied that I thought the impact would be marginal, akin to a child who gets some crayons and […]
Read more
As is often observed, a week is a long time in politics, and this has been a particularly long week. From the EU’s perspective, the high points have been the re-election of the pro-EU government in Armenia and the failure yesterday of eurosceptics to get the hashtag #NotoEU trending on Twitter. Not particularly glorious for […]
Read more
Perhaps it’s been the two weeks of unrelenting rain here, but it’s been hard to be too optimistic about the EU of late. David Cameron’s remarks at the weekend about being less than halfway through the Eurozone crisis have only been reinforced by the poor economic figures, tetchy ECOFIN meetings, potentially deeply problematic elections in […]
Read more
It’s that time of year again, when the European Commission releases its draft budget for the following year, to howls of anguish and disgust from all sides. I’ve already talked some weeks ago about how the EU budget isn’t like national budgets and shouldn’t be compared to them on a like-by-like bias, but today I want […]
Read more
Comment