Social Europe: Not part of Europe anyway?

 The comparative study of welfare states has long stressed British distinctiveness. While the continued collective provision of goods, especially health (the NHS), certainly differentiates the United Kingdom from the United States, the UK (sometimes with the addition of Ireland) stands alone within Europe as representing a liberal world of welfare, distinct from both social-democratic and conservative worlds. Today, in terms of the extent of income inequality and poverty, the UK is mostly an outlier within western Europe, while the movement from passive to active labour-market policies has taken a particularly punitive form. [...]

While the self-image of the US is that it is classless compared to Europe, in fact no country of old Europe matches its class divide—not even Britain. Yet in many ways the British social structure is now less European than before. This is not only a question of poverty and inequality. The degradation (and denigration) of its traditional working class has gone furthest and its management has become the most Americanised.

In the past Italy, with its north-south divide, was the European country with the greatest regional differences. Now the growing gap between London and the south on the one hand and the northern cities on the other means that Britain resembles a US slash-and-burn pattern of economic growth. [...]

As some social historians have noticed, the origins of this divergence lie in the de-industrialisation of the 1980s. While deindustrialisation was a common process across the democratic welfare states of western Europe, in the UK it was interwoven with the Thatcherite political onslaught on the trade union movement. Far more so than elsewhere, in the UK deindustrialisation constituted an explicit undermining of social citizenship.

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The Diplomat: China Doesn’t Understand Europe, and It Shows

 While his tour was designed to improve China’s post-pandemic image in Europe, some of Wang’s statements only made things worse for China. In Norway, while answering a question about the Nobel Peace Prize and Hong Kong, Wang said that China won’t allow the politicization of the Nobel Prize by interfering in China’s internal affairs — a response that many in the West read as a Chinese threat against awarding the Nobel Prize to Hong Kong protesters. Later, while in Germany, Wang criticized the Czech Senate President Milos Vystrcil’s visit to Taiwan and warned that it would incur a “heavy price” — another threat against a European country for doing something considered normal in a democratic state.[...]

China’s run of European mistakes started in 2012, when it decided to set up the 16+1 mechanism with the Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries, among them both EU members and non-members. Back then, China’s decision was watched with suspicion in Brussels and with every step China has taken in the CEE region the European Union’s fear of division has increased. While the EU seems to have gotten over the 2018 Visegrad (V4) moment, when China inaugurated a V4+China format for meetings with Hungary, Poland, Czechia, and Slovakia, and Wang even praised the V4 as the EU’s “most dynamic force,” things changed a lot in 2019. Two crucial moments were Italy’s decision to join the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and Greece’s addition to the 16+1. [...]

Moments like these have shown that China doesn’t understand the EU at all. While world powers no longer create agreements like the Treaty of Tordesillas, the idea of spheres of influence still exists in their minds. Sixteen formerly communist CEE countries teaming up with a communist great power set off alarm bells in Brussels. The EU doesn’t want any new “Berlin Walls” and it definitely doesn’t want to swap out Russian influence with Chinese in the CEE region, creating a new Iron Curtain. The European Union’s fear of division was mainly generated by China, which failed to understand how sensitive and important this subject is for Brussels. [...]

Sometimes, China doesn’t even seem to understand the basics of the European Union. The EU is a supranational entity, which receives its mandate from all 27 EU member-states, yet remains separate from the national institutions of each member state. The members of the European Parliament, although they come from each EU country, represent not their countries, but the EU. China’s failure to grasp the bloc’s basic structure became clear when it scolded the Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs after an Estonian member of the European Parliament went to Taiwan.

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EU south hails step towards federalism, north sees handout

Almost half of this, 32 billion euros ($36bn), comes from NextGenerationEU, with some 19 billion euros ($21bn) in the form of grants and more than 12 billion euros ($13bn) in the form of loans. Over a five-year period, the grants alone amount to a boost of about 2 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per year. [...]

The pandemic is set to claim 8.3 percent of the EU economy, but other countries in the European south stand to lose even more than Greece. Spain, Italy and France are expected to see recessions to the tune of 11 percent. [...]

NextGenerationEU marks the first time all 27 EU members are selling debt together, and it is the first time the Commission is to be given powers to levy taxes and raise resources of its own to service that debt. [...]

"Conte is probably the last thing separating Italy from sliding to a new wave of anti-Europeanism that could be fatal, not just for Italy's participation in the euro, but for the entire European integration project and the single market," he said.

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statista: The Most Culturally Chauvinistic Europeans (Oct 30, 2018)

A Pew Research Center survey set out to answer that question by surveying 56,000 adults across Europe. Respondents were asked whether they agree with the statement "our people are not perfect but our culture is superior to others". The following map shows the share of people in different countries considering their own culture to be superior to others and there are certainly some interesting results. Take Portugal where 47 percent of people agree with the above statement compared to just 20 percent in neighbouring Spain.

The most chauvinistic attitudes towards culture were recorded across Eastern Europe with Romania (66 percent), Bulgaria (69 percent) and Russia (also 69 percent) on top. The highest score of any country across Europe was actually recorded in Greece where 89 percent of people agreed with the statement.

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The Guardian: How Greece is beating coronavirus despite a decade of debt

The bookish professor and no-nonsense former mayor are the faces who have come to be associated with the government’s drive to contain the spread of Covid-19. Their efforts at keeping the country virus-safe appear to be paying off: in a population of just over 11 million, there were, as of Monday, 2,145 confirmed cases of coronavirus and 99 fatalities, far lower than elsewhere in Europe. Italy to date has registered 20,465 deaths.

Greece, it is generally agreed, is having a better crisis than may have been expected. Tsiodras recently allowed himself to speak of “a flattening of the curve” even if authorities accept that the prospect of Orthodox Easter, on 19 April, is unlikely to be without challenge. Traditionally, Greeks flock to ancestral villages in the countryside to celebrate the biggest festival in their religious calendar.

The country’s ability to cope with a public health emergency of such proportions was not a given. After almost a decade embroiled in debt crisis – years in which its economy contracted by 26% – Greece’s health system has far from recovered. [...]

Greece, like Italy, also has a large elderly population, with about a quarter of pensionable age. “There were realities, weaknesses, that we were very aware of,” said Dr Andreas Mentis who heads the Hellenic Pasteur Institute. “Before the first case was diagnosed, we had started examining people and isolating them. Incoming flights, especially from China, were monitored. Later, when others began to be repatriated from Spain, for example, we made sure they were quarantined in hotels.”

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The Guardian: Golden Dawn: the rise and fall of Greece’s neo-Nazis

Although Golden Dawn’s members sometimes played the game of respectable politics, they were no mere rightwing populists; they were the kind of Nazis you are more likely to read about in history books. Driven by profound racism and antisemitic conspiracy theory, with a fervent devotion to Hitler, Golden Dawn combined street violence with torchlit flag-waving rallies and extreme rhetoric. One of its MPs proclaimed “civil war” to a BBC reporter, while an election candidate promised in front of a documentary crew to “turn on the ovens” and make lampshades from the skins of immigrants, a reference to what Nazi Germany did to Jews, Roma and other minorities in the Holocaust. “The Europe of nations is back,” declared the party’s leader, Nikolaos Michaloliakos, at a press conference in May 2012. “Greece is only the beginning.” [...]

Court hearings will end this spring, and a verdict is due shortly after, but Greece has already started to move on. Golden Dawn was wiped out in last year’s general election, and a new conservative government has declared the years of crisis over. Many media outlets only cover the trial sporadically. According to the centrist political commentator Yannis Palaiologos, Greece now has an opportunity to draw a line under the populism of both left and right. “As the various populist myths about the causes and possible solutions to Greece’s crisis have been revealed as delusions and outright lies,” he wrote in a piece for the Washington Post last year, “the fuel that sustained extremism has been depleted.” [...]

Golden Dawn was founded in the early 80s, initially as a Masonic society, according to the investigative journalist Dimitris Psarras, an authority on the party. For many years it remained small and semi-hidden, recruiting its members from Greece’s football hooligan scene. In the late 00s, however, it pursued a new strategy, setting up an “angry citizens” group in Saint Pantaleimon to complain about crime it linked to immigrants, mainly refugees from Afghanistan, who had recently moved into the area. Many lived in poverty or destitution, trapped by a Greek asylum system that didn’t work and an EU regulation that would not let them travel elsewhere, but a community was starting to put down roots; some Afghans had opened shops and cafes on the square. [...]

The country’s political and media class was split over how to treat Golden Dawn, since Greece’s constitution does not allow for the banning of political parties. In late 2013, when parliament voted to suspend the party’s state election funding and waive its MPs’ immunity from prosecution, the move was opposed by a minority of leftwingers, one of whom argued that Golden Dawn was “not a classic Nazi party”, since it set itself in opposition to “the dominant bourgeois forces”. In 2014, several defence lawyers for Golden Dawn members who were under investigation appeared on a TV chat show to argue that while they didn’t support the party’s views, they were doing their jobs in the interest of democracy and free speech.

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Politico: Greek MPs elect first female head of state

In a rare act of unity in the usually turbulent and divisive Greek politics, the nomination by conservative ruling New Democracy was supported by both the main opposition left-wing Syriza and Socialists party. Sakellaropoulou won 261 votes, well over the 200 needed in Greece’s 300-seat parliament to be elected from the first ballot. [...]

She also listed climate change; the mass displacement of people and the ensuing humanitarian crisis; the decline of the rule of law; and inequality as international challenges that extend beyond Greece's borders and require cooperation among governments. [...]

The progressive judge is known for her sensitivity to minorities' rights, civil liberties and refugee issues, which prompted Syriza to select her for the position of the country's top judge. She has particular expertise in environmental law and has written numerous papers on environmental protection, while also chairing a society on environmental law.

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Politico: Germany sets out plan for automatic relocation of asylum seekers

The document has some elements that could win favor from both Mediterranean and northern states, but its call for automatic relocation, and the lack of alternative solidarity measures for countries that don't want to take part, could upset Central and Eastern European countries, according to diplomats. Furthermore, countries such as Hungary have always opposed mandatory relocation and, despite the word not being used in the document, it is clear that this scheme would be compulsory. [...]

One of the document's key aims is to scrap the Dublin regulation under which asylum claims are dealt with in the country of first arrival. Dublin creates “clear imbalances” as “in 2018, 75% of all applications for international protection were lodged in only five member states,” the document says, a point that will come as no surprise to Italy and Greece. [...]

In the German plan, EASO, the EU agency for asylum, would play a key role. There's already a Commission proposal to turn EASO into the European Union Agency for Asylum (EUAA) and in the German plan if an applicant gets through the initial assessment, then “the EUAA would determine which member state is responsible for examining the asylum application.” Yet the agency is often criticized for its internal troubles and having “increased powers could be a problem for some member states,” said one diplomat. [...]

The German document looks at other key points, including how to regulate access to the welfare state: “accommodation and social benefits would be provided only in the member state responsible” but “social benefits should be funded EU-wide as far as possible” and “paid according to an index which would ensure that benefits are at an equivalent level across the EU, independent of the member state.”

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The Economist: How Brexit is changing the EU

Brexit once seemed to pose an existential threat to the European Union. But Britain's withdrawal process has had some surprising results—especially when it comes to how other member states view the EU.

The Guardian: The end of capitalism has begun

Postcapitalism is possible because of three major changes information technology has brought about in the past 25 years. First, it has reduced the need for work, blurred the edges between work and free time and loosened the relationship between work and wages. The coming wave of automation, currently stalled because our social infrastructure cannot bear the consequences, will hugely diminish the amount of work needed – not just to subsist but to provide a decent life for all.

Second, information is corroding the market’s ability to form prices correctly. That is because markets are based on scarcity while information is abundant. The system’s defence mechanism is to form monopolies – the giant tech companies – on a scale not seen in the past 200 years, yet they cannot last. By building business models and share valuations based on the capture and privatisation of all socially produced information, such firms are constructing a fragile corporate edifice at odds with the most basic need of humanity, which is to use ideas freely.

Third, we’re seeing the spontaneous rise of collaborative production: goods, services and organisations are appearing that no longer respond to the dictates of the market and the managerial hierarchy. The biggest information product in the world – Wikipedia – is made by volunteers for free, abolishing the encyclopedia business and depriving the advertising industry of an estimated $3bn a year in revenue.[...]

Meanwhile in the absence of any alternative model, the conditions for another crisis are being assembled. Real wages have fallen or remained stagnant in Japan, the southern Eurozone, the US and UK. The shadow banking system has been reassembled, and is now bigger than it was in 2008. New rules demanding banks hold more reserves have been watered down or delayed. Meanwhile, flushed with free money, the 1% has got richer. [...]

So how do we visualise the transition ahead? The only coherent parallel we have is the replacement of feudalism by capitalism – and thanks to the work of epidemiologists, geneticists and data analysts, we know a lot more about that transition than we did 50 years ago when it was “owned” by social science. The first thing we have to recognise is: different modes of production are structured around different things. Feudalism was an economic system structured by customs and laws about “obligation”. Capitalism was structured by something purely economic: the market. We can predict, from this, that postcapitalism – whose precondition is abundance – will not simply be a modified form of a complex market society. But we can only begin to grasp at a positive vision of what it will be like.

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UnHerd: Can Corbyn learn from the Greek tragedy?

For me, however, there are positives to take away that have implications for the entire project of the global Left. First, Tsipras showed that with a clear narrative, a message of hope and some competent advisers, the far-Left’s project can work in government. The oligarchy, whose two-party system (Pasok and New Democracy) collapsed, expected Syriza to be amateurs: in fact they brought professionalism and openness to an endemically corrupt and chaotic state.

Second, by being radical in opposition, and refusing to give up radicalism even when forced into retreat, Syriza and the wider Greek Left defeated one of the most violent and open fascist threats in the European continent. Its conservative predecessors had tolerated Golden Dawn’s infiltration of the police, and murderous violence on the streets. Without a Left prepared to risk taking power, Greece would have degenerated into a battleground of populisms. [...]

But the political forces emerging out of the 20thcentury Left face two new challenges: the so-called Green Wave, which has swelled the electoral support of Green parties everywhere; and a growing electoral threat from far right or overtly racist parties, some of which are building support among the working class communities where the Left used to be strong. [...]

In future, Left-wing parties will need to look and sound like they care about the planet more than anything else – and the truth is, our tradition has not always done so. The closer you remain to the traditional working class communities which prospered during the carbon era, the harder it is to walk the walk when it comes to zero carbon.

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The Guardian: Mitsotakis takes over as Greece's PM with radical change of style

In a changing of the guard that was as subdued as it was swift, Mitsotakis assumed office after he was officially sworn in by the Orthodox Christian country’s spiritual leader, Archbishop Ieronymos. [...]

From the outset, there was no escaping the change in style. In a radical departure from his leftwing predecessor, a self-declared atheist only ever seen in open-neck shirts, Mitsotakis wore a suit and tie as he took the oath on the Bible, watched by his wife and three children. [...]

His pledge to reduce taxes and create jobs in a county still grappling with record unemployment – at 18%, the highest in the EU – particularly appealed to the middle class hit hard by tax rates imposed by the Tsipras government to meet fiscal targets. [...]

The new cabinet will be sworn in on Tuesday. Mitsotakis may have a fiery start: tensions with Turkey have risen dangerously in the eastern Mediterranean over conflicting claims to energy reserves off the island of Cyprus. In a move that has alarmed the EU, Ankara announced that it would be sending a second drilling ship to begin the search for hydrocarbons off the island on Tuesday.

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UnHerd: The heat is on for Greece

The election marks the first time Greeks will go to the polls since the height of the financial crisis in 2015. This was when fears that the country might tumble out of the Eurozone, and – though an unlikely scenario – the European Union, caused political and financial tremors from Brussels to Washington. [...]

The domestic implications of this are clear. As journalist Yiannis Baboulias, tells me: “Politically, Greece has moved from the anti-austerity financial-based narratives and conflict of the past decade to a political space in which culture wars now dominate.” [...]

Now, New Democracy has continued the populist trend, but from the other extreme, with a scattergun deployment of hard-Right tropes regarding migrants and LGBTQ issues. And as far as they are concerned, Syriza are hardcore communists who will turn Greece into Venezuela.[...]

But most alarming of all is New Democracy’s virulent opposition to the June 2018 Prespa Agreement – the treaty that saw North Macedonia change its name in return for Greece dropping objections to the country’s NATO accession.

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The Atlantic: Greek Elections Close a Chapter, but Not in Europe

Here in Greece, a cycle is ending, and the country is returning to political normality and stability. On Sunday, it will hold national elections—its first since exiting a bailout regime last year—in which Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s center-right New Democracy party, a pillar of Greece’s pre-bailout establishment, is expected to defeat the left-wing populist Syriza party, led by Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. Syriza came to power in 2015 demanding an end to the crippling austerity Greece was forced to undertake as a condition of its bailout, but ended up having to implement it anyway—at the behest of the European Union and the country’s other creditors. [...]

In Italy, for instance, few days go by without Matteo Salvini, the country’s right-wing populist interior minister and the man widely seen as a leader-in-waiting, saying that Italy doesn’t want to “meet the same fate as Greece.” In Salvini’s rhetoric, winding up like Greece means ceding national sovereignty to the baddies of the European Union, who in turn would impose an emasculating austerity regime on Italy. His party has long flirted with the idea of exiting the euro, or even creating temporary IOUs as a parallel currency—a notion that fires up the base, but is not likely to happen because it’s illegal and would cause the single currency to collapse. [...]

Europe’s handling of the Greek debt crisis also haunted talks last month about creating a common European budget for handling moments of extreme financial stress, something French President Emmanuel Macron has been pushing for, but which Germany opposes. That’s because in much of the German political and popular imagination, Greece has been the ultimate example of a spendthrift country whose soaring debts got it into trouble and that required the thrifty creditor Germany to solve its problems; never mind that for years before the crisis, Germany benefited from Greece buying German goods with money borrowed from German banks.

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Politico: Is Putin Losing the Trust of Russians?

Every year, Russian President Vladimir Putin stars in a big show, an hours-long televised question-and-answer marathon in which the president hears the people’s complaints, promises to tackle their problems and explains his views on a wide range of subjects. With more than a million questions submitted, organizers can choose carefully. But there was a hitch with this year’s annual extravaganza. On Thursday, somehow, the wrong questions got on the air—like one that flashed on the screen, “Only one question: When will you go away?” [...]

Putin remains firmly in command, without an imminent threat to his rule. But recent events now suggest a possible tipping point: On a number of fronts, at home and abroad, Putin has faced embarrassing failures, and the population, disenchanted, has lost trust in him, becoming restless enough to challenge his authority boldly. At the very least, this is a trying time for the Russian president. Retrospectively, we may find that it marked the end of his peak power—the results of which would surely reverberate across the world. [...]

Meanwhile, the Russian economy, though out of recession, is barely growing. The economic boom that fueled Putin’s popularity faded after oil prices collapsed years ago. Living standards are falling, and the government’s efforts to curb expenses have sparked a furious reaction. Ever since last year’s move to raise the retirement age to just below the life expectancy of the average Russian man, Russians have been protesting with more fervor. Anti-corruption activists, despite repeated arrests, find their message resonating with protesters too. It’s easier to tolerate the sight of Putin’s friends becoming billionaires when your life is improving. Not now. While Putin’s bold moves across Russia’s borders once boosted Russians’ sense of patriotism, the cost of foreign adventures is taking a toll on family budgets. [...]

The economic stagnation is eroding Putin’s once-stratospheric approval ratings. The leader who strode bare-chested across Siberia is now trusted by just 31.7 percent of Russians, according to state pollster VTsIOM, down from more than 71 percent in 2015, after the Crimea invasion. (After that 31.7 percent was reported earlier this year, the Kremlin demanded an explanation. The pollster revised its methodology, and the poll leapt back to 72 percent.) Putin’s approval rating, a slightly different measure, remains at 60 percent—respectable but sharply lower than his near-90 percent a few years ago.

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Jacobin Magazine: Syriza’s Failure Has Hurt Us All

Added to this, a closer analysis shows that the Syriza electorate in 2019 in fact bears little relation with the voters who first put it in government in 2015. Admittedly, given the lack of any credible alternative on the Left (in the broadest sense) of the political spectrum, it has not collapsed entirely. That’s the big difference with what happened to Pasok in 2012, after its own implementation of austerity measures. [...]

In generational terms, it has lost nearly half its support among younger voters (17 to 24 year-olds) but has shed only 4 percent backing among the over 65s. From an electorate polarized around wage-earners and the youth, it is now a party with a nearly uniform average score among most social strata and age classes (around 20 percent) and is ahead of New Democracy only among the unemployed. The “qualitative” profile of its electorate has undergone an even more dramatic change. A look at the choice Syriza voters made among its candidates for the European Parliament is instructive in this regard. [...]

Syriza’s electorate today looks less like the popular base of a left-wing party than the “de-ideologized” clientelist support of a party of government. It is moreover obvious that it is in part the heir to the “social-liberal” Pasok of the 2000s. Syriza came first in just four constituencies nationally, and of these, three were among PASOK’s historic symbolic bastions: two in Crete and one in the northwestern Peloponnese, around the city of Patras, cradle of that party’s long-dominant Papandreou family.

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The Guardian: Tsipras faces fight to stay in power after EU elections mauling Inbox x

After suffering an unexpectedly heavy defeat at home, Tsipras’s Syriza party was also resoundingly rebuffed by diaspora Greeks, it emerged on Thursday. With 100% of the vote counted, the country’s interior ministry reported that 33.9% had cast ballots in favour of the centre-right New Democracy party in contrast to 15.3% for Syriza. [...]

Asked why the electorate seemed bent on punishing the ruling party he responded: “It’s a little bit of everything; what has happened to the middle class, the [strictures of] bailout oversight, their style in power, a know-all approach and general over-assuredness.”

Diaspora Greeks from America to Australia, who also participated in the European poll, are believed to have been particularly negatively swayed by perceived concessions over Macedonia: in exchange for the neighbouring country agreeing to change its name, the leftist government recognised a Macedonian language and ethnicity which has left many enraged. Although applauded internationally, the name-change deal was aggressively derided by the conservatives as part of concerted efforts to appeal to nationalist voters globally. [...]

“One of the biggest reasons for Syriza’s defeat is the middle class,” said Kaki Balli, editor of the Sunday Avgi paper which reflects Syriza’s views. “Greece, unlike other European countries, has always had a lot of class mobility. Given that every Greek wants to belong to the middle class they have been lured by the promise of less taxation and those are promises that New Democracy is making.”

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Political Critique: Democratizing Europe’s Economy

Italy’s right-wing government has earned popular support for deliberately questioning the European Commission’s budget guidelines in the name of addressing poverty. This shows how skeptical many Europeans are about the EU’s commitment to social welfare and democracy, and it is precisely this skepticism the Italian right-wing is using to provoke a conflict and further undermine the commission’s popular legitimacy. Such an approach has support beyond Southern Europe, and if the commission does not reconsider, it will find itself increasingly vulnerable to popular backlash.[...]

This renewed emphasis on the social dimension is supposed to be connected to the European Semester, which is the commission’s attempt to bring order to European economic governance. Thus the commission ranks the member states according to unemployment rates (especially youth unemployment), reduction in poverty, lifelong learning, access to childcare, and other social indicators. Yet it does not measure the meaningfulness of work. It also fails to assess whether workers have a say over the nature of their work, their relationships at work, their work’s relationship to the greater economy, or their working conditions. In an age when more and more people classify their work as “bullshit jobs,” to use the provocative phrase from the anthropologist David Graeber, something important is being missed.1 [...]

The studies of Herbert Kitschelt and Philippe Rehm using the European Social Survey show that in post-industrial economies, people involved in administrative-organizational occupations tend to have more authoritarian views, independent of their income status (although those at the top may be less inclined toward redistribution, and those at the bottom more inclined). Those involved in more interpersonal occupations, which involve communication and agreement on norms and objectives, tend to have more liberal views independent of their income status. [...]

It is no surprise that the European Commission has not managed to fully connect economic, social, and democratic concerns. Doing so would require the commission to challenge the dogma that economic growth is the basic answer to all social problems, to face up to its own role in undermining social cohesion and democracy simultaneously in the many parts of Europe that have been exposed to austerity programs, and to acknowledge that a technocratic approach exacerbates anti-democratic tendencies and sentiments. With the upcoming European summit in May 2019, the European Parliament elections, and the new European Commission, the union needs a much deeper and more nuanced appreciation of the changing dynamics of the global economy and its implications for political preferences. In so doing, it should follow the lead set by some of its most politically active working citizens.

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Politico: Macedonia’s historic name change leaves deep scars

Eighty-one lawmakers narrowly passed the amendments to the constitution after three days of intense negotiations. Prime Minister Zoran Zaev needed a two-thirds majority, or 80 of the country’s 120 MPs, to ratify the deal he made back in June with Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. Greece has blocked Macedonia’s membership of both NATO and the EU since the early 1990s, arguing that the name infringes culturally and territorially on its own region called Macedonia. [...]

Leaders from NATO and EU member states offered congratulations. NATO secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, hailed the “important contribution to a stable and prosperous region” in a statement on Twitter. EU commissioner for enlargement, Johannes Hahn, tweeted that Friday was “a day that made history!” Hahn said he hopes it “creates a positive dynamic for reconciliation in the whole western Balkan region.” [...]

But concern has grown in recent weeks that the ugly road to the two-thirds majority could carry costs further down the line. Nationalist opposition party the VMRO-DPMNE boycotted the vote, claiming the new name threatens Macedonian identity. They also accused Zaev of using “blackmail and threats” to push it through. [...]

Florian Bieber, professor of Southeast European history and politics at the University of Graz, said the struggle over the name change reflected the realities of political dynamics across the region. “It shows the fundamental dilemma of trying to resolve such an important political dispute. What price is it worth paying in terms of doing a deal which is not exactly transparent, but which in a certain way achieves the ratification?” he asked.

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Social Europe: Why Alexis Tsipras is still not a social democrat

Recently, Alexis Tsipras, Greece’s prime minister and leader of the populist left-wing SYRIZA, which forms a coalition with the right-wing populist ANEL (Independent Greeks) party, has been trying to approach European social democratic leaders in a strategy of opening up to centre-left forces. Indeed, the transformation of Tsipras, from a political leader who criticized the European Union, the “old” parties, including the social democrats, and the Troika (IMF, ECB, EC), to a prime minister who agreed and implemented the third memorandum of understanding in Greece with absolute prudence and agreement with the lenders, constitutes an interesting case study. But this shift should come as no surprise. The reason is specific and related to the very notion of populism; it also tells us whether Tsipras is a social democrat or not. [...]

Apart from cynicism, the radical left-right coalition government is also distinguished by another populist feature: “liberal authoritarian” leadership that undermines democratic institutions such as the rule of law. On the one hand, the government has criticized the independent judiciary for judging certain executive acts as unconstitutional, such as the proposed law on national channels – whose main aim was to reduce pluralism – that limited the licenses to four while the digital broadcasting system could emit more than ten. The restriction of pluralism was precisely the goal of a government that was finally reined back by judicial forces. The attack on the institutions of justice and the media continues even today and undermines the rule of law and democracy itself. [...]

EU social democratic decision-makers may consider that the imminent rescue of a minimum number of MEPs via the participation of SYRIZA members could be a solution to the prolonged crisis in social democratic political identity. But this means the legitimization of social democracy as such only through numbers and not the elaboration of values-based policies. It is more a process of echoing Tsipras’s populist discourse rather than undergoing a radical injection of progressive social values. Social democracy can only overcome its crisis through working towards humanizing socio-economic reality rather than accepting a populist discourse tied to the personal aspirations of one “politician”. Thus, this leader and his party still do not have any real relation with social democracy and its values, and consequently, a possible affiliation can only be dangerous for the latter.

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