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Iain Martin writing in the Times.
If you were running a major international organisation — let’s for the sake of argument call it the EU — facing an extremely difficult set of elections next May, with populists on the rise on the back of voter anger about elite arrogance, would you make your latest summit modest and dial down on the razzamatazz? Or would you put the assembled leaders on the set of The Sound of Music and treat them on the way in like film stars? The answer is obvious. With its usual tin ear for the menacing mood music, the EU under the Austrian rotating presidency opted for expensive glitz in Salzburg this week, despite its leaders meeting amid an epic mess on migration, with eastern European states in open rebellion, and the second largest financial contributor to the club (Britain) sitting there forlorn like Rodgers and Hammerstein’s lonely goatherd.
Of course, Theresa May’s position has become even more isolated and lonely, with the EU 27 in the form of Donald Tusk, EU president, saying today that the prime minister’s proposed Brexit deal — the Chequers compromise keeping the UK aligned with EU rules on goods h Brussels. They oppose the EU’s proposal to expand its own border force. They don’t trust it to do the job properly. When the European parliament moved this month to censure Viktor Orban, the Hungarian leader, over concerns about the eroAt root, the EU’s problem is clear. It is an overly ambitious and insecure organisation, that feels the need to present itself rhetorically in quasi-imperial terms, as the dignified embodiment of European unity and values. In reality it is really a recently patched-together trading bloc with no ability to defend itself and hardly any combined capacity on intelligence and security. Debilitatingly, it is now split in two geographically.
That deep split is not just a technical dispute over specific migration rules; it is cultural and existential. The Visegrad view, contested by European liberals who equate it with nascent fascism, is that what is at stake is the survival of European civilisation in the next few decades, with global migration flows projected to accelerate dramatically.sion of the rule of law in Hungary, the four fought back. The Hungarian government this week launched a campaign calling on Hungarians to “defend Hungary!” and castigating the Green Dutch MEP Judith Sargentini, who had led the criticism of Orban.
But with Britain in its typically shambolic, improvised fashion preparing to say to the EU “so long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, adieu” it is easy to overlook just what a mess the EU and our supposedly glorious European home is in. Ahead of those European elections at the end of May next year, the fear among mainstream politicians is of another populist surge potentially altering the shape of the European parliament and poisoning, from the EU perspective, the atmosphere in Brussels.