Eurobloat #0141 • January 2022
January opened with the Commission slipping its most contested decision in years under the door at ten at night on New Year's Eve, in the hope that nobody was reading. Plenty were, and the rest of the month was the usual mixture of sermons, surveillance and the crowning of a new President.
Folly of the Month: Nuclear and gas are green, signed off at 10pm on New Year's Eve
At 10pm on 31 December, while the continent was opening the champagne, the Commission emailed member states a draft delegated act declaring nuclear power and natural gas "sustainable" investments under its taxonomy. The timing was not an accident. Experts were given until 12 January to respond to a document that overruled the Commission's own technical advisers, Germany called it greenwashing, and Austria announced it would sue. When a scheme has to be published in the dead of night to dodge scrutiny, the scheme is telling you something.
1. A website counter is now illegal
On 13 January the Austrian data protection authority ruled that a health website using Google Analytics had broken the GDPR, because sending an IP address across the Atlantic exposes Europeans to American surveillance. The fix Brussels built for surveillance was to make ordinary websites unlawful while changing nothing about the surveillance. France copied the ruling within a month, and the rest queued up behind.
→ noyb.eu
2. Parliament votes to police everyone's advertising
On 20 January MEPs adopted their position on the Digital Services Act by 530 votes to 78, complete with restrictions on targeted advertising and bans on profiling minors. Having failed to build a single European technology champion of its own, the Parliament settled for the next best thing, which is writing the rulebook for the American ones.
3. A new President, elected on her birthday
On 18 January, following the death of David Sassoli, the Parliament elected Roberta Metsola its President in the first round with 458 votes. She turned forty-three the same day, which the institution found irresistibly poetic. The voting was done remotely and in secret, a fitting touch for a body forever lecturing others about transparency.
4. A declaration of digital rights, because there are not enough already
On 26 January the Commission proposed a "European declaration on digital rights and principles", a non-binding text restating freedoms that already exist in the Charter of Fundamental Rights. It commits nobody to anything and creates a fresh letterhead for everyone to sign. The same Commission spent the month making website analytics illegal, so the declared right to privacy was at least topical.
→ digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu
5. The schoolmaster marks a member state's homework
On 19 January MEPs voted 534 to 151 to deliver an unfavourable opinion on Poland's nominee to the Court of Auditors and demanded the Council submit someone else. The Parliament had already rejected the same man in 2020, the Council appointed him anyway, and the opinion remains non-binding. So the exercise was pure theatre, but it let Strasbourg play headmaster for an afternoon, which is the part it enjoys most.
6. A monitoring centre is promoted to a full agency
On 12 January the Commission proposed turning the Lisbon-based drugs monitoring centre into a full "European Union Drugs Agency" with a stronger mandate, alerts, campaigns and a bigger international role. The drug market had grown, so naturally the answer was a grander acronym and a larger building. No existing body has ever been wound down to make room.
7. France takes the wheel and reaches for the tax pedal
On 19 January President Macron presented the French Council presidency's priorities to MEPs, among them an EU-wide minimum wage directive and the carbon border levy. A minimum wage is something member states set for themselves, and a border levy is a tax dressed as a climate measure, but both arrive labelled as European progress. The pedal Paris pressed hardest was the one marked "more Brussels".
8. The Conference on the Future of Europe takes stock of its citizens
On 21 and 22 January the Conference on the Future of Europe held its third plenary, taking stock of 90 recommendations from two European citizens' panels on democracy and on climate. Two hundred citizens picked from across the Union were wheeled out to debate with the institutional figures already steering towards a familiar destination. A staged conversation with the public was always going to conclude that the public wants a bigger Union.
9. The border Brussels could not hold
Through January the Poland-Belarus frontier remained the scene of an engineered migrant crisis, with Minsk funnelling people from the Middle East towards an EU border that Poland, not Brussels, was actually defending. The Union that preaches open borders within suddenly discovered the value of a hard one without, and left a member state to do the holding. Warsaw guarded the line while the Commission issued statements.
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