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Tag: European Uni

  • EU, US edging toward trade spat when both want unity instead

    EU, US edging toward trade spat when both want unity instead

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    BRUSSELS — The European Union and the United States are treading precariously close to a major trans-Atlantic trade dispute at a time when the two Western giants want to show unity in the face of challenges from Russia and China.

    EU trade ministers on Friday insisted they would be forced to respond if Washington stuck to all the terms of its Inflation Reduction Act, which is favorable to local companies through subsidies and, according to the EU, will unfairly discriminate against its firms that want to compete for contracts.

    “Nobody wants to get into a tit-for-tat or subsidy race. But what the U.S. has done really isn’t consistent with the principles of free trade and fair competition,” Irish Trade Minister Leo Varadkar said.

    Even though the allies have stood shoulder to shoulder by imposing strict sanctions against Russia since the Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, they cannot gloss over the trade differences.

    “What we are asking for is fairness. We want and expect European companies and exports to be treated in the same way in the U.S. as American companies and exports are treated in Europe,” EU Commission Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis said.

    And beyond the European Commission, which negotiates on behalf of the 27 member nations on trade issues, the concerns are largely shared in EU national capitals, too.

    “All the member states are concerned,” said Czech Trade Minister Jozef Sikela, who chaired the emergency meeting.

    The Czech minister said the EU still hopes divergences can be solved during a Dec. 5 meeting of the task force that the U.S. and EU have set up, with the possibility that the bloc would be treated like Canada and Mexico and be exempted from the subsidy conditions.

    Trade disputes have been a red line for decades in trans-Atlantic relations, highlighted by fights over aircraft subsidies and steel exports and affecting everything from hormone-treated beef to liquor exports.

    Planned subsidies under the Inflation Reduction Act passed by the U.S. Congress in August, are especially grating for the EU. For example, electric car buyers are eligible for a tax credit of up to $7,500 as long as the vehicle runs on a battery built in North America with minerals mined or recycled on the continent.

    The EU believes that the measure is a potential trans-Atlantic trade barrier discriminating against foreign producers. Potential actions the EU can take are complaints before the World Trade Organization, trade sanctions or upping subsidies for their own companies.

    Those considerations have to weighed against the need to cooperate on the geopolitical stage and the essence of showing a united front.

    “We see that the parts from the East actually are trying to divide us,” Estonian Trade Minister Kristjan Jarvan said. “And of course economy plays a huge role in that.”

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  • Report: Norway sentences Russian for flying drone

    Report: Norway sentences Russian for flying drone

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    COPENHAGEN, Denmark — A 34-year-old Russian was sentenced to 90 days in prison on Wednesday for flying a drone and thereby breaching sanctions which came into force after Russia went to war against Ukraine.

    The man, who was not identified, was not suspected of espionage, the Norwegian newspaper Bergens Tidende reported.

    He admitted to flying the drone in southern Norway to photograph nature, the daily said, adding he claimed to be unaware that this was banned.

    Under Norwegian law, it is prohibited for aircraft operated by Russian companies or citizens “to land on, take off from or fly over Norwegian territory.” Norway is not a member of the European Union but mirrors its moves and decided on the ban earlier this year after the invasion.

    The prosecution had asked for a 120-day sentence. Prosecutor Marit Formo said she was “very satisfied with the verdict” of the Hordaland District Court.

    Numerous drone sightings have been reported near offshore oil and gas platforms belonging to NATO member Norway, a major oil and gas producer, in recent weeks. Several Russian citizens have been detained over the past few weeks for flying drones or taking photographs of sensitive sites in Norway.

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  • Why Meloni’s win in Italy not sitting well with Berlusconi

    Why Meloni’s win in Italy not sitting well with Berlusconi

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    ROME — The honeymoon is finished even before any marriage of political convenience in Italy could be formalized.

    The resounding victory by far-right leader Giorgia Meloni in the Sept. 25 general election isn’t sitting well with 86-year-old Silvio Berlusconi, the former three-time conservative premier who, four decades her senior, fancies himself the elder statesman of Italy’s political right.

    Meloni is expected to be asked next week by Italy’s president to try to create a governing coalition with campaign allies Berlusconi and right-wing leader Matteo Salvini and become premier. Behind-the-scenes divvying up of ministries in what would be Italy’s first far-right-led government since the end of World War II started after her Brothers of Italy party took 26% of the ballots cast, more than those won by the forces of Salvini and Berlusconi combined.

    The knives carving out those Cabinet posts are proving particularly sharp.

    Salvini on Saturday issued a sort of call for a truce between Meloni and Berlusconi so that three allies’ bid to rule Italy isn’t derailed.

    “I am sure that even between Giorgia and Silvio that harmony, which will be fundamental to government, well and together, for the next five years, will return,” Salvini said in a statement released by his anti-migrant League party about the escalating post-election tensions.

    A spat between Berlusconi and Meloni turned ugly when the former premier and a media mogul scrawled a list of derogatory adjectives about her on stationery emblazoned with the name of his villa near Milan. He positioned it in the Senate in plain view for photographers covering the election on Thursday of the upper parliamentary chamber’s president.

    “Giorgia Meloni,” wrote Berlusconi, jotting down that her ways are “presumptuous, bossy, arrogant, offensive.” A fifth adjective, “ridiculous,” appeared to have been scribbled over, said Italian media, who magnified the image.

    As much as political differences — Berlusconi bills himself a staunch champion of the European Union, while Meloni has said national interests should prevail over any conflicting EU priorities — their spat seemed patriarchal.

    “In Berlusconi’s etiquette, the woman is courted and maybe even venerated, but a true male cannot take orders from her, let alone accept that she says ‘no,’” wrote Massimo Gramellini in the daily Corriere della Serra, in his front-page fixture that takes aim at political foibles.

    By all accounts, Meloni had vetoed a ministry for a close political aide of Berlusconi who is one of his several female political proteges.

    With his self-described weakness for young women, Berlusconi has launched the political careers of female lawmakers from Forza Italia, the center-right party he created three decades ago.

    Reflecting Berlusconi’s pique, nearly all of his senators refused to vote for Meloni’s pick for Senate president, Ignazio La Russa, a long-time fascist nostalgist who helped Meloni, now 45, establish Brothers of Italy in 2012 as she forged her far-right political ascent.

    The Forza Italia boycott delivered a stiff rebuke to her. Meloni, known for her spunk and sharp tongue, wasn’t blinking.

    “It seems like a point was missing among those listed by Berlusconi — that I can’t be blackmailed,” Meloni told private Italian TV La7.

    Meloni already stood her ground during the election campaign. When opinion surveys indicated that she was by far the front-runner over Berlusconi and Salvini, those two unsuccessfully tried to wiggle out of long-standing pact that the top-getter in campaign coalitions would become premier should their forces prove victorious.

    Together, the leaders’ three parties command a comfortable majority in the newly seated Parliament.

    Still, Meloni needs the forces of Berlusconi and Salvini for any viable coalition.

    Salvini chafed for days when it appeared Meloni wouldn’t let him become interior minister, a post he held in 2018-2019 and used to crack down on migrants arriving by the tens of thousands on smugglers boats or rescue ships. On Friday, Meloni’s forces backed the election to the presidency of the lower Chamber of Deputies of a League lawmaker, Lorenzo Fontana, an ultraconservative who, like Salvini, has openly admired Russian President Vladimir Putin.

    Late Friday, the five-pointed star symbol of the Red Brigades, the extreme left group which terrorized Italy in the 1970s while extreme-right militants were also launching attacks, was scrawled along with La Russa’s name on a Brothers of Italy neighborhood office. It is the very office where Meloni cut her political teeth as a teenager in the youth wing of a neo-fascist predecessor of her own party.

    Meloni on Saturday retweeted her party’s description of the vandalism as “clear reference to the dramatic years that we don’t want to live through again and vowed in a tweet to “unite the Nation, not divide it as someone is trying to do.”

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