Latest news with #EuropeanIntegration
Yahoo
17-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Commerzbank employees voice UniCredit deal concerns in Brussels
FRANKFURT (Reuters) -A delegation of employee representatives from Commerzbank met with members of the European Parliament to voice their concerns about a possible takeover by UniCredit, according to a social media post on Thursday and two people with knowledge of the matter. Italy's UniCredit last week doubled its shareholding in the German lender as it pushes for a tie-up between the banks, despite resistance from Commerzbank management, employees and the German government. "We made clear that a takeover would not be progress towards a European banking union," Commerzbank supervisory board member Nina Olderdissen said in a post on LinkedIn about the Brussels meetings. "What may seem like a step towards European integration actually harbors considerable risks for employees, customers and investors on both sides - without any discernible added value," she wrote. UniCredit first emerged as big investor in Commerzbank in September. Its CEO, Andrea Orcel, has said a deal "would create a new national banking champion for Germany", aiding "the revitalisation of the German economy".
Reuters
17-07-2025
- Business
- Reuters
Commerzbank employees voice UniCredit deal concerns in Brussels
FRANKFURT, July 17 (Reuters) - A delegation of employee representatives from Commerzbank ( opens new tab met with members of the European Parliament to voice their concerns about a possible takeover by UniCredit ( opens new tab, according to a social media post on Thursday and two people with knowledge of the matter. Italy's UniCredit last week doubled its shareholding in the German lender as it pushes for a tie-up between the banks, despite resistance from Commerzbank management, employees and the German government. The outreach marks a new front in the defense against the advances of UniCredit, which first emerged as a big investor in Commerzbank in September. "We made clear that a takeover would not be progress towards a European banking union," Commerzbank supervisory board member Nina Olderdissen said in a post on LinkedIn about the Brussels meetings. "What may seem like a step towards European integration actually harbors considerable risks for employees, customers and investors on both sides - without any discernible added value," she wrote. Commerzbank and UniCredit declined to comment. Unicredit's CEO, Andrea Orcel, has said a deal "would create a new national banking champion for Germany", aiding "the revitalisation of the German economy".
Times
27-06-2025
- Business
- Times
Oresund Bridge is £58 to cross. Is the toll just daylight robbery?
For four centuries the Oresund, a strait between Denmark and Sweden that is the gateway to the Baltic Sea, was a geopolitical chokepoint. The Danish kings would routinely top up their treasury by extorting transit fees from passing ships. In 1658 the Swedes got their own back by crossing the frozen waters and surrounding Copenhagen. Urban legend holds that there is still a law on Denmark's statute books that permits loyal Danes to take up a cudgel and bash any Swede attempting to traverse the ice. The sound last became passable on foot in 1996 but no heads were staved in. Four years after that, though, Sweden and Denmark opened a five-mile, €2.6 billion bridge across the strait, whose 25th birthday falls on Tuesday. The kings and queens of both countries will mark the occasion by travelling in a convoy from the Swedish side to the Danish one, pausing halfway on the island of Peberholm. The bridge has become a symbol of European integration, all but turning Copenhagen and the Swedish port of Malmo on the other side of the water into a single conurbation. 'There is a before and after the bridge,' said Linus Eriksson, the chief executive of the company that runs it. 'Before the bridge, Malmo was a town in crisis. Even Copenhagen had a tough situation. Both cities had a tough situation with poor growth. Now it's a totally different region economically.' The crossing was also made famous from Tijuana to Bulawayo by The Bridge, a noirish crime drama in which a chilly Swedish detective called Saga Noren and her Danish partner Martin Rohde solved a series of grisly trans-strait murders. Now, however, many commuters who bought into the dream of living in one country and working in the other are complaining of what they regard as a lower-level but higher-volume crime: daylight robbery. • How Swedish gangs are exporting young contract killers across Scandinavia Weeks before the anniversary, the basic price for a one-way car journey across the bridge has been jacked up to 510 Danish kroner, or £58. For the largest vans, it is the equivalent of £218. Research by Sydsvenskan, a regional newspaper in southern Sweden, suggests this is by far the most expensive bridge toll on the planet, costing about twice as much as its nearest rivals in Japan and Canada. Tommy Frandsen, a Danish warehouse manager, is the embodiment of the Oresund ideal. He lives in Staffanstorp, a Swedish town 12 miles from the bridge, and commutes across it every weekday to his workplace on the Danish side. Even though he gets a reduced rate, this now costs him nearly £350 a month, or slightly more than 10 per cent of his salary after tax. 'I feel like it's terrible because they raise the prices every year,' Frandsen said. 'The ferry is not an option. The train is not a possibility because I live out in the country and there's no trains from here.' Aravin Chakravarthi, who is based in Malmo but works in Hedehusene, Denmark, said he could not afford to traverse the bridge by car and was forced to take longer rail journeys instead. 'I don't drive by car because of the bridge toll, even on desperate days when I'm juggling tight schedules to drop off or pick up my two kids,' he said. Although the bridge consortium is jointly owned by the Swedish and Danish states, it is financed with sizeable loans, which have to be paid back. The toll is also linked by law to the cost of the privately operated ferry that runs between Helsingor and Helsingborg further up the strait, to protect the commercial viability of the latter. 'We are state-owned, so we would not be able to cut the price by half because then the commercially operated ferry company would complain or even sue us,' said Eriksson. Despite the vehicle toll, the total number of people crossing the Oresund by car, train or ferry hit a record 38 million last year, equivalent to about 105,000 trips a day. A one-way railway journey between central Copenhagen and Malmo typically costs only £13. Locals' sentimental attachment to the bridge remains largely undiminished. 'It has created love relationships. It has created party culture and university research,' said Niels Paarup-Petersen, a Swedish Centre Party MP from Malmo. 'There are such gains that have actually become a reality because of the bridge.'
The Guardian
16-06-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Europe should be standing up to Trump and Putin – instead it is mirroring them
Donald Trump's 'America First' policies are undermining decades of transatlantic cooperation just as Putin's Russia destabilises Europe with direct military aggression. But these twin shocks have unintentionally accomplished something the EU institutions never could. They have made European integration feel not just important, but existential – a matter of democratic survival – for ordinary citizens. From Helsinki to Lisbon, people are suddenly experiencing the same existential unease. Trade wars, defence threats and military aggression don't respect borders. More and more Europeans now recognise that their small, individual nations cannot withstand simultaneous pressure from both Washington and Moscow. They find themselves caught between economic coercion and military intimidation. Recent Eurobarometer data confirm the shift: 74% of Europeans now view EU membership as a positive thing – the highest level of support ever recorded. This is a historic opportunity. And yet, EU and national leaders remain paralysed – unable, or unwilling, to convert this public support and shared urgency into political momentum for reducing Europe's dependence on US military guarantees and economic shelter. This is the real tragedy: Europe's governments no longer practise the very ideals they preach. Though the EU still speaks the language of multilateralism and climate leadership, its policy direction and that of most of its member states increasingly mirror Trump's. On migration, the EU's new pact on migration and asylum reframes asylum as a security risk, echoing Trump's immigration crackdown. On climate, Ursula von der Leyen's European Commission has quietly dismantled key green deal initiatives and delayed critical legislation, in a deregulatory shift reminiscent of Trump's EPA rollbacks. Civil society is also under mounting pressure. Just as Trump has targeted non-profits and dissenters, the conservative European People's party (EPP) – von der Leyen's political 'family' – has launched an unprecedented assault on NGOs, threatening their funding and legitimacy. Even fundamental rights are at risk. The EU's response to Hungary's ban on Pride marches and expansion of surveillance powers has been tepid at best – tacitly tolerating democratic backsliding within its own ranks. But perhaps the most dangerous convergence lies in how power is exercised. Trump governs by executive fiat, sidelining Congress with executive orders. Today's commission is drifting in a similar direction at the demand of a majority of its member states. It centralises power, pushing through complex 'omnibus' packages and bypassing the European parliament most recently in its proposal to rearm the EU. What we are witnessing is not just a rupture in the transatlantic alliance but something more insidious. There are signs of an ideological convergence between Trump's America and today's European political centre, where parties are increasingly stealing ideas from the far-right – as in Germany – or governing with those parties, directly or indirectly. That is not only the reality in many EU countries but in the EU system itself under von der Leyen. Despite pledges in her first term to stick to the centre of politics, the commission increasingly relies on the votes of a rightwing majority in the European parliament, formed by conservative and far-right groupings of all stripes. These include the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), which used to be considered mainstream conservative but which now brings together Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni's Brothers of Italy party with more extreme far-right parties such as France's Reconquête and the Sweden Democrats. There is also the Patriots for Europe (PfE) group, co-led by Marine Le Pen and Viktor Orbán, and the even more extreme Europe of Sovereign Nations (ESN), dominated by Germany's Alternative für Deutschland. The EPP has traditionally allied with socialist and liberal MEPs who as a bloc helped elect von der Leyen last year. But the EPP has recently voted with parties to the right of it, notably to delay a new deforestation law. The same happened on budgetary matters, the recognition of Edmundo González as Venezuela's president, and more recently in blocking an EU ethics body. There is also a growing presidentialisation of the commission. During the Covid pandemic, von der Leyen personally negotiated vaccine deals by text message – shielding those discussions from public and parliamentary scrutiny. The risk is that tolerance of such a shift towards personalised, opaque governance makes it easier to pass to the 'Trumpification' stage – where politicians increasingly borrow from the authoritarian playbook, preferring executive fiat over parliamentary democracy. Sign up to This is Europe The most pressing stories and debates for Europeans – from identity to economics to the environment after newsletter promotion This creeping phenomenon weakens Europe's ability to respond to the very threats that should be pushing it closer together. Just when European citizens are most willing to support joint action – on Ukraine, Gaza, big tech, or defence – their leaders are failing to respond. What's missing is the political courage to articulate a compelling alternative to far-right messaging – one that makes an affirmative case for EU-wide action on the issues that matter most to Europeans: common security, managed migration and shared prosperity. This means presenting European integration not as a threat to national identity, but as the means to protect and strengthen it. When European nations pool their defence capabilities, they don't surrender sovereignty – they multiply their capacity to defend their communities. When they coordinate migration policies, they don't open floodgates – they create orderly, humane systems that serve both newcomers and existing communities. When they harmonise economic policies, they don't level down – they lift up regions and workers who have been left behind. This vision appeals to the same desire for security and belonging that populists exploit, but offers real solutions instead of scapegoats. This failure to articulate such a vision has real costs. Every month of delay in building European defence capabilities is another month of dependence on an unreliable US. Every compromise with authoritarians – whether in Budapest or Jerusalem – erodes the democratic credibility that makes European leadership possible. Trump and Putin have inadvertently given Europe a shared sense of purpose and a need for urgent action. The question is not whether Europeans are ready to respond – the polls show they are. The question is whether Europe's leaders will sleepwalk into irrelevance, or worse. Alberto Alemanno is the Jean Monnet professor of EU law at HEC Paris and the founder of The Good Lobby
Yahoo
14-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
A Very Different Anniversary Celebration
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. As tanks roll through Washington today to mark the U.S. Army's 250th birthday—and the 79th birthday of President Donald Trump—Europe is commemorating a different anniversary, not with combat vehicles but with a passenger liner moored near a riverbank. Dignitaries from across Europe are gathering in Schengen, a riparian village in Luxembourg, to celebrate the creation of an international agreement to abolish controls at their countries' common borders. The agreement, signed on June 14, 1985, turned the little-known village into a landmark of European integration; today, Schengen is synonymous with the experiment the agreement spawned—an area of borderless travel that has grown to encompass 29 nations and more than 450 million people. The anniversary celebration in Schengen features artifacts of the treaty-making process, including the MS Princesse Marie-Astrid, the refurbished cruise ship where diplomats from the five original signatory states—France, West Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands—convened on the Moselle River to dismantle border controls. Their aims were practical: The Schengen Agreement was intended to make life more convenient for people—to send a message to workers and vacationers to 'pass, pass, pass,' as one of the signers told me during research for my book about Schengen. 'In principle, you can pass; and we presume that you're honest.' [Read: What Europe fears] But the agreement took on greater symbolic meaning. Schengen embodied the values of liberal internationalism that were ascendant at the so-called end of history, fulfilling the promise of a community of nations where people, goods, capital, and information all would circulate freely. If the Abrams tank is the key symbol of American military might on display today in Washington, the passenger ship anchored in Schengen showcases a very different vision of the international order, one premised on mobility, connection, and cross-border exchange—on the right 'to travel, to migrate, to circulate, to receive and be received,' as one Senegalese migrant in Paris put it in the years after Schengen's founding. Of course, both visions are legacies of the defeat of fascism and the end of the Cold War: a strong United States that vanquished enemies of freedom, a peaceful Europe where erstwhile adversaries worked to eradicate borders that once stood as battle lines. For a time, these visions coexisted. Now they seem to be coming apart. That's all too clear in the contempt that senior members of the Trump administration have expressed for longtime allies; the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, called Europe 'PATHETIC' in a private chat on the Signal messaging app. It's also clear in the administration's escalating crackdown on immigration, and in the deployment of Marines in response to protests in Los Angeles. The vision of free movement animating Schengen is not one shared by Stephen Miller, to say the least. But Schengen is a peculiar creation, in a way befitting our disorienting times. As I explore in my book, the agreement hardly envisioned unrestricted mobility. Instead, it paired the free movement of European citizens with the exclusion of unwanted outsiders, termed 'undesirable' and ranked according to the level of risk they posed to Europe. The agreement assigned participating nations new responsibilities to police the Schengen Area's borders. And it gave them the authority to reintroduce internal controls in the event of a serious threat to 'public policy' or national security. [T. H. Breen: Trump's un-American parade] Nations have done so repeatedly over the past decade, since Europe was jolted by the arrival of an estimated 1.3 million asylum seekers in 2015. A series of deadly terrorist attacks added to the impetus to crack down. Unrelenting emergencies over the past five years—the coronavirus pandemic, Russia's war in Ukraine, and spasms of violence in the Middle East—have put still more pressure on European states to step up border checks. Recently, Germany vowed to maintain controls at all nine of its land borders, citing 'high levels of irregular migration and migrant smuggling,' as well as the country's strained asylum system and the 'global security situation.' The Netherlands closed its borders in part because of the 'pressure on public services' from an influx of migrants and asylum seekers. Multiple Nordic countries, meanwhile, point to the threat of Russian sabotage, among other destabilizing cross-border activities, to justify renewed border checks. Yet 40 years on, the Schengen Agreement is so interwoven into the fabric of European life that nations no longer have the resources or logistical capabilities necessary to seal their borders. There are border checks, at least in some places, but moves to reintroduce controls on a large scale have been mostly symbolic. And for all the opposition to mass migration, which has fueled far-right politics on both sides of the Atlantic, the free movement of people and goods remains one of the European Union's most popular policies. Perhaps that reflects Schengen's origins as an innovation designed to improve everyday life, not a show of force or revolutionary transformation. Or perhaps it reveals that values of peace and pluralism are still deeply held by large parts of Western society. Both, in fact, define the view of Robert Goebbels, who, as Luxembourg's delegate to the negotiations 40 years ago, helped draft the agreement and chose Schengen as the site of the signing ceremony. I wrote to Goebbels, who has since gone on to serve as a government minister and then a member of the European Parliament, on the eve of today's twin anniversary celebrations. Schengen, he told me, is a 'peace project,' binding nations once engaged in bloody conflict and 'offering liberties and well-being to 450 million Europeans.' Trump, meanwhile, 'celebrates himself.' Article originally published at The Atlantic
