Free Republic

Russian President Vladimir Putin has issued a threat to outgoing European Commission President Jose Manual Barroso that he could "take Kiev in two weeks" if he wanted, Italian media reports have said. According to Italian newspaper La Repubblica, the Russian leader made the belligerent statement in a phone call with the outgoing EU leader, who is set to be replaced by Luxembourg's former prime minister Jean-Claude Juncker...

The European Commission has warned that it is running out of money again, in the latest standoff between the EU institutions over its unpaid bills. The EU executive says that the bloc’s budget faces payment gaps worth €4.7 billion covering research and employment programs, cohesion policy, and costs arising from the refugee crisis in Ukraine and Syria. An autumn cash flow crisis for the commission has become a perennial fixture in the EU calendar.After repeatedly warnings from the EU executive that flagship programs such as the Erasmus student exchange scheme and the European Social Fund were within weeks of running...

UK prime minister David Cameron is to force EU leaders to vote on whether to appoint Jean-Claude Juncker to become the next president of the European Commission at a summit later this week. […] A vote would be unprecedented. Traditionally, EU leaders decide on the leader of the EU executive by consensus following a formal discussion. Cameron has argued that Juncker, a former prime minister of the Grand Duchy and veteran of more than twenty years of EU summitry, is too federalist and will be unable to reform the EU, in the wake of election results which saw a surge...

The EU’s anti-fraud office OLAF will have to ask permission to enter the offices of elected and appointed members of the EU institutions under proposals by the European Commission. “For all the other staff, Olaf will continue to work as it has up to now,” European Commission spokesperson Emer Traynor told this website on Wednesday (18 June). […] The commission wants to create a so-called Controller of Procedural Guarantees. OLAF investigators will first have to ask the Controller’s permission before entering the office of a European Commissioner, an MEP, or a minister at the EU Council. Everyone else, including staff...

German Chancellor Angela Merkel on a trip in Sweden listened to British, Swedish and Dutch arguments against appointing Jean-Claude Juncker as the next EU commission chief. Invited by Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, Merkel joined her counterparts from Britain and the Netherlands for a two-day trip complete with a lake boat excursion at Reinfeldt’s summer residence in Harpsund, near Stockholm. The four leaders were set to hold a press conference on Tuesday morning after their talks. Officially, the Juncker appointment was not on the agenda. […] Nominating top candidates, a novelty which EU political families and the European Parliament came...

The fight over who will become the next Commission president has reached Berlin. And that means that an issue that was already one of the most complicated that Merkel has ever faced has become even more so. The number of contradictory interests is unusually large. She wants to keep Britain in the European Union, she doesn’t want to antagonize the SPD, she doesn’t want to anger people within her own party and she doesn’t want to be seen as the one who ignored the election result and prevented election victor Jean-Claude Juncker from taking what many see as his rightful...

Before the European Parliament election last month, voters were told the poll would also determine the next Commission president. In a silent putsch against the electorate, Angela Merkel is now impeding the process. She fears a loss of power and Britain’s EU exit. […] … Merkel had hardly begun her speech last Friday before she got right to the point. With her hands set on the podium in front of her in the Regensburg University auditorium, she said: “I am engaging in all discussions in the spirit that Jean-Claude Juncker should become president of the European Commission.” German news agency...

The European Commission has dismissed a campaign to scrap funding for stem cell research and reproductive health services. The demand was made by the “One of Us” campaign, the second citizens’ initiative to reach the 1 million signatures required under the Lisbon treaty. The campaign, which has been backed by Popes Francis and Benedict, the current and former heads of the Catholic church, and backed by a number of religious organizations, sought to ban the use of EU funds for research, foreign aid programs and public health activities that are linked to the destruction of human embryos. …

The European Commission has today been accused of “raiding the pockets of voters” after demanding an extra £500 million from British taxpayers to meet Brussels spending bills. The EU executive, which oversees European spending, has demanded an extra £3.8 billion in cash from national governments to pay for costs—including £200 million extra help to Ukraine. The rest of the money will be spent on youth employment projects and regional policy. National governments are furious at an increase that comes in the aftermath of EU elections victories for populist and far-Left and Right parties in Britain, France, Denmark and Greece. …

EU leaders on Tuesday (27 May) tasked council chief Herman Van Rompuy with exploring who could fill top EU posts and gather a majority in the European Parliament, with consultations set to last at least until the end of June. They ignored a request made earlier in the day by the leaders of the political groups in the European Parliament to task Jean-Claude Juncker with trying to get a majority behind him for the European Commission presidency. […] Commenting on the leaders’ decision, outgoing Socialist group leader Hannes Swoboda tweeted that it’s “absurd that Juncker has our backing to start...

German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday (22 May) made conciliatory gestures towards the European Parliament on the election of the next commission president after Sunday's EU elections. In an interview with Passauer Neue Presse, Merkel said that voters in the EU elections can bring their contribution to furthering the European project. “A clear qualitative improvement is that, in principle, the Commission president gets elected,” she said. …

Google cannot be broken up into smaller companies without new EU legislation, the European Commission said today (20 May), after detailing two potential new antitrust investigations into the internet giant. Competition Commissioner Joaquín Almunia was responding to comments made earlier this week by German’s Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel, who said Google may have such a dominant market position that a break-up had to be “seriously considered.” Existing competition law was not powerful enough to split up the business, Almunia said. The California-based company may yet face a separate antitrust investigation to the one ongoing since November 2012. Open Internet Project,...

European Commission President candidates say they back an EU-wide strategy to support the fundamental rights of gay people. All but one responded to EUobserver’s questions on implementing a roadmap for the LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans] community. Pro-gay rights groups and MEPs over the years have criticized the European Commission, which proposes laws, for failing to put forward a dedicated policy. Last year, EU commissioner for justice Viviane Reding drew criticism after rejecting a comprehensive EU policy proposal on gay rights by 11 EU ministers. …

The use of drift nets, long vertical nets cast deep into the sea that catch all fish and mammals in their path, would be completely banned under a proposal put forward by the European Commission today (14 May). The use of drift nets has already been largely banned in the EU since 2002. However, the existing law has loopholes. Boats are allowed to keep drift nets on board as long as they are smaller than 2.5 km (1.55 miles) and that their use is not intended for the capture of endangered species. Fishermen are using this loophole to conduct illegal...

European Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger is working on a plan to help Ukraine pay some of its gas bills to Russia, he told Austria's ORF radio on Friday, saying there was "no reason to panic" about Russian gas supplies to Europe. "We are in close contact with Ukraine and its gas company to ensure that Ukraine remains able to pay and the debts that the gas company has to Gazprom do not rise further," he said, adding he would meet Ukraine's energy and foreign ministers on Monday.

Tapping pension funds and encouraging online crowd funding are at the heart of plans unveiled by the European Commission to kickstart business investment. Speaking on Thursday (27 March), financial services commissioner Michel Barnier said the Commission’s blueprint on “long-term financing” published the same day was needed to further encourage alternatives to traditional bank lending which remains stagnant more than five years since the start of the financial crisis. “Our financial system must regain and increase its ability to finance the real economy,” he said, adding that “we need to diversify financing sources in Europe and improve access to finance for...

The European Commission on Tuesday (11 March) announced a new measure to challenge member states in breach of EU rule of law. The proposal would allow the European Union to intervene at an early stage in case of “serious and systemic threats” to the rule of law in member states. Isolated cases of breaches of fundamental rights or miscarriages of justice are excluded from its scope. […] The plan is described as a missing element between a standard infringement procedure and the “nuclear option” of Article 7, which withdraws a member state’s voting rights at the EU level. Article 7...

The European Commission has decided not to include a chapter on EU institutions in a report on corruption in member states due out next week. The original plan, announced in 2011, was to assess corruption across the member states and within the EU institutions. EU home affairs commissioner Cecilia Malmström is set to release the first bi-annual report on Monday (3 February), around six months later than originally planned. Malmström’s spokesperson Michael Cercone told this website in an email that the commission had considered assessing the anti-corruption efforts of the EU’s own institutions but “realized that this is something we...

The European Commission will adopt criteria next week on delivering an Ecolabel to toilets and urinals, EurActiv has learned. The decision comes after years of efforts by experts working for the European Commission’s environment directorate, as well as “stakeholders” studying “user behavior” and “best practices”. … Work on developing an EU standard for toilets has started in January 2011, according documents of the European Commission’s Joint Research Center, Institute for Prospective Technological Studies. A first Ad-Hoc Working Group meeting was held in Brussels on October 2011, with the second such meeting held in the attractive city of Seville, Spain, in...

At the beginning of her third term, Merkel has more power in Germany and Europe than any chancellor before her. There hasn’t been such a strong majority behind a government in Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag, since the first grand coalition half a century ago. In the midst of the European crisis, Germany has become the undisputed dominant power in Europe. The grand coalition will hand Merkel a majority she could use to shape Germany and Europe and address major issues, including constitutional reforms in Germany and the reform of European Union institutions. … (O)fficials at the Chancellery are forging plans...