Europe finished the year better than it started
IT WAS A year of fragmentation and response, progress and decline, fear and resolve. Europe, in short, had a mixed 2019. But overall it finished the year in a better state than it had started; and most Europeans should allow themselves some quiet satisfaction, as they are not only looking at the past 12 months, but also the past 30 years since that dramatic day in November 1989, when the The Berlin Wall fell and the great task of rebuilding a divided continent began.
First, some setbacks. 2019 was a year when too much of the European Union fell back into near stagnation, with flat or negative growth in some of its largest economies, especially Germany and Italy. The slowdown in the German engine has sparked an acrimonious debate within the ruling “grand coalition” in Germany, a difficult alliance between the Christian Democrats, who want to stick with their traditional budgetary orthodoxy (encapsulated in the deficit-free “black zero” policy) and the Social Democrats, who are now lobbying for more spending as part of their leftist party, newly elected leaders. If this conflict cannot be resolved, the coalition could even collapse early next year. Germany’s new economic weakness also threatens the Central European countries, in particular Poland and the Czech Republic, whose long boom is closely linked to the giant’s supply.
Politically also, it has been a difficult year of fragmentation for some of the EU’s most important and powerful actors. Britain has spent the whole year still devastated by the engineering problems of its exit from the EU, and the election by a solid majority of Boris Johnson did nothing to solve this underlying problem. France spent much of the year looking for ways to counter the threat of violent protests yellow vests (yellow jackets), and ended the year with a huge wave of strikes against the limited but still deeply unpopular reforms of President Emmanuel Macron. In Spain, the political impasse, the economic policy and the way of managing the separatists of Catalonia resulted not one but two elections, but neither succeeded in producing a viable government. In Italy, the strange alliance between the far right Northern League and the nonconformist Five Star Alliance has also collapsed, and the new coalition which replaced it seems destined to collapse in the not too distant future . Matteo Salvini’s League would then be ready to conquer absolute power and resume its assault on the euro.
Beyond the EU, the economic and political situation is hardly sunny. The two powerful autocracies on the flanks of the EU, Russia and Turkey, have both been hammered by the economic weakness and growing unpopularity of their leaders, Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Neither man needs to face voters in the near future, and the popular uprising is doomed to failure. But both increased the level of repression they use to protect themselves.
However, there are also reasons to be gay. The biggest may have come to voters European Parliament elections in May. Many feared the rise of European populists; Salvini of Italy had tried, after all, to build a pan-European alliance of nationalists, involving Hungarians, Viktor Orban, the National Rally of Marine Le Pen in France and the Alternative for Germany. Voters took a close look and rejected the plan. Although the political center is now more fragmented than before, with the creation of a large new liberal bloc as well as the traditional center-right and center-left, the populists have made no significant gains.
The information on Europe and NATO is also slightly encouraging. Europeans are gradually coming to accept that they must assume more of the weight of their own defense, bitten of course by threats from Donald Trump, but also by the harsh words of Mr. Macron, who in an interview with The Economist describes the alliance as experience “brain death”.