Free Republic

German Chancellor Angela Merkel says the European Union can move forward on contentious issues even if some member states opt out. In a weekly podcast released Saturday, Merkel cited defense cooperation and the recent creation of a European Public Prosecutors Office as examples where some EU members are pressing ahead. Merkel say “if there are important topics, then they should always be open to everyone” but added that “not everyone has to join in.” …

French finance minister Bruno Le Maire called Thursday for the European Union to become a cohesive whole, as unified and ambitious as the United States, adding that it was time for Britain to face the consequences of Brexit. The remarks come as the EU emerges from a rocky period of rising nationalism and challenges to its unity. Talks between the EU and Britain, which voted last year to secede, deadlocked in Brussels on Thursday, leaving future trade relations in doubt. “I think what we need within the Eurozone is more unity and more ambition,” Le Maire said during an event...

The German government has warned the US against withdrawing from the Iran nuclear agreement. US President Donald Trump is expected to decertify Tehran’s compliance with the 2015 deal in a White House speech at 12:45 p.m. (16:45 UTC) on Friday. “We believe this agreement is an important instrument to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran,” German government spokesman Steffen Seibert said on Friday. “If … an important country like the United States comes to a different conclusion as appears to be the case, we will work even harder with other partners to maintain this cohesion,” he said. German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel...

<p>The European Union is losing a major player in the United Kingdom, but there’s other potential cracks in the alliance showing up and additional wrinkles to resolve. While it’s still far from a sure thing, Catalonia may split off from Spain, leaving a question mark over their future. And some of the established EU members have been making noises about not being terribly happy with the way Brussels runs the operation.</p>

A Luxembourg-based chief prosecutor, tasked with investigating EU budget-related fraud, will start work next year after getting final approval from the European Parliament on Thursday (5 October). The European Public Prosecutors Office, first envisioned in the 2009 Lisbon Treaty, will coordinate national law enforcement efforts with the European police and law agencies Europol and Eurojust, as well as the EU anti-fraud office OLAF. The prosecutor will have the power to coordinate police investigations, freeze and seize assets, and arrest suspects across borders. Until now, only national authorities could investigate and prosecute crimes such as intentional misuse of EU structural funds...

During a meet-the-voter TV show on Thursday night, a cleaning lady asked Chancellor Angela Merkel a question that raised the issue of old-age poverty — leaving her struggling to come up with an answer. “In Austria, there is a citizens’ insurance scheme. Everyone pays into it,” Petra Vogel told the Chancellor on a live show on public broadcaster ZDF on Thursday. Vogel, a cleaner in a hospital in Bochum and trade unionist, went on to explain that if Germany had this too, she would not have to live in poverty as a pensioner. After more than 40 years of work,...

Given the recent history between Hungary, Germany and the European Union on matters of immigration policy and refugee resettlement, one can only imagine how well this is going to go over.Angela Merkel is up for reelection this year so she’s making a point of bolstering her open border policies and her support for the EU. That’s apparently why she felt she had to weigh in on Hungary’s recent positions on the subject. Those positions are, basically, that the EU can commit cultural suicide if they want, but Hungary won’t be having any part of it. Still, Merkel clearly wants...

‘This is not about punishing Great Britain,’ declared Sigmar Gabriel, Germany’s interim foreign secretary, on his recent visit to London. I fell about laughing, because this is precisely what’s going on. It is as obvious to us Germans as it is to the Brits: the EU cannot tolerate the thought of a successful United Kingdom outside the Brussels sphere of influence because, if that were allowed to happen, others might dare to start thinking about leaving the club too. Everything we hear from Brussels flows from this. The EU presents itself as a champion of free trade, especially when its...

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Thursday that the EU’s future took priority over Brexit talks, in a rebuke to British Prime Minister Theresa May’s plans to bring the negotiations up at a Brussels summit. “For me, the future of the (remaining) 27 member states comes before the exit negotiations with Great Britain,” said Merkel, Europe’s most influential leader, as she arrived for the two-day meeting. “We want to conduct these negotiations in a good spirit,” she nonetheless added. …

A German senior defense official called for a European Army on Monday. Hans-Peter Bartels, the German national defense commissioner, “called for Nato’s EU members to organise [sic] their militaries into a single force”. This single force would be wholly detrimental to the sovereignty of individual nation-states and would effectively squash any sort of justified or necessary overthrow of an EU member’s governmental system, perhaps it would even inhibit other “–exit”’s.

Billionaire financier George Soros said Thursday the European Union is in an "existential crisis" and needs to be reinvented in the face of growing threats. "The reinvention would have to revive the support that the European Union used to enjoy," the Hungarian-born Soros said at the Brussels Economic Forum. Such reinvention would have to review the past and explain to European citizens what went wrong and then make proposals to make things right. Soros welcomed a German idea to cut European funds aimed at reducing income inequalities at the regional level for those countries disrespecting the rule of law. Both...

Donald Trump is not fit to be president of the United States. He does not possess the requisite intellect and does not understand the significance of the office he holds nor the tasks associated with it. He doesn't read. He doesn't bother to peruse important files and intelligence reports and knows little about the issues that he has identified as his priorities. His decisions are capricious and they are delivered in the form of tyrannical decrees. He is a man free of morals. As has been demonstrated hundreds of times, he is a liar, a racist and a cheat. I...

Europe “must take its fate into its own hands” faced with a western alliance divided by Brexit and Donald Trump’s presidency, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Sunday. “The times in which we could completely depend on others are on the way out. I’ve experienced that in the last few days,” Merkel told a crowd at an election rally in Munich, southern Germany. “We Europeans truly have to take our fate into our own hands,” she added. While Germany and Europe would strive to remain on good terms with America and Britain, “we have to fight for our own destiny,” Merkel...

Europe "must take its fate into its own hands" faced with a western alliance divided by Brexit and Donald Trump's presidency, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Sunday. "The times in which we could completely depend on others are on the way out. I've experienced that in the last few days," Merkel told a crowd...

Germany heaved a sigh of relief after liberal candidate Emmanuel Macron won France’s presidential election comfortably on Sunday, but the two staunch allies face tough challenges over Europe’s future. Chancellor Angela Merkel had emphatically thrown her support behind Macron against his far-right anti-EU challenger Marine Le Pen, aware that the very existence of the European Union was at stake in the vote. Minutes after Macron’s win, her spokesman Steffen Seibert underlined the message, writing on Twitter:“Congratulations, @EmmanuelMacron. Your victory is a victory for a strong and united Europe and for French-German friendship.”Macron shares Merkel’s commitment to the bloc, which has...

Pro-European Union parties won the Dutch elections, despite concerns that the far-right Freedom Party might ride a Europe-wide tide of populism to victory. For now, the threat of the EU's demise has been postponed, but not eliminated. American conservatives do not seem particularly bothered by the possible demise of the EU. President Trump, for his part, has expressed ambivalence over the EU, embracing Euro-skeptics such as the U.K. Independence Party, even saying the EU's future does not matter to the United States. The truth is, it matters tremendously — not least for American trade, foreign policy and national security.

The German government told Washington it had the wrong address, after the US administration tried to enter talks with Germany on trade. “Trade policy is the responsibility of the European Union,” a spokesperson for the Economy Ministry told its US counterparts when they tried to open discussion on trade, Spiegel reported on Tuesday. Peter Navarro, who heads the White House’s new National Trade Council, called for bilateral talks to reduce the US trade deficit with Germany on Monday. The US recorded a $502-billion trade deficit last year, meaning it imported more than it exported. Germany, meanwhile, exported €253 billion ($270...

Greece to Surrender Gold, Utilities and Real Estate in Exchange For Pieces of Paper Printed in Brussels It's official: The Germans will not allow debt relief for Greece. Instead, Berlin wants to send in the repo man. The untold story of the Greek "bailouts" is that it wasn't a "bailout" — it was an auction of Greek assets. Real, tangible things with real, tangible value were seized in exchange for pieces of paper that guarantee Athens will be chained to Berlin and Brussels for the foreseeable future. It's your basic extortion racket. As one rather gloomy (but intriguing) analysis puts...

The European Union declared the Trump administration a “threat” on Tuesday, laying bare what many Europeans think privately and setting the stage for increased tension between the US and EU. European Union President Donald Tusk’s diplomatic bombshell listed the Trump administration as a threat alongside China, Russia, terrorism and radical Islam, adding that “worrying declarations by the new American administration all make our future highly unpredictable.” “The change in Washington puts the European Union in a difficult situation; with the new administration seeming to put into question the last 70 years of American foreign policy,” Tusk said in a letter...

The European Central Bank should begin winding down its expansive monetary policy in 2017 as inflation returns in the eurozone, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble said in an interview on Friday. “It would probably be right if the ECB starts daring to head for the exit this year,” Schäuble told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper — although he acknowledged it would be a “difficult task”. The ECB has fixed interest rates at record lows in the 19-nation single currency area, as well as offering cheap loans to banks and buying up tens of billions of euros per month of government and...