British Tories' Luxembourg allies slip in unnoticed

As an occasional follower of developments in the British Tory-led European Reformers (ECR) group in the European Parliament, I was intrested to discover that  the latest addition to the ECR fold was Luxembourg's Alternative Democratic Reform party (ADR) Actually, the ADR joined back in June, but as it has no MEPs and Luxembourg politics is not something that even I- with my penchant for small parties and small countries - don't follow that closely, it passed me by. 

The ADR is, however, an interesting right-wing populist outfit, which has it origins in 1987 as grouping demanding the same level of pension rights for private sector employees and the self-employed  as for well looked after state employees. It later broadened out its politics into anti-establishment, anti-bureaucracy positions and is, of course, eurosceptic for these kind of reasons. Some Luxembourgois political scientists have seen it as a functional equivalent of a radical right party, which is unlikely ever to emerge in the Grand Duchy due to a rather distinct, cosmopolitan national identity; a great deal of wealth; and norm of having very large numbers of non-nationals (mostly West European EU-ers) as a fact of life. Still, the ADR has managed to raise concerns about immigrants it sees as less desirable, which seems mainly be have been a debate centring on asylum seekers and illegal migration - and some academic studies rather casually lump it in with the anti-immigrant far right on the basis of expert surveys.

The ADR has never been in government - considered something of dodgy outsider by the country's political establishment - but has been a solid part of the Luxemboourg political landscape for more than two decades with around 10% of the vote. This leaves the ADR potentially well placed to to add an MEP to the ECR  (it missed out very narrowly in 2004 and by a slightly bigger margin in 2009) a grouping already not short of one-member national delegations.

British voters: Václav Klaus needs you!

As in all the best action thrillers, it comes down to this: one man holds the fate of Europe in his hands. Unfortunately - or for those of a certain ideological disposition, fortunately - that man is not Arnie Schwarzenegger or Claude van Damme, but Václav Klaus.

Actually, it's only the fate of the Lisbon Treaty that Mr Klaus may hold in his hands, but as the Czech President has increasingly struck a Masarykian pose over the past few years coming up grandiose personal visions of a Europe re-made (or rather unmade) as a loose alliance of nation statse states bound by common values and free markets, he might prefer the former billing.

But still, the Czech President's willingness (or unwillingness) to pick up a pen is (or soon will be) all that stands between final EU-wide ratification of the LisbonTreaty. Of course, as a dyed-in-the-wool opponent of Lisbon and the ill-fated Constitutional Treaty, Mr Klaus understandably does not want to pick up his.

But surely, sooner or later he has to? The Treaty was, after all, duly ratified in both houses of the Czech parliament several months ago, after all, and Klaus is merely an indirectly elected head of state of a small country with pretty every EU government (including his own) against him.

Despite the optimism of the Czech Republic's caretaker technocrat Prime Minister Jan Fischer and his Foreign Secretary, Stefan Fule, that the Czech ratification of the Treaty would come by the end of the year (and what else, could they say?), this is, however, far from clear.

Constitutionally and politically, Mr Klaus - whose favourite metaphor for politics was for a long time that of an unfolding game of chess - still has a strong defensive position and few good moves left to make

On ordinary domestic legislation, the Czech president does not have strong powers. He has a weak veto on parliamentary legislation, which can be overturned by a simple majority vote of the lower house. His executive powers are also limited. Appointing judges and central bankers and choosing a Prime Minister designate to form a government after election is about the size of it.

However, when we come to international treaties things are bit different. Article 631b of the Czech Constitution states that the President "negotiates and ratifies international treaties". But no one is quite sure if this means the President must sign treaties approved by parliament (directly or as with EU accession by delegating it powers to a referendum) or that he must to do for treaties to be ratified but may not if he chooses. Indeed, a lively debate on the subject has ensued in Czech legal blogs (see here, for example). Some have suggested that were the first interpretation to be followed, a refusal to sign would result in the Treaty passing into law anyway, but that would have to be tested out in the Constitutional Court with the certainty only of a long, complex and controversial case.

Point blank refusal is, however, neither legally nor politically necessary for Klaus to hold up the Treaty There seem, however, to be a consensus that the President can (and indeed should delay) signing a treaty if he thinks it needs further examination or it constitutionality needs testing out. How long can he reasonably do so? How long is piece of string?

Statesmanlike as every Mr Klaus has gone straight for this strategy of seeking minor (but, of course politically unfeasible) amendments to the Treaty in the fundamental interests of the Czech state: specifically he is concern that the Charter of Fundamenal Rights might allow could enable the European Court of Justice to revise the 1945 Beneš Decrees under which the post-war Czechoslovak government stripped its ethnic German citizens of property and citizenship. This demand is a clever move combining the President's widely recognised but informal constitutional role of guardianship of the state role with a totemic and sensivity issue connected with national identity and demand which, viewed superficially, asks for no more than the kind of opt-out that old member states like the UK feel amply entitled to as a matter of course.

The country's politicians and major parties could, in theory, cut through the Gordian Knot by curtailing the President's powers, or indeed remove Klaus directly through some special constitional law or more indirectly by re-making the nature of the Czech presidency altogether through a constitutional amendment (as the Greens seem to suggest). However, given the present non-partisian caretaker government, which rests on a not altogether solid political agreement between the two major Czech parties, divisions in ODS and the unpredictable but Lisbon-unfriendly position of the Communists this seems unlikely. It might also be problematic constitutionally given that the Constitutional Court has akready rapped politicians' knuckles for attempting similar jiggery-pokery with the Constitution to allow early elections. Article 65(2) of the Constitution also allows the indictment (and possible removal) of the President for high treason in the Constitutional Court following a Senate vote but, I suspect, even the most ardent europhile might balk at equating Klaus's opposition to the Lisbon Treaty with this.

But is there any kind of end game available to Klaus? Even if he could, if he wished, lay into the current caretaker government's lack of legitimacy (Who voted for Fischer or Fule?), even in the Czech context the indirectly elected Klaus lacks either the public backing or the political legitimacy to block the will of an elected parliament for ever and a day.

Help, however, is happily at hand in the form of the those old ideological confreres the British Tories, even if Klaus has been fairly contemptuous in the past of the touchy-feely, bluey-green conservatism of Dave Cameron and co. Trying to fudge the issue of Lisbon without facing down his party's eurosceptics or re-open a very internally divisive issue, Cameron promised a British referendum on Lisbon (which would almost certainly reject it) - as a extra to the Treaty's existing ratification by the British Parliament - if and only if the Treaty was still unratified elsewhere and so not in force.

So, all Mr Klaus has to do is string out his questioning of the Treaty another six months and fend off a disunited Czech political class and a government of technocrats until (as seems likely) the British Conservatives win a May 2010 election, hold the promised referendum and let the people speak. The will Brits democratically derail the Treaty, while Mr Klaus say innocently, but with some satisfaction as he did after the Dutch and French referendums rejecting the original Constitutional Treaty, that he knew it would all end in tears when the voters got in on the act, but all he was doing was acting presidential and thoughtfully examining the Treaty and watching out for Czech national interests like a responsible head of state

Dave must be delighted at the prospect.

SEI on EU

Sussex European Institute's roundtable on the euro-elections tries to inject some early academic analysis into interpretation of last week's election. The debate offers more than the sum of its parts. The underlying issue is not who's up and who's down, but how and why we should study the elections (the 'so what' qiestion): as a failing institutional device for addressing the democratic deficit in a multi-level EU political system?; as a set of case studies about 'Europe' in domestic politics; or 27 parallel 'second order' national electoral contests in which disenchanted voters give a pointer to the way that party systems are really going at an underlying level (the UK has is an 8 eight party system struggling to break out of a two-and-half party system.

There's discussion of various factors influencing the results: the impact of economic crisis; national electoral cycles; the willingness of social democratic voters to vote for the radical left; the format of national party systems and so on... I wonder if it might be possible to cluster the 27 cases inro 4-5 configurations rather than picking out patchy trends or making qualified generalisations, or falling back on series of national stories.

Afterwards I duck into theUniversity of Sussex library. A library assistant in an anarcho-syndicalist T-shirt efficiently helps me find the book I'm after.

Bulgaria: People's Commissioners to European Commissioners?

The Economist lays into Bulgaria's Socialist Prime Minister for extraordinary plan to create forms of parallel political administration with the European Commission in which Commissioners would intervene directly (as opposed to indirectly) in the country's government. A sort of Kosova-lite, in which the EU would quietly colonize Bulgaria - although seeing an election wheeze intending to shore up vastly unpopular domestic institutions and a vastly unpopular government, The Economist struck a eurosceptic note, by comparing it to Soviet oversight of the Bulgaria in the 1940s. And Bulgaria's long serving communist strongman Todor Zhivkov did n more than one occasion reportedly offered to make Bulgaria the 16th Republic of the USSR. On the other hand, in 1930s and 40s didn't Hayek and von Mises see collapsing weak, economically irrational national states with democracies all too inclined to sink into nationalist and populstic demagogy into a supranational federation run by well trained technocrats from Vienna as the best defence of liberal Europe?

Czech eurosceptic parties see confused light of day

It’s tough being an entrepreneur in the EU with a new franchise to launch, especially when you’re a political entrepreneur like Declan Ganley whose eurosceptic Libertas.eu movement plans to take to the political field across the Union in the June Euro-elections. The Czech Republic, awash with right-wing euroscepticism since the early 1990s (well, if you read the papers) seemed like a great place for a national franchise: the Ganley-Klaus relationship

However, now ex-TV station owner, Euro MP and founder of the eurosceptic populist Independent Democrats grouping - who flopped in the 2006 parliamentary election, despite a surprise success in the lower-than-lower-turnout 2004 Euroelections - Vladimír Železný, who is a sort of Czech Berlusconi manqué, has stepped into the fray. Mr Železný has gone and nicked Mr Ganley‘s brand, but registering a party called Libertas.cz without Mr Ganley’s approval or knowledge. So far, an Libertas.eu seems to have got no further along the road to creating an official Libertas.cz (given the Irish connection, perhaps we should talk about a ‘official’ and a ‘provisional’ wings of the movement) than translated the appeal on its website for supporters in the CR into Czech (Good start). Ganley, Železný has told the Czech press that could be a ‘Pan-European Obama, if he wasn’t so naïve’, but has proved too a talker, not a do-er and besides Czechs have their own Eurosceptic tribune in Václav Klaus, who hasn’t commented so far, it seems. On the other hand, Železný's version of Libertas doesn't so much as have a web page and there's no a word on the subject on his otherwise up-to-date website about his activities as an MEP.

As, although one poll suggested that 22% might vote for the provisional Železný-led Libertas.cz, commentators suggest that this reflects the Czech electorate’s usual short-lived enthusiasm for novelty parties and is unlikely to last or to be translated into at the ballot boxes. The entry of colourful old stager like Mr Železný, they think, will probably put the kiss of death on Libertas.cz as a serious force.

In the meantime, Czech eurosceptic right-wing voters (actually, rather few in number) can always turn to the newly founded Party of Free Citizens (SSO) founded by Klaus thinktank protege Petr Mach. The SOS whose committee include the philospher Miroslav Bednář and former member of parliament Jiří Payne - both (ex-?)ODS members - as well as more marginal figures like anti-EU gadflies, writer Benjamin Kuras and political activist David Hanák, both of whom were active in the fragmentary campaign No vote in the EU accession referedum in 2003. So, not exactly a star-studded line-up. Hanák’s views, in particular, are part of a would-be conservative-nationalist revival just adjacent to the far-right, which no self-respecting (neo-)liberal like Mach should probably want to go near.

Libertas.eu unveiled, Libertas.cz unseen

So, Declan Ganley has extended his Irish-based anti-Lisbon Treaty NGO-cum-lobby group Libertas into an EU-wide political movement Libertas.eu intent on fighting next year's euro-elections in a host of EU states including, interestingly for me, the Czech Republic.

The only countries where Libertas.eu is not recruiting 'high calibre candidates' are France, and Denmark, - presumably as they are already well equipped with purpose-made eurosceptic parties and movements, such as the June Movement of veteran campaigner Jens Peter Bonde - and Ireland, where Mr Ganley's Libertas organization is already well advanced in plans to field a list. Apart from the links for Estonia, Sweden and Poland all the recruitment ad are in English, suggesting that there is perhaps not a well organized network of Ganley supporters waiting to take the EU polticial stage. Libertas.eu thus seems more akin to a political franchising operation following the modus operandi established by the late Sir James Goldsmith's UK-based Referendum Party, or in a slightly different way, Silvio Berlusconi's launch of Forza Italia. Indeed, academics have already identified both a 'franchise party' and 'business firm model' of party emergence, only the Europe-wide nature of the franchising is novel.

The irony of a eurosceptic (and, in fairness, I should say that like most eurosceptics, he refutes the term) founding the first EU-wide political party is, of course, not lost on commentators, but a more interesting question, but there is a certain logic to it. A more interesting question s whether local eurosceptic groups will relish being invited to send applications to the Ganley's Dublin and Brussels HQs for approval . Not surprisingly, the well established UK Indpendence Party feels Mr Ganley needs no UK branch. It's also hard to imagine Václav Klaus or any of his very opinionated collaborators , who have been in the euroscepticism business much longer than Libertas, sending their CVs off to win Mr Ganley's imprimatur.

Politically, there is the also the question whether a Europe-wide platform is really quite the way to go for forces which say that they value diversity and national sovereignty. On a pressure group level there are plenty of precedents of national groups forming EU-wide platforms, but whether political euroscepticism can reduce itself to narrow set of lobby demands is rather dubious. Put bluntly, who needs a European level eurosceptic platform - beyond Mr Ganley that is?

What Mr G does seem to have, of course, is money. Or perhaps the ability to tap the EU for campaign funding. This - and the imminence of European elections next year - seem to be the key reason that Libertas.eu has been launched as a political/electoral platform, rather than a civil society organization or pressure group along the lines of the original Irish Libertas.