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naraburns  nihil supernum  11mo ago (text post)   1449 thread views

Transnational Thursday for December 21, 2023

After thirty weeks as @Soriek's passion project, Transnational Thursday is getting added to the auto-post bot. But it hasn't been added to the bot yet, I think, so I'm posting it this week, with apologies to anyone whose plans I've mussed!

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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France

Macron has wiggled his way through yet another thorny legislative boondoggle with significant pushback. This time it’s an immigration bill that his own (left wing) Prime Minister, admitted was at least partially unconstitutional. A quick overview:

The controversial new rules – including migration quotas, making it harder for immigrants' children to become French citizens, and delaying migrants' access to welfare benefits – were added to the bill to win the support of right-wing lawmakers for its passage.

The bill makes it easier to expel illegal migrants, while watering down plans to loosen curbs over residency permits for workers in labour-deprived sectors.

Specifically, some of the bill’s measures that restricted welfare access to immigrants seemed to have been taken from or inspired by Macron’s historic opposition party, Le Pen’s National Rally:

A key part of the bill would now see social security benefits for foreigners conditional on being in France for at least five years, or 30 months for those who have jobs, echoing some of the National Rally’s longtime campaign lines.

The bill passed with a dominant majority…with the support of National Rally, while a quarter of his coalition voted against it. The optics aren’t great and Macron is ironically being accused by both by the left and the right of capitulating to the French right. Macron’s Health Minister Aurélien Rousseau has already resigned in protest, and he may not be the last.

the government now faces a shattered coalition in parliament. The debates and compromises have left Macron’s allies badly bruised, with 27 MPs belonging to his centrist coalition voting against the latest version of the legislation…

Speculation is swelling that he might soon undertake a reshuffle including a change of prime minister to re-energize his government.

Separately, France and Germany claim to have a deal in sight to salvage negotiations over the European Union’s new spending rules:

The so-called Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) was put on hold at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic to allow governments to increase spending in the wake of the worst recession since World War II. As it gets reintroduced, the European Commission proposed a reform because of concerns that the rules were too inflexible and unenforceable.

The overhaul is designed to offer more gradual and tailored spending cuts for countries exceeding the EU’s threshold of 3 percent deficit-to-GDP and 60 percent debt-to-GDP. That’s pleased countries such as Italy and France that have run up big debts and are struggling to gain control of their annual deficits ― the difference between how much governments spend and bring in ― but dismayed stricter capitals like Berlin who wanted tougher and more uniform targets.

Under the compromise highly indebted countries would have to keep their annual deficits at about 1.5 percent of GDP and reduce debt by at least 1 percent of their GDP every year….

Paris and Rome were particularly concerned about Germany's insistence on tougher targets because they are two of nine governments whose deficits are above the 3 percent limit. The Commission is expected to slap these countries with its sanctions mechanism ― known as the excessive deficit procedure (EDP) ― in spring 2024.

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