Governments can veto decisions on foreign affairs, enlargement and budget. But this also makes enacting sanctions against countries like Russia or Israel harder to approve.
The article keeps mentioning past pushes to abolish unanimity.
But I think It’s worth mentioning that the treaty of Lisbon already changed voting rules in many fields from unanimity to qualified majority in 2014:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_in_the_Council_of_the_European_Union#Policy_areasIt’s not like there has never been any progress in that direction.
I would prefer the veto rights being reduced strongly.
At the same time, being from a small country, it also worries me that small countries such as Finland can get trampled by the bigger ones. Finland has very close to 1 % of EU’s citizens. There is already a system where smaller countries get more places per capita in the European Parliament than bigger ones, but in the end it changes little. In the EP, Finland has 15 places out of 720, meaning we have about 2% of all the places. And therefore, about 2% of the political power. Assuming the MEPs who are from very different parties could even unite as one front in the first place.
It is a bit scary if Finland only has a 2% weight in any decisions made in the EU. There are already things where we are getting accidentally trampled: There are EU rules about having to add an additive to diesel fuel, to make it less polluting. However, that additive freezes in temperatures that are commonplace in winters in Lapland, at least in nighttime. This means, it is de facto illegal parking a diesel vehicle outdoors during a January night in Lapland. I do not think this was ever the intention of the lawmakers, but that’s the law they ended up writing.
But still: I think it might make sense that there would be some way of getting around a veto, but it should be made in some manner unappealing to use unless really needed. And also, the power should, in general, be moved from commission to EP, thus reducing the number of cases where the veto right exists.
I wonder if some kind of “emergency brake” could be deviced for situations where the parliament is about to make a decision that will disproportionately damage a member state. Maybe this could be organized as a law, so that a court could decide if something of exceptional national importance is being overlooked by the EP?
And, while this is a bit off-topic, I also want to add an anecdote from around year 1998 or so. Back when they decided the name for our currency, Euro, the European Central Bank also decided that when speaking or writing in Finnish, it should be forbidden to say “For the Euro”, “From the Euro”, “Along the Euro”, “Behind the Euro”, “Without the Euro” or any sentence that includes both the word for “no” in connection with the word “Euro”.
Of course it didn’t mean to make such an absurd rule.
But in Finnish those words such as “from”, “for”, etc. come after the word and without a space in between, so they technically count as parts of the same word. And the ECB declared that “Euro” is a word that cannot be declinated in any manner in any language. There is no way of saying “from” in Finnish without adding an ending to a word, so this was something of a very shitty ruling. Obviously it was simply ignored. But it does showcase a situation where Finland had something that was completely unique in EU and got completely overlooked. Back then Finland was the only Finno-Ugric speaking country in the EU, and in Indo-European languages the decision made sense, but in the one country with a language from a different language family, it didn’t. The Finnish language got completely overlooked because Finland was so small, peripheral and insignificant. Maybe not a problem for the EU, but definitely a problem for us people living over here in our insignificant and unimportant corner of the Union.
EU is a failed project if a single Orbanistan could block the important decisions for years, trading votes for more EU money to support his corrupt regime.
Thats why eu should abolish unanimity voting in favor of majority voting instead
Okay, but would that also mean Germany can’t veto more debt?
Despite Hungary abusing the veto, other players also like it.
Germany, as per the article is one of the countries that wants more qualified majority decisions
Other countries, such as Germany and France, are pushing for qualified majority voting in the areas of foreign affairs and security.
Also, what debt are you talking about?
Individual national budgets are not subject to EU vetos. And the Maastricht criteria that are supposed to regulate national debt ratios are three decades old by now.It’s all a matter of perspective—both unanimous and majority voting have their pros and cons. Some countries will lose their privileges, while others will gain theirs.
It will mostly mean that the EU can act in ways that is not beneficial to singular member states, and the importance of member states would suffer in comparison to union decisionmaking.
I am all for it, I just wanted to point out it wasn’t Hungary who joined in 2004 who established the rules, and member states could do away with the veto at any point in time, it’s just other countries like it as well.
None are abusing it as much as Hungary though.
