The EP election 2014 can be characterized mainly by a very low attendance of voters in the Czech Republic. Only 18.2 % of voters threw their ballots into boxes in deserted polling stations, in comparison with the 28.22% attendance of voters in 2009. This aspect has shaped the results very much.
The EP parliamentary elections in Bulgaria took place in the midst of what can only be called a crisis of public representation.
Civic Platform and Law & Justice confirmed their domination on Polish political scene during European Parliament election on 25th of May. Donald Tusk’s party have received 32,13% and Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s party 31,78% of voters support according to final result of elections.
Bulgaria became a member of the EU, it became a member of NATO, but still, I don’t think that the expectations that everybody had when it joined the EU in 2007 were matched to the full extent.
European Commission wants to tackle down on in-app purchases of add-ons for free tablet and mobile games. Commissioner Neven Mimica said, that “consumers, and in particular children, need better protection against unexpected costs”. He’s absolutely right.
Europe is currently threatened the two extremes: the first is the rise “Eurosceptics” who want the dissolution of the EU, and the second in form of “Eurocrats” increasing their efforts to manage everything from Brussels.
If we take a look back at how the integration process evolved, the ‘state of tension’ between the community (the EU) and intergovernmental methods has always been present. The establishment of the three Communities in the 1950s was a reflection of how the process relied on the community method: this is how the creation of the Community common market began.
Despite an ongoing crisis in the past few years, the governments of the 28 member states of the European Union agreed to spend 180m Euro per year and emit additional 19.000 tons of carbon dioxide into atmosphere simply to enable the meetings of the European Parliament to be held in two locations: Brussels and Strasbourg?
On May 1, 2014, the ten years long ban for foreigners on buying land in Slovakia comes to an end. The EU’s philosophy is that the European citizen is at home in every member country of the Union and this entails the possibility to buy an agricultural land. Thus, Slovakia and other member states are obliged to loosen these restrictions.
The effectiveness of European structural and cohesion funds (SCF) has long been a contradictory topic, both for European institutions and researchers. This matter is particularly interesting for in-depth exploration, because of the lack of unambiguous evidence regarding the effect of these funds on beneficiary regions and countries. Four countries (Spain, Italy, Portugal and Greece) have remained the main beneficiaries of SCF since 1989[1]; however, data on GDP growth and labour markets in these countries is…
