A month ago, Ukraine and the EU signed a road agreement that simplified road freight requirements between the parties. The arrangement proved to be mutually beneficial – trade volumes increased, and the cost of transportation from Ukraine decreased. It slowed the price increase for Ukrainian goods on the European market and thus helped fight inflation. The agreement also helped the business of European companies with facilities in Ukraine to transport their goods to Europe.

After the past two years of the pandemic and the associated extraordinary spending, relief measures and fluctuations in economic activity depending on whether we were in the midst of or between lockdowns, the question of how much the average employee contributed to the state from their wages last year remains no less interesting than in previous years.

Małgorzata Manowska, the president of the Supreme Court of Poland, has accused the European Union of “bullying” Poland by demanding further changes to its judicial system in order to receive money from the recovery fund (ca. EUR 35 billion). “After Ursula von der Leyen’s recent statements, I get the impression that this is not about the rule of law”, Manowska stressed.

A second initiative to collect signatures to support a petition calling for an unconditional, universal basic income (UBI) for all citizens in the European Union (EU) has ended. The required one million signatures were never reached. Why?

Imagine that you are given an assignment to design a roadmap to reduce country’s emissions. What would you do first? You would probably try to take stock of where emissions are generated. Since you are thinking economically, you would try to find areas where you can save enough emissions for the least amount of money.

In this episode of the Liberal Europe Podcast, Leszek Jażdżewski (Fundacja Liberté!) welcomes Luuk van Middelaar, a political theorist and historian, a Professor of EU law at Leiden University, a political commentator for NRC Handelsblad, and the author of the prizewinning book The Passage to Europe. They talk about European resilience and solidarity, how the EU has responded to the COVID-19 crisis, and the importance of European public.