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(Bloomberg) -- Almost four decades after the Soviet Union collapsed, living standards in the countries that broke free from its orbit to join the European Union are set to leapfrog the blocs south.

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Per capita income in Slovenia will surpass that of Italy by 2029 when adjusted for purchasing power, according to the latest International Monetary Fund projections. Lithuania will draw level on that metric, while Poland wont be far behind.

The shift would make good on promises for wealth in the nations that became EU members from 2004 to grow closer to the currency unions richer west. That process didnt happen as rapidly as envisaged, with convergence suffering repeated setbacks from the volatile 1990s period to 2008s global crash and the ensuing debt crisis.

Perhaps the latest progress, too, is the result of trends that werent foreseen by economic planners: While the central and eastern European newcomers have seen output surge thanks to foreign investment, access to EUs market and funds, its also been helped by slower growth in Italy.

The more affluent footing is already reaping benefits: Outflows of workers craving fatter pay checks elsewhere has begun to reverse. Governments in the region also hope that proportionally larger economies will translate into heftier political clout as they lobby Brussels over things like increased defense spending.

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Europe's East Will Soon Overtake Club Med for Living Standards - Yahoo! Voices

EU enlargement is vital for Europes long-term security, but the project also requires EU member states to give up perhaps the biggest guarantor of their sovereignty. Thats the latest claim from German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, in a recent opinion piece published on Tuesday, April 30th, celebrating the anniversary of the 2004 EU enlargement.

In order for our Union of Freedom to accomplish this task for our generation, we must reform it. To my mind, this includes reducing the scope for vetoes in the Council, Baerbock wrote. We must remain capable of action also in a future Union potentially numbering over 35 members.

Such a move would serve to isolate the more sovereigntist governments of the Union, while further centralizing power in Brussels.

To be honest, Baerbock is not the first to have this revolutionary idea. Replacing unanimity with qualified majority voting in the EU Council effectively scrapping veto powershas been a central theme of most EU reform proposals circulating in Brussels in recent months.

The logic is always the same: look at conservative troublemakers like Hungary and (formerly) PiS-led Poland, daring to use their vetoes to stop EU legislation that they deem counterproductive to their national interests. Imagine the mood in Brussels: Now we are letting in the eight candidate countries currently in the waiting room, we run the risk of eight more leaders saying no to our liberal agenda, and we cant have that, can we?

Therefore, to keep the EU operational, its leaders would take away the one thing designed to protect member states sovereignty and the democratic choices of their people: the veto. Dont worry, says Baerbock, its fair because the change would affect each country equally.

This includes reaching decisions more often with a large majority as opposed to achieving unanimity. Even if this means that Germanylike any other member statecan also be outvoted, the minister wrote.

Well, the fact is that Germany is not like any other member state. It is by far the largest EU member and therefore, its voice carries a much larger weight already,not to mention in a future Council deprived of the unanimity principle.

In a system based on qualified majority (QMV) voting, one needs only half of member states who represent roughly two-thirds, or 65%, of the EUs total population to pass any law. This means that while the current system gives one votea more or less equal voiceto each EU member in the European Council, under QMV, the larger a state, the more powerful it is relative to others.

Germany alone represents nearly 19% of the total EU populationmore than the smallest 17 member states combined. In fact, the five biggest member states alone (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Poland) together already account for 66% of the total population, meaning that they are far less likely to find themselves on the wrong end of any vote in a QMV system.

In other words, what Baerbock is advocating in the name of freedom and democracy would be the single biggest shift away from true democratic principles in the history of EU reforms.

The problem is that shes not alone. The left-leaning majority of the European Parliament already endorsed several treaty change proposals that include scrapping veto rightsaiming to strengthen Brussels and weaken member states to eliminate any meaningful political oppositionwhile justifying it with the mostly undebated need for enlargement.

As Polish MEP Jacek Saryusz-Wolski explained, the people of Europe are being deliberately kept in the dark about what it truly entails:

The public is not supposed to notice that a putsch is about to take place, that the European Union as a community of sovereign states is being abolished and a superstate is being created without any consent of the people, and that the member states are being reduced to the role of German states.

This is a kind of group of political ideologues, some of whom I would even call fanatics, who want to build a superstate on the ruins of nation-states, where a political oligarchy will rule unaccountably and escape the democratic control of citizens.

Recently, even former Commission chief Jos Manuel Barroso spoke out against the idea of a systematic treaty change, warning that it would be a huge mistake if now Europeans would start a fundamental revision of the [EU] institutions because of enlargement, lest we run the risk of neither becoming a reality.

Instead, the bloc should avoid too ambitious reforms and only make those strictly necessary for enlargement, the ex-Commission president said.

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German Foreign Minister Aims To Abolish Veto in EU Council Ahead of Enlargement - The European Conservative

President of the French far-right Rassemblement National parliamentary group Marine Le Pen delivers a speech during a campaign rally for the forthcoming European Union parliamentary elections, in Perpignan, southern France, on May 1, 2024. ED JONES / AFP

Former far-right French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen on Wednesday, May 1, urged voters to inflict "the most crushing electoral sanction" possible on President Emmanuel Macron's party in European elections next month. The parliamentary leader of the Rassemblement National (RN) spoke at a party congress in the run-up to the European Parliament contest on June 9.

"We must counter them, we must sanction them, we must dismiss them," she told followers in the southern city of Perpignan. "We must inflict on those in power the most crushing electoral sanction that we can," she said.

The RN's list for the elections is not led by Le Pen but by her youthful protg Jordan Bardella, just 28, who has already succeeded the veteran campaigner as party leader. The far-right party has been leading in the polls, well ahead of Macron's centrist alliance.

Seeking to counter youth with youth, Macron has deployed the until now little-known European parliament member Valrie Hayer, 38, to lead the ruling coalition's list for the vote.

"This sanction will be measured by the gap between the list led by Jordan Bardella" and the Renaissance list, Le Pen added.

Second place in the European polls would be a major embarrassment for Macron, who throughout his almost seven years in office has presented himself as a bulwark against the far right as more radical forces gained ground elsewhere in Europe. A recent Le Monde poll found that Hayer's list is increasingly threatened of being caught by the Socialists, who tail her by just three points.

Le Pen urged followers to vote for Bardella's list to ensure that June 9 was the first stage of a great change in Europe, "but also because there are presidential elections in 2027 in France."

Le Monde with AFP

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Le Pen urges 'crushing' defeat of Macron in speech ahead of European elections - Le Monde

The EU has officially opened a significant investigation into Meta for its alleged failures to remove election disinformation. While the European Commissions statement doesnt explicitly mention Russia, Meta confirmed to Engadget the EU probe targets the countrys Doppelganger campaign, an online disinformation operation pushing pro-Kremlin propaganda.

Bloombergs sources also said the probe was focused on the Russian disinformation operation, describing it as a series of attempts to replicate the appearance of traditional news sources while churning out content that is favorable to Russian President Vladimir Putins policies.

The investigation comes a day after France said 27 of the EUs 29 member states had been targeted by pro-Russian online propaganda ahead of European parliamentary elections in June. On Monday, Frances Ministry of Foreign Affairs Jean-Noel Barrot urged social platforms to block websites participating in a foreign interference operation.

A Meta spokesperson told Engadget that the company had been at the forefront of exposing Russias Doppelganger campaign, first spotlighting it in 2022. The company said it has since investigated, disrupted and blocked tens of thousands of the networks assets. The Facebook and Instagram owner says it remains on high alerts to monitor the network while claiming Doppelganger has struggled to successfully build organic audiences for the pro-Putin fake news.

The European Commissions President said Metas platforms, Facebook and Instagram, may have breached the Digital Services Act (DSA), the landmark legislation passed in 2022 that empowers the EU to regulate social platforms. The law allows the EC to, if necessary, impose heavy fines on violating companies up to six percent of a companys global annual turnover, potentially changing how social companies operate.

In a statement to Engadget, Meta said, We have a well-established process for identifying and mitigating risks on our platforms. We look forward to continuing our cooperation with the European Commission and providing them with further details of this work.

The EC probe will cover Metas policies and practices relating to deceptive advertising and political content on its services. It also addresses the non-availability of an effective third-party real-time civic discourse and election-monitoring tool ahead of the elections to the European Parliament.

The latter refers to Metas deprecation of its CrowdTangle tool, which researchers and fact-checkers used for years to study how content spreads across Facebook and Instagram. Dozens of groups signed an open letter last month, saying Metas planned shutdown during the crucial 2024 global elections poses a direct threat to global election integrity.

Meta told Engadget that CrowdTangle only provides a fraction of the publicly available data and would be lacking as a full-fledged election monitoring tool. The company says its building new tools on its platform to provide more comprehensive data to researchers and other outside parties. It says its currently onboarding key third-party fact-checking partners to help identify misinformation.

However, with Europes elections in June and the critical US elections in November, Meta had better get moving on its new API if it wants the tools to work when it matters most.

The EC gave Meta five working days to respond to its concerns before it would consider further escalating the matter. This Commission has created means to protect European citizens from targeted disinformation and manipulation by third countries, EC President von der Leyen wrote. If we suspect a violation of the rules, we act.

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The European Union is investigating Meta's election policies - Engadget

It's hard to see how the EU could legally do what these people are requesting, Nick Fahy, director of health and wellbeing research at the RAND Europe institute, told POLITICO. It's money, not law, but at the same time it would be the EU directly affecting the allocation of resources to health care, and that's explicitly not allowed under Article 168 of the treaty.

Article 168 of the Treatyon the Functioning of the European Union states that the EU can lend support to member countries, but that its actions shall respect the responsibilities of the Member States for the definition of their health policy and for the organisation and delivery of health services and medical care.

Giving funds to a country to allow women from other member states to have abortions there is not going to be a neutral act by the European Commission; that's the European Commission directly interfering in something highly politically sensitive, Fahy said.

Purely from a legal point of view and from a sort of political point of view between the EU and the member states, I don't see this happening either legally or politically, he added.

The Commission wrote in its decision that "there seems to be no straightforward targeted interference with the competences of Member States," but that "the concrete set-up of a financial support mechanism could nonetheless result in such interference."

It concluded, therefore, that the initiative could be registered insofar as the proposed financial support mechanism does not have as its aim or effect the undermining of the public order legislation of the Member States or more generally of the healthcare and ethical choices made by Member States in exercise of their competence in health matters.

The campaign drew close to 100,000 signatures within its first week; activists are hoping to collect 1 million over the next seven weeks, thereby forcing the Commission to consider the proposal.

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Activists press for EU-wide abortion right - POLITICO Europe