Prague, Sept 15 (CTK) – The annual State of the Union address by European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker to the European Parliament was interesting since he did not mention the TTIP treaty and changed his tone compared to 2015 when he spoke about the migrant crisis, Jan Keller writes in Pravo yesterday.
Juncker supported the approval of a treaty with Canada, similar to the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) document which is now being debated, but which he did not mention at all in his one-hour speech, Keller writes.
This may be another proof of that the treaty is practically dead, which is also said by leading politicians in Berlin and Paris, Keller writes.
He writes that in connection with migration, last year Juncker spoke at length about the Europeans’ duty to be helpful in relation to migrants and accept them. He spoke about the Commission’s measures that will force member countries to cooperate, Keller writes.
Last year, Juncker repeated the need to act, face problems and start dealing with the crisis, Keller writes.
This year, he said it is not possible to build Europe against the will of nations and that the Commission does not want to roll over national states even though this is claimed, Keller writes.
He writes that Juncker also said solidarity is meaningful if voluntary and that he complained of unnamed politicians who agree with everything in Brussels, but behave differently at home.
What Juncker did not say is how he wants to solve this situation. He only said he wrote to Slovakia, which is now presiding over the EU, calling on it to try to find a common language of the former West and East, which means of the countries which are more accommodating to migrants and those which are less accommodating, Keller.
He did so even though he must know that unlike the European Commission, the EU presiding country has practically no instruments which it could apply in this respect, Keller writes.
Juncker did not say what will happen if the Slovaks do not resolve this key problem substituting for European institutions, Keller writes.
In daily Mlada fronta Dnes (MfD), Milan Vodicka writes that if he had woken up from hibernation on Wednesday when Juncker was speaking, he would have felt well because nothing special occurred in the EU during his absence.
The mill is nicely clattering, people are satisfied and completely calm, one of the most important members did not decide to leave and no one is pushing its way inside. There is reportedly only an existential crisis, Vodicka writes.
He writes that if the EU is in an existential crisis, Juncker should say something of fundamental importance. The causes should be sought in the nationalism and populism of the people below who are strange, while the tops are spotless, Vodicka writes with irony.
True, people are strange because they feel uneasy about things to which they should not probably pay any attention, Vodicka writes.
He writes that Juncker’s speech was important because of what was not in it. How could he omit Britain’ s departure. How is it possible that he drew no lesson from it, that he made no self-reflection?
It is just as well incomprehensible that Juncker left out from his speech migration and jihadists in Europe, which are the core of the European “existential crisis,” Vodicka writes.
He writes that it was a speech like from another planet. The sole significant sentence, in which Juncker spoke about an existential crisis, had the effect of a random guess, as if Juncker did not know what to do about it and why the situation has reached this point.
Yet, the speech was not entirely useless. It is at least clear why Europe is really slowly reaching the existential crisis, Vodicka writes.
