According to the Finnish Finance Minister Jutta Urpilainen, “it was the Greeks who wanted to keep it secret”. However, the Finnish Supreme Administrative Court decided otherwise, and on May 14, the Government was forced to publish the terms of the contract it signed with Greece in 2012.

Under the agreement Athens pledged to provide financial collateral in exchange for a loan which formed part of the international bailout for the country.

The documents reveal that Finland and the Greece set up three bank accounts into which the money and financial securities used as collateral have since been deposited.

The matter had been referred to the court by the True Finns party and several media outlets, including Helsingin Sanomat. The daily is pleased with this “important and expected” decision —

It will strengthen the principle of the broadest possible implementation of transparency and publicity by government. The public has a right to be informed of all relevant official documents. [...] Helping the weak countries of the eurozone is a naturally difficult and controversial issue in Finland. Confidential documents will only serve to undermine confidence in decisions politicians have taken in the eurocrisis.

In the course of the eurozone crisis, Finland has stood out from among the eurozone states by demanding collateral from countries in difficulty as a condition for financial aid. The deal with Greece served as model for another deal concluded with Spain in July 2012.

When it comes to reforming government the Nordics seem to be the latest model. Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland are topping the tables in everything from economic competitiveness to social health to happiness, and they have avoided southern Europe’s economic sclerosis and America’s extreme inequality.

They offer a "blueprint of how to reform the public sector to make it more efficient and responsive", that the world will be studying for years to come.

“Back to the vicious circle”, announces a worried Süddeutsche Zeitung which reports that a new Northern European alliance is attempting to block direct aid to Eurozone banks – a measure endorsed in the wake of hard-fought negotiations between European heads of state on 28 June in Brussels. The daily reports that on 25 September, German Minister for Finance Wolfgang Schäuble –

… executed what amounts to a dramatic u-turn in euro bailout policy. In a joint declaration with his Finnish and Dutch counterparts [Jutta Urpilainen and Jan Kees de Jager], he could not have been more clear. Any hope or belief that financially weakened Spanish banks could, as early as next year, directly access the ESM [European Stability Mechanism] euro bailout fund without going through the government in Madrid has now been dashed. All existing liabilities will be the responsibility of national governments. What, at first glance, appears to be a reassuring message for European, and especially German citizens – that we will not pay for other people’s mistakes – quite simply means that with a stroke of a pen, the ministers are attempting to correct and even hijack their government leaders’ decision [...] If the Northern European ministers succeed in imposing their about-turn at the next Eurogroup meeting on 8 October – and it is quite likely that they will, given that Germany, the Netherlands and Finland are among the Eurozone’s best financial backers – Spain will have to get by alone.

Recently published EU research says that full-time workers are pulling longer shifts in the face of ongoing economic slump, but hours worked do not equal productivity, says Jason Walsh.

A study performed by Eurofound, the European Union's labour research agency, has found that working hours have increased across the EU, with workers taking-up the slack left by colleagues who have lost their jobs and working longer just to stay in employment.

What is clear is that the traditional office hours of nine-to-five appear to be long behind us, and with most professionals and office-bound workers not actually clocking-on and off it is difficult to know precisely how many hours people are actually working. Indeed, in an era of always-on internet access, smartphones and tablets it is hardly news that more and more of us are taking work home with us.

The aggregate increase across EU as a whole isn't so great: just twelve minutes, up from 39.5 hours per week to 39.7. That figure disguises a number of important facts, however.

Firstly, the survey is only of full-time workers. What of part-timers working extra hours? What of those with more than one job?

Secondly, disparities in working time remain across the EU. The post-2004 accession states work the longest hours, but are also the only cohort of countries to see hours dropping as they begin to come into line with EU norms. 

Among the rest there is no correlation between long hours and economic success. Finns work the fewest hours in the EU, at just 37.8, while Greeks work 40 hours per week and Germans work only slightly more at 40.6. 

The World Economic Forum's 2011-2012 Global Competitiveness Report says the ten most productive and competitive economies are, in descending order,  Switzerland, Singapore, Sweden, Finland, the United States, Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, Japan and the United Kingdom. Of these the US, Singapore and Japan are notorious for their long hours cultures. The culture in the other seven varies.

Thirdly, as the study was at pains to point out, the greatest differential is between agreed and actual working hours: right across the EU, as well as across industrial sectors, people work longer hours than are specified in contracts and union agreements –  and in some cases, employment law.

What is true of a macro level, that long hours do not a strong economy make, may also be true on a micro level. Despite demands on workers to pull ever-longer shifts, productivity slumps when we work too long; a piece of knowedge that we've had since since the early decades of the twentieth century.

This isn't just about the spectre of "presenteeism", the desire to be seen to be in the office regardless of whether you are working or faffing-around on Facebook. Study after study has borne out the fact that there is only so much useful work any one person can do. 

There is nothing inherently wrong with long hours, particularly if workers are recompensed appropriately, but hanging around the office for no real reason other than trying to impress the boss does neither party any favours.

The last member of the eurozone to benefit from a AAA rating from the three major ratings agencies, Finland has nonetheless begun to show signs of weakness. La Croix notes that “the situation deteriorated in the course of second quarter with a one per cent decline in GDP”.

According to Finance Minister Jutta Urpilainen, the country could go into recession if the global economic slowdown continues. [...] Although Finnish state finances are in very healthy state, with a deficit of just 0.8 per cent of GDP, the country remains vulnerable to external shocks. Exports account for 40 per cent of GDP, of which 30 per cent is in trade with other members of the monetary union.

It is an unprecedented situation for Helsinki, which has resulted in an increasing wariness of the bailout mechanisms demanded by its eurozone partners. As the French daily points out, “In early July, Prime Minister Jyrki Katainen reiterated his opposition to the purchase of sovereign debt by the European Stability Mechanism (ESM).

La Croix cites an OECD expert who remarks that –

The Finns are convinced they had to fight it out alone to restore the country’s public finances in the wake of the 1990s banking crisis. And today, they do not have the impression that Southern European countries are demonstrating the necessary initiative.

Finland is preparing for a full-blown currency crisis as tensions in the eurozone mount and will not tolerate further bail-out creep or fiscal union by stealth, reports The Daily Telegraph on its front page. The daily quotes an interview with the country’s finance minister Erkki Tuomioja, in which he is reported to have said –

There is a consensus that a eurozone break-up would cost more in the short-run or medium-run than managing the crisis. There are no rules on how to leave the euro but it is only a matter of time. Either the south or the north will break away because this currency straitjacket is causing misery for millions and destroying Europe’s future. It is a total catastrophe. We are going to run out of money the way we are going. But nobody in Europe wants to be first to get out of the euro and take all the blame.

In Austria, an interview with Michael Spindelegger, the vice chancellor, foreign minister and leader of the conservative ÖVP party, is splashed on the front page of Kurier under the headline “Cheaters out of the euro zone”. he told the Vienna daily –

We need more ways of kicking someone out of the monetary union; countries that do not uphold commitments. If these rules existed, we would already have felt the consequences.

However, experts who were quizzed about Spindelegger’s proposal, the daily reports that a Grexit would result in “unpredictable costs” for the EU and the risk of a euro-collapse “as the exclusion always hits the weakest, and anybody can be the weakest sometimes”. The comments come two weeks after an interview with Bavaria’s Finance minister Markus Söder in Bild created a buzz when he said Greece should leave the eurozone this year.

"EU countries want to impose tax on financial transactions", headlines Süddeutsche Zeitung. The Munich daily reports that finance ministers from nine countries – Germany, France, Spain, Austria, Belgium, Finland, Portugal, Greece and Italy – have addressed a joint letter to the Danish Presidency of the EU requesting that it "overcome all obstacles” to the implementation of a Tobin tax by July 2012. According to the ministers, the measure would create –

… a crucial instrument to guarantee a fair contribution from the financial sector to the cost of the financial crisis.

The initiative is not unprecedented. The European Commission already proposed a duty on transactions involving shares, derivatives and other financial products last September, which met with immediate opposition from the United Kingdom and Sweden. This time around, the ministers point out that they are willing to seek “alternatives” if a solution has not been planned within the next six months – a remark, which SZ believes is evidence of an important development "if you read between the lines” –

The nine signatories send a very clear message: we can go it alone. [According to the provisions of EU treaties] states can enter into agreement for reinforced cooperation if they come together in a group of no less than nine. That is why this short letter reads almost like a heavy-handed threat to colleagues who have yet to make up their minds. All those concerned have been warned: the overwhelming likelihood is that the tax will be introduced.

Finally the daily notes that the letter will also have an internal impact on signatory countries, notably France and Germany: it will enable Nicolas Sarkozy to aspire to more votes in presidential elections in April and May, and give Angela Merkel something to offer the Geman opposition, which made the introduction of a Tobin tax a condition for its endorsement of the fiscal compact.

The EU has favourably greeted the election, on January 5, of pro-EU conservative Sauli Niinistö as President of Finland. He won against another Europhile, environmentalist Pekka Haavisto. This is seen as positive after the breakthrough, nearly a year ago, of the populist True Finn Party in legislative elections which led Helsinki to adopt a tough stance in negotiations on aid to Greece. Yet, notes Finnish daily Helsingin Sanomat, this election does not mean the end "of the mistrust of the citizens toward the EU".

The paper highlights instead the 17% obtained by the centrist candidate, Paavo Väyrynen, an early opponent of the single currency. Väyrynen, who "heard the criticism regarding the euro and managed to make good use of it," campaigned by attacking the social democrat candidate, Paavo Lipponen, who finished 10 points behind Väyrynen. This gap is interpreted by Helsingin Sanomat as a sign of strong Eurosceptic sentiment in Finland.

Helsingin Sanomat also notes that the new president, Sauli Niinistö, is "much more guarded than the rest of his party on the issue of providing financial support to eurozone countries in crisis," and this could complicate future negotiations within the EU.

Ever since the debt crisis began to threaten the stability of the single currency, the “Merkozy” duo has taken over the bridge of the good ship Euro. Not by virtue of any agreement among the member states, but due to a simple conclusion: “There Is No Alternative” – T. I.N.A., to quote a certain Iron Lady.

Or perhaps there is. There’s the European Commission, guardian of the treaties and of the “economic government” of the EU, as its President, Jose Manuel Barroso, recently repeated. But when it comes to the eurozone, it’s the Eurogroup – the Ministers of Economy, i.e. national governments – that has taken over. Again, therefore, Paris and Berlin.

The recent appointment of European Council President Herman Van Rompuy as “Mr. Euro”, with the blessing of Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, strengthens the role of member states in the economic governance of “Euroland”, with Germany and France in the lead.

The catch is that this set-up isn’t based on any agreement and that the decisions taken by “Merkozy” seem increasingly to be evading any debate, even within the eurozone itself. Indeed, no other country is able to influence the discussions or to act as counterweight to a steamroller increasingly unencumbered by courtesies when addressing one’s peers, as shown by the angry and hostile tone in which the proposed referendum in Greece was greeted by “Merkozy”.

Among the other “big” countries, Italy, the third-largest economy in the eurozone, finds itself in the hot seat because of the precariousness of its government and its public finances. Meanwhile Spain, in the middle of an election campaign, is not out of the rut yet. 

Hammered by the debt crisis, they are, like Portugal and Ireland, well distant from the “triple A” of the rating agencies that seems to confer supernatural powers on countries that still have it. Which, incidentally, explains why the French president is obsessed with keeping his country in the most prized circle of the moment. In the eurozone, the other members of this triple-A club – Austria, Finland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands – either pack a light punch or are aligned with the Franco-German duo.

While Merkel and Sarkozy may be able to avoid the most threatening whirlpools, however, they seem to have no clear idea of where they want to steer the good ship Euro – and they have no mandate for it either. This lack of clarity and legitimacy weighs heavily over the uncharted course of the crisis and gives the impression that they’re navigating by sight. Steering through the storm, we’re not willing to hand the helm over unless those who take it can guide the ship and crew safely to harbour.

Translated from the French by Anton Baer

"With the exception of the creation of eurobonds, we got everything we were expecting". If the banker quoted by Le Monde is to believed, the agreement reached on the night of 26-27 October on the devaluation of Greek debt, the recapitalisation of the banks, and the reinforcement of the European Financial Stability Facility will be enough to resolve the Eurozone crisis.

However, the experience of previous agreements hammered out after difficult negotiations should encourage us to hedge our bets. Markets move in mysterious ways, and there is a risk that this latest summit will have been for nothing. With this in mind, it is still too early to draw any conclusions as to its final outcome.

However, in a context where the response of European leaders was informed by the fact that the fate of the EU was at stake, a quick look at the European political landscape in the wake of the October 23 and 26 summits should be sufficient to tell us that the political crisis, which was obscured by the financial crisis, is only beginning.

As many commentators have noted, we are now embarked on a path towards the greater integration of the Eurozone, and this is a move which will generate a lot of uncertainty.

The highly publicised discussions between Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy have demonstrated that the Paris-Berlin axis is once again the main motor of Europe. But we are no longer in a Europe with just six or 12 member states, and this motor will have less horsepower in the wake of successive EU enlargements and the creation of powerful internal organisations like the European Central Bank.

The spat between Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron, and the Commons debate on a UK referendum to decide on Britain’s membership of the EU are evidence that London is also seeking to redefine its role in what is now a shifting architecture. "Merkozy" will be uneager to offer concessions to the British, who have exerted a long-standing influence on the liberal development of the European Commission, without assuming all the political responsibilities that this would imply.

However, the UK is not the only country to wonder about its role in Europe. The nine other EU members which are not in the euro, and in particular Poland and Sweden, are already grumbling about the inception of what will become a two-speed Europe. The Schengen Area and initiatives for European defence have already set a precedent for EU initiatives with a variable geometry. But they do not involve such a developed level of governance as the one implied by the control of national budgets and the appointment of a European minister of finance.

And here, we are touching on the main point about the instability to come: the economic government that Berlin and Paris are aiming to establish, with support from the Netherlands and Finland, will affect the sovereignty of states and raise the question of democratic control – an issue raised by sociologist Jürgen Habermas in a forthcoming essay from which Presseurop has published a number of extracts.

From this point of view, the EU has now embarked on a dangerous transition, in which its leaders will have to demonstrate their political effectiveness and at the same time keep an eye on the practicalities of democracy: especially when you consider that the ratification process for the 21 July agreement has already shown that national parliaments are very slow when they are required to respond to financial markets. 

Worse still, as Timothy Garton Ash pointed out this week in his analysis of the debates in the UK and German parliaments, national democracies are expressing conflicting demands that have caused the EU to stall. 

But given that no one is ready to establish a European democracy based on a parliament that is elected from transnational lists which take up a position on transnational debates, decisions will continue to be taken by political leaders who meet behind closed doors, and they will continue to be approved by parliaments that have been first and foremost elected to deal with national issues. The euro may be saved,  but the EU is still not out of the woods.

Translated from the French by Mark McGovern

After weeks of talks, Finland has obtained financial guarantees from Greece for its participation in the European Stability Mechanism (the ESM is the permanent mechanism that will shortly replace the EFSF). However, as Finnish daily Helsingin Sanomat points out, the country will “pay a high price.” Helsinki will not receive any interest for 20 or 30 years, and will be obliged to hand over its contribution of 1.4 billion euros in one single payment, while other countries will have the option of scheduling theirs over five years. “A good bargain or a bad compromise?” wonders the daily, which notes that the government, under pressure from the True Finns party, had threatened not to participate in the latest Greek bailout.

For its part, Swedish language daily Hufvudstadsbladet remarks that the accord is “a perfect example of economic engineering” that features stiff conditions for Finland, which will deter other countries from backing out of bailout plans in the Eurozone.

Nokia is closing its plant in Jucu, in Transylvania. The announcement made on September 28 will take effect before year’s end and will see 2,200 workers let go and a five-percent fall in Romanian exports. For Adevărul, the Finnish phone giant’s decision to relocate its plant to Asia is fallout from the “iPhone revolution.”

“Steve Jobs has left us without jobs”, leads the Bucharest daily on its front page next to a photo of the boss of Apple. Nokia CEO Stephen Elop, concurs: “The fundamental reason is the change in the market – people want smart phones now, not the conventional phones like those assembled near Cluj.” Nokia, Romania’s second largest exporter after the automaker Dacia, came to Romania three years ago from Germany, where it had just closed a plant in Bochum. Moving on, then and now, is the sign of the times.

A bill to reinforce the European Financial Stability Facility was adopted by the Finnish Parliament on September 28, by 103 votes to 66. The first consequence is that "Finland has raised its debt risk," warns the front page of Finnish daily Helsingin Sanomat. The paper fears that the country will take "increased risks" by committing itself in "the emergency financing of European countries in crisis," especially since the controversial subject of guarantees required by Helsinki from Athens remains vague, the paper notes. Finland was the ninth eurozone country to ratify the measure; Germany became the tenth on September 29.  The measure must be ratified by all 17 eurozone countries.

"In Europe, principles are not what they once were," writes România libera on the eve of the meeting of European ministers. On September 22, the ministers decided to postpone the accession of Romania and Bulgaria to the Schengen area, having failed to reach a compromise with the Netherlands and Finland, which are demanding more guarantees in the fight against corruption and crime. In Bucharest and Sofia the governments feel betrayed, as they feel they had worked hard to do just what was asked of them – in vain. 

Beyond the national perspective, however, everything today indicates that Europe has become a kind of labyrinth in which no one recognises his own borders. The external frontiers, the Schengen area, pressed hard on their Greek or Italian flanks, are reinforced on one side with barbed wire (between Greece and Turkey) or with increased sea patrols (in the Mediterranean) – all without any guidelines having been drawn up at European level.

Internal borders, which theoretically are now largely symbolic administrative lines, are in turn subject to manoeuvring that undermines the very principle of free movement throughout the area. Denmark has restored its border controls, ostensibly to fight cross-border crime, and France has done the same to prevent Tunisians from crossing over from Italy. Finally, other borders, these ones political, forced up by domestic issues, are popping up where they were not necessarily expected: in the Netherlands, in Finland and in Denmark, pushed for by Geert Wilders and his party, by the "True Finns", and by the Danish People's Party.  

“I blame Europe and Italy for being asleep, for not being aware of the nationalist and centrifugal forces that are tugging it apart. We have not remembered the lesson from the Balkans: it's enough simply to identify an enemy of the people for a people short of reference points to take it on as truth,” writes the Italian Paolo Rumiz in his book On the Frontiers of Europe (ed. Hoebeke, 2011). He might have added that it risks abandoning part of its soul to wander between these more or less shifting borders, and lose itself. 

‘Finland puts bomb under EU bailout plans’, headlines De Volkskrant, reporting on Finland's demand that Greece put up collateral against Helsinki's participation in the Greek bailout. According to the Dutch newspaper, the two countries have now struck a deal, and four others – Austria, the Netherlands, Slovakia and Slovenia – are now demanding similar guarantees, leading to fears for the stability of the July 21 agreement to save Greece.

In the Netherlands several MPs have already asked the finance minister to take action. De Volkskrant says it is unclear what Greece could offer as collateral to Finland. Probably not islands or railroads: more likely a cash payment of €0.5bn-1bn. Because Greece has no money of its own, the paper fears that the deposit will have to come from the European fund.

For the author of Aux frontières de l’Europe (“At the Frontiers of Europe”) only in few former communist countries and along the external border of the EU can one still encounter the soul of the Old Continent.

How did you get the idea of travelling extensively along the eastern border of the European Union? I wanted a border that really still was one. As I come from Trieste, I consider myself a son of the border. I was born the same day that the border was drawn around Trieste, on December 20, 1947. This boundary was dismantled exactly sixty years later to the day [when several countries of eastern Europe entered the Schengen area], which coincides, of course, with my sixtieth birthday. That evening my Polish partner [photographer Monika Bulaja] and I looked at each other, and we said: “After wanting this border gone for sixty years, how are we going to handle it, now that it’s no longer there?” It was a wonderful invitation to travel: where has that sense of mystery, which was always wrapped up with the border, gone off to? That day, a little tipsy, a little euphoric, as we were taking down the old Yugoslav border barrier in the middle of a forest in the valley of Rosandra, where you can find the last Italian inn before Yugoslavia, I decided that I would go looking for that real frontier: a place where I would still find genuine border guards. Did you find them?

And how! Can you imagine? If I had made this trip twenty-five years ago, once I had crossed back into Slovenia I would never have had to show my passport, because I would have been inside the zone of the Warsaw Pact and the former USSR. This time, however, the continual coming and going from the Schengen area and the European Union (EU) meant that I found myself – especially between Norway and Russia and between Latvia and Russia – facing frontiers of an incredible rigidity, far tougher than they were before the Wall fell. I wanted to see what there was behind this barrier, this limit. One quickly grasps that there is no difference between one side of the border and the other, despite these absurd barriers, and that in fact the line of the EU frontier runs along a series of trans-boundary regions with wonderful names, like Courland [Lithuania] or Bothnia [Scandinavia] or Dobrudja [Romania / Bulgaria], which existed before the great nationalist fever of the nineteenth century. These are the names and regions that make up the true heart of the continent. The geographical centre of Europe, one hears, is somewhere in western Ukraine... Europe has several centres. One is in Lithuania, one in the Carpathians, one in Poland. It depends on how we measure Europe. What is certain is that Europe is higher than it is wide. The centre of Europe right now is nothing more than a pale imitation of the West, even if strong traces of the East are found in it. This mixture of the Slavic and Judaism, which is the profound soul of Europe, I have found only in these border regions. This is where the heart of Europe beats for me, the heart I had heard of and that I was looking for: a certain maternal femininity, great rivers…. It was in Russia, Ukraine, Poland where I found them. Your story carries an almost immoderate love for the Slavic spirit and the way of life of the people you met. And a kind of disgust towards certain aspects of western Europe. What is the problem of western Europe?

It’s a world that’s more homogeneous, more fake, more celluloid, where time hurries faster every day and burns up in a corrida of e-mails and text messages, where we’ve lost contact with the earth – “zemljia” in Russian. It’s a word that, with “voda”, or water, has followed me throughout my career. In your book you praise the authenticity of the inhabitants of these border regions. Yet many of them have one wish – to live in western Europe or, at least, to adopt the lifestyle. That can’t be forgotten, of course. Without telling them that they’re sticking a finger in their own eye, however, we can remind them that not everything is rosy on this side of the border. Older people are aware of it: they realise that the solidarity that once marked relations among people is no longer there among the Westernised youth. You often mention the “Slavic soul” in your book. How would you define it? Slavs are aware that they are not the brains of the continent, but of being, somewhat, its guts. They let their instincts come to the surface. While this may lead to an incredible aggressiveness, in other situations it gives rise to an unforgettable tenderness. In my book I write of a scene in Minsk, where a group of young women come up to a musician playing an accordion and tell him: “Come on, Igor, make us cry!” A Westerner would never have done it. He would have needed a song to anesthetise that life that’s going by too fast, too senselessly. It’s what I like about the Slavs – this sharing of the shadowy part of their lives, of the melancholia. Has the accession of ten former communist countries to the EU changed Europe?

Yes, because they’ve brought an infusion of dramatic nationalism. From this point of view, the Poles have been a disaster. This feeling that they’re a martyr people who stood up to the Communist moloch. They’ve rediscovered nationalism after the end of nationalism. In Poland it’s pathological. It’s a world centred on itself. What happened with the plane that crashed carrying President Lech Kaczynski and all the other leaders [which went down in Smolensk in April 2010] is a good example: there was no question of the Russians taking them for fools! In your book you seem to make complaints against Europe and its institutions....

I blame Europe and Italy for being asleep, for not being aware of the nationalist and centrifugal forces that are tugging it apart. We have not remembered the lesson from the Balkans: it’s enough simply to identify an enemy to a people short of reference points for that people to take it on as truth. Today, a ruling class facing collapse that would like to transform a political standoff into an ethnic standoff would have no trouble doing so. We no longer have the anti-fascist antibodies, but nor do we have the antibodies of criticism, either. From this point of view, Italy – but Belgium too – are risk areas. One finds there an exasperated regionalist victimisation. It’s a form of resentment of the periphery towards the centre. Interview by Gian Paolo Accardo 

For the new Finnish government, “the endurance test has begun,” headlines Lapin Kansa, following the inauguration of the government led by conservative Jyrki Katainen. Constructed after two months of laborious negotiations, the coalition, led by 39-year old Katainen is, in effect, composed of six parties. These include his own National Coalition Party, the Social-Democrat Party, the Left Alliance, the Green League, the Swedish Popular Party and the Christian-Democrats all of which have widely differing political views. The Lapland-based Lapin Kansa greets the new government with caution because of the compromises it has already agreed to during the talks and because of those to which it will have to consent to during its term if it is to avoid implosion.

Despite a breakthrough in the April 17 legislative elections, the True Finns Party will remain in opposition. The populist party withdrew from the talks due to serious disagreements over European policy. The populist True Finns scored electoral victories by criticising the bailout packages for Greece and Portugal. Although Europhile in nature, the new coalition government intends to adopt a firm view on this issue.

A hundred days after the accident at Japan's Fukushima power plant, La Tribune reports on "the Europe that's said yes to nuclear power." The French business daily points out that "while Germany, Switzerland and Italy are headed for a phase-out of nuclear energy, for many other countries that's far from the case." Among them are France, Great Britain, Finland, the Netherlands and Poland, which are currently building power stations. At the same time, the newspaper notes that the issue of safety "remains people's number one problem." And as Europe’s 27 member states prepare to conduct stress tests on their nuclear power stations, EU energy commissioner Günther Oettinger says that "there is no way to avoid investment to modernise facilities, and the industry will have to cover the cost."

The EU's continued failure to connect with European citizens is not inevitable, it's just very likely.

Reports that the European Union is set to take a seat at the UN's big table must come as something of a relief to embattled officials who have been nervously reading the newspapers over the past year.

A rising tide of anti-EU sentiment has been clear for all to see in Finland’s swing to the right, the Netherlands’ growing anti-immigrant sentiment and Germany’s belated, unhappy discovery that doing things for other countries is the other side of the coin of getting its own way with the refried Deutschmark that we all pretend to call the euro. And then there's the breakdown in the Schengen Area agreement on freedom of movement, arguably the single most attractive and useful thing the EU has ever created.

Seen from this perspective, the EU appears to be on the rocks – that is not to say that it won’t survive; those who say these are the final days of Europe are deluding themselves – but whatever shine it ever had appears to have dulled almost to the point of non-existence.

The EU and its staff have never reacted well to criticism. Colleagues tell me that European Commission workers have contrived to label those who criticise them populists, as if responding to the stated desire of the electorate was somehow bad. 

The apparent "rise of the right" is a case in point. To conflate the EU with tolerance and by extension, claim its critics are xenophobes would be a mistake. The various national electorates’ imagined connection of the EU with hot-button issues such as immigration is understandable. Those who have argued for open borders are only too aware that national electorates’ fears of immigrants are built on the dunghill of scaremongering, not by tiny right-wing rumps like the British National Party, but by the paranoid policies of mainstream political parties such as the UK’s Labour and Conservatives and their fear of the “beast within” citizens.

Insofar as the EU is representative at all it does, at least, have continuity with the beliefs of the various national political elites – and what they fear most is voters. Ironically it is this very mistrust of the people that itself creates the conditions for the very backlash that now perturbs the EU so greatly. If there is a democratic deficit at the heart of the EU – and there is – it is not helped by politicians, whether national or transnational, attempting to operate over the heads of the citizenry. 

It is in the contradictions at the heart of the European project that one finds the cause of its greatest weaknesses. Complaints about an EU superstate fall apart when one considers that those most supportive of the EU project are, like president Herman Van Rompuy and high representative Catherine Ashton, themselves drawn from and appointed by national political elites. If the EU is really building a superstate then it doesn’t even know it itself, nor is it doing a particularly good job.

A noble idea, the EU is unfortunately characterised by a lack of trust in the people of Europe it purports to represent. The frogmarching of the Irish into agreeing to the Lisbon treaty is only really noteworthy to those who have forgotten the treaty was itself a trick to pass into law the European constitution already rejected by the French and Dutch in 2005. I won't even get into the issue of the unwanted "bailout"… 

Like many of my persuasion I have long bristled at the word "eurosceptic", a term that brings to mind half-crazed English Tories whose key objections to the European Union are as alien to me as are those parts of the EU itself that I would like to see pass into the pages of history. If we had a genuinely accountable and democratic EU it is likely that many people’s fear and loathing would melt away. I doubt we shall see one any time soon.

“We, the people”: the European Constitutional Treaty has often been criticised for overlooking this inspiring opening sentence of the U. S. Constitution. What that appears to suggest is a lack of democracy in the European Union. Today, the people are speaking out, and their message is a hard one for Europe’s leaders to hear.

On April 17, nearly 20 percent of Finns voted for a eurosceptic party opposed to financial support for Eurozone countries in difficulty. A year before the presidential election in France, the leader of the National Front, Marine Le Pen, has every chance of making it through to the second round. Her programme: dumping the euro, protectionism and closing the borders. In the Netherlands, under pressure from the popular Geert Wilders, the government is going after tougher conditions for residency for foreigners, including nationals of the European Union. And it is partly to limit electoral damage that Angela Merkel has tightened up the conditions for German participation in stabilising the euro zone.

For the last fifteen or twenty years the anti-Europeans have been on the margins and extremist parties were a problem primarily within national borders; even the crisis caused by the Jörg Haider party taking seats in Austria’s government had few ripples across Europe. But today, in contending for power or as players that cannot be shut out from national governments, these groups, which are attracting more and more voters, are weighing heavily on the overall functioning of the European Union.

Not federal enough to act in a coordinated manner or to remain independent of the political calculations of member states, and yet too federal to build close links to citizens, the EU finds itself in an unprecedented bind: the political trend that is developing flies in the face of what, ever since the Second World War, it has considered its values ​​– and what seemed to be the inevitable course of history. For our national and European leaders, the challenge is an immense one.

“Finns threaten euro rescue plans,” headlines Financial Times Deutschland. Referring to the European Financial Stability Facility, the German business daily explains that general elections scheduled for 17 April could result in "a complete restructuring of the rescue plan.” According to latest polls, 48% of voters are fully opposed to international assistance for Eurozone countries in crisis, and the staunchly eurosceptic True Finns party may well obtain enough support to influence the formation of the country’s next government. Negative views about the rescue plan are also shared authorities in the country. The newspaper quotes a highly placed official in the Finnish Ministry of Finance, who insists: “Wanting to help Portugal is a mistake and helping Greece is a mistake: we should let them go bankrupt.”

“One in ten schoolboys has difficulty reading,” reports Aamulehti. In the wake of the publication of the OECD’s PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) survey of 15-year-olds’ education performance, the daily highlights disappointing results for Finland. While it remains the top-ranked EU member state, “(t)he 10% of boys with literacy issues will have trouble finding jobs,” remarks Aamulehti, noting that the country’s overall score is lower than the previous survey of 2000. “Finland’s success in the PISA rankings is due to the high performance of schoolgirls, 20% of whom demonstrate excellent reading and writing skills, as opposed to 10% of boys,” adds the newspaper.