Press

Europe is “less on top of Greece for doing pushbacks and all the sort of things,” said Camino Mortera-Martinez, who heads the Brussels office for the Centre for European Reform, a think-tank.The latitude given Greece, she said, was in part recognition that the country had lived through a decade of brutal austerity.

“Immigration pretty much automatically adds to GDP because there are more people in the country working and consuming,” said John Springford, deputy director of the Centre for European Reform think-tank. “We have some good evidence that immigration actually helps to grease the wheels of the labor market a bit, and allows people to hand off lower-productivity tasks to other workers and concentrate on things which they were most productive at.”

“I don’t think many European governments are very concerned, presumably because these crises come round quite often but never end in disaster,” said Charles Grant, the director of the Centre for European Reform in London. “Cutting short the trip is a bad signal, but there is such good will to Biden in most capitals that they are prepared to cut him some slack.”

Luigi Scazzieri of the Centre for European Reform, says there are “three fundamental reasons” why relations between the EU and Turkey have deteriorated.“The worsening state of democratic freedoms in Turkey; a plethora of bilateral disputes between Turkey and several member states, which further undermined Ankara’s EU accession process; and disagreements over foreign policy, with many member-states seeing Turkey’s positions as antagonistic,” he wrote in a briefing note published ahead of the elections.

« Les résultats des élections influenceront la relation entre l'UE et la Turquie, qui s'est profondément détériorée au cours de la dernière décennie », écrit Luigi Scazzieri dans une note pour le Centre for European Reform.

„Man merkt, dass die Dinge schlecht sind, wenn Paris und Berlin die Symbolik betonen“, sagt Charles Grant, Direktor der Denkfabrik „Centre for European Reform“.

Two key factors have stood in the way of the development of a single market for telecoms, Zach Meyers, a research fellow at the Centre for European Reform told EURACTIV.“One of those things is the spectrum markets, which are still national, which means that it’s very difficult for companies to kind of coordinate a rollout of a mobile network across different countries at the same time”, he said, adding that “different land access regimes are also a real problem, but obviously politically extremely difficult to fix.”