It's funny, as the EU is normally bashed by left people for being too right, and right people for being too left.
Like, lots of the Treaties are pretty neo-liberal (private services, competition is always good, privatise stuff) but lots more are more left wring (the anti-monoploy stuff, the social charter etc).
Really though the EU is 27 governments in a trenchcoat, so it tends to reflect those governments (which change over time).
Anti-monopoly is left wing and doesn't fit the neo-liberalist compartment?
The social charter is firmly liberalist, though not distinctly of the neo- flavour.
Due to the institutional structures and processes EU rule making tends to be quite resistant to immediate political fashion. For one the power of framing from interest and lobby groups is quite strong, hence the influence from expert groups and lawyer like people. It's why conservatives are pushing towards a kind of United States of Europe direction, they'd prefer a centralisation of power in areas currently governed by the founding agreements.
> Anti-monopoly is left wing and doesn't fit the neo-liberalist compartment?
Yeah, look it could go either way.
> Due to the institutional structures and processes EU rule making tends to be quite resistant to immediate political fashion.
I don't really agree with this. For an example of why not, the AI act is a good one. This was a great Act that got a lot of LLM nonsense pumped into it following ChatGPT. While I get why that happened, I would have preferred that they wait, as the original stuff made lots of sense, and the less well thought through AI/LLM stuff significantly weakens the act.
> It's why conservatives are pushing towards a kind of United States of Europe direction, they'd prefer a centralisation of power in areas currently governed by the founding agreements.
Can you give me some examples of people (national governments particularly) pushing for this? I think that lots of governments are pretty happy with inter-governmentalism even though it has lots of problems.
Like, lots of the Treaties are pretty neo-liberal (private services, competition is always good, privatise stuff) but lots more are more left wring (the anti-monoploy stuff, the social charter etc).
Really though the EU is 27 governments in a trenchcoat, so it tends to reflect those governments (which change over time).