I found the campaign in the Netherlands very frustrating and was even more annoyed by all the hot takes suggesting the result marked a defeat for the populists, so I tried to write my anger away open.substack.com/pub/twentyfo...

Complete coincidence that the European Commission decided to demonstrate the benefits of the tariff ceiling they negotiated with the US with a comparison with a country with a 10% tariff. It could refer to either Brazil or the United Kingdom, wonder which one they were thinking of.

The German people have spoken: they want their Schwarze Null and crumbling infrastructure back

A classic bit of EuroCope to suggest the Europeans caving to Trump was due to strategic errors. In reality, they're unwilling to suffer the economic pain required to do so. The French should know this after they folded instantly when Trump threatened to tariff wine earlier this year.

He did say recently that the EU is nastier than China, so a higher tariff than China is just simple consistency

In our podcast this week @timgwynnjones.bsky.social and I discuss several good reasons for why the ECB might hold at 2% for a while after its June cut, and also I point out that it’s “a nice round number” podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/m...

Visiting Switzerland is a strange experience. Everything is very nice, the trains run on time, and there’s always a mountain in the background. But most alienating of all is seeing banks advertise with 5 year mortgages rates of 1.17%

Can’t wait to pay more for my iPhone in Europe just so Tim Apple can compress his margin in the US to avoid angering Trump on.ft.com/4lp5MZT

We've already established that the formula is ... well ... nonsense. But in the Swiss case, the figures are inflated by investors moving gold into the US at the end of last year due to - that's right! - the threat of tariffs. Exclude those flows and Swiss exports would be subject to 20%.

Very important intervention by @catherinedevries.bsky.social — now that elite consensus on strengthening European militaries has emerged, it is crucial to create genuine mass support, which means being open about the costs it will take.

So far European rearmament has meant more financial engineering than military engineering. Interesting to see the UK considering joint European defence spending but just moving ever more off-budget is not going to avoid the difficult budgeting choices caused by rearmament. on.ft.com/3Yf2bDL

I feel for the future economic historians who have to explain that this wasn’t even because the president’s adviser owned a domestic car firm www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Silly to exclude the UK from this unless you’re 100% certain there will be an EU-UK security agreement very soon on.ft.com/3DEIpux

If we're doing austerity in the UK the first thing that needs to go is these stupid monthly GDP release. The debate here was already overly focused on headline growth rates and has now been completely poisoned by these largely meaningless but overinterpreted estimates

First economists are speaking of a 'real game changer'. To me, exempting defence from the debt brake is even better than a new special fund, as it allows for long-term planning, as the old special fund forced the government to spend quickly always under the shadow 'but what when the fund runs out'

Incredible how fast things have moved in Germany. From no debt brake reform two weeks ago to exempting defence spending above 1% from it and announcing a €500bn infrastructure fund that nobody had even considered last week

I thought the video Macron posted about his charm offensive was actually pretty cool, Trump clearly doesn’t agree

Interesting that inflation didn’t play much of a role, only 5% of Germans mentioned it as the most important theme in their decision

More importantly, as always, SPD is NOT the main supplier of new AfD voters. Most new AfD voters did not vote in 2021 (not only first voters!). Right-wing parties CDU and FDP were main suppliers. Despite hype, BSW took virtually nothing from AfD.

Very interesting to look at the age distribution in the exit poll. The SPD which already did very poorly with young voters last time continues to loose further there - a party of pensioners. Interestingly, also huge losses for the Greens among young voters and massive gains for the Linke.

Think this explains the rather mediocre CDU result: German voters don't forget and still blame them for the countries' problems to just about the same extent as the SPD and Greens but the CDU is seen as responsible the high number of refugees

Basically a bog-standard European election result

Substantial increase in turnout in Germany, which is likely distorted somewhat by the large share of postal votes in 2021. Hard to say what this means but a superficial reading could be good for AfD, also because turnout is up more in eastern states.

*MEANWHILE, IN AUSTRIA..* And so, it’s official and so begin the mutual recriminations: the FPÖ and ÖVP have pulled the plug on their coalition talks, plunging the country into uncertainty as irreconcilable differences between the major parties preclude them from any viable paths to power. 1/27

We need a total and complete shutdown of new funds thought up by EU policymakers until someone can figure out what's going on with the same euro of spending being labeled by multiple different programmes, objectives or funds.

*MEANWHILE, IN AUSTRIA..* Frohes neues Jahr! This morning, Beate Meinl-Reisinger (BMR), the leader of the liberal centrist NEOS, announced the withdrawal of her party from negotiations form a three-party coalition with the conservative People's Party (ÖVP) and centre-left Social Democrats (SPÖ). 1/8

So many think pieces on the Habsburgs and European integration only for the North Americans to create a dual presidency with a customs union modelled on the Austro-Hungarian empire

Should we call it the Bergsen Law of Political Atrophy (after @pbergsen.bsky.social) that all Western political systems eventually end up consisting of a large number of relatively small parties?

Not sure I’ll ever quite get used to how incredibly patronising the whole system of European fiscal monitoring is

A frugal has fallen

In 2021 I published a piece in a German paper telling Germans not to be afraid of a bit of political fragmentation. I obviously wasn’t very convincing as some polls now suggest German voters might return only four or five parties into the next Bundestag, clearly all just to spite me.