Is the European Union beginning to disintegrate?
Spain has become the most recent nation to threaten a Brexit-style exit from the European Union amid anger over a European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruling last Thursday that a jailed Catalan separatist leader should not have been stripped of parliamentary immunity, overruling Spanish courts on the subject.
Oriol Junqueras and nine other Catalan separatist leaders were jailed in 2017 for their role in an illegal independence referendum. Junqueras is currently serving a 13-year prison term for sedition, but was still elected as a Member of European Parliament (MEP) last May. Last Thursday, the ECJ ruled that Junqueras should be immediately released and allowed to take his seat in European Parliament in Brussels.
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The ruling has many Spaniards up in arms, especially those in the right-wing Vox Party, which is now under serious pressure to back a Spanish version of the Brexit referendum. The president of the Vox Party, Santiago Abascal, criticized the ruling and said plainly that Spain “should not have to comply” with the ECJ’s ruling.
Abascal went on to say that Spain needs to confront “this interference” from the EU and that the Vox Party “is not going to accept more humiliations” of this type from the government in Brussels or the ECJ in Luxembourg.
“Spain, (as other countries do) should not abide by any judgment of those who attack our sovereignty and security,” Abascal tweeted.
The Vox Party is currently the third-largest party in Spain, but has seen a surge of support over the past year. Among its tenets are a repatriation of sovereign powers from Brussels back to the national governments. Vox has not officially backed the Spaxit movement yet, but grassroots pressure is urging them to do so. Incidents such as this with the EU.attempting to strongarm the release of a person convicted of sedition won’t bolster the bloc’s popularity.
Everyday Spanish people seem to be getting on board with an exit from the Big Brother EU as the hashtag #Spaxit even became trending on Twitter.
And Spain is not the only EU nation becoming tired of the intrusive reach of Brussels. Just last week, EU judges hinted that Poland might have to leave the bloc if recent judicial reform proposals are accepted. Among the reforms is a proposal that judges could be removed if they question government reforms.
Poland has already been referred to the ECJ regarding its rules for judges.
Poland’s ruling party, Law and Justice, argues that reforms to the judiciary are needed in order to battle corruption and overhaul the judicial system, which the new ruling party claims is still influenced by the Communist era of the country. One of the ways that the reforms attempted to address this was to lower the retirement ages for judges in an effort to root out communist holdover judges.
Poland’s National Judicial Council (NCJ) has already been suspended from membership in the European Network of Councils for the Judiciary.
With Poland’s reluctance to becomepolitically correct on many issues and their obvious distaste for their communist past, the EU might be in the position of having to demand the Poles leave the bloc before the Polish citizens demand the separation.
Spain, Poland, and all nations of the European Union have their own specific cultures, which are important to them. The EU’s insistence on political correctness, its leftist cultural leanings, and its love for mass immigration are starting to wear on everyday Europeans.
Spain wants to jail people it considers seditious. Poland wants to reform its own judicial system. The EU’s insistence on butting in on the internal affairs of its members is endangering its own existence.
Euroscepticism, a European political movement that advocates for countries to disengage from the European Union, is on the rise in many nations in the bloc. Having witnessed Great Britain’s current attempt to remove herself from entanglement with the EU has inspired movements all over Europe to do the same.
Spain, Poland, and other current EU nations will be watching the British experiment in leaving the union very carefully. The United Kingdom’s success or failure in standing on its own feet again without Big Brother Europe watching over it will likely be a key in whether the European Union can stay viable going forward.
Photo: ktsimage/iStock/Getty Images Plus
James Murphy is a freelance journalist who writes on a variety of subjects with a primary focus on the ongoing anthropogenic climate-change hoax and cultural issues. He can be reached at [email protected].
