Press

The most bulletproof method to invoke force majeure and defy lawsuits at court would be the approval of sanctions at the EU level, says Elisabetta Cornago, a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform (CER), who admitted the positions by Hungary and Slovakia make it virtually impossible."This new roadmap the Commission is putting forward today acknowledges that difficulty but tries to find new pathways to technically deliver a phase-out of Russian fossil fuel imports, such as providing paths out of contracts to European companies," Cornago told Euronews.

Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform, placed Trump’s second presidency among seismic historical events, comparing it to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 9/11 attacks. He warned that tariffs increase inflation, restrict trade, hinder growth, and introduce significant uncertainty into the global economy. Yet he also identified unexpected benefits: Trump’s tariffs are inadvertently strengthening European unity, restoring Germany’s leadership role within the EU, and nudging post-Brexit Britain closer to the European continent.

“The [European Central Bank] has the most ironclad independence of any central bank in the world,” said Sander Tordoir, chief economist at the Centre for European Reform and a former ECB staffer. “So if you’re worried about central bank independence, I think most investors will probably just have a bit more exposure to Europe and a little bit less to the US.”

But analysis by the Centre for European Reform, a think tank, found a youth mobility scheme could lead to a rise in GDP of between 0.4 to 0.45 per cent in ten years.

Ian Bond, deputy director at the Center for European Reform, believes “it would be extremely difficult to make the case that Canada is a European country” for several reasons.Even if it were to pass the test of so-called Europeanness, “practical economics” would get in the way, he said.

“It’s a change in the sense that it welcomes investment from abroad in a sector that has been one of the prides of European industrial development,” says Elisabetta Cornago, senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform think-tank.
“It’s also an acknowledgment that there is a gap between the European homegrown knowhow and what is available externally.”