EU hopes to emerge stronger than ever after undesirable Brexit as it battles Russia, Covid and the far-r – iNews

This March marks 65 years since the signing of the Treaty of Rome, a visionary document that brought six European nations still recovering from the ravages of war into a project to forge peace and prosperity across the continent.

That is a grand anniversary: most people reaching 65 are looking at retirement. But the age of the European Unions founding document has not withered the threats to the bloc, and 2022 will see an array of challenges that could shatter the unity of the clubs 27 countries.

These could include a shock, far-right election win in France; a new, more deadly coronavirus variant; a joint Polish and Hungarian blockade of EU decision-making; and a Russian military assault on Ukraine. While each are unlikely, none are improbable, and even one of them could paralyse the EU, sending it into a tailspin.

The EUs democratic challenges will be critical: as a union, the bloc relies on the integrity of each of its member states and elections always raise the prospect however rare that an anti-democratic candidate wins.

2022 will be another tumultuous year for democracy, says Michael Meyer-Resende, the executive director of the Berlin-based NGO Democracy Reporting International. Many important elections in 2022 will be more like referenda on democracy rather than offering voters choices of different democratic currents.

The most important is in France where President Emmanuel Macron is seeking re-election in the presidential vote in April, before the country decides on a new parliament come June. Frances fragmented political landscape means that a far-right candidate has a good chance to reach the run-off second round in the presidential vote, as Marine Le Pen did in 2017.

Ms Le Pen, who leads the National Rally party had long looked set to repeat her 2017 feat, at least until another extreme-right figure emerged, TV pundit-turned-politician Eric Zemmour. Both are nationalists flirting with racism, with little regard for traditional democratic values, let alone supranational organisations like the EU: they talk about removing France from the blocs strictures.

If Le Pen or God help us, Zemmour wins, then the EU is plunged into crisis. That is the nightmare scenario, says John Springford, the deputy director of the Centre for European Reform (CER) in London.

But another European election looms, with critical consequences for democracy: Hungary. Viktor Orbn has been dragging the country towards hard-right authoritarianism since returning for a second stint as prime minister in 2010.

If Orbn wins again, then he will be emboldened to continuing suppressing dissent, Mr Springford says. If he loses, champagne corks will pop in Brussels, as it shows pro-European forces can win although it will not mean that populism is gone.

Another victory by Mr Orbn would also cheer the EUs other would-be dictators, mainly eastern European. Along with Hungary, Poland has faced regular reprimands from Brussels for eroding democratic institutions, to little effect. The EU finally has a tool to use against them, a rule of law mechanism to hold back billions of euros of funding from countries that fail to uphold the EUs values. But this is an extreme option, and officials fear that if it is activated, it could trigger a crisis within the EU: Budapest and Warsaw could retaliate by blocking decision-making inside the bloc.

Further east, the EU faces threats from an increasingly belligerent Russia, which has amassed troops along its border with Ukraine, and this week sent military support to neighbouring Kazakhstans embattled leaders to crush street unrest. Russian President Vladimir Putin, who reveres the old Soviet concept of a near abroad, has also menaced bordering EU countries Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania but even an incursion into Ukraine would split the bloc, and undermine its aspirations as a global political player.

Meanwhile, the Covid-19 pandemic is still upending life two years after first emerging, and the shadow of the Omicron variant will continue to throw the EUs plans into uncertainty. The EU needs to find a balance between keeping people safe and protecting the economy a tension that erupted this week when Mr Macron said he wanted to piss off Frances unvaccinated people. With inflation slowly creeping up, this will spill into the EUs plans to reform budget rules and channel investment into the green economy.

All these events and trends make for a potentially perilous 2022 for the EU. But the bloc has faced other major crises in the past decade, from Brexit to euro strains and refugee influxes, and weathered them. Officials are cautiously optimistic that they can dodge the worst-case scenarios and rebuild. Indeed, if everything goes right, the EU can emerge stronger than ever.

Re-election for Mr Macron (or even his centre-right opponent, Valrie Pcresse) would set the scene for a renewed Franco-German motor with new German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. In Hungary, Mr Orbns opponents have united behind a single candidate and have a good chance to oust him: his defeat would transform Budapest as well as the EU. Mr Putin is sensing pushback from its former Soviet allies while his threats have galvanised the EU to fortify defence ties. Authorities are getting better at dealing with new Covid-19 waves and variants.

Finally, Brexit, which was a body blow in 2016, is no longer an existential issue for the EU: the UK has left the bloc, and no-one seems minded to follow them out the door. The EU has moved on from Brexit, says Paul Adamson, the chairman of the EU-UK Forum and visiting professor at Kings College London. People see whats happened to Britain since it left. They see how undesirable and messy leaving the EU is.

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EU hopes to emerge stronger than ever after undesirable Brexit as it battles Russia, Covid and the far-r - iNews