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Angela Merkel at Fogh.
The German Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel is visiting an embattled Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen on Tuesday the 19th December 2006. Fogh has not been very informative about what was really going on in the democracy projects in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Merkel now wants Fogh’s “yes” to a new democracy project in the EU. The rejected constitution will be awakened again and will be adopted in other terms.

First they will change the name from Constitution to Treaty. Constitution is “grundgestez” in German. Then Germany gets the rejected constitution with their own name and countries where this word is unpopular can sell it as a “mini-treaty”.

From part I some bombastic words have been removed without changing the contents. The Court of Justice has already used Part II in the Constitution concerning the common fundamental rights more than 200 times.
The Court of Justice has already moved the pillars between the present treaty of Rome and the judicial policy co-operation. The introduction of criminal law has also been handled by the judges.

The more the Court of Justice decides, the less the teatry needs to contain to give the same result.

But changes in the decision making from unanimity til qualified majority and the entry of new voting rules together with a smaller Commission can only happen at a government conference. And this is what Merkel now wants to negotiate during the German Presidency and get approved by the end of 2007.

The very comprehensive part III is being rewritten into a few amended sheets compared to the Treaty of Nice. Part III already contains 85% of the Treaty of Nice and 15% of it is new. By making the changes short, incomprehensible and without context you think that it’s possible to cheat the voters into believing that the issue at stake is something different from the rejected constitution.

But the core remains the same and it is by moving power from the voters and the popularly elected to the public servants and to ministers and from small countries to big countries.

The core is 44 new areas for decisions with so-called qualified majority. On these areas, the Danish parliament and other national parliaments in the EU will loose the opportunity to legislate independently and to use the veto power in the EU.

The main part of the laws will be decided by public servants in 300 secret working-groups under the Council of Ministers, after being prepared by 3000 other secret working-groups in the Commission.

The members of the European Parliament will have greater influence but they will win much less than the voters and the national elected will lose.

The democratic deficiency will increase. The legislative power will lose to the executive power. Montesquieu’s seperation of powers will lose to Machiavelli.

For Merkel the most decisive is the implementation of the so-called double majority, where you have to vote after population in the future. This will increase Germany’s power at the expense of the smaller countries. Today, Germany has 32% of the votes needed to block a decision. With the Constitution, they will have 51%. Similarly, Denmark have 7.8% at it’s disposal today - and only 3,4% with the Constitution.

From being necessary conversation partners we will now become superfluous for the pluralisation. That Danish members of the national parliament can agree on this, testifies their lack in the knowledge behind the decision making process in the EU.

For Denmark it is also a problem that the Constitution and it’s replacement will abolish the entitlement to an independent Danish commissioner. The Danish seat in the Commission and especially in the commissioner’s cabinet is important for the daily co-operation between Danish companies and municipalities and EU’s distant French organised authorities.

Fogh and the national parliament’s majority are also willing to sell the Danish Commissioner. In this matter, they should give a call to the leading law graduate from the Danish Council of Trademen., Peter Vesterdorf, who is a member of the Liberals and a strong federalist and who has written the first Danish educational textbook about the European Parliament.

He has been following thousands of EU-cases during Denmark’s entire membership of the EU and he is warning about the selling out of the Danish commissioner in the same way that I am.

The removal of a Danish commissioner is such a decisive change of the co-operation in the EU that the compressed Constitution should be put out to a referendum.

It would suit the opposition and the Danish People’s Party, if they use Merkel’s visit to announce that they do not want any changes sneaked in the EU-co-oeration without a referendum.

Bonde’s Briefing