caucus

Putin far worse threat to EU than ‘Grexit’

The first POLITICO Transatlantic Caucus survey finds concerns about Russia and the crisis in Ukraine greatly outweigh fears of Greece or Britain leaving the EU.

While “Grexit” and “Brexit” dominate headlines, POLITICO’s Transatlantic Caucus survey shows Vladimir Putin is seen as a greater threat to Europe.

The Russian president represents by far the most serious challenge to Europe at the moment, followed by the bloc’s weak economy. The prospects of budget-plagued Greece leaving the euro or Britain voting to leave the European Union altogether are seen as much less grave.

Meanwhile, Europe’s relations with the United States have gotten a bit friendlier since U.S. President Barack Obama took office in 2009, but don’t count on seeing a transatlantic trade pact being signed in the next two years.

Those are some of the main lessons to be drawn from a survey of POLITICO’s Transatlantic Caucus, a group of 50 politicians, policymakers and analysts who represent all sides of the political spectrum within Europe and the United States.

Despite wall-to-wall media coverage of Greece’s debt crisis and Prime Minister David Cameron’s election pledge to hold a referendum on Britain’s EU membership, it is the ongoing conflict in Ukraine and Putin’s aggressive posture toward the West that the group found most worrying.

More than half of respondents said Putin was the gravest threat facing Europe, and an overwhelming majority — 44 out of 50 — said they didn’t expect relations between the EU and Russia to improve this year.

POLITICO’s survey was taken just before world leaders from the G7 group voiced support over the weekend to uphold economic and targeted sanctions against Russia, which is accused of stoking a conflict between Ukrainian armed forces and Kremlin-backed separatist troops.

“The depth of the crisis with Russia is often underestimated,” said a European participant who doesn’t work in government. “This is a systemic shift going beyond Ukraine and, possibly, beyond Putin himself.”

After Putin, the issue most worrying for this cross-section of European leaders is the faltering economic recovery, followed closely by the rise of populist and nationalist parties, the migration crisis and Islamist terrorism.

The prospect of “Grexit” and “Brexit” trailed far behind on the list of concerns. About half of the respondents said they expected Greece to leave the euro — but only one saw this prospect as a very serious problem.

Britain’s role in the EU

Cameron’s re-election as Britain’s conservative Prime Minister has sparked a frenzy of speculation about whether the EU will accept a renegotiation of its key treaties to accommodate British demands. After an initially cool reception from the continent, German Chancellor Angela Merkel told the BBC this week that she was open to tweaking the treaties if that could keep Britain inside the Union, and that she was not “losing sleep” over the issue.

Whether French President Francois Hollande will prove as accommodating as Merkel is an open question. So far, French officials don’t seem in the mood to grant Cameron any favors.

Overall, POLITICO’s Caucus showed that a clear majority of respondents believe that Britain will stay in the EU. Half see the bloc’s treaty being renegotiated to accommodate British demands; half do not.

“He will not get all of them,” said one official from southern Europe, referring to British demands that range from opt-out clauses on financial regulation to a right to deny benefit to migrant workers. “Only those that are enough to present within the UK as successes.”

Said another official, from France: “Yes, but he will get support only for a limited number of reforms that befit all the member states, not only to Britain …  He will not get support for major changes.”

Relations with United States

Since Obama’s election, many Europeans have complained that he has neglected Western Europe, America’s traditional ally, in favor of trading partners in Asia. Revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden about wholesale U.S. spying on European leaders has only deepened transatlantic suspicion.

The Transatlantic Caucus survey suggested ties were slowly improving. Twenty out of 51 respondents said the relationship was better, versus 16 who said it was the same and 14 who said it had worsened.

Relations are “definitely better,” said a Southern European official. “But not as ‘warm’ as one might have imagined or hoped at the beginning of his first term.”

However, others pointed to repeated disappointments, including the NSA revelations and Obama’s decision to back away from airstrikes on Syria in 2013 — a move that was supported by several European states as having damaged the relationship in a lasting way.

“We’ve moved beyond the strains over Iraq, but they’ve been replaced by the NSA scandals and now Europe under pressure from Russia is reeling from an intentionally less engaged U.S. in Europe,” said a Washington foreign policy specialist.

Nowhere have the Snowden revelations generated greater mistrust than in Germany. To the specific question of how badly news of NSA spying on Merkel had affected U.S.-German relations, a majority of respondents (35) described the flap as a “temporary” problem, while 10 said that Americans failed to understand why Germans were so upset.

Reflecting still-weak trust between the U.S. and EU as a whole, a slim majority of respondents said they did not expect a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) to see the light of day within the next two years.

Europeans are also keeping a close watch on the U.S. presidential race. Among those questioned for the Transatlantic Caucus survey, Hillary Clinton came out the clear favorite, with 14 out of 38 saying they preferred her to be the next U.S. president. Jeb Bush, Rand Paul and Bernie Sanders won one European vote each. The rest of the participants abstained.

Migrant crisis

Europe remains paralyzed over the question of how it should respond to an influx of migrants from Africa, hundreds of whom have drowned when the makeshift vessels carrying them across the Mediterranean sink. Should the bloc take more migrants in, or toughen its security to dissuade them from trying to make the crossing in the first place?

A majority (35) said that the EU should take in more migrants, with just three saying they should accept fewer.

“Europe will need immigration in order to solve its demographic problems,” said a British official. “But it has to establish a system for processing potential migrants outside Europe and having rules for establishing who is a legitimate refugee or asylum seeker and who is moving for economic or other reasons.”

A French analyst added: “The EU is made of 500 million people. To accept 40,000 migrants is very little.”