Comment by mamonster
6 hours ago
Given that France is also starting to suffer badly, one thing to watch is more and more people demanding a cut to EU budget contributions from these countries. Its like 40 billion EUR worth of net transfers. Could make for explosive politics.
Much to my annoyance, despite this being practically a rounding error (like, 1% or so of GDP), the EU budget contributions absolutely did have this effect in the UK.
Well, the thing is: French budget reforms that the government wants to do is 40 billion EUR, their net contribution is 10 billion. Just going to neutral gets you a 4th of the way there without touching your internal social security. If you cancel contributions that's 25 billion, that's 60% of the way there.
Not saying I agree but this sort of argument will be impossible to counter for centrists with the mounting populist backdrop.
Being the French, their tactics will rather be what it always has been: Not reduce their contribution, but vastly increase their received subsidies from the EU. That way, they can let the EU subsidize what they can no longer afford to pay for with their own money. The EU will go along with this because this is the accepted MO of France's EU contributions since forever, and increased spending towards France will increase the EU's overall budget and therefore importance. The only unhappy member states will be Germany and a few unimportant small payer states. But Germany has always gone along with those shenanigans, so no reason to think they won't happily open their wallet again...