17 May 2016

#MEPTalks: Why MEPs did not recognise China’s Market Economy status.

As another EP Plenary in Strasbourg ended last week, we looked again at what MEPs were busy posting on Twitter between meetings, debates and press conferences. The recognition of China’s Market Economy status was by far the hottest topic of the week with almost 300 tweets. It was followed by the TTIP-CETA talks (214), the celebration of Europe Day (201) and the EU-Turkey deal (180) [1].

The recognition of China’s Market Economy status was by far the hottest topic of the week with almost 300 tweets. It was followed by the TTIP-CETA talks (214), the celebration of Europe Day (201) and the EU-Turkey deal (180) [1].

Ninety MEPs tweeted about the approved non-legislative resolution that stressed the obligation for China to fulfil first the EU’s five criteria (source ‘Granting Market Economy Status to China’ p.18) to be recognised as a market economy. Until it is recognised as such, its exports to the EU must be treated in a “non-standard” way. The top five most active MEPs on China were:

The most shared tweets were all posted by Marine Le Pen, six in total. We decided to pick up only the most successful one of those six to show you who else got some buzz out there. Here are our findings for the top five popular tweets about the China anti-dumping resolution:

It was clear that MEPs are strongly opposed to recognising China as a market economy. Many of them called for anti-dumping investigations to protect EU industry and defend EU jobs.

Similarly, last Wednesday in a press conference a group of MEPs led by Marine Le Pen spoke out against the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the EU, Canada and the United States.

The conversation continued online. 79 MEPs posted more than 200 tweets about the status of the talks and whether or not the respective agreements were favourable for the EU. Marine Le Pen and Lola Schez Caldentey were two of the most influential authors but also two of the most active ones.

The overall tone seemed negative with MEPs being largely against these agreements. Some of them picked up the news about the classified documents on TTIP published by Greenpeace last week. We identified the most active and the most influential authors. The top five active authors were:

  • Luke ‘Ming’ Flanagan @lukeming with 30 tweets and RTs
  • Marine Le Pen @MLP_officiel with 20 tweets and RTs
  • Lola Schez Caldentey @LolaPodemos with 16 tweets and RTs
  • Ernest Urtasun @ernesturtasun with 14 tweets and RTs
  • Reinhard Butikofer @bueti with 5 tweets and RTs

Top 5 influential tweets:

Finally, other relevant discussions of last week were (A) the revision of the common asylum system (B) how to restore a fully functioning Schengen system (C) new powers to help Europol step up efforts to fight terrorism (D) the state of negotiations on the Greek economic adjustment programme (E) the EU-Turkey deal and (F) Food origin and fish labelling.

If you want to know more about any of these topics, drop me an email and let’s have a chat.

See you at the next EP Plenary!

@Giammabxl

[1] We deliberately kept out of this analysis the BrexitSaga as it was not linked to the EP Plenary agenda of last week. Considering that since February Brexit has constantly been the most discussed topic by MEPs, we decided that a second ad hoc analysis following our first one would be more appropriate.

Watch this space 😉