According to a Daily Express article, thousands of EU officials are earning more than 290.000 a year, which is more than German Chancellor Angela Merkel. We rate the claim as uncheckable. The salaries of EU officials have been a wildly debated topic over the years. Last month, the Daily Express reported on the German…
On 15 January 2019, Merja Kyllönen, the Member of the European Parliament, questioned the legality of the EU-Morocco Agreement in her tweet. According to her, an addendum to the agreement does not comply with the decision made by the Court of Justice of the European Union regarding the adjacent waters of Western Sahara. The claim…
On 26th November 2017, now-Italian Minister of the Interior said: “If elected, the centre-right government must guarantee 100.000 expulsions per year, in order to get half a million irregular migrants back to their countries in five years”. His promise has turned out to be false.
Reinier van Lanschot, party leader of the new, pan-European party Volt – and probable new member of the European Parliament – claims on Twitter that migrant aid is punished in several European member states. Subsequently, he asks his followers to sign a European citizen initiative to make an end to this. However, punishment of migrant…
On 21 January, Finnish parliament member Olli Immonen stated in his blog that “Finland currently has the loosest asylum policy in the Nordic countries when it comes to, for example, family reunification.” Our research shows that norms and practices related to asylum policies are so complex that it is not possible to make a reliable…
On their website, the Belgian party N-VA (member of the European Conservatives and Reformists) has stated that the monthly move of the European Parliament (EP) between Brussels and Strasbourg costs the European taxpayers 200 million euros per year. A lot of money which according to N-VA is anything but an example of good governance. The…
Sargentini: “Hungary spends 18 million euros on campaign against me”. This is what the Dutch radio news show Met het Oog op Morgen (‘In View of Tomorrow’) reported on 5 February 2019 on its website. The claim is mostly true.
On 20th February 2019 Athens Voice published an article “Microsoft: Fear of cyber attacks ahead of EU elections”, according to which the American software company Microsoft in Germany, issued a notice, aimed at politicians and civil society organizations, striking the risk of a possible hacker attack, ahead of the European elections next May. Microsoft report…
In a recent publication on the opinion page of the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant, historian Ronald Havenaar tries to combat rising cultural pessimism in Europe by pointing to average voter turnouts of between 70 and 80 percent. We rate the claim as mostly false.
The claim is backed by an actual study, but experts suggest the exact percentages are difficult to determine. On 23 January 2019, Mari Pantsar, the Director of carbon-neutral circular economy of Sitra, a Finnish Innovation Fund, claimed on Twitter: “A 1.5 degree world can only be “circular.” That’s why the #circulareconomy has to be placed…