The Week in Bloggingportal: Welcome to Silly Season!

Summertime is in the air! EU politics takes a long, sleepy break as the parliament goes on holiday and journalists struggle to fill their papers with stories. Let “silly season” commence, then, as the media circus starts reporting non-stories about hamsters and bloggers. Except…

This year’s silly season is a bit different. First of all (if you’re living in Brussels, at least) there’s no summer. Secondly: there’s a surplus of news jostling for space in national headlines. From a far-right maniac massacring teenagers in Norway (something Vihar warns could spell a return of the ghosts of the past), to the rocket-ride of the euro, to the US edging towards default, to the phone hacking revelations in the UK, to Amy Winehouse yesterday joining the 27 club to a famine in the Horn of Africa.

Phew! Journalists are more likely to collapse from exhaustion this silly season than take a long relaxing nap in the sun. This has been a make-or-break week for the EU (and it’s still not clear what’s been made and what’s been broken). Yet things seem to be moving, grudgingly, toward “more Europe” as the solution. Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer signalled that the UK now fully supports deeper EU fiscal integration. Place du Luxembourg gave us a euro for our thoughts with some likely options for Friday’s summit. Then, you can read what actually happened here.

The consensus seems to be that the Eurozone leaders’ plan is fairly sensible (and represents a bolder step than was feared) but the jury is still undecided on whether it will be sufficient to prevent contagion and save the Euro. All eyes now turn to the US, to see how their leaders handle their debt crisis – a crisis that risks a credit event 10 times worse than the 2008 Lehman Brothers collapse.

Summer holidays? What summer holidays?

Image by fabio.dilupo