Trust in gonverment is very low, voter turnout was around 48% in regional elections.
Our politicians blame war in Ukraine, it's ridiculous.
> Most ridiculous is that our power plants make enough energy for entire country and 15% are sold abroad, but... All energy is auctioned on the Leipzig Stock Exchange for 600% higher price than it is actually made (1 kWh cost around 1 CZK to made, it's sold for 6-7 CZK and rising.
Why is that ridiculous? We make something cheap, and sell it abroad for profit. Isn't it a good thing we're exporting? (I'd get it if your argument was against the coal power plants, I don't get why selling abroad for a profit is bad in general.)
It's called "lichva". Germans have cheaper prices and also 3 times more average income.
Also what's the point to make own people suffer and be poor by this business? It's absolutely ridiculous.
It's a global world. If someone else is willing to pay more for the energy than us, we should sell it to them and use the money we earn to buy the things we value more, things we're willing to pay more for.
What you're advocating for is economic colonialism where the rich countries can just buy everything they want and the poor ones are forced to sell while starving their people.
"Sorry Ghana, no drinking water for you anymore as Nestle, the US and Switzerland are willing to pay more for it. But you can use the money you get to buy bottled water back from us."
The unified EU energy market has been a disaster for the consumers in energy stable poor countries who saw massive price increases as they were forced to sell energy to higher bidders suffering a shortage, like Germany, with the profits going to the private energy companies instead of the governments. It's basically privatizing the winnings and socializing the losses.
If my country (Croatia) is importing natural gas for cheap (and it is), and then selling it to EU countries, and then importing that same gas back to Croatia, but now with price increase in triple digits, which vast majority of it's citizens cannot afford, then I call this a scheme where government isn't working for it's citizens, it is working for someone else's. And this doesn't even account for extremely high profits some of the companies (and politicians) are making.
I would understand if you sell the extra gas (and there is plenty of that too) to EU market; but keeping your citizens poor and/or without heating so a better paying western european citizen can have plenty of gas is troublesome to say the least.
You may have a point that with that price difference while exporting gas the government has extra money. I'm not so sure if thats a great idea, as governments are just corrupted as hell (at least Croatian one is) and a normal citizen won't see a cent of it. One may argue that corruption and energy prices are two separate things, but I would argue that they are just two faces of the same coin and they go well hand in hand.
How can you apply same prices to different countries?
The litmus test is this: can a EU country use european funds to create a new carmaker to compete with central european carmakers? Hell no. But you can spend all european funds buying cars from Germany, that's never wasteful.
The EU has no policy to enrich the entire union, only the central countries. The EU funds are basically a workaround for direct transfers of money from the German government to German companies, via foreign countries.
I'm not from a Eastern European country, but I do live in a poor Eastern European economy, it's the same dynamic.
It's not though. EU wide corruption scandals prove this.
Western EU companies routinely pay bribes to dump plastics and toxic waste in Romanian landfills under the disguise of "recyclable material". This way those private companies save a few bucks to stay competitive, and their countries keep getting to call themselves "green" by exporting their environmental damage across the border.
IKEA, plus Austrian and German wood companies routinely paid bribes in the Romanian timber industry to be able to perform mass deforestation.
Austrian companies, like STR*BAG, paid bribes to Romanian politicians to get preferential juicy building contracts, sometimes using EU funds, for highways that never get completed due to various technicalities that got intentionally omitted from the contract so that the building company can just bail out from the deal without having built anything while getting paid in full. Basically, the EU taxpayer is paying for a western EU company to make bank in the east, all through EU funds funneled trough Romania, to build roads that never get built.
All this high level corruption benefits major western EU companies, and corrupt eastern EU politicians a lot. Western EU politicians also benefit from this as the major companies in their countries lobby for them to keep this corrupt system going so they can keep making bank.
The EU is a great thing, but it's also ripe with corruption that's costing the taxpayers tens of billions.