Jonah Redfern France has added its signature to Germany's campaign to scrap unanimous voting in EU foreign policy, joining Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Romania, Spain and Sweden in a letter to the EU's foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, according to Politico. Germany has pushed the idea for years; France had traditionally resisted it, per the same report.
The eleven-country group wants most Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) decisions shifted from unanimity to qualified majority voting, a push driven largely by Hungary's repeated vetoes under then-prime minister Viktor Orbán, according to Kyiv Post.
The tool the group wants activated is Article 31(3) of the Treaty on European Union, known as the 'passerelle clause'. It lets the European Council decide, case by case, that a given CFSP question should be settled by qualified majority instead of unanimity, excluding matters with military or defence implications.
The catch, noted in both source reports: that decision itself requires a unanimous vote of the European Council. Any single government objecting to losing its veto can simply veto the mechanism meant to remove it — a structural loop critics call a Catch-22, per Kyiv Post.
Until now the initiative was carried mainly by smaller and mid-sized states plus Germany. With Paris behind it, Politico frames the push as now backed by the bloc's two largest members — a political shift that raises its weight in Brussels.
