On 1 July 2022, Czechland assumes the Presidency of the Council of the European Union. The presidency rotates every six months, and France has held it for the last six months, and after the Czechs it will go to Sweden.
The role is to set the agenda of the Council of the EU, lead its meetings, act as the broker between all of the individual interests of the member states while representing the council in negotiations with the European Commission, the European Parliament and external partners.
This will be the second time that the country has held the presidency. The first time was from 1 January until 30 June 2009, right before I moved to Czechia.
So Petr Fiala, the Czech Prime Minister, will be in charge of the EU for the next six months. The top five priorities, which are pretty closely linked are:
- Managing the refugee crisis and Ukraine's post-war recovery
- Energy security
- Strengthening Europe's defence capabilities and cyberspace security
- Strategic resilience of the European economy
- Resilience of democratic institutions
It was announced last month that the presidency's slogan will be "Europe as a task: rethink, rebuild, reposer." The "Europe as a task" comes from a speech that former president Václav Havel once made in Germany.
Here's a short video I found out on YouTube about the upcoming transition.
One of the criticisms of the upcoming Czech presidency is that there are at least five Czech minister that won't be able to lead meetings in English. I don't really get what the minor uproar is all about. Only the European Commission has English, French, and German as its working languages. The EU has 24 official languages, of which Czech is one of them, so if any of the ministers don't feel comfortable using English then they can use an interpreter.
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