There are five principles of good governance: Openness, Participation, Accountability, Effectiveness and Coherence.

Hit by the crisis, Europeans have lost their confidence in the EU.  In countries like Spain,  72% of citizens express mistrust. In Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Italy and Cyprus, the EU is viewed with a distrust as overwhelming as we see in Spain. Significantly, however, the leap of distrust in the EU is taking place not only in the debtor countries, but in the creditor countries, or those financially better off: the people of Germany, Austria, France, the Netherlands and Finland have also lost their trust in the EU.

The crisis in Cyprus is fundamentally a banking crisis . So Cyprus was presented with a solution , which was no solution at all. It was told that it had to do two things : to borrow an enormous amount of money relative to the economy in order to refinance the banks and  some more money had to be found through taxing the deposits--in other words, by imposing a levy on the deposits. The combination of these two measures will simply destroy the economy.

When the bailout plan was first announced, it included Russia extending its existing € 2.5 billion to the Cyprus by five years as well as reducing that loan's interest rate. Now, Russia has said NIET.

SIMPLE majority in the 56-member House of Representatives will be required for approval of the government bill on the deposits haircut. However the numbers simply do not add up to a majority.  If all members are present and voting, a simply majority means 29 votes

Under the best case scenario the government would have 26 deputies backing its bill:

Diko (President's party) 20 + Diko 4 + European Party 2= 26

Parties that would vote against:

Diko 4 + AKEL 19 + EDEK 5 + Green Party 1 + Independent Deputy 1= 30

Today the Cypriot Parliament is due to vote on the terms of the bailout package. But the NO is still not out of question. The Democratic Rally (DISY) and the Democratic Party (DIKO), the parties which supported President Anastasiades in his recent election, do not have a majority- only 28 out of 56 MPs. AKEL, the main left opposition party which has 19 MPs has said it will vote against the package, while DIKO has recently seen at least one MP who does not support Anastasiades split off.

Ronald Reagan was a born leader. Margaret Thatcher, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Reagan's political soul mate once said "Being in power is like being a lady. If you have to remind people that you are, you aren't not. Reagan never hand to remind people he was in power because he had something many powerful people do not: authority. And he had authority because he knew how to lead. Reagan knew that you manage things and you can lead people. He knew that leadership is not about the self, but is about self-sacrifice.

All the leading credit agencies have slashed Cyprus’s credit rating.  Standard and Poors dropped it to BBB last October, citing among other things the island nation’s exposure to Greek sovereign debt as cause for concern.

AALEP has been invited to participate as guest in the 3rd meeting of the Public Affairs Community in Europe (P.A.C.E.). After Rome and Madrid, this year’s meeting is organized in Paris on 24 and 25 May by the Association Française des Conseils en Lobbying (AFCL)

P.A.C.E. is a common platform for European Public Affairs professionals and lobbyists. The P.A.C.E. provides support, networking and intelligence to EU and country-based Public Affairs professionals and aims to set up the grounds for a European identity for Public Affairs professionals.

Croatia is set for EU entry on 1st July 2013. Is the Croatian administration and the private sector prepared for abosrbing the EU structural and cohesion funds (SCF) that it will gain access to after accession?