Spain will attempt Monday to reenergize the EU’s stalled proposal to end seasonal clock changes and demand Brussels fulfill its promise to end daylight saving time.
“As you know, the clocks will change again this week and I, frankly, no longer see the point in it,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said in a video posted on X Monday morning.
“In all the surveys in which Spaniards and Europeans are asked, the majority are against changing the time,” he said. “Moreover, there’s plenty of scientific evidence that shows it barely helps to save energy and has a negative impact on people’s health and lives.”
The bloc’s transport, telecoms and energy ministers have traditionally handled discussions regarding the EU’s time policies, which can affect the functioning of the all-important single market and have an impact on power use and transport safety.
The issue was not scheduled to be debated at Monday’s ministerial summit in Luxembourg but, upon his arrival at the meeting, Spanish Secretary of State for Energy Joan Groizard announced he had requested its inclusion on the agenda.
“The energy system is changing a lot, and it’s important to reopen the debate to find a solution that works as well as possible,” Groizard said.
Representatives from northern EU members including Finland and Poland have repeatedly raised concerns about clock-changing, citing data which shows the practice has negative physical or mental effects on an estimated 20 percent of Europe’s population.
Indeed, 84 percent of the 6.4 million Europeans who participated in a 2018 European Commission public consultation on the matter said the bloc should put an end to daylight saving time.
In his social media post, Sánchez said it was high time for the EU to carry out the proposal announced by then-European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker during his 2018 State of the Union address in the European Parliament.
“Clock-changing must stop,” Juncker told lawmakers, insisting that daylight saving shifts would end by October 2019 at latest. “We are out of time.”
But Juncker’s proposal irritated national leaders, who questioned the Commission’s mandate for proposing such a shift, let alone imposing a short timeline for its costly implementation.
Then-Portuguese Prime Minister António Costa — who became the president of the European Council last year — rejected the idea altogether, citing the advice of technical experts who said the change would be detrimental to his country’s citizens. Greece, too, was opposed to the change.
The split among national leaders permitted daylight saving to survive Juncker’s 2019 deadline and the European Parliament’s later call for time changes to end by 2021. It’s unclear if Spain’s effort is quixotic: to secure the Council’s endorsement of the proposal, it requires the backing of a qualified majority of member countries.
Sánchez will need to convince 15 out of the bloc’s 27 member countries, or a group of countries representing at least 65 percent of the EU’s population, to back the idea — and hope fewer than four capitals oppose it outright.
Seasonal clock-changing was first introduced in Europe during World War I in a bid to conserve coal, but was abandoned after the conflict ended. Similar energy concerns prompted most countries to reintroduce the scheme during World War II, and in response to the 1970s global oil crisis.
In 1980 the then-European Communities issued its first directive on time arrangements to ensure all EU members followed the practice and made the biannual switch at the same date and time. The current EU rules, which have been in place since 2001, specify EU member countries move their clocks forward one hour at 1 a.m. on the last Sunday of March, and wind back one hour on the last Sunday in October.
The post Spain restarts push to kill daylight saving time in EU appeared first on Politico.
