Six months before the European elections, scheduled for June 2024, the true or false sifts through the more or less founded beliefs around the European Union. The True or False Cell is looking in particular at the issue of time change.
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It has been a sea serpent for years and is likely to remain so for a long time to come. Today, all member states change their time twice a year. This is the case in France, which has alternated summer time and winter time since the 1970s to save energy. But this change is increasingly contested. In 2018, the European Commission launched a major public consultation; more than 4.5 million people responded, and a large majority were in favor of ending the time change.
A year later, the European Parliament adopted a draft directive in favor of removing this time change. MEPs gave the 27 countries a little over a year to decide whether they would keep winter time or summer time, trying to coordinate as best they could, before implementation planned in theory, two years later, in 2021.
Nothing went as planned
The project was stopped in its tracks in 2020 due to the Covid health crisis which brought the whole world to a standstill. The UK’s exit from the EU hasn’t helped either; Brexit caused long and intense negotiations between London and Brussels and the time change fell into oblivion.
After Covid and Brexit, the European Union had to face the war in Ukraine and then inflation. These successions of crises over a few years ended up definitively relegating the time change to second place. So much so that this file no longer even appears in the work program of the European Commission, published each year. So much so that we will continue to ask ourselves the same question twice a year: should we go back or forward an hour this time?
