Europeans and Switzerland have advanced their watches on Sunday to go to summer time. The ritual has more and more detractors, but the European Union cannot decide.
Twice a year in Brussels, this subject passes for a funny illustration of the difficulties in agreeing when you are 27 around a table.
Because the European Commission had proposed in 2018 “to abolish” the change of time, following a vast consultation across Europe. Nearly 4 million people had spoken out to end this use, then the Parliament had given the green light.
But since then, nothing. The proposal remained in limbo after having encountered the opposition of certain European states.
The end of the time change? “Come and rest the issue in six months,” said a spokesperson for the committee on Thursday.
Studies, however, highlight the negative impacts of the hour change in health or road accidents, for modest energy saving benefits.
Poland, which provides the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union until July, would like to put the question on the agenda. She plans to inform the Member States informally to try to advance this file.
And the Commission encourages the resumption of discussions.
But “the hour turns,” warn the Poles, who recognize that the support of the Member States is limited.
Because some see it only as a waste of time, far from the major challenges that the Union is confronted, between the invasion of Ukraine by Russia and the threat of a trade war with the United States.
If Poland is white, a senior Lithuanian civil servant assures that his country will take matters into hand and make the fight against time change a priority when Lithuania occupies the rotating presidency of the EU in … 2027.
Egyptian regrets
In Parliament, the abolition of the time change also has fervent supporters such as the Irish MEP Sean Kelly (PPE, right). “There are a large number of evidence suggesting that the time change is bad for human health, bad for animals, bad for road safety, and that it has very few beneficial effects,” he says.
To hear it, the fight against the time change could even be one of the few points of convergence with the America of Donald Trump.
After his re-election, the billionaire explained that he wanted to rid the United States of the summer hour, “incontesting” and “very expensive”. He has since nuanced his words and sees it as a question at “50-50”.
His ally Elon Musk got involved in the case by asking his millions of subscribers on his social network X if they prefer to stay in winter or summer time.
The majority of the 1.3 million voters have opted for the summer time, with a sun which rises and sets later in the day.
If the European Union and the United States one day stop the clock, they will not be the only ones.
Over the past decade, Azerbaijan, Iran, Russia, Syria, Turkey and Uruguay have suppressed summer time, the Pew Research Center said.
Some have had regrets. Egypt, which had eliminated the time change in 2014, returned back nine years later in the name of energy savings.
In Europe, for decades, the inhabitants have advanced their hour clock on the last Sunday in March and awarded it to an hour on the last Sunday in October.
Created to win an hour of light in the evening, summer time was born in Germany during the First World War, and spread on the continent.
The custom had fallen into disuse after the Second World War, until the oil crisis in the 1970s, where it was reintroduced to save energy.
