What started out as a simple plan to abandon semi-annual clock changes and permanently end ‘daylight saving’ or ‘summer time’ in the EU is now about to slip through another round of turning the clock back on October 31 as the change measure remains mired in bureaucracy.
The European Parliament voted in 2019 to do away with the change, following a proposal by the EU’s executive body, the European Commission. That booted the next step to the 27, then 28, member states who meet as the European Council, which has since pushed it back to the Commission for another ‘impact assessment.’
In surveys done across Europe prior to the 2018 proposal, huge majorities across states indicated that the clock-switching has few friends among Europe’s citizens, although some states indicated preference for permanent summer time and others permanent winter time. The plan was for each country to make a decision and switch for the last time either in March or October of this year.
While that plan leaves open the possiblity of a checkerboard of time zones across Europe, it seems more likely that it would it create, in essence, two geographically-split time zones. But Portugal and Ireland, still EU members and the UK, no longer a member, are already one hour earlier than the rest of Europe, and a change that did not include the UK could leave Ireland split for half the year.
To the east of the EU, a number of countries including Russia, Turkey and Belarus have already eliminated daylight savings. At the present rate, you may need to check Google Maps before answering the question “What time is it?”
