this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2025
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I we were in true democracies that thing would have been scrapped long ago. Not a single person like it or see any actual purpose on it.
That's true, no-one likes it. But the attempts to end it got stuck on democracy, unfortunately. People were inable to get behind one solution. Some countries prefered to keep the natural time, some wanted the summer time. There are reasons for both approaches and lots and lots of emotions. It was unreasonable to let different EU countries addopt different time systems, so the whole idea to get rid of the time changes was scrapped.
Weirdly, I've heard people here in Iceland (where we never had DST) who want to adopt it. It never made sense to me. If we want to shift our day around the sun, let's just agree as a society to shift business opening hours during the summer.
I don't really see the issue. Many different countries already have different timezones. Spain for instance have different timezone than Portugal.
Spain has the same timezone as Poland, despite most of Spain being west of Greenwhich, which is one hour later already.
It is evident that the choice was made politically, with the message being that easy compatibility with the economies of France, Germany and Italy was more important, than the clock reflecting the course of the sun.
Spain is the very example of the difficulties of timezone politics.
France actually was in the same timezone as the UK before WWII and the German occupation. My grandma remembers switching to “German time”. Franco’s Spain similarly changed timezones in 1942 to match their German allies. So, yes, the change was made politically. :-) I’m guessing France is also responsible for Algeria ~~and Morocco~~ being in UTC+1, not sure if they’ve ever discussed changing zones.
Edit: I just checked and I was wrong about the Moroccan time zone. Algeria is in UTC+1 though (all year long, they don’t use DST), not sure why it’s in yellow on your map.
You're right.