Spain’s Podemos party has come out in favor of a Catalan independence referendum, making it the first major national party to break with the government of Mariano Rajoy on the issue.
The anti-establishment movement remains opposed to Catalan independence and argues that a referendum should not be legally binding, but the new policy is a win for Catalonia’s separatists all the same.
It’s probably not for them that Podemos has changed their minds, though.
Party leader Pablo Iglesias coupled the announcement with a warning to the mainstream Socialist Party, saying he would only do a deal with them to unseat Rajoy’s minority right-wing government if they support a referendum too.
He knows the Socialists won’t — and that’s the point. (more…)
Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte is received by Jan Peumans, the speakers of the Flemish parliament, in Brussels, October 15, 2015 (Vlaams Parlement)
Negotiations to form a new coalition government in the Netherlands are at a standstill after center-right parties failed to do a deal with the Greens.
Talks broke down when the four parties could not find common ground on climate, immigration and income policy.
All major parties have since reiterated their red lines, which rule out many of the alternatives.
But some of those red lines could be negotiable. Dutch parties have always found a way in the past. It is far too early to expect they might fail this time. (more…)
And “to” seems the right word, because this was done to Turkey by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his political machine. International electoral monitors cite fraud; so too does the powerful Republican People’s Party. That hardly matters, it seems. Turkish election officials will not allow a recount.
And so even if cheated, it is a victory for Erdoğan. It has been a long road for a critical Middle Eastern nation. The geopolitical trajectory of Turkey is now set. (more…)
Russian president Vladimir Putin looks out a window in Budapest, Hungary, February 17, 2015 (Facebook/Viktor Orbán)
In short, if it wasn’t one thing, it would have been another.
It didn’t have to have to be a gas attack. It could have been a stray Russian shell in some Ukrainian city, a dead exiled opposition leader on the streets of a Western capital city, a major hacking attack against a critical American target, a crucial NATO ally “flipped” by a Russian disinformation campaign or a released set of Trump e-mails.
It could have been Donald Trump waking up one day to realize the Russians aren’t interested in destroying the Islamic State so long as IS distracts the Americans and grinds down anti-Assad rebels.
It could have been when Trump tried to rally Moscow to support a new round of sanctions or military threats against North Korea.
Perhaps Trump’s bromance might have ended with a shooting incident over Finnish skies or maybe he’d have changed his mind if Russian troops showed up in Libya to prop up Moscow’s increasingly favorited local strongman, Khalifa Haftar.
The fact is, on a long enough timeline, he would have changed his mind or faced an all-out revolt from his cabinet, his generals and his party.
The furor surrounding Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s alleged influence over the airstrikes last week is therefore overblown. Presume then that they did not exist and that Steve Bannon continued to whisper pro-Russian lullabies in the president’s ear, even as critical NATO allies like the United States, France, Canada and Germany clamored for action.
How long until the next incident? How long could Trump have kept ignoring his spy and military chiefs because Steve Bannon and his alt-right supporters said to? (more…)
French party leader Marine Le Pen makes her way to a news conference in Strasbourg, May 11, 2016 (European Parliament/Fred Marvaux)
Polls suggest five candidates could qualify for the decisive second voting round of the French presidential election.
They range from the far left to the far right, but a look at their policies suggests that these categories may have outlived their usefulness.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Marine Le Pen are supposed to be on opposite ends of the political spectrum, yet they make common cause against the European Union and NATO.
The center-right candidate, François Fillon, shares their friendly attitudes toward Russia. But Fillon sides with the left-wing Benoît Hamon and the center-left Emmanuel Macron in arguing for a more political eurozone.
Le Pen’s economic policies have more in common with the left than the mainstream right. Fillon and Macron, on the other hand, share proposals for labor reform — but they have different social views. The Republican is a Catholic and social conservative who agrees with Le Pen that the French must protect their identity. The independent Macron is socially liberal and pro-immigration.
All candidates want cleaner energy, but where Fillon, Macron and Le Pen see nuclear as part of the solution, Hamon and Mélenchon want to phase it out alongside fossil fuels.
Here is an overview of the signature policies of all five candidates. (more…)
German chancellor Angela Merkel speaks with American president Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington DC, March 17 (Bundesregierung)
American president Donald Trump reportedly presented Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, with a $374 billion invoice for missed contributions to NATO when she visited Washington DC earlier this month.
As first reported by The Times, Trump arrived at the figure by calculating how much Germany has fallen short of NATO’s 2-percent defense spending target since 2002 and then adding interest.
A German official described the move as “outrageous” to The Times. Merkel ignored it.
It’s hard to imagine a previous president treating an ally so cruelly, but the story is not at all unbelievable given what we know about Trump: that he humiliates people, is intimidated by powerful women and sees international relations in transactional terms. (more…)
View of Paris, France from Montmartre, October 2, 2016 (Unsplash/Colin Maynard)
And why is it so critical? Nothing less than the European Union is at stake — and with it, the geopolitical contract that has bound Germany and France together since World War II.
After the defeat of anti-Islam populist Geert Wilders early this month in the Netherlands, it is reasonable to ask if populism as shaped by the alt-right has hit its limit. Europeans have watched the confusion in Britain over Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump. Now they are revisiting both their Euroskepticism and their willingness to gamble on ideologies not yet fully tested.
Yet France is subject to powerful forces quite different than the Netherlands, which has only a fraction of its population and international obligations. A large, unassimilated Muslim and African population simmers; an aging, conservative voter base roils; a discredited, weakened left wavers; and nobody knows what to do with the neoliberal threads that hold together the European Union yet impoverish just about anyone not in the upper classes.
All these factors make France a combustible mix of alt-right populism, weakened mainstream parties, terror cells, angry youth and dithering establishment elites. If we were shocked by Brexit, we should be less shocked by whatever happens next month as the French go to vote. France is as upended as everyone else. 2017 compares to the turmoil of the collapse of the Fourth Republic in 1958. (more…)
Dutch government offices and parliament buildings in The Hague (iStock/Fotolupa)
As expected, no single party won a majority of the votes in the Netherlands on Wednesday. Parties must now form a coalition in parliament in order to govern. (more…)
Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon has said she wants to hold a second independence referendum for the region in either late 2018 or early 2019.
The announcement comes days before the United Kingdom is expected to formally inform its allies in the European Union that it intends to withdraw from the body. Such a notification would trigger a two-year divorce process. If Sturgeon gets her way, that means Scots would be asked to choose between the EU and the United Kingdom by the time the terms of “Brexit” are known.
Sturgeon and a majority of Scots elected to remain in the EU in a referendum last year. They were outvoted by majorities in England and Wales.
The first minister told reporters in Edinburgh on Monday that she would do her utmost to represent Scotland’s interests in the negotiations with the EU.
But, she added, “I cannot pretend to the Scottish people that a compromise agreement looks remotely likely given the hardline response from the prime minister so far.” (more…)
Three young women listen to a debate in the European Parliament in Strasbourg, September 14, 2016 (European Parliament)
The European Commission published a white paper on Wednesday that sets out five possible futures for the European Union.
The scenarios range from muddling through to something resembling a federal Europe, with three options in between.
The fact that the EU executive recognizes that it would be misleading to boil the choice down to “more” or “less” Europe is itself a welcome change.
That doesn’t mean the five scenarios are all-encompassing. One could add an EU collapse on the one end and a United States of Europe on the other. But neither is likely to happen. (more…)
Skyline of Toronto, Canada (Unsplash/Maarten van den Heuvel)
Canada is often considered to be a haven from geopolitics, a nation relatively free from economic want or political cant. But if by geopolitics we refer simply to the influence of geography upon politics, Canada may in fact be a prime place to study it, if only because the country posseses so much of the former when in comparison to the latter.
The basic fact of Canadian geopolitics is this: more Canadians live in the city of Toronto than live in the 2,500-kilometer expanse of land separating Toronto from Alberta.
(Or, to put it in the most Canadian possible of ways, there are a heckuva lot more people who would like to see Auston Matthews take the Calder than Patrick Laine.)
Canada is in this way divided in two: between Alberta and British Columbia on the one hand, in which around 25 percent of Canadians live and 30 percent of Canada’s GDP is generated, and Ontario and Quebec on the other, which account for roughly 60 percent of Canada’s population and GDP.
These two halves are, in turn, each divided in two. Alberta is separated from British Columbia by the Rockies; Ontario from Quebec by the Anglo-French divide. (The debate is still open as to which of these two barriers is the more venerable.)
However, while the British Columbia-Alberta split is pretty well balanced — Alberta’s GDP is a bit larger than British Columbia’s, but British Columbia’s population is a bit larger than Alberta’s — the Ontario-Quebec divide is tilted strongly in support of Ontario. By itself, Ontario accounts for an estimated 38.6 percent of Canada’s population and 38.4 percent of Canada’s GDP. (more…)
Greek flag in Athens, October 11, 2008 (Ananabanana)
Time is — once again — running out for Greece. This time the sticking point is a €7 billion tranche from its bailout program. Greece needs the money by July, but European officials had hoped to reach an agreement with the International Monetary Fund about the payment early next week, lest Greece’s debt crisis become an issue in the Dutch and French elections.
The mood in Brussels isn’t hopeful, the Financial Times reports. The expectation is that the creditors will miss their self-imposed deadline.
That would be especially unfortunate for the Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, who faces reelection in four weeks. He famously promised voters in 2012 that he would not support any more bailouts for Greece — but then he did. This is the worst possible time for him to be reminded of that broken promise.
There is no immediate risk of bankruptcy, let alone ejection from the eurozone, for Greece. But the closer we get to July, the more markets will worry and the more pressure will rise on lenders to hash out a compromise.
London, England at night, February 14, 2012 (Warren Chrismas)
Last month, I argued here that the election of Donald Trump in America and the vote to leave the EU in Britain could be understood as rural revolts against “the city”. This is a subplot in the story of the cosmopolitan-communitarian culture war that is shaping up to be the defining political divide of our time.
I focused on the electoral politics of city versus countryside at the time and sort of skipped the question of why exactly there is so much discontent in the former.
Jonn Elledge answers that question in Britain’s New Statesman.
Put crudely, he argues the reason is that cities have won.
Under globalization, entire industries shipped overseas; and, with technological improvements, those that remain require far fewer workers. Towns that grew up to provide workers for a mine or a factory or the docks are now surplus to requirements. Their communities have, quite literally, lost their purpose.
Those trends have conspired with others, including the shift from manufacturing to services and a widening gap between college- and non-college-educated workers, to concentrate growth and opportunity in urban areas.
Cities have always been more liberal. But the influx of young, worldly university graduates — and the ease with which they move between cities — has sharpened the divide with the countryside. (more…)
