At a time of political polarization and upheaval in the West, the Atlantic Sentinel believes the center can hold. It are not the fanatics on either side who get things done; it are reasonable people in the middle. Better to muddle through than to veer to extremes.
Catalan Socialist Party leader Salvador Illa listens to his Basque counterpart, Eneko Andueza, making a speech, January 16 (Socialistas Vascos)
Catalonia’s Socialists missed an opportunity after the last election to split up the region’s left- and right-wing independence parties. The moderate Republican Left, which supports a Socialist government nationally, had tired of the hardliners in Together for Catalonia (Junts), but local Socialist Party leader Salvador Illa wouldn’t accept anything short of the presidency for himself.
“Why should I invest a person that I defeated at the polls?” he remarked of the Republican party leader, Pere Aragonès.
Illa won 50,000 more votes than the Republicans, but both parties got 33 out of 135 seats. Aragonès claimed the presidency too, but he had two paths to a majority, not one. Illa’s intransigence drove the Republicans into the arms of Junts.
But the coalition proved short-lived and Illa has recently set his ego aside. (more…)
Workers clean the steps of the United States Capitol in Washington DC in the early morning of January 8, 2021 (Victoria Pickering)
59 percent of Americans believe Democrats will “open the US-Mexico border” if they win the election on Tuesday. 53 percent worry they will cut police funding.
They won’t. Nor will they step up border enforcement or raise police budgets, and they should: illegal border crossings and violent crime are rising. But only far-left extremists believe in open borders and defunding the police. Few have been nominated by Democrats. Even fewer will win elections.
The other half of the country sees Republicans as the extremists: 56 percent believe a Republican Congress would ban abortion and overturn democratic elections.
There is more justification for those beliefs. Many Republican candidates support a federal ban on abortion. Many were complicit or silent when Donald Trump tried to steal the 2020 election. But the party is divided on both questions.
More than anything, the results of the CBS poll reveal that Democrats and Republicans believe the worst about each other.
What about the 40 percent of Americans who identify with neither party? (more…)
Impossible burgers made from plants (Impossible Foods)
Reducing dairy and meat consumption is the easiest thing Westerners can do to slow down climate change and improve the lives of animals.
Livestock farming causes 15 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. We could quit fossil fuels tomorrow, and animal agriculture would still push us past 1.5˚C of global warming.
Environmentalists feel guilty about flying, but eating meat and yoghurt every day causes more pollution. And no animals are harmed in building airplanes.
We should eat more seafood and vegetables anyway. Europeans eat twice as much meat as the rest of the world. Spaniards top the list with 100 kilograms per year, which is about the same as Americans. Nutritionists recommend between a quarter and a third of that.
Meat is a source of iron, protein and nutrients, like vitamin B12 and zinc. But most can be found in fish and vegetables as well. Eating too much — especially red — meat can cause bowel cancer and raise cholesterol levels, which increases the risk of heart disease and stroke. Even carnivores who care little about animals or the environment should give that vegaburger a try for the sake of their own heart.
France Unbowed leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon sits in the European Parliament in Brussels, June 6, 2019 (The Left)
Supporters of Jean-Luc Mélenchon who are thinking of sitting out the second voting round of the French presidential election ought to take a lesson from Bernie Sanders’ supporters in the United States. When they abstained from the 2016 presidential election, or voted for Green party candidate Jill Stein, they made it possible for Donald Trump to win.
Just 1.5 out of 136 million Americans voted for Stein. Another 100,000 wrote in Sanders’ name (in the fourteen states where that was allowed), even though he wasn’t a candidate and had endorsed Hillary Clinton.
But those 1.6 million votes made the difference. Clinton lost Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, three states Barack Obama had won four years earlier, by a margin of less than 1 percent and a total of 75,000 votes. In all three states, the votes for Stein could have tipped the balance in Clinton’s favor, which would have given her, not Trump, an Electoral College majority. (more…)
American president Joe Biden boards a helicopter at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, October 7, 2021 (White House)
One year into Joe Biden’s presidency, the media consensus is that he is failing.
The Financial Times reports that the Democrat is trying to “reboot” his “faltering” presidency. The Washington Post believes he is “stumbling”. The Wall Street Journal calls it “flailing”.
Foreign journalists agree. Britain’s The Guardian newspaper writes that Biden is historically unpopular and “much of his domestic agenda is stalled on Capitol Hill.” Here in the Netherlands, EW Magazine wonders if anyone is still happy with the president while RTL reports that he has “blundered” abroad and “broken” his election promises. (more…)
Spanish labor, finance and social security ministers Yolanda Díaz, María Jesús Montero and José Luis Escrivá give a news conference in Madrid, May 27 (La Moncloa)
Spanish employers and trade unions have done a deal with Pedro Sánchez’ socialist government to overturn several labor reforms of his conservative predecessor, Mariano Rajoy.
I argued against repeal. Rajoy’s liberalizations helped bring down unemployment, from a peak of 26 percent to 14 percent before the pandemic, and encouraged business growth. They allowed companies to opt out of collective bargaining agreements and expanded trial periods for employees.
The reforms did not create more precarious jobs. The share of part-time, temporary and self-employed workers has barely changed in a decade.
Temp work will nevertheless be restricted. Luckily the rest of Sánchez’ changes are mild. (more…)
Keeping a thousand years of European history readable is no small feat, but Peter H. Wilson manages it.
The Holy Roman Empire touches on everything from high politics to peasant life. Wilson’s central insight: the empire’s perceived weaknesses were its strengths.
The Holy Roman Empire changed composition through the centuries. Its internal organization was in a constant state of flux. Emperors had to negotiate to come to power and compromise to stay in power. Autonomy given to one city or prince did not necessarily apply to another. For a long time, such agreements were not even written down. The empire refused to lay down one law, one language, one religion. It ended up a patchwork of overlapping competencies and jurisdictions that kept bureaucrats, lawyers and politicians busy for centuries. (more…)
Debate in the plenary chamber of the German parliament in Berlin, July 1, 2020 (Pixabay)
When Germany’s Christian Democrats and Social Democrats — who frequently split up to 90 percent of the votes between them during the Cold War era — fell to a combined 50 percent support in the federal election in September, alarm bells went off across the Atlantic.
The New York Times saw “messier politics” and “weaker leadership” ahead. The Washington Post feared a period of “limbo” as a result of Germany’s “Dutchification”. Harold James, a professor at Princeton University, lamented that Germany had acquired “the most destructive features of politics in neighboring countries.” The consequences, he argued, would be “complexity,” “endless negotiations” and “inevitably complicated coalition agreements.” Damon Linker, a columnist for The Week, predicted forming a “stable” government would be “challenging” and “decisive action” more difficult.
Some people never learn. We saw the same reaction after the European elections in 2019, and again when Stefan Löfven lost his parliamentary majority in Sweden this summer. Yet Christian Democrats, Social Democrats and liberals were able to quickly form a working majority in the European Parliament and Löfven remains prime minister.
Germany’s liberals and Greens — who can help either the Christian Democrats or Social Democrats to a majority — have already done a deal between them, clearing the biggest hurdle to a three-party coalition. Negotiations are now underway. Olaf Scholz, the Social Democratic Party leader, could become chancellor in a few weeks. So much for the “limbo” we were told to expect. (more…)
German Social Democratic Party leader Olaf Scholz attends a conference in Berlin, June 25 (PES)
Olaf Scholz has given German social democracy a new lease on life. For the first time in sixteen years, his Social Democratic Party (SPD) — Germany’s oldest — has defeated the center-right Union of Christian Democrats. Support for the SPD went up from 20.5 to 26 percent in the election on Sunday. Still below its pre-reunification heights, when it would routinely win up to 40 percent, but enough to make Scholz the most likely next chancellor.
His counterparts in Portugal and Spain have been equally successful. António Costa was reelected with 36 percent support in 2019. Pedro Sánchez won two elections that year. Both govern with the support of the far left. Four of the five Nordic countries are led by social democrats. The fifth, Norway, soon will be, after Labor won the election two weeks ago.
It wasn’t so long ago that commentators ruminated on the “death of European social democracy,” myself included. Now it’s back in swing in the north, south and center. What changed? (more…)
Prime Minister António Costa of Portugal greets his Spanish counterpart, Pedro Sánchez, in Lisbon, July 2, 2018 (Governo da República Portuguesa/Clara Azevedo)
Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez has pardoned the nine Catalan separatists who were imprisoned for organizing an unsanctioned independence referendum in 2017.
The pardons fall short of an amnesty. Former regional vice president Oriol Junqueras and the other politicians who were convicted to between nine and thirteen years in prison for “sedition” against the Spanish state and misuse of government funds are still barred from holding public office.
“Sedition” remains a crime. (Although Sánchez’ government is looking into revising the arcane statute.) A vote on Catalan independence would still be illegal. It’s why I argued a month ago a pardon was the least Sánchez could do.
Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz and French president Emmanuel Macron speak on the sidelines of a summit in Brussels, April 10, 2019 (BKA/Arno Melicharek)
One constant of Emmanuel Macron’s presidency has been Anglo-American handwringing about his popularity.
This started almost immediately after he defeated Marine Le Pen in 2017, when Macron’s support fell from 66 percent in the election to just over 50 percent in the opinion polls.
The Guardian called it a “precipitous decline in approval ratings.”
American president Joe Biden boards Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, February 5 (White House/Adam Schultz)
European leaders are “weak”, the American president is “bold”. It’s a trope so old, at this point it tells us more about the people who perpetuate it than about elected officials on either side of the Atlantic.
Romano Prodi was “weak“. José María Aznar was “weak“. François Mitterrand was “weak“. His successor, Jacques Chirac, lacked “gravitas“.
A year before the election of Donald Trump, Robert Kaplan disparaged the “grey, insipid ciphers” who wandered Europe’s halls of power. An article in Foreign Affairs accused the continent’s “cowardly” leadership of rendering the EU “irrelevant”. A 2005 op-ed in The New York Times lamented the “weakness” of European leaders at the very time President George W. Bush called for a “renewal” in transatlantic relations. (The same George W. Bush who two years earlier had created the deepest crisis in transatlantic relations since the end of the Cold War by invading Iraq.)
Here we go again. Jef Poortmans, a commentator for Belgium’s Knack magazine, compares Joe Biden’s “zeal” with Europe’s “washed out” leadership. Timothy Garton Ash, whose expectations the EU has never met, argues the bloc faces “one of the biggest challenges of its life” (again). Philip Stephens contrasts Biden’s “ambition”, “audacity”, “energy” and “resolve” with the “defensive incrementalism” of his European counterparts, in particular Angela Merkel.
The “real significance” of Biden’s agenda, writes Stephens in the Financial Times — a $1.9 trillion coronavirus rescue program and a $3 trillion education and infrastructure bill — “lies in a bold reassertion of the responsibilities of government.”
His mistake is to assume America and Europe are starting from the same point. (more…)
Debating chamber of the Israeli Knesset in Jerusalem, May 30, 2012 (Israeli Ministry of Tourism/Noam Chen)
Israel’s center-left has a chance to eject Benjamin Netanyahu after twelve years of right-wing government — if they are willing to make a deal with Arab parties.
Deals with non-Zionist parties are almost taboo in Israel, which is 75 percent Jewish. This permanently excludes the 20 percent of Israelis who are Arab from power.
Little wonder Arab turnout is consistently low and fell below 50 percent on Tuesday, according to estimates. (more…)
Presidents Charles de Gaulle of France and Lyndon B. Johnson of the United States meet at the memorial service for Konrad Adenauer, the former chancellor of West Germany, April 25, 1967 (LBJ Library)
Charles de Gaulle’s great accomplishment, to paraphrase his British biographer, Julian Jackson, was that he reconciled the French left to patriotism and the French right to democracy.
The history of France since 1789 has been a consistent struggle between a universalist left and the conservative right; between republic and monarchy; the Enlightenment and Catholicism; labor and capital; Paris and La France profonde.
History hasn’t ended. Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen embody opposite visions of France today. But de Gaulle narrowed the divide and helped Frenchmen and -women think of each other as opponents rather than enemies.
That America could use a whiff of Gaullism isn’t my idea. Ross Douthat, the conservative columnist of The New York Times, called for an American de Gaulle two years ago.
I suspect he envisaged an authority figure on the right. Instead we have Joe Biden. Can he play the same role? (more…)
Angela Merkel delivers a televised address from the chancellery in Berlin, Germany, November 18, 2015 (Bundesregierung/Sandra Steins)
Saturday’s election for the leadership of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is also a debate over the future identity of the party.
Friedrich Merz, the darling of the right, would arrest Angela Merkel’s twenty-year slide to the center and take the fight to the far right with small-government and law-and-order policies.
Armin Laschet, the prime minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, and Norbert Röttgen, a parliamentarian, fear Merz would throw away Merkel’s gains with younger and women voters. They argue for continuity (critics might say muddling through), with Röttgen proposing a slightly more modernizing program.
Waiting in the wings are Jens Spahn, the ambitious health minister, and Markus Söder, the prime minister of Bavaria. Neither man is in the running for the party leadership, but they may yet hope to be nominated for the chancellorship. Spahn is a younger version of Merz, Söder a more solid version of Laschet. (more…)
