Monthly Archives: June 2013

Croatia, European Union

From Dublin to Dubrovnik: Reflections on 40 years of EU enlargement

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Guest post by Michael J. Geary

Croatia on Monday becomes the 28th member of the European Union, marking a historical transformation for a country at the crossroads of central Europe, the Balkans and the Mediterranean.European_Unioncroatia

The second former Yugoslav country to join the European Union (following Slovenia, also a eurozone member), Croatia declared its independence in 1991, an event that led to the breakup of the union of Yugoslavia, an event that the United Nations and the European Union may have hastened in 1992 Croatia’s independence when they provided international recognition to a sovereign Croatia.  At the same time, the Croatian War of Independence broke out between Croat forces loyal to the newly independent Croatia and the Serb-controlled Yugoslav People’s Army and local Serb militia, the latter determined to prevent Croatia from breaking away. Between 1991 and 1995, when the conflict finally ended,more than 20,000 people had died and much of the country was destroyed.

Croatia, however, has marked major progress since the mid-1990s.  Successive Croatian governments have edged closer (albeit, sometimes with a gentle nudge from Brussels) to the European Union and the country formally applied for membership in February 2003.  A year later, the European Commission endorsed its application, and the European Council granted Croatia candidate status.  Enlargement negotiations proved difficult — not least because Slovenia, already an EU member state since 2004, had insisted that certain border disputes be resolved before Croatia could be accepted as a member.  The Slovenian veto stalled the negotiations for 10 months in the late 2000s before finally the two former Yugoslav nations agreed to settle border issues bilaterally.  Yet the extradition of Croatian citizens to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia proved to be a far thornier issue dominating the EU-Croatia enlargement talks.  The United Nations established the Tribunal in 1993 to deal with war crimes that took place during the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s. Croatia’s full cooperation with the Tribunal (reluctant at times) was a prerequisite for EU membership.

2013 is a year of contrasts for the EU enlargement process — arguably one its most successful policies, and one of the reasons that the European Union received the Nobel Prize for Peace last year.  Aside from Croatia’s pending membership, the European Union is set to open negotiations with Serbia and possibly sign a Stabilisation and Association Agreement with Kosovo after those two countries signed a landmark agreement in April normalizing relations between Belgrade and Pristina after almost two decades of hostilities. Continue reading From Dublin to Dubrovnik: Reflections on 40 years of EU enlargement →

Russia

Putin ally Sobyanin maneuvers to hold onto power in Moscow in snap September election

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Though it’s sometimes easy to forget in the post-Cold War era, Moscow is still the most populous city in Europe and one of the five most populous cities in the world — it not only Russia’s capital, but Russia’s central city for power, politics and finance. Russia Flag IconMoscow

That makes the city’s mayor one of the most powerful official in the entire Russian federation and, with snap elections due for Moscow’s mayor in September, it gives some of the most unpredictable voters in Russia the opportunity to make a rare popular statement with five years to go until another presidential election, despite fears that the vote may be titled in favor of the incumbent mayor, an ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Earlier in June, Moscow’s current mayor Sergei Sobyanin announced his resignation, despite the fact that his term runs through 2014, setting up snap elections for September 8 that seem increasingly likely to be an easy victory for Sobyanin as his most viable rivals have either stepped aside or face an uphill challenge even making it to the ballot.  Critics immediately called Sobyanin’s resignation and the early elections a ruse to avoid real competition, thereby cementing control over Russia’s largest city within Putin’s grasp.

Elections for Moscow’s mayor are themselves a new phenomenon, given that then-president Dmitry Medvedev and the Russian Duma only reintroduced direct elections for governors and other positions last year, after president Vladimir Putin suspended gubernatorial elections in 2004 on the somewhat dubious rationale of national security and anti-terror efforts.  Under the new direct elections law, however, new hurdles have been introduced that require candidates to have the support of other lawmakers in the region.  Given that Putin’s United Russia (Еди́ная Росси́я) is by far the dominant political party in Russia, that means Putin will continue to have at least some influence on gubernatorial and local elections.

Moreover, earlier this year, Putin pushed through another law allowing regions to avoid direct elections through an alternative process whereby each party in a regional legislature submits three candidates to the Russian president, the Russian president chooses three finalists, and the regional legislature elects a governor from among the three finalists. (You can’t make this up!)

The man who was most widely anticipated to challenge Sobyanin — former presidential candidate and billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov — opted out of the mayoral race in mid-June when it was clear that he would not be able to meet the legal requirements in time for the snap race.  Prokhorov, who formed Civic Platform (Гражданская Платформа), a liberal political party in June 2012 in the wake of his relatively successful presidential race.  But Prokhorov, who is the owner of the New Jersey Nets professional basketball team in the United States, would have run afoul of requirements that require his assets to be repatriated prior to serving as Moscow’s mayor. Continue reading Putin ally Sobyanin maneuvers to hold onto power in Moscow in snap September election →

Nicaragua

Don’t take the concept of the Nicaraguan Canal seriously until the Chinese government does

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(11) View from Parque Historica

Over the past month, Nicaragua has been working to push forward with a plan to build a canal linking the Pacific Ocean to the Caribbean Sea — a dream that predated the actual construction of the Panamá Canal in 1914.Nicaragua

The original push in the United States for a canal through Central America started as the dream of U.S. senator John Tyler Morgan of Alabama, a former Confederate colonel during the U.S. civil war, who hoped that a canal through Nicaragua would restore the U.S. south to economic prominence, and he pushed throughout the 1880s for a Nicaraguan canal, in particular, long before Panamá, then itself the northernmost province of the Republic of Colombia, was a serious option, despite the fact that the engineer of the Suez Canal, Ferdinand de Lesseps, had failed in French-led efforts to build a canal through the isthmus of Panamá.

19th century Nicaraguan dreams turn to 20th century Panamanian realities

After the French disaster in Panamá — beset by corruption, disease and ultimately failure — Nicaragua seemed the clear favorite for U.S. interests in the construction of a Central American canal.  The story of how Wilson Nelson Cromwell (who helped found the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell) and Philippe Bunau-Varilla transformed public opinion, first within the administration of former U.S. president William McKinley and, thereafter, Theodore Roosevelt, and then in the U.S. Congress, to favor a Panamanian route as speedier and less costly is one of the most amazing stories in the history of congressional lobbying.  After all, Panamá already featured a French railway to facilitate construction, ports on either side of the isthmus, the remnants of the aborted French canal effort, and it would, after all, be much shorter than any Nicaraguan canal.

As debate in Congress ultimately turned into a battle of the routes, Bunau-Varilla and U.S. senator Mark Hanna, a top Republican powerbroker, had worked to convince skeptical colleagues that Nicaragua’s volcanic activity made it too unstable for a canal.  Incredulously, Hanna delivered a speech on the Senate floor purporting to show all of Nicaragua’s supposed active volcanoes would make the route more difficult.

But the tour de force turned out to be a stamp — as Matthew Parker writes in Panama Fever: The Epic Story of One of the Greatest Human Achievements of All Time:

Over the next few days Bunau-Varilla scoured the philatelists of the capital looking for a certain 1900 one-centavo Nicaraguan stamp, which he had come across the year before.  In the foreground of the stamp is pictured a busy wharf while in the background rises the magnificent bulk of Mount Momotombo.  In an artistic flourish the illustrator had added smoke to the top of the volcano, which was actually more than a hundred miles from the proposed Nicaragua canal.  Just before the vote, every senator was sent this ‘evidence’ of the dangers of the Nicaragua route.

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Ultimately, the vote favored Panamá over Nicaragua by just eight votes.  Roosevelt’s administration thereafter embarked on the self-interested cause of Panamanian independence from Colombia and, having helped deliver such independence in 1903, commenced building the Canal over the next decade, with U.S. doctors and engineers learning how to reduce yellow fever and malaria along the way through the reduction of mosquito populations.  Though the United States controlled the Canal through much of the 20th century, U.S. president Jimmy Carter formally agreed in a 1977 treaty to cede control of the Panamá Canal Zone back to Panamá.  Since that transition in 1999, Panamá has reaped much of the economic benefit of the Canal’s income, which has helped Panamá become one of Central America’s strongest economies, and the country is preparing for the completion of a project in 2014 to widen the Canal, thereby expanding Panamanian economic opportunities.

A Sandinista canal

Fast-forward nearly a century, and Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega hopes to succeed where over a century’s worth of futile dreams have failed — that is, with a little help from the Chinese.

Ortega came to power for the first time in 1979 when his Sandinista revolutionaries overthrew U.S.-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza, the last of a line of three Somoza family members that had controlled Nicaragua since the mid-1930s.  Somoza was no great loss for Nicaragua, but his overthrow came at a difficult time for the country, which was slowly recovering from an earthquake in 1975 that had essentially leveled Managua, the capital, hastening its long-term decline as the financial capital of Central America to the rising Panamá City.  Ortega came to power as part of a Sandinista junta, and though he slowly emerged as Nicaragua’s top leader as president from 1985 to 1990, his rise to power led to one of the most brutal proxy fights of the Cold War, with Ortega and the Sandinistas turning to the Soviet Union for support and the United States clandestinely arming and supporting the ‘Contras,’ plunging the tiny Central American country into a decade-long civil war.

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Ortega (pictured above) stepped down in 1990 after losing the presidential election, but as Nicaragua slowly recovered from the carnage of the 1980s, and as Nicaraguans suffered through a long line of democratically elected, if massively corrupt and mediocre presidents, Ortega retained a strong following, especially among the country’s poorest residents.  He returned to power in 2006 after winning a highly fragmented election under the old Sandinista banner (FSLN, Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional), having remade himself as a democratic socialist along the lines of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez.  Ortega, who quickly consolidated the instruments of power, eliminated the hurdle of term limits and was overwhelmingly reelected in November 2011 under conditions that were tilted widely in favor of the Sandinistas.

But unlike in the 1980s, when Ortega seemed to be genuinely interested in eliminating corruption and establishing a new more just, socialist era for Nicaragua, Sandinista 2.0 has jettisoned the ideology for a state capitalist model that’s just as corrupt as the Somoza era ever was. Continue reading Don’t take the concept of the Nicaraguan Canal seriously until the Chinese government does →

Albania, Australia, Czech Republic

Rudd returns as prime minister of Australia in advance of September election

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There’s not a single week that goes by in world politics that’s not amazing, and being away this week in France for a wedding proves it.

We’valbaniae seen the longtime prime minister of Albania, Sali Berisha, concede defeat to the Albanian Socialist party leader Edi Rama after Sunday’s election (read Suffragio‘s preview of the June 23 Albanian election here), which apparently won 84 seats to just 56 for Berisha’s center-right Democratic Party, a strong majority in the country’s unicameral parliament.  I’ll certainly have a bit more to add later in July when I’m back about how this could boost Albania’s chances for European Union membership — and I think it does.  Rama’s pulled his party out of its communist roots into the social democratic center, and he’s now gunning to pull Albania ever closer to the center of Europe, so he’ll start off as prime minister with a strong start.

Wczeche’ve also seen the appointment of a new prime minister of the Czech Republic in Jiří Rusnok, an economic adviser to the country’s new president Miloš Zeman, which raises even greater questions about Zeman’s push to become the country’s most powerful public servant following the resignation of the country’s prime minister Petr Nečas earlier this month.  Nečas, prime minister since 2010 and already unpopular as the leader of the center-right Civic Democratic Party over austerity measures and a flatlining economy, couldn’t withstand charges of eavesdropping against his chief of staff, with whom he is linked romantically.  In naming Rusnok, though, Zeman is indicating that he will try to take a very large role in policymaking, though the Civil Democrats want to appoint popular parliamentary speaker Miroslava Nemcova as the country’s first female prime minister and Zeman’s former colleagues, the Social Democrats, want to hold new elections.  More on this soon, too — it’s going to set the course of the relationship between the Czech president and prime minister for years to come, just over 100 days after Zeman took office following the first direct election of a Czech president.  It’s a move that The Economist called ‘Zeman’s coup,’ and that’s not far from the truth.

That’s all while the Turkish and Brazilian protests continue apace (more on that this week), while the world waits in anxiety to learn about the health of South Africa’s former president Nelson Mandela and after former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf will be tried for treason by the new government of Nawaz Sharif, the U.S. Supreme Court effectively ruled in favor of full federal rights for same-sex marriage and overturned California’s ban on gay marriage.  Quite a week.

BAustralia Flag Iconut the most important news in world politics has come from Australia, where former prime minister Kevin Rudd (pictured above) has stunningly defeated Julia Gillard as the Australian Labor Party’s prime minister on a 57-45 leadership ballot — he’s already been sworn in.  More on that tomorrow too.  I’m pretty biased in favor of world heads of government named Kevin, but it’s not biased to say that Rudd’s sudden return as Australia’s prime minister transforms the September 14 election from an inevitable Labor loss into something much more competitive.  I’m on holiday, but I will hope to have some thoughtful analysis on what this means for Australia, Labor, the opposition Coalition, Rudd, Gillard, and September’s election within hours.

 

Egypt, Ethiopia

Will Egypt and Ethiopia come to blows over the Renaissance Dam and water politics?

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Though you might think of the Nile as a primarily Egyptian river in Africa, its roots go much deeper.  The White Nile originates far within sub-Saharan Africa at Lake Victoria, winding up through Juba, the capital of the newly-minted country of South Sudan, and the Blue Nile originates at Lake Tana in northeastern Ethiopia, and it joins the While Nile near Khartoum, the capital of (north) Sudan. egypt_flag_newethiopia_640

But the rights to the water originating from the Blue Nile have become the subject of an increasingly tense showdown between Egypt and Ethiopia, with Ethiopia moving forward to bring its long-planned Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam into operating, sparking a diplomatic showdown between the two countries and a crisis between two relatively new leaders, both of whom took office in summer 2012 — Ethiopian prime minister Hailemariam Desalegn and Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi.

The Renaissance Dam and the politics of the Nile were no less fraught between former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and the late Ethiopian prime minister Meles Zenawi.  But with the project moving forward, Hailemariam and Morsi are locked in a diplomatic tussle that could escalate into something much worse.  Morsi has recently warned Ethiopia that ‘all options are open,’ which conceivably includes an Egyptian air attack to bomb the Renaissance Dam, which would initiate military confrontation between the second-most and third-most populous countries on the continent of Africa.

The Renaissance Dam is Meles’s legacy project and, with a price tag of between $4 billion and $5 billion, it’s embedded with an atypical amount of Ethiopian national pride.  When it is completed, the dam will make Ethiopia a huge hydroelectric producer, perhaps Africa’s largest energy producer, with an estimated generation of 6,000 megawatts of electricity.  To put that in perspective, the Hoover Dam in the southwestern United States has a maximum generation of around 2,100 megawatts and Egypt’s own Aswan High Dam has a maximum of around 2,500 megawatta, while China’s Three Gorges Dam has a maximum capacity of 22,500 megawatts.

Egypt’s chief concern is that the dam will reduce the amount of water that currently flows from the Blue Nile to the Nile Delta, and Ethiopia has already started to divert the course of the Blue Nile to start filling the Renaissance Dam’s reservoir (see below a map of the Nile and its tributaries).  While that process is expected to temporarily reduce the amount of water that flows to Sudan and to Egypt for up to three years, Egyptian officials have voiced concerns that the Renaissance Dam might permanently reduce the flow of the Nile through Egypt, despite technical reassurances to the contrary.  Moreover, Egyptian officials point to colonial-era treaties with the United Kingdom from 1929 and 1959 that purported to divide the Nile’s riparian rights solely as between Egypt and the Sudan, without regard for Ethiopian, Ugandan, Tanzanian or other upriver national claims.  Ethiopian anger at exclusion from the 1959 Nile basin negotiations led, in part, to the decision by Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie I to claim the independence of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church from the Coptic Orthodox Church based in Alexandria, Egypt.

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It’s clear however, where Ethiopia’s Nile neighbors stand on the issue — the leaders of South Sudan and Uganda have voiced their approval for the project, and even Sudan, which will also mark some reduction in Nile water while the dam is constructed, is inclined to support it, which will result in a wider source of crucial electricity throughout the Horn of Africa, east Africa and beyond.  Ironically, it could even be Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, currently under indictment by the International Criminal Court for atrocities stemming from the Darfur humanitarian crisis in the mid-2000s, who has the regional credibility with both Cairo and Addis Ababa to diffuse the crisis.  Continue reading Will Egypt and Ethiopia come to blows over the Renaissance Dam and water politics? →

India

BJP’s Modi begins Indian election campaign in an incredibly strong position

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It’s nearly a year before Indians will go to the polls in the world’s most populous election, but Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi looks ever more like the man with the easiest path to become India’s next prime minister.India Flag Icon

Eleven months is a long time in the politics of any country, so there’s no guarantee, and even if Modi winds up as prime minister, it will be after a long-fought slog.  But the decision last week of the conservative Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (the BJP, or भारतीय जनता पार्टी) to anoint Modi as the leader of its 2014 parliamentary campaign makes Modi the indisputable, if unofficial, leader of the BJP efforts to regain power after what will be a decade-long hiatus in opposition.

Modi faces plenty of obstacles, too, within his own party and the wider National Democratic Alliance coalition, of which the BJP is the largest participant.

But the fundamental fact is that Modi is now the BJP and NDA standard-bearer and he’ll playing offense against the governing Indian National Congress (Congress, or भारतीय राष्ट्रीय कांग्रेस).  A tired prime minister Manmohan Singh will likely leave office in 2014 after a decade of missed opportunities, above all having presided over an underperforming economy.  Moreover, the likely Congress standard-bearer, Rahul Gandhi, seems a hesitant and reluctant leader, even as the party moves more fully toward consolidating under his leadership.  Whereas Modi, after a decade in regional government, personifies a triumphant hunger to gain power and jumpstart India’s economy, Gandhi personifies the listlessness of a fourth-generation scion of a political dynasty that’s been intermittently in power since India’s independence in 1947.

That doesn’t mean that the residual power of the Gandhi family brand of the rougher edges or internal strife within the BJP and the NDA won’t scuttle Modi’s chances — polls show that Congress remains relatively unpopular and that, Indian voters aren’t quite completely sold on the BJP, the ‘saffron party’ nonetheless remains in a very good position to benefit from Congress’s expense.

The 2014 election will determine the membership of the Lok Sabha ( लोक सभा), the 552-member lower chamber of the Indian parliament.  The governing United Progressive Alliance holds 226 seats, of which Congress itself holds 203 seats; the NDA holds 136 seats, of which the BJP itself holds 115 seats.  The Third Front, a coalition of communist and other leftist third parties, holds 77 seats, and the so-called Fourth Front, which is dominated by the Samajwadi Party (Socialist Party) based in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, holds 25 seats.   Continue reading BJP’s Modi begins Indian election campaign in an incredibly strong position →

Guinea

Guinea struggles to schedule elections after opposition protests and six years of delay

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Guinean voters were set to participate in their first parliamentary elections in over a decade later this well, despite protests over the vote earlier this year that overshadowed the elections and despite the fact that Guinea’s parliament hasn’t even met since 2008.guinea

But it seems increasingly likely that the scheduled June 30 elections will be postponed yet again after opposition protests over fairness and transparency, following six years of delay and political turbulence — just last week, fresh violence led Guinea’s opposition to pull out of talks with the government over the long-delayed election to its unicameral Assemblée nationale (National Assembly) of Guinea.

Its francophone neighbor to the north, Senegal, has a long history with democracy and, just last year, marked its second consecutive peaceful, post-election transfer of power when Macky Sall overwhelming defeated incumbent Abdoulaye Wade in the March 2012 presidential election.

Meanwhile, Guinea is still learning the ropes of democratic elections — it held its first direct election for president only in 2010.  The ultimate winner, Alpha Condé, only narrowly defeated Cellou Dalein Diallo in the runoff, on a vote that broke on largely ethnic lines, with Condé consolidating support among the Malinke ethnic group (around 30% of Guinea’s population) and the Susu groups (around 20%), and with Diallo winning the support among his own Fula group (40% of Guinea’s population).

The disparity in rule of law and democratic institutions matters.

Guinea’s population (10.25 million) is just slightly less than that of Senegal’s (12.75 million), but its economy is less than one-half the size of Senegal’s, giving Guinea a GDP per capita of something like $1,100 to something like $2,000 for Senegal.

The 2010 election followed a relatively despotic era of governance for a country that came into being amid controversy.  Continue reading Guinea struggles to schedule elections after opposition protests and six years of delay →

Personal

Mois d’été, que la vie est douce…

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(111) View of Paris from Centre Pompidou

With the approaching holiday, and with a nice stretch before the autumn election season kicks off in September (capped by Germany’s long-awaited federal elections) Suffragio is taking a little bit of a summer breather.brittany_breton_region_flag-1France Flag Icon

I’m headed to France for a few days in Paris and thereafter a wedding in Bretagne.

So posting will be a little lighter than normal, and it may include a few more cultural and political thoughts on French and Breton life rather than the cut-and-thrust of Iranian politics or Pakistani economics.

À bientôt!

Photo credit to Kevin Lees — view of Eiffel Tower from Centre Pompidou, January 2006.

Greece

Kouvelis, Democratic Left withdrawal from Greek government leaves precarious majority

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Just a little over a year after the second of two divisive elections in Greece, the smallest partner in the three-party governing coalition withdrew its support today — leaving Greece ever closer to new elections, though the government will continue on with a slim majority for now.Greece Flag Icon

Fotis Kouvelis, in announcing that his party, the Democratic Left (Δημοκρατική Αριστερά), would leave the coalition over the growing row related to the sudden closure of ERT, the national broadcaster, emphasized that Greece did not need new elections, and he indicated that the party would perhaps provide external support to what’s left of prime minister Antonis Samaras’s coalition to keep Greece on track with respect to the terms of its bailout program with the ‘troika’ of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

What does that mean for Greece?

Though it’s true that the departure of the Democratic Left doesn’t necessarily mean new elections, it leaves the government in a precarious position.

Samaras’s New Democracy (Νέα Δημοκρατία), Greece’s longstanding center-right party, holds 125 seats in the 300-member Hellenic Parliament (Βουλή των Ελλήνων).  Its other coalition partner, PASOK (Panhellenic Socialist Movement – Πανελλήνιο Σοσιαλιστικό Κίνημα), Greece’s traditional center-left party, holds 28 seats.  Together, that gives the government an ostensible three-seat majority, though the 14 seats that Kouvelis delivered provided a wider margin for comfort over a year that’s seen Samaras’s government push forward with the fiscal adjustments mandated by the bailout program.

But more importantly, Kouvelis (pictured above, left, with Samaras in center background) delivered the votes of one of the two parties of the anti-bailout left, giving Samaras’s government a broader base and a credible claim to being somewhat of a unity government.

The Democratic Left formed only in 2010 when moderates split from the leftist SYRIZA (the Coalition of the Radical Left — Συνασπισμός Ριζοσπαστικής Αριστεράς).  So while SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras is content to lead the opposition, Kouvelis and his party brought an outsized amount of legitimacy to Samaras’s government.  After all, both New Democracy and PASOK had backed Greece’s bailouts, and many voters have held the two parties, which switched back and forth in power in recent decades, especially responsible for Greece’s economic woes.

Their continued unpopularity is one reason why no one wants to risk elections anytime soon.  PASOK, in particular, has lost nearly all of its support among voters to the benefit of Tsipras and SYRIZA, which have given more muscular voice to the anti-bailout left.  If elections were held tomorrow, it’s not even certain that PASOK would pass the 3% threshold to win seats in the Hellenic Parliament.

One recent poll shows New Democracy holding onto a very narrow lead, with 21% to just 20.5% for SYRIZA.  In third place is the neo-fascist Golden Dawn (Χρυσή Αυγή) with a staggering 10.2%.  Greece’s far-left Communist Party (KKE) registered 5.7%, the center-right (but anti-bailout) Independent Greeks registered 5.2%.  PASOK won just 5.1%, and the Democratic Left won just 4.8%.

With such weak support, neither Samaras nor PASOK leader and former finance minister Evangelos Venizelos have an incentive to trigger new elections.  So while the chances that Greece will go to the polls for the third time in 12 months are slim, there’s no escaping the fact that the Democratic Left’s decision to leave the government is a setback for Samaras.  Continue reading Kouvelis, Democratic Left withdrawal from Greek government leaves precarious majority →

Albania

Edi Rama set to return Socialists to power in Albania’s parliamentary election

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After nearly a decade in opposition, the newly united Albanian left is favored to defeat the incumbent center-right government of prime minister Sali Berisha with just days to go until the country’s June 23 parliamentary elections.albania

A country of about 3.5 million residents, tucked on the southeastern Adriatic coast and bounded by the floundering Greece to its southeast, troubled Kosovo to its northeast with Montenegro to its northwest, Albania is the only country outside of the former Yugoslavia federation to have missed the first wave of European Union expansion in southeastern Europe.  Unlike neighboring Serbia, Macedonia and Montenegro (or even, officially, Turkey), Albania is not yet even an official candidate for EU membership, following an embarrassing rejection in 2010 of its application for candidate status.

Regardless of who wins Albania’s elections, the world — and especially the European Union — will be watching keenly to gauge whether Albania’s government can conduct free and fair elections and orchestrate a seamless transfer of power if, as expected, it is voted out of office.  Though Albanian elections have become steadily fairer in the two decades since the country emerged from one-party rule, standards fall somewhat behind those within EU members, including most recently in 2011 local elections that resulted in charges of fraud and incompetence.  Moreover, Berisha has increasingly tried to use pan-Albanian nationalism to rally supporters, and he has even tried to extend suffrage to ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, none of which has endeared Albania’s current government to European policymakers.

After eight years in power, Berisha’s government has some modest accomplishments to boast for itself, despite its failure to get Brussels to take its EU aspirations seriously.  Berisha forged strong ties with the United States, hosting the first U.S. presidential visit to the country in 2007, and he helped shepherd Albania into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 2009.  Berisha has also presided over steady GDP growth rates of between 5% and 7% before the global financial crisis and between 3% and 5% from 2009 through 2011.

Berisha leads the Partia Demokratike e Shqipërisë (PD, Democratic Party of Albania), the country’s largest conservative party and the most dominant member of a wider coalition of parties (the so-called Alliance for Employment, Prosperity and Integration) contesting the parliamentary elections.  The PD-dominated coalition currently controls 69 seats in the 140-member, unicameral Albanian parliament (Kuvendi).

But because Albania depends on Italy to purchase nearly half of its exports, it’s not a surprise that growth dropped to just 1% in 2012, with forecasts to remain tepid in 2013.  After nearly two decades of growth after Albania emerged from its statist, Soviet-era economy, that has felt like recession for most Albanians, and that’s one of the reasons that both major parties in Albania are campaigning on the theme of change in 2013.  It’s also one of the reasons that the country’s main center-left party, the Partia Socialiste e Shqipërisë (PS, Socialist Party of Albania) and its alliance with a handful of smaller leftist parties (the Alliance for a European Albania) seems very likely to win the elections — the PS has held has held a consistent, if narrow, lead throughout the election campaign.  The PS and its allies currently hold 61 seats in Albania’s parliament. Continue reading Edi Rama set to return Socialists to power in Albania’s parliamentary election →

Lebanon, Syria, United States

U.S. move to support anti-Assad allies jeopardizes Lebanon’s stability

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Hassan Nasrallah

The United States doesn’t typically like to hand gifts to Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime leader of Hezbollah, the Shi’a militia that remains a key player not only in the domestic politics of Lebanon, but throughout the Middle East. freesyriaUSflagSyria Flag IconLebanon

But when news broke last Friday that U.S. president Barack Obama was preparing U.S. assistance to arm Syrian rebels in their fight against Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad, that’s in effect what the United States has done by broadening the two-year civil war in Syria, a conflict that neighboring, vulnerable Lebanon has largely managed to avoid in the past two years.

Hezbollah’s recent military mobilization against the mostly Sunni rebels, however, in support of Assad, was already rupturing the national Lebanese determination to stay out of the conflict.  The U.S. announcement of support for the rebels, however tentative, gives Hezbollah a belated justification for having expanded its own military support to Assad, and risks further internationalizing what began as an internal Syrian revolt against the Assad regime.

The U.S. decision to support anti-Assad rebels

The United States is signaling that it will provide small arms and ammunition to only the most ‘moderate’ of Syria’s rebels, though not the heavier anti-aircraft and anti-tank weaponry that rebel leaders have said would make a difference.  But even if the Obama administration changed its mind tomorrow, the damage will have already been done in the decision to back the largely Sunni rebels.  No matter what happens, Hezbollah will now be able to posture that it’s fighting on behalf of the entire Muslim world against Western intruders rather than taking sides in a violent sectarian conflagration between two branches of Islam.

Supporters of U.S. intervention credibly argue that Hezbollah’s decisive intervention earlier in May and in June in Qusayr, a town in western Syria, led to an Assad victory that will inevitably make Syria’s civil war longer and deadlier.  Hezbollah’s decision to intervene on behalf of Assad was a key turning point that marked a switch from indirect and clandestine support to becoming an outright pro-Assad belligerent in Syria, which brings tensions ever closer to exploding in Lebanon.  Furthermore, Russian support for Assad, Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s increasingly strident opposition to Assad, as well as implicit Iranian support for Hezbollah, means that Syria is already a proxy for geopolitical positioning, whether U.S. policymakers like it or not.

But that doesn’t mean that the active support of the United States will suddenly make things better in Syria — after all, the United States has a controversial track record over the past decade in the Middle East.  It’s winding down a 12-year war in Afghanistan that, though it pushed the Taliban from power within weeks in 2001, has done little to establish lasting security or foster a truly national government.  Its 2003 invasion of Iraq, which toppled one of the two Ba’athist regimes in the Middle East in removing Saddam Hussein from power, and the subsequent U.S. occupation still failed to prevent vicious Shi’a-Sunni sectarian fighting that approached the level of civil war between 2006 and 2008 and that still simmers today.

It’s the same familiar kind of bloody sectarian violence that now features in Syria, the remaining Ba’athist regime in the Middle East.

Moreover, the risks to Lebanon are now even more staggering.  Lebanon, which had been set to hold national elections last weekend on June 16, has instead postponed those elections indefinitely, because negotiations among Lebanon’s various religious confessional groups to draft a new election law have taken a backseat to the more pressing task of keeping the country together.

The U.S. came to its decision in light of a determination that Assad had used chemical weapons against at least a small segment of the rebels, thereby crossing a ‘red line’ that Obama established in August 2012 in the heat of the U.S. presidential campaign last year.  But as The Washington Post‘s Ernesto Londoño reported last week, U.S. advisers had already been working quietly with Jordanian officials for months in order to reduce the chances that Syria’s stockpiles of chemical weapons will fall into misuse by either the Assad regime or by the opposition.

It still remains unclear just what the Obama administration believes is the overwhelming U.S. national interest in regard of Syria — though the Assad regime is brutal, repressive and now likely guilty of war crimes, there’s not necessarily any guarantee that a Sunni-dominated Syria would be any better.  Last Friday, U.N. secretary-general Ban Ki-moon indicated that he opposes the U.S. intervention in Syria because it risks doing more harm than good.

As Andrew Sullivan wrote in a scathing commentary last week, the forces that oppose Assad are a mixed bunch, and there’s no way to know who exactly the United States is proposing to arm:

More staggeringly, [Obama] is planning to put arms into the hands of forces that are increasingly indistinguishable from hardcore Jihadists and al Qaeda – another brutal betrayal of this country’s interests, and his core campaign promise not to start dumb wars. Yep: he is intending to provide arms to elements close to al Qaeda. This isn’t just unwise; it’s close to insane….

Do we really want to hand over Syria’s chemical arsenal to al Qaeda? Do we really want to pour fuel on the brushfire in the sectarian bloodbath in the larger Middle East? And can you imagine the anger and bitterness against the US that this will entail regardless? We are not just in danger of arming al Qaeda, we are painting a bulls-eye on every city in this country, for some party in that religious struggle to target.

I understand why the Saudis and Jordanians, Sunni bigots and theocrats, want to leverage us into their own sectarian warfare against the Shiites and Alawites. But why should America take sides in such an ancient sectarian conflict? What interest do we possibly have in who wins a Sunni-Shiite war in Arabia?

The ‘rebels’ are, of course, a far from monolithic unit — the anti-Assad forces include all stripes of characters, including the Free Syria Army, a front of former Syrian army commanders dismayed at Assad’s willingness to commit such widespread violence against the Syrian people, but also including more radical Islamist groups such as the Syria Islamic Front, the Syria Liberation Front and even groups with non-Syrian leaders with global links to al-Qaeda, such as Jabhat al-Nusra, which is comprised of radical Salafists who want to transform Syria into an Islamist state.

Liberal interventionism strikes again

When Obama announced earlier this month that he was promoting Susan Rice as his new national security adviser and Samantha Power as his nominee to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, I argued that it was a victory for liberal interventionists within Obama’s administration and that it could mean that the United States takes a stronger humanitarian interest in Syria.  Many other commentators, such as Wonkblog‘s Max Fisher, downplayed that possibility, arguing that their promotions meant ‘not much’ for U.S. policy on Syria, and that ‘there is good reason to believe that Power and Rice are not about to change U.S. policy in Syria.’

That, of course, turned out to be a miscalculation.  Less than 10 days after the Rice/Power announcement, the Obama administration is now ratcheting up its involvement in the Levant on a largely humanitarian, liberal interventionist basis, with the plausible possibility that a U.S.-supported no-fly-zone could soon follow.

The key fear is that the Obama administration’s ‘humanitarian’ response may result in an even more destabilizing effect on Lebanon. Continue reading U.S. move to support anti-Assad allies jeopardizes Lebanon’s stability →

Czech Republic

With Nečas out, the future of Czech government is in Zeman’s hands

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In his first 100 days in office, Miloš Zeman, the former social democratic prime minister who became the Czech Republic’s first elected president, made it clear that he intends his role to be much more powerful than a merely ceremonial head of state, pursuant to a Czech constitution that gives somewhat more power to the presidency than in neighboring countries like Germany, Poland or Italy.czech

But with the resignation of prime minister Petr Nečas, Zeman has an opportunity to imprint his vision of government on the Czech Republic beyond what he might have expected when he was elected in January 2013 over the aristocratic center-right foreign minister Karel Schwarzenberg.

Nečas’s resignation on Monday capped a fast-moving weeklong drama in Czech politics that has plunged the country of 10.5 million citizens into a period of uncertainty.

The crisis began last week with an unprecedentedly wide police raid of government offices that resulted in the arrests of eight government officials, including Nečas’s chief of staff, Jana Nagyová.  Though corruption has long been issue in Czech government, it often goes unpunished, and when corrupt officials are charged, they are rarely arrested in such a sweeping and high-profile manner.  Milan Kovanda, head of Czech military intelligence, and his predecessor Ondrej Páleník, were both arrested as well.

Nečas (pictured above) announced last week that he is divorcing Radka Nečasová, his wife of three decades and mother of his four children. But he has long been rumored to have had a romantic relationship with Nagyová, who is accused of bribery and abuse of power for allegedly having military spies follow Nečas’s wife.  The widespread belief that Nagyová is believed to have committed crimes that are associated with her relationship with Nečas made his position as prime minister increasingly difficult.  That, in turn, led to Nečas’s capitulation on Monday when he announced he would step down as prime minister and as leader of the Czech Republic’s main center-right party, the Občanská demokratická strana (ODS, Civic Democratic Party).  Nečas will remain as a caretaker prime minister until a new government is formed.

The center-right ODS has governed in coalition with Schwarzenberg’s liberal Tradice Odpovědnost Prosperita 09 or ‘TOP 09′ (Tradition Responsibility Prosperity 09) and with various members of a third, minor conservative party, Věci veřejné (VV, Public Affairs), since the May 2010 election, though the government nearly lost power when its smallest partner Public Affairs nearly imploded in 2012 over its own corruption scandals.  Despite Nečas’s resignation, Schwarzenberg’s allies want to try to form a new government under deputy ODS chairman Martin Kuba, the current trade and industry minister, that will continue to govern through the end of the current parliamentary term in May 2014.

ČSSD leader Bohuslav Sobotka, however, is calling for early elections and has promised that any new ODS-led government will meet with a vote of no confidence that Kuba is not certain to win.

The decision rests entirely in Zeman’s hands — he can give Kuba a mandate to form a new government, he can call early elections, or he could try to give the mandate to Sobotka or, more likely, a technocratic government that would be expected to do Zeman’s bidding for the next 11 months.

Though ODS holds 53 seats and TOP 09 holds 41 seats, the Česká strana sociálně demokratická (ČSSD, Czech Social Democratic Party), with 56 seats, has the greatest number of seats in the 200-seat Poslanecká sněmovna (Chamber of Deputies), the lower house of the Czech parliament.  Zeman, a former  ČSSD leader and prime minister from 1998 to 2002, broke with the ČSSD in 2009, and the ČSSD sponsored an alternative candidate for president earlier this year in Jiří Dienstbier Jr., a young senator, rising star and son of a famous Czech dissident.  But since becoming president, Zeman has taken steps to realign himself with the ČSSD, speaking to the party’s annual congress in March 2013 and otherwise worked to bridge the gap between with the current ČSSD leadership.

Though Schwarzenberg emerged as a surprisingly strong contender for the presidency in January, the ODS candidate finished in eight place with less than 2.5% of the vote in the first round of the presidential election.  The party remains relatively unpopular after implementing an all-too-familiar austerity program of tax increases, budget cuts and reductions in government services alongside an economy that contracted by an estimated 1% in 2012 and that features a rising unemployment rate that’s currently at 7.3%. The fantastic scandal over the past week that’s now ended Nečas’s career came when the ČSSD was already in a strong position in advance of the next parliamentary elections — polls show the ČSSD with a wide lead.  One poll last month gave the ČSSD 24% support, with the more leftist (though increasingly a potential ČSSD coalition ally) Komunistická strana Čech a Moravy (KSČM, Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia) far behind in second place with just 10.5% support, with TOP 09 at 9.5% support and the ODS with 9% support.

Zeman, who passed the 100-day mark of his presidency just last week, has taken an aggressive posture as president, convinced that the fact of his direct electoral mandate (unlike past presidents Václav Havel and Václav Klaus, who were elected indirectly by the Czech parliament) gives Zeman more authority to assert himself over the Czech government.  He immediately set out to boost Czech ties with the European Union by flying the EU flag at Prague Castle, the presidential residence, and signing amendments to the EU Treaty of Lisbon, both of which marked a 180-degree turn from the relatively antagonistic EU policy of Klaus, his immediate predecessor.  He’s also tangled with Schwarzenberg over the right to name the country’s ambassadors.

Iran

Did Rowhani’s support in Iran outperform the potential of a Rafsanjani candidacy?

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Hassan Rowhani’s runaway first-round victory in Iran’s June 14 presidential election was unexpected after many U.S. commentators had disregarded Rowhani’s chances when Iran’s Guardian Council refused to permit former president Hashemi Rafsanjani to run.Iran Flag Icon

Before the Guardian Council’s decision, Rafsanjani was thought to have been the stronger candidate for Iran’s presidency, though by no means did anyone suggest Rafsanjani would be a shoo-in for victory.

It may well ironically turn out that Rowhani — and not Rafsanjani — proved to be the stronger candidate all along.

Rowhani, moreover, ultimately won election with the backing of the same coalition that Rafsanjani was expected to mobilize — moderates like Rowhani himself, more liberal reformists and followers of former president Mohammed Khatami, the ‘Green movement’ supporters who backed Mir-Hossein Mousavi, unsuccessfully, in the 2009 presidential race, and other who have become disenchanted with the outgoing president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, over Iran’s stumbling economy, stringent international sanctions over Iran’s nuclear energy program, and political freedoms.

Of course, we’ll never know whether Rafsanjani (pictured above, right, with Rowhani) would have been able to attract even more than the 18.6 million votes that Rowhani won in the election.

But it seems likely that Rowhani could have actually overperformed a hypothetical Rafsanjani candidacy (assuming that Rowhani would have dropped out of the race in deference to Rafsanjani).

In many ways, the Rowhani campaign offered all of the benefits of a Rafsanjani candidacy without any of the drawbacks.

Rowhani has been a strong Rafsanjani ally since the 1980s and the earliest days of the Islamic Republic, when Iran was locked in a fierce, decade-long border war with Iraq.  When Rafsanjani became Iran’s president in 1989, he appointed Rowhani as the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, putting Rowhani at the head of Iran’s regional security as the Iraq war wound down.  Khatami, upon assuming the presidency in 1997, retained Rowhani in that role, and he appointed Rowhani as the country’s first negotiator over Iran’s nuclear energy program in 2003, a position that Rowhani relinquished when the more hardline Ahmadinejad came to power in 2005.

As such, Rowhani’s victory is seen as somewhat of a victory for Rafsanjani, who is expected to return to influence as a guiding role in Rowhani’s administration:

“Rafsanjani was really the only choice to re-energize reformists,” said Rasool Nafisi, an Iranian affairs analyst at Strayer University in Virginia. “Rowhani only got their support because he is seen as Rafsanjani’s man and a vote for Rowhani was a vote for Rafsanjani.”

This deep connection between the two men could give a potential Rowhani presidency a dual nature: Rowhani as the public face and Rafsanjani behind the scenes as its powerful godfather and protector.

Although all key policies such the nuclear programme are directed by the ruling clerics, the alliance with Rafsanjani may give Rowhani more latitude to put his stamp on Iran’s negotiation tactics with world powers after four rounds of talks since last year have failed to make any significant headway.

But three weeks ago, it was not entirely clear which of Iran’s eight approved presidential candidates would emerge as the clearest voice of change — the runner-up in the presidential vote, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, came to the race as both a conservative ‘principlist,’ but also as a strident Ahmadinejad critic with a substantial base of support as Tehran’s mayor since 2005, a role in which Qalibaf has been viewed as a relatively effective executive by boosting Tehran’s green spaces, public transport and benefits for its poorest residents. Continue reading Did Rowhani’s support in Iran outperform the potential of a Rafsanjani candidacy? →

Spain, United States

Costos nomination to Madrid shows why the U.S. system of appointing top ambassadors is flawed

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Late last Friday afternoon, U.S. president Barack Obama announced six new ambassadors to a wide list of countries — Spain, Denmark, the Vatican, Brazil, Ethiopia and Germany.USflagSpain_Flag_Icon

Of the six new ambassadors, however, only two are career diplomats.  The new ambassador to Spain is James Costos (pictured above), an HBO executive and a top donor whose partner happens to be Michael Smith, who has served as the interior decorator of the White House.  The high-profile gay couple raised millions of dollars for Obama’s reelection.  That Costos and Rufus Gifford, Obama’s 2012 fundraising chairman and nominee for the Danish post, are both openly gay highlights the wide progress of LGBT equality since the troubled 1999 nomination of James Hormel as the U.S. ambassador to Luxembourg.

As Joshua Green and Hans Nicholas explained in December 2012 in BusinessWeek after Obama’s reelection, around 31% of the U.S. ambassadorships are currently held by political donors rather than by career diplomats.  Though the arrangement gives an opportunity for a president to reward his donors, there’s a bona fide economic reason for appointing wealthy supporters to some of the world’s most poshest embassies — the costs run much higher than the U.S. government provides to conduct the wide array of social and diplomatic events that are expected:

The funds embassies receive from the U.S. Department of State don’t begin to cover the high costs of the frequent parties and dinners ambassadors are expected to host. Some wind up paying more than $1 million a year out of their own pockets, according to one of the president’s top donors who requested anonymity because he didn’t want to discuss private conversations.

But does that necessarily make sense?

The bipartisan tradition of appointing top donors as ambassadors is relatively novel, going back to the administration of U.S. president Ronald Reagan around three decades ago.  In the days leading up to Obama’s inauguration, The New York Times even published a sort-of guide to the etiquette of making the transformation from donor to ambassador:

Interviews with more than a dozen donors, Democratic officials and advisers involved in the discussions revealed some unspoken rules: Volunteer for more than one country. Be prepared to serve for only two years, so that a second round of envoys can be appointed before Mr. Obama leaves office. Don’t mention how much money you raised for the campaign (but don’t expect much if you didn’t raise at least a million dollars). Let it be known where you want to go, but don’t publicly campaign for the job.

Appointing donors instead of professional diplomats comes at a cost — diplomats have spent decades learning their craft, whereas political appointees may not always understand the nuances of ambassadorial life.  Seattle philanthropist Cynthia Stroum learned that the hard way when, in 2011, she resigned as the U.S. ambassador to Luxembourg after a U.S. state department report found Stroum to have had a negative and confrontation management style and, possibly, that Stroum may have misspent U.S. funds for personal use while ambassador.

Luxembourg, in the grand scheme of things, is a minor country vis-a-vis the United States, but how long before another Cynthia Stroum is appointed as a political donor to a G20 country?

Costos is an HBO executive in charge of global licensing and retail, and he’s certainly proven himself as a successful businessman.  CNN reports that he gave over $67,000 in total last year to boost Obama’s reelection and the Democratic Party, he’s a previous donor to former New York senator and secretary of state Hillary Clinton and former Vermont governor Howard Dean, and he has also given to Newark mayor Cory Booker, who is running to become New Jersey senator.  The White House announcement states that he’s also a former vice president for Hermes in New York and he serves on the Board of Directors of The Humane Society.

That may, as the tireless pro-LGBT group Human Rights Campaign noted Friday in a statement, make Costos a ‘true citizen of the world,’ but does it makes Costos the most qualified candidate to represent the United States in Spain?

It’s not clear if Costos even speaks Spanish.

Moreover, Costos’s appointment on Friday was covered more by Hollywood media than by the political media in the United States, and he’s expected to take a forceful line with the Spanish government on piracy, not an unexpected view from a Hollywood executive.  His appointment is viewed as a reward not only to Costos individually, and also to Obama’s Hollywood donors and to the LGBT community as well, but those are not necessarily incredibly strong qualifications for U.S.-Spanish relations.

While bilateral relations with Spain aren’t as tricky as, say, relations with China, they’re still important. Spain, a country with nearly 50 million citizens, has the world’s 13th largest economy, and is the fifth-largest economy in Europe.  Its unemployment rate is 26.7%, and the economy is, by far, in the worst shape at any time since the end of the Francoist dictatorship in the 1970s.  As if that weren’t enough, the next ambassador to Spain will bear witness to what will likely be an fraught battle over regional autonomy and Catalan independence.

Costos has already stepped into one difficult issue — as a Humane Society activist, he has taken a dim view of bullfighting, a controversial issue in Spain in recent years, with animal rights activists and other alleging the sport’s cruelty.  But a move by the nationalist regional government of Catalonia to ban bullfighting in 2011 means that the issue is loaded with broader tensions over the growing rift between Spain’s central government in Madrid and regional Catalan leaders, who have pushed for greater autonomy or even independence.  Indeed, Catalan regional president Artur Mas seems likely to proceed with a controversial plan to schedule a referendum in 2014 for Catalan independence, despite the disapproval of prime minister Mariano Rajoy.  Costos’s anti-bullfighting views already inadvertently puts him firmly on one side of what’s likely to be the trickiest political battle he’ll face while in Madrid.  Continue reading Costos nomination to Madrid shows why the U.S. system of appointing top ambassadors is flawed →

European Union, Iceland

Iceland ends its short-lived quest to join the European Union

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It should have come as no surprise to observers of Iceland, but its new center-right government has firmly closed the door to membership in the European Union anytime soon, with an announcement from Icelandic foreign minister Gunnar Bragi Sveinsson (pictured above, left) last week.Iceland Flag IconEuropean_Union

It was virtually certain that Iceland would take a step back from EU membership, given that both governing parties — the Framsóknarflokkurinn (Progressive Party) and the Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn (Independence Party) — campaigned against EU membership in Iceland’s April parliamentary elections.

Former social democratic prime minister Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir launched membership talks with the European Union in July 2009, when Iceland was still reeling from the effects of a financial crisis that bankrupted its three major banks and left Iceland in economic meltdown.  In the immediate aftermath of the September 2008 crisis, some Icelanders even seriously considered joining the euro after the Icelandic krónur tanked in value.  As Iceland’s economy has recovered to some degree, despite difficult loan burdens and continued currency controls, and as the eurozone has come to appear more like a monetary straitjacket than an economic life raft, Icelandic voters have increasingly soured on the benefits of EU membership.

Though prime minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson’s Progressive Party was seen as originally more open to continuing the talks, Gunnlaugsson seems to have taken aboard the more hardline views of the Independence Party — no one quite expected the government to end negotiations with such resolute finality in only its first month in office.

So while Iceland will continue to be a part of Europe, it will do so, like Norway and Switzerland, outside of a formal membership of the European Union.

As I wrote in the immediate aftermath of the election, however, the line between membership and Iceland’s current status is not as bright as you might expect: Continue reading Iceland ends its short-lived quest to join the European Union →