Monthly Archives: May 2014

Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, European Union, Finland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Slovakia, Slovenia

A detailed look at the European parliamentary election results (part 3)

1 Comment

Nearly a week after the European elections, the reverberations are still shaking the entire continent, on at least two levels — the consequences of the historic level of eurosceptic parties elected across Europe and in terms of the growing battle between the European Parliament and the European Council over electing the next European Commission president. European_Union

In the first part of a Suffragio series examining the results of the May 25 European parliamentary elections, I focused on the five most populous countries in the European Union: the United Kingdom and France, where eurosceptic parties won the greatest share of the vote; Germany, where chancellor Angela Merkel won another strong victory; Italy, where prime minister Matteo Renzi won a near-landslide mandate just three months into his premiership; and Spain, where both traditional parties lost support to a growing constellation of anti-austerity movements — so much so that Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, the leader of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE, Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party), Spain’s traditional center-left party, resigned. 

In the second part, I examined the results in nine more countries — Poland, Romania, The Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, the Czech Republic, Portugal, Hungary and Sweden.

In the third and final part, I examine the results in the remaining 14 countries of the European Union. Continue reading A detailed look at the European parliamentary election results (part 3) →

Ukraine

A closer look at Ukraine’s election results

Leave a comment

Though business tycoon and pro-Western opposition figure Petro Poroshenko easily won election as Ukraine’s next president in last Sunday’s election, the final numbers suggest that he’ll take the helm of a divided country.Ukraine Flag Icon

Here’s a map of turnout nation-wide:

Явка_виборців_на_позачергових_виборах_Президента_України_2014_по_округах

What’s immediately apparent is that turnout was extremely low in the eastern oblasts that have been the scene of several pro-Russian separatist movements. Notably, many parts of Donetsk oblast didn’t even participate in the election.

Though Poroshenko won 54.70% of the vote, with other candidates barely winning more than single digits, he’ll be hard pressed to argue that he has a mandate from the eastern Ukrainians who now feel so alienated from Kiev’s central government and the rest of the country.

* * * * *

RELATED: In-depth: Ukraine’s elections

* * * * *

It’s a far cry from the 2004 and 2010 presidential elections, which saw voting highly polarized, also on west-east lines. But compare the map of turnout in the 2014 election to the following map showing the relative support of Viktor Yushchenko and Viktor Yanukovych in 2004 and the relative support of Yulia Tymoshenko and Yanukovych in 2010:

ukraine2010 ukraine2004

There’s an obvious link between the support for Yanukovych in 2004 and 2010 and regions with depressed turnout in 2014.

It’s same Ukrainian divide that’s only become more pronounced over the past decade. Accordingly, the lesson of the 2014 election isn’t so much that Poroshenko has magically and suddenly united Ukraine, it’s that eastern Ukrainians have been effectively disenfranchised.

Note, also, that Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March has removed another bloc of voters that, in 2004 and 2010, opposed  Ukraine’s pro-Western presidential candidates.

Since the election, Poroshenko has indicated that he’ll take a hard line against eastern separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, and, if anything, fighting between Ukrainian forces and the separatists has escalated since May 25, with a particularly deadly clash over the Donetsk airport.  Continue reading A closer look at Ukraine’s election results →

Egypt

Egypt election results: Egypt has a new pharaoh

Leave a comment

egypt14

As the results come in from Egypt’s presidential election, here’s one thing to keep in mind about the extent of Abdel Fattah El-Sisi’s staggering margin of victory: egypt_flag_new

If his margin holds up in the final official results, el-Sisi will have won the election with a larger share of the vote than Egypt’s longtime strongman, Hosni Mubarak in both 1999 (93.79%) and 2005 (88.6%).

egypt14

That’s all you really need to know about whether this was really a fair election — after months of pre-campaigning designed to paint el-Sisi as Egypt’s national savior and the military-led crackdown on journalists and dissent of all stripes, not just among the Muslim Brotherhood (الإخوان المسلمون) and supporters of former president Mohammed Morsi, who was deposed in July 2013 by el-Sisi, then in his capacity as army chief of staff and defense minister.

But if the margin is impressive, the turnout was not. Amid reports that just 7.5% of the electorate bothered to turn out in the two days in which polls were open, Egypt’s presidential election commission decided to allow voting for a third day, and the military government’s threats to fine non-voters helped boost turnout to around 47.3%, according to government reports (that may or may not be entirely accurate).  Continue reading Egypt election results: Egypt has a new pharaoh →

United States

Obama doctrine: ‘Don’t do stupid stuff.’ Or, as we call it, ‘realism.’

1 Comment

obama

Foreign policy analysts are fawning over US president Barack Obama’s commencement address today at West Point, many of whom argue that it marks the most definitive summary of the ‘Obama doctrine,’ whatever that may be, of his second term — and maybe even his entire administration.USflag

Max Fisher at Vox proclaimed it one of the most anti-war doctrines in US history in decades. I don’t mean to focus on Fisher in particular but is that really true?

Obama outlined many of the themes that have long marked his approach to foreign policy:

 “America must always lead on the world stage,” he said. “But U.S. military action cannot be the only – or even primary – component of our leadership in every instance. Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail.” Under pressure from critics who say the United States has been rudderless amid a cascade of crises, the president said that those who “suggest that America is in decline, or has seen its global leadership slip away – are either misreading history or engaged in partisan politics.”

Obama also announced a new $5 billion fund designed to help allies in the Middle East and Africa fight radical terrorists, and he pointed to the ways in which the United States can assist countries deal with the burdens of the influx of refugees in countries like Lebanon and Iraq. He defended the notion that the United States could provide a constructive role in solving some of the world’s most vexing international hot spots without necessarily committing to military force — including Syria’s ongoing civil war and Ukraine’s recent turmoil.

Despite the polished address, The New York Times reports a clearer version of Obama’s vision on the basis of private conversations and previous addresses:

On a trip to Asia last month, Mr. Obama described his foreign policy credo with a baseball analogy: “You hit singles, you hit doubles; every once in a while we may be able to hit a home run.” But, he added, the overriding objective is to avoid an error on the order of the Iraq war. In private conversations, the president has used a saltier variation of the phrase, “don’t do stupid stuff” – brushing aside as reckless those who say the United States should consider enforcing a no-fly zone in Syria or supplying arms to Ukrainian troops.

There’s already a name for what Obama has described: realism, or if you like, neorealism. And it’s nothing new. It’s been a pillar of mainstream US foreign policy since at least World War II. You could easily imagine the same themes from Obama’s speech today in any speech from just about any US president, Republican or Democratic, in the last seven decades. Continue reading Obama doctrine: ‘Don’t do stupid stuff.’ Or, as we call it, ‘realism.’ →

European Union

The mother-of-all-battles over European integration has begun

Leave a comment

merkelEC

Three days after the European elections, the reverberations are still shaking the entire continent, with leaders at the national and European level firing the first shots in what promises to be an epic battle over European integration — and that will determine who really calls the shots in the European Union.European_Union

Last night, at an informal meeting of the European Council, the leaders of all 28 member-states of the European Union met to discuss how to approach the election of the next president of the European Commission, the powerful regulatory and executive arm of the European Union. The term of current president José Manuel Barroso, who has served in the role since 2004, will end within six months.

* * * * *

RELATED: In depth — European parliamentary elections

RELATED: The European parliamentary elections are real four contests

* * * * *

They poured cold water on the notion that they would automatically propose former Luxembourg prime minister Jean-Claude Juncker as Commission president. Since Sunday, Juncker has stridently made his case that as the Commission presidential candidate (the ‘Spitzenkandiat‘) of the European People’s Party (EPP), which won the greatest number of seats in Sunday’s EU-wide elections, he should have the first right to attempt to assemble a parliamentary majority. That’s a position that, ironically, even the center-left Party of European Socialists (PES), the second-largest bloc in the European Parliament has endorsed:

Commenting on the leaders’ decision, outgoing Socialist group leader Hannes Swoboda tweeted that it’s “absurd that Juncker has our backing to start negotiations but is blocked in the Council by his own EPP family!”

It’s already starting to appear that, behind the scenes, the EPP, which won around 214 seats, and the PES, which won around 191 seats, are coming closer to forming a ‘grand coalition’ to back Juncker’s candidacy in a bid to assert the precedent that the Parliament should be the institution to determine the Commission presidency, not the Council. Both Juncker and the PES Spitzenkandidat, German social democrat Martin Schulz, have argued repeatedly that the Parliament should reject any Commission president that wasn’t among the original Spitzenkandidaten.

But it’s not so simple. The Commission president must win not only a parliamentary majority. He or she must also win a qualified majority among the heads of government and state that comprise the  Council, and enthusiasm among those leaders seems to be flagging for Juncker.

* * * * *

RELATED: Here come the Spitzenkandidaten! But does anybody care?

* * * * *

The key player, German chancellor Angela Merkel (pictured above), seemed testy in two press conferences since the election when asked about the looming showdown. As the leader of one of the top parties in the EPP, she officially supports Juncker, but her comments should hardly give Juncker comfort:

She also thanked Juncker for the “good campaign” he ran for the European People’s Party, but seemed slightly irritated by the avalanche of questions as to whether she backs Juncker to become the next EU commission president.

“I don’t decide who gets the post. Juncker is our candidate, the EPP candidate, and we will put his name forward in the discussions. It’s always been said that it’s up to the strongest group to put forward the candidate, but just being the strongest group is not enough, a majority is required,” she said.

Egypt

Voting will continue until the morale (and turnout) improves

2 Comments

sisipharoh

UPDATE: As it turns out, turnout amounted to just 7.5% in the first two days of voting on Monday and Tuesday. No wonder authorities wanted to keep polls open today — at this rate, they might want to consider opening voting through the whole week. But the high apathy indicates just how uncompetitive this election is — and quite possibly how apathetic Egyptians are about el-Sisi’s soft authoritarianism and his promises to bring austerity economics in a bid to jumpstart Egypt’s private sector.

* * * * *

Now here’s a measure for increasing voter turnout that I’ll bet the European Union’s leaders never considered:egypt_flag_new

Amid disappointing turnout during the first and second days of the presidential elections, a judicial source has said the High Elections Committee decided to extend the presidential elections for a third day until Wednesday, with voting to last until 9pm on Tuesday.

The High Elections Committee said the elections were extended for another day due to the heat wave, the increasing demand in the evening and the difficulty to extend the voting hours until late at night.

If you don’t like the turnout, just keep the polls open until you do.

Furthermore, Egypt’s military-led government is harassing Egyptians to vote and threatening non-voters with fines of around $72. Interim president Adly Mansour encouraged Egyptians to ‘impress the world’ with a large turnout, and his government proclaimed Tuesday a public holiday, closing banks and other official offices.

If you’re surprised at what seems like a ridiculous aberration for a fair election, don’t be — the ‘election’ is more of a coronation than a truly competitive contest.

The wide frontrunner in the race is Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (pictured above), until late March the army chief of staff and defense minister of the country. It was his decision in July 2013 to overthrow Mohammed Morsi, Egypt’s first directly elected president in a free and fair election. Though Morsi’s government had tried to pull the country in a more Islamist direction, and though mainstream and secular Egyptians gathered in the millions throughout June and early July 2013 protesting its excesses, el-Sisi’s military regime spent the rest of the year cracking down on the Muslim Brotherhood (الإخوان المسلمون), which it designated a ‘terrorist group,’ and just about anyone else who criticized military rule too loudly, including journalists.

In the months leading to el-Sisi’s resignation from the military, he waged an all-but-in-name shadow campaign for the Egyptian presidency, with the apparent backing of the Egyptian military elite.

* * * * *

RELATED: The official unofficial el-Sisi
presidential candidacy continues in Egypt

* * * * *

El-Sisi faces secular leftist Hamdeen Sabahi, who narrowly finished in third place in the first round of the May 2012 presidential election. El-Sisi, who has become genuinely popular in his quest to crack down on the Muslim Brotherhood and in his efforts to stabilize Egypt, is expected to win by a wide margin. Many of Egypt’s top political movements, including the Tamarod (تـمـرد‎) protest movement that opposed Morsi, former Arab League secretary-general Amr Moussa and his supporters, many of Egypt’s most established secular liberal parties, and even many Salafists, who are technically even more conservative than the Muslim Brotherhood, are backing el-Sisi’s candidacy.

* * * * *

RELATED: How Egypt’s El-Sisi out-Nassered (and out-Sabahi’ed) Sabahi

* * * * *

When the military government held a referendum in January (Egypt’s third since the fall of former president Hosni Mubarak in February 2011) on amending the constitution, Egyptian voters approved it by a margin of 98.13% to 1.87%. In that election, the turnout was just 38.6% — still higher than the turnout of 32.9% for the equally forced constitutional referendum Morsi held in December 2012 to introduce a new constitution.  Continue reading Voting will continue until the morale (and turnout) improves →

Afghanistan, United States

Why there’s reason for optimism about the Afghan troop drawdown

Leave a comment

obamaafghan

US president Barack Obama earlier today announced that while most of the US military forces in Afghanistan, which currently number around 35,000, will leave the country later this year, a force of 9,800 will remain — and could remain through 2016.afghanistan flagUSflag

It’s still possible that under a new bilateral security agreement, which US officials hope to conclude later this year with the administration of Afghanistan’s next president, small numbers of US forces will remain even longer. But Obama’s remarks make it clear that US hostilities, by and large, will be over by the time his successor is elected in November 2016:

“Americans have learned that it’s harder to end wars than it is to begin them,” he said. “Yet this is how wars end in the 21st century.” 

Despite Mr. Obama’s attempt to draw to a close more than a decade of American military engagement in Afghanistan, the United States will continue to have thousands of troops engaged in lethal counterterrorism operations for at least two more years. He also acknowledged that the United States will leave behind a mixed legacy. “We have to recognize Afghanistan will not be a perfect place, and it is not America’s responsibility to make it one,” he said. “The future of Afghanistan must be decided by Afghans.”

In a June 14 runoff, Abdullah Abdullah, a former foreign minister, who is half Pashtun and half Tajik, will face Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, a former finance minister and World Bank official, who is Pashtun. After the first round of the election, Abdullah led with 44.94% to just 31.47% for Ghani. The outgoing president, Hamid Karzai, who has held the office since late 2001, has had increasingly difficult relations with the Obama administration, and he has refused to sign a status-of-forces agreement regarding future US security arrangements. Both Abdullah and Ghani, however, have rushed to assure Afghans that they will prioritize a US-Afghan security agreement.

* * * * *

RELATED: Afghanistan hopes for calm as key presidential election approaches

RELATED: Did Abdullah just with the Afghan presidency?

* * * * *

Abdullah, who recently won the support of the third-place candidate, Zalmai Rassoul, until recently Karzai’s foreign minister. Rassoul was widely seen as Karzai’s unofficial candidate, due to his recent role in the Karzai administration and the endorsement he won from Karzai’s brother. Rassoul won strong heavy in Kandahar province, Karzai’s home power base.

That makes that Abdullah has the ethnic and tribal arithmetic on his side, making his the strong favorite to win the June 14 runoff. Pashtuns, which comprise around 42% of Afghanistan’s population, have traditionally held political power in Afghanistan, including Karzai, within the Taliban and the Afghan monarchy that ruled the country for nearly three centuries until its overthrow in 1973.

Tajiks, which comprise around 27% of the population, are predominant throughout northeastern Afghanistan, and are the largest ethnic group in Kabul. They played a predominant role in the Northern Alliance that assisted US forces topple the Taliban government in 2001.

Not everyone, however, is sanguine about Afghanistan’s post-US future. Max Fisher, writing at Vox, takes a pessimistic line over the eventual drawdown:

The bad news is that the administration is tacitly confirming what everybody already knew: the war against the Taliban is not one that the US believes it can win, so we’re going to stop trying. That war, Afghanistan’s war, is going to continue….

The Afghan military has been problematic from the beginning: it runs on US funding and is plagued with desertions. Another year of US help is not likely to turn them into a victory force. President Obama’s declaration that this will help the Afghan military “stand on its own” is just not very likely.

But the Taliban was never likely to strike a peace deal with the United States, and despite attempts at peace talks, it’s hard to imagine that there’s any cultural or political space for the Taliban and its insurgent allies to engage in seriously negotiations with the United States. 

That’s not the same, however, as an Abdullah administration or a Ghani administration striking a deal with the Taliban.  Continue reading Why there’s reason for optimism about the Afghan troop drawdown →

United Kingdom

Why Clegg should step down as LibDem leader

Leave a comment

cleggeuro

Though he may well survive his party’s horrendous defeat in Sunday’s European elections, Nick Clegg’s decision to cling to the leadership of the Liberal Democrat will almost certainly doom it to equally damaging losses in the May 2015 British general election. United Kingdom Flag Icon

Appearing weary in a television interview after his party lost 10 of its previous 11 seats in the European Parliament, Clegg (pictured above) defied calls yesterday from both inside and outside his party to step down as leader.

It’s axiomatic that junior coalition partners tend to suffer in elections. The Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP, Free Democratic Party), which joined German chancellor Angela Merkel in government between 2009 and 2013, lost all of its seats in the Bundestag, the lower house of the German parliament, for the first time since World War II in last September’s federal elections. It, too, suffered on Sunday, losing all but three of its previous 12 MEPs in Sunday’s election as well. 

In Ireland, the center-left Labour Party, the junior partner in a government led by center-right Fine Gael, lost all three of its MEPs and won just 5.3% of the vote. Its seven-year leader, Eamon Gilmore, who has served as Ireland’s Tánaiste, its deputy prime minister, and foreign affairs minister, since 2011, resigned on Monday, taking responsibility for Labour’s horrendous showing. 

Gilmore’s example makes Clegg’s position even more awkward.

Paddy Ashdown, a member of the House of Lords, and the party’s leader between 1988 and 1999, defended Clegg, as did former leader Sir Menzies Campbell. But private polls, leaked to the press, show that Clegg’s Liberal Democrats are headed for an equally jarring defeat in 12 months, and that Clegg himself could even lose his seat.

Clegg is widely viewed as having lost a series of debates with the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party, Nigel Farage, who led UKIP to a stunning victory on Sunday, winning 27.5% of the vote and 24 seats in the European Parliament:

UK

Farage credited his victory, in part, to the debates with Clegg, though he crowed on Monday that Clegg’s position as leader is untenable, and that he would be ‘surprised’ if Clegg leads the LibDems into the next election.

To Clegg’s credit, neither Conservative prime minister David Cameron nor Labour leader Ed Miliband were willing to debate Farage by strongly defending European integration and the continued British role in the European Union. Former Labour prime minister Tony Blair noted Clegg’s integrity yesterday for doing so, while accurately highlighting the more fundamental problem for the LibDems heading into election season:

Blair praised the way in which Nick Clegg had shown leadership in confronting the anti-EU mood in the country. “To be fair to Nick Clegg – I don’t want to damage him by saying this – over the past few years he has shown a quite a lot of leadership and courage as a leader.

“The problem for the Lib Dems is nothing to do with Europe. The problem they have is very simple: they fought the 2010 election on a platform quite significantly to the left of the Labour party and ended up in a Conservative government with a platform that is significantly to the right of Labour.

Partly in response to UKIP’s rise, David Cameron agreed last year that, if reelected, he will hold a referendum on British EU membership in 2017. Continue reading Why Clegg should step down as LibDem leader →

Belgium, Czech Republic, European Union, Greece, Hungary, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Sweden, The Netherlands

A detailed look at the European parliamentary election results (part 2)

2 Comments

 Across Europe on Monday, officials, voters and everyone else were trying to sort through the consequences of yesterday’s voting, across all 28 member-states, to elect the 751 members of the European Parliament.European_Union

Late Sunday, I began analyzing the results on a state-by-state basis — you can read my take here on what the European election results mean in Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy and Spain.

This post picks up where that left off, however, with a look at some of the results in Europe’s mid-sized member-states.

* * * * *

RELATED: A detailed look at the European parliamentary election results (part 1)

* * * * *

With the count now almost complete, here’s where the Europe-wide parties stand:

EP14

The European People’s Party (EPP), which has been the largest group in the European Parliament since 1999, will continue to be the largest group, but with fewer seats (215) than after any election since 1994.

The second-largest group, the Party of European Socialists (PES) has 188 seats, a slight gain, but not the breakout performance for which it was hoping.

The Alliance of Liberals and Democrats of Europe (ALDE) will remain the third-largest group, notwithstanding the collapse of two of its constituent parties, the Liberal Democrats in the United Kingdom and the Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP, Free Democratic Party) in Germany.

The European Greens have won 53 seats, just two less than before the elections. The Party of the European Left, which had hoped to make strong gains on the strength of its anti-austerity message, gained nine seats to 44.

The Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), a slightly eurosceptic group of conservative parties, including the Conservative Party of the United Kingdom, holds steady at 46 seats — that’s a slight loss of around eight seats. The Movement for a Europe of Liberties and Democracy (MELD) gained six.

The real increase was among the ‘non-inscrits,’ the unaffiliated MEPs, which will rise from around 30 to 104. The bulk of those MEPs include the newly elected eurosceptics that have made such a big splash in the past 24 hours, including Marine Le Pen’s Front national (FN, National Front) in France.

But, in addition to being a pan-European contest with wide-ranging themes that resonate throughout the European Union, the elections are also 28 national contests, and they’ve already claimed resignations of two center-left leaders — Eamon Gilmore, of Ireland’s Labour Party, and Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE, Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party).

Here’s a look at how the European elections are affecting nine more mid-sized counties across the European Union: Poland, Romania, The Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, the Czech Republic, Portugal, Hungary and Sweden.

Continue reading A detailed look at the European parliamentary election results (part 2) →

India, Pakistan

Photo of the day: Modi, Sharif meet at India’s inauguration

4 Comments

Former Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi was sworn in today as India’s 14th prime minister in New Delhi today.India Flag IconPakistan Flag Icon

But as historic as his inauguration is, which brings to power Modi’s conservative, Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (the BJP, भारतीय जनता पार्टी) after a landslide victory in India’s April/May national elections with the largest mandate of any Indian political party since 1984, it’s been eclipsed by the presence of Pakistan prime minister Nawaz Sharif.

modi

It was the first time that a Pakistani leader has ever attended an Indian inauguration, and the handshake between Modi and Sharif is an audacious start for the Modi era. Modi, who has evinced a hawkish line on foreign policy, especially regarding India’s Muslim-majority neighbors, Pakistan and Bangladesh, made the surprising invitation to Sharif late last week. Sharif, much to the world’s surprise, and likely in opposition to hardliners in his own conservative party, the Pakistan Muslim League (N) (PML-N, اکستان مسلم لیگ ن) and within Pakistan’s military and intelligence communities, accepted invitation over the weekend. 

Sharif joins a handful of regional leaders from within the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) to attend Modi’s swearing-in ceremony, including Sri Lanka president Mahinda Rajapaksa and Afghanistan’s president Hamid Karzai.

Modi’s invitations weren’t without controversy at home — Modi’s hard-right, Hindu nationalist allies in Shiv Sena (SS, शिवसेना) opposed the outreach to Sharif, and Tamil Nadu leaders in both Modi’s National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and Tamil Nadu chief minister Jayalalithaa decried the invitation to Rajapaksa.

But Modi’s mandate is so sweeping that he has enough political capital to do just about whatever he wants, no matter what his allies think. Modi’s hawkish reputation, in combination with his parliamentary majority, could give him the space to pursue the kind of closer economic ties that have eluded prior Indian governments. Continue reading Photo of the day: Modi, Sharif meet at India’s inauguration →

European Union, United States

The US perspective on the European parliamentary elections

Leave a comment

EUbudget

I sat down with Brian Beary from Europolitics late Sunday night to discuss the results of the European parliamentary elections, with a particular focus on the US perspective. USflagEuropean_Union

The link is here (unfortunately, subscription only), but here’s one excerpt:

Is there a US equivalent to the Eurosceptics that did so well in the European elections?

In a formal sense, it is a peculiarly European thing. There are no parties in the US that are saying ‘we need to pull out of the United States’. The one thing they do share is that politicians in the US, for at least two generations now, in every election run against Washington. And in Europe, whether it is the hard Euroscepticism of groups like UKIP or Front National, or the soft Euroscepticism of certain members of the British Labour Party, or Silvio Berlusconi, there is an anti-Brussels-ness that reminds me of the way US politicians campaign against Washington.

Though many commentators and academics like to refer to the European Union today as a kind of ‘United States of Europe,’ especially during the EU’s ill-fated constitutional debate in 2004 and 2005, I argued that the European Union today more closely resembles the confederation of US states that existed under the 1781 Articles of Confederation.

Most US headlines in the lead-up to the European elections have concerned Ukraine and the ongoing security crisis and showdown with Russia that’s caused a regeneration of interest in transatlantic security, NATO’s role and additional follow-on issues,  such as the potential US export of liquified natural gas to Europe. In the aftermath of the European elections, US headlines are focusing on the rise of eurosceptic parties like Nigel Farage’s UK Independence Party and Marine Le Pen’s Front national in France.

In both cases, that’s understandable — and both topics are incredibly important. The real issues where the European Parliament will have the most impact in the next fiver years, however, are somewhat less sexy, but they should be on the radar of US policymakers and investors in the years ahead: Continue reading The US perspective on the European parliamentary elections →

Spain

With Spanish left reeling, Rubalcaba steps down as PSOE leader

Leave a comment

rubalcaba

The European parliamentary elections have claimed their first national leader in Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, the general secretary of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE, Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party), Spain’s traditional center-left party.Spain_Flag_Icon

In Sunday’s elections, Spanish voters elected 54 members of the European Parliament. The ruling Partido Popular (the PP, or the People’s Party) of prime minister Mariano Rajoy won the largest share of the vote, around 26%, and the largest number of seats, 16.

The PSOE placed second with just 23% and 14 seats — that’s a loss of nine seats in the European Parliament.

spain

Rubalcaba, taking the blame for his party’s losses, announced he would step down from the leadership, calling a meeting on July 19-20 to select a new general secretary of Spain’s largest center-left party:

“We have not managed to regain the trust of the citizens,” Mr Rubalcaba told a press conference in Madrid on Monday, adding that he would not stand for re-election at an extraordinary party conference in July. “We have to take political responsibility for the bad results, and this decision is absolutely mine,” he added.

There’s no guarantee that the next PSOE leader will be able to unite the Spanish left, which has fractured in the face of the economic crisis in the past five years.

The PSOE’s performance was hardly much worse than Rajoy’s party, which lost eight seats. Taken together, the two major Spanish parties won around 49% of the vote. That’s down from nearly 84% in the 2008 Spanish general election, 80% in the previous 2009 European elections and 73% in the 2011 general election.

So while the greater pressure fell on Rubalcaba and the PSOE, the results are hardly heartening for Rajoy. Continue reading With Spanish left reeling, Rubalcaba steps down as PSOE leader →

European Union, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, United Kingdom

A detailed look at the European parliamentary election results (part 1)

Leave a comment

BogvmPUIUAACkxJ

We now have most of the results from across Europe in the 28-state elections to elect all 751 members of the European Parliament.European_Union

At the European level,  the center-right, Christian democratic European People’s Party (EPP) emerged with about 25 more seats than the center-left, social democratic Party of European Socialists (PES).

That immediately gives former the EPP’s candidate for the presidency of the European Commission, former Luxembourgish prime minister Jean-Claude Juncker, a boost in his efforts to actually become the Commission president. But it’s still far from automatic, despite Juncker’s aggressive posture at a press conference Sunday evening:

“I feel fully entitled to become the next president of the European Commission,” Juncker, a former Luxembourg prime minister, told supporters late yesterday in Brussels after the release of preliminary results. Premier for 18 years until he was voted out of office in December, Juncker also gained recognition in his dual role as head of the group of euro-area finance ministers during the debt crisis.

Juncker (pictured above) still must to convince the European Council to propose him as Commission president, and he’ll still need to win over enough right-wing or center-left allies to win a majority vote in the European Parliament.

* * * * *

RELATED: Here come the Spitzenkandidaten! But does anybody care?

* * * * *

That process, which could feature a major battle between the European Council and the European Parliament, will unfold in the days, weeks and possibly months ahead.

But what do the results mean across Europe in each country? Here’s a look at how the European elections are reverberating across the continent.  Continue reading A detailed look at the European parliamentary election results (part 1) →

Colombia

Colombia election results: Zuluaga edges out Santos in first round

Leave a comment

zuluaga

Juan Manuel Santos, Colombia’s president, is officially in trouble. Colombia Flag Icon

After the first round of Colombia’s residential vote today, Santos finished around 3.5% behind Óscar Iván Zuluaga, a more hardline conservative backed by former president Álvaro Uribe, whose campaign won increasing support from voters over the past two months.

Here are the results:

colombia14

As widely expected prior to today’s voting, Zuluaga and Santos will now advance to a runoff on June 15.

Santos was first elected in 2010, running with Uribe’s support and on his record as defense minister under Uribe. The former president is best known for his militarized campaign against what remained of Colombia’s drug cartels in the 2000s and its leftist guerrillas, notably the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), is now opposing Santos. Though Santos largely helped Uribe carry out his quasi-military campaign against the Marxist FARC, which has been waging an insurgency against the Colombian government since 1964, Santos has opened the most comprehensive and promise peace negotiations with FARC to date.

Santos’s narrow first-round loss may actually bolster his chances in the runoff. Despite Zuluaga’s surge over the past two months, the runoff will almost certainly become a referendum on the FARC negotiations.

Expect the Colombian left to line up behind Santos as a matter of national unity to save the peace talks, including those voters who supported López and Peñalosa in the first round (it’s very difficult to imagine Zuluaga winning over many of their supporters) and, probably, a fair number of Ramírez supporters as well. If you add up the combined support of Santos, López and Peñalosa, it’s over 49% of the first-round vote. Given a choice between continuing the FARC talks or returning to a more militarized, Uribe-style approach, it’s easy to believe that a ‘peace front’ will emerge to bolster Santos on June 15.

So on paper, Santos has the easier route to victory — but that’s only so long as Santos holds onto his first-round base. There’s a chance that Zuluaga, having weakened Santos, could pull soft voters away from Santos if he’s aggressive enough in the next three weeks.

But the last month of the campaign has been characterized by scandal and dirty politics. Hackers with connections to the Zuluaga campaign are accused of illegally obtaining confidential information related to the FARC negotiations, while Santos’s campaign manager, is accused of taking millions in exchange for intervening on behalf of drug dealers trying to avoid extradition to the United States. There’s no way to know whether new revelations might change the dynamic of the race in the next three weeks in unpredictable ways.

Moreover, Zuluaga seems to have outmaneuvered Santos with his strong stand against the FARC, making Santos seem weak in comparison. Meanwhile, Zuluaga has arguably also outmaneuvered Santos on bread-and-butter economic issues. While the economy has grown at a stead pace of between 4% and 5% in the past four years, growth has been uneven, and Zuluaga has fashioned a more populist campaign based on promises of greater social spending and higher employment.

The biggest surprise might be that Enrique Peñalosa, a moderate, anti-corruption candidate, who served as the mayor of Bogotá between 1998 and 2001, finished far behind in fifth place. At one point earlier this spring, Peñalosa had surged into second place, and several polls showed that he would even defeat Santos in a runoff. But as Zuluaga became an increasingly serious contender, Peñalosa’s support collapsed, and even top leaders within the newly formed Alianza Verde (Green Alliance) defected to indicate their support for Santos.

Marta Lucía Ramírez, the candidate of the Partido Conservador Colombiano (Colombian Conservative Party), won just over 15% of the vote, as did Clara López, the candidate of the leftist Polo Democrático Alternativo (Alternative Democratic Pole).

Uribe, who formed a new political party last year, Centro Democrático (Democratic Center), won a seat in the Colombian Senado (Senate) in congressional elections earlier in March.

Santos is backed by a trio of parties, the centrist Partido Liberal Colombiano (the Colombian Liberal Party), the Partido Social de Unidad Nacional (Social Party of National Unity, ‘Party of the U’), and Cambio Radical (Radical Change).

Ukraine

Exit polls show Poroshenko will easily win Ukraine’s presidency

Leave a comment

No surprises here, but Petro Poroshenko is set to win Ukraine’s presidency in a first-round victory after exit polls gave him over 50% of the national vote in today’s election.Ukraine Flag Icon

Poroshenko (pictured above) was winning between 56% and 58% of the vote, according to two national exit polls. Far behind in second place was former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko with around 13%. Oleg Lyashko was winning around 8% to 9%.

When the official results come in, however, I’ll be interested to see the turnout in eastern Ukraine, where pro-Russian separatists may have dampened and hindered turnout. I’d also like to see whether Poroshenko won over 50% in the east, especially in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts — and if any candidate, such as Lyashko, who campaigned in eastern Ukraine, managed to break way with any significant support. Those numbers won’t tell us so much, though, because the anti-Poroshenko voters are likely not to have participated at all in what they believe is an invalid election.

The result hasn’t been in any incredible doubt since March, when pro-Western political leader Vitali Klitschko dropped out of the race and backed Poroshenko — instead, Klitschko decided to run for mayor of Kiev, and exit polls show that he, too, has overwhelmingly won his election.

The biggest question now is how Russian president Vladimir Putin responds to Poroshenko’s election. There were some signs as the election approached that Putin would respect the results, amid other signals that the Kremlin believes it can work with Poroshenko.

If Poroshenko can stabilize relations with Russia, he will then have to turn to mending bridges with eastern Ukrainians, extinguishing the anarchy of separatist control in Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts, and reforming Ukraine’s lackluster economy. It’s a tall order.

You can follow much, much more about the election and its background at Suffragio‘s in-depth Ukraine page.

Photo credit to AFP / Sergei Supinsky.