The European Political Community: a Truss-Macron ‘olive branch’

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Written by northsouth

Category: Europe

Published: 30 September 2022

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LONDON/PARIS - The British Prime Minister Liz Truss will attend the inaugural summit of the European Political Community (EPC) next week, a new forum proposed by French president Emmanuel Macron to bring together EU nations and those outside the bloc.

The move by Truss marks a “significant attempt” to “repair strained UK relations with the EU”, said the Financial Times. It will be seen as an “olive branch” to Macron, the paper added.

Truss will join the first meeting of the group in Prague on 6 October, just months after the prime minister criticised the summit in her previous role as foreign secretary.

And her attitude towards Macron and France was questioned during the Conservative leadership election when she was asked if she considered the president “friend or foe”. She controversially replied: “Time will tell.”

What is the EPC?

The summit is the brainchild of Macron, who hopes it can bring together European nations from within and outside the EU.

The French president announced it in May, in a speech to mark Europe Day. He said that leaders had a “historic obligation” to form a “new European organisation” that “would allow democratic European nations to find a new space for political cooperation, security, cooperation in energy, transport, investment, infrastructure [and] the movement of people”.

The EPC includes the leaders of the EU, as well as candidate countries such as Ukraine, the western Balkans and Turkey, and neighbours that explicitly do not want to join the union, such as Norway, Switzerland and the UK.
Why does Truss want to attend?

Truss’s new-found enthusiasm for the group will “raise eyebrows”, said The Independent, given she was explicitly critical of the project just a few months ago when she was foreign secretary.

In June, she said she did not “buy into” a Europe-wide political community. But in a significant volte-face, the prime minister has now even expressed willingness to host the next summit of the EPC in London.

Truss is said to believe that the new group offers an opportunity to rebuild the UK’s relationship with the EU in the wake of Brexit. “It’s good that the EU is thinking about their relationship with us after Brexit and vice-versa,” said one Truss supporter.

The UK’s participation in the summit could also help to ease tensions over the Northern Ireland Protocol, the part of Britain’s Brexit deal with the EU that has proven most controversial.

Is Truss’s attendance a risk?

For Truss, rejoining a European political project is a “high-risk” move, which comes at a “sensitive time”, Politico said. This is especially so considering the broadly eurosceptic complexion of her Conservative Party post-Brexit, not to mention the fact that “she is already battling to save her skin”, the news site added, after a “disastrous” first few weeks in office.

The move has certainly proven popular with Tories who did not want Britain to leave the UK. Former cabinet minister David Lidington, who backed Remain in the Brexit referendum, said yesterday that Truss’s attendance would be a “very welcome development”.

What does the EU think of the project?

“Critics, within the EU, are wary of what they see as a ‘vague’ French-led project,” the BBC reported.

Some have expressed concern that France, “a known sceptic of EU expansion”, will use the EPC as a way to create a “parking lot” for countries who want to join the EU. However, Brussels officials have stressed that the new community will not “replace” its own enlargement policy.

Many within the EU have welcomed the UK’s participation in the group. They see Truss’s decision to attend as a “positive signal” after the UK’s relationship with Europe turned “sour” under Boris Johnson, particularly over the Northern Ireland Protocol, said the FT.

“[Truss’s] participation sends a positive signal about broader neighbourhood engagement,” a senior EU diplomat told the newspaper. “It would have equally been worrying if she had decided not to attend.”

Putin grants Russian citizenship to US whistleblower Snowden

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Written by northsouth

Category: Europe

Published: 27 September 2022

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MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin on Monday granted Russian citizenship to former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, nine years after he exposed the scale of secret surveillance operations by the National Security Agency (NSA).

Snowden, 39, fled the United States and was given asylum in Russia after leaking secret files in 2013 that revealed vast domestic and international surveillance operations carried out by the NSA, where he worked.

U.S. authorities have for years wanted him returned to the United States to face a criminal trial on espionage charges.

Snowden's name appeared without Kremlin comment in a Putin decree conferring citizenship on 72 foreign-born individuals.

Snowden later issued a message, essentially an updated version of a November 2020 tweet, saying he wanted his family to remain together and asking for privacy.

"After years of separation from our parents, my wife and I have no desire to be separated from our SONS," the tweet read.

"After two years of waiting and nearly ten years of exile, a little stability will make a difference for my family. I pray for privacy for them - and for us all."

The new tweet made no reference to the Kremlin leader's decree, but it was attached to a 2020 Twitter thread in which Snowden said he and his family were applying for dual U.S.-Russian citizenship.

The news prompted some Russians to jokingly ask whether Snowden would be called up for military service, five days after Putin announced Russia's first public mobilization since World War Two to shore up its faltering invasion of Ukraine.

"Will Snowden be drafted?" Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of the state media outlet RT and a vocal Putin supporter, wrote with dark humour on her Telegram channel.

Snowden's lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, told RIA news agency that his client could not be called up because he had not previously served in the Russian army.

He said that Snowden's wife Lindsay Mills, who gave birth to a son in 2020, would also apply for citizenship.

U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price said he was unaware of any change to Snowden's status as a U.S. citizen.

"I am familiar with the fact that he has in some ways denounced his American citizenship. I don't know that he's renounced it," Price said in a press briefing.

Russia granted Snowden permanent residency rights in 2020, paving the way for him to obtain Russian citizenship.

That year a U.S. appeals court found the program Snowden had exposed was unlawful and that the U.S. intelligence leaders who publicly defended it were not telling the truth.

Putin, a former Russian spy chief, said in 2017 that Snowden, who keeps a low profile while living in Russia, was wrong to leak U.S. secrets but was not a traitor.

Italy voters shift sharply, reward Meloni's far-right party

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Written by northsouth

Category: Europe

Published: 26 September 2022

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By FRANCES D'EMILIO and GIADA ZAMPANO

ROME — Italian voters rewarded Giorgia Meloni's euroskeptic party with neo-fascist roots, propelling the country toward what likely would be its first far-right-led government since World War II, based on partial results Monday from the election for Parliament.

In a victory speech, far-right Italian leader Giorgia Meloni struck a moderate tone after projections based on votes counted from some two-thirds of polling stations showed her Brothers of Italy party ahead of other contenders in Sunday's balloting.

“If we are called to govern this nation, we will do it for everyone, we will do it for all Italians and we will do it with the aim of uniting the people (of this country),” Meloni said at her party’s Rome headquarters.

“Italy chose us,” she said. “We will not betray (the country) as we never have.”

The formation of a ruling coalition, with the help of Meloni's right-wing and center-right allies, could take weeks. If Meloni, 45, succeeds, she would be the first woman to hold the country’s premiership.

The mandate to try to form a government is given by Italy’s president after consultations with party leaders.

Meanwhile, former European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi, whose government collapsed two months ago, stays on in a caretaker role.

Differences among Meloni's potential coalition partners could loom.

She has solidly backed the supplying of Ukraine with arms to defend itself against Russia's invasion. In contrast, right-wing League leader Matteo Salvini, who before the war was a staunch admirer of Russian President Vladimir Putin, has voiced concern that Western sanctions could end up hurting Italy's economic interests more that punishing Russia's.

Former Premier Silvio Berlusconi, another long-time Putin admirer, has said that his inclusion in a center-right bloc's coalition would guarantee that Italy stays firmly anchored in the European Union and one of its most reliable members.

With Italy's households and businesses struggling with staggeringly high energy bills as winter approaches, Meloni has demurred from Salvini's push to swell already-debt-laden Italy by tens of billions of euros for energy relief.

What kind of government the eurozone’s third-largest economy might be getting was being closely watched in Europe, given Meloni’s criticism of “Brussels bureaucrats” and her ties to other right-wing leaders. She recently defended Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban after the European Commission recommended suspending billions of euros in funding to Hungary over concerns about democratic backsliding and the possible mismanagement of EU money.

After opinion polls in the run-up to the vote indicated she would be headed to victory, Meloni started moderating her message of “God, homeland and family” in an apparent attempt to reassure the European Union and other international partners, worried about euro-skepticism.

“This is the time for being responsible,” Meloni said, appearing live on television and describing the situation for Italy and the European Union is “particularly complex.”

She promised more detailed comments later on Monday. In her campaign, she criticized European Union officials as being overly bureaucratic and vowing to protect Italy's national interests if they clash with EU policies.

Projections based on votes counted from nearly two-thirds of the polling stations in Sunday’s balloting indicated Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party would win some 25.7% of the vote.

That compared to some 19.3% by the closest challenger, the center-left Democratic Party of former Premier Enrico Letta. Salvini’s League was projected to win 8.6% of the ballots, roughly half of what he garnered in the last 2018 election. Berlusconi's Forza Italia party, appeared headed to win 8%.

Meloni’s meteoric rise in the European Union’s third-largest economy comes at a critical time, as much of the continent reels under soaring energy bills, a repercussion of the war in Ukraine, and the West’s resolve to stand united against Russian aggression is being tested. In the last election, in 2018, Meloni’s party took 4.4%.

Fellow euroskeptic politicians were among the first to celebrate. French politician Marine Le Pen’s party also hailed the result as a “lesson in humility” to the EU.

Santiago Abascal, the leader of Spain’s far-right Vox opposition party, tweeted that “millions of Europeans are placing their hopes in Italy.” Meloni “has shown the way for a proud and free Europe of sovereign nations that can cooperate on behalf of everybody’s security and prosperity.”

Turnout according to the Interior Ministry, was 64%, as eligible voters deserted polling stations in droves. That is far lower than the previous record for low turnout, 73% in 2018.

Italy has had three coalition governments since the last election — each led by someone who hadn’t run for office, and that appeared to have alienated many voters, pollsters had said.

Meloni’s party was forged from the legacy of a neo-fascist party formed shortly after the war by nostalgists of Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.

Italy’s complex electoral law rewards campaign alliance. Meloni was buoyed by joining campaign forces with Salvini and Berlusconi.

The Democrats went into the vote at a steep disadvantage since they failed to secure a similarly broad alliance with the left-leaning populists of the 5-Star-Movement, the largest party in the just-ended legislature.

Headed by former Premier Giuseppe Conte, the 5-Stars appeared headed to a third-place finish, with some 16% of the vote. Had they joined forces in a campaign agreement with the Democrats, their coalition would have roughly take the same percentage of Meloni's alliance

The election Sunday came six months early after Draghi's pandemic unity government, which enjoyed wide citizen popularity, collapsed in late July after the parties of Salvini, Berlusconi and Conte withheld support in a confidence vote.

Meloni kept her Brothers of Italy party in the opposition, refusing to join Draghi’s unity government or the two previous coalitions led by Conte.