On the anniversary of Putin’s aggression, however, uncertainty and irritation were undisguised in Kyiv. Ukrainians wanted to know why Western sanctions on Russia are not working, and why Moscow keeps getting components for its missiles from Western companies. Why Ukrainians have to keep asking for weapons; and why the U.S. is not pushing through the crucial new aid package for Ukraine.
“We are very grateful for the support of the United States, but unfortunately, when I turn to the Democrats for support, they tell me to go to the Republicans. And the Republicans say to go to the Democrats,” Ukrainian MP Oleksandra Ustinova said at a separate Kyiv conference on Saturday. “We are grateful for the European support, but we cannot win without the USA. We need the supply of anti-aircraft defenses and continued assistance.”
“Why don’t you give us what we ask for? Our priorities are air defense and missiles. We need long-range missiles,” Ustinova added.
U.S. Congressman Jim Costa explained to the conference that Americans, and even members of Congress, still need to be educated on how the war in Ukraine affects them and why a Ukrainian victory is in America’s best interests.
“I believe that we must, and that is why we will decide on an additional aid package for Ukraine. It is difficult and unattractive. But I believe that over the next few weeks, the US response will be a beacon to protect our security and democratic values,” Costa said.
The West is afraid of Russia, Oleksiy Danilov, Ukraine’s security and defense council secretary, told the Saturday conference.
“The West does not know what to do with Russia and therefore it does not allow us to win. Russians constantly blackmail and intimidate the West. However, if you are afraid of a dog, it will bite you,” he said.
“And now you are losing not only to autocratic Russia but also to the rest of the autocracies in the world,” Danilov added.
Vestager was addressing increasing concerns among competition regulators that the control over artificial intelligence is being gobbled up by a few leading technology companies.
Microsoft has acquired a leading stake in OpenAI, the company behind popular chatbot ChatGPT, and is in a fierce race with competitor Google over who can roll out the most advanced AI tech the fastest.
Antitrust authorities have zoned in on the issue. In the United States, both the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission are looking at how to probe OpenAI on antitrust grounds. European Union regulators in January asked industry players for feedback on whether they see issues with competition for AI. And the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) launched a similar survey in December.
At the heart of Europe’s fears: A repeat of what happened with the last generation of internet giants. When social media, search and cloud firms boomed, it created titans like Facebook’s parent company Meta, Google and Amazon — but reduced Europe to a bystander unable to catch up and compete.
Big data became “an essential driver of competition … It completely changed market dynamics,” Vestager said in the interview, on her visit to Washington, D.C. “Now, with AI, it is likely that we will see a change in market dynamics as well, and it’s likely that it will happen much faster than what we saw of network effects and the data-driven marketplace,” she said.
TAIPEI — Forget Xi Jinping or Joe Biden for a second. Meet Taiwan’s next President William Lai, upon whom the fate of U.S.-China relations — and global security over the coming few years — is now thrust.
The 64-year-old, currently Taiwan’s vice president, has led the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) to a historic third term in power, a first for any party since Taiwan became a democracy in 1996.
For now, the capital of Taipei feels as calm as ever. For Lai, though, the sense of victory will soon be overshadowed by a looming, extended period of uncertainty over Beijing’s next move. Taiwan’s Communist neighbor has laid bare its disapproval of Lai, whom Beijing considers the poster boy of the Taiwanese independence movement.
All eyes are now on how the Chinese leader — who less than two weeks ago warned Taiwan to face up to the “historical inevitability” of being absorbed into his Communist nation — will address the other inevitable conclusion: That the Taiwanese public have cast yet another “no” vote on Beijing.
1. Beijing doesn’t like him — at all
China has repeatedly lambasted Lai, suggesting that he will be the one bringing war to the island.
As recently as last Thursday, Beijing was trying to talk Taiwanese voters out of electing its nemesis-in-chief into the Baroque-style Presidential Office in Taipei.
“Cross-Strait relations have taken a turn for the worse in the past eight years, from peaceful development to tense confrontation,” China’s Taiwan Affairs Office spokesman Chen Binhua said, adding that Lai would now be trying to follow an “evil path” toward “military tension and war.”
While Beijing has never been a fan of the DPP, which views China as fundamentally against Taiwan’s interests , the personal disgust for Lai is also remarkable.
Part of that stems from a 2017 remark, in which Lai called himself a “worker for Taiwanese independence,” which has been repeatedly cited by Beijing as proof of his secessionist beliefs.
Without naming names, Chinese President Xi harshly criticized those promoting Taiwan independence in a speech in 2021.
Without naming names, Chinese President Xi harshly criticized those promoting Taiwan independence | Mark Schiefelbein-Pool/Getty Images
“Secession aimed at Taiwan independence is the greatest obstacle to national reunification and a grave danger to national rejuvenation,” Xi said. “Those who forget their heritage, betray their motherland, and seek to split the country will come to no good end, and will be disdained by the people and sentenced by the court of history.”
2. All eyes are on the next 4 months
Instability is expected to be on the rise over the next four months, until Lai is formally inaugurated on May 20.
No one knows how bad this could get, but Taiwanese officials and foreign diplomats say they don’t expect the situation to be as tense as the aftermath of then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the island in 2022.
Already, days before the election, China sent several spy balloons to monitor Taiwan, according to the Taiwanese defense ministry. On the trade front, China was also stepping up the pressure, announcing a possible move to reintroduce tariffs on some Taiwanese products. Cases of disinformation and electoral manipulation have also been unveiled by Taiwanese authorities.
Those developments, combined, constitute what Taipei calls hybrid warfare — which now risks further escalation given Beijing’s displeasure with the new president.
No one knows how bad this could get, but Taiwanese officials and foreign diplomats say they don’t expect the situation to be as tense as the aftermath of then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the island in 2022 | Annabelle Chih/Getty Images
3. Lai has to tame his independent instinct
In a way, he has already.
Speaking at the international press conference last week, Lai said he had no plan to declare independence if elected to the presidency.
DPP insiders say they expect Lai to stick to outgoing Tsai Ing-wen’s approach, without saying things that could be interpreted as unilaterally changing the status quo.
They also point to the fact that Lai chose as vice-presidential pick Bi-khim Hsiao, a close confidante with Tsai and former de facto ambassador to Washington. Hsiao has developed close links with the Biden administration, and will play a key role as a bridge between Lai and the U.S.
4. Taiwan will follow international approach
The U.S., Japan and Europe are expected to take precedence in Lai’s diplomatic outreach, while relations with China will continue to be negative.
Throughout election rallies across the island, the DPP candidate repeatedly highlighted the Tsai government’s efforts at diversifying away from the trade reliance on China, shifting the focus to the three like-minded allies.
Lai has to tame his independent instinct | Annabelle Chih/Getty Images
Southeast Asia has been another top destination for these readjusted trade flows, DPP has said.
According to Taiwanese authorities, Taiwan’s exports to China and Hong Kong last year dropped 18.1 percent compared to 2022, the biggest decrease since they started recording this set of statistics in 1982.
In contrast, Taiwanese exports to the U.S. and Europe rose by 1.6 percent and 2.9 percent, respectively, with the trade volumes reaching all-time highs.
However, critics point out that China continues to be Taiwan’s biggest trading partner, with many Taiwanese businesspeople living and working in the mainland.
5. Lai might face an uncooperative parliament
While vote counting continues, there’s a high chance Lai will be dealing with a divided parliament, the Legislative Yuan.
Before the election, the Kuomintang (KMT) party vowed to form a majority with Taiwan People’s Party in the Yuan, thereby rendering Lai’s administration effectively a minority government.
While that could pose further difficulties for Lai to roll out policies provocative to Beijing, a parliament in opposition also might be a problem when it comes to Taiwan’s much-needed defense spending.
“A divided parliament is very bad news for defense. KMT has proven that they can block defense spending, and the TPP will also try to provide what they call oversight, and make things much more difficult,” said Syaru Shirley Lin, who chairs the Center for Asia-Pacific Resilience and Innovation, a Taipei-based policy think tank.
“Although all three parties said they wanted to boost defense, days leading up to the election … I don’t think that really tells you what’s going to happen in the legislature,” Lin added. “There’s going to be a lot of policy trading.”
On October 7, Hamas fighters launched a bloody attack against Israel, using paragliders, speedboats and underground tunnels to carry out an offensive that killed almost 1,200 people and saw hundreds more taken back to the Gaza Strip as prisoners.
Almost three months on, Israel’s massive military retaliation is reverberating around the region, with explosions in Lebanon and rebels from Yemen attacking shipping in the Red Sea. Meanwhile, Western countries are pumping military aid into Israel while deploying fleets to protect commercial shipping — risking confrontation with the Iranian navy.
That’s in line with a grim prediction made last year by Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian, who said that Israel’s counteroffensive in Gaza meant an “expansion of the scope of the war has become inevitable,” and that further escalation across the Middle East should be expected.
What’s happening?
The Israel Defense Forces are still fighting fierce battles for control of the Gaza Strip in what officials say is a mission to destroy Hamas. Troops have already occupied much of the north of the 365-square-kilometer territory, home to around 2.3 million Palestinians, and are now stepping up their assault in the south.
Entire neighborhoods of densely-populated Gaza City have been levelled by intense Israeli shelling, rocket attacks and air strikes, rendering them uninhabitable. Although independent observers have been largely shut out, the Hamas-controlled Health Ministry claims more than 22,300 people have been killed, while the U.N. says 1.9 million people have been displaced.
On a visit to the front lines, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant warned that his country is in the fight for the long haul. “The feeling that we will stop soon is incorrect. Without a clear victory, we will not be able to live in the Middle East,” he said.
As the Gaza ground war intensifies, Hamas and its allies are increasingly looking to take the conflict to a far broader arena in order to put pressure on Israel.
According to Seth Frantzman, a regional analyst with the Jerusalem Post and adjunct fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, “Iran is certainly making a play here in terms of trying to isolate Israel [and] the U.S. and weaken U.S. influence, also showing that Israel doesn’t have the deterrence capabilities that it may have had in the past or at least thought it had.”
Northern front
On Tuesday a blast ripped through an office in Dahieh, a southern suburb of the Lebanese capital, Beirut — 130 kilometers from the border with Israel. Hamas confirmed that one of its most senior leaders, Saleh al-Arouri, was killed in the strike.
Government officials in Jerusalem have refused to confirm Israeli forces were behind the killing, while simultaneously presenting it as a “surgical strike against the Hamas leadership” and insisting it was not an attack against Lebanon itself, despite a warning from Lebanese caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati that the incident risked dragging his country into a wider regional war.
Tensions between Israel and Lebanon have spiked in recent weeks, with fighters loyal to Hezbollah, the Shia Islamist militant group that controls the south of the country, firing hundreds of rockets across the frontier. Along with Hamas, Hezbollah is part of the Iranian-led “Axis of Resistance” that aims to destroy the state of Israel.
In a statement released on Tuesday, Iran’s foreign ministry said the death of al-Arouri, the most senior Hamas official confirmed to have died since October 7, will only embolden resistance against Israel, not only in the Palestinian territories but also in the wider Middle East.
The Israel Defense Forces are still fighting fierce battles for control of the Gaza Strip in what officials say is a mission to destroy Hamas | Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images
“We’re talking about the death of a senior Hamas leader, not from Hezbollah or the [Iranian] Revolutionary Guards. Is it Iran who’s going to respond? Hezbollah? Hamas with rockets? Or will there be no response, with the various players waiting for the next assassination?” asked Héloïse Fayet, a researcher at the French Institute for International Relations.
In a much-anticipated speech on Wednesday evening, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah condemned the killing but did not announce a military response.
Red Sea boils over
For months now, sailors navigating the narrow Bab-el-Mandeb Strait that links Europe to Asia have faced a growing threat of drone strikes, missile attacks and even hijackings by Iran-backed Houthi militants operating off the coast of Yemen.
The Houthi movement, a Shia militant group supported by Iran in the Yemeni civil war against Saudi Arabia and its local allies, insists it is only targeting shipping with links to Israel in a bid to pressure it to end the war in Gaza. However, the busy trade route from the Suez Canal through the Red Sea has seen dozens of commercial vessels targeted or delayed, forcing Western nations to intervene.
Over the weekend, the U.S. Navy said it had intercepted two anti-ship missiles and sunk three boats carrying Houthi fighters in what it said was a hijacking attempt against the Maersk Hangzhou, a container ship. Danish shipping giant Maersk said Tuesday that it would “pause all transits through the Red Sea until further notice,” following a number of other cargo liners; energy giant BP is also suspending travel through the region.
On Wednesday the Houthis targeted a CMA CGM Tage container ship bound for Israel, according to the group’s military spokesperson Yahya Sarea. “Any U.S. attack will not pass without a response or punishment,” he added.
“The sensible decision is one that the vast majority of shippers I think are now coming to, [which] is to transit through round the Cape of Good Hope,” said Marco Forgione, director general at the Institute of Export & International Trade. “But that in itself is not without heavy impact, it’s up to two weeks additional sailing time, adds over £1 million to the journey, and there are risks, particularly in West Africa, of piracy as well.”
However, John Stawpert, a senior manager at the International Chamber of Shipping, noted that while “there has been disruption” and an “understandable nervousness about transiting these routes … trade is continuing to flow.”
“A major contributory factor to that has been the presence of military assets committed to defending shipping from these attacks,” he said.
The impacts of the disruption, especially price hikes hitting consumers, will be seen “in the next couple of weeks,” according to Forgione. Oil and gas markets also risk taking a hit — the price of benchmark Brent crude rose by 3 percent to $78.22 a barrel on Wednesday. Almost 10 percent of the world’s oil and 7 percent of its gas flows through the Red Sea.
Western response
On Wednesday evening, the U.S., Australia, Bahrain, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom issued an ultimatum calling the Houthi attacks “illegal, unacceptable, and profoundly destabilizing,” but with only vague threats of action.
“We call for the immediate end of these illegal attacks and release of unlawfully detained vessels and crews. The Houthis will bear the responsibility of the consequences should they continue to threaten lives, the global economy, and free flow of commerce in the region’s critical waterways,” the statement said.
The Houthi movement insists it is only targeting shipping with links to Israel in a bid to pressure it to end the war in Gaza | Houthi Movement via Getty Images
Despite the tepid language, the U.S. has already struck back at militants from Iranian-backed groups such as Kataeb Hezbollah in Iraq and Syria after they carried out drone attacks that injured U.S. personnel.
The assumption in London is that airstrikes against the Houthis — if it came to that — would be U.S.-led with the U.K. as a partner. Other nations might also chip in.
Two French officials said Paris is not considering air strikes. The country’s position is to stick to self-defense, and that hasn’t changed, one of them said. French Armed Forces Minister Sébastien Lecornu confirmed that assessment, saying on Tuesday that “we’re continuing to act in self-defense.”
“Would France, which is so proud of its third way and its position as a balancing power, be prepared to join an American-British coalition?” asked Fayet, the think tank researcher.
Iran looms large
Iran’s efforts to leverage its proxies in a below-the-radar battle against both Israel and the West appear to be well underway, and the conflict has already scuppered a long-awaited security deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
“Since 1979, Iran has been conducting asymmetrical proxy terrorism where they try to advance their foreign policy objectives while displacing the consequences, the counterpunches, onto someone else — usually Arabs,” said Bradley Bowman, senior director of Washington’s Center on Military and Political Power. “An increasingly effective regional security architecture, of the kind the U.S. and Saudi Arabia are trying to build, is a nightmare for Iran which, like a bully on the playground, wants to keep all the other kids divided and distracted.”
Despite Iran’s fiery rhetoric, it has stopped short of declaring all-out war on its enemies or inflicting massive casualties on Western forces in the region — which experts say reflects the fact it would be outgunned in a conventional conflict.
“Neither Iran nor the U.S. nor Israel is ready for that big war,” said Alex Vatanka, director of the Middle East Institute’s Iran program. “Israel is a nuclear state, Iran is a nuclear threshold state — and the U.S. speaks for itself on this front.”
Israel might be betting on a long fight in Gaza, but Iran is trying to make the conflict a global one, he added. “Nobody wants a war, so both sides have been gambling on the long term, hoping to kill the other guy through a thousand cuts.”
Emilio Casalicchio contributed reporting.
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Gabriel Gavin, Antonia Zimmermann and Laura Kayali
DUBLIN – For Sinn Féin chief Mary Lou McDonald to become Ireland’s next prime minister, she will have to negotiate a delicate path over the newly hot-button topic of immigration.
Tensions about Ireland’s overwhelmed refugee system have shot to the top of the political agenda following race riots in Dublin — and now pose challenges for all parties ahead of elections later this year.
While centrists in Ireland’s coalition government face their own backroom tensions over immigration policy, it is the main opposition party, Sinn Féin, which is considered most at risk of splitting its base and shedding support to right-wing rivals.
Such a development would undercut Sinn Féin right on the cusp of an historic breakthrough in the Republic of Ireland, where it appears poised to gain power for the first time following decades of expansion from its longtime stronghold in neighboring Northern Ireland. The Irish republicans, with popular anti-establishment messages and strong working-class roots, have held a commanding lead in every opinion poll since 2020 — an advantage that could slip away as public unease over immigration spikes.
Unusually for a nationalist party in Europe, Sinn Féin principally fishes for votes on the crowded left of the Irish political divide, not the relatively empty right – where, according to polling, many of its traditional supporters are flowing as they seek a tougher line on asylum seekers.
Since November 23 — when an Algerian man stabbed three schoolchildren and a teacher in central Dublin, igniting rioting and vandalism by hundreds of protesters chanting bigoted slogans — Sinn Féin has seen its popularity fall below 30 percent in national polls for the first time in two years. Much of the lost support has drifted to rural independent politicians and right-wing fringe parties, among them Sinn Féin defectors now free to express immigration-critical views.
Rank and file Sinn Féin politicians have been warned internally not to post anything on social media at odds with McDonald’s immigration stance, which focuses on the impact on services — reflecting a hyper-twitchy environment in which commentators are primed to pounce on any perceived hardening in her position.
McDonald wants her party to stay focused on housing, specifically its core pre-election promise to build tens of thousands of public housing units beyond the government’s own expanding commitments.
She sees anti-immigrant sentiment as tied to the soul-crushing struggle to secure an affordable home in a country where property prices and rents are among the highest in Europe. This market dysfunction reflects a Europe-leading population boom amid tight supply.
‘I share that anger’
The pace of social change has been staggering, particularly on the relatively impoverished north side of Dublin. Barely a generation ago, Ireland had only 3.5 million people and almost no immigrants in a country where its own people were its biggest export. By contrast, a fifth of today’s nearly 5.3 million residents were born outside Ireland.
The population boom has been fueled by nearly a decade of strong multinational-driven economic growth and, more recently, a disproportionate intake of 100,000 Ukrainian war refugees and more than 26,000 other asylum seekers, hundreds of whom are now sleeping in tents in parks and side streets. Starting later this month, the government is poised to cut benefits to new Ukrainian arrivals in a bid to reduce them coming via other EU states, where benefits are lower.
“If you are a person who can’t get a home, or your son or daughter can’t get housed, and then you reckon that lots more people are coming to the country, naturally enough, you’re going to say: ‘Well, how am I going to be housed?’” McDonald told the Business Post, the latest in a series of interviews in which she portrays anti-immigrant sentiment as both understandable and unfair.
Followers of Hare Krishna, many of whom fled Ukraine during the war, listen to a lecture after prayer near Enniskillen, western Northern Ireland | Paul Faith/AFP via Getty Images
“All of that anger about housing, I share that anger,” she said. “But that’s on the government, not on new people coming into the state.”
It’s an argument that, behind the scenes, McDonald and senior party lieutenants are having with their own supporters, whose anti-immigrant sentiment has been vividly captured by pollsters if not permitted on official Sinn Féin platforms.
According to the most detailed recent survey isolating the views of each party’s grassroots, Sinn Féin voters came out as the most anti-immigrant.
While majorities of voters for other parties identified continued immigration as positive, Sinn Féin’s took the opposite tack. More than 70 percent said too many immigrants were arriving, with a majority associating this with “an increase in crime” and Ireland “losing its personality.” Only 38 percent viewed immigration as “beneficial for the economy.”
Tapping into those sentiments are a disparate array of right wing upstarts. Among them is Aontú (Unity), a party founded by ex-Sinn Féin lawmaker Peadar Tóibín, and the Rural Independents, a loose grouping of lawmakers including another Sinn Féin defector, Carol Nolan. Two other Rural Independents from Cork and Limerick have just founded a new party, Independent Ireland, which they bill as offering “a comfortable alternative” to Sinn Féin.
Independents could potentially hold the balance of power following the next general election, which must come by March 2025 but is widely expected in late 2024.
Sinn Féin vice president Michelle O’Neill, left, watches on during the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis | Charles McQuillan/Getty Images
First, however, these and other rising voices on the far right will get the chance to build grassroots organizations in local council elections, which take place in June alongside European Parliament elections. Likely candidates include anti-immigrant activists who have led protests outside vacant properties earmarked for housing asylum seekers, some of which have subsequently been torched.
Police have failed to bring charges in relation to any of these arson attacks, which began in 2018 and escalated in size and frequency in the past year.
McDonald – a Dubliner who succeeded Gerry Adams as Sinn Féin leader in 2018 – has started to experience heckling from far right activists as she attends meetings with local groups in her central Dublin constituency. These critics vow to field candidates for June’s council elections, potentially gaining a toehold in democratic institutions for the first time.
Some are members of the Brexiteer-aping Irish Freedom Party, which predicts shelters “will continue to burn” unless government policy on immigration is reversed. Others back the far-right National Party, although its divided leadership is mired in dispute over the ownership of €400,000 in gold bars seized by police from the party’s HQ.
The irony of Irish people demonizing immigrants is not lost on government ministers tasked with salvaging Ireland’s tourist-focused image of céad míle fáilte – “a hundred thousand welcomes.”
When Nolan introduced a Rural Independents anti-immigration motion in parliament last month, Green Party Minister for Integration Roderic O’Gorman recalled how Ireland had “closed the doors” to Jews fleeing the Holocaust and should never act that way again – particularly given millions of Irish had emigrated since the 18th century in search of a better life.
Sinn Féin principally fishes for votes on the crowded left of the Irish political divide, not the relatively empty right | Charles McQuillan/Getty Images
Referring to the motion’s claim that placing “unvetted single males” in rural towns and villages presented “grave potential consequences for residents,” O’Gorman said the opposition should vet their own family trees.
“Can any of us put our hand on our heart and say there is not a male member of our family who has not gone abroad seeking work?” he said. “There are ‘unvetted’ male migrants in every one of our families. We are lucky as a country that other countries let them come in and contribute to the system.”
TAIPEI — 2024 will be a bumper year of elections around the world, but one of the first votes on the calendar will also be one of the most hotly contested and consequential: Taiwan, where there are vital strategic interests at play for both the U.S. and China on January 13.
If the campaign started with expectations in the U.S. that the ruling, pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), whose top brass are frequent and welcome guests in Washington, would stroll to victory, the final stages of the presidential and legislative race have turned into a nail-biter.
Chinese President’s Xi Jinping’s Communist Party leadership, increasingly assertive in its claim that democratic Taiwan is part of China and keen to see the ruling party in Taipei ousted, is trying to swing the election through a disinformation campaign of hoaxes and outlandish claims on social media.
And the tactics may be working. The latest polls for the first-past-the-post presidential race on the My Formosa portal have DPP leader William Lai on 35.2 percent, only just keeping his nose out in front of his main challenger from the Beijing-friendly Kuomintang (KMT), Hou Yu-ih,on 30.6 percent. On Tuesday, the Beijing-leaning United Daily News put both candidates on 31 percent.
“This is not a walk in the park,” admitted Vincent Chao, a city councillor and prominent DPP personality, speaking to POLITICO’s Power Play podcast at a campaign event in New Taipei, a municipality surrounding the capital.
It could hardly be a more febrile period in terms of security fears over the Taiwan Strait, where insistent Chinese maneuvering has been matched by a high-stakes U.S.-backed boost to the island’s defenses. Only on December 15, the U.S. approved another $300 million of spending on defense kit, sparking a retort from China that the expenditure would harm “security interests and threaten peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.”
Lai’s opponents are playing hard on these security implications of the vote, and are accusing him of bringing the island closer to conflict because of his past comments in favor of the island’s independence. China has, after all, continually warned that independence “means war” and Xi has said Beijing is willing to use “all necessary measures” to secure unification. Lai has hit back that his rivals “are parroting the [Chinese Communist Party line] as propaganda to score electoral benefits.”
For the global economy, open war over Taiwan would be a disaster, perhaps even outstripping the shock of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, due in particular to the island’s critical role in microchip supplies.
Head-to-head race
The specter of a DPP defeat has raised the temperature of the fevered last few weeks of the campaign.
Chao, the DPP councillor and a former political secretary in Taiwan’s Washington representation, admitted that the DPP ends the year in “a head-to-head race” in the final stretch. “I mean, it’s democracy and the party has been in power for eight years. Anything could change,” he said.
Wearing a jaunty white and green “Team Taiwan” tracksuit, the party’s signature colors, he talks above the backstage din of an evening event, held among the tower block estates of New Taipei. Volunteers hand out pork dumplings, the outgoing president Tsai Ing-wen gives a rousing speech about freedom and security, and there are ballads of national loyalty and singalong love songs. It feels heartfelt, but also very Taiwanese in its orderliness, the crowd sitting on stools in the evening heat, waving small flags in unison.
Chao is candid about the scale of China’s social media offensive.
The specter of a DPP defeat has raised the temperature of the fevered last few weeks of the campaign | Annabelle Chih/Getty Images
“What we’re seeing is a much more sophisticated China,” Chao reflected. “They’ve grown much more confident in their abilities to influence our elections, not through military coercion or other overt means, but through disinformation, through influencing public opinion, through controlling the information that people see … through social media organizations like TikTok.”
One of the many unfounded stories that gained currency on social posts was a claim the U.S. had asked Taiwan to develop biological weapons research, a rumor aimed at raising anxiety about an arms race. Another accused the DPP of covert surveillance of its rivals.
Trade and business links are another lever. According to Japan’s Nikkei newspaper, some 300 executives from big Taiwanese businesses operating China were called to a meeting by by China’s Taiwan Affairs Office Director Song Tao, a close ally of China’s President Xi, in early December and roundly encouraged to fly home to Taiwan support a pro-Beijing outcome in January.
A third concern is an international system buckling under new conflicts and crises, with less time to devote to Taiwan’s freedoms, all compounded by an uncertain outcome in the upcoming U.S. election. In the wake of Beijing’s ’s clampdown on freedoms in Hong Kong and with the backwash of the Ukraine crisis, anxieties run high among DPP supporters about Taiwan’s outlook and the need for high levels of deterrence.
“We really do not want to be the next Ukraine,” Chao added, with feeling.
Bending with Beijing
Opinion is strongly divided about the smartest tactical response toward China’s muscle flexing.
Opinion is strongly divided about the smartest tactical response toward China’s muscle flexing. | Annabelle Chih/Getty Images
Across town, at one of the opposition’s bases, where campaigners wear tracksuits in the white and blue of the Kuomintang party, International Relations Director Alexander Huang said his political troops were “within touching distance” of a possible victory.
Keen to shake off a reputation of being reflexively pro-China, as opposed to merely cautious about riling its powerful neighbour, the KMT hosted cocktails for foreign journalists in a trendy, Christmas-decorated bar, bringing together Chinese news-agency writers with Western reporters covering the election.
Huang, who hails from a military intelligence background and studied Chinese military and security doctrine in Washington, argued renewed Western support and commitments of defence expenditure by the U.S. administration increased the risk of something backfiring over Taiwan’s security. “We are under a great military threat [from China],” he told Power Play. “Our position is deterrence without provocation: assurance without appeasement.”
He also reckoned the current chilly relations between the governing DPP party and Beijing were widening distrust. “Our current government has no direct communication with the other side. If you are not able to communicate your view to your adversary, how can you change that?”
It’s less clear what reassurances the KMT expects from Beijing in return for a more accommodating relationship. Huang cites a possible decrease in trade tensions, which can hit Taiwanese agriculture and fishing when Beijing turns the screws, and further action on climate change and pollution (Taiwan is downwind of China’s emissions).
Colorful cast
The race certainly does not lack for colorful personalities.
The DPP’s presidential candidate, Lai, is a doctor and parliamentarian, while his KMT rival Hou is a former policeman and mayor in New Taipei. Mindful that the mood has become cynical about political elites, both sides have chosen frontmen who can claim humble roots: Hou hails from a family that scratched a living as food market traders, while Lai, the epitome of a slick Taiwanese professional, grew up with a widowed mother after his father died in a mining accident.
Hou is a former policeman and mayor in New Taipei | Annabelle Chih/Getty Images
The “Veep” contenders are flashier than the main candidates and more media-friendly. Hsiao Bi-khim, educated in the U.S. and until recently ambassador to Washington, is a pet-lover who styles herself as an agile “cat warrior” in stark contrast to China’s pugnacious “wolf-warrior” diplomats. Her KMT opponent is Jaw Shaw-kong, a formidable, populist-tinged debater and TV personality, who channels overt pro-Beijing sentiment, recently calling for more alignment in military planning with China’s leadership.
The billionaire Foxconn founder Terry Gou, who had run as a maverick, wafting pets as incentives to couples to have more babies to combat a worryingly low birthrate, quit the race after China’s tax authorities launched punitive investigations into his company, the builder of iPhones.
Russell Hsiao of the Global Taiwan Institute, a non-partisan research organization, reckoned that even if the DPP wins, its mandate will be less compelling than in the glory days of 2020, when it surged to a record level.
The guessing game of how likely an intervention — or even invasion — by China is helps explain the nervy tenor of this race.
The KMT’s Huang thought a “full-scale, kinetic invasion” is unlikely in the immediate future. How long does he think that guarantee would hold? “I would say not for the next five years, if we get our policy right.”
Hardly the most durable time-frame.
Taipei politics being a small world, Huang is a longstanding frenemy of the DPP’s Chao, who counters that Taiwan urgently needs to retain its defiant stance and deepen its strategic alliances with the West. They just disagree widely on the means to secure its future.
“The aim of [Beijing’s] engagements is unification … by force if necessary. Democracy, freedom, they are not just words. They represent what our people sincerely believe and hope to uphold.”
Stuart Lau contributed reporting.
Anne McElvoy is host of POLITICO’s weekly Power Play interview podcast, whose latest episode comes from the Taiwan election campaign.
LONDON — President Joe Biden has quietly shelved plans for a “foundational” trade agreement with the U.K. ahead of the 2024 election — following Senate opposition and disagreements over the scope of the deal.
A draft outline of the pact and its 11 proposed chapters, prepared by the United States Trade Representative’s (USTR) office earlier this year, indicated negotiations would begin before the end of 2023.
But after facing multiple headwinds, the deal is not expected to go ahead, two people briefed by the British and U.S. governments respectively told POLITICO.Both were granted anonymity to speak on a sensitive matter.
“I don’t think we’re going to see that re-emerge,” said one of the people briefed on the proposed negotiations.
The proposal’s timeline for talks — which would not consider market access or meet the World Trade Organization’s definition of a free trade agreement — set out that negotiations would wrap up ahead of elections in Britain and the U.S. next year.
The deal was closer in substance to the U.S.-led Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF) — which tackles regulation and non-tariff barriers — than a full trade agreement.
But last month IPEF talks fell apart after senior Democrats criticized the Biden administration’s negotiation of trade provisions that did not contain enforceable labor standards.
The British government has long coveted a trade agreement with the U.S. as a significant post-Brexit prize.
The draft was considered a road map to eventually securing a full-fledged, comprehensive deal. Business and Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch pitched the IPEF-style deal in April during Biden’s visit to Belfast, Bloomberg reported, to reinvigorate talks first started under the Trump administration.
Congressional oversight
Key voices in the U.S. have expressed concern about the nature of a pact with the U.K.
“Trade negotiations should be driven by substance,” said a spokesperson for Democratic Senator Ron Wyden, chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, which provides congressional oversight for trade.
“It is Senator Wyden’s view that the United States and United Kingdom should not make announcements until a deal that benefits Americans is achievable,” the spokesperson added.
When POLITICO first reported on proposed talks in October, Wyden said it was “extremely disappointing” the Biden administration was attempting to proceed “with a ‘trade agreement’ that will neither benefit the American public, nor respect the role of Congress in international trade.”
Wyden’s spokesperson said Congress “must have a clear role in approving any future trade agreements” and that the senior Democrat “believes it is important for USTR to be significantly more engaged with Congress on any future negotiations.”
‘The vibes were quite tough’
USTR has gone back to Congress to ask for its input on a potential U.K. trade deal. But major outstanding issues between the U.S. and U.K. remain, including agriculture and whether any agreement would benefit American workers.
In a recent meeting with U.S. diplomats “the vibes were quite tough,” said the second person briefed on the proposed negotiations cited earlier. “They just doubled down on ‘you guys really need to lean into the worker-centric trade policy’ and ‘put yourself in the shoes of somebody in Pennsylvania.’”
The message, the person added, was “does this improve the lot of the farmers in Iowa? Does this help the U.S. economy? And if it doesn’t, they’re not going to do it.”
The U.S. approach “seems to be very focused on labor standards, on environmental issues on these very worthy things,” said the first person briefed on the proposed negotiations quoted at the top of this story.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Cabinet also pushed back on a chapter dealing with agriculture regulations in the draft after the British leader told a food summit earlier this year that he would not allow chemical washes or hormone-injected beef imports like those from the U.S. into Britain.
Scottish ministers meanwhile complained they hadn’t been consulted. Agriculture regulations are a devolved issue in Scotland.
In the meantime, the focus of the U.K.-U.S. trade relationship is predominantly on securing a critical minerals agreement that would allow British automotive firms to tap into electric vehicle rebates offered in the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act.
“The U.K. and U.S. are rapidly expanding co-operation on a range of vital economic and trade issues building on the Atlantic Declaration announced earlier this year,” said a U.K. government spokesperson.
Some in the U.K. are taking a philosophical view on whether a wider ranging trade deal with the U.S. is really needed. Michael Mainelli, who, as lord mayor of the City of London, opened a new outpost for the U.K.’s powerhouse financial district in New York City on Monday said: “The trade has been going on fine without it. It might go a bit better with it.”
The latest numbers show total two-way trade between the nations grew 23.8 percent in the year to the end of Q2 2023.
But in the U.S. a trade deal with the U.K. is just “not that high on the list,” Mainelli said.
BERLIN — At its summit this week, the European Union is threatening to name and shame more than a dozen Chinese companies that, it claims, are supplying critical technology to equip Russia’s war machine.
But what about the Western companies that make dual-use and other advanced gear that is subject to sanctions and yet, according to an analysis of wreckage found on the Ukrainian battlefield, is used in Russian Kalibr missiles, Orlan drones and Ka-52 “Alligator” helicopters?
Radio silence.
So here’s a trivia question for you: Which company is the leading maker of the so-called “high-priority battlefield items” trafficked to Russia that the Western coalition wants to interdict?
If you said Intel, then go to the top of the class: According to the sanctions team at the Kyiv School of Economics, the U.S. semiconductor giant again leads the pack this year. It’s followed by Huawei of China. Then come Analog Devices, AMD, Texas Instruments and IBM — all of which are American.
Russian imports of microelectronics, wireless and satellite navigation systems and other critical parts subject to sanctions have recovered to near pre-war levels with a monthly run rate of $900 million in the first nine months of this year, according to a forthcoming report from the Kyiv School’s analytical center, the KSE Institute.
All of this indicates that, while Western sanctions imposed over Russia’s full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, had a temporary impact, Moscow and its helpers have largely succeeded in reconfiguring supply chains — with the help of China, Hong Kong and countries in Russia’s backyard like Kazakhstan and NATO member Turkey.
That in turn begs the question as to whether, as the EU strives to deliver a 12th package of sanctions against Russia in time for a leaders’ summit on Thursday, the bloc is serving up yet another case study for the definition of insanity often attributed to Albert Einstein: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
For Elina Ribakova, director of the international program at the KSE Institute, the Western private sector must also be held to account. It should, she argues, be required to track its products along the entire value chain to their final destination — just as banks were forced to tighten anti-money laundering controls and customer checks after the 2008 crash.
“We have a policy in a void. We have put it on paper but we don’t have any infrastructure for the private sector to comply — or for us to check,” Ribakova told POLITICO. “We need to have the private sector enforce and implement this.”
Intel, responding to a request for comment, said it had suspended all shipments to Russia and Belarus, its ally, and that it was compliant with sanctions and export controls against both countries issued by the U.S. and its allies.
“While we do not always know nor can we control what products our customers create or the applications end-users may develop, Intel does not support or tolerate our products being used to violate human rights,” the company said in a statement. “Where we become aware of a concern that Intel products are being used by a business partner in connection with abuses of human rights, we will restrict or cease business with the third party until and unless we have high confidence that Intel’s products are not being used to violate human rights.”
As for Europe, while its companies may not feature among the top makers of critical technology sold to Russia, its industrial businesses are facing growing scrutiny over the supply of machinery and spare parts — often via third countries like Kazakhstan that have seen suspicious surges in imports.
It’s here, also, that Europe has fallen down.
In imposing sanctions, it’s a case of “all for one” — the bloc has jointly agreed on and implemented measures affecting everything from energy to banking.
But enforcement is a matter for individual member countries. Some are on board with the program. Others, like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, overtly sympathize with Russia. And others, still, are conflicted — as when it emerged that the husband of hawkish Estonian premier Kaja Kallas owned a stake in a freight firm that still did business in Russia.
Then there are countries like neutral Austria, with historical ties to the Soviet military-industrial complex that have left politicians and law enforcement with a huge blind spot.
That’s important because, as independent researcher Kamil Galeev put it to POLITICO, Russia today still upholds an organizing principle dating back to the early Soviet era that civilian industry should “be able to switch 100 percent to military production should the need arise.”
Justice delayed
Despite evidence of widespread breaches, only a handful of sanctions cases are being pursued by European law enforcement. Among them, German prosecutors have secured the arrest of a businessman suspected of supplying precision lathes to two Russian companies that make sniper rifles.
But the wheels of justice turn slowly: The arrest in August of Ulli S. — prosecutors, following German tradition, have not published his full name — relates to the initial imposition of Western sanctions over Russia’s occupation of Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014.
The press had already cracked the case by the time the suspect appeared in court, naming DMG Mori — a Japanese-German joint venture — as the supplier. One customer was Kalashnikov, maker of the famed AK-47 rifle. The other was Promtekhnologia, which has been sanctioned by the U.S. and featured in POLITICO’s sniper bullets investigation. Promtekhnologia makes the Orsis sniper rifle promoted by action movie actor Steven Seagal — now a Russian citizen — and used by President Vladimir Putin’s men in Ukraine.
DMG Mori, formerly called Gildemeister, suspended sales to Russia after the full-scale invasion. But, because it has closed down its operations in the country, it says it is no longer able to keep control over its machines made there (although an internal probe did find that they were being used for civilian purposes). The German Federal Prosecutor did not respond to a request for comment.
The real bad actors
It’s not just in stopping imports to Russia that sanctions are falling short of their stated intention.
Vladimir Putin’s former wife, Lyudmila (left), and her new partner have splashed the cash on luxury property investments in Spain, Switzerland and France a POLITICO investigation found | Yuri Kochetkov/EPA
Russians with close ties to Putin — and their money — continue to be more than welcome in Europe despite the death and destruction his regime has unleashed. His former wife, Lyudmila, and her new partner have splashed the cash on luxury property investments in Spain, Switzerland and France, as a POLITICO investigation found at the start of the year.
And when the European Council — the intergovernmental branch of the EU — does sanction Russian business leaders suspected of aiding and abetting the Putin regime, it has often relied on slipshod evidence that makes the decisions easy to challenge in court, POLITICO has also found.
Nearly 1,600 Western multinationals continue, meanwhile, to do business in Russia. Many that announced they would pull out have struggled to do so, as POLITICO discovered when it investigated Western liquor companies that said they had quit Russia — only to find that their booze was still freely available. And some companies that did stay, like Danone and Carlsberg, have been shaken down by Putin and his cronies — a case of Russian roulette, if ever there was one.
With the EU apparently lacking the means, or the political will, to do more to economically isolate Russia, the bloc is sending its sanctions envoy, David O’Sullivan, on a mission to apply moral suasion to countries that are, as he diplomatically puts it, “not aligned” on sanctions.
On the high-priority battlefield technology, Sullivan told POLITICO’s EU Confidential podcast last month that the EU has had “a limited success — but in an area which is absolutely critical to the defense of Ukraine.”
More broadly, he said: “The sanctions are a sort of slow puncture of the Russian economy. Perhaps not the blowout that some people initially predicted, but … the air is escaping from the tire and sooner or later the vehicle is going to become impossible to drive.”
To be fair, O’Sullivan isn’t overselling the efficacy of sanctions. And he may ultimately be proven right.
But he only will be vindicated if Western governments do a better job of holding their own businesses to account in stemming the flows of technology, equipment and spare parts that sustain Putin and his war of aggression.
That will come down to whether they have the will to enforce their decisions. And the evidence so far is that they don’t.
BRUSSELS — Eva Kaili and Francesco Giorgi had left nothing to chance.
The duo that would later become the most famous — many would say infamous — couple in the European Union capital had been gearing up for this moment for years.
As Qatar prepared to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup, they were among the Gulf state’s fiercest advocates in Brussels, defending its record on human rights and fending off criticism of its treatment of migrant workers.
And now, less than a week before the high-profile soccer tournament was to kick off, it was all coming to a head. At a crucial hearing in the European Parliament, Qatar’s Labor Minister Ali bin Samikh Al Marri — aka “the Doctor” — would come in person to plead his case before the chamber’s human rights committee.
In the preceding days, Kaili, a Greek lawmaker who was then a vice president of the European Parliament, had ramped up her efforts. According to public records, interviews and a cache of investigative files seen by POLITICO, she had flown back and forth to Doha and spent hours pleading and cajoling fellow lawmakers to give Qatar a clean bill of health on human rights.
At several points, she turned to her partner, Giorgi, for advice. “Who else should I talk to?” she texted him on November 14, according to transcriptions of her WhatsApp messages included in the police investigation files.
While Kaili worked the phones, Giorgi, an Italian parliamentary assistant, had been putting the finishing touches to the Qatari minister’s speech. In police surveillance photographs taken three days before the hearing, he can be seen poring over the text with his longtime boss, Pier Antonio Panzeri — a former EU lawmaker who Belgian prosecutors would later describe as the mastermind of a sweeping cash-for-influence operation known as “Qatargate.”
Per their usual working method, the Italian-speaking Panzeri wrote the speech in his native language and then passed it on to Giorgi for translation. With one day to go, Giorgi and Kaili huddled with Al Marri in his suite at the 5-star Steigenberger Wiltcher’s hotel, according to hotel video recordings obtained by the police.
Finally, it was the big day. As the minister took to the stage on November 14, 2022, Kaili nervously texted her partner again to ask if she should show up in person.
“Don’t come,” Giorgi replied via WhatsApp. “I’m afraid you will be exposed. To enter with the baby, everyone will notice u.”
She replied: “I don’t want to be exposed.”
So she stayed with the couple’s child, while the rest of the key suspects in what would become the Qatargate scandal crowded into the auditorium where Al Marri — the man police would later describe as the leader in his country’s efforts to corrupt the European Parliament — was taking to the stage.
At a hearing, Ali bin Samikh Al Marri laid out the case for Qatar’s labor reforms and why his country deserved the world’s respect despite reports alleging abuse of migrant laborers | Pierre Albouy/EFE via EPA
If everything went well and Al Marri came out satisfied with their efforts over many months of lobbying, the Italian former lawmaker stood to make good on a long-standing business relationship he and Giorgi would later tell police was worth more than €4 million.
And if it failed? Nobody wanted to know.
As Al Marri spoke, laying out the case for Qatar’s labor reforms and why his country deserved the world’s respect despite reports alleging abuse of migrant laborers, Kaili and her partner of five years WhatsApped back and forth, as one might do while watching a major sporting event from two different locations.
“So Arabic and speaks without reading,” Giorgi texted.
A few minutes later, Kaili commented: “He’s losing it a bit.”
As other lawmakers took to the floor following Al Marri’s speech, she bristled at criticism of Qatar.
“Who is this fat,” she texted her partner, referring to one lawmaker, adding an adjective which to her was an insult: “Communist.”
As Al Marri wrapped up, the Greek lawmaker asked: “Why he didn’t follow the speech.”
Finally, it was over.
Giorgi texted Kaili: “Ela, we did everything we could.”
For the watch party, a major milestone had been crossed. A senior Qatari representative had been given a chance to address criticism in what could have been a fiercely critical environment.
So far, so good. Except what they didn’t know was that Giorgi and Panzeri had been under surveillance by Belgian secret services for months, suspected of taking part in a sweeping cash-for-influence scheme under which Qatar paid to obtain specific legislative outcomes. Their communications, including with Kaili and other suspects, would be scooped up as part of the wiretaps and the subsequent investigations.
Eva Kaili maintains her defense of Qatar was part of her job as a representative of the European Union | Julien Warnand/EFE via EPA
Kaili denies any wrongdoing in a scheme in which police say Panzeri and others accepted money from Qatar, Morocco and Mauritania in exchange for pushing their interests in the European Parliament. Kaili maintains her defense of Qatar was part of her job as a representative of the European Union and that the investigation into her actions breached the parliamentary immunity enjoyed by sitting MEPs.
There is no other evidence in the hundreds of pages of wiretapping by the secret services that indicates Kaili directly received money from Qatar or other countries. Giorgi has provided details of the operation to police, but his lawyer has argued his statements were extracted under duress.
And yet, as the pro-Qatar operation turned to its next challenges, Belgian investigators who had taken over the probe from the secret service were closing in.
On the morning of December 9, the trap slammed shut. Kaili, Giorgi, Panzeri and a couple of other suspects were arrested and thrown into jail on charges of corruption, money laundering and participating in a “criminal conspiracy.” Two other members of the European Parliament, Marc Tarabella and Andrea Cozzolino, would also be arrested and charged.
Police published photographs of bags stuffed full of hundreds of thousands of euros which they had recovered in Panzeri’s flat, at Kaili and Giorgi’s home and in a suitcase wheeled by Kaili’s father — instantly turning their probe into a page one news story for outlets around the Continent.
* * *
The shock arrests of one of the highest-ranking members of the European Parliament, her boyfriend and their alleged accomplices smashed open a window onto a murky world of lobbying for foreign governments in the heart of EU democracy.
The Brussels bubble, as the EU’s policymaking apparatus is known, likes to think of itself as a global paragon of democracy, transparency and respect for human rights. There’s another side of the EU capital, however — an ecosystem of hidden connections and low-grade corruption, of back-scratching politicians and the filter feeders that gravitate toward centers of political power and public largesse.
While the Qatargate case has yet to go to court and several of the key players, including Kaili, insist they are innocent of the charges, the scandal has already led to reforms. The European Parliament has introduced changes bolstering transparency, and the creation of an ethics body establishing common standards for EU civil servants is being negotiated.
The story of Qatargate is also still being written. And nobody better captures the human element of this complex affair — and the cozy, transactional world in which it took place — than Kaili and Giorgi.
Start with Kaili: A political celebrity in her native Greece, where she’d gained fame as a TV presenter, at the time of her arrest she was one of Brussels’ most prominent politicians, widely believed to be bound for higher office either within the EU system or back home. She’d recently had her first child with Giorgi, an ambitious parliamentary assistant nine years her junior whose wavy blond hair and dimpled smile were well known in the European Parliament.
Together, they formed a formidable power couple on the Brussels circuit — as well as a shining example of what Europeans hailing from their respective Mediterranean homelands can achieve in the EU system if they play their cards right.
And yet, in an instant, it was all over. Both of them were in jail, their reputations in tatters, their infant child outside and in the care of family members. In the space of a single morning, the EU capital’s golden couple had become the most notorious duo in town.
Pier Antonio Panzeri hired Francesco Giorgi as an intern in 2009 | European Union
To understand what propelled this sudden plunge, it helps to dial back the clock to the earliest days of their relationship, five years before anyone heard of the so-called Qatargate scandal.
It was a Monday in early 2017. Giorgi was at work doing a familiar task — interpreting for his language-challenged boss, Pier Antonio Panzeri, at a conference in Parliament.
The two men went back a long way. Panzeri had been Giorgi’s boss for nearly a decade already, having hired him first as an intern in 2009 and then as a full-blown accredited assistant. The elder Italian was a well-known politician in Parliament — a shrewd operator on the left wing of Italy’s Partito Democratico, a trade union veteran from Milan who turned to international affairs late in his 15-year parliamentary career.
But he was a man of his generation — only really comfortable speaking in Italian and, according to Giorgi, unable to switch on a computer.
For all of those things, there was Giorgi. Then aged around 30, he was in a good place professionally and socially. Like thousands of Italians who flock to Brussels every year, he looked to the EU system as a land of opportunity. And the system had served him well. Paid handsomely, he had a front-row seat on his boss’s dealings, which included travel to places like Rabat, Morocco and Doha, Qatar, as well as more mundane tasks.
But nearly 10 years in, Giorgi was ready for change. And little did he know, the embodiment of that change was about to walk in the door.
While Kaili and Giorgi had seen each other in the halls of the European Parliament a few times since her election in 2014, according to her interviews with Belgian police, that Monday meeting in Brussels would stick out for them as their first proper encounter.
The mutual interest must have been powerful because it’s hard to overstate the disparity, in terms of age and political and financial power, that separated Giorgi from Kaili as she walked in, heading a NATO delegation.
To put it bluntly, Giorgi was a cog in the machine with no political weight. By contrast, Kaili was already a well-established politician in Brussels and very well plugged-in with Greece’s political and business elite. She had barreled her way up through the ranks of the Greek socialist party, PASOK, while still in her twenties, before making the jump to the European Parliament in 2014. In her office, Kaili employed no fewer than three Giorgis.
And yet the young Italian, who’d grown up sailing in the Mediterranean and skiing in the French Alps, decided to try his luck. According to Kaili’s testimony to police, after this initial encounter, the two of them dined “two or three times.” Giorgi spent the better part of a year trying to woo the Greek lawmaker, but it was tough going as she claimed to be far too busy with her work to carve out time for a serious relationship.
It was only after about a year, she said, that things became “serious.” Marking the transition from casual dating to partnership, they made a shared commitment: co-investing in an apartment located just behind their shared place of work, the European Parliament. It was Christmas Eve, 2019, according to Giorgi’s statements to police.
After Kaili returned to Greece in 2019 to campaign for reelection, Giorgi joined her a few months later. In February 2021, they were joined by a baby girl.
Eva Kaili returned to Greece in 2019 to campaign for reelection | Menelaos Myrillas/SOOC/AFP via Getty Images
But that’s where their story departs from the norm. Most wage-earning couples don’t live surrounded by stacks of cash. Most EU bubble couples don’t possess a “go bag” brimming with bank notes, or end up as suspects in sprawling corruption probes.
Part of the explanation can be found in their link to Panzeri, the Svengali-like third wheel in their relationship, whom Giorgi described initially as a “father figure” and whom Kaili later called a manipulator taking advantage of her boyfriend’s “idealistic” personality.
Indeed, in his interviews with Belgian investigators, Giorgi traces back the “original sin” of his involvement in Qatargate to a deal he agreed to with Panzeri shortly after becoming his employee in 2009. Under that arrangement, Giorgi allegedly agreed to pay Panzeri back €1,500 per month of his wages in exchange for the privilege of working for him, a relatively common scheme in the Parliament. (As a point of comparison, when the scandal broke, Giorgi was earning some €6,600 per month as an assistant to a different MEP).
The deal was to prove an introduction to a transactional world in which Panzeri — as a lawmaker and later, as the head of Fight Impunity, a nongovernmental organization he launched after leaving Parliament — had no trouble accepting large sums of cash from foreign governments in exchange for services rendered.
From 2018, Giorgi and Panzeri dove headlong into a partnership allegedly based on lobbying for Qatar in exchange for big cash payments. According to Giorgi’s statements to police, they agreed on a long-term lobbying agreement worth an estimated €4.5 million and to be split 60/40, with the larger share going to Panzeri.
Once arrested, Giorgi and Panzeri would butt heads about the precise role of each in the lobbying arrangement. But one of the younger Italian’s key tasks was to pick up cash payments at various places around Brussels, often from total strangers. Once he picked up €300,000 in cash near the Royal Palace from a person driving a black Audi with Dutch license plates. Another time, the drop-off happened in a parking lot near the canal.
In total, there were around ten such drop-offs, two or three per year, with the smallest amount around €50,000.
The alleged quid pro quo was that Giorgi and Panzeri would deliver specific parliamentary and public relations outcomes to their clients, which in addition to Qatar included Morocco and Mauritania. The ever-meticulous Giorgi kept a spreadsheet on his computer on which he documented hundreds of influence activities that the network allegedly carried out between 2018 and 2022.
It records more than 300 pieces of work, using a network of aides inside parliament whom they called their “soldiers,” according to the files.
Even as they pressed their clients’ interests, they were also trying to exploit their lack of familiarity with the workings of the bubble, reporting certain actions that, according to Giorgi, they actually had no influence over.
The scheme, Giorgi later told police, “relied on the ignorance of how parliament works” — on the part of the duo’s clients.
Panzeri, through his lawyer, declined to comment for this article.
* * *
As Giorgi dug deeper into his partnership with Panzeri, his romance with Kaili was expanding into a business partnership.
While each already had other properties — including Kaili’s two apartments in Athens (which she said were worth a combined €400,000) and one in Brussels (estimated by Kaili at €160,000) and one belonging to Giorgi purchased for €145,000 in Brussels — they were soon eyeing other purchases.
Eva Kaili and Francesco Giorgi purchased a flat near the European Parliament for €375,000 in 2019 | Leon Neal/Getty Images
After the Christmas Eve purchase of their flat near the Parliament for €375,000 in 2019, they purchased a plot of land on the Greek island of Paros for €300,000 in 2021 which they planned to develop into four holiday villas and at least one swimming pool, according to files recovered from Giorgi’s computer in a folder called “Business”. Then, in 2022, came the purchase of their second apartment, a penthouse right next to the Parliament, worth €650,000, according to Giorgi’s statements to police.
All told, the couple’s joint real estate purchases amounted to more than €1.3 million over a period of two years.
In between these purchases, there were other expenses: sailing holidays, a Land Rover bought for €56,000 and a fully refurbished kitchen. On several occasions, the couple sought to minimize their outlay by exploiting their insiders’ knowledge of the system.
According to documents seized at Giorgi’s home, a Qatari diplomat helped him get a discount on the Land Rover by taking advantage of special conditions for diplomatic staff, reducing the sticker price by about €10,000.
By any normal standards, Kaili and Giorgi were already wealthy based on their income.
In addition to taking home €6,600 per month as a parliamentary assistant, Giorgi received €1,000 in social benefits for their daughter, €1,800per month from the rental to the Mauritanian ambassador and — since the envoy never occupied the flat — €1,200 in cash from two women to whom he sublet the flat for a few months.
As for Kaili, she earned about €10,000 before taxes plus about €900 in monthly rent from a flat she owned in Brussels.
All told, the couple was pulling in well over €20,000 per month, an eye-watering amount in a country where the median monthly wage is €3,507 before taxes.
Yet even these substantial monthly earnings seem not to have covered the mounting costs related to their real estate investments or make the couple feel fully secure. Despite the fact her partner was pulling in more than three times the Belgian median wage, Kaili would tell police during the first interview after her arrest: “I know that Francesco doesn’t have a lot of money because he isn’t able to partake in all of our expenses.”
What motivated this drive for accumulation? According to a person who knew Kaili professionally and asked not to be named due to fear of retaliation, the answer lies partly in her background growing up without much money in Thessaloniki, Greece. “It feels like she grew up with a lot of deprivations,” the person said. “She wanted to feel that even if she quits politics, she will have a comfortable life.”
According to a person who knew Kaili professionally, the answer to her drive for accumulation lies partly in her background growing up without much money in Thessaloniki | Sakis Mitrolidis/AFP via Getty Images
As a result, Kaili tended to be very focused on financial opportunities. “She loved people with power and money. She was always, ‘You know this event is going to have businessmen,’” the person added. “And she always liked to have houses and property stuff, but she was never into luxury stuff.”
As for Giorgi, the son of a school director and import-export entrepreneur, he grew up in more comfortable circumstances in a town near Milan.
But as the junior partner in his relationship with Kaili, he may have struggled to keep up financially with a partner who earned more than he did and kept company with wealthy entrepreneurs and crypto bros.
“I have never loved luxury. I don’t know why I lost my way,” he told police during his first interview shortly after his arrest.
* * *
In interviews with police, Giorgi admitted to being part of a scheme, with Panzeri, to take hundreds of thousands of euros in cash from foreign governments — admissions his lawyer now says he made under pressure from police who he says threatened to take away his daughter.
But Kaili always maintained that she had nothing to do with the setup. Not only does she claim ignorance about the ultimate source of much of the money found in her apartment, and on her father; she also told police that she had nothing to do with Panzeri and Giorgi’s deals with foreign governments — an argument that her partner has always backed up, telling police early on that she had nothing to do with the scheme.
Panzeri, however, says the opposite. He alleges that in the spring of 2019, Kaili was part of a pact struck with Qatar to fund several MEPs’ election campaigns to the tune of €250,000 each. Giorgi and Panzeri both attest that a deal like this took place — but disagree on whether Kaili was involved.
In any case, having forged a reputation as a tech policymaker, Kaili’s work as a lawmaker veered suddenly toward the Middle East and the world of human rights, particularly in the Gulf, from 2017 onwards the year she met Giorgi. She traveled to Qatar for the first time later that year, at the invitation of another lawmaker, and made trips — some with Giorgi, some without — in 2020 and 2022.
In early 2022, just after she became a Parliament vice president, she asked the chamber’s president, Roberta Metsola, to give her files related to the Middle East and human rights. “I hope I didn’t make it difficult for you,” Kaili WhatsApped Metsola. “You gave me everything I love the most!” She was later designated as the vice president who would replace Metsola in her absence on issues related to the Middle East.
In the days and weeks leading up to the kickoff of the World Cup, Kaili and Giorgi’s work increasingly overlapped on two main files: opposition to a resolution critical of Qatar and a deal Doha was seeking with the EU that would allow its citizens to travel to the bloc without a visa.
On November 12, two days before Qatar’s labor minister would appear before the European Parliament, she reached out to Metsola, offering her tickets to the tournament in Doha.
“My dear President!” she wrote to Metsola. “Hope you are well. I have to pass you an invitation for the World Cup, you [sic] or your husband and boys might be interested,” she wrote on WhatsApp.
Eva Kaili reached out to European Parliament President Roberta Metsola, offering her tickets to the World Cup in Doha | Sean Gallup/Getty Images
It’s not clear what, if anything, Kaili asked from Metsola in exchange for the tickets. Throughout her dealings with lawmakers over Qatar, the Greek lawmaker would occasionally delete the messages she had sent. This includes her side of the rest of the conversation with Metsola — except for one text: “The rest I disagree too but I believe they will digest if we get the visa,” she wrote.
(A spokesperson for the Parliament president said Metsola never accepted any tickets to the World Cup and did not read Kaili’s messages before they were deleted.)
With the World Cup having started, the next big challenge awaiting Kaili, Giorgi and Panzeri was a plenary session in Strasbourg where rival politicians aimed to criticize Qatar’s human rights record weeks before the World Cup by putting a resolution on the agenda. Once again, they ramped up their lobbying.
So noticeable was the pro-Qatari line being pushed by Kaili and others affiliated with Panzeri that it started raising eyebrows among their colleagues.
“There were some very strange opinions being voiced on how we should not criticize Qatar, and we should rather recognize the reforms they were making and so on,” remembered Niels Fuglsang, a Danish MEP from the same S&D group. “I thought it was obvious that our group should criticize this, we are social democrats, we care about workers’ rights and migrants’ rights.”
For example, on November 21, Kaili pressed José Ramón Bauzá Díaz, a Spanish centrist MEP who ran the Qatari-EU friendship group, over his political faction’s stance on the resolution, poised to slam Qatar’s human rights track record.
“So, your group wants to vote in favor of a resolution Against Qatar World Cup,” she WhatsApped to him. He said: “It is crazy.” She went on to press him to take a pro-Qatari stance and reject the resolution.
Later that day, in a now-infamous video, Kaili took to the stage during Parliament’s plenary session and sung the praises of Qatar. “I alone said that Qatar is a front-runner in labor rights,” she said. “Still, some here are calling to discriminate them. They bully them and they accuse everyone that talks to them, or engages, of corruption. But still, they take their gas.”
With a crunch vote on the resolution’s final wording still to take place on November 24, Kaili was still going strong, texting with Abdulaziz bin Ahmed Al Malki, the Gulf country’s envoy to the European Union and NATO.
During this exchange, the Qatari gave Kaili direct instructions to take action on legislation of interest to Qatar.
“Hi Iva,” wrote the Qatari in a WhatsApp message on November 24. “My dear my ministry doesn’t want paragraph A about FIFA & Qatar. Please do your best to remove it via voting before 12 noon or during the voting please.”
Kaili deleted her responses.
Eva Kaili has challenged the lifting of her immunity in an EPPO investigation at the European Court of Justice | Nicolas Bouvy/EPA via EFE
But the recipient appeared to be pleased with what she texted, writing back a few hours later: “Thanks excellency” with a hands-clasped-in-prayer emoji.
The Qatar Embassy in Brussels and the spokesperson’s office in Doha did not respond to requests for comment.
* * *
Plainclothes Belgian police arrested Giorgi at 10:42 a.m. on December 9 at his home in Brussels. Earlier, they had picked up Panzeri. According to her statements to police, Kaili did not immediately know what had happened and originally thought Giorgi was involved in a car accident. She was told by police that her partner had been arrested.
Having tried and failed to get through by phone to Panzeri and his friends, Kaili set about trying to get rid of the stacks of cash in her apartment.
She headed to the safe that Giorgi had installed in their apartment and started to shovel stacks of bills into a travel bag. On top of them, she placed baby bottles for her child as well as a mobile phone and a laptop computer. Then she told her father, a civil engineer and sometime political operator who was visiting the family in Brussels, to take the bag and go to a hotel, where her father’s partner and Kaili’s baby were waiting. “I didn’t leave him the choice,” she later told police. “I just said, ‘Take this and go.’”
A few hours later, police followed Kaili’s father as he walked to the Sofitel, a short distance from their flat. According to a person familiar with the details of the investigation, bank notes were fluttering out of the bag as he went. Cops stoppedKaili’s father inside the hotel, seized the suitcase and detained him. Then it was Kaili’s turn. In the early afternoon, police detained her and took her to the Prison de Saint-Gilles.
The next day, the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO) announced it was investigating Kaili and another Greek member of Parliament in a probe looking at whether she took kickbacks from her assistant’s salaries as well as cuts of their reimbursements for “fake” work trips. Kaili has challenged the lifting of her immunity in this case at the European Court of Justice.
As the one-year anniversary of her spectacular downfall has approached, Kaili and her lawyers have done their best to turn the tables on the prosecutors, casting doubt on the evidence gathered against her and the way the investigation was carried out. Since her arrest, and through a four-month incarceration, Kaili has never wavered from her story. Her advocacy for Qatar, she has argued, was just part of her job as a European politician trying to foster ties with a petroleum-rich country in a region of critical importance to the EU.
Kaili’s lawyers have argued that the testimony provided by Panzeri, who has struck a deal with investigators and confessed in detail, cannot be trusted. Giorgi’s lawyer, Pierre Monville, has maintained his client’s statements were made under duress. “Whatever Giorgi has declared or written during his detention was under extreme pressure and preoccupation regarding the fact that his daughter was left without her parents,” he said.
Kaili’s lawyers have also noted that police kept Panzeri and Giorgi in the same cell in the days after their detention, giving them a chance to coordinate their stories. Kaili’s lawyers argue she was subjected to illegal surveillance, arbitrary detention and what amounts to “torture” while in jail.
The Qatargate suspects won a major victory last summer when the lead investigator, Michel Claise, stepped down over conflict-of-interest concerns after it was revealed that his son was in business with the son of an MEP who was close to Panzeri but hasn’t been arrested or charged.
Then, in September, Kaili played the ace up her sleeve, throwing the entire investigation in doubt with a legal challenge arguing that the evidence against her should be ruled inadmissible because it was gathered before the European Parliament voted to lift the immunity she enjoyed as a lawmaker.
The Qatargate suspects won a major victory last summer when the lead investigator, Michel Claise, stepped down over conflict-of-interest concerns | BELPRESS
Prosecutors retort that such a step wasn’t needed because Kaili had been caught red-handed by her decision to send her father out with a suitcase full of cash, but the case has been delayed pending a decision on her challenge by an appeals court expected in the middle of next year.
“We’re exploring uncharted legal territory here,” said a person familiar with the case, who requested anonymity as they were not allowed to speak on the record. In the meantime, Kaili is back in Parliament, giving interviews to international media and losing few opportunities to make the case for her innocence to her fellow lawmakers.
Giorgi and Kaili are, by all accounts, living together again. One of her lawyers says they’ve been given dispensation to do so, despite the fact that they are suspects in the same case.
Kaili and Giorgi declined to comment for this article, but they clearly haven’t given up the fight. Giorgi’s WhatsApp status is “FORTITUDINE VINCIMUS” — through endurance, we conquer.
Kaili’s profile pic on the app features the famous quote often wrongly attributed to Mahatma Gandhi:
“First they ignore you.
Then they laugh at you.
Then they fight you.
Then you win.”
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Nicholas Vinocur, Elisa Braun, Eddy Wax and Gian Volpicelli
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Some countries at the COP28 climate talks are lying about the potential for capturing the greenhouse gases fossil fuels emit, U.S. climate envoy John Kerry said.
Kerry was speaking at an event on Friday evening on the sidelines of the U.N. COP28 climate talks in Dubai, where the nations of the world are wrangling over the draft of a pledge to end fossil fuel use.
The deal has been forcefully opposed by fossil fuel-producing countries, including Saudi Arabia. Negotiators from Riyadh argue carbon pollution can be largely captured and buried using scrubbing technology that Kerry said remains largely unproven at the needed scale.
“There are people here who want to just continue business as usual. And the great facade is: ‘Oh no, we’ll be able to capture everything,’” said Kerry, his voice hoarse from a chest cold. “No scientist tells me we can capture it all. Can’t do it. Can we capture some? Yes, and by the way, I’m for it.”
Kerry said it was up to the gas industry “to show us they can capture all those emissions, to tell us whether it’s really going to be part of the future. But don’t lie to people and tell them it’s green. And don’t pretend to people that that’s the main alternative.”
Kerry said the next few days of talks, which are scheduled to end Tuesday, would be “absolutely critical. Without any question whatsoever.”
A draft text released on Friday by the United Arab Emirates government, which is hosting the conference, included several options for a deal between almost 200 countries to “phase out” fossil fuels — a phrase being pushed by small island states, the U.S. and the European Union. But it also included an option for no deal at all, which is the result many countries, including Saudi Arabia, China and Russia prefer.
“I am concerned that not everyone is engaging in a constructive manner,” German climate envoy Jennifer Morgan said in a statement shared with reporters.
Saudi negotiators have pushed for the deal to focus on the emissions that cause climate change, rather than the fuels that cause the emissions, UAE chief negotiator Hana Al Hashimi told reporters Saturday. That necessitates the use of carbon capture — but countries are divided over how much the technology can be used, versus the need to simply stamp out the use of the fuels.
The EU is arguing for the deal at COP28 to include a stipulation that carbon capture and storage (CCS) only be used for the hardest sectors to cut out the use of fossil fuels, such as the manufacture of cement.
“Make no mistake, we cannot CCS ourselves out of the problem,” said EU climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra at a press conference Friday, adding that carbon capture and storage was “a minor part of the solution space.”
Advocates for a fossil fuel phase-out deal believe it will scare investors away from fossil fuel projects. “One thing I know to absolute certainty,” Kerry said, “we are not going to go back to the old energy paradigm, you can absolutely bank on that. We are not going back.”
The world’s top climate summit has become embroiled in a hypocrisy scandal, days before the start of key talks.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) schemed to use its position as host country of the imminent COP28 United Nations climate talks to discuss oil and gas deals with more than a dozen countries, leaked documents published by the BBC show.
Briefing notes prepared by the UAE’s COP28 team for meetings with foreign governments during the summit, which starts Thursday in Dubai, include talking points from the Emirati state oil and renewable energy companies, according to documents published Monday by the Centre for Climate Reporting.
Germany, for example, is to be told that the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) — whose CEO, Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber, is COP28’s president — “stand[s] ready to expand LNG supplies to Germany.”
The briefing notes for China say that ADNOC is “willing to jointly evaluate international LNG opportunities (Mozambique, Canada, and Australia).”
They also propose telling oil-rich giants Saudi Arabia and Venezuela that “there is no conflict between sustainable development of any country’s natural resources and its commitment to climate change.”
With COP28 just days away, the leaked documents have cast a shadow over the start of the crucial forum.
Zakia Khattabi, Belgium’s climate minister, told POLITICO: “If confirmed, these news reports add to the existing concerns regarding the COP28 presidency. The credibility of the U.N. climate negotiations is essential and is at stake here.”
The documents also sparked an outcry from climate NGOs.
In a statement, Greenpeace’s Policy Coordinator Kaisa Kosonen said, “if the allegations are true, this is totally unacceptable and a real scandal.”
“The climate summit leader should be focused on advancing climate solutions impartially, not backroom deals that are fuelling the crisis,” Kosonen said.
“The significant representation of EU and European countries in this list is alarming and a direct contradiction to the EU’s position to achieve a phase out of fossil fuels at this year’s COP,” Chiara Martinelli, director of Climate Action Network Europe, said in a written statement to POLITICO.
“Any deal with the UAE’s oil and gas companies is a slap in the face of the U.N. process on climate change,” Martinelli added.
The documents also include estimates of ADNOC’s commercial interests in the targeted countries, as well as an outline of energy infrastructure projects led by Masdar, the UAE’s state renewable energy company.
ADNOC’s business ties with China, for example, are valued at $15 billion over the past year, while those with the United Kingdom are worth $4 billion and the Netherlands’ stand at $2 billion.
Every year, the country hosting COP appoints a president to lead negotiations between countries. The president meets foreign dignitaries and is expected to “rais[e] ambition to tackle climate change internationally,” according to the U.N.
Home to some of the largest oil reserves in the world, the UAE has attracted criticism for appointing al-Jaber as COP president in spite of his role as chief of the country’s national oil company. Al-Jaber is also chairman of the board of directors of the national renewable energy company.
In a statement, a COP28 spokesperson said: “The documents referred to in the BBC article are inaccurate and were not used by COP28 in meetings. It is extremely disappointing to see the BBC use unverified documents in their reporting.”
This article has been updated to clarify Ahmed al-Jaber’s role at the national renewable energy company and to add comments fro, COP28 and Greenpeace.
This article is part of the Road to COP special report, presented by SQM.
Last week’s surprise deal between China and the United States may provide a boost to the climate talks in Dubai — but the two powers remain at odds on tough questions such as how quickly to shut down coal and who should provide climate aid to developing nations.
The world’s top two drivers of climate change are also divided by a thicket of disagreements on trade, security, human rights and economic competition.
The good news is that Washington and Beijing are talking to each other again and restarting some of their technical cooperation on climate issues, after a yearlong freeze. That may still not be enough to get nearly 200 nations to commit to far greater climate action at the talks that begin Nov. 30.
The two superpowers’ latest detente creates the right “mood music” for the summit, said Alden Meyer, a senior associate at climate think tank E3G. “But it still is not saying that the world’s two largest economies and two largest emitters are fully committed to the scale and pace of reductions that are needed.”
The deal, announced after a meeting this month between U.S. climate envoy John Kerry and his Chinese counterpart Xie Zhenhua, produced an agreement to commit to a series of actions to limit climate pollution. Those include accelerating the shift to renewable energy and widening the variety of heat-trapping gases they will address in their next round of climate targets.
U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping endorsed that type of cooperation after a meeting in California on Wednesday, saying they “welcomed” positive discussions on actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions during this decade, as well as “common approaches” toward a successful climate summit. Biden said he would work with China to address climate finance in developing countries, a major source of friction for the U.S.
“Planet Earth is big enough for the two countries to succeed,” said Xi ahead of his bilateral with Biden.
But the deal leaves some big issues unaddressed, including specific measures for ending their reliance on fossil fuels, the main contributor to global warming. Andthe two countries are a long way from the days when a surprise U.S.-Chinese agreement to cooperate on climate change had the power to land a landmark global pact.
That puts the nations in a dramatically different place than in 2014, when Xi and then-President Barack Obama made a historic pledge to jointly cut their planet-warming pollution, paving the way for the landmark Paris Agreement to land in 2015.
Even a surprise joint deal between the two nations in 2021 failed to ease friction, with China emerging at the last minute to oppose language calling for a phase-out of coal power. The summit ended with a less ambitious “phase-down.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi speaks after receiving the Order of Propitious Clouds with Special Grand Cordon, Taiwan’s highest civilian honour | Handout/Getty Image
The two countries’ struggles to find comity have come at the worst possible moment — at a time when rapid action is crucial to preventing climate catastrophe. A growing number of factors has threatened to widen the U.S.-Chinese wedge further, including their competition for supremacy in the market for clean energy.
Two nations at odds
While the U.S. has contributed more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than any other nation during the past 150 years, China is now the world’s largest climate polluter — though not on a per capita basis — and it will need to stop building new coal-fired power for the world to stand a chance of limiting rising temperatures.
The recent agreement hints at that possibility by stating that more renewables would enable reductions in the generation of oil, gas and coal, helping China peak its emissions ahead of its current targets.
The challenge will be bridging the countries’ diverging approaches to climate issues.
The Biden administration is urging a rapid end to coal-fired power, which is waning in the U.S., even as it permits more oil drilling and ramps up exports of natural gas — much of it destined for Asia.
At the same time, it wants the United States to claim a larger role in the clean energy manufacturing industry that China now dominates, and is seeking to loosen China’s stranglehold on supply chains for products such as solar panels, electric cars and the minerals that go into them. It’s also pressuring Beijing to contribute to U.N. climate funds, saying China’s historic status as a developing country no longer shields it from its responsibility to pay.
China sees the U.S. position as a direct challenge to its economic growth and energy security.
Beijing wants to protect the use of coal and defend developing countries’ access to fossil fuels. It has also backed emerging economies’ demands that rich countries pay more to help them deploy clean energy and adapt to the effects of a warmer world. China says it already helps developing countries through South-South cooperation and points to a clause in the 2015 Paris Agreement that says developed countries should lead on climate finance.
Hanging over the talks is also the prospect of a change of administration in the U.S., and continued efforts by Republicans to vilify Beijing and accuse the Biden administration of supporting Chinese companies through its climate policies and investments. And as China’s response to Pelosi’s trip underscored, climate cooperation remains hostage to other tensions in the two countries’ relationship, a dynamic likely to heighten in the coming year as both Taiwan and the U.S. hold presidential elections.
One challenge is that China doesn’t seem to see much to gain from offering more ambitious climate actions amid worsening relations with other countries, said Kevin Tu, a non-resident fellow at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University and an adjunct professor at the School of Environment at Beijing Normal University.
“In the past several years, China has voluntarily upgraded its climate ambitions a few times amid rising geopolitical tensions,” Tu said, pointing to its 2020 pledge to peak and then zero out its emissions. “So China does not necessarily have very strong incentive to further upgrade its climate ambition.”
The divide between the two nations has created a dilemma for some small island nations that often walk a fine line between negotiating alongside China at climate talks while pushing for more action to scale back fossil fuels.
The U.S. and China remain at odds on how quickly to shut down coal and who should provide climate aid to developing nations | Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images
“The U.S. is trying to drag everyone to talk about an immediate coal phase-out,” Ralph Regenvanu, climate minister for the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu, said during a recent call with reporters, calling the effort a “U.S.-versus-China thing.”
“But we also need to talk about no more oil or gas as well,” he added.
Operating on its own terms
The dynamic between China and the U.S. will either drag down or bolster the ambitions of countries updating their national climate pledges, a process that begins at the close of COP28. Nations are already woefully behind cuts needed to hit the goals they laid out in Paris.
China’s new 10-year targets will be crucial for meeting those marks, given that China accounts for close to 30 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and that it plans to build dozens of coal-fired power plants in the coming years. The U.S., and many other countries, will be looking for greater commitments from China — whether that’s modifying what it means by phasing down coal or setting more stringent targets.
China has pledged to peak its carbon emissions before 2030 and zero them out before 2060,a decadelater than the United States has promised to reach net-zero. Beijing is unlikely to accelerate that timeline, in part because — analysts say — its philosophy is fundamentally different from that of the U.S.: underpromise and overdeliver.
Even without committing to more action, China’s massive investments in low-carbon energy installations — twice that of the United States — may inadvertently help the country achieve its peaking target early, some analysts say.
A complicated picture
If the Trump years drove China further from America, the global pandemic and resulting economic slowdown that started during his final year didn’t bring it closer. And the energy crunch stemming from Russia’s war with Ukraine cemented China’s drive for reliable energy to meet the rising needs of its 1.4 billion people. That created a coal boom.
Meanwhile, China heavily subsidized the expansion of wind, solar and electric vehicle production. Its clean energy supply chain dominance has lowered the global costs for those technologies but drawn scorn from the U.S. as it tries to rebuild its own domestic manufacturing base.
China has turned more combative in response. Rather than work with the U.S. to make joint announcements on climate action, Xi has made clear that China’s climate policy won’t be dictated by others. At G20 meetings, China has aligned with Saudi Arabia and Russia in opposing language aimed at phasing out fossil fuels.
“At the end of the day, it’s harder to make a claim that China needs the U.S. and it’s harder to make the claim that the U.S. can rely on China,” said Cory Combs, a senior analyst at policy consulting firm Trivium China.
Wealthy countries’ inability to deliver promised climate aid to vulnerable countries hasn’t helped. While China remains among the bloc of developing nations in calling for more action on climate finance, it also points to the investments it’s making in the Global South through its Belt and Road infrastructure initiative and bilateral aid.
A foreign diplomat who asked for anonymity to speak openly said China has resisted pressure to contribute money to a climate fund that would help developing countries rebuild after climate disasters and would likely push back against a focus on its continued build out of coal-fired power plants.
US climate envoy John Kerry sits next to China’s special climate envoy Xie Zhenhua | Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images
“Anything that would signal that they would need to do more is something that gets blocked,” the person said.
China did release a plan earlier this month to cut emissions of the potent greenhouse methane, delivering on a promise it had made in a joint declaration with the U.S. at climate talks in 2021. But it has still not signed onto a global methane pledge led by the U.S. and the European Union.
All that amounts to a complicated picture for the U.S.-Chinese relationship and its broader impact on global climate outcomes.
“The U.S.-China talks will help stabilize the politics when countries meet in the UAE, but critical issues such as a fossil fuel phase-out still require much [further] political efforts,” said Li Shuo, incoming director of the China climate hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute.
“It’s very much about setting a floor,” and the talks in Dubai still need to build out from there, Shuo added.
He argues in a recent paper that China will subscribe to targets it sees as achievable and will continue toside with developing countries on climate finance. Chinese government officials are cautious about what they’re willing to commit to internationally, which sometimes serves as a disincentive for them to be more ambitious, he said.
The calculation is likely to be different for Biden’s team, who “want a headline that the world agrees to push China,” said David Waskow, who leads the World Resources Institute’s international climate initiative.
Not impossible
The power of engagement can’t be completely written off, and in the past it has proven to have a positive effect on the U.S.-China relationship.
“[Climate] sort of was a positive pillar in the relationship,” said Todd Stern, Obama’s former chief climate negotiator. “And it came to be a thing where when the two sides have come to get together, it was like, ‘What can we get done on climate?’”
Engagement with Chinaat the state and local level and among academics and research institutes has potential — in large part because it’s less political, said Joanna Lewis, a professor at Georgetown University who closely tracks China’s climate change approach.
There could also be opportunities to separate climate from broader bilateral tensions.
“I do feel like there’s that willingness to say, ‘We recognize our roles, we recognize our ability to have that catalytic effect on the international community’s actions,’” said Nate Hultman, director of the University of Maryland’s Center for Global Sustainability and a former senior adviser to Kerry. “It doesn’t solve all the world’s issues going into the COP, but it gives a really strong boost to international discussions around what we know we need to do.”
Sara Schonhardt and Zack Colman reported, and Phelim Kine contributed reporting, from Washington, D.C.
This article is part of the Road to COP special report, presented by SQM.The article is produced with full editorial independence by POLITICO reporters and editors. Learn more about editorial content presented by outside advertisers.
This article is part of the Road to COP special report, presented by SQM.
LONDON — World leaders will touch down in Dubai next week for a climate change conference they’re billing yet again as the final off-ramp before catastrophe. But war, money squabbles and political headaches back home are already crowding the fate of the planet from the agenda.
The breakdown of the Earth’s climate has for decades been the most important yet somehow least urgent of global crises, shoved to one side the moment politicians face a seemingly more acute problem. Even in 2023 — almost certainly the most scorching year in recorded history, with temperatures spawning catastrophic floods, wildfires and heat waves across the globe — the climate effort faces a bewildering array of distractions, headwinds and dismal prospects.
“The plans to achieve net zero are increasingly under attack,” former U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May, who set her country’s goal of reaching climate neutrality into law, told POLITICO.
The best outcome for the climate from the 13-day meeting, which is known as COP28 and opens Nov. 30, would be an unambiguous statement from almost 200 countries on how they intend to hasten their plans to cut fossil fuels, alongside new commitments from the richest nations on the planet to assist the poorest.
But the odds against that happening are rising. Instead, the U.S. and its European allies are still struggling to cement a fragile deal with developing countries about an international climate-aid fund that had been hailed as the historic accomplishment of last year’s summit. Meanwhile, a populist backlash against the costs of green policies has governments across Europe pulling back — a reverse wave that would become an American-led tsunami if Donald Trump recaptures the White House next year.
And across the developing world, the rise of energy and food prices stoked by the pandemic and the Ukraine war has caused inflation and debt to spiral, heightening the domestic pressure on climate-minded governments to spend their money on their most acute needs first.
Even U.S. President Joe Biden, whose 2022 climate law kicked off a boom of clean-energy projects in the U.S., has endorsed fossil fuel drilling and pipeline projects under pressure to ease voter unease about rising fuel costs.
Add to all that the newest Mideast war that began with Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7.
On the upside, investment in much of the green economy is also surging. Analysts are cautiously opining that China’s emissions may have begun to decline, several years ahead of Beijing’s schedule.And the Paris-based International Energy Agency projects that global fossil fuel demand could peak this decade, with coal use plummeting and oil and gas plateauing afterward. Spurring these trends is a competition among powers such as China, the United States, India and the European Union to build out and dominate clean-energy industries.
But the fossil fuel industry is betting against a global shift to green, instead investing its profits from the energy crisis into plans for long-term expansion of its core business.
The air of gloom among many supporters of global climate action is hard to miss, as is the sense that global warming will not be the sole topic on leaders’ minds when they huddle in back rooms.
“It’s getting away from us,” Tim Benton, director of the Chatham House environment and society center, said during a markedly downbeat discussion among climate experts at the think tank’s lodgings on St James’ Square in London earlier this month. “Where is the political space to drive the ambition that we need?”
Fog of war
The most acute distraction from global climate work is the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. The conflagration is among many considerations the White House is weighing in Biden’s likely decision not to attend the summit, one senior administration official told POLITICO this month. Other leaders are also reconsidering their schedules, said one senior government official from a European country, who was granted anonymity to speak about the sensitive diplomacy of the conference.
The war is also likely to push its way onto the climate summit’s unofficial agenda: Leaders of big Western powers who are attending will spend at least some of their diplomatically precious face-time with Middle East leaders discussing — not climate — but the regional security situation, said two people familiar with the planning for COP28 who could not be named for similar reasons. According to a preliminary list circulated by the United Arab Emirates, Israeli President Isaac Herzog or Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will attend the talks.
A threat even exists that the conference could be canceled or relocated, should a wider regional conflict develop, Benton said.
The UAE’s COP28 presidency isn’t talking about that, at least publicly. “We look forward to hosting a safe, inclusive COP beginning at the end of November,” said a spokesperson in an emailed statement. But the strained global relations have already thrown the location of next years’ COP29 talks into doubt because Russia has blocked any EU country from hosting the conference, which is due to be held in eastern or central Europe.
The upshot is that the bubble of global cooperation that landed the Paris climate agreement in 2015 has burst. “We have a lot of more divisive narratives now,” Laurence Tubiana, the European Climate Foundation CEO who was one of the drafters of the Paris deal, said at the same meeting at Chatham House.
The Ukraine war and tensions between the U.S. and China in particular have widened the gap between developed and developing countries, Benton told POLITICO in an email.
Now, “the Hamas-Israel war potentially creates significant new fault lines between the Arab world and many Western countries that are perceived to be more pro-Israeli,” he said. “The geopolitical tensions arising from the war could create leverage that enables petrostates (many of which are Muslim) to shore up the status quo.”
Add to that the as yet unknown impact on already high fossil fuel commodity prices, said Kalee Kreider, president of the Ridgely Walsh public affairs consultancy and a former adviser to U.S. Vice President Al Gore. “Volatility doesn’t usually help raise ambition.”
The Biden administration’s decisions to approve a tranche of new fossil fuel production and export projects will undermine U.S. diplomacy at COP28, said Ed Markey, a Democratic U.S. senator from Massachusetts.
“You can’t preach temperance from a barstool, and the United States is running a long tab,” he said.
U.N. climate talks veterans have seen this program before. “No year over the past three decades has been free of political, economic or health challenges,” said former U.N. climate chief Patricia Espinosa, who now heads the consulting firm onepoint5. “We simply can’t wait for the perfect conditions to address climate change. Time is a luxury we no longer have — if we ever did.”
The EU backlash
Before the Mideast’s newest shock to the global energy system, the war in Ukraine exposed Europe’s energy dependence on Russia — and initially galvanized the EU to accelerate efforts to roll out cleaner alternatives.
But in the past year, persistent inflation has worn away that zeal. Businesses and citizens worry about anything that might add to the financial strain, and this has frayed a consensus on climate change that had held for the past four years among left, center and center right parties across much of the 27-country bloc.
In recent months, conservative members of the European Parliament have attacked several EU green proposals as excessive, framing themselves as pragmatic environmentalists ahead of Europe-wide elections next year. Reinvigorated far-right parties across the bloc are also using the green agenda to attack more mainstream parties, a trend that is spooking the center.
Germany’s government was almost brought down this year by a law that sought to ban gas boilers — with the Greens-led economy ministry retreating to a compromise. In France, President Emmanuel Macron has joined a growing chorus agitating for a “regulatory pause” on green legislation.
If Europe’s struggles emerge at COP28, the ripple effect could be global, said Simone Tagliapietra, a senior fellow at the Brussels-based Bruegel think tank.
The “EU has established itself as the global laboratory for climate neutrality,” he said. “But now it needs to deliver on the experiment, or the world (which is closely watching) will assume this just does not work. And that would be a disaster for all of us.”
U.K. retreats
The world is also watching the former EU member that stakes a claim to be the climate leader of the G7: the U.K.
London has prided itself on its green credentials ever since former Prime Minister May enacted a 2019 law calling for net zero by 2050 — making her the first leader of a major economy to do so.
According to May’s successor Boris Johnson, net zero was good for the planet, good for voters, good for the economy. But under current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, the messaging has transformed. Net zero remains the target — but it comes with a “burden” on working people.
In a major speech this fall, Sunak rolled back plans to ban new petrol and diesel car sales by 2030, bringing the U.K. into line with the EU’s 2035 date. With half an eye on Germany’s travails, he said millions of households would be exempted from the gas boiler ban expected in 2035.
In making his arguments for a “pragmatic” approach to net zero, Sunak frequently draws on the talking points of net zero-skeptics. Why should the citizens of the U.K., which within its own borders produces just 1 percent of global emissions, “sacrifice even more than others?”
The danger, said one EU climate diplomat — granted anonymity to discuss domestic policy of an allied country — was that other countries around the COP28 negotiating table would hear that kind of rhetoric from a capital that had led the world — and repurpose it to make their own excuses.
Sunak’s predecessor May sees similar risks.
“Nearly a third of all global emissions originate from countries with territorial emissions of 1 per cent or less,” May said. “If we all slammed on the brakes, it would make our net zero aspirations impossible to achieve.”
Trump’s back
The U.S., the largest producer of industrial carbon pollution in modern history, has been a weathervane on climate depending on who controls its governing branches.
When Republicans regained control of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2022, it created a major drag on Biden’s promise to provide $11.4 billion in annual global climate finance by 2024.
Securing this money and much more, developing countries say, is vital to any progress on global climate goals at COP28. Last year, on the back of the pandemic and the energy price spike, global debt soared to a record $92 trillion. This cripples developing countries’ ability to build clean energy and defend themselves against — or recover from — hurricanes, floods, droughts and fires.
Even when the money is there, the politics can be challenging. Multibillion-dollar clean energy partnerships that the G7 has pursued to shift South Africa, Indonesia, Vietnam and India off coal power are struggling to gain acceptance from the recipients.
Yet even more dire consequences await if Trump wins back the presidency next year.
A Trump victory would put the world’s largest economy a pen stroke away from quitting the Paris Agreement all over again — or, even more drastically, abandoning the entire international regime of climate pacts and summits. The thought is already sending a chill: Negotiations over a fund for poorer countries’ climate losses and damage, which Republicans oppose, include talks on how to make its language “change-of-government-proof” in light of a potential Trump victory, said Michai Robertson, lead finance negotiator for a bloc of island states.
More concretely for reining in planet-heating gases, Trump would be in position to approve legislation eliminating all or part of the Inflation Reduction Act. Biden’s signature climate law included $370 billion in incentives for clean energy, electric vehicles and other carbon-cutting efforts – though the actual spending is likely to soar even higher due to widespread interest in its programs and subsidies – and accounts for a bulk of projected U.S. emissions cuts this decade.
House Republicans have attempted to claw back parts of Biden’s climate law several times. That’s merely a political messaging effort for now, thanks to a Democrat-held Senate and a sure veto from Biden, but the prospects flip if the GOP gains full control of Congress and White House.
Under a plan hatched by Tubiana and backed by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, countries would in the future log their state and local government climate plans with the U.N., in an attempt to undergird the entire system against a second Republican blitzkrieg.
The U.S. isn’t the only place where climate action is on the ballot, Benton told the conference at Chatham House on Nov. 1.
News on Sunday that Argentina had elected as president right-wing populist Javier Milei — a Trump-like libertarian — raised the prospect of a major Latin American economy walking away from the Paris Agreement, either by formally withdrawing or by reneging on its promises.
Elections are also scheduled in 2024 for the EU, India, Pakistan, Taiwan, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Russia, and possibly the U.K.
“A quarter of the world’s population is facing elections in the next nine months,” he said. “If everyone goes to the right and populism becomes the order of the day … then I won’t hold out high hopes for Paris.”
Zack Colman reported from Washington, D.C. Suzanne Lynch also contributed reporting from Brussels.
This article is part of the Road to COP special report, presented by SQM.The article is produced with full editorial independence by POLITICO reporters and editors. Learn more about editorial content presented by outside advertisers.
BRUSSELS — When EU digital chief Věra Jourová sat down in Beijing with a senior Chinese official in September, her complaint list was as long as the 11-course dinner her host had prepared.
Sore points included Beijing’s disinformation campaigns, electoral interference, state control over Artificial Intelligence development, and ties with Russia.
Predictably, Jourová didn’t get many straight answers from her counterpart, Vice Premier Zhang Guoqing. It’s a nail-biting time to be a politician in China, as major figures such as Qin Gang and Li Shangfu have recently been purged as foreign and defense ministers, and no one wants to be accused of making big concessions to the West.
Then, in a sudden surprise initiative, Zhang said he was ready to offer a goodie to European businesses facing an increasingly hostile political environment in President Xi Jinping’s China. He explained Beijing was willing to move on data flows — a sphere where China has been trying to curb the ability of foreign companies to export data generated within the country. All that data is a goldmine for European business, but China guards it zealously.
A deal on data flows was a big call from Zhang, but can be explained by China’s growing fears about its precarious economy. While security is front-and-center to Chinese policymakers, they also know they have to offer some big carrots to keep foreign investors onside.
“You could feel that something clicked on the spot,” said an EU official with knowledge of the discussion, recalling the heated debates on data over Chinese delicacies like beef in lotus leaves and dim sum.
Although the dinner happened in September, three officials with knowledge of China’s switching tack have only now explained how the change of heart in Beijing came about.
“The vice-premier told her he understood the proposal makes sense, and asked the relevant authorities to take the matter forward,” the first official said. Zhang immediately turned to his junior colleagues from the Cyberspace Administration of China and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. “You had a feeling that that was the moment the big guy gave the go-ahead.”
According to another official, when Trade Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis visited Beijing shortly after Jourová, he received the final confirmation of the changes to the data laws from his counterpart, Vice Premier He Lifeng, an influential economic aide to President Xi Jinping.
Shortly afterward, China agreed to reverse the burden of proof under the relevant laws, allowing most data stored in China to be transferred out of the country unless expressly excluded by the authorities. EU officials, though, cautioned that they’ll still wait to see how Chinese authorities at all levels implement the new provision.
Special gift to Europe
Even though U.S., Japanese and other companies had also been pushing for this kind of measure from Beijing on data, China offered the diplomatic win to the EU.
The European Union Chamber of Commerce, among the first to be notified when Beijing made the legal revision, sent Jourová a congratulatory letter, seen by POLITICO.
China’s Vice Premier Zhang Guoqing | Lintao Zhang/Getty Images
“Make no mistake, China is merely fixing a problem of its own making,” the second official noted. “It’s not an act of benevolence. It’s an act of self-correction.”
Still, that self-correction is far from a given under a nationalistic government facing stiff competition from the U.S.
Increasingly, China’s uncompromising ideological focus is forcing many companies to adjust their business strategies, including by taking their new investments out of China. Indeed, the EU and the rest of the G7 rich democracies are calling on their companies to “de-risk,” as Russia’s war against Ukraine prompts concerns about a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
According to a report issued Wednesday by Penta, a business research group, one in five EU policymakers considers China to be the most pressing issue facing the bloc — while only 16 percent of people say they’re open to working with companies from China, bottom of the list.
It’s against this backdrop that Beijing wants — and needs — to throw some bones to the EU.
“For sure there’s a lot of self-interest for China [to give EU the data deal], where there’s a sharp drop of foreign direct investment which China desperately needs,” the first official said.
European Council President Charles Michel and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen | Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP via Getty Images
Over the past three months, Beijing has welcomed a long line of EU officials in a thaw from the 2021 low point where China’s sanctions on EU politicians and intellectuals were followed by an indefinite freeze of a massive EU-China trade deal, which remains unratified.
Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and her European Council counterpart Charles Michel are expected to attend an EU-China Summit in December and meet Chinese President Xi Jinping.
EU officials should use China’s underperforming economy — most specifically in the real estate sector — as leverage, according to Luisa Santos, deputy director of BusinessEurope, a Brussels-based lobby group, who is currently visiting China.
Speaking before her trip, Santos described the Chinese economy as “not in a great situation,” adding that EU officials should seize this opportunity to convince Beijing to open up further.
“China needs to recognize that what is happening in our bilateral relationship is something that is not sustainable,” she said.
Big Tech companies are coming out of the woodwork to challenge the European Commission’s new enforcement regime for digital competition with TikTok and Meta Platforms filing legal appeals this week.
Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta and Microsoft are all considered “gatekeeper” companies under the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the European Union’s new digital rulebook, for 22 core online services they run — everything from app stores and social networks to messaging services and online marketplaces.
Meta on Wednesday was the first to say it had filed a legal challenge to the EU’s revamped enforcement regime before the European Union’s General Court, disputing EU officials’ decision to bring its Marketplace and Messenger services in scope of the new digital competition rulebook.
TikTok’s owner ByteDance on Thursday argued its video-sharing platform was wrongly labeled as a social network under the new law. The firm also took issue with being targeted as a digital giant when it sees itself as a challenger to the other “gatekeeper” companies that have a vast ecosystem of digital services.
The six targeted firms had until November 16 to file their legal paperwork. Some already indicated that they aren’t happy with the new labels the Commission has given them, according to filings published online in recent weeks.
Already some companies are making changes to how they run their businesses in Europe. Facebook and Instagram will offer paid ad-free subscriptions in the EU. Google has been opening up data sharing as part of German and Italian antitrust cases.
Their other option is to convince European Union judges to overturn the Commission’s decisions.
But we don’t understand!
Companies designated as gatekeepers can ask the EU’s General Court to cancel individual decisions. That’s precisely what Meta and TikTok did in their filings Wednesday.
Alfonso Lamadrid, a partner at law firm Garrigues, said they could claim that they don’t understand why certain services were caught by the law and that EU officials failed to give “sufficient reasoning.”
They could also file appeals — either now or later — on the Commission’s probes to determine whether Apple’s iMessage, along with Microsoft’s Bing search engine, its Edge web browser and its advertising service, should be considered core platform services. There’s a February 6 deadline to wrap those up. Another probe into Apple’s iPadOS has until September 6 next year.
Lamadrid — who has worked with Google on antitrust challenges including the tech giant’s recent court appeal against an antitrust fine for its shopping service — said he doesn’t think Big Tech firms “will be taking the decision to appeal very lightly.”
Who might grumble?
Meta and TikTok aren’t the only gatekeepers unhappy with the Commission’s decisions so far.
Meta isn’t the only gatekeeper unhappy with the Commission’s decisions so far | Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Apple previously argued with the Commission that its services shouldn’t be subject to the new rules, according to the Commission documents.
Apple tried unsuccessfully to convince officials that its App Store comes in five separate versions for different devices and that its Safari browser in three, which would reduce the number of active users for each service. Apple didn’t respond to a request for comment.
ByteDance told the Commission earlier that its viral video app is “about content discovery, not about establishing or maintaining real-world connections,” according to an EU decision published last month.
Telecoms companies are also unhappy. They told the Commission it should designate Apple’s iMessage as a core platform service that needs to follow DMA curbs, according to a letter to Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton seen by POLITICO.
What are the others saying?
Microsoft is classified as a gatekeeper for its social network LinkedIn and Windows PC operating service. Microsoft spokesperson Robin Koch said in September that the tech giant “accepts our designation as a gatekeeper under the Digital Markets Act and will continue to work with the European Commission” to meet its obligations.
Alphabet — which has eight core platform services targeted under the DMA, including Google Search and web browser Chrome — said in September it will “work closely with the European Commission and other stakeholders” and would “make changes that meet the new requirements while protecting the user experience.”
Alphabet — which has eight core platform services targeted under the DMA, including Google Search and web browser Chrome — said in September it will “work closely with the European Commission and other stakeholders” and would “make changes that meet the new requirements while protecting the user experience.” | Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Amazon’s marketplace and advertising businesses were both labeled as core platform services under the DMA in September. The company said at the time it is “committed to delivering services that meet our customers’ requirements within Europe’s evolving regulatory landscape” and would “work constructively with the European Commission as we finalize our implementation plans.”
Amazon earlier this year did challenge another digital label in the EU, asking a court to cancel the Commission’s declaration that it was a Very Large Online Platform.
But with just four months to go now until the rules are enforceable, any challenge could just poke the bureaucratic bear.
“This is now an important moment in time for compliance,” Lamadrid said, “so it’s not ideal to have pending court proceedings while you’re trying to negotiate with the Commission on compliance… I don’t think it’s in the company’s best interest to antagonize the Commission.”
This article was updated on November 16 to include recent developments.
SARCELLES, France — In the usually lively “Little Jerusalem” neighborhood of Sarcelles, the only people loitering are gun-toting French soldiers on patrol.
Since Hamas’ deadly assault against Israel on October 7, this largely Jewish enclave in the northern suburbs of Paris has gone eerily quiet, with locals keeping their movements to a minimum, and with restaurants and cafés bereft of their regular clientele — fearing an increasing number of antisemitic attacks across France.
“People are afraid, in a state of shock, they’ve lost their love for life” said Alexis Timsit, manager of a kosher pizzeria. “My business is down 50 percent, there’s no bustle in the street, nobody taking a stroll,” he said in front of a large screen broadcasting round-the-clock coverage of the war.
France has seen more antisemitic incidents in the last three weeks than over the past year: 501 offenses ranging from verbal abuse and antisemitic graffiti, to death threats and physical assaults have been reported. Antisemitic acts under investigation include groups gathering in front of synagogues shouting threats and graffiti such as the words “killing Jews is a duty” sprayed outside a stadium in Carcassonne in the southwest. The interior minister has deployed extra police and soldiers at Jewish schools, places of worship and community centers since the attacks, and in Sarcelles that means soldiers guard school pick-ups and drop-offs.
“I try not to show my daughter that I’m afraid,” said Suedu Avner, who hopes the conflict won’t last too long. But a certain panic has taken hold in the community in the wake of the Hamas attacks, in some cases spreading like wildfire on WhatsApp groups. On one particularly tense day, parents even pulled their children out of school.
France is home to the largest Jewish community outside Israel and the U.S., estimated at about 500,000, and one of the largest Muslim communities in Europe. Safety concerns aren’t new to France’s Jewish community, as to some degree, it has remained on alert amid a string of terror attacks on French soil by Islamists over the last decade.
Israel’s war against Hamas is now threatening the fragile peace in places like Sarcelles, one of the poorest cities in France, where thousands of Jews live alongside mostly Muslim neighbors of North African origin, from immigrant backgrounds, and in low-income housing estates.
Authorities meanwhile are often torn by conflicting imperatives — between the Jews, who are fearful for their safety, and the Muslims, who feel an affinity for the Palestinian cause. During his visit to Israel and the Palestinian Territories, French President Emmanuel Macron himself struggled to strike a difficult balance between supporting Israel in its fight against Hamas, and calling for the preservation of Palestinian lives.
A community under threat
For Timsit, the threat is very real. His pizzeria was ransacked by rioters a couple of months ago, when the fatal shooting of a teenager by a police officer in a Paris suburb caused unrest in poor housing estates across France.
The attack was not antisemitic, he said, but was a violent reminder. In 2014, a pro-Palestinian demonstration protesting Israel’s ground offensive against Gaza degenerated into an antisemitic riot against Jewish shops. “All you need is a spark to set it off again,” said Timsit.
France’s Jews have seen an increase in antisemitic attacks since the early 2000s, a reality that cuts deep into the national psyche given the memories of France’s collaboration with Nazi Germany in the Second World War.
“The fear of violence [in France] appeared with the Second Intifada,” said Marc Hecker, a specialist on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with IFRI think tank, with reference to the uprising against Israeli occupation in Palestinian Territories.
Patrick Haddad, the mayor of Sarcelles, is working to keep the communities together | Clea Caulcutt/POLITICO
“Every time the situation in the Near East flares up, there’s an increase in antisemitic offenses in France,” he added. The threat of antisemitic attacks has led to increased security at Jewish schools and synagogues, and has discouraged many French Jews from wearing their kippahs in some areas, according to Jewish organizations.
In addition to low-level attacks, French Jews are also a prime target for Islamists as France battles a wave of terrorist attacks that have hit schools, bars and public buildings, among other targets, in the last decade. In 2012, three children and a rabbi were shot dead at a Jewish school in Toulouse at point-blank range by Mohamed Merah, a gunman who had claimed allegiance to al-Qaida. In 2015, four people were killed at a kosher supermarket near Paris.
While Hamas, al-Qaida and ISIS networks are separate, Hecker warned that the scale of Hamas’s attack against Israel has “galvanized” Islamists across the board, once again sparking deep fears among France’s Jews.
Delicate local balance
Many of Sarcelles’ Jews are Sephardic — that is, of Spanish descent — and ended up in North Africa when Spain expelled its Jewish population in the Middle Ages. Most came to France after having lived in the former French colonies of Algeria and Tunisia. Sarcelles’ Muslim population therefore shares a cultural and linguistic history with its Jewish community, and the two groups have lived together in relative harmony for decades.
In his office, the mayor of Sarcelles, Patrick Haddad, stands under the twin gazes of Nelson Mandela and Marianne, the symbol of French republicanism, with pictures of both adorning his wall, as he reflects on the thus-far peaceful coexistence among the local population.
“There’s been not a single antisemitic attack in Sarcelles since the attacks … It’s been over two weeks, and we are holding things together,” he said, smiling despite the noticeable strain. Relations between the city’s Muslims and Jews are amicable, said Haddad, and locals on the streets are proud of their friendship with people of a different religion.
Israel’s war on Hamas is testing relations in Sarcelles, one of France’s poorest cities | Clea Caulcutt/POLITICO and Bertrand Guay/AFP via Getty Images
“Relations are easy, we share a similar culture, a lot of the Jews are originally from Tunisia, Algeria, they even speak some Arabic,” said Naima, a Muslim retiree who did not want to give her surname to protect her privacy. “My family, my husband and my children respect the Jews, but I know many who are angry with Israel,” said Naima, who moved to France from Algeria as a young adult.
“I’ve got Muslim friends, we get along fine, we don’t go around punching each other,” said Avner.
But for many, politics — and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — is off-limits, and communities live relatively separate lives, with most Jewish pupils enrolled in religious schools. Many Jews from Sarcelles have also chosen to emigrate to Israel in recent years.
But Israel’s image as the ultimate, secure sanctuary for Jews has been shattered after Hamas killed more than 1,400 Israelis in horrific attacks, said Haddad.
“Where are [Jews] going to go if they are not safe in Israel? People’s fears have been magnified, they fear what is happening here, and they are anguished about what is happening in the ‘sanctuary state’ for Jews,” he said.
In a twist of the many tragic reversals of Jewish history, several French families have returned from Israel since the Hamas attacks to find temporary shelter in the relative peace of Sarcelles.
BEIRUT — Once again, the Lebanese are glued to their TV sets and are compulsively checking their cell phones, following every twist and turn of skirmishes on the border, trying to weigh up whether another war is imminent.
In desperation, they are asking themselves how a nation so often shattered by conflict — and pummeled by an economic crisis — is again at risk of tipping back into the abyss.
The chief fear for many Lebanese is that they could soon be the second front of Israel’s war against its Islamist militant enemies, after Hamas’ brutal onslaught against Israel a week ago that killed more than 1,300 people. While most eyes are focused on an expected retaliatory ground assault against Hamas in Gaza, Israeli forces have also declared a 4-kilometer-wide closed military zone on Lebanon’s southern border, where they have exchanged fire with Hezbollah, a Shiite political party and militant group based in Lebanon.
One person close to Hezbollah said the Golan Heights — Syrian land occupied by Israel to the southeast of Lebanon — was shaping up into an especially dangerous flashpoint, saying Hezbollah has moved elite units there in the past few days.
Finger on the trigger
For now, this border fighting appears contained, but Iran’s flurry of regional diplomacy is heightening the anxiety that Tehran could be about to commit its proxies in Hezbollah headlong into the war. Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian warned on Saturday that if Israel doesn’t halt its military campaign in Gaza, then Hezbollah, a key player in the Tehran-orchestrated “axis of resistance,” is “prepared” and has its “finger is on the trigger.”
“There’s still an opportunity to work on an initiative [to end the war] but it might be too late tomorrow,” Amir-Abdollahian told reporters after meeting Hamas’ political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Qatar where they “agreed to continue co-operation” to achieve the group’s goals, according to a Hamas statement.
Mark Regev, an adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told Britain’s Spectator TV his country was ready for Hezbollah, which he labeled a twin of Hamas. “Hezbollah could try to escalate the situation, so my message is clear: if we were caught by surprise by Hamas on Saturday morning, we are not going to be caught by surprise from the north. We are ready, we are prepared. We don’t want a war in the north but if they force one upon us, as I was saying, we are ready and we will win decisively in the north too.”
“That was music to my ears,” said Ruth Boulos, a mother of two, as she sipped coffee at a restaurant in Raouché, one of the most expensive neighborhoods in Beirut, dotted with modern skyscrapers. “Let’s hope Hezbollah listens,” she added.
At nearby tables, mostly well-heeled Lebanese Christian families could be heard debating whether the country will once again be mired in war and whether they should get out now, joining other affluent Lebanese who have been leaving because of the economic crisis that’s left an estimated 85 percent of the population below the poverty line.
Lebanon’s caretaker government has no power to influence the course of events, Prime Minister Najib Mikati has admitted. He told a domestic TV channel Friday that Hezbollah had given him no assurances about whether they will enter the Gaza war or not. “It’s on Israel to stop provoking Hezbollah,” Mikati said in the interview. “I did not receive any guarantees from anyone about [how things could develop] because circumstances are changing,” he said.
Thanks to Lebanon’s hopelessly fractured politics, the country has had no fully functioning government since October 2022. The cabinet only met Thursday amid rising concerns that the border skirmishes might lead to the war’s spillover. It strongly condemned what it called “the criminal acts committed by the Zionist enemy in Gaza.” Ministers later told media the country would be broken by war. Lebanon “could fall apart completely,” Amin Salam, the economy minister, told The National.
Scarred by war
The rocket and artillery skirmishes along the Lebanese border since Hamas launched its terror attack on Israel have been of limited scope but have killed several people, including Reuters videographer Issam Abdallah. They are not, however, entirely out of the ordinary. An officer with the United Nations peacekeepers in southern Lebanon, who asked not to be identified as he’s not authorized to speak with the media, said he thought the skirmishes were mounted to keep Israel guessing.
The Lebanese are no strangers to toppling over the precipice. There are still grim pockmarked reminders dotted around Beirut of the 1975-1990 Lebanese civil war, a brutal sectarian conflict that pitched Shiite, Sunni, Druze and Christians against each other in a prolonged and tortuous quarrel that drew in outside powers, killed an estimated 120,000 people, and triggered an exodus of a million.
In 2006 the country was plunged into war once again when Hezbollah seized the opportunity to strike Israel a fortnight into another war in Gaza. Hezbollah, the Party of God, declared “divine victory” after a month of brutal combat, which concluded when the U.N. brokered a ceasefire. Hezbollah’s capabilities took everyone by surprise, with Israel’s tanks being overwhelmed by “swarm” attacks.
Some see that brief war as the first serious round of an Iran-Israel proxy war, something more than just a continuation of the conflict between Arabs and Israelis.
No one doubts, though, that another full-scale confrontation between Israel and Hezbollah would be of much greater magnitude.
Armed with an estimated 150,000 precision-guided missiles thanks to Iran, which has been maintaining a steady flow of game-changing sophisticated weaponry for years via Syria, Hezbollah has the capability of striking anywhere in Israel and has a force that could easily be compared to a disciplined, well-trained mid-sized European army — but with a difference; Hezbollah has thousands of war-hardened fighters, thanks to its intervention in the Syrian Civil War.
Speculation is rife that air strikes on Damascus and Aleppo airports in Syria on Thursday were a step by Israel to impede Hezbollah’s arms supply line from Iran. Others see it as a warning to Syria not to get involved — Syrian support for Hezbollah could be especially important in the Golan Heights.
Fighting in the vanguard alongside Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, Hezbollah fighters honed their skills in urban warfare. When Hezbollah first intervened in Syria, Israeli defense analysts viewed the foray as a blessing — better to have their Lebanese arch-enemy ensnared there.
But concern rapidly mounted in Israel that Hezbollah was gaining valuable battlefield experience in Syria, especially in managing large-scale, offensive operations, something the Shiite militia had little skill at previously. Other enhanced Hezbollah capabilities from Syria include using artillery cover more effectively, using drones skillfully in reconnaissance and surveillance operations, and improving logistical operations to support big integrated offensives.
A question of timing
But will Hezbollah decide to strike now?
“I don’t think Hezbollah will open a second front,” Paul Salem, president of the Middle East Institute, and a seasoned Lebanon hand, told POLITICO. But he had caveats to add. “That assessment depends on what the Israelis do in Gaza.”
“If Israel moves in a big way in Gaza and begins to get close to either defeating or evicting Hamas, let’s say like the eviction of the PLO from Lebanon in 1982, then at that point Hezbollah and Iran would not want to lose Hamas as an asset in Gaza,” he said.
“That’s a strategic imperative that might spur them to open a second front to make sure that Hamas isn’t defeated. Another factor will be the human toll in Gaza — if it is huge that might force Hezbollah’s hand because of an angry Arab public reaction,” Salem adds.
Tobias Borck, a security research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, said Hezbollah faces a dilemma.
When it fought Israel in 2006 it became very popular across the Arab world, but that flipped when it intervened in Syria with “people asking — even Shiites in its strongholds in southern Lebanon and the Beqaa Valley — what fighting in Syria had to do with resisting Israel, its supposed raison d’être, although it exists really to protect Iran from Israel,” he said.
“Hezbollah has to regain legitimacy and that puts an awful lot of pressure. That’s the worrying factor for me. How can Hezbollah still maintain it is the key player in the ‘axis of resistance’ against Israel and not get involved?” he added.
On Friday, Hezbollah deputy chief Naim Qassem told a rally in the southern Beirut suburbs that the group would not be swayed by calls for it to stay on the sidelines of the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, saying the party was “fully ready” to contribute to the fighting.
“The behind-the-scenes calls with us by great powers, Arab countries, envoys of the United Nations, directly and indirectly telling us not to interfere will have no effect,” he told supporters waving Hezbollah and Hamas flags.
The question remains what that contribution might be.
BERLIN — The political maneuver shaking Germany’s postwar democratic order involves a piece of legislation that is about as mundane as it gets.
Center-right legislators in the eastern German state of Thuringia wanted to cut a local property tax by a small amount — and did so with the support of the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD.
The move broke with years of tradition in which mainstream parties have vowed to maintain a Brandmauer, or firewall, between themselves and the AfD, a party many in a country alert to the legacy of Nazism see as a dire threat to democracy. Even accepting the party’s support, the thinking goes, would legitimize far-right forces or make them salonfähig — socially acceptable.
And so, when parliamentarians from the conservative Christian Democratic Union, or CDU, passed the tax reduction on a late afternoon in September with AfD votes, it sent tremors across the country’s political landscape that still are reverberating.
“For me, a taboo has been broken,” Katrin Göring-Eckardt, a leader of the Greens who hails from Thuringia, said after the vote. “It shows me not only that the firewall is gone, but that there is open collaboration.”
For mainstream parties, and the CDU in particular, the question of how to handle the growing presence of far-right radicals in governing bodies from federal and state parliaments to local councils is likely to grow only more vexing.
That especially is the case in the states of the former East Germany, where the AfD now leads in polls at around 28 percent. Next year, the eastern states of Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg will all hold parliamentary elections. Polls show the party leading in all three states.
The AfD is likely to expand its presence in the parliaments of Bavaria and Hesse when those states vote on Sunday. In Hesse, the AfD is coming close to overtaking German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s center-left Social Democratic Party, according to the latest polls.
The dilemma facing mainstream parties is clear. To work with the AfD means to normalize a party that many believe seeks to subvert the republic from within. But to ostracize the party only alienates its many voters.
The firewall also serves as an unintended political gift, allowing the AfD to depict itself — at a time of high dissatisfaction with mainstream parties — as the clear choice for those who want to send a burn-it-down message to the country’s political establishment.
At the same time, the controversy over the latest vote in Thuringia seems to have played into the AfD’s hands, allowing the party to depict itself as seeking to uphold rather than undermine democracy.
The “‘firewall’ is history — and Thuringia is just the beginning,” AfD party leader Alice Weidel posted on X, formerly Twitter, after the vote. “It’s time to respond to the democratic will of citizens everywhere in Germany.”
Historic fears
Germany’s political leaders are all too aware that the Nazi seizure of power began with democratic electoral success. In fact, it was in Thuringia where, in 1930, the Nazi party first took real governing power in coalition with conservative parties.
The “‘firewall’ is history — and Thuringia is just the beginning,” AfD party leader Alice Weidel posted on X, formerly Twitter, after the vote. “It’s time to respond to the democratic will of citizens everywhere in Germany” | Christof Stache/AFP via Getty Images
That fact was not lost on the CDU’s opponents.
“German conservatism has already been a stirrup holder of fascism,” Janine Wissler, a head of the Left party, told the German Press Agency after the vote. “Back then, too, it started in Thuringia,” she added. “Instead of having learned from that, the CDU is going down a path that’s as dangerous as fire.”
CDU leaders in Thuringia deny the vote on the tax reduction means the firewall is crumbling. They say there was no cooperation with the AfD ahead of the vote (though AfD members say there were discussions between lawmakers).
“I cannot make good, important decisions for the state that provide relief for families and the economy dependent on the fact that the wrong people might agree,” Mario Voigt, the head of the CDU in Thuringia said after the vote.
Friedrich Merz, the national leader of the CDU, has sent mixed signals on the firewall — or at least on what exactly the firewall means. Merz says the CDU will not form coalitions with the AfD but he’s been less clear on whether the CDU will work with the party in other ways.
In a television interview over the summer, he seemed to suggest working with the AfD on the local level was all but inevitable.
Friedrich Merz, the national leader of the CDU, has sent mixed signals on the firewall | Tobias Schwarz/AFP via Getty Images
“We are of course obliged to accept democratic elections,” he said. “And if a district administrator, a mayor is elected there who belongs to the AfD, it’s natural that you look for ways to then continue to work in this city.”
After an uproar ensued, Merz walked back the comment. “There will be no cooperation between the CDU and the AfD at the municipal level either,” he posted on X, formerly Twitter.
After the vote in Thuringia, Merz stood by the CDU leadership of the state. “We don’t go by who agrees, we go by what we think is right in the matter,” he said on German television.
Even some within his own party do not see things that way. Daniel Günther, the CDU premier of the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein, sharply criticized his party colleagues in Thuringia. “As a conservative, I must be able to say plainly and simply the sentence, ‘I do not form majorities with extremists,’” Günther said.
‘Cordon sanitaire’
It’s not the first time Thuringia has been at the center of a controversy over the firewall. In 2020, a little-known politician in the pro-business Free Democratic Party, Thomas Kemmerich, was elected state premier with the support of the CDU and AfD. Then-Chancellor Angela Merkel weighed in to call the vote “unforgivable.”
In the furor that followed, Kemmerich resigned as did the then-head of the CDU faction in the state. But given the AfD’s large presence in the local parliament, the issue was bound to resurface.
It’s not the first time Thuringia has been at the center of a controversy over the firewall | Christof Stache/AFP via Getty Images
The problem is far from Germany’s alone. Mainstream parties are under growing pressure due to the rise of the radical right across Europe.
In France, parties from across the political spectrum have formed a cordon sanitaire, or sanitary cordon, to keep Marine Le Pen, a leader of the far-right National Rally, out of the presidency. But with Le Pen’s party now the biggest opposition group in the National Assembly, the cordon is getting harder to maintain.
In the European Parliament, where a similar cordon has been erected, the center-right European People’s Party has been openly courting the European Conservatives and Reformists, home to Poland’s nationalist Law and Justice party and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s far-right Brothers of Italy party.
In Thuringia, the stakes are even higher as the local branch of the AfD contains some of the party’s most extreme members. State-level intelligence authorities tasked with surveilling anti-constitutional groups have characterized the party’s local branch as extremist.
The leader of the AfD in Thuringia is Björn Höcke, who is set to face trial for using banned Nazi rhetoric. (In 2021, he closed a speech with the phrase “Alles für Deutschland!” or “Everything for Germany!” — a slogan used by Nazi stormtroopers.)
Höcke railed against Holocaust remembrance in Germany and warned of “Volkstod,” the death of the Volk, through “population replacement.” For such views, German courts have ruled that Höcke could justifiably be referred to as a fascist or Nazi.
GERMANY NATIONAL PARLIAMENT ELECTION POLL OF POLLS
LONDON — Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s trade deal with India will not include legally enforceable commitments on labor rights or environmental standards, five people briefed on the text have told POLITICO.
British businesses and unions now fear the deal’s already-finalized labor and environment chapters will undercut U.K. workers’ rights and efforts to combat climate change.
Sunak’s government is racing to score a win with the booming South Asian economy ahead of the 2024 election. His plans for a return trip to India in October with the aim of sealing the pact are still on track.
Sunak and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi added impetus to negotiations when they met on the sidelines of the G20 in New Delhi early this month. The 13th round of talks continues in London this week.
Just days after Sunak’s meeting with Modi, Badenoch’s team shared the deal’s labor and environment chapters with businesses, unions and trade experts on a September 13 briefing call.
Key enforceable dispute resolution powers which the U.K. set out to negotiate are missing from those chapters, said the five people briefed on the text. It means neither London nor New Delhi can hold the other to their climate, environmental and workers’ rights commitments.
Businesses, unions and NGOs now fear the deal could undercut British firms because Indian firms operate to less stringent and expensive environmental and labor standards. Firms and unions say their access to the negotiations was curtailed earlier this year as talks progressed.
“Industry also wants binding commitments — partly for greater certainty, partly because businesses are made up of people who themselves want to be properly treated and to avoid climate catastrophe,” said a senior British businessperson from the services sector briefed on the chapters. They were granted anonymity to speak candidly about the negotiations.
“Suppression of trade unions, child labor and forced labor are all widespread in India,” said Rosa Crawford, trade lead at the Trades Union Congress (TUC) — the largest coalition of unions in Britain. “But the labor chapter that the U.K. government has negotiated cannot be used to clamp down on these abuses and could lead to more good jobs being offshored to exploitative jobs in India.”
The Department for Business and Trade said it does not comment on live negotiations and that it will only sign a deal that benefits the U.K. and its economy.
‘Everyone was deeply unhappy’
At the outset of the talks, the British government committed to negotiating enforceable labor and environment chapters as it laid out its strategic approach. “We remain committed to upholding our high environmental, labour, food safety and animal welfare standards in our trade agreement with India,” the government said in January 2022.
Indian and British officials say the labor and environment chapters are now closed and are not up for discussion. The U.K.’s first post-Brexit trade pacts with Australia and New Zealand have dispute settlement mechanisms in both these chapters. Three people POLITICO spoke to for this piece said it was an achievement in itself that Britain was able to get such chapters in a deal with India.
Businesses, unions and NGOs have all been concerned after Kemi Badenoch closed the key forums in February to carry out a required review of their activities | Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
But, as the U.K.-India deal stands, if either country were to weaken its environmental standards or workers’ rights “the other party would not have recourse to initiate consultations on changes in laws,” said a person familiar with the content of the chapters. “There is no dispute settlement in the environment and labor chapters.”
British firms and unions are also concerned that the pact the EU is negotiating with India has enforceable chapters “bound by sanctions in case the parties don’t comply,” the same person said. Those EU-India chapters are not yet finalized.
British stakeholders “are totally up in arms,” said a former trade department official familiar with the briefing. “Everyone was deeply unhappy.”
Adding enforceable chapters would only slow down negotiations, said an Indian government official. “If you put in too much of these things into a trade deal, then it delays the process.” The U.K. and India are already “bound by” their international commitments on labor and climate, they added.
The deal “is dire for working people because trade unions were excluded from the trade talks,” said the TUC’s Crawford. Nearly three years ago, ministers pitched the idea of involving unions in 11 influential Trade Advisory Groups (TAGs) that gave input on ongoing trade negotiations.
Businesses, unions and NGOs have all been concerned after Britain’s trade chief Kemi Badenoch closed the key forums in February to carry out a required review of their activities. International Trade Minister Nigel Huddleston received officials’ recommendations to restructure the groups in mid-August. A final decision is expected before the end of the year.
With 40-50 people on the U.K. government’s current briefing calls about the India trade deal there’s little businesses or unions can do to feed into negotiations. Officials can “only really be in transmit mode,” said a business representative familiar with the briefings.
“What this means in real terms is that decisions are being made about the future of people’s livelihoods, people’s health, and the environment we all depend on without any input from those who will be impacted,” said Hannah Conway, trade and agriculture policy advisor at the NGO Transform Trade.
“It’s crucial,” she said, “that the government addresses its democratic deficit on trade policy by undertaking meaningful consultation with civil society and businesses.”
“It’s high time the government rethinks its approach,” said the TUC’s Crawford, “and includes unions in trade talks — that’s how you get trade deals that work for working people.”
Warsaw has stopped supplying weapons to Kyiv and is focusing on arming itself instead, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said Wednesday, amid a dispute over Ukraine’s agricultural exports.
“We are no longer transferring weapons to Ukraine, because we are now arming Poland with more modern weapons,” Morawiecki said in an appearance on Polish television channel Polsat, according to European Pravda. “If you don’t want to be on the defensive, you have to have something to defend yourself with,” he added, insisting, though, that the move wouldn’t endanger Ukraine’s security.
Morawiecki’s terse comments came as tensions escalated between Kyiv and the EU over the past week, after the European Commission moved to allow Ukrainian grain sales across the bloc, ending restrictions on grain imports which five eastern EU countries originally sought to protect their farmers from competition.
Poland, Hungary and Slovakia responded to the Commission’s move by imposing unilateral bans on Ukrainian grain imports, in apparent violation of the EU’s internal market rules. Kyiv struck back by filing lawsuits against the three countries at the World Trade Organization.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Tuesday took a thinly veiled swipe at those imposing grain bans, telling the U.N. General Assembly: “It is alarming to see how some in Europe, some of our friends in Europe, play out solidarity in a political theater — making a thriller from the grain. They may seem to play their own role but in fact they are helping set the stage to a Moscow actor.”
While Zelenskyy didn’t specifically name-check Poland, Warsaw summoned Kyiv’s ambassador to the foreign ministry in response.
Morawiecki also delivered a “warning” to “Ukraine’s authorities,” earlier telling Polsat, “if they are to escalate the conflict like that, we will add additional products to the ban on imports into Poland. Ukrainian authorities do not understand the degree to which Poland’s farming industry has been destabilized.”
Poland is in the midst of a high-stakes campaign ahead of an election next month, with the right-wing Law and Justice government battling for reelection. While Warsaw initially threw its weight behind the campaign to help Kyiv fend off Russia’s attempted invasion, that full-throated support has waned as the consequences of supporting Ukraine for its own farmers have become more evident.
