Europeans were reeling Sunday from President Trump’s announcement that eight countries will face a 10% tariff for opposing American control of Greenland.
The responses to Mr. Trump’s decision ranged from saying it risked “a dangerous downward spiral” to predicting that “China and Russia must be having a field day.”
Mr. Trump’s threat sets up a potentially dangerous test of U.S. partnerships in Europe. Several European countries have sent troops to Greenland in recent days, saying they are there for Arctic security training. Mr. Trump’s announcement came Saturday as thousands of Greenlanders were wrapping up a protest outside the U.S. Consulate in the capital, Nuuk.
The Republican president appeared to indicate that he was using the tariffs as leverage to force talks with Denmark and other European countries over the status of Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of NATO ally Denmark that he regards as critical to U.S. national security. Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Finland would face the tariff.
The eight countries issued a joint statement Sunday: “As members of NATO, we are committed to strengthening Arctic security as a shared transatlantic interest. The pre-coordinated Danish exercise ‘Arctic Endurance,’ conducted with Allies, responds to this necessity. It poses no threat to anyone.”
The statement added: “We stand in full solidarity with the Kingdom of Denmark and the people of Greenland. Building on the process begun last week, we stand ready to engage in a dialogue based on the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity that we stand firmly behind. Tariff threats undermine transatlantic relations and risk a dangerous downward spiral. We will continue to stand united and coordinated in our response. We are committed to upholding our sovereignty.”
Protesters wave Greenland flags during a demonstration at City Hall Square in Copenhagen on Jan. 17, 2026.
Kristian Tuxen Ladegaard Berg/NurPhoto via Getty Images
There are immediate questions about how the White House could try to implement the tariffs, because the EU is a single economic zone in terms of trading. Norway and the U.K. are not part of the 27-member EU, and it was not immediately clear if Mr. Trump’s tariffs would impact the entire bloc. EU envoys scheduled emergency talks for Sunday evening to determine a potential response.
It was unclear, too, how Mr. Trump could act under U.S. law, though he could cite emergency economic powers that are currently subject to a Supreme Court challenge.
European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said China and Russia will benefit from the divisions between the U.S. and Europe. She added in a post on social media: “If Greenland’s security is at risk, we can address this inside NATO. Tariffs risk making Europe and the United States poorer and undermine our shared prosperity.”
Mr. Trump’s move also was panned domestically.
Sen. Mark Kelly, a former U.S. Navy pilot and Democrat who represents Arizona, posted that Mr. Trump’s threatened tariffs on U.S. allies would make Americans “pay more to try to get territory we don’t need.”
“Troops from European countries are arriving in Greenland to defend the territory from us. Let that sink in,” he wrote on X. “The damage this President is doing to our reputation and our relationships is growing, making us less safe. If something doesn’t change we will be on our own with adversaries and enemies in every direction.”
A CBS News poll released Sunday found widespread opposition among Americans to buying Greenland or taking it by military force. Seventy percent said they would oppose using federal funds to buy the territory, and 86% said they would oppose seizing it militarily.
The tariffs announcement even drew blowback from Mr. Trump’s populist allies in Europe.
Italy’s right-wing Premier Giorgia Meloni, considered one of Mr. Trump’s closest allies on the continent, said Sunday she had spoken to him about the tariffs, which she described as “a mistake.”
The deployment to Greenland of small numbers of troops by some European countries was misunderstood by Washington, Meloni told reporters during a two-day visit to South Korea. She said the deployment was not a move against the U.S. but aimed to provide security against “other actors” that she didn’t name.
Jordan Bardella, president of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party in France and also a European Parliament lawmaker, posted that the EU should suspend last year’s tariff deal with the U.S., describing Mr. Trump’s threats as “commercial blackmail.”
Mr. Trump also achieved the rare feat of uniting Britain’s main political parties — including the hard-right Reform UK party — all of whom criticized the tariff threat.
“We don’t always agree with the U.S. government and in this case we certainly don’t. These tariffs will hurt us,” Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, a longtime champion and ally of Mr. Trump, wrote on social media. He stopped short of criticizing Mr. Trump’s designs on Greenland.
Meanwhile, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who leads the center-left Labour Party, said the tariffs announcement was “completely wrong” and his government would “be pursuing this directly with the U.S. administration.”
The foreign ministers of Denmark and Norway are also expected to address the crisis Sunday in Oslo during a news conference.
Dutch firebrand Geert Wilders’s hard-right Freedom Party was on the brink of losing power after elections in the Netherlands on Wednesday, indicating that Europe’s populist politicians who draw strong support while in opposition can struggle once they are in government.
The Freedom Party was on track to place second in parliamentary elections, according to exit polls, with a sharp drop in support, as voters punished Wilders’s party for failing to deliver on its promises.
ROME (AP) — Two armed Turkish men were arrested in the central Italian city of Viterbo, near Rome, hours before a popular local festival, Italy’s Premier Giorgia Meloni said Thursday.
Meloni praised police and Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi for their “swift intervention” leading to the arrests on Wednesday night, which she said “allowed for the safe celebration of a unique event.”
Italian media reported that the two men were suspected of preparing an attack during Wednesday’s celebration, which was attended by Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani. Police in Viterbo were not immediately available to comment on the arrests.
Thousands of people attend Viterbo’s Macchina di Santa Rosa festival, a religious procession and celebration held every year on Sept. 3 to honor the city’s patron saint, Santa Rosa. The main event involves 100 “Facchini di Santa Rosa,” porters carrying a towering, illuminated structure called the “Macchina,” which weighs nearly 5 tons, through the city’s narrow medieval streets.
In recent months, Turkish authorities have conducted major operations against Turkish crime groups operating abroad in cooperation with European police.
In April, coordinated raids in Turkey and several European countries led to 234 arrests for drug trafficking and money laundering, and the seizure of over 21 tons of drugs.
In May 2024, a joint task force of Italian law enforcement and Interpol forces raided a flat in the Viterbo hamlet of Bagnaia and arrested the alleged Turkish mafia boss Bariş Boyun, one of Ankara’s most wanted men.
ROME (AP) — Italy approved new rules late Wednesday to put lucrative concessions for beach clubs up for bidding by June 2027, responding to pressing demands from the EU to open up the sector to new players.
Under the new legislation by the right-wing government led by Giorgia Meloni, existing beach licenses would remain valid until September 2027.
The deadline could be further postponed to March 2028 if there are “objective reasons” to delay the tender process, the government said.
The compromise seeks to address complaints by existing operators who risk losing their concessions and would be entitled to compensation paid by the new holders.
For almost two decades, the European Commission has been locked in a legal battle with Italy over its beach concession practices, accusing the country of lacking transparency and breaching competition rules.
Previous Italian governments, from left to right, have staunchly resisted EU directives requiring competitive tendering, persistently renewing the existing beach concessions without open procedures.
For years, many of these beach spots have been controlled by the same operators, often resulting in a lack of innovation and high prices.
Economists believe that opening the sector could bring in fresh players, potentially improving service quality and reducing costs for beachgoers.
Currently, they can pay from 25 euros to rent two chaise lounges and an umbrella for the day in the most basic establishments, to several hundred euros in fancy resorts such as Capri or Puglia’s Salento.
BEIJING (AP) — Italy and China signed a three-year action plan on Sunday to implement past agreements and experiment with new forms of cooperation, Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said on an official visit to the Chinese capital.
Meloni is trying to reset relations with China as fears of a trade war with the European Union are interwoven with continued interest in attracting Chinese investment in auto manufacturing and other sectors.
“We certainly have a lot of work to do and I am convinced that this work can be useful in such a complex phase on a global level, and also important at a multilateral level,” she said in remarks at the start of a meeting with Chinese Premier Li Qiang.
Her five-day visit comes several months after Italy dropped out of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a signature policy of Chinese leader Xi Jinping to build power and transportation infrastructure around the world to stimulate global trade while also deepening China’s ties with other nations.
Still, Italy remains keen to pursue an otherwise strong economic relationship with China. Stellantis, a major automaker that includes Italy’s Fiat, announced in May that it had formed a joint venture with Leapmotor, a Chinese electric car startup, to begin selling EVs in Europe.
Li, addressing Italian and Chinese business leaders after the meeting with Meloni, said that China’s push to upgrade its economy will increase demand for high-quality products, expanding opportunities for cooperation between companies from their two countries.
He pledged to open Chinese markets further, ensure that foreign companies get the same treatment as Chinese ones and create a transparent and predictable business environment, responding to frequently heard complaints from businesses operating in the world’s second-largest economy.
“At the same time, we hope the Italian side will work with China to provide a more fair, just and non-discriminatory business environment for Chinese companies doing business in Italy,” he said.
Meloni told the business leaders that the two sides had signed an industrial collaboration memorandum that includes electric vehicles and renewable energy, which she described as “sectors where China has already been operating on the technological frontier for some time … and is sharing the new frontiers of knowledge with partners.”
Electric vehicles have also become a symbol of growing China-EU trade tensions, with the European Union imposing provisional tariffs of up to 37.6% on China-made electric vehicles in early July. The two sides are holding talks to try to resolve the issue by an early November deadline.
Meanwhile, China launched an anti-dumping investigation into European pork exports, just days after the EU announced it would impose the tariffs on Chinese EVs.
Meloni, who arrived in Beijing on Saturday, is making her first trip to China as prime minister. She has held talks with Li before, meeting in New Delhi last September during the annual G-20 summit, which brings together the leaders of 20 major nations.
Italy’s decision to join the Belt and Road Initiative in 2019 appeared to be a political coup for China, giving it an inroad into Western Europe and a symbolic boost in a then-raging trade war with the United States. But Italy says the promised economic benefits didn’t materialize, and its membership created friction with other Western European governments and the United States.
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Associated Press writer Giada Zampano in Rome contributed to this report.
Rome — Elon Musk will attend a conservative political festival in Rome on Saturday organized by Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and her far right-wing party, the Brothers of Italy, the party says. In addition to the tech billionaire, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, Spanish far-right Vox party leader Santiago Abascal and Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama were set to join the Atreju festival in the Italian capital.
Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX who bought Twitter last year, travelled to Rome in June to meet Meloni and the two discussed the dangers of artificial intelligence, as well as how to shore up Italy’s declining population. Italy has one of the lowest birth rates in the world.
Elon Musk is seen at the AI Safety Summit 2023 at Bletchley Park in Bletchley, U.K., Nov. 1, 2023.
Chris J. Ratcliffe/Bloomberg/Getty
Sunak and Meloni are political allies who have put immigration at the center of their political agendas. The two jointly penned an editorial calling for tougher action against illegal immigration, and Sunak’s government has been trying to get a contentious plan past the U.K. courts that would see it fly migrants and asylum seekers who arrive on Britain’s shores without permission to Rwanda for processing.
At a London meeting in April, Sunak told Meloni their two countries were “very aligned” in their values. Meloni, who was elected last year to head her country’s most right-wing government since World War II, has proposed sending some migrants who arrive in Italy to Albania for processing.
The Atreju festival, which takes its name from the central character in the fantasy book and movie “The NeverEnding Story,” was started by Meloni in 1998 to gather and celebrate Italy’s conservative youth. At the time she was the head of the Rome branch of a right-wing youth movement.
In addition to political speeches, the festival will entertain approximately 10,000 attendees with a Christmas village, ice rink and concerts.
BRUSSELS — Western leaders are grappling with how to handle two era-defining wars in the Middle East and in Ukraine. But there’s another issue, one far closer to home, that’s derailing governments in Europe and America: migration.
In recent days, U.S. President Joe Biden, his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron, and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak all hit trouble amid intense domestic pressure to tackle immigration; all three emerged weakened as a result. The stakes are high as American, British and European voters head to the polls in 2024.
“There is a temptation to hunt for quick fixes,” said Rashmin Sagoo, director of the international law program at the Chatham House think tank in London. “But irregular migration is a hugely challenging issue. And solving it requires long-term policy thinking beyond national boundaries.”
With election campaigning already under way, long-term plans may be hard to find. Far-right, anti-migrant populists promising sharp answers are gaining support in many Western democracies, leaving mainstream parties to count the costs. Less than a month ago in the Netherlands, pragmatic Dutch centrists lost to an anti-migrant radical.
Who will be next?
Rishi Sunak, United Kingdom
In Britain, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is under pressure from members of his own ruling Conservative party who fear voters will punish them over the government’s failure to get a grip on migration.
U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak speaks during a press conference in Dover on June 5, 2023 in Dover, England | Pool photo by Yui Mok/WPA via Getty Images
Seven years ago, voters backed Brexit because euroskeptic campaigners promised to “Take Back Control” of the U.K.’s borders. Instead, the picture is now more chaotic than ever. The U.K. chalked up record net migration figures last month, and the government has failed so far to stop small boats packed with asylum seekers crossing the English Channel.
Sunak is now in the firing line. He made a pledge to “Stop the Boats” central to his premiership. In the process, he ignited a war in his already divided party about just how far Britain should go.
Under Sunak’s deal with Rwanda, the central African nation agreed to resettle asylum seekers who arrived on British shores in small boats. The PM says the policy will deter migrants from making sea crossings to the U.K. in the first place. But the plan was struck down by the Supreme Court in London, and Sunak’s Tories now can’t agree on what to do next.
Having survived what threatened to be a catastrophic rebellion in parliament on Tuesday, the British premier still faces a brutal battle in the legislature over his proposed Rwanda law early next year.
Time is running out for Sunak to find a fix. An election is expected next fall.
Emmanuel Macron, France
The French president suffered an unexpected body blow when the lower house of parliament rejected his flagship immigration bill this week.
French President Emmanuel Macron at the Elysee Palace in Paris, on June 21, 2023 | Ludovic Marin/AFP via Getty Images
After losing parliamentary elections last year, getting legislation through the National Assembly has been a fraught process for Macron. He has been forced to rely on votes from the right-wing Les Républicains party on more than one occasion.
Macron’s draft law on immigration was meant to please both the conservatives and the center-left with a carefully designed mix of repressive and liberal measures. But in a dramatic upset, the National Assembly, which is split between centrists, the left and the far right, voted against the legislation on day one of debates.
Now Macron is searching for a compromise. The government has tasked a joint committee of senators and MPs with seeking a deal. But it’s likely their text will be harsher than the initial draft, given that the Senate is dominated by the centre right — and this will be a problem for Macron’s left-leaning lawmakers.
If a compromise is not found, Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally will be able to capitalize on Macron’s failure ahead of the European Parliament elections next June.
But even if the French president does manage to muddle through, the episode is likely to mark the end of his “neither left nor right” political offer. It also raises serious doubts about his ability to legislate on controversial topics.
Joe Biden, United States
The immigration crisis is one of the most vexing and longest-running domestic challenges for President Joe Biden. He came into office vowing to reverse the policies of his predecessor, Donald Trump, and build a “fair and humane” system, only to see Congress sit on his plan for comprehensive immigration reform.
U.S. President Joe Biden pauses as he gives a speech in Des Moines, Iowa on July 15, 2019 | Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
The White House has seen a deluge of migrants at the nation’s southern border, strained by a decades-old system unable to handle modern migration patterns.
Ahead of next year’s presidential election, Republicans have seized on the issue. GOP state leaders have filed lawsuits against the administration and sent busloads of migrants to Democrat-led cities, while in Washington, Republicans in Congress have tied foreign aid to sweeping changes to border policy, putting the White House in a tight spot as Biden officials now consider a slate of policies they once forcefully rejected.
The political pressure has spilled into the other aisle. States and cities, particularly ones led by Democrats, are pressuring Washington leaders to do more in terms of providing additional federal aid and revamping southern border policies to limit the flow of asylum seekers into the United States.
New York City has had more than 150,000 new arrivals over the past year and a half — forcing cuts to new police recruits, cutting library hours and limiting sanitation duties. Similar problems are playing out in cities like Chicago, which had migrants sleeping in buses or police stations.
The pressure from Democrats is straining their relationship with the White House. New York City Mayor Eric Adams runs the largest city in the nation, but hasn’t spoken with Biden in nearly a year. “We just need help, and we’re not getting that help,” Adams told reporters Tuesday.
Olaf Scholz, Germany
Migration has been at the top of the political agenda in Germany for months, with asylum applications rising to their highest levels since the 2015 refugee crisis triggered by Syria’s civil war.
The latest influx has posed a daunting challenge to national and local governments alike, which have struggled to find housing and other services for the migrants, not to mention the necessary funds.
The inability to limit the number of refugees has put German Chancellor Olaf Scholz under immense pressure | Michele Tantussi/Getty Images
The inability — in a country that ranks among the most coveted destinations for asylum seekers — to limit the number of refugees has put German Chancellor Olaf Scholz under immense pressure. In the hope of stemming the flow, Germany recently reinstated border checks with Poland, the Czech Republic and Switzerland, hoping to turn back the refugees before they hit German soil.
Even with border controls, refugee numbers remain high, which has been a boon to the far right. Germany’s anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party has reached record support in national polls.
Since overtaking Scholz’s Social Democrats in June, the AfD has widened its lead further, recording 22 percent in recent polls, second only to the center-right Christian Democrats.
The AfD is expected to sweep three state elections next September in eastern Germany, where support for the party and its reactionary anti-foreigner policies is particularly strong.
The center-right, meanwhile, is hardening its position on migration and turning its back on the open-border policies championed by former Chancellor Angela Merkel. Among the new priorities is a plan to follow the U.K.’s Rwanda model for processing refugees in third countries.
Karl Nehammer, Austria
Like Scholz, the Austrian leader’s approval ratings have taken a nosedive thanks to concerns over migration. Austria has taken steps to tighten controls at its southern and eastern borders.
Though the tactic has led to a drop in arrivals by asylum seekers, it also means Austria has effectively suspended the EU’s borderless travel regime, which has been a boon to the regional economy for decades.
Austria has effectively suspended the EU’s borderless travel regime, which has been a boon to the regional economy for decades | Thomas Kronsteiner/Getty Images
The far-right Freedom Party has had a commanding lead for more than a year, topping the ruling center-right in polls by 10 points. That puts the party in a position to win national elections scheduled for next fall, which would mark an unprecedented rightward tilt in a country whose politics have been dominated by the center since World War II.
Giorgia Meloni, Italy
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni made her name in opposition, campaigning on a radical far-right agenda. Since winning power in last year’s election, she has shifted to more moderate positions on Ukraine and Europe.
Meloni now needs to appease her base on migration, a topic that has dominated Italian debate for years. Instead, however, she has been forced to grant visas to hundreds of thousands of legal migrants to cover labor shortages. Complicating matters, boat landings in Italy are up by about 50 per cent year-on-year despite some headline-grabbling policies and deals to stop arrivals.
While Meloni has ordered the construction of detention centers where migrants will be held pending repatriation, in reality local conditions in African countries and a lack of repatriation agreements present serious impediments.
Italy’s Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni at a press conference on March 9, 2023 | Tiziana Fabi/AFP via Getty Images
Although she won the support of Commission President Ursula von der Leyen for her cause, a potential EU naval mission to block departures from Africa would risk breaching international law.
Meloni has tried other options, including a deal with Tunisia to help stop migrant smuggling, but the plan fell apart before it began. A deal with Albania to offshore some migrant detention centers also ran into trouble.
Now Meloni is in a bind. The migration issue has brought her into conflict with France and Germany as she attempts to create a reputation as a moderate conservative.
If she fails to get to grips with the issue, she is likely to lose political ground. Her coalition partner Matteo Salvini is known as a hardliner on migration, and while they’re officially allies for now, they will be rivals again later.
Geert Wilders, the Netherlands
The government of long-serving Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte was toppled over migration talks in July, after which he announced his exit from politics. In subsequent elections, in which different parties vied to fill Rutte’s void, far-right firebrand Geert Wilders secured a shock win. On election night he promised to curb the “asylum tsunami.”
Wilders is now seeking to prop up a center-right coalition with three other parties that have urged getting migration under control. One of them is Rutte’s old group, now led by Dilan Yeşilgöz.
Geert Wilders attends a meeting in the Dutch parliament with party leaders to discuss the formation of a coalition government, on November 24, 2023 | Carl Court/Getty Images
A former refugee, Yeşilgöz turned migration into one of the main topics of her campaign. She was criticized after the elections for paving the way for Wilders to win — not only by focusing on migration, but also by opening the door to potentially governing with Wilders.
Now, though, coalition talks are stuck, and it could take months to form a new cabinet. If Wilders, who clearly has a mandate from voters, can stitch a coalition together, the political trajectory of the Netherlands — generally known as a pragmatic nation — will shift significantly to the right. A crackdown on migration is as certain as anything can be.
Leo Varadkar, Ireland
Even in Ireland, an economically open country long used to exporting its own people worldwide, an immigration-friendly and pro-business government has been forced by rising anti-foreigner sentiment to introduce new migration deterrence measures that would have been unthinkable even a year ago.
Ireland’s hardening policies reflect both a chronic housing crisis and the growing reluctance of some property owners to keep providing state-funded emergency shelter in the wake of November riots in Dublin triggered by a North African immigrant’s stabbing of young schoolchildren.
A nation already housing more than 100,000 newcomers, mostly from Ukraine, Ireland has stopped guaranteeing housing to new asylum seekers if they are single men, chiefly from Nigeria, Algeria, Afghanistan, Georgia and Somalia, according to the most recent Department of Integration statistics.
Ireland has stopped guaranteeing housing to new asylum seekers if they are single men, chiefly from Nigeria, Algeria, Afghanistan, Georgia and Somalia | Jorge Guerrero/AFP via Getty Images
Even newly arrived families face an increasing risk of being kept in military-style tents despite winter temperatures.
Ukrainians, who since Russia’s 2022 invasion of their country have received much stronger welfare support than other refugees, will see that welcome mat partially retracted in draft legislation approved this week by the three-party coalition government of Prime Minister Leo Varadkar.
Once enacted by parliament next month, the law will limit new Ukrainian arrivals to three months of state-paid housing, while welfare payments – currently among the most generous in Europe for people fleeing Russia’s war – will be slashed for all those in state-paid housing.
Justin Trudeau, Canada
A pessimistic public mood dragged down by cost-of-living woes has made immigration a multidimensional challenge for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
A housing crunch felt across the country has cooled support for immigration, with people looking for scapegoats for affordability pains. The situation has fueled antipathy for Trudeau and his re-election campaign.
Trudeau has treated immigration as a multipurpose solution for Canada’s aging population and slowing economy. And while today’s record-high population growth reflects well on Canada’s reputation as a desirable place to relocate, political challenges linked to migration have arisen in unpredictable ways for Trudeau’s Liberals.
Political challenges linked to migration have arisen in unpredictable ways for Trudeau’s Liberals | Andrej Ivanov/AFP
Since Trudeau came to power eight years ago, at least 1.3 million people have immigrated to Canada, mostly from India, the Philippines, China and Syria. Handling diaspora politics — and foreign interference — has become more consequential, as seen by Trudeau’s clash with India and Canada’s recent break with Israel.
Canada will double its 40 million population in 25 years if the current growth rate holds, enlarging the political challenges of leading what Trudeau calls the world’s “first postnational state”.
Pedro Sánchez, Spain
Spain’s autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla, in Northern Africa, are favored by migrants seeking to enter Europe from the south: Once they make it across the land border, the Continent can easily be accessed by ferry.
Transit via the land border that separates the European territory from Morocco is normally kept in check with security measures like high, razor-topped fences, with border control officers from both countries working together to keep undocumented migrants out.
Spain’s autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla, in Northern Africa, are favored by migrants seeking to enter Europe | Pierre-Philippe Marcou/AFP
But in recent years authorities in Morocco have expressed displeasure with their Spanish counterparts by standing down their officers and allowing hundreds of migrants to pass, overwhelming border stations and forcing Spanish officers to repel the migrants, with scores dying in the process.
The headaches caused by these incidents are believed to be a major factor in Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s decision to change the Spanish government’s position on the disputed Western Sahara territory and express support for Rabat’s plan to formalize its nearly 50-year occupation of the area.
The pivot angered Sánchez’s leftist allies and worsened Spain’s relationship with Algeria, a long-standing champion of Western Saharan independence. But the measures have stopped the flow of migrants — for now.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Greece
Greece has been at the forefront of Europe’s migration crisis since 2015, when hundreds of thousands of people entered Europe via the Aegean islands. Migration and border security have been key issues in the country’s political debate.
Human rights organizations, as well as the European Parliament and the European Commission, have accused the Greek conservative government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis of illegal “pushbacks” of migrants who have made it to Greek territory — and of deporting migrants without due process. Greece’s government denies those accusations, arguing that independent investigations haven’t found any proof.
Mitsotakis insists that Greece follows a “tough but fair” policy, but the numerous in-depth investigations belie the moderate profile the conservative leader wants to maintain.
In June, a migrant boat sank in what some called “the worst tragedy ever” in the Mediterranean Sea. Hundreds lost their lives, refocusing Europe’s attention on the issue. Official investigations have yet to discover whether failures by Greek authorities contributed to the shipwreck, according to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
In the meantime, Greece is in desperate need of thousands of workers to buttress the country’s understaffed agriculture, tourism and construction sectors. Despite pledges by the migration and agriculture ministers of imminent legislation bringing migrants to tackle the labor shortage, the government was forced to retreat amid pressure from within its own ranks.
Nikos Christodoulides, Cyprus
Cyprus is braced for an increase in migrant arrivals on its shores amid renewed conflict in the Middle East. Earlier in December, Greece sent humanitarian aid to the island to deal with an anticipated increase in flows.
Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides has called for extra EU funding for migration management, and is contending with a surge in violence against migrants in Cyprus. Analysts blame xenophobia, which has become mainstream in Cypriot politics and media, as well as state mismanagement of migration flows. Last year the country recorded the EU’s highest proportion of first-time asylum seekers relative to its population.
Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides has called for extra EU funding for migration management | Ludovic Marin/AFP via Getty Images
Legal and staffing challenges have delayed efforts to create a deputy ministry for migration, deemed an important step in helping Cyprus to deal with the surge in arrivals.
The island’s geography — it’s close to both Lebanon and Turkey — makes it a prime target for migrants wanting to enter EU territory from the Middle East. Its complex history as a divided country also makes it harder to regulate migrant inflows.
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Tim Ross, Annabelle Dickson, Clea Caulcutt, Myah Ward, Matthew Karnitschnig, Hannah Roberts, Pieter Haeck, Shawn Pogatchnik, Zi-Ann Lum, Aitor Hernández-Morales and Nektaria Stamouli
DUBAI — The war in Gaza crashed into the United Nations climate summit on Friday, as furious sideline diplomacy, blunt censures of violence and an Iranian boycott shoved global warming to the side.
It was a sharp change in tone from the COP28 opening on Thursday, which ended on an upbeat note as countries promised to support climate-stricken communities. The mood darkened the following day as news broke that the week-old truce between Israel and Hamas was collapsing.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog spent much of the morning in meetings telling fellow leaders about “how Hamas blatantly violates the ceasefire agreements,” according to a post on his X account. He ended up skipping a speech he was meant to give during Friday’s parade of world leaders.
There were other conspicuous no-shows. Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was absent, despite being listed as an early speaker. And Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority leader, also disappeared from the final speakers’ list after initially being scheduled to talk just a few slots after Herzog.
Then, shortly after leaders posed for a group photo in the Dubai venue on Friday, the Iranian delegation announced it was walking out. The reason, Iran’s energy minister told his country’s official news agency: The “political, biased and irrelevant presence of the fake Zionist regime” — referring to Israel.
By Friday afternoon, the Iranian pavilion had emptied out.
The backroom drama played out even as leader after leader took the stage in the vast Expo City campus to make allotted three-minute statements on their efforts to stop the planet from boiling. The World Meteorological Organization said Thursday that 2023 was almost certain to be the hottest year ever recorded.
U.N. climate talks are often buffeted by outside events. This is the second such meetingheld after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. That war provoked some public barbs and backroom discussions at last year’s summit in Egypt, but leaders still maintained their scheduled speaking slots and a veneer of focus on the matter they were supposedly there to discuss.
This year, that veneer cracked.
“There are currently a number of very, very serious crises that are causing great suffering for many people. It was clear that these would also affect the mood at the COP,” a German diplomat, granted anonymity to discuss the issue candidly, told POLITICO.
But that can’t distract officials working on climate change, the diplomat added: “It is also clear that no one on our planet, no country on Earth, can escape the destructive effects of the climate crisis.”
Tell-tale signals
There had been early signs that the conflict would spill over into discussions at the climate summit.
Sameh Shoukry, president of the COP27 climate conference and Egyptian minister of foreign affairs, Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber, president of COP28 | Sean Gallup/Getty Images
At Thursday’s opening ceremony, Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry — president of last year’s COP27 summit — asked all delegates to stand for a moment of silence in memory of two climate negotiators who had recently died, “as well as all civilians who have perished during the current conflict in Gaza.”
On Friday, Jordanian King Abdullah II, Iraqi President Abdul Latif Rashid, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan were among the leaders who used their COP28 speeches to draw attention to the war.
“This year’s COP must recognize even more than ever that we cannot talk about climate change in isolation from the humanitarian tragedies unfolding around us,” Abdullah said. “As we speak, the Palestinian people are facing an immediate threat to their lives and wellbeing.”
Ramaphosa went further: “South Africa is appalled at the cruel tragedy that is underway in Gaza. The war against the innocent people of Palestine is a war crime that must be ended now.
But, he added, “we cannot lose momentum in the fight against climate change.”
Asked for comment, an official from the United Arab Emirates, which is overseeing COP28, said the country had invited all parties to the conference and “are pleased with the exceptionally high level of attendance this year.”
The official added: “Climate change is a global issue and as the host for this significant, momentous conference, the UAE welcomes constructive dialogue and continues to work with all international partners and stakeholders across the board to deliver impactful results for COP28.”
The other summit in Dubai
In the back rooms of the conference venue, leaders were holding urgent talks on the war. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken huddled with Herzog on Thursday, according to a post on Herzog’s X account.
“In addition to participating in the COP, I’ll have an opportunity to meet with Arab partners to discuss the conflict in Gaza,” Blinken told reporters Wednesday while in Brussels for a NATO gathering. He didn’t offer further details.
A senior Biden administration official told reporters Vice President Kamala Harris would also be “having discussions on the conflict between Israel and Hamas” during her trip to Dubai.
On his X account, Herzog said he had met with “dozens” of leaders at the summit. His post featured photographs of Britain’s King Charles III, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, India’s Narendra Modi and Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. He also posted about meetings with Blinken and UAE leader Mohamed bin Zayed.
Erdoğan met with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni at COP28 to discuss the war in Gaza, according to a statement by the Turkish communications directorate that made no mention of climate action.
U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak made no secret of the fact that he intended to use some of his brief visit to Dubai to talk about regional security.
U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak made no secret of the fact that he intended to use some of his brief visit to Dubai to talk about regional security | Sean Gallup/Getty Images
“I’ll be speaking to lots of leaders … not just [about] climate change, but also the situation in the Middle East,” he told reporters on his flight outof the U.K. Thursday night.
The reignited Israel-Hamas conflict came to dominate his time at the summit. Meetings with other leaders were arranged with regional tensions in mind — not climate. Sunak met Israel’s Herzog and Jordan’s Abdullah, as well as Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al Sisi and the emir of Qatar.
“Given the events of this morning in Israel and Gaza, the prime minister has spent most of his bilateral meetings discussing that situation,” Sunak’s spokesperson told reporters in Dubai.
The meetings focused on “what more we can do both to support the innocent civilians in Gaza, to de-escalate tensions, to get more hostages out and more aid in,” the spokesperson said.
Even the U.K.’s ostensibly nonpolitical head of state, King Charles III — in Dubai to give an opening address to world leaders — was deployed to aid the diplomatic effort. Buckingham Palace said the king would “have the opportunity to meet regional leaders to support the U.K.’s efforts to promote peace in the region.”
Separately, French President Emmanuel Macron was planning to meet various leaders on the security situation and then fly on for talks in Qatar, according to an Elysée Palace official.
Meanwhile, three of Europe’s leaders who have been the strongest backers of the Palestinians — Irish leader Leo Varadkar, Belgian Prime Minister Alexander de Croo and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez — held talks on the fringes of COP on Friday morning.
Earlier on Friday, Israel withdrew its ambassador to Spain, blasting what it called Sánchez’s “shameful remarks” on the situation.
Brazil’s Lula, whose country will host a major COP conference in 2025, lamented that just as more joint action is needed to prevent climate catastrophe, war and violence were cleaving the world apart.
“We are facing what may be the greatest challenge that humanity has faced till now,” he said. “Instead of uniting forces, the world is going to wars. It feeds divisions and deepens poverty and inequalities.”
Zia Weise, Suzanne Lynch and Charlie Cooper reported from Dubai. Karl Mathiesen reported from London.
Clea Calcutt contributed reporting from Paris. Nahal Toosi contributed reporting from Washington, D.C.
BERLIN — Germans gave the world schadenfreude for a reason. And southern Europe couldn’t be more pleased.
For countries that spent years on the receiving end of Europe’s German-inspired fiscal Inquisition, there’s no sweeter sight than to see Germany splayed on the high altar of Teutonic parsimony.
The irony is that Germany put itself there on purpose and has no clue how it will find redemption.
A jaw-dropping constitutional court ruling earlier this month effectively rendered the core of the German government’s legislative agenda null and void left the country in a collective shock. In order to circumvent Germany’s self-imposed deficit strictures, which give governments little room to spend more than they collect in taxes, Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition relied on a network of “special funds” outside the main budget. Scholz was convinced the government could tap the money without violating the so-called debt brake.
The court, in no uncertain terms, disagreed. The ruling raises questions about the government’s ability to access a total of €869 billion parked outside the federal budget in 29 “special funds.” The court’s move forced the government to both freeze new spending and put approval of next year’s budget on hold.
Nearly two weeks after the decision, both the magnitude of the ruling and the reality that there’s no easy way out have become increasingly clear. Though Scholz has promised to come up with a new plan “very quickly,” few see a resolution without imposing austerity.
The expectation in the Bundestag is that Scholz will find enough cuts to deal with the immediate €20 billion hole the decision created in next year’s budget, but not much more.
In the meantime, his government is on edge. While Economy Minister Robert Habeck, a Green, has been telling any microphone he can find that Germany’s economic future is hanging in the balance, Finance Minister Christian Lindner has triggered panic and confusion by announcing a series of ill-defined spending freezes.
On Thursday, the government was forced to deny a report that a special fund created to bolster Germany’s armed forces after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine would be affected by the cuts.
At a press conference with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni late Wednesday, Scholz endured the humiliation of a reporter asking his guest whether she considered Germany to be a reliable partner given its budget crisis. A magnanimous Meloni, whose country knows a thing or two about creative accounting, gave Scholz a shot in the arm, responding that in her experience he was “very reliable.”
Greek accounting
Between the lines, the justices of Germany’s constitutional court suggested the use of the shadow funds by Scholz’s coalition amounted to a bookkeeping sleight of hand — the same sort of accounting alchemy Berlin upbraided Greece for more than a decade ago. Perhaps unwittingly, the court ruling echoed then-Chancellor Angela Merkel’s unsolicited advice to Athens during Greece’s debt crisis: “Now is the time to do the homework!”
For eurozone countries with a recent history of debt trouble — a group that alongside Greece includes the likes of Spain, Portugal and Italy — Germany’s financial pickle must feel like déjà vu all over again. From 2010 onwards, they found themselves in the unenviable position of trying to explain to Wolfgang Schäuble, Merkel’s taskmaster finance minister, how they planned to return to the path of fiscal rectitude. At Schäuble’s urging, Greece nearly ditched the euro altogether.
The expectation in the Bundestag is that Scholz will find enough cuts to deal with the immediate €20 billion hole the decision created in next year’s budget, but not much more | Odd Andersen/AFP via Getty Images
In recent months, Germany has once again assumed the role of the fiscal scold in Brussels, where officials have been negotiating a new framework for the eurozone’s rulebook on government spending, known as the Stability and Growth Pact. The pact, which dates to 1997, has been suspended since the pandemic hit, but it is set to take effect again next year. Many countries want to loosen the rules given the huge budget pressures that have followed multiple crises in recent years. Berlin is open to reform but skeptical of granting its fellow euro countries too much leeway on spending.
The latest budget mess certainly won’t help the Germans make their case.
Simple hubris
The allure of the strategy the court has now deemed illegal was that the government thought it could spend money it salted away in the special funds without violating Germany’s constitutional debt brake, which restricts the federal deficit to 0.35 percent of GDP, except in times of emergency.
Put simply, Scholz’s coalition wanted to have its cake and eat it too, creating a veneer of fiscal discipline while spending freely to finance an ambitious agenda.
Despite ample warning from legal experts that the government’s plan to repurpose a huge chunk of emergency pandemic-related funds might not withstand a court challenge, Scholz and his partners went ahead anyway. What’s more, they staked their entire political agenda on the assumption that the strategy would go off without a hitch.
Last week’s court decision is the national equivalent of a rich kid being cut off from his trust fund: Daddy’s money is still there, but junior can’t touch it and has to exchange his Porsche for an Opel.
What many in Berlin cite as the main reason for what they are calling derSchlamassel (fiasco), however, is simple hubris.
Scholz’s mild-mannered public persona belies a know-it-all approach to governing. A lawyer by training who has served for decades in the top ranks of German government, Scholz, at least in his own mind, is generally the smartest person in the room.
During coalition negotiations in 2021, Scholz sold the budget trick idea to his future partners — the conservative liberal Free Democrats (FDP) and the Greens — as a way to square the circle between the welfare agenda of his own Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens’ expensive climate agenda, and the FDP’s demands for fiscal rigor (or at least the appearance thereof).
Indeed, it’s doubtful the coalition would have ever been formed in the first place without the plan. The Greens and FDP happily went along; after all Scholz, Germany’s finance minister from 2018-2021, knew what he was doing. Or so they thought.
Finance minister or ‘fuck-up’?
Scholz’s role notwithstanding, his successor as finance minister, FDP leader Christian Lindner, shares a lot of the responsibility for the snafu, for the simple reason that it was his ministry that oversaw the strategy.
During the coalition talks in 2021, Lindner was torn between a desire to govern and the fiscal strictures long championed by his party. Scholz offered him what appeared to be an elegant way to do both.
Scholz’s role notwithstanding, his successor as finance minister, FDP leader Christian Lindner, shares a lot of the responsibility for the snafu | Sean Gallup/Getty Images
When Lindner, who had never served in an executive government role before, was poised to secure the finance ministry, some critics questioned his qualifications to lead the financial affairs of Europe’s largest economy.
Many Germans have no doubt made their determinations in recent weeks.
Green machine
In contrast to the FDP, the Greens, had no qualms about endorsing Scholz’s bookkeeping tricks.
When it comes to realizing the Greens’ environmental goals, the ends have long justified the means.
In the early 2000s, for example, party leaders sold Germans on the idea of switching off the country’s nuclear plants and transitioning to renewables. They won the argument by promising that the subsidies consumers would be forced to finance to pay for the rollout of solar and wind power wouldn’t cost more every month than a “scoop of ice cream.”
In the end, the collective annual bill for German households was €25 billion, enough to have cornered the global ice cream market many times over.
The Greens’ ice cream strategy — secure difficult-to-reverse legislative commitments and worry about the financial details later — also informed their approach to what they call the “social, ecological transformation,” a plan to make Germany’s economy carbon neutral.
That’s why the shock of the court decision has hit the Greens hardest. After more than 15 years in opposition, the Greens saw the alliance with Scholz and Lindner as the culmination of their effort to convince Germans to embrace their ecological vision for the future. Just as the hoped-for revolution was within reach, it has slipped from their grasp.
Habeck, the face of the Green transformation, has looked like a man at his wits’ end in recent days, making dire predictions about the coming economic Armageddon.
“This marks a turning point for both the German economy and the job market,” Habeck told German public television this week, predicting that it would become much more difficult for the country to maintain the level of prosperity it has enjoyed for decades.
Road to perdition
For all his candor, Habeck failed to address the elephant in the room: It’s a fake debt crisis.
There is no objective reason for Germany to be in this dilemma. A best-of-class credit rating means Berlin can borrow money on better terms than almost any country on the planet. With a budget deficit of 2.6 percent of GDP last year and a total debt load amounting to 66 percent of GDP, Germany is also well above average compared to its eurozone peers in terms of fiscal discipline — even counting the debt raised for the special funds.
The only reason Germany can’t spend the money in the special funds is not because it can’t afford to, but rather because it remains beholden to an almost religious fiscal orthodoxy that views deficit debt as the road to perdition.
That conviction prompted Germany to anchor the so-called debt brake in its constitution in 2009, thereby allowing the government to run only a minor deficit, barring a natural disaster or other emergency, such as a war.
For eurozone countries with a recent history of debt trouble — a group that alongside Greece includes the likes of Spain, Portugal and Italy — Germany’s financial pickle must feel like déjà vu all over again | Aris Messinis/AFP via Getty Images
The constitutional amendment passed by a comfortable margin with broad support from both the Christian Democrats (CDU) and the SPD, which shared power in a grand coalition led by Merkel. At the time, Germany was still recovering from the shock triggered by the 2008 collapse of investment bank Lehman Brothers and had to commit billions to shore up its banking sector.
The country’s federal government and states had begun planning a reform of fiscal rules even before the crisis. The emergency gave them additional impetus to pursue a debt brake enshrined in the constitution as a way to restore public trust.
In that respect, it worked as planned. As countries such as Greece and Spain struggled with their public finances in the years that followed, Germany’s debt brake looked prescient.
Even as southern Europe struggled, the German economy went into high gear powered by strong demand for its wares from Asia and North America, allowing the government to not just balance its budget but to run a string of surpluses, peaking in 2018 with a €58 billion windfall.
Goodbye to all that
The good times ended with the pandemic. Germany, along with the rest of the world, was forced to dig deep. It had the fiscal capacity to do so, however, as the pandemic justified lifting the debt brake in both 2020 and 2021.
The fallout from Russia’s attack on Ukraine forced the government to do so again in 2022.
By drawing from special funds, Scholz and Lindner believed they could avoid a repeat in 2023. But the court’s ruling dashed that plan.
Long before the current crisis, it had become clear to most in government — both conservative and left-leaning — that the debt brake was a hampering investment in public infrastructure (Merkel’s coalition emphasized paying down debt instead of investing the surpluses) and, by extension, Germany’s economic competitiveness. Hence the liberal use of the now-closed special fund loophole.
Trouble is, even as many politicians have woken up to the perils of the debt brake, the public remains strongly in favor of it. Nearly two-thirds of Germans continue to support the measure, according to a poll published this week by Der Spiegel.
Repealing or even reforming the brake would require Germany’s political class not just to convince them otherwise, but also to muster a super majority in parliament, which at the moment is unlikely.
Late Thursday, the finance minister signaled that the debt brake would have to fall for 2023 as well. That means the government will have to retroactively declare an emergency — likely in connection with the war in Ukraine — and then hope that the constitutional court buys it.
THE HAGUE — One line in Geert Wilders’ inflammatory pitch to Dutch voters will haunt Brussels more than any other: a referendum on leaving the EU.
Seven years after the British voted for Brexit, a so-called Nexit ballot was a core plank of the far-right leader’s ultimately successful offer in the Netherlands.
And while Wilders softened his anti-Islam rhetoric in recent weeks, there are no signs he wants to water down his Euroskepticism after his shock election victory.
Even if Dutch voters are not persuaded to follow the Brits out of the EU — polling suggests it’s unlikely — there’s every indication that a Wilders-led government in The Hague will still be a nightmare for Brussels.
A seat for Wilders around the EU summit table would transform the dynamic, alongside other far-right and nationalist leaders already in post. Suddenly, policies ranging from climate action, to EU reform and weapons for Ukraine will be up for debate, and even reversal.
Since the exit polls were announced, potential center-right partners have not ruled out forming a coalition with Wilders, who emerged as the clear winner. That’s despite the fact that for the past 10 years, he’s been kept out by centrists.
For his part, the 60-year-old veteran appears to be dead serious about taking power himself this time.
Ever since Mark Rutte’s replacement as VVD leader, Dilan Yeşilgöz, indicated early in the campaign that she could potentially enter coalition talks with Wilders, the far-right leader has worked hard to look more reasonable. He diluted some of his most strident positions, particularly on Islam — such as banning mosques — saying there are bigger priorities to fix.
On Wednesday night, with the results coming in, Wilders was more explicit: “I understand very well that parties do not want to be in a government with a party that wants unconstitutional measures,” he said. “We are not going to talk about mosques, Qurans and Islamic schools.”
Even if Wilders is willing to drop his demand for an EU referendum in exchange for power, his victory will still send a shudder through the EU institutions.
And if centrist parties club together to keep Wilders out — again — there may be a price to pay with angry Dutch voters later on.
Brexit cheerleader Nigel Farage showed in the U.K. that you don’t need to be in power to be powerfully influential.
Winds of change
Migration was a dominant issue in the Dutch election. For EU politicians, it remains a pressing concern. As migrant numbers continue to rise, so too has support for far-right parties in many countries in Europe. In Italy last year, Giorgia Meloni won power for her Brothers of Italy. In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally remains a potent force, in second place in the polls. In Germany, the Alternative for Germany has also surged to second place in recent months.
In his victory speech, Wilders vowed to tackle what he called the “asylum tsunami” hitting the Netherlands.
“The main reasons voters have supported Wilders in these elections is his anti-immigration agenda, followed by his stances on the cost of living crisis and his health care position,” said Sarah de Lange, politics professor at the University of Amsterdam. Mainstream parties “legitimized Wilders” by making immigration a key issue, she said. “Voters might have thought that if that is the issue at stake, why not vote for the original rather than the copy?”
For the left, the bright spot in the Netherlands was a strong showing for a well-organized alliance between Labor and the Greens. Frans Timmermans, the former European Commission vice president, galvanized support behind him. But even that joint ticket could not get close to beating Wilders’ tally.
Next June, the 27 countries of the EU hold an election for the European Parliament.
On the same day voters choose their MEPs, Belgium is holding a general election. Far-right Flemish independence leader Tom Van Grieken, who is also eyeing up a major breakthrough, offered his congratulations to Wilders: “Parties like ours are on their way in the whole of Europe,” he said.
Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was celebrating, too: “The winds of change are here!”
Pieter Haeck reported from Amsterdam and Tim Ross reported from London.
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Tim Ross, Pieter Haeck, Eline Schaart and Jakob Hanke Vela
BERLIN — German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said Wednesday his ruling coalition would seek to present new budget plans “very quickly” to Parliament, after a constitutional court ruling last week plunged his government and its finances into disarray.
The chancellor is facing mounting criticism that he still hasn’t managed to offer a proposal on how to make up Germany’s yawning budgetary shortfall one week after the bombshell court ruling blew a €60 billion hole in the books.
It’s an accounting mess that now throws into doubt future payments for energy, the green transition of industry and microchip manufacturing.
Crucially, last week’s ruling means not only a delay to next year’s budget — which became evident on Wednesday when a parliament committee postponed a preliminary adoption of spending plans for 2024 — but may also require a supplementary “emergency” budget for this year to deal with the fallout of the court decision.
Speaking at a press conference with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in Berlin, Scholz evaded specifics on what happens next, arguing the consequences of the ruling must still “be examined very carefully,” which should now be done “very swiftly and promptly.”
The Social Democratic chancellor argued his three-party coalition, which also includes the Greens and the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP), was determined to “very quickly” move forward with new budget plans, and “ensure that what we have set out to do — for good cohesion in Germany, for the further development of our welfare state, for the modernization of our economy — can actually be pursued further.”
Still, he did not say where he could make the spending cuts that appear to be needed to make this possible.
Scholz had already sounded upbeat on Tuesday that, despite budget cuts, Germany could still pay subsidies to chipmakers Intel and TSMC for building new plants in eastern Germany.
A key consequence of last week’s ruling is that it will probably limit the ability of German leaders, both at the federal and state level, to use money from a variety of special funds that have been established to circumvent the debt brake. This mechanism restricts the federal deficit to 0.35 percent of GDP, except in times of emergency.
During a budgetary committee hearing on Tuesday, several legal experts argued Scholz’s government would have to present a supplementary “emergency” budget for this year to account for more than €30 billion of expenses for energy subsidies. These subsidies had been financed via a special fund outside the regular budget — a practice that is likely to be unlawful in the light of last week’s ruling.
Controversially, such a decision would probably require the suspension of the debt brake for this year.
Questioned by POLITICO during an event in Berlin on Tuesday evening, German Finance Minister Christian Lindner, who has expressed great pride about upholding the debt brake in the past, evaded making a clear reply on potentially relaxing debt rules for this year.
Lindner also argued the 2024 budget would be “a little less moderate and a little more restrictive.”
Italy’s “family-first” prime minister Giorgia Meloni has broken up with her TV journalist boyfriend after lewd comments in which he grabbed his genital area as he propositioned a co-host to a “threesome or foursome,” led to the suspension of his television show.
Meloni took to social media Friday to announce the split from Andrea Giambruno who is also the father of their 7-year-old daughter.
“My relationship with Andrea Giambruno, which lasted almost ten years, ends here,” Meloni wrote just two days after video of his lewd behavior during a commercial break of the popular Striscia la Notizia program on Mediaset went viral.
“I thank him for the splendid years we spent together, for the difficulties we went through, and for giving me the most important thing in my life, which is our daughter Ginevra.”
Giambruno said through his agent Friday that he and Mediaset had “agreed” that his show would be suspended in the aftermath of the scandal. He was not in the anchor chair during the Friday afternoon show taping. Mediaset told CNN affiliate SKY24 that they were “investigating the facts” surrounding Giambruno’s alleged behavior.
In the video, which was shot during a commercial break in front of a live audience, and posted on the program’s social media accounts and website, Giambruno is seen walking around the set and heard asking a female co-host if she has a boyfriend, which she says she does and that he had asked her earlier.
Then he asks if she wants to have group sex, asking her if he minded if he touched his genital area, which he did, while talking to her, according to the video published by the program. The co-host is seen looking down at the desk during his comments.
Mediaset, which was owned by the late politician Silvio Berlusconi, has long been criticized for airing sexist content and often publishes behind-the-scenes videos of their popular program.
In Meloni’s social media post, she wrote: “Our paths have diverged for some time, and the time has come to acknowledge it. I will defend what we were, I will defend our friendship, and I will defend, at all costs, a seven-year-old girl who loves her mother and loves her father, as I was unable to love mine.”
Meloni’s father was a drug addict who spent time in prison, according to her autobiography. Many of her coalition members, including Infrastructure Minister Matteo Salvini and Interior Minister Antonio Tajani and her own political party Brothers of Italy tweeted “hugs” in support of her personal pain.
She added, “I have nothing else to say about this” and asked her critics not to try to capitalize on her problems at home.
Giambruno previously embarrassed the prime minister by suggesting that a spate of gang rapes of young women could have been prevented if the girls avoided alcohol.
“If you go dancing you are fully entitled to get drunk,” he said on his television program, which Mediaset has cancelled after video of his behavior leaked this week.
“But if you avoid getting drunk and losing consciousness, perhaps you’d also avoid getting into trouble, because then you’ll find the wolf.”
When answering a question about Giambruno’s statements on violence against women, Meloni said he had been “misunderstood.”
“He has been misunderstood. I believe in freedom of the press and I don’t tell him what to say,” she said.
Meloni has been widely criticized for her focus on traditional families despite not having married Giambruno, and for her focus on limiting rights of same sex parents by criminalizing surrogacy, removing one parent’s name from birth certificates in cities where her political party has the majority.
Calls, texts and emails to Meloni’s spokespeople and political party for comment were not answered. A text to Giambruno was not answered. Mediaset public affairs office confirmed that his show was suspended, but did not give a reason.
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
Elisabeth Brawis a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and adviser at Gallos Technologies and a regular columnist for POLITICO.
In the 17th century, the Italian chess player Gioachino Greco created the world’s first chess handbook. One of the moves he recorded was the Queen’s Gambit, an ingenious opening in three parts.
Almost exactly 300 years later, his compatriot Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is about to launch a Queen’s Gambit of her own — in foreign policy. And much like Greco’s move, it involves several interlinked steps that, if executed successfully, could yield great dividends.
When Greco began his pioneering manuscript detailing entire chess matches, he was already considered one of the world’s best players. By contrast, Meloni was hardly a household name outside of Italy before leading her party to victory in the country’s parliamentary elections last year.
The world didn’t really know what to expect — especially when it came to foreign policy. Since then, however, Meloni has been surefooted on issues ranging from Ukraine to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. And when heads of state and government gather to address the world’s most pressing challenges at the United Nations General Assembly this week, the Italian prime minister will outline her Queen’s Gambit.
Meloni’s move involves several interconnected steps that deal with the national-security risks posed by climate change, strengthening the Euro-Atlantic alliance and helping African countries become more stable and secure. “Meloni has recently talked a great deal about the need to look at the entire global chessboard without losing sight of any area or piece,” her foreign policy advisor Ambassador Francesco Taló told me.
“For example, by moving the queen toward the East, we risk not noticing the bishop coming from Africa,” he added.
One could argue that the urgent issues we currently face are so interlinked, every head of government needs to develop a Queen’s Gambit. “In today’s situation, you can’t have vertical policy lines,” noted Taló, who previously served as Italy’s ambassador to NATO. “So many things are interconnected.”
But the need for such a strategy is particularly obvious in Italy, which sits at the nexus of Europe, Africa and the Middle East, and is a key participant in the globalized economy — as well as a similarly crucial participant in the West’s defense against Russia and its support of Ukraine. Then add to that the serious disruption coming every country’s way as artificial intelligence and climate change inexorably advance.
These real-world challenges are clearly not as neat as a chessboard, and the foreign policy moves have to be executed simultaneously rather than sequentially — but the intricacy of the strategy is the same.
Take climate change: To protect its astonishing number of UNESCO World Heritage sites — not to mention its famous viniculture and agriculture — Italy needs carbon reductions not just at home but around the world. Of course, far more than Italy’s stunning sites and food hangs in the balance here — without a significant reduction in carbon emissions, sections of Africa risk becoming uninhabitable, which would force even more people to make their way to Europe via Italy.
During the first half of this year, over 73,000 boat migrants reached the country — more than double the number from all of 2021. And if the world exceeds the crucial 1.5-degree average temperature increase, the number of those having to flee their homes will be many times that.
Over 73,000 boat migrants reached the shores of Italy in the first half of 2023 | Antonio Masiello/Getty Images
Just last week, thousands of Libyans died and thousands of others were left homeless when Storm Daniel pounded the country and collapsed a pair of dams. Meloni had phone calls with Libya’s two rival prime ministers, one after the other, the day after the disaster struck, and committed to assisting the country.
The U.N. Climate Change Summit COP28, which will be held in Dubai this December, will face this intricate task of addressing climate change even as the global economy worsens. Ultimately, however, the West needs to slash its carbon emissions — as does China. And in order to get results, the two sides need to work together closely, even as geopolitical tensions increase.
But these are not the only issues the Queen’s Gambit must address.
Like many other countries, Italy needs to slash its commercial links with Russia and reduce its dependence on China too. Meloni has already decided that Italy will leave China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and since the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the country has managed to more than halve its Russian gas imports. The new electricity connector that’s being built between Tunisia and Sicily represents the flipside of this strategy — a new focus on expanded and multilayered collaboration with countries in Italy’s neighborhood.
This EU-financed connector will create jobs in Tunisia, help Italy reduce its dependence on Russian gas, and any surplus will go to Europe. And in the meantime, Meloni — joined by Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte — has also negotiated a migration agreement with Tunisia, which was signed by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in July.
The Italian prime minister is, in fact, trying to create the kind of mutually beneficial relationship that has so often eluded European and African countries. That they would benefit from teaming up on climate change and better commercial links is clear — and Meloni believes Italy can also help make the case for Ukraine with some African leaders who might be best suited to propose ways out of the war.
“Italy is trying to engage not just with Ukraine’s traditional supporters but with other countries that are willing to propose solutions as well,” Taló said. “After all, any country can be assaulted by its neighbor, so every country should be able to understand Ukraine’s situation.”
In the Italian parliament, Meloni herself has dramatically dressed down legislators who have suggested supporting Ukraine is futile. That’s a world away from March 2020, when a COVID-stricken Italy asked its EU friends for help but received sluggish answers. Instead, the country had to turn to Russia and China, which made a big show of their rather limited assistance.
Greco helped the Queen’s Gambit become one of chess’s favorite opening moves, one that’s still used by grand masters today. It doesn’t always succeed, but it’s always worth trying because its rewards are considerable. There’s no guarantee that a Queen’s Gambit will work on the foreign policy stage either — but with so many crises and challenges pressing at the same time, trying to tackle them one by one is futile.
BUDAPEST — Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has accused other European leaders of fearmongering over the threat of climate change at the expense of ignoring the problem of falling birth rates.
“Europe is acting out of fear and fear makes us defeatist,” said the right-wing leader on Thursday. “We say there’s no future, and as such, this is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Hungary is one of a number of Central and Eastern European countries that are trying to reverse falling birth rates. All countries across the European Union have fewer than the 2.1 children per woman needed to keep the population stable without migration.
This aging population raises thorny questions for governments around how to fund the welfare state as the number of older people increases and the proportion of people of working ages falls.
In his address at the two-day Budapest Demographic Summit, a pro-family conference organized by the Hungarian government, Orbán said that “Western elites” were ignoring the question of demographics, and were instead busy with “carbon quotas.”
“They require people to live in fear of an approaching Armageddon,” he said.
Orbán’s government has made birth rates a key political priority, investing around 5 percent of the country’s GDP into family-creation policies like tax breaks and subsidized loans for new houses. Hungary’s birth rate is no longer the lowest in the EU, where it was a decade ago, instead hovering a little above the bloc’s average.
On Thursday, the Hungarian leader ramped up these policies, announcing that the government would lower the threshold for women to receive a lifetime exemption from paying tax from four children to three.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who attended the summit in Budapest, praised Hungary’s efforts to encourage families to have more children and warned that demographic change is an existential risk for her country.
“In our view, demography is not just another of the main issues of our nation. It is the issue on which our nation’s future depends,” she said. “We need the courage to say that demographers’ projections for the future are very worrying.”
Europe has registered birth rates below replacement level for decades, but it’s an issue that has been gaining more attention, especially in Silicon Valley. Elon Musk recently cited Orbán’s efforts approvingly.
Katalin Novák, Hungary’s president and the organizer of the conference, echoed Orbán’s messaging on misguided European priorities. She said that while “alarm bells are ringing about climate change, little attention is being paid to the real problem.
“The demographic winter is turning into an Ice Age,” she said.
In an unusual diplomatic move, Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni settled a restaurant bill of four Italian tourists who left a restaurant in Albania without paying.
Albania’s Prime Minister Edi Rama raised the issue with his Italian counterpart while Meloni was visiting Albania with her family last week. The incident reportedly took place in Berat, which sits on the Osum River, .
Meloni responded by telling her ambassador to “go and pay the bill for these idiots,” Italian paper La Stampa reported. The bill amount to around €80, according to the BBC.
Italy’s embassy in Albania confirmed that it paid the bill with Meloni’s personal funds.
“The Italians respect the rules and pay off their debts and we hope that episodes of this kind will not repeat themselves,” the embassy said.
Francesco Lollobrigida, the Italian agriculture minister, told Reuters that it was a matter of national pride. “She offered to pay the bill. The ambassador was on his way back to Tirana and was available to do this,” he told the news service. “A few dishonest individuals cannot embarrass a nation of decent people,” Lollobrigida said.
BRUSSELS — Right-wing and Euroskeptic parties are set to surge in the next European election at the expense of centrist parties, exclusive polling analysis by POLITICO’s Research and Analysis Division shows.
If the elections were held today, the right-wing European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) would become the third-biggest group in the European Parliament — tied with the centrist Renew — with 89 seats.
That would represent a massive 23-seat gain from the 2019 elections for the sometime-Euroskeptic ECR — home of Poland’s ruling nationalist Law and Justice party — with most of the surge coming from Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s far-right Brothers of Italy.
Similarly, the far-right Identity and Democracy (ID) group would make sizable gains, winning 77 seats — a 15-seat rise driven by the Alternative for Germany’s (AfD) recent surge in the polls.
The anticipated rightward swing reflects a broader trend across national elections in Europe, where voters in countries such as Italy, Finland and Greece have increasingly elevated more conservative and hard-right parties.
That said, POLITICO’s analysis shows that the center-right European People’s Party (EPP) would retain its spot as the Parliament’s largest group, despite a predicted 12-seat loss taking it down to 165 seats.
Alice Weidel, co-leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany | Rinny Hartmann/AFP via Getty Images
The center-left Socialists and Democrats (S&D) would even gain two seats to preserve its spot as Parliament’s No. 2 group, with 145 seats. Renew would drop 12 seats to match ECR in the third slot, the analysis shows.
That means the traditional grand coalition of the EPP, S&D and Renew, which spans the center left to center right, would keep its clear majority over a potential new right-leaning alliance of EPP, ECR and Renew.
Recently, however, the EPP has shown a willingness to partner with ECR, allying with the group to oppose Green Deal legislation.
The election’s biggest losers would be the Greens, which would keep only 48 seats, a loss of 24 spots, while the Left group would gain eight seats but remain the smallest group in Parliament with 45 seats.
Europeans will head to the polls from June 6-9 next year to select the 705 MEPs who represent them in Brussels. The number of MEPs is set to increase to 720 for the 2024 elections but, as the changes still need to be formally approved by the European Council and Parliament itself, the polling estimates are based on a 705-seat scenario.
These seat projections are based on national voting intention polls aggregated in POLITICO’s Poll of Polls, taking into account each country’s current system to allocate Parliament seats.
POLITICO’s Research and Analysis Division also consulted with experts to assign new unaffiliated European lawmakers to their likely groupings.
The only G7 country to join China’s controversial Belt and Road Initiative now thinks that decision was a mistake.
“The choice to join the Silk Road was an improvised and atrocious act,” Guido Crosetto, Italy’s defense minister, told Corriere della Sera, an Italian newspaper, on Sunday.
Italy needs to decide whether to stay in the Chinese infrastructure investment scheme by December, or else the agreement will expire by March 2024. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has yet to publicly state her position beyond promising a decision by December.
Yet Crosetto gave a clear indication of where Rome is headed. “The issue today is: How to walk back [from the Belt and Road Initiative] without damaging relations,” he said on Sunday.
Then-Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte agreed to join the Belt and Road Initiative in 2019, making Italy the largest economy (outside of China) and the only G7 country to sign onto the scheme.
Meloni has noted on several occasions that membership in the Belt and Road is not required for tight economic links with China. “The paradox of the Belt and Road Initiative is that we’re the only nation in…but we are not the nation that has the best trade with China,” Meloni said on Sunday in an interview with Fox News. “That means you can have good relations with China without the Belt and Road Initiative,” she suggested.
What is the Belt and Road Initiative?
China launched the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013. The global infrastructure development program is meant to hearken back to historical trading networks between China and Europe, such as the overland “Silk Road” over Central Asia and the maritime trading routes through Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean.
Around 150 governments have signed onto the Belt and Road Initiative, according to the Chinese government.
Yet Western governments like the U.S. view the program as Beijing’s attempt to expand its economic influence globally, and warn that recipients risk getting caught in a “debt trap.” (The U.S. has reportedly put pressure on Rome to publicly pull out of the Belt and Road Initiative, though Meloni denies that U.S. President Joe Biden has pushed the issue in meetings.)
Some recipients of Chinese government money are now devoting a third of their government revenue to paying back their foreign loans, half of which come from China, an Associated Pressanalysis found earlier this year.
Nor is it clear that the Belt and Road Initiative has met China’s expectations. Beijing started telling its banks to ease up on lending last year, after realizing that many funded projects were expensive, behind schedule, and unlikely to earn a decent return, reported the Wall Street Journal in September 2022.
Italy’s trade with China
On Sunday, Crosetto complained that the BRI hadn’t resolved the country’s trade deficit with China. “We exported a load of oranges to China, they tripled exports to Italy in three years,” he said.
Italy had a $45.7 billion trade deficit with China in 2022, growing from a $20.6 billion deficit in 2019, according to Reuters. Italy’s statistics bureau reports a $34.2 billion global trade deficit for the country last year, though that may have been due to spiking energy prices: Excluding energy, Italy would have had an $88.4 billion trade surplus, the bureau notes.
Surprisingly, Italian exports to China boomed in the first three months of the year, hitting $7.8 billion compared to $4.1 billion the year before.
Analysts puzzled over the data, with some wondering whether Italy’s agreement to join the BRI might finally be paying off.
The answer was much stranger. The boom in Italian exports to China was fueled solely by pharmaceuticals, and just one drug in particular: a medicine used to treat liver disease and gallstones. Chinese consumers had flocked to the drug as an alternative method to prevent COVID-19.
Italy intends to leave the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) “without doing damage” to its relationship with Beijing, Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto said.
“The issue today is: how to walk back [from the BRI] without damaging relations” with Beijing, Crosetto said in an interview with Corriere della Sera. “Because it is true that China is a competitor, but it is also a partner.”
In May, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said the country could enjoy good relations with China even without being part of Beijing’s controversial infrastructure initiative. Crosetto’s comments are the first confirmation of Italy’s intention to leave the Chinese program.
“The choice to join the Silk Road was an improvised and wicked act, made by the government of Giuseppe Conte, which led to a double negative result. We exported a load of oranges to China, they tripled exports to Italy in three years,” said Crosetto in the interview.
In 2019, Italy became the first G7 country to join China’s global infrastructure program to the surprise of allies in the West.
Critics noted that Rome’s decision to enter the Beijing initiative did not improve its trade deficit with China. Chinese exports to Italy increased 51 percent from 2019 to 2022, while China’s imports from the EU country rose by 26 percent during the same years, according to Italy’s Trade Agency.
French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire, meanwhile, said France wants better access to the Chinese market and a more “balanced” trade relationship, not a “decoupling.”
“We don’t want to face some legislative hurdles or some other barriers to get access to the Chinese markets,” Le Maire told a press conference in Beijing a day after what he called “constructive” trade talks with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng.
When Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni walks into the Oval Office on Thursday, her transformation will be complete.
Gone is the ghoulish caricature of an extremist monster, sympathetic to Moscow, whose party was descended from fascists, and in her place stands a pragmatic conservative willing to do business with a grateful international mainstream.
For U.S. President Joe Biden and Ukraine’s backers in the West, securing Meloni’s long-term commitment to the war effort is vital: Italy will assume the leadership of the G7 next year, at what’s likely to be a critical time in the conflict.
Initially, the signs weren’t good. Before she was elected last September, Meloni alarmed officials in Western capitals with her blunt brand of far-right populism. She banged the drum for nationalist causes, vowing to slam the brakes on immigration, stand up to the European Union’s leadership in Brussels and even opposed sanctioning Russia over Ukraine.
Yet 10 months since Meloni won power, the picture has changed dramatically. She will receive VIP treatment at the White House Thursday, with a welcome from Biden that will be as sincere as for any other G7 ally. While the Democrat and the far-right populist share almost nothing in their political outlooks, their handshake is likely to be one of mutual relief.
Meloni’s Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani, leader of the center-right Forza Italia party, told POLITICO that the Ukraine war had bolstered Italy’s relationship with the U.S. The Meloni government’s “three polar stars” are now the EU, the U.N. and NATO, he said.
“Italy is part of the Western alliance and wants to be a protagonist in the Western alliance and in particular in its alliance with the U.S.A.,” Tajani said. “Since the crisis in Ukraine, our relationship on issues of security and shared policy with the U.S.A. has been getting stronger.”
Putin’s pals
It is a far cry from the sort of rhetoric that had, until recently, emanated from Rome.
As leader of the hard right Brothers of Italy, she supported Putin’s strongman politics while in opposition, congratulating him after his re-election by saying “the will of the people appears unequivocal.”
After Moscow’s 2014 invasion of Crimea she repeatedly opposed sanctions against Russia, citing the need to protect Italian exports. During the pandemic Meloni endorsed Russia’s Sputnik vaccines. In a TV interview in 2022 before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, she highlighted how essential it was to remain on good terms with Putin and accused Biden of “using foreign policy to cover up the problems he has at home.”
If Meloni seemed like a problem to Western leaders, her coalition partners were an even worse prospect. Matteo Salvini, leader of the right wing League, who once wore a T-shirt printed with Putin’s face to the EU Parliament, attempted to arrange a peace mission to Moscow with flights paid by the Russian embassy.
And Meloni’s coalition partner Silvio Berlusconi, who led the center-right Forza Italia party until his death in June, blamed Ukraine for the war and had a personal friendship with Vladimir Putin, continuing to exchange gifts with the Russian leader even after the invasion.
When she took power, there were deep, if private, fears within the White House, according to several Biden administration officials who were granted anonymity to speak candidly, that Meloni might shatter the G7 support for Ukraine.
But Meloni surprised U.S. officials at the G7 summit in Hiroshima in May with just how eager she seemed to build a strong relationship with Biden, according to two government officials who witnessed their interactions.
At the NATO summit earlier this month in Vilnius, Meloni stood just a few feet from both Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy when the G7 nations announced additional security guarantees for Kyiv that were meant as something of a make-good after NATO declined to fast-track Ukraine’s membership.
At the NATO summit earlier this month in Vilnius, Meloni stood just a few feet from both Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy | Odd Andersen/AFP via Getty Images
With Italy set to take over the presidency of the G7 in January, Meloni’s support for the cause has prompted sighs of relief from both sides of the Atlantic.
“The President and the Prime Minister have built a good, productive relationship as they have worked together closely on a variety of issues such as our support for Ukraine and our approach to China, and President Biden is looking forward to continuing that conversation,” said Adrienne Watson, a spokesperson for Biden’s national security council.
Pleasantly surprised
Biden has told those around him he has been pleasantly surprised by Meloni’s leadership in the war effort but is eager to get to know the Italian leader better, according to multiple administration officials.
For Alessandro Politi, Director of the NATO Defense College Foundation in Rome, Meloni “understood very quickly that when you get into government you have responsibilities and the U.S.A. is a primary ally.”
Her visit to Kyiv in February was a clear sign she was following “an orthodox path” and a moment when “she convinced the wider international community that she was in charge of the coalition and that her allies had to follow her political line.”
Meloni’s support for the Western stance does not mean the whole of Italy feels the same way.
Some populists on both the left and right of Italian politics still hold pro-Russian views, and the question of whether it’s right to send arms to Ukraine elicits fierce debate in the media. Italy’s longstanding position on Russia has always been to try to act as a bridge, facilitating good relations between East and West.
But although a majority of Italians are opposed to it, Meloni has continued to back Ukraine with military aid. Ukrainians are “defending freedom and democracy on which our civilization is based,” she told the Italian Senate in March.
While Biden and Meloni are likely to agree on Ukraine, it is not certain that they will be in harmony on all issues.
In 2019 Italy became the only G7 country to join China’s Belt and Road global infrastructure initiative. Later this year it is up for renewal, but in the new cold war climate the U.S. expects the deal to be scrapped.
While Meloni has indicated that she might not extend the agreement with Beijing, calling it “a big mistake,” this position is not yet confirmed. If she does return to the more traditional Italian line of walking a middle ground, the cracks in the Biden-Meloni relationship will open up again.
