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  • Spain’s Socialists have a Sánchez problem

    Spain’s Socialists have a Sánchez problem

    SEVILLE, Spain — Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez won’t be on the ballot when Spaniards vote in local elections Sunday — but he might as well be.

    Everyone in the country sees this weekend’s municipal votes as a dress rehearsal for the national election, which has to be held by the end of the year.

    That’s bad news for Socialist candidates like Antonio Muñoz, the mayor of Seville who just wants to be reelected on his own merit — but may end up losing his post because Sánchez is so unpopular.

    In an interview with POLITICO, Muñoz complained that the national framing of the election — and the conservative party’s critiques of Sánchez — had undermined the possibility of real debate over how to improve Spain’s fourth-largest city, the capital of the country’s Andalusia region.

    “If you want to just generate noise and have a debate about national politics: run for parliament, not mayor of Seville,” Muñoz said. “Me, I’ve stayed faithful to my slogan in these elections — Seville and only Seville — and I think that’s what voters want to hear about.”

    In any ordinary election season, Muñoz might be right.

    The openly gay, 63-year-old economist is an unusually popular mayor in Seville, a city that once had a reputation for being inward-looking and socially conservative.

    Elected to the city council in 2011, Muñoz has worked to redefine the city’s identity and reinforce the idea that there’s more to it than bullfights, religious processions and flamenco — while being careful not to alienate Seville’s traditionalists.

    As the city council member in charge of the powerful urbanism, tourism and culture portfolios, he bet on a more alternative, vibrant vision of Seville — promoting electronic music and indie film festivals; and lobbying to steal major events like the Goyas, Spain’s version of the Oscars, away from Madrid.

    It was under Muñoz’s watch that Game of Thrones came to town, when the dragon-packed extravaganza used the lush Alcázar palace as a stand-in for the kingdom of Dorne. The producers of Netflix’s The Crown also passed through, using the palatial Alfonso XIII Hotel as a double for Beverly Hills and filming Mohamed Al-Fayed’s Egyptian wedding in Seville’s sumptuous Casa de Pilatos estate.

    At the same time that he’s shown off the city center — famed for its narrow, winding streets, whitewashed homes, interior gardens and Moorish architecture — he’s also promoted newer parts of Seville. These include the high-tech Cartuja Science and Technology Park, where the European Commission recently inaugurated the headquarters of its new European Centre for Algorithmic Transparency.

    He’s also an enthusiastic booster of the eclectic Fibes Conference Center, located in the working-class Sevilla Este district, which this year will host the 2023 Latin Grammys, the first-ever to be held outside the United States.

    “During the next term, we’ll be doing even more to consolidate this city as a Spanish and European reference point for culture, the green economy and the digital transition,” said Muñoz. He became mayor early last year when his predecessor stepped down to run for office at the regional level.

    While crafting a more modern image of Seville, Muñoz has been careful not to neglect the city’s classic cultural scene.

    He may not be a member of any religious brotherhood, but he has no problem joining religious processions during Holy Week. He may not be a bullfighting enthusiast, but he’s happy to socialize with famous toreros. And while he may not have a passion for flamenco, he’s an almost omnipresent force at the city’s annual April Fair, where smartly dressed men spend a week dancing with women in long, ruffled, polka-dot dresses while downing pitchers of rebujito, the signature Andalusian cocktail.

    “You can like those events more, or less … but they’re a part of our history, our way of life,” said Muñoz.

    The skill with which Muñoz has walked the line has played well among sevillanos, especially those who work in the hospitality sector and have been delighted to see the number of tourists in the city boom. Some 6.5 million overnight stays were registered last year.

    “I’ve always been proud of my city, but right now I feel that Seville is at a new level as a destination, as a brand,” said restaurant owner Emilio Gimeno. “I think a lot of that has to do with the mayor because he’s always promoting the city, he never stops.”

    “I like that he’s a normal guy who lives in the city and doesn’t move around in an official vehicle or surrounded by bodyguards,” he added. “If you’re opening up a new bar, he’s the sort of person who will make time in his schedule to show up at the inauguration, the sort that wants things to work out and go well for you.”

    The Sánchez problem

    The trouble for Muñoz is that when Sevillanos head to the polls, they’re be making their choice based not just on his performance — but on the reputation of his party.

    “The polls suggest that three out of four Spaniards intend to base their vote on local matters, but a quarter admit their vote will depend on national issues,” said Pablo Simón, a political scientist at Madrid’s Carlos III university. “That’s problematic for some mayors because Sánchez is such a polarizing figure.”

    The local election will take place just months before Sánchez’s fragile left-wing coalition government — the first in Spain’s history — is set to complete its four-year term in December.

    Despite the devastating impact of the COVID crisis and the economic impact of the war in Ukraine, from the outside, Sánchez’s administration appears to have weathered the storm well.

    Spain’s gross domestic product has been growing at a rate above the EU average, and unemployment has dropped to levels not seen since 2008.

    The country’s residents pay some of the lowest power prices in Europe, thanks to the Iberian Exception energy price cap. The European Commission has applauded Spain for efficient handling of its share of the bloc’s pandemic recovery cash.

    And yet, within Spain, perception of the government is negative, and all of the parties in the ruling coalition have suffered a steep drop in the polls. Since May of last year, Sánchez’s Socialists have trailed behind the country’s conservative Popular Party, which is currently 7 percentage points ahead.

    Simón, the political scientist, said that some Spaniards distrust Sánchez for having entered into a coalition government with far-left parties with which he said he’d never govern. Not to mention that, like most political leaders, the prime minister’s prestige took a hit during the pandemic.

    “The government’s policies — the higher minimum wage, the basic income, the country’s role in Europe — are broadly popular,” Simón said. “But at a personal level, he isn’t.”

    Juan Espadas, Muñoz’s predecessor in Seville’s city hall and current leader of the Andalusian Socialists, admitted that the prime minister’s unpopularity had become a factor in the local elections.

    “The right has realized that they can’t challenge him on his politics, so now what they’re trying to do is to discredit him on a personal level,” he said, adding that the Popular Party had focused on casting Sánchez as “an egoist” willing to do anything to hold on to power.

    “Their only goal is to make it so that people won’t go vote because they don’t like the person behind the party,” he said.

    The ghost of ETA

    In addition to invoking the unpopular prime minister, the Spanish conservatives have been reminding voters of the coalition government’s cordial relations with pro-independence parties in the national parliament.

    When the Basque pro-independence party EH Bildu included 44 former members of the terrorist group ETA in its official lists for the local elections earlier this month, the Popular Party seized on the issue and turned it into a major talking point in its campaign in cities across the country.

    Muñoz has worked to redefine Seville’s identity and reinforce the idea that there’s more to it than bullfights, religious processions and flamenco | Cristina Quicler/AFP via Getty Images

    In Seville, José Luis Sanz, the conservative candidate for mayor, rallied supporters by declaring that his neighbors “could not understand how Muñoz’s Socialists have surrendered to the heirs of ETA.”

    Like other Socialist candidates, Muñoz has denounced this line of attack, stressing its irrelevance in a campaign that should be about the threat posed by housing insecurity or extreme heat — not a terrorist group that ceased to exist more than a decade ago.

    “I think what the [Popular Party] is doing is enormously disrespectful toward voters,” he said. “Instead of talking about what’s needed in this city’s poorest neighborhoods, about what we can do to promote culture, about how we should manage tourism, they want to talk about a party that isn’t up for election in Seville.”

    But what politicians want to talk about and what voters are hearing seem to rarely be the same thing.

    In the middle-class Los Remedios district, 83-year-old María Camacho Rojas has followed the campaign and decided she won’t give her vote to the mayoral candidate of a party led by Sánchez, a politician she believes to be “a compulsive liar.”

    “[Sánchez] does deals with ETA, he doesn’t care about Spain, and I — like most Spaniards — am worried about the state in which he’s going to leave our country,” she said.

    She added she’d vote for Muñoz in a heartbeat if he belonged to another party. “I like the mayor, I like how much he does for the city, how much he cares about Seville,” she said. “I’m not going to vote against him but I won’t vote for him: I’ll cast a blank ballot on Sunday.”

    In Seville, the latest polls predict a technical tie, with Muñoz’s Socialists winning 12 or 13 seats in the city council and the Popular Party taking 12. That would leave the two mainstream parties dependent on the support of more extreme elements, the far-right Vox party on one side and array of left-wing groups on the other — with those two ideological blocs also nearly tied.

    Whatever the outcome, the fallout is not likely to remain contained within city limits: Muñoz’s Sánchez problem could easily become Sánchez’s Seville problem.

    Losing the city — the largest municipality controlled by the Socialists — would be a severe blow for the prime minister just months ahead of the national elections.

    “One city won’t decide a general election,” said Simón. “But it can make the outcome easier for some, and all the more difficult for others.”

    Aitor Hernández-Morales

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  • Greece heads to the polls again on June 25

    Greece heads to the polls again on June 25

    ATHENS — Greece’s parliament was dissolved Monday, less than 24 hours after convening, paving the way for a new election on June 25.

    Under a decree signed by Greek President Katerina Sakellaropoulou, caretaker Prime Minister Ioannis Sarmas and Cabinet ministers, the next parliament will convene on July 3.

    No party achieved an overall majority in the national election on May 21, which was held under a simple proportional representation system; there was no attempt to form a coalition.

    The conservative New Democracy party achieved a landslide victory, getting 40.79 percent of the vote — but that was not enough to form a single-party government.

    The next election will be contested under a different system that grants the winning party up to 50 bonus parliamentary seats; that gives the conservative New Democracy an edge to form a majority government.

    However, the number of parties that make it into parliament will be crucial to determining the makeup of the eventual majority. The more parties pass the 3 percent threshold needed to win seats in parliament, the higher the share of the vote needed for an outright majority.

    On May 21, two parties barely missed the cutoff, with 2.9 percent support; if they pass that baseline on June 25, it could raise the threshold for a party to achieve an overall majority to about 39 percent.

    The conservatives are appealing to voters not to take the result for granted and head back to polls, while opposition leaders called on them to snip New Democracy’s lead and avoid the prospect of a dominant majority government with no significant opposition.

    GREECE NATIONAL PARLIAMENT ELECTION POLL OF POLLS

    For more polling data from across Europe visit POLITICO Poll of Polls.

    Nektaria Stamouli

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  • Silence speaks volumes as Switzerland still reels from bank meltdown

    Silence speaks volumes as Switzerland still reels from bank meltdown

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    ZURICH — In one of Europe’s wealthiest squares, overlooked by the looming headquarters of a huge international bank that disintegrated just weeks ago, the impeccably dressed men and women who shuffle in and out of gleaming offices are in the grip of a Mafia-like omertà.

    “You won’t get anything from anyone,” one of them says with a firmness that’s meant to draw a line under any conversation before it’s even begun. The informal code of silence dominates. His friend drags him away, through the doors of a second global bank — the one that rescued the first for 3 billion Swiss francs.

    This is Paradeplatz in Zurich, Switzerland’s biggest city. Home to Credit Suisse, whose collapse in March after 167 years could have triggered a full-on global crisis had UBS not been forced to step in and take it over. The recriminations started almost immediately. Now, amid its rattling trams and luxury chocolate shops, this 17th-century square could rival the Vatican for the way the fog of secrecy has descended.

    Stay there long enough and an occasional whisper about the demise of the once-great bank might be overheard. Speculation, nothing more. Gossip about political repercussions or what could happen to bonuses — exchanged over strong coffee and furtive early-morning glances at the Financial Times or Neue Züricher Zeitung. But not with outsiders of course, and certainly not with those who approach with journalist notebook in hand.

    It’s easy to spot the bankers in the Swiss financial capital: a perfectly tailored blue suit, single-breasted trench coat, hand-held briefcase (leather, preferably). And what about the demise of Credit Suisse, then? “We can’t talk about it,” says one of them over an espresso with a colleague.

    Turn the corner, to where a younger man is smoking, behind the dead bank’s HQ that still stands at Paradeplatz’s northern end. He dismisses all questions too: “For that, we have corporate comms.”

    Nobody’s responsible

    There’s a reason for all this silence. The Alpine nation, known for its utmost discretion in its role as banker to the world’s rich, is still trying to process exactly what went wrong — and what to do about the people who took Credit Suisse to the brink.

    The public is “very angry,” according to Tobias Straumann, professor of modern and economic history at the University of Zurich, especially as it’s been just 15 years since UBS’ own public bailout.

    “The taxpayer has to save a bank, where people earned a lot of money, and nobody’s responsible now,” he said. “That’s the feeling.”

    With national elections coming up in October, the question turns to who will be on the receiving end of that feeling. Just the bankers themselves? The regulators who watched it go up in flames? The politicians who set the rules in the first place? All of the above?

    The Swiss parliament has started exerting its authority — rejecting the government’s request to approve an emergency credit line underpinning the takeover. But that was largely symbolic. It will decide in June whether to launch a parliamentary commission — which would then be able to summon those involved for questioning.

    The Swiss parliament has started exerting its authority — rejecting the government’s request to approve an emergency credit line underpinning the takeover | Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images

    “My prediction would be that in the short run, not much is going to happen,” Straumann said. “But probably after the elections, then you’re going to see a bigger coalition that really does something,”

    Pig market

    It won’t help the public mood that some Credit Suisse bankers plan to sue over lost bonuses. A few hundred years ago Paradeplatz was known as Säumärt — pig market, and now accusations of snouts in troughs have become ever more common in public discourse.

    Céline Widmer, a Swiss Social Democrat lawmaker, has called for a ban on bankers’ bonuses, as well as for higher capital requirements for lenders to make them safer. In her view, Switzerland’s financial watchdog should also get stronger sanctioning powers.

    “It was the behavior of the banks, which [demonstrated] they are not accountable,” she said of what went wrong at Credit Suisse.

    The Swiss authorities find themselves under intense scrutiny. Although they stopped the bank’s collapse from triggering broader financial contagion, the government and regulators face questions over why they didn’t step in earlier.

    As it was, Credit Suisse had problems for years, but over a few days in March, it rapidly lost the trust of financial markets amid broader panic over bank failures in the U.S.

    According to Finance Minister Karin Keller-Sutter, the bank would have run out of money without the hasty takeover by UBS, as clients pulled their deposits and its shares and bond prices tanked.

    The government promised to swallow up to 9 billion francs of losses if needed and the Swiss central bank offered 100 billion francs of liquidity.

    Legal cases are underway contesting the decisions taken over that pivotal weekend of the merger — including the Swiss financial watchdog’s wipeout of 16 billion francs of Credit Suisse bonds, reversing the usual hierarchy of losses in a collapse.

    Those investors, whose bonds are now worth nothing, have won an early victory by forcing the release of a contested emergency decree.

    A banking monster

    And life might get harder for the other bank with its headquarters in Paradeplatz now that it’s gobbled up its rival.

    “We created a monster with UBS,” said Thomas Borer, a former Swiss ambassador to Germany, who is involved in representing the interests of Credit Suisse bondholders wiped out in the takeover.

    “[It’s now] one of the biggest banks in the world when it comes to wealth management. We are not one of the biggest countries in the world. How should we regulate that? That’s now where the debate is focusing on.”

    According to Finance Minister Karin Keller-Sutter, the bank would have run out of money without the hasty takeover by UBS | François Walschaerts/AFP via Getty Images

    The parliamentary investigation could lead that debate — and even Switzerland’s tight-lipped bankers are keen.

    “We are supporting that there be an independent and complete and open-minded review of these events,” said August Benz, deputy chief executive of the Swiss Bankers Association.

    Credit Suisse’s failure had triggered “certain emotions,” Benz said, but hoped an inquiry would help Switzerland pick “the right measures” in response to the bank’s failure. He pushed back against the idea that a global bank like UBS could be too big for the country.

    “Germany has one [globally systemic bank], Italy has one, Spain has one, [the Netherlands has one] and Switzerland looks like it’ll have one,” he said.

    Stable no more

    Back on the streets of Zurich, Credit Suisse’s HQ is a visible reminder of the uncertainty brought about by its failure, peering over at UBS across Paradeplatz.

    “It’s a huge institution that suddenly disappears,” says Reinhard Berger, a 36-year-old chemist, waiting for the tram.

    A few blocks away, Eliane Christen, a patent engineer, 35, is wistful. The failure makes her “unsure about the stability we always say Switzerland has,” she says. The stability seemed to vanish in one weekend.

    Hannah Brenton

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  • Sinn Féin scores record win in Northern Ireland as voters rage at DUP blockade of Stormont

    Sinn Féin scores record win in Northern Ireland as voters rage at DUP blockade of Stormont

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    DUBLIN — Sinn Féin has scaled new electoral heights in Northern Ireland. They can thank the Stormont-wrecking antics of their sworn enemies, the Democratic Unionist Party, for making it possible.

    The Irish republicans had been tipped to finish a strong first place in Northern Ireland’s council elections last Thursday, overtaking Jeffrey Donaldson’s DUP along the way. But even Sinn Fein’s wildest hopes were eclipsed as the weekend’s results built to a crescendo over a marathon two-day count.

    When final results were declared in Belfast City Hall after midnight Saturday, Sinn Féin had won 144 seats, a 39-seat gain that more than doubled expectations. Its 30.9 percent share of the vote marked a historic high, two points better even than last year’s poll-topping Northern Ireland Assembly election — a performance that should have propelled the party’s regional leader, Michelle O’Neill, into the first minister’s chair for the first time.

    But O’Neill has been denied the chance to lead a cross-community executive, as the Good Friday peace accord intended, because the Democratic Unionists — used to finishing first — have spent the past year blocking the formation of any government at Stormont. The current rules of power-sharing require both Sinn Féin and the DUP to participate.

    According to analysts and other party leaders, the DUP’s obstructionist tactics may have galvanized support with unionist die-hards — but also triggered waves of new support for their traditional enemies from voters sick of the deadlock.

    “Jeffrey Donaldson has become the greatest recruiting sergeant possible for republicans. The longer Michelle O’Neill is blocked from becoming first minister, the more voters are driven into the arms of her party,” wrote Suzanne Breen, political editor of the Belfast Telegraph.

    Social Democratic and Labour Party leader Colum Eastwood, who competes with Sinn Féin in Irish nationalist areas, said his own moderate party’s grassroots had switched to Sinn Féin in unprecedented numbers because the DUP had exhausted their patience.

    “They’re very annoyed that Michelle O’Neill hasn’t been able to become first minister,” said Eastwood, whose party — one of the architects of the Good Friday breakthrough a quarter-century ago — suffered heavy losses amid the Sinn Féin-DUP showdown.

    “They want politicians to get back to work and deal with the issues besetting our community,” Eastwood said. “Now it’s over to the DUP to get on with it.”

    Still waiting

    When or whether the DUP actually does so remains far from certain, given that its own vote held up well at Thursday’s election.

    Donaldson and other senior DUP figures have spent the past three months picking holes in the British government’s Windsor Framework, the successor post-Brexit trade deal for Northern Ireland designed to reduce — but not eliminate — EU-required checks on goods arriving from the rest of the United Kingdom. Unionists argue such checks effectively place Northern Ireland partly outside the U.K., and on a slippery slope toward a united Ireland, Sinn Féin’s ultimate goal.

    U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak had hoped the Windsor Framework compromise package would have persuaded the DUP to resume cooperation at Stormont with a strengthened Sinn Féin.

    Jeffrey Donaldson said that his party’s resilient performance showed most unionists would rather have no Stormont than accept “barriers to trade between Northern Ireland and Great Britain.” | Charles McQuillan/Getty Images

    But Donaldson told reporters at Belfast City Hall that his party’s resilient performance — it won 122 of the 462 seats on Northern Ireland’s 11 councils, the exact same total as in the 2019 election — showed most unionists would rather have no Stormont than accept “barriers to trade between Northern Ireland and Great Britain.”

    “The DUP have polled strongly despite everything that has been thrown at us,” said Donaldson, who now wants Westminster to pass unspecified legislation reinforcing Northern Ireland’s constitutional ties to Britain. “The U.K. government must move to ensure that our place in the United Kingdom is not only respected, but protected in law. The mandate we’ve been given reinforces that message.”

    His immediate predecessor as DUP leader, Edwin Poots, said while others expected the party to end its Stormont sabotage now that the election was out of the way, such a move remains unlikely unless the U.K. government finds extra support for Stormont’s ailing finances.

    “We’re ready to go back but we need to get more than what’s currently on the table,” Poots said. “If we went back into the assembly and executive in the morning, with this budget, the first task of every minister would be to implement cuts. It’s imperative that we get a package to ensure this will not be the case.”

    O’Neill, who spent much of the weekend joining in jubilant scenes with Sinn Féin activists, expressed exasperation that the DUP might string others along indefinitely for many months longer.

    “I am not accepting the autumn as a timeframe for a restored executive, as a lot of people are suggesting. There shouldn’t be any more delays. Let’s do it Monday morning,” she said.

    Joining O’Neill in Belfast was Sinn Féin’s overall leader, Mary Lou McDonald, a Dubliner whose eye remains on a bigger prize: leading a government in the neighboring Republic of Ireland for the first time.

    Sinn Féin, the only party contesting elections in both parts of Ireland, wants as part of its Irish unity strategy to gain the reins of power in both jurisdictions simultaneously. For decades a fanciful dream — and a unionist nightmare — this scenario has become a probability.

    The party’s growth to become the top party in Northern Ireland is matched south of the border by McDonald’s successful efforts to build Sinn Féin into the dominant opposition party in Dáil Éireann, Ireland’s parliament. It has topped every opinion poll for years and looks likely to win the next general election, which must happen by 2025 but could come sooner.

    As McDonald and O’Neill together ascended the steps of Belfast City Hall, Sinn Féin activists cheered their party’s rising expectations of gaining power in both the Dáil and Stormont, with McDonald as prime minister in Dublin and O’Neill as first minister in Belfast — if the DUP ever relents.

    Shawn Pogatchnik

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  • Greece’s conservatives achieve landslide victory but fall short of majority

    Greece’s conservatives achieve landslide victory but fall short of majority

    ATHENS — Greece’s conservative ruling party achieved a landslide victory in Sunday’s election, but it will have to wait for a second vote later this summer in its bid to secure an outright majority.

    The New Democracy party of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis managed to gain a double-digit lead over its main rival, the left-wing Syriza party, and was missing only a few seats for a majority even with the new proportional representation system, according to early results.

    “The political earthquake that occurred today calls on all of us to accelerate the process for a final governmental solution,” Mitsotakis declared Sunday evening from his party headquarters.

    “The data from the ballot box is catalytic — it proves that New Democracy has the approval to govern independently and strongly and they demanded it emphatically, in an absolute way,” he said.

    With 75 percent of the votes counted, New Democracy was poised to get 40.8 percent of the vote and 145 seats in the 300-seat parliament. Syriza was lagging with only 20.1 percent and 72 seats, while the Socialist Pasok party had 11.7 percent and 42 seats. The Communists KKE had 7.1 percent and 25 seats and the nationalist Greek Solution 4.5 percent and 16 seats.

    Three smaller parties that initially looked poised to get 3 percent and top the threshold to make it to parliament, eventually scored lower. The participation rate was at 59.2 percent, the Interior Ministry reported.

    Nonetheless, New Democracy didn’t gather the percentage of votes — 45 percent — needed to win an outright majority.

    Mitsotakis managed to gain among voters despite his premiership being burdened with a spying scandal, spiraling inflation and mounting concerns over the rule of law.

    “Our collective bodies will be convened immediately in order to evaluate the election results,” said Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras, calling the results extremely negative for his party.

    However, he said “the election cycle is not yet over, as there will probably be a second election and therefore, we do not have the time to wait. We must immediately make all changes necessary, in order to give the best possible conditions to the next crucial and final electoral battle.”

    “It is a devastating outcome for the opposition, especially for Syriza,” said Wolfango Piccoli, co-founder of risk analysis company Teneo.

    “It will take a long time for the main opposition party to recover, leaving New Democracy in a position to dominate Greek politics and run the government with no meaningful scrutiny,” he said.

    “The outcome of today’s vote will be welcome by investors, but ND’s dominance of the political system together with a weak opposition may raise concerns about clientelism and the quality of policy-making,” Piccoli added.

    “The resounding victory of New Democracy sends a clear and undisputed message all over Europe,” said Thanasis Bakolas, the center-right European People’s Party secretary general, adding that this is the first time since 2000 in Greece that the incumbent government emerges stronger after its term.

    “A message to Brussels? — Today’s electoral result is a clear message against all those outside Greece who have consistently questioned the quality of Greek democracy and the will of the Greek people,” Bakolas added.

    Starting from Monday, each of the three leading parties will get the mandate to form a government, starting with the winner, before passing to the second and then third party. Each one will have up to three days to try to form a government.

    If there is no agreement on a coalition, the parliament elected on Sunday will be sworn in and then dissolved, paving the way for a second round of elections to take place and a caretaker government will be sworn in.

    Bolstered by his triumph, Mitsotakis is expected to immediately seek a second vote, rejecting the option of a coalition after this first round of voting.

    That means Greeks will probably head to the ballot boxes again on June 25 or July 2, with New Democracy poised to gain an outright majority, thanks to a system that grants the winning party in the second round up to 50 bonus seats.

    Nektaria Stamouli

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  • King Charles III crowned in Westminster Abbey

    King Charles III crowned in Westminster Abbey

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    LONDON — In a ceremony of pageantry, quirks and ancient tradition, King Charles III, Britain’s 62nd monarch, was on Saturday officially crowned head of state of the United Kingdom and 14 Commonwealth realms.

    The king, who succeeds his late mother, Queen Elizabeth II, was coronated at London’s Westminster Abbey alongside his wife Camilla in a two-hour ceremony attended by world leaders, members of the royal family, foreign dignitaries, faith leaders, and heads of state.

    The historic event was overseen by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, and punctuated with rituals, regalia, and objects dating back centuries.

    These included oaths, spurs, a Jewelled Sword of Offering, various sceptres and an orb. The king was anointed with holy oil via a coronation spoon, while the watching public were offered the chance to declare their loyalty by proclaiming: “God save King Charles.” 

    Among the 2,000 guests were French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte. First Lady Jill Biden, the wife of U.S. President Joe Biden, was also present, accompanied by her granddaughter, Finnegan. They wore blue and gold attire respectively, interpreted as support for Ukraine, whose flags share the same colors. 

    The U.S. president himself chose not to attend, but wrote on Twitter: “Congratulations to King Charles III and Queen Camilla on their Coronation. The enduring friendship between the U.S. and the U.K. is a source of strength for both our peoples. I am proud the First Lady is representing the United States for this historic occasion.”

    European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen sat beside President of the European Council Charles Michel, despite long-standing tensions between Brussels’ two most prominent politicians. European Parliament President Roberta Metsola was also in the congregation.

    U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry was seen speaking briefly to former U.K. Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, now president for global affairs at Meta. King Charles has been a life-long campaigner on the environment.

    U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who gave a reading during the service, was joined by senior members of his Cabinet and as well as all his living predecessors, including Tony Blair, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss — the latter having served in Downing Street for just 49 days last year. Commons Leader Penny Mordaunt, a member of Sunak’s Cabinet, took a leading role in the ceremony, carrying the sword of state due to her ceremonial role as lord president of the privy council. 

    Keir Starmer, leader of the U.K.’s opposition Labour Party, sat next to the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey, while leaders of the devolved nations in the U.K. were also in attendance. Prince Harry was seated among members of the U.K. royal family, though his wife, Meghan Markle, remained in California with their children.

    Also present were the presidents of Germany and Italy, Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Sergio Mattarella, China’s vice-president, Han Zheng, and the prime minister of Pakistan, Shehbaz Sharif. Han’s attendance had been a subject of controversy in the U.K. due to his central role in China’s repression of Hong Kong.

    There were also leaders from the 14 Commonwealth nations for whom Charles is head of state, including Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and New Zealand’s Chris Hipkins, as well as representatives from Grenada, Papa New Guinea, the Bahamas and others. 

    Celebrities such as singer Katy Perry, chef Jamie Oliver, actor Emma Thompson, and British TV duo Ant and Dec also took seats in the Abbey.

    Thousands of flag-carrying members of the public gathered along the procession route | Niklaas Halle’n/AFP via Getty Images

    Britain is a constitutional monarchy, and as head of state King Charles has a ceremonial role in opening and dissolving parliament, appointing a government, and approving bills before they become law. He also meets weekly with Sunak, the prime minister.

    However, the ability to make and pass legislation rests with politicians in an elected parliament.

    Thousands of flag-carrying members of the public enjoyed another British tradition — light summer drizzle — as they gathered in the early hours along the procession route from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey. Before the coronation, the head of the U.K.’s leading republican movement, which held a protest in Trafalgar Square, was among those arrested by police. 

    Members of the royal family were gathered on the Buckingham Palace balcony later Saturday afternoon ahead of a series of celebratory events taking place Sunday, including a pop concert at Windsor Castle. Monday has been designated a public holiday in Britain to mark the occasion.

    This article is being updated as the ceremonies continue.

    Sebastian Whale

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  • Erdoğan finds a scapegoat in Turkey’s election: LGBTQ+ people

    Erdoğan finds a scapegoat in Turkey’s election: LGBTQ+ people

    ISTANBUL — To President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s LGBTQ+ community represents “deviant structures” and a “virus of heresy.”

    In the run-up to Sunday’s too-close-to-call election, he has ramped up his poisonous invective against homosexuality, as he seeks to shore up his conservative Islamist base. Almost every other speech from the campaign trail accuses the opposition of undermining family values and of being in the thrall of improbably powerful LGBTQ+ networks — sometimes with hints they are run by paymasters abroad.  

    “The AK Party has never been an LGBT supporter,” Erdoğan roared at a recent Istanbul rally, referring to his governing party. “We believe in the sanctity of the family. Family is sacred.”

    Adding a menacing note, he followed up with: “So are we ready to bury these LGBT supporters in the ballot box?”

    To some extent, the homophobic focus of the campaign is easily explicable. Increasingly deserted by his early supporters, Erdoğan is having to form coalition partnerships with more extreme Islamists in this year’s elections.

    But even so, his language smacks of a fixation, and an attempt to divert attention from the country’s most pressing ailments — including a snowballing cost of living crisis and scorching inflation.   

    Diversionary tactics

    Fulden Ergen, editor of Velvele.Net, an online debate platform for LGBTQ+ rights, said she was taken aback by the ubiquity of Erdoğan’s propaganda against the LGBTQ+ community in this year’s campaign.

    She reckoned the attacks were an attempt to mask how few answers to Turkey’s profound problems the AK Party now has.

    “I was not expecting them to be this devoid of policies and just talking about LGBTI,” she said. “The alliance does not have much to give people anymore,” she added, referring to the conservative coalition backing the president. “They don’t know how to deal with the economic crisis. They have no policies left, I see this campaign as a defeat.” 

    Though he may be running out of ideas, Erdoğan could still win. And that is now a serious concern to LGBTQ+ people.

    Life is already tough, and could get significantly worse. LGBTQ+ flags are banned, gatherings are arbitrarily blocked by the government and participants in pride parades are regularly attacked or detained by police. The fear is that their organizations could now be made illegal, and — in the worst case scenario — that laws to protect families could be extended to outlaw homosexuality itself.

    Activists say that if Erdoğan stays in power, violence could follow his hate speech.  

    An anti-LGBTQ+ rally in Istanbul in 2022 | Chris McGrath/Getty Images

    One of the dangers is that his government could use security laws to crack down on homosexual relations — casting them as part of a foreign conspiracy. The government is playing on perceptions that “people don’t believe LGBTI can be from Turkey,” Ergen said.  

    One of the biggest setbacks for women and LGBTQ+ people has been Turkey’s 2021 withdrawal from the — ironically named — Istanbul Convention, which is intended to prevent, prosecute and eliminate violence against women and promote gender equality. 

    Domestic violence is a severe problem that kills at least one woman every day in Turkey. According to data from the Monument Counter, a website that commemorates women who lost their lives to domestic violence, 824 women have been killed in just the past two years.

    Gender parity is another failing across the country’s political spectrum. According to the country’s Women’s Platform for Equality, a rights group that has been tracing the candidates on the various parties’ electoral lists, a mere 117 female deputies are set to be elected to Turkey’s 600-seat parliament. 

    ‘I have seen many Erdoğans in my life’

    Zeynep Esmeray Özadikti, who has been an activist for trans rights for 30 years, looks set to be an exception to that trend. She is a candidate for the Workers’ Party of Turkey and the first openly trans woman with a good chance of making it to parliament. 

    In a café in Kurtuluş, a neighborhood in Istanbul where there are significant numbers of trans voters, Esmeray told POLITICO that, if elected, she would fight for the rights of LGBTQ+ people against discrimination, hate crimes and violence. “I am getting very positive feedback from the streets,” she said. “If we can judge it by looking at the streets then I’ll definitely be getting into the parliament.”

    If Erdoğan stays in power, Esmeray believes he will take the country in a more religiously conservative direction, even aiming for Sharia law.

    Ergen, the Velvele.net editor, echoed Esmeray’s line of thought. She feared that Article 10 in Turkey’s constitution — a part of the national charter that gives some vague protection to gender equality — might be doctored, paving the way to the possible criminalization of homosexuality. 

    “This is my biggest fear,” she says. “If they win, they are going to do it.”

    Still, the fear of Erdoğan does not mean the LGBTQ+ community feels completely protected by the opposition, whose candidate Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu is leading in the polls ahead of Sunday’s first round vote.

    Ergen thinks the right-wing parties within the wide-ranging opposition alliance could also lobby to make life harder for LGBTQ+ groups. 

    Kılıçdaroğlu himself is fairly guarded in his LGBTQ+ remarks, knowing that the government could easily turn the subject against him.

    To Erdoğan, Turkey’s LGBTQ+ community represents “deviant structures” | Burak Kara/Getty Images

    He is, however, committed to a trajectory toward EU norms. When asked for his stance by POLITICO, he said: “We defend all human rights. It is our common duty to defend human rights. Democracy demands it. You cannot alienate people based on their beliefs, identities and lifestyles, you have to respect everyone.”

    Both Esmeray and Ergen believed the priority should be for Turkey to return the Istanbul Convention to reinforce some basic freedoms.

    And both reckoned Turkey’s population was ahead of its politicians.

    “I am more optimistic about people, not political parties,” said Ergen, who based her hopes on the breadth of civil society activities in Turkey.  

    Esmeray added: “I have seen many Erdoğans in my life. If he wins, we will continue fighting. If it comes to that, I will face him and tell him to kill me.”

    POLITICO Staff

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  • Finland cleared to join NATO following Turkish vote

    Finland cleared to join NATO following Turkish vote

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    The Turkish parliament on Thursday unanimously ratified Finland’s accession to NATO, effectively allowing Helsinki to join the military alliance but leaving Sweden out in the cold.

    Finland could now become a formal member of NATO within days. 

    “All 30 NATO members have now ratified Finland’s membership,” Finnish President Sauli Niinistö tweeted. “I want to thank every one of them for their trust and support. Finland will be a strong and capable Ally, committed to the security of the Alliance,” he said. 

    His country, the president added, “is now ready to join NATO.” 

    The Turkish vote, occurring minutes before midnight in Ankara, comes after months of delays. 

    Finland and Sweden initially applied for membership last May, prompted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And while the two countries were formally invited to join the alliance last summer, both Turkey and Hungary have been stalling on ratifying their memberships.  

    Ankara has raised concerns about the countries’ support of Kurdish groups and limitations on arms exports. But despite striking a deal with both Helsinki and Stockholm that spurred policy changes, Ankara ultimately decided to greenlight Finland while holding Sweden back.

    Hungary’s parliament on Monday also ratified Finland’s membership but like Turkey has yet to schedule a vote on Sweden. 

    Western officials had hoped that both countries would become full members before a summit of NATO leaders scheduled to take place in Vilnius in July, but it remains uncertain whether Sweden could still become a member before the gathering. 

    Turkey is set to hold elections in May, fuelling speculation that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is withholding support for Sweden for domestic political reasons and could change his mind at a later stage. 

    Niinistö, the Finnish president, said in his tweet late Thursday that “we look forward to welcoming Sweden to join us as soon as possible.” 

    Now that Finland has Turkey’s formal support, only procedural steps are left before Helsinki officially joins NATO. 

    Finland will soon get a formal invitation from NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg and then give the U.S. its so-called instrument of accession. The U.S. will then issue a statement that Finland is now part of the North Atlantic Treaty.

    The NATO chief welcomed Turkey’s vote.

    “This,” Stoltenberg tweeted, “will make the whole NATO family stronger & safer.” 

    Lili Bayer and Leyla Aksu

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  • Biden to mark Good Friday peace deal in 5-day Irish trip

    Biden to mark Good Friday peace deal in 5-day Irish trip

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    DUBLIN — U.S. President Joe Biden will pay a five-day visit to both parts of Ireland next month to mark the 25th anniversary of the U.S.-brokered Good Friday peace accord, according to a provisional Irish government itinerary seen by POLITICO.

    The plans, still being finalized with the White House, have the president arriving in Northern Ireland on April 11. That’s one day after the official quarter-century mark for the Good Friday Agreement, the peace deal designed to end decades of conflict that claimed more than 3,600 lives.

    With Irish roots on both sides of his family tree, Biden has long taken an interest in brokering and maintaining peace in Northern Ireland. He has welcomed the recent U.K.-EU agreement on making post-Brexit trade rules work in the region — a breakthrough that has yet to revive local power-sharing at the heart of the 1998 accord.

    According to two Irish government officials involved in planning the Biden visit itinerary, the president will start his stay overnight at Hillsborough Castle, southwest of Belfast, the official residence for visiting British royalty, as a guest of the U.K.’s Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris.

    Then he’s scheduled to visit Stormont, the parliamentary complex overlooking Belfast, at the invitation of its caretaker speaker, Alex Maskey of the Irish republican Sinn Féin party.

    That could prove controversial given that, barring a diplomatic miracle, the Northern Ireland Assembly and its cross-community government — a core achievement of the 1998 agreement — won’t be functioning due to a long-running boycott by the Democratic Unionists. That party has not yet accepted the U.K.-EU compromise deal on offer because it keeps Northern Ireland, unlike the rest of the U.K., subject to EU goods rules and able to trade more easily with the rest of Ireland than with Britain. Nonetheless, assembly members from all parties including the DUP will be invited to meet Biden there.

    The president is booked to officiate the official ribbon-cutting of the new downtown Belfast campus of Ulster University. During his stay in Northern Ireland he also is expected to pay a visit to Queen’s University Belfast, where former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton serves as chancellor.

    Next, the Irish government expects the presidential entourage to cross the border into the Republic of Ireland, potentially by motorcade, the approach last adopted by Bill Clinton during his third and final visit to Ireland as president in 2000.

    This would allow Biden to pay a visit to one side of his Irish family tree, the Finnegans, in County Louth. Louth is midway between Belfast and Dublin. Biden previously toured the area in 2016 as vice president, when he met distant relatives for the first time and visited the local graveyard.

    In Dublin, it is not yet confirmed whether Biden will deliver a speech at College Green outside the entrance of Trinity College. That’s the spot where Barack Obama delivered his own main speech during a one-day visit as president in 2011.

    A White House advance team is expected in Dublin this weekend to scout that and other potential locations for a speech and walkabout. He isn’t expected to hold any functions at the Irish parliament, which begins a two-week Easter recess Friday.

    Members of Ireland’s national police force, An Garda Síochána, have been told by commanders they cannot go on leave during the week of April 10-16 in anticipation of Biden’s arrival. The Irish expect U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to accompany the president and take part in more detailed talks with Northern Ireland’s leaders.

    Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar plans to host the president and Blinken at Farmleigh House, a state-owned mansion previously owned by the Guinness brewing dynasty, inside Dublin’s vast Phoenix Park.

    The final two days of Biden’s visit will focus on the other side of his Irish roots, the Blewitts of County Mayo, on Ireland’s west coast, which he also visited in 2016. Distant cousins he first met on that trip have since been repeated guests of the White House, most recently on St. Patrick’s Day.

    White House officials declined to discuss specific dates or any events planned, but did confirm that Biden would travel to Ireland “right after Easter.” This suggests an April 11 arrival in line with the Irish itinerary. Easter Sunday falls this year on April 9 and, in both parts of Ireland, the Christian holiday is a two-day affair ending in Easter Monday.

    Jonathan Lemire contributed reporting.

    Shawn Pogatchnik

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  • After Macron, le déluge

    After Macron, le déluge

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    Anyone looking at France right now could be forgiven for thinking the country was on the edge of a revolution.

    Major cities from Paris to Lyon erupted in riots overnight on Thursday, with black-clad protesters lighting bonfires and hurling projectiles at riot police after President Emmanuel Macron rammed an unpopular reform of the pension system through parliament. More than 400 police were injured.

    The violence capped weeks of mass protests as millions marched through French cities to oppose the reform, which will raise the legal age of retirement to 64 from 62 currently. More protests are already planned for next week, piling pressure on Macron’s already embattled government and prompting Britain’s King Charles to cancel a highly-awaited visit.

    Yet for all the sound and fury of the protests, which could yet worsen if students join in, there’s nearly zero risk that Macron himself will have to leave office. Having narrowly survived a vote of no confidence, he may seek to reshuffle his cabinet and sack his prime minister, Élisabeth Borne — but the presidential system is so designed that the leader is nearly guaranteed to remain president until the last day of his term, in 2027.

    The bigger question, then, is about what happens after Macron, whose hyper-personal style of leadership has often been described as king-like, even by the standards of France’s monarchical Republic, leaves the stage for good. 

    Barred from seeking a third term by the constitution, Macron will leave behind a leaderless and rudderless ruling party that may well cease to exist without him, creating a power vacuum that far-left and far-right leaders, including three-time presidential contender Marine Le Pen, are itching to fill. 

    And while Macron has a solid hold on power now, the parliamentary rebellion his government faced down this week — and the chaos engulfing the country — raise ominous questions about the future for anyone who hopes to see France stay firmly anchored to the pro-EU, pro-NATO liberal camp.

    In other words, after Macron, le déluge. 

    Macron’s shaky platform

    The first danger sign flashing over French democracy is the state of Macron’s own party, the centrist Renaissance group. In many systems, ruling parties have deep roots and an ideological foundation that, at least in theory, give them a raison d’être beyond exercising power. 

    But this isn’t the case for Macron’s party, which was born for the sole purpose of hoisting its founder into the Elysée presidential palace and then supporting his government. As such, it’s docile by nature and, with a few exceptions, hasn’t produced bold personalities who would in other circumstances be natural successors to the president. 

    And while the party is already short of a majority in parliament, the rebellion against the pension reform this week revealed Renaissance to be much weaker even than was previously thought — more of a hollow platform for Macron to stand on than a launchpad for future leaders. Indeed, Prime Minister Borne believed that she could rely on support from the center-right Les Républicains party to provide the necessary votes to pass the reform, as part of an informal coalition arrangement.

    Yet this hope vanished suddenly and unexpectedly when a group of 19 Les Républicains, led by southern lawmaker Aurélien Pradié, defied orders from their own party leadership and announced they would support a motion of no confidence in Macron’s government. As rebellions go, it revealed not just the weakness of Renaissance, but the continued disarray of the mainstream center-right in France — which has produced most of the country’s leaders since World War II and is now a shadow of its former self.

    “The political landscape isn’t just fractured; it doesn’t offer any hope for the president, the government or their supporters,” said Jean-Daniel Lévy, a political analyst with pollster Harris Interactive. “There is no such thing as a Macron doctrine or an ideological successor to Macron.”

    The rebellion against the pension reform this week revealed President Emmanuel Macron’s party to be much weaker even than was previously thought | John Macdougall/AFP via Getty Images

    The second alarm bell ringing is how much the pension crisis has emboldened the far-right and far-left factions in parliament. Take Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a far-left firebrand who’s made two failed bids for the presidency, and is now the most recognizable face in the NUPES, a recently-formed left-wing coalition gathering what’s left of the Socialist party, Mélenchon’s hard-left France Unbowed group and the Greens.

    Having faded from view, Mélenchon has roared back into the limelight during the pension reform battle, appearing constantly in the media. Anti-NATO, Euroskeptic and calling for an end to France’s 5th republic (his 6th Republic would end the presidential monarchy), the ex-socialist whose sympathies lean more toward Venezuela than Brussels is ideally suited to produce revolutionary soundbites.

    With his pension reform, Macron has “lit a fire and blocked all the exits,” Mélenchon quipped this week.

    Le Pen eyes the crown

    Yet Mélenchon’s prospects of taking power in 2027 look slim. According to an IFOP poll published in early March, just 21 percent of the French believe he’s best-positioned to lead the opposition — suggesting he’s not very well-loved by other adherents of the NUPES coalition.

    Much better positioned is Marine Le Pen, the far-right chief whom Macron defeated twice in the final rounds of two presidential elections. Indeed, since her last defeat, Le Pen has made further strides toward making herself look presidential while continuing to try to detoxify her party’s image.

    Not only has Le Pen ditched the “National Front” party name that was associated with her Holocaust-minimizing father, Jean-Marie Le Pen; she has abandoned an electorally-disastrous plan to exit the euro currency zone and she’s established herself as the leader of her party’s 88-strong delegation in the French parliament, placing her at the center of the action against the pension reform.

    She hasn’t confirmed that she’ll make a fourth bid for the presidency. But there’s no reason to believe she wouldn’t. And this time, Macron won’t be around to stop her.

    “After Macron, it will be us,” she told BFMTV this week, referring to her National Rally party.

    Aside from Le Pen, the obvious choice to succeed Macron would be Édouard Philippe — his remarkably beloved one-time prime minister. Since leaving office in 2017, Philippe has been quietly biding his time as mayor of Le Havre, a mid-sized port city on France’s northern coast, and nurturing his own center-right political platform, Horizons.

    The fact that Philippe, in an interview earlier this month, came out to address the fact that he’s suffering both from alopecia and vitiligo only seemed to bolster his popularity with the French, who rate him as their preferred political personality, according to this ranking.

    But Philippe’s stance on retirement, backing an increase in the legal age to 67 — above and beyond what Macron proposed — has not done him any favors. According to a poll by Odoxa, 61 percent of the French weren’t happy with his attempt to defend the pension reform.

    He still hasn’t said for sure whether he will run in 2027, and the past week’s action suggests his association with Macron could turn out to be a drag on his prospects once campaigning gets started, should he decide to enter the race.

    Nicholas Vinocur

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  • Brussels to Berlin: We’ll find a way to save the car engine

    Brussels to Berlin: We’ll find a way to save the car engine

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    On the future of the internal combustion engine, Germany has gotten its own way, again.

    The European Commission and Germany’s Transport Ministry announced a deal Saturday morning that commits the EU executive to figuring out a legal way to allow the sale of new engine-installed cars running exclusively on synthetic e-fuels even after a mandate comes into force requiring sales of only zero-emission vehicles from 2035.

    “We have found an agreement with Germany on the future use of e-fuels in cars,” the Commission’s Green Deal chief Frans Timmermans said on Twitter. “We will work now on getting the CO2 standards for cars regulation adopted as soon as possible.”

    The deal heads off a row over car legislation that was all-but-agreed until Germany, along with a small club of allies, slammed on the brakes just days before formal final approval on a law that is the centerpiece of the EU’s green agenda.

    Timmermans said the Commission would “follow up swiftly” with “legal steps” to turn a non-binding annex to the law, introduced originally at the insistence of Europe’s car-making titan Germany, into a concrete workaround allowing new vehicles running on e-fuels, which do emit some CO2, to be sold post-2035.

    As a first step, the Commission has agreed to carve out a new category of e-fuel-only vehicles inside the existing Euro 6 automotive rulebook and then integrate that classification into the contentious CO2 standards legislation that mandates the 2035 phase-out date for sales of new combustion-engine vehicles.

    The terms of the final deal from Timmermans’ cabinet chief Diederik Samsom, seen by POLITICO, say the Commission will reopen the text of the engine-ban law if EU lawmakers manage to stop the introduction of a technical annex that would make space for e-fuels alongside the agreed CO2 standards. Reopening the proposed law’s text is a move that is fundamentally opposed by the European Parliament and green-minded countries.

    The crux of the standoff was that Germany demanded binding legal language that would ensure the Commission would find a way to satisfy Berlin’s demands even if the European Parliament, or the courts, moved to block any tweaks or legal annexes to the 2035 zero-emissions legislation covering cars and vans.

    In the statement, Samsom promised the Commission will publish its full e-fuels proposal as a so-called delegated act this fall. In practice, that means the original 2035 legislation will pass at first — offering the European Commission a critical win — but it sets up a future fight over the technical additions needed to satisfy Berlin.

    “The law that 100 percent of cars sold after 2035 must be zero emissions will be voted unchanged by next Tuesday,” said Pascal Canfin, the French liberal lawmaker spearheading the file in the assembly. “Parliament will decide in due course on the Commission’s future proposals on e-fuels.”

    Engine endgame

    The deal means energy ministers can sign off on the original 2035 proposal during a meeting on Tuesday given that Berlin now has assurances that its demands will be met. In advance, EU ambassadors will review the bilateral deal between Brussels and Berlin on Monday, an EU diplomat said.

    The agreement caps a decade of German pushback on EU automotive emissions rule-making.

    In 2013, then-Chancellor Angela Merkel intervened late to water down previous iterations of car emission standards legislation, securing tweaks critical to the country’s hulking automotive industry.

    The deal means Germany has effectively dropped its last-minute opposition to the car engine ban law | Sean Gallup/Getty Images

    Since the Volkswagen Dieselgate scandal, most carmakers have shifted their investments toward electric vehicles, but some industry interests, notably high-end carmakers such as Porsche and Germany’s web of combustion engine component makers, have sought to save traditional gas guzzlers from the clutches of a de facto EU sales ban.

    Figuring out a final workaround on e-fuels in the 2035 legislation will still take some months, given that technical standards haven’t yet been clarified for setting out a “robust and evasion-proof” system for selling cars that can only be fuelled on synthetic alternatives to petrol and diesel, according to Samsom’s statement.

    The timeline is already clear in Berlin’s perspective. “We want the process to be completed by autumn 2024,” said the German Transport Ministry, which is run by the country’s Free Democratic Party. The FDP, the most junior in Germany’s three-way governing coalition, had wanted fixed legal language to guarantee a loophole for e-fuels, which can theoretically be CO2-neutral but which wouldn’t normally comply with the emissions legislation since they do still emit tailpipe pollutants.

    With the FDP’s popularity tumbling, the car policy row with Brussels has been a popular talking point in German media over recent weeks. One survey reports that 67 percent of respondents are against the engine ban legislation. Ahead of national elections in late 2025, the FDP is betting on driver-friendly policies such as e-fuels, new road construction initiatives and a block on the implementation of a national highway speed limit, to raise its profile.

    Market watchers don’t anticipate e-fuels to offer much in the way of a mass-market alternative to electric vehicles, given that they are costly to produce and don’t exist in commercial volumes today. A study by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research reports that even if all global e-fuel production was allocated to German consumers, the output would only meet a tenth of national demand in the aviation, maritime and chemical sectors by 2035.

    “E-fuels are an expensive and massively inefficient diversion from the transformation to electric facing Europe’s carmakers,” said Julia Poliscanova from the green group Transport & Environment.

    Auto politics

    Despite not being on the formal agenda, the issue dominated discussions on the sidelines of this week’s summit of EU leaders in Brussels. A deal between Brussels and Berlin was only struck at 9 p.m. on Friday, hours after leaders left the EU capital, before being formally announced on social media early Saturday.

    “The way is clear,” said German Transport Minister Volker Wissing in announcing the agreement. “We have secured opportunities for Europe by keeping important options open for climate-neutral and affordable mobility.”

    The deal means Germany has effectively dropped its last-minute opposition to the car engine ban law, collapsing a blocking minority of Italy, Poland, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic that had put a roadblock in front of final ratification by ministers of the deal reached last October between the three EU institutions. 

    It remains unclear whether Italy’s attempts to find a separate workaround for biofuels — promoted personally by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni at the summit — also succeeded. However, without Berlin’s support, Rome doesn’t have a way to block the legislation.

    German Transport Minister Volker Wissing | Maja Hitij/Getty Images

    Responses to the Commission working up a bespoke fix for its biggest member country on otherwise agreed legislation were generally negative, with many arguing the e-fuels issue is a diversion.

    “The opening for e-fuels does not mean a significant change for the transformation to electric cars,” said Ferdinand Dudenhöffer, a professor at the Center for Automotive Research in Duisburg. He said the Commission’s dealmaking raised “new investment uncertainties” that undermined the bloc’s efforts to catch up with China, the world’s leading producer of electric vehicles.

    Still, most are just happy that the combustion engine row is ended, for now.

    “It is good that this impasse is over,” said German Environment Minister Steffi Lemke, who backed the original 2035 deal without a reference to e-fuels. “Anything else would have severely damaged both confidence in European procedures and in Germany’s reliability inside European politics,” the minister said in a statement.

    Joshua Posaner

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  • Finland on course for NATO membership after Hungarian vote

    Finland on course for NATO membership after Hungarian vote

    The Hungarian parliament ratified Finland’s NATO membership on Monday, putting Helsinki one step closer to joining the alliance but leaving Sweden waiting in the wings. 

    Members of Hungary’s parliament voted by a margin of 182 to 6 in favor of Finnish accession.

    Helsinki now only needs the Turkish parliament’s approval — expected soon — to become a NATO member. 

    Hungary’s move comes after repeated delays and political U-turns. 

    Hungarian officials spent months telling counterparts they had no objections and their parliament was simply busy with other business. 

    Budapest then changed its narrative last month, with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán — who has an iron grip over his ruling Fidesz party — arguing the point that some of his legislators had qualms regarding criticism of the state of Hungarian democracy. 

    Finland and Sweden have been at the forefront of safeguarding democratic standards in Hungary, speaking out on the matter long before many of their counterparts.

    But earlier this month — just as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced that he will support Finland’s NATO membership — the Fidesz position flipped again, with its parliamentary group chair then announcing support for Helsinki’s bid.

    Turkey’s parliament is expected to ratify Finnish membership soon. But it is keeping Sweden in limbo, as Turkish officials say they want to see the country implement new anti-terror policies before giving Ankara’s green light. 

    Following in Turkey’s footsteps, Hungary is now also delaying a decision on Sweden indefinitely — prompting criticism from Orbán’s critics. 

    Attila Ara-Kovács, a member of the European Parliament from Hungary’s opposition Democratic Coalition, said that Orbán’s moves are part of a strategy to fuel anti-Western attitudes at home. 

    The government’s aim is “further inciting anti-Western and anti-NATO sentiment within Hungary, especially among Orbán’s fanatical supporters — and besides, of course, to serve Russian interests,” he said. 

    “This has its consequences,” Ara-Kovács said, adding that “support for the EU and NATO in the country is significantly and constantly decreasing.”

    A recent Eurobarometer poll found that 39 percent of Hungarians view the EU positively. A NATO report, published last week, shows that 77 percent of Hungarians would vote to stay in the alliance — compared to 89 percent in Poland and 84 percent in Romania.

    But Hungarian officials are adding the spin that they do support Sweden’s NATO membership. 

    The Swedish government “constantly questioning the state of Hungarian democracy” is “insulting our voters, MPs and the country as a whole,” said Balázs Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister’s political director (no relation to the prime minister).

    It is “up to the Swedes to make sure that Hungarian MPs’ concerns are addressed,” he tweeted on Sunday. “Our goal,” he added, “is to support Sweden’s NATO accession with a parliamentary majority as broad as possible.” 

    Lili Bayer

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  • It’s not just TikTok: French also warn against WhatsApp, Instagram

    It’s not just TikTok: French also warn against WhatsApp, Instagram

    PARIS — In a typically French move, France’s top lawmakers are refusing to side with the United States and single out China’s TikTok.

    This week, top members of France’s National Assembly strongly encouraged fellow MPs to “limit” their use of social media apps and messaging services, according to a damning internal email seen by POLITICO. The recommendation does include Chinese-owned TikTok — at the heart of a storm on both sides of the Atlantic — but also features American platforms such as Snap and Meta’s WhatsApp and Instagram, alongside Telegram, founded by Russian-born brothers, and Signal.

    “Given the particular risks to which the exercise of their mandate exposes MPs using these applications, we wish to appeal to your extreme vigilance and recommend that you limit their use,” wrote Marie Guévenoux and Eric Woerth from Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party and Eric Ciotti from conservative Les Républicains.

    France’s narrative of putting Chinese and American companies in the same basket is in stark contrast to moves by other European countries, including the Dutch government, which decided to target apps from countries that wage an “offensive cyber program” against the Netherlands, such as China, Russia, North Korea and Iran.

    But refusing to pick sides and follow the United States’ geopolitical lead is a long political tradition in France, which is often accused of anti-American bias. During the Cold War, French President Charles de Gaulle tried to position his country as an alternative between the U.S.’s capitalism and the Soviet Union’s communism. 

    “France has not mourned the loss of its power and is trying to resurrect the so-called third way, also carried by [European commissioner] Thierry Breton,” said Asma Mhalla, a tech geopolitics lecturer at Columbia University and Sciences Po. “This will serve as a political argument to put French sovereignty and French tech back on the table,” she added, arguing that the next step will likely be to promote French apps instead.

    And indeed, the top lawmakers’ letter encourages members of parliament to use French software WIMI for project management and collaborative work.

    Their main issue with foreign social media apps is that Chinese and American laws are extraterritorial. The personal data gathered via the platforms — including contacts, photos, videos, and both professional and personal documents — could be used by foreign intelligence services, they argued in their email.

    During Macron’s tenure, France has fought tooth and nail against the U.S. Cloud Act, a piece of legislation that allows American authorities to seize data stored on American servers even if they’re located abroad. Paris has even come up with a specific set of rules for cloud services to try and shield European data from Washington’s extraterritorial reach.

    In China, an intelligence law also requires domestic technology companies to hand over data to state authorities on subjects anywhere in the world.

    “The U.S. are well aware that all their arguments used against TikTok — namely that Chinese law is extraterritorial — awkwardly echo what the Europeans have been reproaching them for some time,” said Mathilde Velliet, a researcher in tech geopolitics at the French Institute of International Relations (IFRI).

    “On the other hand,” she added, “the U.S. also believes they cannot be put on the same footing as China, because they’re a European ally with a different political and security relationship, and because it’s a democracy.”

    Washington and EU capitals including Paris and Brussels also engage in dialogue on data security issues and cyber espionage, which is not the case with Beijing.

    In the National Assembly’s corridors, however, the top lawmakers’ decision to call out foreign platforms from both the U.S. and China was very much welcome. “It’s all starting to look like a third way, which would be European sovereignty,” said Philippe Latombe, an MP from Macron’s allied party Modem. “And that’s good news.”

    Océane Herrero contributed reporting.

    This article has been updated.

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  • Macron on the brink: How French pensions revolt could wreck his presidency

    Macron on the brink: How French pensions revolt could wreck his presidency

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    PARIS — French President Emmanuel Macron will face a moment of reckoning Thursday as lawmakers gear up for a final vote on the government’s deeply unpopular pension reform.

    The controversial bill, a centerpiece of Macron’s second term, has sparked weeks of nationwide protests led by trade unions and faced intense criticism from both the far left and the far right in the National Assembly.

    The French president wants to increase the legal age of retirement to 64 from 62 and extend contributions for a full pension in an effort to balance the accounts of France’s state pensions system — among the most generous in the world. According to projections from France’s Council of Pensions Planning, the finances of the pensions system are balanced in the short term but will go into deficit in the long term.

    Despite government concessions on various aspects of the bill in recent weeks, opposition to the reform remains very high, with polls saying two-thirds of French citizens oppose it.

    Speculation is running high that Macron might not have enough support in the National Assembly, and may choose a constitutional maneuver to bypass parliament — in a move that could unleash a political storm in France.

    On Thursday, the French Senate and the National Assembly are expected to cast a crucial vote on the second reading of the bill, after the Senate voted in favor last week. The outcome will determine the shape of Macron’s second term and stands to bear heavily on his legacy.

    The worst case: Macron loses the vote in parliament

    Losing the parliamentary vote would be a stunning defeat for the French president, who pinned his bid for a second term on his promises to reform France’s pensions system. But political commentators have been speculating in recent days that Macron’s Renaissance party doesn’t have enough votes to pass the bill.

    The French president lost its absolute majority in the National Assembly in parliamentary elections last June. He has since been forced into making ad-hoc deals with MPs from France’s conservative party Les Républicains. But the once-mighty conservatives appear split on the reform, despite assurances this week from their leader Olivier Marleix that there was “a clear majority” backing the bill.

    A defeat in parliament would have seismic and long-term repercussions for Macron’s second term and it is likely that the president’s trusted lieutenant Prime Minister Elizabeth Borne would have to resign in such a scenario. Party heavyweights however say they will not shy away from seeking a vote.

    “There will be a vote, we want a vote, everyone must take its responsibilities,” said Aurore Bergé, leader of the Renaissance group in the National Assembly.

    “There can be an accident … we’ll manage it as we can,” admitted Jean-Paul Mattei, a centrist MP who belongs to Macron’s coalition, with reference to a defeat in parliament.

    However, this is the most unlikely scenario as expectations are that the government will bypass a vote if they sense that they are short on votes.

    Protestors hold an effigy of French President Emmanuel Macron, during a demonstration on the 8th day of strikes and protests across the country against the government’s proposed pensions overhaul in Paris on March 15, 2023 | Alain Jocard/AFP via Getty Images

    Pretty bad: Macron bypasses parliament and loses credibility

    In the face of a potential defeat in the National Assembly, Macron has a nuclear option: invoke article 49.3 of the French constitution. This mechanism allows the government to force through legislation without submitting it to a vote.

    While the constitutional maneuver may seem like an easy way out, it’s a highly risky move as it allows lawmakers to table a motion of no confidence within 24 hours. Macron’s government has faced down motions of no confidence in the past but the stakes are much higher this time around.

    Beyond surviving a motion of no-confidence, Macron and Borne will also come under fire for refusing to submit to the democratic process.

    According to Frédéric Dabi, general director of the IFOP polling institute, the impact on public opinion if the government uses the 49.3 article as opposed to passing a tight vote in parliament would be “radically different.”

    “Public opinions on the 49.3 article have changed … it is regarded as a tool to brutalize the National Assembly: it’s now seen as authoritarian instead of merely authoritative. People want more transparency, more democracy today,” he said.

    France’s hardline unions would no doubt use this to stoke unrest and call for further strike action.

    Trade union leader Laurent Berger has warned the government against using the 49.3 article, saying that it would be “incredible and dangerous.”

    “Nobody can predict what will happen, the protest movement seems to be running out of steam, but if the government invokes article 49.3 it could be read as forcing the issue and may relaunch the protest movement,” said Dabi.

    Still not great: Macron wins vote but faces mass protests

    If the French president wins the vote in parliament, it’ll be seen as a victory but one that may completely drain his political capital, and whip up protests on the streets.

    “It’ll be a victory for Macron, but it’ll only bear its fruit in the long term. In the short term, he’ll face a tense country where relations have become very strained,” said Chloé Morin, a writer and political analyst.

    Trade union leader Berger has said that he would “take on board” the result of Thursday’s vote in parliament. But protests, which have been almost weekly since January, may continue nonetheless across the country in an effort to force the government into backing down and withdrawing the text.

    Morin thinks it is unlikely there will be “an explosion of protests” after the vote as people are resigned to seeing it pass.

    French police officers intervene during a protest by local council employees against the government’s retirement reform in front on the prefecture in Seine Saint-Denis, in Bobigny, a surburb of Paris on March 14, 2023 | Thomas Samson/AFP via Getty Images

    “However, the protest movement might become more radical with lightning protests or sabotages, led by a minority in the citizens’ movement,” said Morin.

    In October last year, industrial action in France’s refineries led to nationwide shortages at petrol stations, forcing the government to intervene in what was seen as Macron’s biggest challenge since his re-election last year.

    There are dangerous precedents for Macron too. In December 2019, the government was forced to abandon a new green tax when faced with the explosive Yellow Vests protests that shook the political establishment.

    Clea Caulcutt

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  • Macron’s defiant show of force in parliament exposes a weakened president

    Macron’s defiant show of force in parliament exposes a weakened president

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    PARIS — French President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to bypass parliament and impose his deeply unpopular pensions reform has revealed an uncompromising and weakened leader who now faces severe backlash from emboldened opposition lawmakers and protesters.

    Macron had vowed to abandon his top-down approach to politics and work with opposition parties during his second term. But when it comes to old-style politicking, Macron’s troops still have a lot to learn.

    Despite intense lobbying efforts with MPs and frantic meetings at the Elysée on Thursday and in the weeks leading up to the decisive moment, the French president and his stalwart lieutenant Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne faced the likelihood of a defeat in parliament and decided instead to invoke a controversial constitutional tool — article 49.3 — to bypass a vote.

    “My political interest would have been to submit to a vote … But I consider that the financial, economic risks are too great at this stage,” Macron privately told ministers according to a participant at the meeting.

    Macron’s flagship pensions reform aims to increase the legal age of retirement to 64 from 62 and extend contributions for a full pension in an effort to balance the accounts of France’s state pensions system. Macron’s Renaissance party lost its absolute majority in the National Assembly in parliamentary elections last year, but the government was able to pass legislation in recent months with the support of the conservative party Les Républicains. It appears, however, that in the nail-biting run-up to the vote, there were concerns the president wasn’t able to rally enough troops in favor of the bill.

    Arriving in parliament on Thursday, Borne faced scenes of anger and unrest in the National Assembly as she made her announcement triggering article 49.3. Far-left lawmakers from the France Unbowed party booed and chanted the national hymn the Marseillaise as far-right National Rally MPs shouted “Resign! Resign!” The speaker of the house was forced to suspend debates to allow Borne to make her speech.

    “We can’t take the risk of seeing 175 hours of parliamentary debate come to nothing,” Borne said.

    After the announcement, opposition MPs vowed to continue the battle against the reform, either in parliament, by supporting a motion of no-confidence, or in the streets.

    The leader of the far-right National Rally, Marine Le Pen, slammed the move as a “personal failure” for Macron. “It’s his reform, he’s the one who proposed it and defended it during his campaign,” she told reporters at the National Assembly.

    Spontaneous protests erupted Thursday evening in several cities across France, including Paris, where thousands of protestors descended on the Place de la Concorde after the move, clashing with police and setting fire to scaffolding. Trade unions called for a day of protest on March 23, undeterred by Macron’s decision to push through the legislation.

    Article 49.3, ‘a denial of democracy’

    Invoking article 49.3 is widely seen as a perilous move for the government as it allows MPs to put forward a motion of no-confidence within 24 hours and risks radicalizing protest movements in France. Trade unions have already shown great unity and led almost weekly marches and strikes, bringing out hundreds of thousands of citizens to the streets. In Paris, a strike by garbage collectors has seen an estimated 7,000 tons of garbage left on the street.

    While the French constitution does allow governments to bypass parliament under certain conditions, its use is increasingly seen as undemocratic in France amid social tensions and the growing mistrust of politicians.

    “The government’s use of the 49.3 procedure reflects the failure of this presidential minority,” Charles de Courson, a longtime independent lawmaker, told the BFMTV news channel.

    “They are not just a minority in the National Assembly, they are a minority in the whole country. The denial of democracy continues,” he said.

    Speaking ahead of the vote, Frédéric Dabi, general director of the IFOP polling institute, said that opinions on invoking article 49.3 — as opposed to passing a tight vote in parliament — are “radically different.”

    “Public opinions on the 49.3 article have changed … it is regarded as a tool to brutalize the National Assembly: it’s now seen as authoritarian instead of merely authoritative. People want more transparency, more democracy today,” he said.

    But the show of force also exposes a weakened president, who after having lost a majority in parliament and amid low popularity ratings, was unable to turn the tide of public opinion in France.

    Surviving now, and later

    In the short term, the government will have to survive several motions of no-confidence that are expected to be voted on Monday. Macron’s government has faced down motions of no confidence in the past but the stakes are much higher this time around.

    “It’s maybe the first time that a motion of no-confidence may overthrow the government,” Green MP Julien Bayou told reporters, adding that the government was “prepared to wreak havoc” in the country.

    Longer term, the move destroys prospects of a closer alliance between Macron’s Renaissance party and the conservative Les Républicains following a string of ad-hoc deals in recent months. In a worrying sign for Macron’s second term, as the debates on the pensions reform reached a climax, the leadership of the conservative party could not muster its own faithful despite concessions on the bill from the ruling party.

    The great irony for Macron — needing partners and not finding them — is that he is the man who upended France’s political landscape by crushing the traditional left-wing and right-wing parties in 2017.

    The dilemma for Macron is how he will get anything done in the next four yours of his presidency, given the reinvigorated opposition he is sure to face in a parliament dominated by the far left and the far right, and without reliable coalition partners.

    Perhaps the only silver lining for Macron is the view from abroad.

    “On the international scene, it’s a sign that France can make reforms, even if, frankly, many may think we are having a nervous breakdown over something so small, given that the government has made so many concessions [on the bill],” said Chloé Morin, a writer and political analyst ahead of the vote.

    “Everybody knows that [reforming pensions] in France is difficult …That’s what’s at stake for Macron: he is a president who is building his legacy,” she said.

    Clea Caulcutt

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  • Macron pays high price in popularity over pension reform, survey shows

    Macron pays high price in popularity over pension reform, survey shows

    Emmanuel Macron is paying a high price for his push on pension reform as a survey on Sunday showed the French president is facing a new low in popularity — as low as during the protests of the so-called Yellow Jackets.

    As the French take to the streets to protest against Macron’s pension reform, 70 percent of respondents said they are dissatisfied with the president, according to the Ifop barometer published by Le Journal du Dimanche. Macron’s popularity rating fell by 4 points in one month, it showed.

    Since December, Macron has suffered a substantial drop of 8 points, and he now sees only 28 percent satisfied and 70 percent dissatisfied, according to the poll carried out, Le Figaro emphasized, between March 9 and 16.  

    That is the same period as the negotiations that finally led the Elysée to shun parliament and impose the unpopular pension reforms via a special constitutional power, the so-called Article 49.3, which provides that the government can pass a bill without a vote at the National Assembly, the lower house of parliament, after a deliberation at a Cabinet meeting.

    The procedure has been used in the past by various governments. But this time it’s prompting a lot of criticism because of the massive public opposition to the proposed reform, which raises the legal retirement age from 62 to 64 years. Some media stress that recent opinion polls have shown that a majority of the French are opposed to this type of procedure.

    “You have to go back to the end of the Yellow Jackets crisis in early 2019 to find comparable levels of unpopularity,” writes Le Journal du Dimanche commenting the survey. The outlet also stresses that dissatisfaction with Macron crosses all categories, the younger generations as well as the blue- and white-collar workers.

    A total of 169 people, including 122 in Paris, were taken in custody for questioning on Saturday evening in France during demonstrations marred by tensions between the police and the protesters, according to French media citing figures communicated on Sunday by the Ministry of the Interior. 

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  • Macron narrowly survives crucial no-confidence votes in parliament

    Macron narrowly survives crucial no-confidence votes in parliament

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    PARIS — Emmanuel Macron’s government narrowly survived a no-confidence vote in the French parliament Monday, after it pushed through a deeply unpopular pensions overhaul without a vote last week, sparking outrage and spontaneous protests across the country.

    In a high-stakes vote in France’s lower house of parliament, 278 MPs, mostly from the left and the far right, voted in favor of a cross-party motion of no confidence, falling just short of the 287 votes needed to topple the government. A second motion, backed only by the far-right National Rally, did not garner enough votes.

    The outcome of the first vote was much tighter than anticipated and increases the pressure on Macron to withdraw his reform. It may also give a boost to the protest movement led by trade unions against the measures. The French president will also be under pressure to respond either by addressing the country or reshuffling his government.

    Speaking ahead of the votes, the centrist MP Charles de Courson, one of the authors of the cross-party motion, accused Macron’s government of lacking “courage” during the parliamentary debates.

    “You could have submitted [your reform] to a vote, and you probably would have lost it, but that’s the game when you are in a democracy,” he told MPs.

    The leader of Macron’s Renaissance parliamentary group Aurore Bergé lashed out at accusations the government had failed to seek compromises with MPs and accused opposition parties of working against the common good.

    “When people speak of a grand coalition, it should be so that people work together for the good of the country. It’s the opposite that you are offering us … you want to bring our country to a halt, in our institutions and … in the street,” she said.

    The motions of no confidence were proposed last week after Macron authorized the use of a controversial constitutional maneuver on Thursday to bypass a vote in parliament on his pensions reform bill. The French president wants to raise the legal age of retirement to 64 from 62, in an effort to balance the accounts of France’s indebted state pension system and to bring France’s retirement age in line with other European countries such as Spain and Germany where it ranges from 65 to 67 years old.

    The no-confidence motions were voted on in the National Assembly as industrial action disrupted flights, public transport, waste collection and refineries ahead of a nationwide day of protests on Thursday. Trade union leaders hope for a show of force against the government and have also warned that social unrest risks spiraling after several protests in Paris turned violent in recent days.

    “I send this alert to the president, he has to withdraw the bill before there’s a disaster. [Our protests] have been very controlled since the beginning, but the temptation of violence, of radicalization … is there,” said CFDT trade union leader Laurent Berger on Sunday.

    While the government has survived efforts to topple it, speculation is now running high that Macron will want to replace his beleaguered Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne in a government reshuffle aimed at refreshing his image. According to an IFOP-JDD poll published on Sunday, Macron’s popularity rating fell by 4 points in one month to 28 percent.

    A tight win for Macron

    Monday’s no-confidence motions had been widely seen as unlikely to pass ahead of the vote because the French National Assembly has been deeply divided since parliamentary elections last year. While Macron’s Renaissance party has lost its absolute majority, opposition parties backing the no-confidence motion failed to get enough votes because most MPs from the conservative Les Républicains refused to support it.

    Still, more conservative MPs than expected decided to ignore the party line and back the cross-party motion of no confidence, exposing the deep divides within Les Républicains.

    Elisabeth Borne will live to see another day as French Prime Minister | Pool photo by Gonzalo Fuentes/AFP via Getty Images

    On Monday, one of the leading rebels, conservative MP Aurélien Pradié, said voting in favor of the motion of no-confidence was needed to “emerge from the chaos.”

    “The Macron club has not understood what is going on. And if we need to jolt them with a motion of no-confidence, I will back it and lend my voice to the people who feel disdained,” he told Europe 1 radio.

    This article has been updated with more details on the votes.

    CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misstated the number of MPs who voted in favor of a cross-party motion of no confidence.

    Clea Caulcutt

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  • French Senate adopts pension reform as street protests continue

    French Senate adopts pension reform as street protests continue

    The French Senate voted in favor of the controversial pension reform overnight, paving the way for a potential final adoption of the law on Thursday, as thousands of people continue to demonstrate across the country.

    The widespread opposition to the retirement overhaul is a political test to French President Emmanuel Macron, whose liberal party has been struggling to pass the reform ever since it lost its majority in parliament last summer.

    “A decisive step to bring about a reform that will ensure the future of our pensions. Totally committed to allow a final adoption in the next few days,” French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne tweeted after the vote.

    The French government wants to change the retirement age from 62 to 64, with a full pension requiring 43 years of work as of 2027. The right-leaning Senate adopted the reform with 195 in favor and 112 against the measure.

    Hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated across France on Saturday, and protests were expected to continue on Sunday. So far, strikes have disrupted sectors including public transport, oil refineries, schools and airports.

    On Sunday, Laurent Berger — who heads the largest French labor union — said: “I call on parliamentarians to see what’s happening in their districts. … You can’t vote for a reform that’s rejected by so many in the workforce.”

    During the presidential campaign, Macron vowed to reform the French pension system to bring it in line with other European countries like Spain and Germany, where the retirement age is 65 to 67 years old.

    Official forecasts show that the French pensions system is financially in balance for now, but it’s expected to build up a deficit in the longer term.

    French labor unions are calling for a “powerful day of strikes and demonstrations” on Wednesday, when lawmakers from the Senate and National Assembly are set to hold a small-group meeting to find a compromise on the pensions revamp. If they do reach an agreement, the law could be adopted on Thursday.

    The government could also ultimately decide to adopt the revamp using an exceptional procedure that requires no parliamentary vote.

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  • France pushes protectionism in Ukraine defense plan

    France pushes protectionism in Ukraine defense plan

    As Russia’s war in Ukraine puts a heavy strain on EU arms, there’s infighting in Brussels over how best to reload.

    The latest skirmish is focused around a procurement fund intended to ramp up production of arms in Europe.

    POLITICO has learned that key committees in the European Parliament — namely, the committees for industry, the internal market, and the subcommittee on security and defense — have clashed over the fund, formally known as European Defense Industry Reinforcement Through Common Procurement Act (EDIRPA). It holds €500 million for now, with the possibility to grow.

    A French-led group in the Parliament is vying to keep the joint defense purchase pot within the borders of the European Union — which opponents are deriding as a power grab for France.

    Currently, a compromise text seen by POLITICO leaves the door open to spending outside the EU. It says non-EU companies may be involved “provided that this does not contravene … the security and defense interests of the union and its member states.”

    A faction across the relevant committees — consisting mainly of Polish, Estonian, Portuguese, German and Luxembourgish parliamentarians — has also amended the text to include “associated third countries.” They want to keep open the option to tap non-EU countries, like South Korea or the United States, to fill any gaps in weapon production.

    In light of grinding ground battles on Ukrainian territory, concerns have been growing over the EU’s capacity to ramp up production of ammunition and weapons.

    Yet French MEPs who dominate the Renew Europe group have been pushing back, seeking to make the fund a European-only affair.

    Nathalie Loiseau, chair of the parliamentary defense subcommittee, denied that the push to limit funding to European countries would benefit only France. “France is not the only country producing weapons in Europe,” the Renew MEP told POLITICO, pointing also to Germany, Italy and Poland. 

    Loiseau said the entire remit of EDIRPA is intended to strengthen European industrial policy. “We need our industries to be able to produce [arms] more quickly, and we need to find a way to encourage this, so we need a solid EDIRPA.”

    Ivars Ījabs, a Latvian MEP in the Renew Europe group who is leading work on the file in the internal market committee, described how he and his colleagues are “aware of the immediate challenges to European defense forces.”

    As one of the MEPs most opposed to the French position, he explained: “My French colleagues are very much in support of the European Commission’s original proposal, with an emphasis on strengthening the defense industrial base in the medium term.”

    Loiseau added that while she is open to non-European companies producing the weapons, “they must be produced in Europe,” arguing that spending EU money on weapons produced outside the bloc would be illegal under EU treaties, risking collapse of the entire procurement program.

    Striking a balance

    The increasingly acrimonious row in Parliament over the defense plan hits on a question raised since Europe began discussing beefing up its defense capabilities: Who will be able to get their hands on the extra billions of euros the EU intends to invest?

    Thierry Breton, the internal market commissioner who announced the plan last year and has been championing it, is also French. Unveiling the initiative, he said, “These investments, funded by the European taxpayers … should benefit first and foremost European industry wherever that is possible.”

    French industry accounts for more than 25 percent of European military capabilities. But many other countries, from Italy to Sweden, also have strong defense sectors (and many key companies based there often have strong corporate ties with countries outside the EU, such as the U.K. and the U.S.).

    German center-right MEP Andreas Schwab said a balance needs to be struck to get the process moving. 

    “This instrument needs to find a middle ground, a middle way: sufficiently flexible for foreign components, but also a boost to EU industry — and especially, a boost to make ministries of defense start working together on bigger joint procurement projects,” he told POLITICO. 

    Thierry Breton announced the procurement plan last year, arguing it should benefit first and foremost European industry | Pool photo by Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP via Getty Images

    All major players agree on one thing: The fund should be bigger.

    While the Commission’s plan earmarked an initial €500 million, the draft European Parliament proposal by the internal market and defense committees increased that to €1.5 billion. 

    But even €1.5 billion is “peanuts” when it comes to military hardware, said Dragoş Tudorache, Renew’s lead on EDIRPA in the defense subcommittee.

    Tudorache explained that Parliament could theoretically wrap it up within two to three weeks once there’s agreement among the three committees.

    As to which of the two camps will win out: “Right now I would not call it either way,” the MEP said.

    A vote of the full Parliament — possibly in June — may be the most likely outcome.

    EDIRPA is separate to the European Peace Facility, an off-budget intergovernmental EU fund that is now being used to backfill member countries’ supplies once they’ve sent arms to Ukraine. This mechanism is at the center of current plans to provide ammunition quickly to Ukraine, as first reported by POLITICO.

    In contrast, EDIRPA is a medium-term project, originally meant to be for 2022 to 2024, to carry forward the joint procurement of arms and ammunition. 

    Based on EDIRPA, the Commission is meant to present an even larger program for joint procurement, called the European defence investment programme, which was originally expected for last year but is now tapped to arrive later this year.

    Diplomats point out that is unclear where the Commission could find the money for a more ambitious joint procurement program.

    Suzanne Lynch, Eddy Wax and Jacopo Barigazzi

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  • ChatGPT broke the EU plan to regulate AI

    ChatGPT broke the EU plan to regulate AI

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    Artificial intelligence’s newest sensation — the gabby chatbot-on-steroids ChatGPT — is sending European rulemakers back to the drawing board on how to regulate AI.

    The chatbot dazzled the internet in past months with its rapid-fire production of human-like prose. It declared its love for a New York Times journalist. It wrote a haiku about monkeys breaking free from a laboratory. It even got to the floor of the European Parliament, where two German members gave speeches drafted by ChatGPT to highlight the need to rein in AI technology.

    But after months of internet lolz — and doomsaying from critics — the technology is now confronting European Union regulators with a puzzling question: How do we bring this thing under control?

    The technology has already upended work done by the European Commission, European Parliament and EU Council on the bloc’s draft artificial intelligence rulebook, the Artificial Intelligence Act. The regulation, proposed by the Commission in 2021, was designed to ban some AI applications like social scoring, manipulation and some instances of facial recognition. It would also designate some specific uses of AI as “high-risk,” binding developers to stricter requirements of transparency, safety and human oversight.

    The catch? ChatGPT can serve both the benign and the malignant.

    This type of AI, called a large language model, has no single intended use: People can prompt it to write songs, novels and poems, but also computer code, policy briefs, fake news reports or, as a Colombian judge has admitted, court rulings. Other models trained on images rather than text can generate everything from cartoons to false pictures of politicians, sparking disinformation fears.

    In one case, the new Bing search engine powered by ChatGPT’s technology threatened a researcher with “hack[ing]” and “ruin.” In another, an AI-powered app to transform pictures into cartoons called Lensa hypersexualized photos of Asian women.

    “These systems have no ethical understanding of the world, have no sense of truth, and they’re not reliable,” said Gary Marcus, an AI expert and vocal critic.

    These AIs “are like engines. They are very powerful engines and algorithms that can do quite a number of things and which themselves are not yet allocated to a purpose,” said Dragoș Tudorache, a Liberal Romanian lawmaker who, together with S&D Italian lawmaker Brando Benifei, is tasked with shepherding the AI Act through the European Parliament.

    Already, the tech has prompted EU institutions to rewrite their draft plans. The EU Council, which represents national capitals, approved its version of the draft AI Act in December, which would entrust the Commission with establishing cybersecurity, transparency and risk-management requirements for general-purpose AIs.

    The rise of ChatGPT is now forcing the European Parliament to follow suit. In February the lead lawmakers on the AI Act, Benifei and Tudorache, proposed that AI systems generating complex texts without human oversight should be part of the “high-risk” list — an effort to stop ChatGPT from churning out disinformation at scale.

    The idea was met with skepticism by right-leaning political groups in the European Parliament, and even parts of Tudorache’s own Liberal group. Axel Voss, a prominent center-right lawmaker who has a formal say over Parliament’s position, said that the amendment “would make numerous activities high-risk, that are not risky at all.”

    The two lead Parliament lawmakers are working to impose stricter requirements on both developers and users of ChatGPT and similar AI models | Pool photo by Kenzo Tribouillard/EPA-EFE

    In contrast, activists and observers feel that the proposal was just scratching the surface of the general-purpose AI conundrum. “It’s not great to just put text-making systems on the high-risk list: you have other general-purpose AI systems that present risks and also ought to be regulated,” said Mark Brakel, a director of policy at the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit focused on AI policy.

    The two lead Parliament lawmakers are also working to impose stricter requirements on both developers and users of ChatGPT and similar AI models, including managing the risk of the technology and being transparent about its workings. They are also trying to slap tougher restrictions on large service providers while keeping a lighter-tough regime for everyday users playing around with the technology.

    Professionals in sectors like education, employment, banking and law enforcement have to be aware “of what it entails to use this kind of system for purposes that have a significant risk for the fundamental rights of individuals,” Benifei said. 

    If Parliament has trouble wrapping its head around ChatGPT regulation, Brussels is bracing itself for the negotiations that will come after.

    The European Commission, EU Council and Parliament will hash out the details of a final AI Act in three-way negotiations, expected to start in April at the earliest. There, ChatGPT could well cause negotiators to hit a deadlock, as the three parties work out a common solution to the shiny new technology.

    On the sidelines, Big Tech firms — especially those with skin in the game, like Microsoft and Google — are closely watching.

    The EU’s AI Act should “maintain its focus on high-risk use cases,” said Microsoft’s Chief Responsible AI Officer Natasha Crampton, suggesting that general-purpose AI systems such as ChatGPT are hardly being used for risky activities, and instead are used mostly for drafting documents and helping with writing code.

    “We want to make sure that high-value, low-risk use cases continue to be available for Europeans,” Crampton said. (ChatGPT, created by U.S. research group OpenAI, has Microsoft as an investor and is now seen as a core element in its strategy to revive its search engine Bing. OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.)

    A recent investigation by transparency activist group Corporate Europe Observatory also said industry actors, including Microsoft and Google, had doggedly lobbied EU policymakers to exclude general-purpose AI like ChatGPT from the obligations imposed on high-risk AI systems.

    Could the bot itself come to EU rulemakers’ rescue, perhaps?

    ChatGPT told POLITICO it thinks it might need regulating: “The EU should consider designating generative AI and large language models as ‘high risk’ technologies, given their potential to create harmful and misleading content,” the chatbot responded when questioned on whether it should fall under the AI Act’s scope.

    “The EU should consider implementing a framework for responsible development, deployment, and use of these technologies, which includes appropriate safeguards, monitoring, and oversight mechanisms,” it said.

    The EU, however, has follow-up questions.

    Gian Volpicelli

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