Stranger swings

You might assume that the huge inflow of asylum-seekers since 2015 has made Europe more xenophobic. Opinion polls tell a more nuanced story. In November 2014 Eurobarometer began asking citizens of EU countries about their sentiments towards immigrants. Since then, the overall share of people who have negative feelings about arrivals from outside the bloc has fallen from 57% to 52%. Different regions, however, have been pulling in opposite directions. Western and southern European countries have generally become friendlier to foreigners, while northern and eastern countries have grown more hostile. Crucially, though, there seems to be no correlation between how many migrants and refugees a country admitted and its changing opinions of non-Europeans.

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President Erdogan’s alliance with the far right pays off

TURKEY’S right-wing nationalists have seldom had it so good. The government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has embraced their main causes, bombing Kurdish insurgents at home and abroad, promoting militarism in education and using siege mentality as foreign policy. Their supporters have reaped the rewards of an alliance with the ruling Justice and Development (AK) party. The ulkuculer, as they are colloquially known, have landed scores of jobs in the bureaucracy amid the mass purges that followed the attempted coup of 2016.

Theyhave emerged even stronger from the presidential and parliamentary elections held simultaneously on June 24th. Ulkucu voters helped propel Mr Erdogan to a solid first-round victory. Their main political group, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), won over 11% in the parliamentary contest, twice as much as most polls predicted. The ruling AK party, which ended up a few seats short of an outright majority, depends...Continue reading

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An interview with Bruno Le Maire

Le Maire the transformer

LESS than two years ago, Bruno Le Maire was an outsider in the race for France’s centre-right Republican presidential nomination. Little over a year ago, he denounced another presidential candidate, Emmanuel Macron, as a “man without a project because he is a man without conviction”. Today, the “man without conviction” occupies the presidency and Mr Le Maire (who quit his own party) serves as his finance minister. Astonishingly, all this is regarded in France as perfectly normal.

If Mr Macron’s hybrid government, which has borrowed from the former left, right and centre, is ever a source of frustration for the self-described Gaullist, Mr Le Maire will not say so. “We are doing exactly what we need to do to be successful in the social and economic transformation of the French model,” he insists. In just over a year, the government has cut corporate tax, ended the wealth tax and introduced a flat tax on investment income. The budget...Continue reading

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An enemy of crooked politicians is fired in Romania

FOR Romania’s corrupt politicians, Laura Kovesi has been a nightmare. Appointed chief of the National Anticorruption Directorate (DNA) in 2013, the implacable prosecutor has overseen the convictions of more than 1,000 officials, businesspeople and politicians, including nine former ministers. In June the DNA won a felony conviction against Liviu Dragnea who, as head of the ruling Social Democrats (PSD), is Romania’s most powerful politician. He could face three-and-a-half years in prison for putting two PSD functionaries on the payroll of the state child-protection agency.

Yet Mr Dragnea’s allies have fought back, implausibly accusing Ms Kovesi of incompetence and of targeting only politicians she dislikes. In February the justice minister ordered her to be fired, but President Klaus Iohannis refused to sign her dismissal. The constitutional court sided with the government, and on July 9th Mr Iohannis reluctantly sacked her.

Ms Kovesi and the DNA have been a beacon of...Continue reading

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The Trump-Putin summit was spectacle, not substance

IF GEORGE W. BUSH once famously looked Vladimir Putin in the eye and saw his soul, Donald Trump, when he met the Russian president in Helsinki on July 16th, saw his own reflection: an alpha male who made his country “great again”; a fellow populist and disrupter who disdains the politically correct and hypocritical liberal elite, and the institutions they inhabit; a man guided by interests, who likes doing deals while trusting nobody and who uses the media to create his own reality show. Vladimir Putin saw in Mr Trump a confirmation of a long-held belief that Western leaders operate in exactly the same way as he does and only pretend to have “values”.

Appropriately enough, the meeting took place in the Hall of Mirrors at the presidential palace in Helsinki. It was both an imitation and a reversal of traditional foreign-policy engagements. Stylistically, it resembled cold-war summitry. But unlike past summits, it lacked a clear agenda or substance. There was little change in the official...Continue reading

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