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Europe Tag

After celebrating the win of the "Australia First" Liberal Party, and cheering on the milkshake-covered Brexit candidates in Great Britain, it pleases me greatly to report that anti-EU parties made significant gains in Sunday’s European election. After processing the results, I have several essential takeaways. Perhaps the most significant that the win for the anti-EU parties is a hard loss for the centrists who want to run the entire world from Brussels.

United Kingdom Prime Minister Theresa May announced through tears this morning that she will leave her post on June 7 after a Brexit mess that has lasted for three years. From The London Times:
“It is and will always remain a matter of deep regret to me that I have not been able to deliver Brexit,” she said. “I believe it was right to persevere, even when the odds against success seemed high.

The new Islamophobia definition proposed by an all-party British parliamentary group could undermine police efforts in countering Islamic terrorism, the UK police warned. The legal adoption of the term could hamper law enforcement officers from going after terrorists and those spreading jihadist propaganda, UK's National Police Chiefs' Council (NPCC), a body representing country's police chiefs, said.

Over the weekend, Ukraine held its presidential election. Current President Petro Poroshenko, who won in 2014 after the ouster of Viktor Yanukovych, lost to comedian Volodymyr Zelenskiy in a landslide. Television became real life since Zelenskiy played "school teacher Vasyl Holoborodko, who by a sheer stroke of coincidence becomes Ukraine’s president," on the show Servant of the People.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's apparent re-election has irked the European mainstream media. Many leading European media outlets decried the Israeli leader's "right-wing" policies that mobilized Israeli voters ahead of Tuesday's vote. German newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau described Netanyahu's victory using anti-Semitic terminology with the headline: "The Eternal Netanyahu," a reference to the 1940 anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda film, The Eternal Jew.

Duchess of Sussex Meghan Markle, the wife of Prince Harry, is backing a campaign to "decolonize" the British curriculum by getting more women and ethnic minorities to join the faculties instead of "male, pale, and stale" professors, the UK newspapers report. Getting endorsement from the newly-minted Duchess of Sussex is more than a publicity coup for the leftist campaigners who are calling to purge Britain of its distinct cultural and historic legacy by replacing it with their politically correct worldview. The newest member of the royal family has a great sway over the academic policy making since she is the Patron of the Association of Commonwealth Universities, with over 500 member institutions in the UK and former British colonies.

The anti-EU parties are poised to win one-third of the seats in the EU Parliament election in May, according to a study titled "The 2019 European Election: How anti-Europeans plan to wreck Europe and what can be done to stop it," released by a pro-EU think-tank. By securing the controlling share of the seats, the anti-establishment rightist parties could "paralyze decision-making at the center of the EU" and end up "curbing the [bloc's] liberal orientation and returning power to member states," the London-based European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) said.

The leader of the Italian League party, Matteo Salvini, plans to form an electoral alliance with Poland's ruling conservatives in the run-up to the upcoming European Union elections. Salvini is spearheading a campaign to build an anti-establishment alliance ahead of the election. In October, he teamed up with Marine Le Pen's newly-formed French National Rally (NR) to launch the "Freedom Front" coalition. Salvini will meet the leader of Poland’s Law and Justice (PiS) party, Jarosław Kaczyński, on Wednesday to "strike a deal" ahead of the EU parliament elections scheduled for this May, the public broadcaster Radio Poland disclosed.

Austrian police have changed a young woman with inflicting bodily harm for defending herself against a sexual molester, local newspapers report. The incident took place during the New Year's Eve celebrations in Vienna's landmark City Hall square, where a 21-year-old Swiss woman pushed back an Afghan migrant who tried to assault her.

The year began with an ominous warning from the German authorities. A team of researchers commissioned by the Ministry of Family Affairs found a "correlation between the refugee arrivals and violent crimes." Not that anyone needed a report to prove the obvious. The mainstream German media predictably trashed the findings and politicians in Berlin ignored them.

The European Union is in the midst of a political turmoil over the ratification of the United Nations pact on migration. The resistance to the pact is galvanizing in Europe ahead of the December 10 deadline when the representatives from some 180 UN member states will meet in Morocco, a Muslim-majority country in North Africa, to formally adopt the "Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration," as the pact is officially called.

Belgium became the latest EU country to get sucked into the crisis, with its ruling coalition teetering on the brink of collapse over the migration dispute. The country's right-wing New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) broke away from the ruling alliance amid sharp disagreements over the UN pact. The N-VA regards the agreement as an infringement of Belgian sovereignty. "In our democracy, we decide. The sovereignty is with the people," the party said.

Amid rising antisemitism and anti-Israel activism in Europe, over 3000 members of Jewish diaspora and supporters of Israel gathered in Frankfurt, Germany, for the 5th German Israel Congress this weekend. Widely regarded as the biggest pro-Israel event in Europe, the conference was attended by leading politicians, government officials, and public figures from Germany and Israel. Israel's Strategic Affairs Minister Gilad Erdan took the opportunity to urge the German government to take a tougher stance on Iran. "Germany should take a more aggressive stance against the Iranian regime," Minister Erdan said. "It was only yesterday that President Rouhani called Israel metastatic cancer. History has taught us that anti-Semitic threats from fanatical leaders, and exporters of terror who have hegemonic aspirations, must be taken seriously."

European leaders need to halt mass-immigration to curb the growing right-wing populist movement across the continent, Hillary Clinton warned in an interview with a British newspaper. Europe "must send a very clear message – "we are not going to be able to continue provide refuge and support" – because if we don’t deal with the migration issue it will continue to roil the body politic," she told The Guardian.

Poland has signed a long-term gas deal to buy natural gas from the United States to ease its reliance on Moscow. Polish state-run energy company PGNiG signed a 20-year supply contract with Louisiana-based Venture Global LNG. "Today we can fulfill our efforts to improve the sovereignty, security, and competitiveness of our gas sector," Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki told reporters on Wednesday.