In the News

[Jubal]

The "fall back on WTO terms" thing is really misleading. We can rejoin the WTO and apply for exactly our share of the EU's quotas, but there's no reason to assume we'll get them. The WTO has 164 members who we'll need to negotiate with over that. And, uh, about our negotiating skills...

Meanwhile, the withdrawal agreement has lost another parliamentary vote. Third time it's been defeated. The Prime Minister is currently waving its corpse around like a puppet trying to pretend it isn't dead.

[Pentagathus]

No we don't need to negotiate with every wto member over certifying our WTO schedule, every nation can choose to trade on our schedule if it remains uncertified. The EU has not certified its schedule since 2004 apparently, despite making many changes to it since then.
Pretty sure we ain't ever gonna give EU up.

[Jubal]

Also on this front, Vote Leave have dropped their appeal to the electoral commission and thereby formally admitted that they broke the law during the referendum campaign:

https://twitter.com/ElectoralCommUK/status/1111682932979232768

[comrade_general]

Also the collusion delusion is over.

[Pentagathus]

You mean there's actually no evidence that the independently wealthy billionaire was in the pocket of a foreign nation? Madness.

[Jubal]

Netanyahu wins another term in Israel for his hard right coalition. He promised in the campaign to formally annex Israeli West Bank settlements, which could become a big new conflict flashpoint if it happens. Bit worrying.

[Pentagathus]

Sleazy Swedish man has apparently been arrested at last.

[Jubal]

He's Australian - Sweden was where the rape allegations were from, but it's not his home country.

Also, we're now not Brexiting probably until October, so at least I'm unlikely to get chucked out of Germany during my stay here.

[Pentagathus]

Should have known he was descended from convicts. Deffo guilty.

[comrade_general]

Agreed.

[Jubal]

In other news, Ukraine had one of the odder presidential election debates of recent years, in which one candidate didn't show up.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47925330

The guy who didn't show up is probably going to win, incidentally

[Pentagathus]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-48320983
Good news for you Joobs?

[Jubal]

Seems likely, yes Though it's really hard to know what it might mean for what the next government will look like - I expect the OVP (the Chancellor's conservatives) will gain a lot at the expense of the FPO (who just had the corruption scandal), but it'll be hard for them to gain so much that they can govern with just one minor party in support, and now the FPO and social democrat SPO both really hate Chancellor Kurz. So who knows?

Seeing the European election results from Austria today will be the first indication of how badly this has hurt the FPO, I think. It could be very bad for them - Strache was very, very important to them and all their campaigns for years have been pretty much just fronted by him - but also their new leader is quite well known because he ran for President and nearly won, so it may be that it won't be as damaging as we might expect.

[Jubal]

Secularists finally won something in Turkey! Specifically, the mayoralty of Istanbul:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48739256

Erdogan, the religious-conservative President, is probably now regretting his famous utterance that whoever controls Istanbul controls Turkey



Also, Georgia has been blowing up recently a bit (not literally fortunately) because some idiot decided to allow a visiting Russian MP to address parliament from the speaker's chair. In Russian. Given Russia de facto occupies 20% of Georgia via two separatist regions (it's hard to know how separatist they really are because they're a bit full of Russian troops, much like Crimea/Donbass but they've been doing it for longer)... it's not hard to see how this upset people a lot. There've been several days of protests, the parliamentary speaker has resigned, the billionaire oligarch who runs the government has now agreed that next year's elections will be fully proportional for the first time as well.



And the Czech Republic has faced the largest protests since the fall of Communism, over major corruption scandals surrounding their ruling party ANO (which are centrist-populists - their main opponents are a conservative party and, amusingly, the pirate party who are now the largest progressive force in the country).


It's a bit busy out there in the world!

[Jubal]

Some interesting stuff from Europe, particularly the EU's two most authoritarian countries:

In Poland, the ruling Law and Justice party, which basically holds the eastern half of the country tightly through a mix of hard-line social conservatism and big social welfare projects, has been re-elected with a slightly increased majority in the parliament - but has lost control of the Senate, with the left wing parties returning to a more functional position and the main centrist/fiscal conservative opposition solidifying its position though not advancing. It remains to be seen if this will slow or accelerate the Law and Justice attempts to "reform" the judiciary by bringing it more under governmental appointment control.

Meanwhile in Hungary, local elections provided an unexpected setback for its near-dictatorial leader Viktor Orban, who lost control of the capital city to a left-liberal opponent, with a unified opposition ranging from the traditional left and the Greens, to the liberal Momentum party, to Jobbik (who were formerly Hungary's most extreme neo-fascist party, but have tentatively moved towards a more typically national-conservative position and cut ties with some former far right allies as Orban has blocked out all the space on the extreme right of politics). Jobbik gained some mayoralties in other cities. The problem for the opposition is that their headway in cities relies on people there having access to media other than the wildly pro-Orban state broadcasters. In rural areas, this doesn't exist enough, and so Orban maintains massive support there with a completely broken skewed media environment. Nonetheless, Budapest changing hands might yet act as a catalyst for wider changes.



Meanwhile in the Middle-east, Turkey's invasion of Rojava continues and the US pullout has forced the Rojavans to do a deal with the Russian-aligned Syrian government, which seems like the sort of thing that may end badly for everyone involved... far too little international action, still.