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Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Moldova's President Maia Sandu and President of the European Council Charles Michel attend a joint press conference, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in Kyiv, Ukraine November 21, 2023.
Europe flirts with the East but won’t yet commit
The European Union has expanded to the East in recent years, but some would-be members remain in line to join the club.
On Tuesday, Ukraine and Moldova finally began talks to join the European Union after applying for membership within weeks of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. (Ironically, it was Ukrainian protests over their president’s failure to sign a trade agreement with Europe that triggered the uprising that led Vladimir Putin to invade Crimea in 2014.)
Eager to encourage them, the EU has “fast-tracked” their processes, but aligning with the union’s dozens of policy requirements takes time. (Just ask Turkey, now entering its 20th year of talks.) Ukraine must also contend with efforts by Hungary’s government, Russia’s best European friend, to block Kyiv’s bid to join both the EU and NATO.
But the EU isn’t the only club open for new memberships. The eurozone, a monetary union comprised of 20 member states, told EU members Bulgaria and Romania they haven’t yet cleared the hurdles needed to adopt the euro. Bulgaria is close; of all the needed economic criteria, its high inflation is the only remaining barrier to entry. Romania must do much more to tame inflation, bribery, money laundering, and Russian influence on its policymaking.
Mehrdad Bazrpash, an Iranian politician and the Minister of Roads and Urban Development, is speaking to the media at a media center in the Iranian Interior Ministry building after registering as a Presidential elections candidate during the last day of candidates' registration for Iran's early Presidential elections, in Tehran, Iran, on June 3, 2024.
Hard Numbers: Iran’s candidates, Stronach’s sex crime charges, Bulgarians vote again, US border crossings drop
6: Iran’s Guardian Council — an unelected body of religious clerics — has approved six candidates to run in elections scheduled for June 28, after President Ebrahim Raisi was killed in a helicopter crash last month. Five of the candidates come from the hardline conservative camp, one is a reformer, and former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was barred from running again.
5: Austrian-Canadian billionaire and politician Frank Stronach has been charged with five sexual assault crimes dating between the 1980s and 2023. The 91-year-old’s lawyers denied any impropriety, and police are withholding details about the charges, which include rape, indecent assault on a female, sexual assault, and forcible confinement.
6: Bulgarians went to the polls for the sixth time in just three years on Sunday as the European Union’s poorest member struggles to form a stable government in the wake of anti-corruption protests. No single party is expected to gain a majority, which will continue to inhibit Bulgaria’s development and block access to funds from Brussels.
3,100: US Customs and Border Patrol apprehended roughly 3,100 migrants crossing the border with Mexico on Friday, reflecting a drop of about 20% from just days before. It may be an early indication that Biden’s new border crackdown, which went into effect last week, is working.
AI vs. truth: Battling deepfakes amid 2024 elections
With nearly half of the globe heading to the polls this year amid lightning-speed developments in generative AI, fears are running rampant over tech-driven disinformation campaigns.
During a Global Stage panel at the Munich Security Conference, Bulgarian politician and European Parliament member Eva Maydell said she fears we will soon be unable to separate fact from deepfake fiction.
While acknowledging the important developments AI and emerging tech offer, Maydell warned that we also “need to be very sober” about how they are threatening the “very fabric of our democratic societies” and eroding trust.
While the EU is trying to push voluntary measures and legislative proposals, Maydell points out that political conversations often revolve around the sense that “we'll probably never be as good as those that are trying to deceive society.”
“But you still have to give it a try, and you need to do it in a very prepared way,” she adds.
Watch the full conversation: How to protect elections in the age of AI
Watch more Global Stage coverage on the 2024 Munich Security Conference.
- How to protect elections in the age of AI ›
- How AI and deepfakes are being used for malicious reasons ›
- Deepfakes on are on the campaign trail too ›
- Taylor Swift AI images & the rise of the deepfakes problem ›
- Deepfakes are ‘fraud,’ says Microsoft's Brad Smith ›
- Combating AI deepfakes in elections through a new tech accord ›
What We're Watching: Chinese tennis star reappears, Bulgarian president re-elected, US Fed chief renominated
Is Peng Shuai really safe? The Women's Tennis Association has said that Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai's video call with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) on Sunday does not sufficiently address concerns about her safety and whereabouts. Peng disappeared from public life several weeks ago after accusing former Chinese Vice-Premier Zhang Gaoli of sexually assaulting her. Over the weekend, Chinese state media published photos of her at a restaurant and a tennis tournament, and she held a half-hour call with the IOC in which she said she was fine and asked for privacy. But no one can be sure that Peng wasn't coerced into making those statements. The WTA, which has threatened to pull tournaments out of China, continues to call for a full investigation into Peng's allegations, and the story is adding fresh impetus to calls for nations around the world to boycott the upcoming Beijing Winter Olympics.
Bulgaria's president wins re-election. Rumen Radev, a political independent and anti-corruption crusader, won a second five-year term as president after trouncing his opponent Anastas Gerdzhikov, who was backed by the center-right GERB party of long-serving former PM Boyko Borissov. Although the Bulgarian presidency is largely ceremonial, Radev's victory could ease more than six months of political chaos: the country has held three different parliamentary elections this year, with a different winner each time. The victor of the most recent one, held last week, was "Change Continues," an anti-corruption alliance founded by two US-educated entrepreneurs just two months ago. Radev is close to "Change Continues," but the party still needs to hammer together a coalition. A little political stability would be a good thing as Bulgaria struggles with one of the worst COVID waves — and lowest vaccination rates — in Europe.
Powell is renominated to head the Fed. US President Joe Biden will renominate Jerome Powell to head the Federal Reserve for another four years. Tapping Powell, who has bipartisan support, avoids a political fight during the confirmation hearings and preserves continuity as the US economy struggles with the worst inflation rates in decades. The move will stoke tension with progressive Democrats, who wanted a nominee tougher on banks and more responsive to the economic impacts of climate change. Their preferred choice, Lael Brainard, will serve as vice-chair. Powell, who was first nominated by Trump, has a tough job ahead of him: inflation is soaring thanks to some combination of post-pandemic bottlenecks, high government spending (which will spike again as a new infrastructure plan moves forward), and low interest rates. But keeping inflation in check is just one of the Fed's jobs. Another is to maximize employment. Some 20 months after the first US lockdowns, millions of workers have yet to return to the labor force.
What we certainly aren't watching anymore
Afghan soap operas. The Taliban government of Afghanistan has decreed that women may no longer appear in soap operas or other dramatic television programming. The ruling, issued by the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, came atop several other guidelines restricting what women are permitted to wear on TV and in public. Back in the 1990s, when the Taliban last ran the country, they famously banned all TV and films. It appears for now that TV programming will continue, but does anyone want to, like, watch this stuff?Delegates talk during the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow, Scotland, Britain November 13, 2021.
Hard Numbers: COP26 is a wrap, Argentines & Bulgarians vote, Thai royal offenses
197: The COP26 climate summit in Glasgow concluded with a compromise deal that for the first time commits 197 governments to gradually wind down coal and end all subsidies for fossil fuels. Top polluters and coal-users China and India objected to an earlier draft that called for completely phasing out coal, as demanded by environmental groups and most developing countries.
40: The leftwing coalition of President Alberto Fernández suffered a crushing defeat in Argentina's midterm parliamentary election on Sunday. His Peronistas lost control of the Senate for the first time in almost 40 years, putting Fernández in a very weak position to deal with the country's ailing economy.
3: A new anti-graft, centrist party is expected to win Bulgaria's third legislative election this year, after previous votes in April and July delivered fragmented parliaments with no majority to form a government. Barely a quarter of Bulgarian voters showed up due to rising COVID deaths in the country with the EU's lowest vaccination rate and highest vax hesitancy.
155: At least 155 people have been charged with royal defamation — which carries up to 15 years in prison — in Thailand since mid-2020, when youth-led protests against the government first called to reform the monarchy. Thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Bangkok on Sunday to bash a recent court ruling that says any attempts to curb the powers of the king are tantamount to treason.Protest rally against COVID-19 vaccinations on 30 August 2021 in Sofia, Bulgaria.
The world’s worst COVID outbreak (for now)
Right now, only one region of the world is reporting an increase in new daily COVID cases. Here's a hint: it's one of the places where vaccines are, for the most part, easiest to get.
It's Europe. According to the World Health Organization, the region last week notched a 7 percent uptick in new daily infections, the third week in a row that infections rose there.
Much of that comes from Central and Eastern Europe, which is currently mired in its worst COVID outbreak to date. Home to just four percent of the world's population, the former Eastern Bloc is now racking up 20 percent of all new cases each day.
Russia, Ukraine and Bulgaria have in the past three days all reported their highest daily numbers of infections and deaths since the start of the pandemic.
Romania, where funeral parlors are now running out of coffins, leads the world with 22 daily COVID deaths per million people, followed closely by neighboring Bulgaria and eleven other Eastern European countries in a row.
Governments in the region, once hailed for their early action to "flatten the curve," are yet again imposing fresh restrictions on businesses, schools, and entertainment venues. Latvia recently went back to an almost full lockdown. Russia has ordered most businesses and schools to close for a full week beginning October 30, with some regions of the country starting already.
Part of the story is that vaccination rates throughout the region are still low. While three-quarters of all EU adults are fully vaccinated, those numbers fall off a cliff as you move eastward. In Romania it's barely 36 percent, while Bulgaria's mark is still below 25 percent. In Russia, which developed one of the earliest COVID vaccines, Sputnik V, just 32 percent of the population has been fully immunized. In Ukraine, it's 16 percent.
And it's not because there aren't enough jabs in stock. Despite early hiccups with securing vaccines, the EU now has more than it needs. Russia now makes its own supply in large quantities. Ukraine is a partial exception here, as the country's fractious politics have hampered its ability to buy and distribute shots.
But the region's problem isn't supply, it's demand — or, more specifically, it's vaccine hesitancy.
EU surveys find that rates of vaccine hesitancy are much higher in Eastern Europe. A recent EU poll found that just 31 percent of Bulgarians were keen to get the shot, and fewer than half of Slovaks, Croatians, and Latvians were with them. Other countries like Romania are in the 50s, but that's far off the overall EU mark of 59 percent, or the Western European countries which are almost all above 70. Surveyed separately, Russia had one of the highest rates of vaccine skepticism in the world, as does Ukraine.
Why is this happening? Not coincidentally, public trust in government is also markedly lower in Eastern Europe, where democracies are in general younger and less well established, than in Western Europe.
It's hard to draw a direct link between trust in government and willingness to take a vaccine — but in countries where people generally don't believe what their governments tell them, it's harder for those governments to convince people that vaccines are safe and important.
Moreover, political turmoil in some of the worst-hit places isn't helping: Romania's government collapsed after a no-confidence vote earlier this month, and Bulgaria is heading next month into its third election of the year, in a vote where new coronavirus restrictions are shaping up to be a salient issue.
Upshot: Unlike in earlier waves of the pandemic, most of Eastern Europe has the tools to grapple more successfully with COVID-19. But political bickering, weak trust in government, and high skepticism about the jabs are proving to be an endemic condition of their own.
What We're Watching: Iraqi COVID ward burns, the EU's Mozambique mission, Bulgaria's punk-rock leader
Iraqi COVID ward burns: Clashes broke out Monday between police and relatives of patients at the al-Hussein hospital in Nasiriyah (Iraq's fourth largest city) who were killed when a fire broke out in the COVID-19 isolation ward. At least 92 people died, and dozens were injured when a the shoddy ward, constructed a few months ago to manage the growing COVID outbreak, became ablaze. (Iraq's Health Ministry has still not confirmed the cause of the fire.) This disaster comes as the COVID crisis has severely strained the country's already-feeble healthcare system, leading to more than 1.4 million infections and at least 17,000 COVID deaths nationwide (likely a gross undercount). Monday's blaze comes months after a deadly fire at a Baghdad hospital killed at least 82 people. Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi has ordered the suspension and arrest of health and defense officials in Nasiriya, but it's unclear whether this move will be enough to placate furious Iraqis who are rising up after years of neglect, economic stagnation, war, and now a pandemic. Indeed, many Iraqis who have hit the streets in recent months are asking a simple question: what do we have to lose? Only 2.5 percent of the Iraqi population has received one dose of COVID vaccine.
EU's Mozambique mission: The EU said Monday that it will establish a new military mission in Mozambique to help the government push back against an increasingly brazen Islamic insurgency that's taken over large swaths of territory in the country's northeast. Portugal, Mozambique's former colonizer, is already training Mozambican troops and will head the mission on the ground. Like the EU operation launched in Mali in 2013, European troops will train soldiers and help rebuild infrastructure, but they will not engage in combat missions. It's unclear whether the 27-member bloc will send military equipment. For more than three years, fighters belonging to the al-Shabaab militant group that claim loose ties to the Islamic State have waged a brutal insurgency in Cabo Delgado province that has killed thousands and displaced more than 700,000 people. Earlier this year, US Special Forces soldiers began training Mozambican troops as part of an effort to quash the insurgency in the country's northeast.
Will Bulgaria have a punk-rock PM? With around 99 percent of votes counted from Sunday's national election in Bulgaria, former punk-rock front man and TV personality Slavi Trifonov, who fashions himself as "anti-politics," is favored to head Bulgaria's next government. So far, Trifonov's There Is Such a People party has won 23.9 percent of the vote, just 0.2 percentage points ahead of former prime minister Boyko Borisov's conservative GERB party. Trifonov, who says he will only sit in government with specific protest parties, says he will not try to form a coalition, but will instead head a minority government. The former pop star, who has no real political agenda and did no real canvassing prior to the polls, says he is not courting groups like the anti-corruption group Stand Up! Mafia Out! that emerged from last year's rallies against the corruption plagued Borisov government. Given the slim margin, analysts say that another election cannot be ruled out, which would be Bulgaria's third in 2021. Either way, this result is likely to signal the end of Borisov's years-long grip on power, an era characterized by successive corruption scandals and allegations of ties to organized crime groups. (For your amusement, here is Trifonov rocking it out with the Ku ku band, circa 2011.)
French politics heat up over "civil war" letter
Carl Bildt, former Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Sweden, shares his perspective on Europe In 60 Seconds:
What's the issue with the letter in France talking about the "civil war"?
Well, I think it is part of the beginning of the French election campaign. We have some people in the military encouraged by the more right-wing forces, warning very much for the Muslim question. That's part of the upstart to the election campaign next year. More to come, I fear.
Is there any update on the EU accession for the Western Balkan countries?
There was a meeting of the EU foreign ministers the other day and they were very much in favor of the process. But we still have the question of the Bulgarians blocking off Macedonia for historical unrelated reasons that are completely unacceptable but is a fact. And we also don't know really where the French are. So we are still waiting for the important decision on that.