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Hungarian government roiled by sex abuse scandal
Don’t look now, but one of Europe’s biggest defenders of family values is embroiled in a scandal over the sexual abuse of children. In recent days, Hungary’s proudly “illiberal” Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has seen his president and justice minister – both women – resign over the pardon of an orphanage director accused of covering up sexual abuse claims.
The justice minister’s husband has since accused Orbán of “hiding behind skirts” and blasted the government for corruption. Orban’s allies say this is just the yelping of “amoral lying bastards.” Spicy!
It’s not the first time that Orbán, who opposes LGBTQ rights, has run into the buzzsaw of hypocrisy. Remember when Brussels police caught one of his closest allies shimmying down a drainpipe to escape a gay orgy with drugs in his backpack?
Experts doubt the scandal itself will hurt Orbán, whose Fidesz Party won its fourth consecutive election back in 2022. Orbán’s grip on the media, coupled with the opposition’s weakness, will shield him, says Anna-Carina Hamker at Eurasia Group.
But the corruption accusations could prove more of a headache, she says, particularly if “they incite others to step up and speak out.”
Ukraine faces threat from Western flank
While visiting Buenos Aires on Sunday for the inauguration of Argentina’s new president Javier Milei, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was able to buttonhole Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
Cameras caught an unimpressed-looking Zelensky sharing his thoughts with a defensive-looking Orban. We don’t know what he said – Zelensky said later that it was a “frank” exchange – but we can guess that the Ukrainian was calling Orban out for acting on behalf of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is seeking to gain through politics what he has so far failed to gain on the battlefield: Ukraine’s submission.
Twenty months after Russian tanks crossed the border in a failed thunder run for Kyiv, the war is at a stalemate. Ukraine’s improbably successful resistance stopped an outright Russian victory, but a counteroffensive this year failed to make the hoped-for gains, and now Putin’s friends in Western capitals are seeking to capitalize on fatigue with the war to stop the Western arms that allow Ukraine to fight.
Orban, Putin’s best European ally, is threatening to block Ukraine’s accession to the European Union and is arguing against a crucial European aid package for Ukraine at a summit this week, although France’s Emmanuel Macron will try to get him onside. Meanwhile, Orban’s representatives in Washington are meeting with far-right Republicans who want to prevent the United States from approving $60 billion in military aid for Zelensky’s fighters.
Quid pro quo
Republicans are split on the question of aid to Ukraine but united in a desire to stop migrants from crossing into the United States, so President Joe Biden is trying to appease them by putting more resources into securing the southern border.
The White House is wrangling with Senate Republicans to seek a compromise, but the holidays are coming, and they need to make a deal before they all leave for the year on Friday.
“Biden is under tremendous pressure to approve an additional aid package,” says Clayton Allen, Eurasia Group director for the United States. Such a deal would likely help him with voters later, said Allen, since border security “has proven a perennial issue for his reelection chances.”
To stop the increasing number of migrants, Biden is reportedly offering to expel migrants without processing their asylum claims using Title 42, a pandemic-era measure that Donald Trump used to turn away migrants on public health grounds.
If GOP leaders in the Senate can make a deal with Biden before the holiday break, it may allow Speaker Mike Johnson to sell it to enough of his members to get it through the House. On Tuesday, he said that border security was the “hill to die on.” Johnston will likely not be able to convince Freedom Caucus members — the people who are meeting with Orban’s representatives — but he may be able to put together enough votes to get it passed, as he did to avert a government shutdown last month.
Money on the line
Biden’s job may be easier than it looks because congressmen will be motivated by a desire for economic activity in their districts, says Christopher Sands, director of the Wilson Center’s Canada Institute. “All these wars do have a tendency to benefit us in that sense because it's such a big military production that'll help a lot of congressional districts.”
When the horse trading in Washington is over, it seems likely that Ukraine will get money to keep fighting Putin, but the politics is not getting easier as the war grinds on.
“Whether Orban is the mastermind or Putin, we've seen over the last couple of years that the authoritarian countries … have been going for our great weaknesses in democracies, which is free debate,” says Sands. Spreading fake news or propaganda is “the best way to weaken the support for Ukraine.”
Canadian Conservatives change sides
Until recently, all Canadian parties shared a consensus on support for Ukraine. More than a million Canadians trace their roots to that country, so there are good electoral reasons to support Zelensky, but the Conservatives under Pierre Poilievre have quietly started voting against aid to Ukraine. In the run-up to the next general election, Poilievre wants to avoid losing any conservative support to the far-right People’s Party of Canada, which has always opposed helping Ukraine, like populists around the world.
“I think what he understands is that he has to ameliorate the right flank,” says Canadian pollster Nick Nanos. “He's doing the political calculus that if he can pick up three points out of the PPC, that could put him into majority territory.”
The Conservative votes in Canada can’t stop aid to Ukraine, but it is nonetheless a sign that Zelensky’s diplomatic challenges are getting tougher. If the Russians can win in Western capitals, and Ukraine is left to its fate on the battlefield without support from NATO countries, Putin will be able to conquer its neighbor, and the West will be weakened.
“A collapsing USA now obviously has very significant near-term military implications for Ukraine,” says Allen. “It cuts off supplies of artillery and air defense, which are essential to Ukraine's offensive and defensive capabilities.”
But it also raises questions about the durability of US security commitments and guarantees with American allies. “A failure to approve additional Ukraine aid now,” says Allen, “will diminish US influence and leverage in negotiations and interactions moving forward.”
Zelenksy has used skillful diplomacy and media savvy to build global support for his country’s struggle against Russian imperialism, but time looks to be on Putin’s side.
What We’re Watching: Bibi’s defiance, US strikes in Syria, Lula’s China visit, Putin’s Hungary refuge, India vs. free speech
Bibi’s not backing down
Israelis waited with bated breath on Thursday evening as news broke that PM Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu was preparing to brief the nation after another “day of disruption” saw protesters block roads and strike over the government’s proposed judicial reforms.
The trigger for the impromptu public address was a meeting between Bibi and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, also from the ruling Likud Party, who has voiced increasing concern that the looming judicial reform would threaten Israel’s national security, particularly as more and more army reservists are refusing to show up for training.
That never happened. While he talked about healing divisions, a defiant Netanyahu came out and said he will proceed to push through the reform, which, among other things, would give the government an automatic majority on appointing Supreme Court judges. This came just a day after the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, passed a bill blocking the attorney general from declaring Netanyahu unfit for office due to a conflict of interest over his ongoing legal woes and his bid to dilute the power of the judiciary. In response, the attorney general released a letter Friday saying Netanyahu's involvement in judicial reform is "illegal," suggesting a much-dreaded constitutional crisis may have begun.
Two things to look out for in the days ahead: First, what does Defense Minister Gallant do next? If he threatens to – or does – resign, it could set off subsequent defections and be a game changer. Second, how do the markets respond? Indeed, markets rallied Thursday before Bibi’s address in hopes that the government was set to backtrack on the reforms that are spooking investors, but the shekel value slumped after the speech.
US strikes Iranian-backed group in Syria
The US confirmed Thursday that it had struck an Iranian-backed group in northeastern Syria after a Tehran-aligned militia launched a drone attack against a US base near the province of Hasakah, killing at least one US contractor and injuring another contractor as well as five US troops.
While strikes on US bases in northeastern Syria are not necessarily uncommon, the scale of casualties seen Thursday is quite rare. Indeed, a high-ranking US official recently said that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps, which takes orders directly from the supreme leader, has launched 78 attacks on US positions in Syria since Jan. 2021.
The US Department of Defense, meanwhile, said that the drone used in this attack was of Iranian origin, and that President Joe Biden had given the go ahead for a precision-guided retaliatory strike on an Iranian-backed group that reportedly killed 11 fighters.
Video footage suggests the strike was on Deir Ez-Zor, a province that borders Iraq and contains oil fields. The US still maintains around 900 troops in the country’s northeast after President Donald Trump ordered the withdrawal of roughly 2,000 troops in 2018. It is at least the fourth known attack on Iranian assets in northwestern Syria under the Biden administration.
Iran, for its part, has not commented on the strikes, but the likelihood of increased tensions with the US is only rising.
Lula takes his beef directly to Xi Jinping
“Tell me who you walk with,” the saying goes, “and I’ll tell you who you are.” Well, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva is rolling deep to his upcoming summit with Xi Jinping, taking nearly 250 businesspeople along for the ride. More than a quarter of them are from Brazil’s powerful meat export industry alone.
That tells you everything about the trip’s main focus: trade, trade, and more trade. And why not? It was during Lula’s last stint as president that China displaced the US as Brazil’s largest commercial partner, fueling a historic economic boom as it gobbled up huge quantities of Brazilian meat, soybeans, and iron ore. Nowadays, facing a much tougher economic and political environment, Lula is keen to recapture some of that commercial magic.
But the geopolitical context also matters. Important as China is commercially, the US is Lula’s most important regional security and investment partner, and Washington was Lula’s first trip beyond Latin America as president. As the US-China rivalry deepens, Lula and his dealmaking entourage will need to tread carefully in a world that is splitting apart under their feet.
Hungary is a safe space for Putin
The Hungarian government said Thursday it wouldn’t jail Vladimir Putin if he came to Hungary, despite the International Criminal Court’s recent issuance of an arrest warrant for the Russian president for war crimes.
Budapest’s reasoning was a doozy: While they have signed and ratified the Rome Statute, which created the ICC, they say they haven’t gotten around to incorporating it into Hungarian law yet, so no-can-do on arresting Putin.
It’s all purely hypothetical, as there’s no chance of Putin going to Hungary any time soon. But that’s the point. Hungary’s avowedly “illiberal” PM Viktor Orban has long made clear that he won’t just toe the EU party line on Russia. He’s reluctantly gone along with EU sanctions on Russia, but he’s also said the EU is needlessly expanding and prolonging the war by arming Ukraine – something his government won’t do.
Moscow, for its part, says arresting Putin abroad would be “an act of war.”
India's opposition leader sentenced to prison for defamation
The world’s largest democracy seems to be getting less comfortable with a key tenet of it: free speech.
Rahul Gandhi, a member of the Indian National Congress, the main opposition party, was sentenced on Thursday to two years in prison for “defaming” Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He was also disqualified as a lawmaker by the lower house of parliament. In April 2019, Gandhi referred to the PM — along with two corrupt officials also named Modi and charged with embezzling millions of dollars — as “thieves.”
This is a big deal because Gandhi is Indian political royalty. After all, he's the son, grandson, and great-grandson of prime ministers (his great-grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru, was India's first PM), and was surely planning to run against Modi for the top job in 2024. What's more, he recently completed a five-month-long march in hopes of reviving the Congress party, which for decades dominated Indian politics but took a beating from the BJP in the last election.
Although his party is appealing the conviction, the stakes are very high for Gandhi due to a provision in India’s election law that disqualifies MPs sentenced to, coincidentally, at least two years in prison for any offense, including defamation. Gandhi turned to Twitter in defiance, tweeting up a storm on Thursday with messages like "Long live the revolution" and quoting Mahatma Gandhi with "truth is my God."
Meanwhile, opposition groups accuse the PM of using the courts to go after his political rivals. Indeed, Gandhi’s sentence comes on the heels of the recent arrest on corruption charges of Manish Sisodia, the head of the AAP, another opposition party that runs the capital, New Delhi. Democratic backsliding indeed.
What We're Watching: Morocco plays French politics, 11th-hour EU/Hungary deal, big energy milestone
Atlas Lions vs. French far-right
When reigning champion France takes on underdog Morocco in the World Cup semifinals on Wednesday, French President Emmanuel Macron will be in the stands. And whatever happens on the pitch it’s almost certain to cause tremors for him at home. The “Rocky Balboa” success of Morocco’s “Atlas Lions” – the first Arab or African team ever to make it this far in a World Cup – has struck a chord with millions of first- and second-generation French citizens of Arab and African origin. The worry is that a small minority of those fans may riot in the streets after the match — regardless of whether Morocco wins or loses — as they did last weekend in Paris after first Morocco beat Portugal and then France defeated England in the quarterfinals. Popular far-righters like TV provocateur and former presidential frontrunner Éric Zemmour will surely seize on any unrest to advance their calls for tighter restrictions on immigration. And that will cause a problem for Macron himself, who’s under pressure from the French right to pass a new law targeting illegal immigrants.
Orbán-EU draw
Another round of confrontation between the European Union and perennial EU gadfly Viktor Orbán has concluded. Once again, the Hungarian prime minister and Europe have each made concessions. This is not a surprise. Hungary’s economy and currency are struggling, and the EU has money that Orbán’s government badly needs. But Orbán knows how to pick fights with Brussels that boost his standing at home and force the EU to compromise in order to get his support for urgent European priorities. Late Monday evening, Hungary dropped its objection to an 18 billion euro ($19.15 billion) EU aid package for Ukraine and a 15% minimum tax for big corporations. In return, Hungary will get 5.8 billion euros in badly-needed COVID recovery money, and the European Commission has agreed to unfreeze 1.2 billion euros of the 7.5 billion euros it had previously withheld over concerns about corruption and rule-of-law violations in Hungary. Both sides will claim victory, but the battle will continue: the EU is still demanding reforms in Hungary that would strengthen judicial independence and anti-graft oversight. This ain’t over.
Fusion breakthrough
Well, it lasted only a few trillionths of a second, but what a few trillionths of a second they were. In a historic breakthrough, US government scientists announced they’d successfully carried out a burst of nuclear fusion, a clean energy process that (mindbogglingly) generates more energy than it requires. The long-term implications for energy, climate, and geopolitics are huge. But first, let’s set your mind at ease — after all, “nuclear fusion” sounds scary. Fusion is different than fission. Fission is what powers today’s nuclear reactors (and atomic bombs). It works by splitting atoms in a way that releases huge amounts of energy, but also generates radioactive waste and the occasional nuclear plant meltdown. Fusion, on the other hand, is the opposite: a controlled process of mixing atoms together in to produce energy. No waste. No meltdowns. But also, for now, no guarantee it can replicated at scale outside of a lab. Still, if it could it would open the way to a world-changing source of clean and sustainable energy. China and the US are already locked in a high-stakes race to develop fusion for military and civilian purposes. That viability is decades away, but all decades start with a few trillionths of a second.What We’re Watching: UNGA meets amid global crises, Hungary scrambles to secure EU funds, protests persist in Iran
UNGA high-level talks begin
World leaders are gathering at the United Nations headquarters in New York this week for the annual General Assembly. The event kicked off Monday with a summit on education. On the plus side, they’re attending in person for the first time since the pandemic began. On the down side, the world is as divided as it’s been at any time since the Cold War. An overarching item on the agenda will be the ongoing war in Ukraine — debate will focus not only on how to end the war, but also the extent to which the nations of the world are willing to hold Russia accountable for starting the conflict and for potential war crimes. A second but related issue is the ongoing global food crisis, which has been worsened by the war in Ukraine despite a recent agreement to resume grain shipments from Ukrainian ports. The UN World food program is worried food prices could continue to rise over the next five years. Third is climate change, and UN Secretary-General António Guterres has warned that “the message to world leaders is clear: lower the temperature — now.”
EU takes aim at Hungary
The European Union and Hungary have squabbled for years over the EU’s right to impose rules and values on its members. The EU accuses PM Viktor Orbán of undermining democracy, rule of law, and the independence of courts and the media within his country for political gain. A talented and avowedly “illiberal” populist, Orbán styles himself as a defender of Hungary’s traditional values against Brussels’s elites. To force him into line, the EU has one effective tool: it can withhold large amounts of cash from a member state if it can prove that corruption in the country is leading to the theft of EU funds. On Sunday, for the first time ever, the EU used this mechanism, threatening to withhold 7.5 billion euros (about 5% of Hungary’s GDP) unless Budapest takes very specific steps to crack down on corruption. The Hungarian government, already grappling with high inflation, a weakening currency, and a coming energy crisis, has so far said all the right things about its willingness to comply. On Monday, it submitted an anti-corruption bill to parliament with the promise of more to come. But on November 19, the EU Council and the 26 other EU states will decide (by a qualified-majority vote) whether to withhold or deliver the funds.
Days after Mahsa Amini’s death, protests in Iran continue
Iranians took to the streets on Monday for a third day of protests following the in-custody death of a young Iranian woman. Mahsa Amini, 22, was allegedly beaten to death by the Islamic Republic’s morality police for failing to comply with the regime’s strict head-covering requirements. Protests broke out after her funeral in a Kurdish province, as well as in Tehran, where some students held placards reading “women, life, freedom.” What’s more, a social media campaign has gained steam with women cutting their hair on camera and tearing off their headscarves in solidarity with the slain woman. The death of Amini, who was visiting Tehran with her brother when she was apprehended for not wearing a hijab, has sparked broader demonstrations against the morality police (known as the Guidance Patrol), which enforce the strict modesty rules for women instituted after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The government responded by cutting internet access and cracking down on protesters – including firing tear gas to disperse crowds. Meanwhile, President Ebrahim Raisi, a hardliner who recently signed a decree mandating stricter punishments for women who violate modesty laws both in public and online, wants the protests to end before he addresses the UN General Assembly in New York this week.Europe’s oil sanctions and a shifting Russian war narrative to come
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi everybody. Ian Bremmer here and I am back in New York City with a Quick Take to kick off the week. And the big news, a hundred days in just about continues to be, yes, the Russian war in Ukraine. And most importantly, in the last 24 hours, the sixth round of sanctions agreement coming from the Europeans, most importantly, essentially an oil boycott.
Now there's a lot of back and forth on what exactly this means because the Hungarians, with Viktor Orban, much more aligned with the Russian president and also very dependent on energy from Russia, was extremely obstreperous and basically refused to participate in the deal. So they got an extension and that extension is temporary but undefined.
What that basically means is that the boycott is on oil that's transferred through ships as opposed to by pipe. And that means that a bunch of the East Europeans will be excluded from it, will still be buying Russian oil. But the reality is, two thirds of all the oil that Europe gets from Russia is already going to be cut out. And if you add to that, what the Germans and the Poles are doing, their pledges to wind down their own pipeline imports by the end of the year, you're talking about 90% of Russian crude to Europe is now going to be boycotted. That's a very big deal. That's a very big cost, billions and billions of dollars, to the Russians every year. Some of that they'll be able to sell at a discount to other countries around the world. Some of it they won't because there's going to be a challenge when most of the ships that they can get the oil out come from Europe and they need to be insured as well. And all of that is under direct sanction. It means the Russians are going to have a very hard time.
And on the back of that, crude prices, and for Brent shooting up to 124 bucks a barrel. Gas prices, which are already record levels in the United States are going to continue to go up. There's going to be more pressure on Biden to lean into additional forms, additional sources of fossil fuel production, both in the United States, as well as a deal from the Saudis. And of course the progressives in the Democratic Party don't like that, but Biden doesn't like even more the fact that his approval rates are down around 40%, the lowest of his administration to date. Not looking great for the midterms.
Anyway, all of that is to be seen in the context of the United States and Europe that for the last three plus months has been trying to increase the costs to the Russians of this invasion and improve the support that the Ukrainians have been getting. That has been the story for the first three months. Increasingly that's not the story. Increasingly the story is going to be that the Americans and Europeans are doing close to the maximum of what you're going to see. It's going to be harder for the Europeans to get to a seventh round of sanctions, and it's also going to take a lot longer before the gas is cut off, and everything else is pretty marginal. Most of that gas we're talking about really next year, the year after, not talking about this year. Unless of course it gets blown up through Ukraine or the Russians themselves decide they're going to do this on their timeline. There's an economic cost to that.
For the Americans, you already see these missile systems that are being provided. There's a lot of debate. You provide the systems, but you don't want long range artillery because you don't want the Ukrainians to be hitting the Russians inside Russia and then expanding the war more significantly. The Americans are trying to thread the needle here. They want to be seen as doing everything they can to ensure that the Ukrainians can retake their land, but not to expand the war. And the Europeans want to do everything they can to show that they're punishing the Russians, but not to hurt their own civilians in a way that would lead to backlash domestically, politically. And if you put that, if you combine that with the fact that for the first few months, the Russians have largely been all about military losses, all about sort of not being able to take Kyiv, having to push back, to pull back, not being able to take Kharkiv in the north and having to give up some of those territorial gains.
More recently, we're starting to see the focus, of course, on the Southeast of Ukraine and the Russians, albeit very slowly, taking more land, about a kilometer every day, as they get closer to occupying all of Luhansk. They're very close to 100% of that. And the majority of Donetsk. Put together, that's the Donbas. That is what the Russians claim the war is now all about. They also have this land bridge to Crimea and so having occupied most or all of that, they start probably annexing it. They start integrating it into Russia. Do we then have the potential for a frozen conflict with Ukraine? And also are the Russians able to say, "We've outlasted the toughest of what the Americans and the Europeans can do, and now we're playing our long game where we're going to squeeze the Ukrainians economically. They won't get as much support from the West. We've killed their economy by 50% in one year when the West contracted the Russians by only 10%. And they can't export any food, any fertilizer."
They maintain the blockade, ad infinitum, unless the West is prepared to reduce some of their sanctions, which they're not willing to do. In other words, Putin has looked on the back foot for the last three months, and certainly he's not in any way going to be happy about where Russia stands in terms of its global geostrategic positioning, in terms of vis-a-vis NATO and expanded NATO and expanded defense spending and being cut off from the West economically. But the narrow perspective of how the war on Ukraine is going, that narrative for Putin is likely to look a little bit better in coming months than it has for the last three.
And if you saw that Washington Post piece over the weekend that focused on Ukrainian troops not doing so well on the ground in Southeast Ukraine, where of course there are a lot more Russian speakers, a lot more ethnic Russians, they aren't quite as welcome. And also a number of them deserting. That's the first really big public story that's been quite negative for the Ukrainian military that I've seen since the war started. You're going to see more of that too. So the information war is going to be a little bit harder for the Ukrainians to continue to win the way they have.
There's also just general question of war fatigue. This has dominated not just my feed, but frankly, a lot of the international news in the West. A lot of the coverage in the West has been about Russia-Ukraine. Can that continue? For the Americans, certainly a big question as we get closer to midterms. But even for some of the Europeans, I'm thinking here, those that are a little more removed from the front and also where the economy is going to be an open question for them. Italy, France in particular, a bit of Germany too. That's something we're going to have to watch very carefully over the coming weeks and months.
One other thing I would mention is just how little the rest of the world cares about the Western narrative on the war. As I've mentioned before, this war matters a hell of a lot more to the rest of the world than Afghanistan or Syria or Libya or Iraq, because of the impact on food prices, on fertilizer prices, because of how many people will starve on the back of this war. But that doesn't mean that the rest of the world blames Russia for it. In fact, increasingly I'd say the rest of the world, the developing world, is angrier at the West for the sanctions that they put on than the Russians who invaded Ukraine, which in turn precipitated the sanctions. Some of that is a communications challenge that just needs more work from the West, more outreach from the West, but some of it is a lack of alignment between poorer countries who don't think the United States care very much about them, except for when it is immediate and expedient.
And that's something that has been a problem growing for decades now on the back of global inequality, and on the back of climate change, on the back of the pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine crisis. In that regard, fits nicely for them into that broader narrative. Something I heard a lot when I was at Davos last week from Indian participants, Middle Eastern participants, Brazilian participants, and the rest. In that regard, closer to the China perspective than they are to the United States. It's something you don't hear a lot about from Washington. Well, I'm there next week, I'll be talking a lot about that.
Anyway, that's it for me. I hope everyone's doing well. And I'll talk to you all real soon.
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What We're Watching: Hungarian holdout, hope in Shanghai, US troops return to Somalia
Is Hungary holding the EU “hostage”?
The European Commission is pushing hard for a bloc-wide ban on Russian oil imports. But one member state — Hungary — has gone rogue and is holding up the embargo. At a meeting of EU foreign ministers on Monday, Lithuania’s representative accused Hungary of holding the bloc “hostage,” after PM Viktor Orbán demanded that Brussels dole out hundreds of millions of dollars to offset losses from moving away from cheap Russian fossil fuels. Orbán is buddies with Vladimir Putin and has been trying to expand Hungary’s economic relationship with the Kremlin in recent months, so he is driving a hard bargain, saying that ditching Russian oil would be an “atomic bomb” for his country’s economy. Landlocked Hungary relies on Russia for around 45% of its total oil imports, and finding alternative sources could lead to shortages and price hikes at a time when Hungarians are already grappling with sky-high inflation. Still, Brussels says Budapest is being greedy because Hungary has already been given a longer window — until the end of 2024 — to phase out Russian imports. But Orbán is hoping to get more concessions ahead of a big EU summit on May 30, when the bloc aims to find a political solution to this stalemate.
Shanghai’s June bloom
Officials in China’s most populous city say they are planning for life to return to normal by June 1 following a draconian COVID lockdown that has kept most of Shanghai’s 26 million residents cooped up since early April. China’s zero-COVID policy, which imposes harsh restrictions in response to even the smallest outbreaks of the virus, has wreaked havoc not only on the lives of tens of millions of people in Shanghai and other Chinese cities but on global supply chains too. When the world’s second-largest economy buys and makes fewer things, the world quickly feels it. Public health experts, including the head of the World Health Organization, have said that zero-COVID is unsustainable due to the high transmissibility of omicron, but Beijing remains unmoved. Given the low vaccination rates among China’s elderly (and most vulnerable) population and questions about the efficacy of Chinese-made jabs more broadly, researchers warn that if omicron were left to spread freely in China, more than 1 million people could die in the coming months. That’s something that Xi Jinping seems keen to avoid ahead of this fall’s 20th Party Congress, where he’s aiming to be re-“elected” to an unprecedented third term as party boss and president. Will Shanghai soon find a way out of lockdown, and will the city become a model for other Chinese urban centers looking to get back to normal?
US troops return to Somalia
The Biden administration has approved a Pentagon request to redeploy US troops to conflict-ridden Somalia. This comes less than two years after the Trump administration withdrew almost all 700 US ground troops from the East African nation as part of a broader effort to pull back from “forever wars” in faraway places. Fewer than 500 troops will be stationed in Somalia, according to the US Department of Defense, which says that since Trump’s pullback, al-Shabab — a militant group loosely aligned with al-Qaida — has expanded its reach across the country. As part of Washington’s new counterterrorism mission, President Joe Biden has also reportedly authorized the targeting of al-Shabab leaders. It remains unclear, however, whether this will allow the US military to conduct airstrikes inside Somalia. Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, Somalia’s newly tapped president, welcomed the US’ return, but many Americans who supported Biden’s pledge to end US involvement in foreign conflicts might not feel the same way, particularly given the symbolism associated with the previous (and disastrous) US presence in Somalia.Macron beats Le Pen, encore
Sometimes the polls aren’t wrong. On Sunday, centrist French President Emmanuel Macron defeated far-right hopeful Marine Le Pen in a rerun of their 2017 presidential runoff.
Macron is the first incumbent re-elected in France since 2002, when Jacques Chirac routed Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. The president is projected to capture 58.8% of the vote once all the ballots are counted, compared to 41.2% for Le Pen, according to polling agency Ipsos. That’s slightly more than the polls predicted but a much narrower margin than in 2017.
In the end, most French voters picked Macron’s promise of an open France, a strong EU, and more responsible public spending over Le Pen’s vision of getting tough on immigration, weakening the bloc, and having a France-first welfare state.
Still, the fact that more than 40% of the electorate was on board with Le Pen's policies, which would have been at odds with both Brussels and the French constitution, cannot be ignored. Her political ideas are not going away, regardless of whether she decides to run for the top office again in 2027.
Macron’s victory avoids a political earthquake in Europe while war is being waged on its eastern flank. One world leader who was hoping for an upset was Vladimir Putin, whom Le Pen embraced in the past but has notably tried to distance herself from as part of her rebrand to court moderate voters. Now, the Russian president knows that Europe will remain united in their stand against Russia’s war in Ukraine — the lone exception being Viktor Orbán, Putin’s recently re-elected buddy in Budapest.
What comes next for the French president? “This is a great triumph for Emmanuel Macron,” tweeted Mujtaba Rahman, Eurasia Group's top Europe analyst. Rahman believes the incumbent’s better-than-expected result over Le Pen gives him momentum for his La République en Marche party to win a majority in June’s parliamentary election.