European Commissioner Kristalina Georgieva and Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov | Tolga Bozoglu/EPA
Bulgarian PM: No Kristalina Georgieva UN candidacy, for now
Boyko Borisov said support for Irina Bokova will continue until September 26 when she must place among the first two candidates in a straw poll.
Bulgaria said that it would make a final choice on its candidate for U.N. secretary-general after September 26, scotching speculation that it would nominate European Commission Vice President Kristalina Georgieva on Tuesday.
Prime Minister Boyko Borisov told journalists in Sofia that UNESCO Director General Irina Bokova would remain the official candidate for the next two weeks to determine how she performs in the next straw poll of Security Council members.
“Our support will continue until September 26 when she will have to be among the first two candidates,” Borisov was quoted as saying by Sega.
There had been numerous reports in recent days that the Bulgarian government was considering replacing Bokova with Georgieva.
The four straw polls to date have revealed tepid support for Bokova, who placed fifth among the 10 candidates in the most recent poll last Friday, well behind the frontrunner, former Portuguese Prime Minister António Guterres.
New telecoms rules to force three countries to change laws
The Netherlands and Slovenia would have to remove bans on zero-rated content, the U.K. would lose its porn filter.
New rules for Internet providers across the European Union could weaken existing laws for downloading data in the Netherlands and Slovenia and eliminate an adult content filter for pornography in the U.K.
The telecoms single market rules, approved June 30, will go before the full European Parliament for a vote this fall. If the legislation gets a green light, it will trump existing national laws.
In addition to the porn filter, the most controversial omission from the rules is a ban on Internet service providers from giving customers access to certain earmarked content, without counting it against their monthly limits for downloading data. This is also known as “zero rating.”
That could mean that, by December 31, 2016, the Netherlands and Slovenia will have to change their laws, which currently do not allow Internet service providers to favor one type of content above another.
Both countries voted against these elements of the net neutrality provisions in Council on July 8, but their voices were overwhelmed by the majority.
“We are disappointed. For us, this is a step back for both consumers and companies,” said a Dutch source who requested anonymity as he was not authorized to speak to the press.
Likewise, a person close to the Slovenian negotiators said, “We would like to keep our national rules. But okay, this is how Europe works.”
Why is zero rating an issue?
Telecoms companies say zero rating is good for customers, because it offers unlimited access to apps or services without needing to worry about data download limits.
In the opposite camp, consumer groups and net neutrality advocates argue the practice distorts the market and is anti-competitive, because telecoms tend to exempt their affiliated content from the data limits, but not their competitors’.
“Such exemptions enable the largest telecoms operators and content providers to continue to shape the market to the detriment of consumer choice,” said Monique Goyens, head of consumer organization BEUC.
The fight apparently is not over.
“I have pushed for stronger and clearer wording, including a ban on zero rating, however the Council had very different ideas,” said Marietje Schaake, Dutch member of Parliament for the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe.
Looking for loopholes
While the telecoms reforms don’t ban zero rating, they don’t explicitly allow it. And there is a provision that lets national regulators intervene in the case of market distortions and consumer harm.
If large telecoms players are offering zero-rated content and there is limited consumer choice, the Slovenian and Dutch authorities may act to ensure a level playing ground.
“They may use that discretion to challenge zero rating, especially when consumers are disadvantaged,” Schaake said.
Fight over zero rating isn’t over
Several MEPs said they will continue pushing for a zero-rating ban.
“Further initiatives against zero rating are urgently needed,” Petra Kammerevert, a German MEP from the Socialists & Democrats, said in a statement. “Combating such business practices, especially in the wake of increasing vertical integration of the companies … needs to be addressed quickly.”
U.K. porn filter also to go
Despite the best efforts of U.K. Conservatives in the Parliament, the EU-wide regulation will put an end to Internet service provider-level filters for adult content, which will mean new U.K. laws by the end of next year.
Currently in the U.K., the major ISPs give users the option to block pornography or gratuitous violence. Consumers are prompted to choose whether to turn on the blocking filter when they first use their Internet connection.
While an exception for parental blocking tools was debated, it was not included in the final text.
Veteran actor Robert Davi eviscerated Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) for reversing his support for a U.S.-Mexico border wall and criticized media networks for ignoring the New York Democrat’s “flip-flopping” on the issue.
“My dear Mr. Schumer, what I find that you are doing is absolutely disingenuous,” Davi began in a video shared to his Twitter account.
“How many times are you going to continue to sit there like a rotten corpse with a bald-faced lie on your face? I saw you, sir, vote for the wall.” the Die Hard actor continuedas he wagged his finger disapprovingly. “You voted for a wall, sir, several years ago. So did Ms. Pelosi.”
Robert Davi then noted how Democrats, including Schumer and then-Sens. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Hillary Clinton (D-NY), voted for The Secure Fence Act of 2006, which funded a 700-mile long border fence to the tune of $50 billion over 25 years.
“How come the networks aren’t showing your flip-flopping?” Davi asked. “Show that CNN, MSNBC! Show Schumer wanting a wall and now saying it’s ‘un-American, it’s immoral.’”
The The Expendables 3 speculated the establishment media won’t challenge Schumer and other Democrats over their reversal because they possess a “Marxist-Socialist” background.”
Davi’s remarks come as President Donald Trump visited the border wall town of McAllen, Texas, to push his demand for a wall, one day after failed negotiations with Democrats to end the partial government shutdown.
On Wednesday, Trump invited Democratic leaders to the White House and began by asking if they would approve the wall in exchange for him ending the government shutdown. When the Democrats said no, he walked out.
“A total waste of time,” the president tweeted of the meeting. “I said bye-bye, nothing else works!”
Schumer told reported that President Trump “sort of slammed the table,” then “got up and walked out.”
“Again, we saw a temper tantrum because he couldn’t get his way,” he claimed.
The Texas trip gives the president yet another high-profile stage to push his wall plan, following a national television address Tuesday in which he reiterated his demand for $5.7 billion for its construction. “We want a secure country,” he told journalists just before departing.
President Trump has reportedly stated that his administration is evaluating the possibility of declaring a national emergency to build the wall.
The Agence France-Presse contributed to this report.
"Hello, dictator" — Juncker and his snark, ahead of an EU summit in May 2015 | EPA
Orbán and Juncker to face off on migration
The crisis escalates as two leaders at the center of the political battle prepare to meet in Brussels.
In one corner: Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission president who slams the “short-sightedness of those who would like to see a Europe that is divided by anti-migrant walls.” In the other: Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary who has just finished building an anti-immigration fence on his country’s southern border with Serbia.
The two leaders will sit down behind closed doors Thursday on an issue that deeply divides them: Europe’s escalating migration crisis. From the highways of Austria to the shores of Greece to the main railway station in Budapest, thousands of migrants arriving each day are putting pressure on national governments and especially the European Union to find a way to cope with the influx.
The meeting follows days of sharp volleys between Budapest and Brussels. A top Orbán aide told a Hungarian parliament committee that the migration problem was due partly to “the leftist approach” of the Commission, after Juncker, in an article published last week by several European newspapers, wrote that countries had to do their part and “adopt the European measures and implement them.”
In a sharply worded op-ed published Thursday in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Orbán again criticized EU politicians for failing to address public concerns about the refugee crisis. He also wrote that most of the refugees arriving in Hungary were Muslims, not Christians, and suggested it was “alarming that Europe’s Christian culture is barely in a position to uphold Europe’s own Christian values.”
Despite their differences on migration, Juncker and Orbán belong to the same political party group, the center-right European People’s Party, which holds the majority in the European Parliament and which includes also German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party, the CDU.
The party recognizes it faces an internal clash and is trying to smooth out the differences. “We will do our best not to get divided among us,” said Antonio Tajani, a vice president of the European Parliament and senior figure in the EPP. “What is important is that everybody grasps how difficult the situation is.”
In Hungary, there is little question of that. By the end of May, 50,000 refugees and migrants had crossed the country’s borders, compared with 43,000 in all of 2014, local authorities said. More than 2,280 refugees crossed the border on Tuesday alone, the officials said.
Juncker is speeding up his efforts to propose a permanent solution to relocate asylum-seekers across the bloc, and aiming to present it ahead of a September 14 emergency meeting of justice and home affairs ministers. But this new proposal, whatever it turns out to include, will attempt to build on a migration agenda introduced in May by the Commission that has already met with opposition from many countries, especially in Eastern Europe.
Commission officials held three private sessions Wednesday where migration was at the top of the agenda. One option under consideration is a new temporary relocation mechanism for 120,000 refugees, including asylum seekers stuck in Hungary — an element that could soften the opposition of Eastern European countries, a person familiar with the talks said.
The meeting between Orbán and Juncker is described as routine by Commission officials, who deny it was called in response to the emergency situation. The two leaders will discuss how the EU can help Hungary beyond a contribution of €8 million in emergency funds it has already asked for to help it deal with the flux of refugees, a request that the Commission has fast-tracked. Migration commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos will also travel to Hungary next Monday.
Juncker hits back
On the eve of Juncker’s meeting with Orbán, the Commission struck back at the Hungarian claims that the EU is somehow responsible for the migration crisis. The Commission president is working “day and night” to resolve the issue, a Commission spokesman told reporters Wednesday, refusing to elaborate on which country he was referring to. He urged them to read again the Commission proposal presented in May as a sign that the EU has been on top of the issue.
Meanwhile, the blame game has become borderless.
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, in an interview Sunday with French radio Europe 1, said it was “scandalous” the way certain Eastern European countries have handled the current refugee crisis. Austria has attacked Hungary for its handling of the crisis and Hungary has attacked Germany for its decision to accept Syrian refugees who arrive via other countries, contradicting an EU rule that says they should remain in the first country they arrive.
The Commission Agenda launched in May has yet to be voted by the European Parliament and still must be finalized by the Council. It called for the relocation of 40,000 refugees from Italy and Greece and the resettlement of 20,000 from outside the EU. The 40,000 goal has not been reached yet mainly because of the opposition of Eastern European countries, backed by Spain.
Hungary, for example, has agreed to accept none of those refugees.
Despite the setbacks, the Commission is pushing ahead, hoping to move beyond the temporary measures in the May proposals with a permanent mechanism. The new proposals were meant to be announced by the end of the year but are now being pushed more quickly in response to recent events, Commission officials said. The September 14 meeting of justice and interior ministers will come just five days after Juncker addresses the issue in his State of the Union address to the European Parliament.
The challenge will be finding European solidarity on the issue.
Opponents dig in
In an interview Tuesday with Reuters, Avramopoulos sounded upbeat. “Some countries that were a bit reluctant … have changed their mind because now they realize that this problem is not the problem of other countries but theirs as well,” he said.
Yet in many Eastern European countries remain resistant.
Slovakia, with a population of 5 million, is taking only 200 asylum seekers, and Prime Minister Robert Fico has made it clear that all of them should be Christians.
Fico estimated that 95 percent of those moving to Europe are economic migrants, not refugees fleeing war. “We won’t assist in this folly with arms opened wide with the notion that we’ll accept them all regardless of whether they’re economic migrants or not,” he said recently, calling on countries along the EU’s external frontiers to “carry out their duties properly and not open the borders to everybody.”
Poland has been similarly lukewarm about taking large numbers of refugees, and has also expressed a preference for taking Christian over Muslims.
Jerzy Polaczek, an MP from the right-wing Law and Justice party, wrote recently that the potential assimilation of Muslims into overwhelmingly Roman Catholic Poland “would be much more difficult — if at all possible — than Christians.”
Speaking last month to POLITICO, Andrzej Duda, Poland’s new president, made it clear that he felt his country was too poor to accept many refugees, and would be more open to receiving ethnic Poles living in the former Soviet Union.
Ewa Kopacz, the Polish prime minister, is coming under strong pressure from Germany, Poland’s leading EU partner, to shift her position. The country has agreed to take 2,200 refugees, but Kopacz is now saying that in light of growing numbers of migrants she said there may have to be a reassessment of how many people are accepted, which Poland will respond to “in the spirit of responsibility and the assessment of our capabilities.”
The Polish government is also operating in a difficult political environment. Kopacz and her Civic Platform party are trailing Law and Justice ahead of this fall’s parliamentary elections.
“We know that we have to show solidarity, but we have elections on Oct. 25,” said a Polish government official.
The Czech Republic is also dealing with growing numbers of migrants. Police, apparently unaware of the way their actions would be perceived outside the country, this week detained more than 200 migrants trying to travel to Germany, marking their arms with ID numbers.
“We want measures that will lead to the stopping of migration waves,” Milan Chovanec, the Czech interior minister, said, according to the CTK news agency.
“The issue of migration is contentious domestically; the fact is people are genuinely scared. This does not only apply on the to the Czech Republic but all the Central European countries,” said a senior Czech government official. “The public wants the government to take a tough line, but the EU is all about solidarity. This is a difficult balancing act.”
Leaders from the Visegrad Group of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary are meeting Friday to hammer out a common position on migration.
It’s unclear whether the meeting between Juncker and Orbán the day before will have made their job any easier.
The Frenchman is once again being charged with the task of getting the Blancos back on top in Spain, with his job possibly on the line
Zinedine Zidane will leave any decision on his future as Real Madrid manager in the hands of others, with the Frenchman reluctant to speculate on whether he needs the Liga title in order to keep his job.
The Frenchman has delivered on that front before, with a hat-trick of Champions League crowns also secured during a memorable first stint in charge at Santiago Bernabeu.
An SOS call was sounded out to him during the 2018-19 campaign as Real sought to get back on track after failed stints in the dugout from Julen Lopetegui and Santiago Solari.
More teams
Zidane has had to rebuild a squad that no longer boasts the considerable quality of Cristiano Ronaldo and is currently sweating on challenges for honours at home and in Europe.
A Clasico clash with arch-rivals Barcelona is next on the agenda for Madrid, with it possible that the Blancos could clamber back to the Liga summit on Sunday.
Quizzed on whether he needs silverware in order to remain in his post for 2020-21, Zidane told reporters: “Well, that’s someone else’s decision. I know what I need to do…but you can only have one title winner.
“You [the press] have a job to do and I have mine to do. We’ve had some bad results, but I have the strength to go on and the players to do so.”
Real have endured an untimely wobble over recent weeks, dropping domestic points against Celta Vigo and Levante while also crashing out of the Copa del Rey and suffering a 2-1 defeat to Manchester City in the first leg of their Champions League last-16 encounter.
“It’s delicate,” Zidane said of Madrid’s current position.
“It’s true we’ve not had great results but this happens. We know we can change this. We’re good enough and, with the fans behind us from the start.”
He added on the value of victory in the Clasico: “I understand our fans could be upset but we’ll give 100%.
“All our games are important. There are three points up for grabs, but it’s a special game and we’ll do what we can to win it.
“When a team drops points, people over-analyse. We are still working hard and looking forward to turning the tide.
“Both clubs are first and second in the table. Neither side is a disaster, we’re the top two.
“It’s a great chance to turn the momentum. I’m a positive person and my players will go out to win.
“I could sit here for half an hour and talk about how the game could go. As I’ve said, we’ll give it our best shot.”
Barca talisman Lionel Messi will once again provide the greatest threat to Real at Santiago Bernabeu, but Zidane has no special plans for trying to contain the six-time Ballon d’Or winner.
He said of the mercurial Argentine: “We all know how important he is, he’s their star player. We know what they can do and what we need to do.”
US President Barack Obama waves as he departs the White House for his trip | Molly Riley/AFP via Getty Images
Trade backers hope for ‘watershed’ Obama visit
Supporters talk of an ‘economic NATO,’ but the US campaign is undermining support for a transatlantic trade deal.
WASHINGTON/BRUSSELS — President Barack Obama will try to rally reluctant Europeans behind a U.S.-EU trade deal when he touches down in Germany Sunday, but he doesn’t exactly arrive with the political trade winds at his back.
Back home in the United States, anti-trade sentiment in both parties is the highest in a generation, and nearly all of Obama’s potential successors are hardening their views on the subject — with potential implications for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).
On the Democratic side of the U.S. presidential primary, Vermont senator and “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders holds up former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s past support for trade deals as evidence she is not “qualified” to be president. Clinton now calls the recently-concluded Trans-Pacific Partnership, which she initially supported, a raw deal. And then, of course, there is Donald J. Trump. The frontrunner for the normally pro-trade Republican Party has opposed TPP and decried the (Bill) Clinton-era North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as a “disaster.”
TTIP hasn’t faced the same vociferous public opposition in the United States that it currently does in Europe, but the tumultuous election-year maneuvering has complicated the political backdrop, say trade advocates. The Obama administration and other TTIP supporters want to conclude a deal before the president leaves office — a goal driven in part by a realization that a future president might not be a TTIP fan.
“I think there is a lot of pushback, it seems, on both sides of the aisle around trade and maybe trade has come to symbolize some of this anger we see out there about taking away jobs,” Eric Spiegel, the chief executive of Siemens USA, the American subsidiary of the German export giant, told POLITICO this week.
Spiegel will be at the Hannover Messe Sunday, as Obama arrives to open the massive industrial show with Chancellor Angela Merkel before the two meet with David Cameron, Matteo Renzi and François Hollande on Monday. But he’s not holding his breath for a TTIP deal anytime soon, he told POLITICO.
“I think it’s a huge opportunity, but in the current situation I don’t think anything is going to happen in the near term,” he said.
John Engler, a former governor of Michigan who now heads the Business Roundtable, told POLITICO “there is a sense it would be a miracle to see [TTIP] concluded” during the Obama administration — and U.S. politics are having “a negative effect.” The decline in Michigan’s auto sector played a role in Clinton’s narrow loss to Sanders in the presidential primary there in March.
‘New paradigm’
The limited polling data on TTIP seem to back up his caution. In a survey about TTIP commissioned by Germany’s Bertelsmann Foundation and conducted by U.K.-based market research firm YouGov in late February, only 18 percent of the 1,126 Americans questioned supported the deal, compared to 53 percent in 2014. That’s comparable to public discontent with the deal in Germany, where suspicion about Corporate America is longstanding.
With trade politics becoming more complicated at home and the clock on his presidency ticking, some Europeans worry that Obama will try to cut a less comprehensive deal this week in Europe before the latest round of talks start in New York.
“That’s a possibility raised by certain persons who are afraid of an American willingness to speed things up,” French Trade Minister Matthias Fekl told POLITICO, adding that a scaled-back deal is “completely contradictory” to what France wants.
All along, TTIP has been a victim of timing. The Obama administration’s decision to make the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) its trade legacy priority — despite lots of grumbling from European governments — means the U.S.-EU trade negotiations have largely escaped the attention of the general public even as the trade policy community in Washington follows the negotiations closely. In the Bertelsmann survey, almost half of U.S. respondents said they did not know enough about the agreement.
TTIP has come up rarely in the campaign, and the few reactions it has gotten may give supporters pause. Asked about the arbitration mechanism uses to resolve investor-state disputes in TPP and TTIP, Clinton wrote last week in a questionnaire for the Pennsylvania Fair Trade Coalition that “I think we need to have a new paradigm for trade agreements that doesn’t give special rights to corporations that workers and [non-governmental organizations] don’t get.”
Still, TTIP would seem to face a smoother road than TPP. It’s less about tariffs and more about regulatory standards. U.S. and EU standards are both high relative to the rest of the world, and there is less resistance to the negotiations from U.S. labor unions. The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, which is generally against free trade deals, notes on its website that it “believes that increasing trade ties with the EU could be beneficial for both American and European workers but as with all trade agreements, the rules matter.”
As Rep. Richard Neal, a top Democrat on the trade-writing House Ways and Means Committee, said last week in a speech, the White House faces a difficult challenge in getting the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal approved in Congress this year — but a potential TTIP deal faces less resistance.
“At the moment, there’s not the organized resistance to TTIP,” Neal said. “There doesn’t seem to be the concerted effort that there has been on TPP.”
Chlorine chicken
Siemens’ Spiegel hopes this weekend’s meetings in Hanover will be a “watershed” for U.S.-European cooperation on high-tech manufacturing. Founded in Germany in 1847, Siemens but now does more business in the United States than it does in Germany — just under €20 billion in revenues in 2015 with just over €4.5 billion in exports. It’s just the kind of company that TTIP might benefit most.
Spiegel and other U.S. business leaders get excited about the prospect of a TTIP deal that would bring into line U.S. and EU standards and regulations so that, for instance, the brakes on a car could be certified so that an automobile from the same production facility could be sold in both Paris, Texas and Paris France.
They talk up the benefits and geo-strategic importance of the deal — an “economic NATO,” some call it. Proponents regularly point to data showing that a comprehensive TTIP deal would be a €120 billion boon to the European economy and a €95 billion boost for the U.S. economy.
Still, that study, conducted in 2013 by the London-based Centre for Economic Policy Research, assumes that a deal will reduce non-tariff barriers in goods and services by 25 percent — and public procurement barriers by 50 percent.
And at this point in the negotiations, both those issues remain key sticking points, says Gary Hufbauer, a former U.S. Treasury official and senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC.
“There’s a general agreement that we should have international standards,” Hufbauer said. “But both sides think they have the best standards…and the Europeans have placed a premium on getting these going forward and I don’t think they’re getting close to working out modalities for that.”
Hufbauer, for one, thinks TTIP will become a campaign issue as the negotiation process plays out alongside the 2016 presidential campaign cycle. “There will be opponents,” Hufbauer said, predicting that the idea of the United States giving up sovereignty to investor-state dispute settlement courts as part of TTIP will rile up opponents.
The arbitration mechanism is hardly a new feature of trade deals or a new political issue, but become more controversial lately in Europe; after public outrage about how large companies can sue countries over trade disputes, the European Commission proposed a new series of courts to deal with investment disputes.
On this side of the Atlantic, many Americans, Hufbauer says, would likely say that that Europeans shouldn’t be telling them how to license their doctors or engineers or accountants — not unlike in Europe, where Germans complain about the “Chlorhühnchen”, or chlorine-water-washed American chicken that many fear they’d be forced to eat under TTIP.
Meanwhile, political views on those types of issues seem to be shifting by the day.
Clinton seems to be backing away from the investor-state dispute approach taken by the administration in TPP, in favor of an approach more in line with social and environmental activists. On the Republican side, Trump’s chief Republican rival —senator Ted Cruz — initially supported giving President Obama the power to negotiate a Pacific Rim trade deal before turning around months later and opposing it. Trump’s stance on free trade has been all over the map, but boils down to a simple applause line: recent U.S. trade deals will decimate U.S. manufacturers and people will lose jobs.
EU trade chief Cecilia Malmström told reporters in early March that the heated verbiage on the campaign trail should not slow the TTIP trade talks. And business leaders hold out hope that the Obama-Merkel meeting this weekend may make a difference.
“I think if the President and Chancellor come out and talk about what we’re on the verge of and how the U.S. and EU can play a part in that, I think it will be a big moment and we may look back to it and say that it was really a watershed moment,” says Siemens’ Spiegel.
Victoria Guida in Washington contributed to this story.