Section: European Voice (EU)
America’s relationships are on the line — no matter who wins
NEW YORK — All politics is geopolitical in this year’s presidential race — and top Democrats and Republicans fear that will reshape America’s relationships around the world no matter who wins. This week, the uncertain state of those relationships will be on full display in New York as the United Nations General Assembly gathers and...
Donald Trump has diplomats abandoning vows of silence
NEW YORK — There’s a longstanding custom among the world’s diplomats: You don’t trash-talk candidates running for office in a foreign country. Donald Trump is close to destroying that tradition. As thousands of diplomats gather for the U.N. General Assembly here this week, many are struggling to hold their tongues about the...
Trump to meet with Egyptian president
NEW YORK — Donald Trump has apparently taken Hillary Clinton’s bait. The Republican presidential nominee will meet on Monday with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in New York on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly, according to Egyptian state media. Clinton, the Democratic nominee, announced last week she would meet with Sisi...
Nicolas Sarkozy, end of the dream
PARIS — A few days before Nicolas Sarkozy announced he would run for reelection as French president next year, he fielded an unusual question from a caller on a radio show: Could Sarkozy, the caller asked, ever make him dream again? The man on the line, named Régis, said he had voted for Sarkozy for president in 2007 on the basis of his uplifting...
Europe must open up, not turn its back
TALLINN — In the months following the United Kingdom’s Brexit referendum, the European Union seems to be undergoing an episode of post-traumatic stress. At a time when increased openness is of the utmost importance, the Continent is erecting internal barriers and isolating itself from the rest of the world. Some of the countries that make...
Russian opposition fights for survival in Duma vote
MOSCOW — Dmitry Gudkov was once a rising star of an opposition movement that posed a threat to Vladimir Putin. Now he’s fighting to hang on to his seat in the Russian Duma. It’s a foregone conclusion that Putin’s United Russia and allied parties will dominate Sunday’s parliamentary election: The only open question is how...
Visegrad’s illusory union
BRATISLAVA — The four Visegrad countries have of late been seen as an exception to the disunity across the European Union, and plan to use Friday’s EU leaders summit in the Slovak capital to push for a rethink of the way the EU functions after Brexit. Not so fast. Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia — so often lumped together...
State of Juncker’s Union: What he has (and hasn’t) delivered
When Jean Claude-Juncker gave his first State of the Union address in September 2015, he told MEPs it was “not the time for business as usual.” In the year since, the EU has certainly seen little of that. From continuing political battles over how to address Europe’s migration crisis, to terror attacks in several countries, to...
Bulgaria caught between NATO and the Kremlin
Bulgaria’s impending presidential election is a tempting opportunity for Russia to try to haul a vulnerable eastern European country back into its strategic orbit. Rumen Radev — a daredevil MiG-29 jet pilot — is the candidate who has set alarm bells ringing over Sofia’s ties to Moscow. A loop-the-looping highlight at airshows, he is...
Clinton goes after Trump on terrorism
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump both paused their campaign ads on Sunday, the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, a day when politics is traditionally set aside. But Clinton didn’t hold back from criticizing her GOP opponent in a pre-taped interview with Chris Cuomo on CNN’s “State of the Union,” saying that Trump’s rhetoric...
