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The United States Navy said Friday that a Russian jet flew within six meters of an American spy plane earlier this week over the Black Sea, but that the encounter was professional.

The Russian jet was scrambled to greet the U.S. Navy P-8A Poseidon in international airspace Tuesday as the U.S. plane flew near Russian territory, according to the Russian Defense Ministry.

The Russian pilot approached the spy plane “at a safe distance” in order to identify it as a U.S. aircraft, the statement said, noting that the U.S. plane changed its course after the encounter and the Russian jet returned to its base.

U.S. Navy spokeswoman Pamela Kunze said in a statement the encounter was conducted in a “safe and professional” manner, downplaying the proximity of the Russian aircraft to the U.S. aircraft.

“For aviation interactions, distance, speed, altitude, rate of closure, visibility and other factors impact whether an event is characterized as safe or unsafe, professional or not professional,” she said. “Every event is unique and any single variable does not define an event.”

Kunze said that Navy aircraft and ships interact with their Russian counterparts in international waters on a routine basis, but did not provide any further details about Tuesday’s encounter.

The incident is the latest in a series of close fly-bys between U.S. and Russian planes. In February, four Russian aircraft buzzed a Navy destroyer in the Black Sea, flying within 91 meters of the ship.

Last month, the U.S. military intercepted two Russian bombers in international airspace off Alaska’s coast. That encounter was similarly described as “safe and professional” by the Navy.
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Turkey’s state-run news agency says police have detained 62 former employees of the Istanbul stock exchange over their alleged links to a U.S.-based Muslim cleric blamed for last year’s coup attempt.

Anadolu Agency said the suspects were detained Friday in simultaneous police raids in Istanbul and five other cities. Detention warrants were issued for 40 other people, the agency reported.

The detained are suspected of being followers of Fethullah Gulen who the government says is behind the July 15 coup attempt. Anadolu said the suspects were removed from positions at Borsa Istanbul stock exchange following the attempt.

Gulen denies involvement in the failed coup.

Turkey declared a state of emergency following the attempt and dismissed some 100,000 people from government jobs while arresting more than 47,000 people.
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Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny returned home Thursday after surgery in Spain to fix his eye that was damaged in an attack and immediately roused his supporters to action.

Navalny suffered a severe chemical burn in his right eye last month when an attacker doused him with green antiseptic. His supporters identified the attacker as a pro-government activist. Police have failed to track him down.

Navalny urged his supporters in a YouTube video broadcast Thursday to attend anti-corruption rallies next month. He said the demonstrations are planned in 147 Russian cities.

Plans bid for presidency

The charismatic opposition leader intends to run for president next year. He said he would continue to travel widely to open his campaign offices.

Navalny shot to prominence with his investigations into official corruption and was a key driving force behind massive anti-Kremlin protests in Moscow in 2011-2012.

He also organized anti-government rallies in March, Russia’s largest and most widespread in years.

Trip to Spain allowed

Until his medical trip to Spain, Navalny had been denied travel documents for five years. He is serving a five-year suspended sentence in a dubious embezzlement case.

 He said Thursday that after his Moscow doctor strongly recommended he to travel abroad for eye surgery, he wrote to Kremlin human rights council chief Mikhail Fedotov to demand that authorities issue him a passport.

On Fedotov’s advice, he then sent the same request to Kremlin chief of staff Anton Vaino. Navalny said he also applied for a passport and received one the next day.

Navalny, who was operated on at a Barcelona clinic, said doctors expect the vision in his injured eye to be restored in several months.
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Bulgaria is seeking private investors to build a nuclear power plant on the Danube River, which was canceled five years ago, Prime Minister Boiko Borisov said during a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday.

Sofia canceled the Belene project in 2012 after failing to find foreign investors and facing pressure from Brussels and Washington to limit its energy dependence on Russia.

Since then Bulgaria has opened a gas link with neighboring Romania and is working to connect its gas network with neighboring Greece, Turkey and Serbia to diversify its suppliers.

It hopes to privatize the nuclear plant project after it paid more than 600 million euros ($652 million) in compensation to Russia’s state nuclear giant Rosatom when it canceled the 10 billion euro project. Rosatom had agreed to provide the nuclear reactors.

Bulgarian authorities have already said that Belene could be built without state guarantees or obligatory long-term contracts for the government to purchase power from it.

“Prime Minister Boiko Borisov said the government is looking for a strategic private investor to develop the project,” the government’s press office said in a statement.

In December, the Bulgarian government said that Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), China’s biggest lender by assets, was ready to finance the Belene nuclear power project. China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) has also expressed an interest in investing in the project.

During their phone call, Borisov and Putin also underlined their mutual interest in the construction of the natural gas hub on Bulgarian territory, the government’s press office said.

Plans for a hub at the Black Sea port of Varna, which would store and transport gas from Russia and the Caspian Sea to southeastern and central Europe, follow the cancellation of Russian gas giant Gazprom’s South Stream gas pipeline project, which would have shipped Russian gas under the Black Sea via Bulgaria to central Europe.
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The U.N.’s human rights chief urged Uzbekistan on Thursday to avoid “repressive policies” in its fight against Islamist radicalization, a growing threat throughout Central Asia, while welcoming a rapprochement with Tashkent.

Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the first United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to visit Uzbekistan since the post was created in 1993, said the former Soviet republic had agreed to work with his office after previously refusing to do so.

Commenting on President Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s reform plans, which include an overhaul of the judicial system and measures to tackle religious extremism, Hussein said it was crucial to balance the latter with ensuring individual rights.

“As in other countries, I have emphasized that the answer to the risk of radicalization is not simply heavy-handed security measures and repressive policies which breed resentment and frustration, thereby making it easier for extremists to recruit new supporters,” he said.

President Islam Karimov, who died in September after 27 years in power, had been widely criticized for his government’s human rights violations, and Tashkent’s ties with the West hit their lowest point after troops violently suppressed unrest in the city of Andijan in 2005.

Hussein, describing the Andijan events as “terrible,” told a briefing: “While it is important to look forward, it also important to come to terms with past events and ensure that victims are not forgotten and their grievances are addressed.”

Hussein said he had had an hour-and-a-half meeting with Mirziyoyev, “in which we found much common ground and reached agreements on a number of concrete steps.”

Uzbekistan found itself in a global security spotlight after an Uzbek man living in Sweden was identified as the main suspect behind the deadly truck attack in Stockholm last month. Hundreds of Uzbeks are also believed to have joined the Islamic State militant group based in Syria and Iraq.
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U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the foreign ministers of the other Arctic Council nations, Russia, Greenland, Canada, Norway, Finland, Sweden and Iceland meet Thursday amid changes to the North Pole ice and a decision by the Trump administration about the U.N. Paris Agreement on Climate. Any changes to U.S. climate policy could have a direct impact on the lives of Alaskan Natives, who depend on the Arctic Sea to survive. VOA’s Cindy Saine reports from Fairbanks, Alaska.
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Montenegro’s historic port city of Kotor has earned the status of UNESCO World Heritage Site for the beauty of its well preserved medieval town. But Kotor’s international fame has become a source of trouble in recent years. Excessive construction is now threatening to diminish the town’s beauty and its reputation as one of the world’s top tourist destinations. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke has more.
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Syria was at the top of the agenda Wednesday as Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov came calling on President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. But as VOA’s Peter Heinlein reports from the White House, the meetings touched on several other world hotspots.
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U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis on Tuesday criticized what he called a destabilizing Russian military build-up near Baltic states and officials suggested the United States could deploy Patriot missiles in the region for NATO exercises in the summer.

U.S. allies are jittery ahead of war games by Russia and Belarus in September that could involve up to 100,000 troops and include nuclear weapons training —the biggest such exercise since 2013.

The drills could see Russian troops on the border with Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.

Russia has also deployed Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad, its enclave on the Baltic Sea. It said the deployment was part of routine drills, but U.S. officials worry that it may represent a permanent upgrade to Kaliningrad’s missile capability.

Asked during a trip to Lithuania about the Russian missile deployment, Mattis told a news conference: “Any kind of buildup like that is simply destabilizing.”

The United States is ruling out any direct response to the Russian drills or the potential missile deployment.

But at the same time, U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, raised the possibility that a Patriot missile battery could be deployed briefly to the Baltic region during upcoming NATO exercises in July that focus on air defense, known as Tobruk Legacy.

One of the officials said Patriots had not been previously deployed to the Baltics, although they had been in Poland. The officials stressed the Patriots, if deployed, would be withdrawn when the drills were concluded. That would likely happen before the Russian drills began, they said.

Mattis declined to comment directly on the possible Patriot deployment when asked by reporters after talks in Vilnius.

“The specific systems that we bring are those that we determine necessary,” Mattis said, saying that NATO capabilities in the region were purely defensive.

It was Mattis first trip to the Baltic states, who fear a repeat of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula. The Baltic states are concerned about their lack of air defenses and are weighing upgrades in their military hardware.

Asked about any future Patriot deployment, Lithuania’s President Dalia Grybauskaite, standing next to Mattis, said: “We need all necessary means for defence and for deterrence, and that’s what we’ll decide together.”

The scale of this year’s Russian Zapad exercises, which date from Soviet times when they were first used to test new weapon systems, is one of NATO’s most pressing concerns. Diplomats say the war games are no simple military drill.

Estonian Defense Minister Margus Tsahkna told Reuters last month NATO governments had intelligence suggesting Moscow may leave Russian soldiers in Belarus once the Zapad 2017 exercises are over, also pointing to public data of Russian railway traffic to Belarus.

Moscow denies any plans to threaten NATO and says it is the U.S.-led alliance that is risking stability in eastern Europe.

The Kremlin has not said how many troops will take part in Zapad 2017.

 
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U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will welcome Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to the State Department Wednesday, for talks expected to be dominated by the two countries’ differences over Syria and Ukraine. This will be the first time Lavrov has visited Washington since 2013, and analysts say the two men will have their work cut out for them, before both head to Alaska for a ministerial meeting of the Arctic Council. VOA State Department correspondent Cindy Saine reports,
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Britain’s political centrists and liberals can only look on jealously. The victory of Emmanuel Macron across the English Channel in France’s presidential race is reviving talk in Britain of a progressive alliance to deprive the Conservatives of a likely landslide win in next month’s parliamentary elections.

The leaders of the country’s main opposition Labor Party, however, are rejecting out of hand any electoral pact with the Liberal Democrats and Greens, despite mounting calls from activists for them to do so.

“Labor is a national party and everyone needs to have the opportunity to vote for a Labor candidate,” senior Labor lawmaker John Ashworth told reporters Monday. “Politicians who try to do these backroom deals never, ever come out of it well.”

Last week, Labor candidates in local elections suffered a stunning defeat at the hands of the Conservatives, losing control of councils in the party’s traditional heartland territory of the industrial Midlands and the north, regions that favor Brexit — Britain quitting the European Union.

If the voting pattern is repeated in the parliamentary elections on June 8, Labor could be facing a wipeout as large as the one it suffered in 1983 at the hands of Margaret Thatcher, who secured a 144-seat majority in the House of Commons. One gloomy newspaper columnist quipped that the local election setback was “a bloodbath foreshadowing a full-on abattoir come June 8.”

Tactical voting

Nonetheless, Labor leaders also are discouraging supporters from engaging in tactical voting on election day, an idea touted by former Prime Minister Tony Blair to the fury of party stalwarts.

Blair and some other opposition party grandees have urged voters to back “progressive” candidates in the strongest position in their districts to defeat Brexit-supporting Conservative rivals.

Labor’s leader, the hard-left Jeremy Corbyn, is insisting against the facts, “We are closing the gap on the Conservatives.”

The Green Party has decided not to run candidates against Labor’s in London and the southern coastal town of Brighton, and it has demanded to no avail that Corbyn return the favor elsewhere. The Greens’ leader, Caroline Lucas, is accusing the Labor leader of paving the way for a Tory majority by ignoring calls for an election deal.

“We are going to wake up on June 9 and a lot of people are going to be asking themselves, ‘When will the left ever learn?’” she said Monday.

Lucas told BBC Radio, “We’ve still got a few more days where we could build on these alliances, which it isn’t just the Green Party asking for them, it is people up and down the country begging parties of the left and the center-left to get together to do grown-up politics and to be able to put in place a group of people who have a better chance of serving the interests of the people, rather than allowing a massive Tory landslide.”

Ideological battles

As an electoral annihilation approaches, the Labor Party — moderates and hard-left alike — appears more eager to focus on internal ideological battles and to position itself for an internecine fight after the election. The ideological divisions are spilling out publicly on the campaign trail as party members fight for the soul of their party and Labor candidates opposed to Corbyn distance themselves publicly from their leader.

Labor moderates see a huge defeat on June 8 as the only way of forcing Corbyn, who has weathered several attempts by them to oust him, to resign. As they see it, that would clear the path for a moderate to replace him. The party could then begin the arduous process of expunging the hard left from its ranks, modernizing the party and returning Labor to credibility, much as the Labor modernizer Tony Blair and his supporters did more than 20 years ago after Thatcher’s three-on-the-trot [one after the other] election victories.

Corbyn loyalists, many of whom are young entryists from far-left Trotskyite groups, are less interested in electoral politics, say their critics, and are focused on refashioning the party as a revolutionary protest movement, pure in ideology and untainted by the nasty compromises electoral politics require.

Some Labor stalwarts are turning away from the party’s tribal politics. A former Labor minister, Chris Mullin, a former darling of the Labor left and a one-time editor of the weekly Tribune newspaper, once the home of writer George Orwell, believes “the only way forward” is “an eventual pact between Labor, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens not to oppose each other in marginal seats.”

“It will be difficult for any party that is not the Conservative party to form a government on its own in the foreseeable future,” Mullin recently argued.

“It may take three or four election defeats for the penny to drop,” he added.

Even if the penny did drop [meaning: an understanding of the situation occurs] before June 8, it is not clear, thanks to Britain’s first-past-the-post voting system, that a ‘progressive’ electoral pact could even stop the Conservative juggernaut. Pollsters say a functioning progressive alliance would only reduce a likely Tory majority.

 
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Gibraltar is preparing for a post-Brexit setup in which its firms will have no longer access to the European Union market but will maintain a preferential relationship with Britain, a top Gibraltar financial official said on Tuesday.

The tiny British enclave on Spain’s southern tip, with a population of 30,000, is home to around 15,000 companies and is a major provider of insurance and gambling services.

“We are currently planning for a hard Brexit,” James Tipping, director at Gibraltar’s government body for financial promotion, told EU lawmakers in a hearing in Brussels.

He said Gibraltar did not expect to obtain a “special status” and was resigned to lose its access to the EU market after Britain leaves the EU at the end of a process triggered in March by British Prime Minister Theresa May.

This would mark a shift in Gibraltar’s stated policy of seeking extraordinary arrangements with the EU after Brexit.

Many companies have so far been attracted to Gibraltar by the prospect of being able to operate in all 28 EU countries from a territory with low tax rates and business-friendly regulations.

The loss of the access to the EU market, granted to EU member states by so-called passporting rules, may reduce firms’ appetite to establish their headquarters in the British enclave.

But this may not discourage Gibraltar-based firms that operate in the United Kingdom.

“Our financial model will not have to change,” Tipping told lawmakers, noting Britain has committed to guarantee full access to its market for Gibraltar companies.

He said about 20 percent of motor vehicles in Britain are underwritten by Gibraltar-based insurance companies, making insurers the largest financial sector in Gibraltar, which is also home to more than a dozen banks, several investment funds and top online gambling firms.

Gibraltar, often dubbed “the Rock” because of its famous cliff-faced mountain, voted overwhelmingly to remain in the EU at last year’s Brexit referendum.

It remains, however, committed to remain part of Britain after Brexit. The enclave rejected the idea of Britain sharing sovereignty with Spain by 99 percent to 1 percent in a 2002 referendum.

The future of Gibraltar is one of the many thorny issues that will have to be sorted in the two-year divorce talks between Britain and the EU which will end in March 2019.

The EU offered Spain a veto right over the future relationship between Gibraltar and the EU after Britain leaves the bloc.
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Italy will open new detention centers across the country in the next few months as part of its push to speed up deportations of illegal migrants, despite critics saying that the centers are not only inhumane but also do not produce the desired result.

Violent protests and difficulty identifying migrants has led to the closure of similar centers over the past few years, but on Tuesday the Interior Ministry asked regional governments to provide a total of 1,600 beds in such centers.

Interior Minister Marco Minniti says migrants must be detained to stop them from slipping away before they can be sent home.

The plans include reopening one for men at Ponte Galeria on the outskirts of Rome where migrants had sewed their mouths shut in protest before it was destroyed by interned migrants in 2015.

Over the weekend, Reuters journalists visited the still-open female section of the Ponte Galeria center, and spoke to three Nigerian women. All have applied for asylum from behind bars.

Of the 63 women now being held in the center, more than two thirds are awaiting asylum request responses. Twenty-seven are Nigerian, many of them victims of sex trafficking.

Isoke Edionwer, 28, said she was a prostitute for five years, but two years ago paid off her debt and lived in Naples until she was brought to the center a few weeks ago.

“I’m a changed person. I’m no longer a prostitute,” she said. She wants to go back to Naples and earn a living from selling soaps and other items from a shop she opened.

Mass migrant arrivals by sea are putting Italy under increasing pressure. Numbers are up almost 40 percent this year after a record 181,000 came in 2016, and more than 175,000 are being housed in shelters for asylum seekers.

Senator Luigi Manconi of the ruling Democratic Party said the new-style detention centers had been phased out previously because officials working there had failed to determine the real identity and nationality of most migrants for deportation.

“If they didn’t work before, the solution isn’t to create a bunch of new ones,” he told Reuters outside the Ponte Galeria center’s gate, which is guarded by soldiers and police.

In particular, victims of sex trafficking should be helped, not locked up, Manconi said: “Why aren’t they being protected? Are they a threat to the state? No!”

Between 45-50 percent of those held in the new centers were likely to be deported, officials said. Others either cannot be identified or are not accepted by their countries of origin and must be released.

Some 4,000 were deported in 2015, but there are no official numbers yet for 2016.

Happy Idahosa, 20, was picked up by police in the city of Perugia on New Year’s Eve and sent to Ponte Galeria.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” she said. “I came to Italy because there is peace and freedom here, and I want to stay.”

 
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Emmanuel Macron, 39, will join the ranks of the world’s youngest leaders when he is inaugurated as president of France on Sunday.

Some leaders past and president who made big marks were even younger when they assumed power.

Fidel Castro

The Cuban revolutionary leader, who died last year, was 32 when his rebel forces took control of Cuba. He ruled for nearly five decades as one of the world’s last communist leaders.

John F. Kennedy

Kennedy was the youngest person ever elected to the presidency of the United States. The wealthy senator and war hero was 43 when he took the oath of office in 1961. But he was not the youngest U.S. president ever — that was Theodore Roosevelt, who was 42 when he took over after the assassination of President William McKinley.

Tony Blair and David Cameron

Blair was 43 when he was elected Britain’s prime minister in 1997 — the country’s youngest leader since 42-year-old Lord Liverpool in 1812.

Cameron was also 43, but a few months younger than Blair, when he became Britain’s leader in 2010.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk

Ataturk, the revered founder of the Republic of Turkey, was 42 when he became the country’s first president in 1923. The revolutionary leader’s last name means “Father of the Turks.”

Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson

In Iceland, Gunnlaugsson became prime minister at 38 in 2013. He resigned in 2016 after details of his offshore financial holdings were revealed in the Panama Papers leak.

Moammar Gadhafi

The late Libyan leader was 27 when he seized power in 1969. The dictator held on to power until he was ousted in 2011. He was captured and killed a few months later.

Gamal Abdel Nasser

Nasser was 38 when he became president of Egypt in 1956. He nationalized the Suez Canal and championed the pan-Arab cause, becoming one of the world’s most prominent anti-imperialist figures by the time of his death in 1970.

Kim Jong Un

The North Korean ruler’s age remains something of a mystery, but he is thought to be 32 or 33. Kim, the third generation in North Korea’s ruling dynasty, assumed power in December 2011 upon the death of his father, Kim Jong Il.

Rajiv Gandhi

Gandhi was catapulted to India’s highest office when his mother, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, was assassinated in 1984. He began his premiership with promises of modernizing India’s creaking government. Within a few years, he was forced to resign amid allegations of taking bribes in an arms deal. He was assassinated in 1991 while campaigning to return to office.

Justin Trudeau

Trudeau was elected as Canada’s prime minister in 2015, when he was 43. Like Rajiv Gandhi, he had a strong family connection to the office — his father, Pierre Trudeau, also served as prime minister.
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The prospect of an economic doomsday for Greece may have diminished in the past week, but citizen Angelika Dinkel doesn’t much care.

Following months of negotiations, the Greek government last week agreed to further austerity measures in order to access loans from its $94 billion bailout program..

But as she waits in central Athens for a church to open and a hoped-for handout of maybe $5 — or even $10 if she’s lucky —  the 60-year-old’s mind is focused on day-to-day survival.

There may be talk of a light at the end of the tunnel for a country traumatized by seven years of economic turmoil, but on the streets of Athens they seem a world away from everyday reality.

“There’s no reason to pay attention. Things are just getting worse,” says Dinkel, who struggles to scrape together the $50 a month she needs to stay off the streets.  

“No one thought it could be this bad.”

A disconnect

The race is now on for Greek officials rushing to create a bumper package of new legislation agreed to during the negotiations.

These include a cut in taxes, the opening up of energy markets and a further slashing of pensions.

Pending approval from the Greek parliament in the coming days, it is expected the agreement will be ready for the next meeting of eurozone finance ministers on May 22.

There, hopes are that $8 billion in rescue loans will be approved, allowing the country to make a crucial debt repayment in July.

The markets have been largely cheered by the news, while there have been other positive signs too — last month, the country posted its first overall budget surplus in more than two decades.

Yet little of this is being felt on the ground, where poverty and homelessness remain all too prevalent.  

“I don’t think [the latest agreement] will improve the daily lives of people,” claims Aliki Mouriki, a sociologist and senior research fellow at the National Center for Social Research in Athens. “People are seeing further cuts in things like their pensions, so why would they be happy? Some segments of the Greek population and businesses may be happy over [the reforms] as the economic climate has less uncertainty, but this is not reflecting on daily lives.”

Sense of betrayal

The Greek leftist ruling party Syriza and its leader Alexis Tsipras may have emerged with a deal, but the moves have already sparked new protests.

Meanwhile, many consider these latest steps just another act of weakness or betrayal by a party that swept into power on an anti-austerity ticket in 2015.

Though emergency funds from the European Union (EU) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) helped pull Greece back from the brink of collapse in 2010, this is the third such bailout, and many Greeks are of the opinion that the country’s supposed medicine of reforms and austerity is actually proving to be its poison.

Chrysa Lazaridou, who runs a bakery not far from the city’s towering ancient Acropolis, has been keeping an eye on recent developments.

Despite the inclusion of “counter measures” against the austerity — including rent subsidies for low income families — she feels the agreed package represents more of the same when it comes to Greece’s current place in the world.

“I thought [Alexis] Tsipras would be different, but in practice he’s not,” she said.

“All the decisions made here are made outside of Greece in the European Union, while politicians and businessmen will be the ones to profit.”

Vanishing savings

Meanwhile, other signs of progress remain tentative.

Amid the bailouts, reforms and austerity, the unemployment rate has declined from a peak of nearly 28 percent.

However, in recent months it has climbed once again to 23.5 percent — still the highest in Europe — while Friday the European Commission is set to revise its prediction of growth in Greece over 2017 from 2.7 percent to 2 percent.

Panagiotis Lappas, approached by VOA in central Athens, is a banking lawyer who often deals with families overcome by debt — something he sees with increasing regularity.

“Their savings have vanished after seven years,” he explained.

He was circumspect about the latest agreement, stating it was neither “pleasant nor necessary, but maybe now we have no other choice.”

However, in Lappas’ view, the time for austerity is over. More needed to be done, he thought, to stimulate growth and attract investment by lowering business rates.

He also called for debt relief, an issue still at the heart of the debate among creditors regarding Greece, and a pre-condition demanded by the IMF for its participation in this bailout.  

Eyes abroad

Tsipras has talked up the deal as “balanced and sustainable,” but he may find the Greek public even harder to convince than his own party, or those holding the purse strings.

Syriza is badly lagging behind its competitors in the polls, though the true test will come in the country’s elections in 2019.

Meanwhile, for one teenager not yet old enough to vote, the answer may not lie with Tsipras, or any of his political rivals.

Clutching his skateboard in Athens’ Monastiraki neighborhood, 17-year-old Alberto Frangou feels little allegiance to the idea of the EU and is scornful of Greek politicians.  

“I hate them, they’ve not helped us,” he said, telling VOA that he feared entering a job market where youth unemployment was measured at 48 percent in January.

Instead, he is considering another option, one that potentially spells more trouble for Greece in the coming years.

Between 2008 and 2016, around 450,000 mostly young and educated people left the country in search of a better future.

“If things don’t get any better, then I will just have to go elsewhere,” he told VOA.
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Czech President Milos Zeman on Monday demanded his prime minister terminate the agreement that formed the coalition government if he is to agree to firing the finance minister, deepening a rift between the country’s two leaders.

The European Union member is in political crisis over the future of Finance Minister Andrej Babis, a billionaire businessman who faces questions over past business practices and is the main political rival of Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka.

With an election due in October, Sobotka is demanding the president dismiss Babis, but the finance minister, who heads the anti-establishment ANO party, has found an ally in Zeman who has long had poor relations with the prime minister.

Sobotka, who heads the center-left Social Democrats, asked Zeman on Friday to dismiss Babis by May 9, but the president has refused to do so.

“The president stated that the prime minister cannot task the president with setting a date for dismissal,” the presidency said in a statement issued after Zeman met Babis on Monday.

Under the constitution, the president dismisses a minister if requested by the prime minister. Lawyers say the head of state should act promptly and has little wiggle room.

However, on Monday Zeman said Sobotka’s and Babis’s parties were bound by coalition agreement — reached in 2014 to form the cabinet — and that the prime minister must pull out of the deal before requesting Babis’ dismissal against the minister’s will.

“A termination of the coalition agreement would be needed for a valid dismissal,” the statement said.

Such a move could trigger the coalition government’s collapse. Last Friday the prime minister took back a pledge to resign along with his whole government in order to dislodge Babis.

Zeman also wanted to see a nomination for a replacement, the statement added.

Sobotka later urged the Zeman to respect the constitution.

“I would like to call on Mr. President to respect the fundamental law of our country. The coalition agreement has nothing to do with that,” the prime minister said in a statement.

Sobotka has said Babis failed to clear suspicions he dodged taxes by buying tax-free bonds from his conglomerate Agrofert.

Babis says he has not violated any laws.

The EU’s fraud office and Czech police have also been investigating whether Babis manipulated ownership of a conference center to unfairly qualify for EU subsidies meant for small businesses.

Babis has said the prime minister’s actions are politically motivated ahead of parliamentary elections in October. Babis’ ANO party enjoys a more-than 10 point lead over the Social Democrats, according to opinion polls.
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German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats have opened a seven-point lead over the center-left Social Democrats five months ahead of the Sept. 24 election, according to a poll on Sunday in the Bild am Sonntag newspaper.

The Emnid institute survey found the Christian Democrats and their Christian Social Union allies winning 36 percent of the vote if the election were held on Sunday, unchanged from a similar Emnid poll for Bild am Sonntag taken a week ago.

But the Social Democrats (SPD), led by their chancellor candidate Martin Schulz, continued to slide and lost two percentage points in the week to 29 percent. The CDU/CSU long held a comfortable lead in polls until Schulz was nominated in early 2017 and lifted the SPD to the same levels as the CDU/CSU.

The latest poll, taken just one week before an important state election in Schleswig-Holstein, also showed the CDU/CSU’s preferred coalition partner, the Free Democrats (FDP), rising one point to 6 percent in the last week.

The center-right alliance would still be well short of winning a majority in parliament with 42 percent.

The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) would win 9 percent, unchanged over the week. All parties have said they will not join forces with the AfD, making it more difficult to form the next government.

The SPD’s preferred partner, the Greens, rose 1 point to 7 percent in the last week. The far-left Linke party would win an unchanged 9 percent, according to the latest Emnid poll. The so-called “red-red-green” alliance of SPD, Linke and Greens would also fall short of a majority with 45 percent.

The CDU/CSU and SPD currently lead Germany in a grand coalition government. Both parties have said they do not want to continue that arrangement after the Sept. 24 election.
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FIFA Council member Sheikh Ahmad al-Fahad al-Sabah of Kuwait is resigning from his soccer roles under pressure from allegations in an American federal court that he bribed Asian officials.

Sheikh Ahmad said Sunday in a statement he will withdraw from a May 8 election in Bahrain for the FIFA seat representing Asia, which he currently holds.

“I do not want these allegations to create divisions or distract attention from the upcoming AFC [Asian Football Confederation] and FIFA Congresses,” said the Kuwaiti royal, who denies any wrongdoing.

“Therefore, after careful consideration, I have decided it is in the best interests of FIFA and the AFC, for me to withdraw my candidacy for the FIFA Council and resign from my current football positions,” he said.

The long-time Olympic Council of Asia president contacted the ethics panels of FIFA and the IOC after the allegations were made in Brooklyn federal courthouse on Thursday.

FIFA audit committee member Richard Lai, an American citizen from Guam, pleaded guilty to wire fraud conspiracy charges related to taking around $1 million in bribes, including from Kuwaiti officials. The cash was to buy influence and help recruit other Asian soccer officials prepared to take bribes, Lai said in court.

Sheikh Ahmad resigned his candidacy ahead of a FIFA panel deciding whether to remove him on ethical grounds.

The FIFA Review Committee, which rules on the integrity of people seeking senior FIFA positions, has been studying the sheikh’s candidacy since the allegations emerged, The Associated Press reported on Saturday.

The FIFA ethics committee is making a separate assessment of whether to provisionally suspend the sheikh, a long-time leader of Kuwait’s soccer federation who was elected to FIFA’s ruling committee in 2015.

Resigning from his soccer positions does not necessarily put Sheikh Ahmad out of reach of FIFA ethics prosecutors and judges if any action was taken.

In 2012, former FIFA presidential candidate Mohamed bin Hammam of Qatar was banned for life by the ethics committee days after he resigned.

Bin Hammam was also clearly identified in Lai’s court hearing for having paid Lai a total of $100,000 in bribes to support the Qatari’s failed challenge to FIFA’s then-president Sepp Blatter in 2011. Bin Hammam was removed from that election contest in a Caribbean bribery case.

Sheikh Ahmad has also contacted the IOC’s ethics commission about the allegations against him, the IOC said on Saturday.

As president since 2012 of the global group of national Olympic bodies, known as ANOC, Sheikh Ahmad’s support has often been cited as key to winning Olympic election and hosting awards. The sheikh was widely credited for helping Thomas Bach win the IOC presidency in 2013.

Although Sheikh Ahmad was not named in Department of Justice and court documents last week, he has become one of the most significant casualties of the sprawling U.S. federal investigation of bribery and corruption in international soccer revealed two years ago.

The sheikh could be identified in a transcript of Lai’s court hearing which said “co-conspirator [hash]2 was also the president of Olympic Council of Asia.” Sheikh Ahmad has been OCA president since 1991.

Co-conspirator #3 was described as having a “high-ranking” role at OCA, and also linked to the Kuwait soccer federation.

According to the published transcript, Lai claimed he “received at least $770,000 in wire transfers from accounts associated with Co-Conspirator [hash]3 and the OCA between November of 2009 and about the fall of 2014.”

“I understood that the source of this money was ultimately Co-Conspirator #2 and on some occasion Co-Conspirator #3 told me to send him an email saying that I need funds so he could show the email to Co-Conspirator #2,” Lai said in court.

Lai admitted that he agreed to help recruit other Asian officials that voted in FIFA elections who would help Kuwait’s interests.

The Guam soccer federation leader since 2001, Lai pleaded guilty to wire fraud conspiracy charges and failing to disclose foreign bank accounts. He agreed to pay more than $1.1 million in forfeiture and penalties, and will be sentenced at a later date.

The American federal investigation of corruption linked to FIFA has indicted or taken guilty pleas from more than 40 people and marketing agencies linked to soccer in the Americas since 2015.

Lai’s case marked the first major step into Asia, and suggests other soccer officials potentially recruited by the Kuwait faction could be targeted.

The Asian election for FIFA seats on May 8 in Manama, Bahrain, is the same day as a FIFA Council meeting which the sheik will not attend. The FIFA congress is held in the city three days later.
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Pope Francis called on Sunday for the respect of human rights and an end to violence in Venezuela, where nearly 30 people were killed in unrest this month.

Francis, speaking to tens of thousands of people in St. Peter’s Square for his weekly address, decried a “grave humanitarian, social , political and economic crisis that is exhausting the population”.

Venezuela’s opposition is demanding elections, autonomy for the legislature where they have a majority, a humanitarian aid channel from abroad to alleviate an economic crisis, and freedom for more than 100 activists jailed by President Nicolas Maduro’s government.

“I make a heartfelt appeal to the government and all components of Venezuelan society to avoid any more forms of violence, respect human rights and seek a negotiated solution …,” he said.

Supporters say Leopoldo Lopez, the jailed head of the hardline opposition Popular Will party, and others are political prisoners whose arrests symbolize Maduro’s lurch into dictatorship.

Maduro says all are behind bars for legitimate crimes, and calls Lopez, 45, a violent hothead intent on promoting a coup.

Vatican-led talks between the government and the opposition have broken down.

Francis told reporters on the plane returning from Cairo on Saturday that “very clear conditions” were necessary for the talks to resume.
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Macedonia’s rival parties are trading blame for violence in parliament, while world powers are giving opposing reactions to the events.

The European Union and the United States condemned Thursday’s attack, in which protesters stormed the Macedonian parliament in Skopje, attacking opposition lawmakers after they elected an ethnic Albanian speaker.

Russia blamed the events on the West, saying it had meddled in the Balkan nation’s internal affairs.

Pointing fingers

In Macedonia, the previous night’s violence turned into a war of words between rival politicians on Friday.

Zoran Zaev, the head of the opposition Social Democrats, who were targeted in the attack, accused the attackers of attempted murder.

Former Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski, whose supporters were among the mob that stormed the parliament, said he deplored the violence, but he accused the opposition of instigating it with an attempted power grab.

Interior Minister Agim Nuhiu announced his resignation Friday over the night’s events. He told reporters that 10 lawmakers and an unspecified number of journalists were among those hurt.

The interior ministry said 102 people were treated at city hospitals.

Speaker election

The violence began Thursday after lawmakers from the Social Democrats and ethnic Albanian parties elected former Defense Minister Talat Xhaferi speaker, even though the country has no functioning government.

Demonstrators stormed the parliament and began throwing chairs and attacking opposition lawmakers.

Demonstrators blocked the door of the chamber, refusing to let lawmakers leave as demonstrators waved flags in lawmakers’ faces and shouted “traitors.” Police outside the building fired stun grenades to break up the crowd.

Zaev’s Social Democrats and the ethnic Albanians would have enough seats to form a coalition government, but President Gjorge Ivanov has refused to give him a mandate.

The conservatives won December’s parliamentary election, but without enough seats to form a government. Coalition talks with other parties collapsed over ethnic Albanian demands to make Albanian an official language.

International reaction

The United States condemned Thursday’s violence “in the strongest terms.” In a statement posted on its State Department website, the U.S. Embassy in Skopje said the violence “is not consistent with democracy and is not an acceptable way to resolve differences.”

The U.S. called on all parties to “refrain from violent actions which exacerbate the situation.”

The European Union also condemned Thursday’s violence. 

“I condemn the attacks on MPs in Skopje in the strongest terms. Violence has no place in parliament,” enlargement commissioner Johannes Hahn said. “Democracy must run its course.”

However, Russia blamed the events on the West, saying the Macedonian opposition had “foreign patrons.”

A Foreign Ministry statement said Xhaferi’s election was an “unceremonious manipulation of the will of citizens” and said EU and U.S. representatives were quick to recognize the speaker, indicating the vote was planned in advance.

The United Nations said in a statement by the U.N. secretary-general’s spokesman that it is “following developments unfolding in the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia with great concern and call for restraint and calm. Violence directed at democratic institutions and elected representatives of the people is unacceptable.”

Macedonia has a Slavic majority, but about a third of the population is ethnic Albanian. The Balkan country aspires to join the European Union and NATO.
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France’s far-right National Front, the party of presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, has replaced its leader for the second time in three days.

Jean-Francois Jalkh, who was named interim president of the party on Tuesday after Le Pen stepped down, was forced to vacate the office in response to allegations he praised a Holocaust denier. He also expressed doubts about the reality of Nazi gas chambers, which killed millions of Jews during World War II.

Jalkh is being replaced by Steeve Briois. Each has served as one of the party’s five vice presidents.

Another party vice president, Louis Aliot — Marine Le Pen’s partner — told reporters that Briois would take over the interim leadership and “there’ll be no more talk about it.”

It is a blow to the campaign of Le Pen, who had a better-than-expected showing in French elections on Sunday and faces a runoff with centrist rival Emmanuel Macron on May 7.

Le Pen raised controversy earlier in the campaign by saying France was not responsible for the roundup and demise of thousands of Parisian Jews during World War II.

Ironically, she expelled her father, party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, from the party in 2015 because he referred to the Holocaust as a “detail of history.”

Macron is expected to win the May 7 runoff, but experts say an unexpected voter turnout could rock the results to one side or the other.
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The independent Russian television channel Dozhd (Rain) reported Friday that the central executive committee of the country’s ruling party, United Russia, had distributed to its regional branches a list of 36 slogans that party activists should use during party activities next week marking the annual May Day holiday.

While, according to Dozhd, the slogans include some praising the country’s president (“Putin is for the People, He is Leading Russia to Success!”) and others condemning corruption (“Praise Honesty, Jail Bribe-takers!”), none of them refers to the Russian prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, who happens to be United Russia’s formal head.

The likely reason for that omission is not hard to figure out: Medvedev has seen his popularity drop sharply since early March, when anti-corruption blogger and opposition leader Alexei Navalny published a video investigation into the prime minister’s alleged wealth. It offered viewers shots of yachts, villas, and even a winery in a picturesque Italian village, all allegedly belonging to Medvedev.

A survey released Thursday by the Levada Center, Russia’s only independent national polling agency, found that Medvedev’s “trust” rating had fallen to a record low since Navalny’s video was posted and viewed more than 20 million times.

Bloomberg News, citing two Medvedev “allies,” reported this week that he “is more worried than ever about his political future.”

The news agency quoted President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, as brushing aside the drop in Medvedev’s approval, saying “ratings go up and down, that’s a normal process.”

Still, Peskov declined to say whether the prime minister still “enjoys Putin’s full trust,” Bloomberg reported.

The prime minister has become a lightning rod for Russian anger over official malfeasance. On March 26, an estimated 60,000 people answered Navalny’s call and took to the streets in more than 80 Russian cities to protest corruption. Many protesters mocked Medvedev’s taste for expensive athletic shoes by hanging sneakers on street lamps.

Medvedev finally responded to Navalny’s video in early April. He claimed, among other things, that the allegations of corruption cited in the video were based on “nonsense” about “acquaintances and people that I have never even heard of.” He also obliquely referred to Navalny as “a political opportunist” who is trying to seize power.

Meanwhile, another Levada poll published this week found that 45 percent of respondents would like to see Medvedev dismissed as prime minister, up sharply from the 33 percent who felt that way last November.

Medvedev’s press secretary, Natalya Timakova, a former Kremlin pool reporter, called the Levada poll a “political hit job.”
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Britain’s economy slowed sharply in the first three months of 2017 as higher inflation, boosted by last year’s Brexit vote, hit spending on the high street and hurt other consumer-focused businesses.

With the country heading for an election June 8, there were other signs Friday of a slowdown in the economy as house prices fell for a second month and measures of consumer confidence fell.

The Office for National Statistics said growth in the overall economy weakened to a one-year low of 0.3 percent in the January-March period from 0.7 percent in the last three months of 2016.

That represented a sharper slowdown in the rate of quarterly gross domestic product growth than the drop to 0.4 percent forecast by economists in a Reuters poll.

Last year, on par with Germany

Last year, Britain vied with Germany to be the fastest growing of the world’s major advanced economies with annual growth of 1.8 percent, defying widespread predictions of recession after the vote to leave the European Union.

But Friday’s figures are the clearest sign so far that the country is slowing in the run-up to the early election called by Prime Minister Theresa May.

British finance minister Philip Hammond said the economy remained resilient.

Fair to blame Brexit

But Alan Clarke, an economist at Scotiabank, said he expected it would slow further in the coming months.

“This weakness is likely to be blamed on Brexit. That is probably fair,” Clarke said, citing higher inflation.

“We see the trough in growth at 0.2 percent quarter-on-quarter towards the end of this year, when the squeeze from inflation is at its most intense,” he added.

The June 2016 Brexit vote led to a big fall in the value of sterling, which is now starting to push up inflation and eat into consumers’ disposable income.

The ONS said the biggest drag to first-quarter growth came from retailers and hotels, which had been hurt by higher prices.

Official data last week showed the biggest quarterly fall in retail sales since 2010.

Consumer price inflation is rising at its fastest since September 2013 as companies pass on increased costs caused by sterling’s slide in value since the Brexit vote, and many economists expect it to hit 3 percent later this year.

Despite the pick-up in inflation, the Bank of England is widely expected to keep interest rates at their record low of 0.25 percent as it waits to see the full impact of Brexit on the country’s economy.
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A woman in her 60s who was injured in the April 7 truck attack in Stockholm has died, Swedish authorities said Friday, raising the death toll to five.

The Stockholm police said in a statement the woman, who has not been publicly identified, had been hospitalized in southern Sweden.

Other victims of attack were an 11-year-old Swedish girl, a 31-year-old Belgian woman, a 69-year-old Swedish woman, and a 41-year-old Briton whom the British government identified as Chris Bevington. Fourteen others were injured in the attack.

A 39-year-old Uzbek man, Rakhmat Akilov, has pleaded guilty to a terrorist crime for ramming the truck into a crowd on a main pedestrian shopping street in the Swedish capital. Police have not disclosed a motive for the attack and no extremist group has claimed responsibility for it.

Akilov’s Swedish residency application was rejected last year, but police said there was nothing to indicate he might plan an attack. After the rejection, Akilov had been been ordered to leave Sweden in December. Instead, he allegedly eluded authorities’ attempts to track him down.

Akilov was caught in a northern suburb of Stockholm, hours after he drove the stolen beer truck into the crowd of afternoon shoppers outside the Ahlens store.

The attack shocked Sweden, known for its welcoming policy toward migrants and refugees.

In 2015, a record 163,000 asylum-seekers arrived in the country, the highest per-capita rate in Europe. The government responded by tightening border controls and curtailing some immigrant rights.
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British counterterror police have shot a woman and arrested six people in raids in London and southeastern England. A senior officer said Friday the arrests disrupted an active terrorist plot.

The woman in her 20s is in serious but stable condition in a hospital after the raid on a house in Willesden, northwest London, the Metropolitan Police said Friday.

In footage shot by a witness, what sounds like several shots ring out as police surround the row house Thursday evening. 

Woman in hospital, not arrested

Police said the injured woman was the subject of an ongoing investigation. She is under police guard but has not been arrested.

A 20-year-old woman and a 16-year-old boy were arrested at that address, as was a 20-year-old man nearby. A man and a woman both age 28 were arrested when they returned to the house later.

A 43-year-old woman in Kent county, south of London, was also arrested.

Police say the suspects are being held on suspicion of preparation of terrorist acts.

A police statement says the raids were not related to Thursday’s incident near Parliament in which a man was arrested while allegedly carrying large knives in a backpack.

Police say threat contained

Metropolitan Police Deputy Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu said the Willesden raid disrupted an ongoing plot, but did not elaborate.

Basu said that in both the Willesden and Parliament incidents, “we have contained the threat that they posed.”

Britain’s official threat level from international terrorism stands at the second-highest, severe, meaning an attack is highly likely. 
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U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley ratcheted up her rhetoric against Russia on Thursday, saying more pressure needs to be put on Moscow to stop the war in Syria.

“Many of you said we need to put pressure on the Syrian regime; that’s actually not the case. We need to put pressure on Russia,” Haley told her counterparts on the 15-nation Security Council.

The council was holding its monthly meeting on the humanitarian situation in Syria, where U.N. aid chief Stephen O’Brien told them that at least six hospitals and three schools have been bombed there this month, and a “noose has tightened” around besieged eastern Ghouta, where some 400,000 people have been cut off from U.N. aid convoys since October 2016.

“All eyes and all pressure now need to go to Russia, because they are the ones that could stop this if they wanted to,” Haley said.

The U.S. envoy said the regime of Bashar al-Assad has been emboldened by its continued protection from Moscow.

“Because Russia continues to cover for the Syrian regime, Russia continues to allow them to keep humanitarian aid from the people that need it, Russia continues to cover for a leader that uses chemical weapons against his own people, Russia continues to veto and Assad continues to do these things, because they know Russia will continue to cover for him,” Haley said.

“I will continue to press the Security Council to act, to do something regardless if the Russians continue to veto it, because it is our voice that needs to be heard,” she added.

Russia has used its veto eight times in the 6-year-long conflict to protect the Assad regime from sanctions and other international action.

Russian response

“The ongoing criticism of the Syrian government and the emotional calls to the country guarantors, including Russia, don’t help anything,” Russia’s acting ambassador Petr Illichev told council members. “We are carrying out our obligations in good faith; there are other important players who are not hurrying to meet us halfway.”

Russia, along with Iran and Turkey, led talks in Astana, Kazakhstan, that led to a cessation of hostilities in December that can be described as shaky at best. But the Russian envoy told council members that, “In Syria as a whole, the cessation of hostilities is holding.”

This despite a poison gas attack earlier this month and ongoing shelling, airstrikes and ground fighting in several parts of the country.

Israeli airstrikes

Earlier Thursday, the Russian government called on Israel and other countries to avoid any actions that may escalate tension in Syria, after Syrian officials accused Israel of conducting airstrikes against an arms supply hub near Damascus International Airport.

“All countries need to refrain from any kind of actions that lead to an increase in tension in this already restive region,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters in Moscow.

Peskov also said Syria’s sovereignty should be respected.

The arms hub is operated by the Lebanese group Hezbollah. Syrian rebel and regional intelligence sources said the strikes targeted weapons that were shipped from Iran on military and commercial cargo planes.

Throughout the Syrian war, which began in March 2011, Israel has made it clear it would not allow shipments of weapons from Iran to Hezbollah units fighting in Syria. Israeli forces have on multiple occasions used airstrikes or other attacks to stop such moves, with the military often declining to confirm it was responsible for the strikes.

Hezbollah and Israel fought each other in the 2006 Lebanon War.

VOA’s Chris Hannas contributed to this report.
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A new crossing point intended to encourage Cyprus’ hoped-for reunification is nearing completion two years after the delay-plagued project was announced, Greek and Turkish Cypriot officials were told Thursday.

The Deryneia crossing, located near the east coast of Cyprus, was hailed as another important milestone in helping to build trust between the ethnically divided island’s breakaway Turkish Cypriots in the north and Greek Cypriots living in the internationally recognized south.

Greek Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades and Turkish Cypriot leader Mustafa Akinci announced the crossing in May 2015, when they launched a new round of negotiations aimed at reunifying Cyprus as a federation.

But there have been delays, and work on the new passageway remains unfinished while troubled reunification talks trudge on.

Slovakia’s ambassador to Cyprus, Oksana Tomova, organized a tour of the crossing point on Thursday, calling the link “one of the most important confidence-building measures agreed by the leaders of the two communities.”

Deryneia would be the eighth such crossing since 2003, when the first cut was made through a U.N.-controlled buffer zone nearly three decades after Cyprus’ was divided. The island’s split came in 1974 when Turkey invaded following a coup by supporters of uniting Cyprus with Greece.

Most of the road work has been finished. But barbed wire, metal obstacles, acacias and other unchecked vegetation still crowd the 150-yard stretch across the no-man’s land that a nearby U.N. guard post oversees.

Deryneia Mayor Andros Karagiannis said the crossing’s opening would be an economic boon for his community by increasing tourist traffic and easing commerce between Greek and Turkish Cypriots.

Turkish Cypriot Halil Onashi said it would only take “a couple of minutes” to cross southwards from his home instead of having to take a longer, circuitous route through another crossing point.

No one on the tour could explain the reasons behind the delays. But an official with knowledge of the project’s details who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the project said all that remains is for funding to be allocated.

“We want to believe that it’ll open the soonest,” said Averof Neophytou, president of the largest Greek Cypriot political party, the right-wing Democratic Rally. “But it’s not enough to open crossing points after 43 years. … What we want is to reunify our divided country.”

In August 1996, the area where the new crossing will be located was the site of the worst outbreak of violence since the invasion. A Greek Cypriot man taking part in a protest against the island’s division was killed after being attacked by Turkish Cypriots. His cousin was fatally shot trying to take down a Turkish flag at a guard post a couple days later.
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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s referendum victory to extend his powers was bittersweet.  

For the first time he lost in Turkey’s main cities, including Istanbul, which has been his electoral power base since 1994.  In the aftermath of his narrow win he has ordered a party investigation into the vote.  The drop in support coincides with an economic slowdown, an ominous sign given the president is facing crucial polls in two years.

Erdogan’s unprecedented electoral successes were largely achieved in a period of economic boom, but those halcyon days appear to be waning.  

“Currently, inflation rate is at 11.3 percent and is expected to increase further to around 12 percent in the coming months,” observes Inan Demir, an economist for Nomura Bank, “It would constitute the highest inflation rate since before the global financial crisis in 2009.  Also, unemployment is at multi-year highs.  So we are talking about a significant jump in the inflation and unemployment rate.”

The impact of the economic slowdown has been felt the most in western Turkey, where more than 70 percent of the country’s economic production is located, and most closely linked to European markets.  The same region saw some of the biggest drops in support for the president in the referendum vote.  While the Turkish economy is predicted to grow faster than that of Europe, it is still below the rate needed to absorb new entrants into the labor market.

Disaffected youth

A striking development of the referendum was the youth vote, overwhelmingly voting no, bucking its traditionally stalwart support for Erdogan.  

“Youth unemployment is affecting the first-time vote.  The youth unemployment ratio was 25 percent, according to the last data, notes Atilla Yesilada, a political consultant with Global Source Partners, “Fifty-eight percent of first-time voters voted “No.” (citing IPSOS research).  According to OECD research, Turkish students are the unhappiest in the world with 72 percent saying they are very unhappy with conditions.  So given Turkey’s very high rate of young population, up to six percent of the voters in the next election cycle, which starts in March 2019, will be first-time voters, which in my view is slipping from their [Erdogan government’s] grasp”.

 2019 is scheduled for an unprecedented three polls – of local, general and presidential elections.

Erdogan’s success in the referendum was due in part to the overwhelmingly support he received in the rural heartland of the country, known as Anatolia, a region that has particularly benefited from the expansion of social security benefits under Erdogan’s AK Party rule.

“I detect that certain voters are becoming clients of AKP, these people can’t survive in the globalized economy of Turkey,” claims consultant Yesilada, “they are largely existing on account of the welfare state and also  AKP has been very successful in imposing the view entitlements are coming form the party, rather than the state.  So a dependency has been created between the poor in Anatolia and AKP, and these are people are so afraid if AKP ever loses they will lose their entitlements.”

In the run-up to the referendum, the government again turned to state intervention, launching major programs of cheap loans for businesses, job creation schemes, and massive public works projects.

Early elections?

Economists predict that with individuals and private companies racked with debt, more state intervention is likely, ”Turkey will find it difficult to sustain that debt-fueled growth, that’s why the public sector will play an increasing role in supporting economic activity going forward.  Personally, I expect elections to be held earlier than the current schedule.  I would not be surprised to see elections by this time next year.  So I think it can be sustained until that time.”

The pressure to call early elections will deepen worries about how the government will fund it’s growing economic and financial programs.  “So [numbers] are simple,” warns Yesilada, “we cant borrow abroad, because it very costly or foreign lenders are no longer willing, and Turkish deposits have been completely converted into loans.  I don’t know how this can go forwards.”  

Given that the bedrock of Erdogan’s electoral success has been built on economic prosperity, the continuation and trajectory of those programs ultimately could determine his fate.

 
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