The Atlantic: A Nonbinding Migration Pact Is Roiling Politics in Europe

The United Nations Global Migration Compact, signed this week by 164 countries, has been years in the making, and includes relatively uncontroversial goals like improving data collection. In a sign of its import, German Chancellor Angela Merkel—whose legacy will likely be defined by her decision to allow more than 1 million refugees into her country in 2015 and 2016—flew in to Marrakech, Morocco, for the signing ceremony, arguing that it was “worth it to fight for this pact.” [...]

More than half a dozen other European countries have also questioned whether to join the pact in the lead-up to this week’s UN gathering. The first domino to fall was Austria, which pulled out of the agreement in October despite negotiating it on behalf of all European Union countries (except Hungary). The country’s chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, leads a coalition government with the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) and has shifted his country sharply to the right on migration since taking office a year ago. Since then, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia have all said they will not sign it, either. [...]

Why is the UN compact, which is non-binding, so controversial? Arguments against it include the idea that it will ultimately lead to a “human right to migration” and that domestic courts could use it in deciding immigration cases. That it explicitly states that it upholds national sovereignty and has no legal standing has done little to assuage those concerns. [...]

As the debate in Germany shows, rhetorical pressure from the far right has forced mainstream parties to talk differently about migration issues—and to debate things like this compact that previously might have been taken for granted.

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Foreign Policy: Macron Can Survive France’s Anger

Macron’s grip over his very large majority in the National Assembly has weakened in recent days as law-makers have called for a roll-back of tax hikes and a prompt meeting with “yellow jacket” leaders, at least if leaders can be found to meet with. Nevertheless, few Western leaders can depend on the legislative loyalty that Macron still commands. I called some of the same freshman legislators with whom I met in May and found them fazed but scarcely panicked. Gaël Le Bohec, a representative from Brittany, said that he saw in the protests a “crisis of representativity” brought on by the collapse of institutions through which criticism was once channeled, including unions and opposition parties, but not a direct repudiation of Macron’s policies. [...]

Liberalization is not popular, but that’s no surprise. President Nicolas Sarkozy, a notorious hard-ass, was forced to retreat from his efforts to make it easier for French firms to hire and fire first-time workers in the face of mass protests. The French recognize that they are stuck in a low-growth, high-unemployment rut, but they resist the labor-law and tax reforms that have worked in Germany, Denmark, and other northern European welfare states. Voters never gave Macron a mandate for reform; the collapse of the traditional parties made him the sole alternative to Marine Le Pen of the National Front (now renamed the National Rally). The French voted for republicanism, not liberalism.

The demise of the usual alternatives constitutes Macron’s other structural advantage. Laurent Bigorgne, head of the very pro-Macron Institut Montaigne, pointed out to me that the self-appointed leaders of the gilets jaunes protests have been at pains to distance themselves from parties of either the left or the right. So far, the protests have hurt Macron without helping any of his rivals. The acid test will come in elections to the European Union Parliament in May. Le Pen’s party has edged ahead of Macron’s in the most recent polls of voter intentions for May. Such an outcome would be a crippling blow for Macron. Despite his calls for the patience required for the harsh medicine of reform to begin working, the economic timescale may turn out to be more protracted than the political one. [...]

Macron thought the French wanted a reincarnation of De Gaulle. He has said that the French still feel the absence of the king, and has spoken [] almost wistfully of a doctrine of “democratic heroism” in which the leader incarnates the spirit of the people. He has sought to find that space between technocrat and monarch; one can only observe that so far, the French have not been persuaded by the technocrat or seduced by the monarch. The French regard him as an elitist who carries out policies that benefit the elite at the expense of the squeezed middle class. They repudiate both his manner and his views, which stipulate that France must encourage investment by diminishing the regulatory and tax burden on companies and on the rich.

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Jacobin Magazine: Remember El Mozote

El Mozote was neither the first nor the last mass atrocity in El Salvador’s nightmarish civil war. The rape and murder of four US churchwomen by the National Guard, the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero while he held mass, the massacre of at least three hundred civilians at Sumpúl River, a similar mass killing a year later at Lempa River, the execution-style murder of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter at the University of Central America — the list of horrors goes on and on, and is so long and brutal that it risks overshadowing the daily dumpings of bullet- and torture-riddled bodies of those who dared to speak out against the hard-right government on city streets and in public parks during the Salvadoran Civil War, which stretched from 1980 to 1992. [...]

At its height, the United States was giving over $1 million a day to the Salvadoran government in various forms of training, arms, military advising, and other aid in an attempt to prevent a Sandinista-style takeover by the FMLN and its supporters. “By the late 1980s,” Walter LaFeber writes, US aid “approached 100 percent of the Salvadoran government budget.” [...]

Over eight hundred innocent men, women, and children were slaughtered over two days at El Mozote and surrounding hamlets. Not only was the loss of these lives not enough to convince the United States to change its brutal course in El Salvador, but the Right sprang into action to downplay the massacre and attack the journalists who first reported it. [...]

Whether or not this is true (in interviews both recent and at the time, Bonner claims he doesn’t think it is), Danner wrote that the decision had a major impact on the way the paper covered the Salvadoran Civil War: “The New York Times editors appeared to have ‘caved’ to government pressure, and the Administration seemed to have succeeded in its campaign to have a troublesome reporter — the most dogged and influential in El Salvador — pulled off the beat.”

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openDemocracy: Marching with Dabrowski – what the centenary of Polish Independence can tell us about the radical right?

Peculiarly, armbands commemorating The Home Army of 1944 (the Polish resistance movement), were worn by both skinheads and small children brought to the march by their parents. What remains remarkable are the organizational capacities; the official rules of the march forbade the use of alcohol, as well as antisemitic or xenophobic messages. Seldom violated, the Polish radical right showed noteworthy command of the situation if they were, excluding those intoxicated from the main marching groups. [...]

There are at least two important implications arising from the picture I saw. The first is quantitative: the event gathered more than 200,000 attendees, which is the absolute record. The second points to a more substantial concern: seeing Polish families and small children side by side with extremists signalled the mainstreaming of the radical right. Right-wing President Duda’s move to ‘unite the Nation’ by merging the marches only underscored the fact that the two sides, if not of the same coin, certainly belong to the same currency. The leading populist Law and Justice (PiS) party, as the mainstream manifestation of the radical right, is proving successful in absorbing most of these voters.[...]

Nonetheless, this does not mean that such actors are not worth talking to, especially in a country which is considered a stronghold of Catholic nationalism (more than 85% of Poles are Roman Catholics). While the line is always to be drawn, the radical right plays, even if on the fringe, on those empty spaces that our liberal democracies have left behind. Through grassroots activism and contact with the ‘ordinary’ people, they create space to embellish the national memory with references to the pride of the imagined community. After all, when MW or ONR organize a charity event in a village far away from the eyes of decision-makers, the content of their propaganda remains secondary to those who received their help.

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CityLab: Luxembourg’s New Deal: Free Transit and Legal Weed

Luxembourg rarely gets much international attention. But last week, the government of the Rhode-Island-sized nation-state made some dramatic policy announcements. Last Thursday, a new ruling coalition announced that the landlocked Grand Duchy would be the first country in the world (just ahead of Estonia) to make its public transit entirely free at point of use.

If that groundbreaking announcement weren’t enough, the coalition also confirmed that it would boost Luxembourg’s monthly minimum wage by €100 ($114), give everyone two more days off a year, and legalize recreational cannabis by 2023. [...]

Right now, for example, public transit is practically free: A two-hour ticket on the railways costs €2 (or €3 in first class), while an all-day pass costs €4. Young people and students, meanwhile, already travel free. These nominal charges only generate €30 million of revenue annually for a system that costs a little under €1 billion to run, so it’s no great leap to dispense with charging at point of use altogether. Dispensing with the need for tickets also cuts the costs incurred selling and checking them, and the revenue shortfall will be partly recouped by cancelling a commuter subsidy. The hope is that the law will ultimately pay off in other ways, by reducing direct costs for citizens and getting cars off the road when they travel. [...]

The minimum-wage raise and extra holidays, meanwhile, might sound like populist pie in the sky to Americans. But in Luxembourg, it’s just an extra cherry on top of an already generous layer cake of progressive working conditions. Working weeks are already short (an average of 1,512 working hours per year in 2015, compared to 1,783 in the U.S. and 1,676 in the U.K.) and conditions especially flexible. Creating a new national holiday and adding a day to the country’s statutory minimum will bring the total number of days off employees must receive (excluding national holidays) up to 26. With the total national holidays now at 11 days, that means all Luxembourg workers can expect 37 paid days off a year. And the minimum wage in Luxembourg is already quite high. With different minimum categories depending on age and qualification, its current lowest rate for workers over 18 is €2,084.54 ($2,364) a month.

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The Calvert Journal: “We aren’t just suffering”

Dmitry Kozachenko: I am openly gay, and in Russia there are no publications I would like to read. Usually LGBTQ+ magazines are run by members of the older generations, who don’t really understand the worldview and lifestyles of young people. A lot of LGBTQ+ magazines ignore pop culture, even though it’s one of the key vehicles for promoting progressive ideas. I wanted to create a publication in which queer youth could express themselves and help others in their community. [...]

SK: Unfortunately we aren’t yet able to cover all of Russia, so for now we’re focusing on life in Moscow and St Petersburg, where we live and know the queer culture inside out. At the moment we have a very fractured community, so my aim is to tell queer people about other queer people and create a sense of connection. It’s also important to raise questions of physical and mental health and self-care. We want to write about different gender and sexual identities — queer diversity is still new for a lot of LGBTQ+ people in Russia. We want to be as inclusive as possible to trans and non-binary people, and we’re actively looking for writers from these communities to contribute to the site. Also, life-affirming features are very important: we aren't just suffering, we have a lot of fun. [...]

SK: Russia is a very big country, and people have very varied lifestyles. In Moscow and St Petersburg, LGBTQ+ people can blend in with the crowd, society is more advaned, one can find relatively tolerant environments — maybe not perfect, but safe. But unfortunately most of Russia is made up of small towns where it’s hard to survive even for a heterosexual cis person; for queer people it is simply terrifying. I talked to queer people who moved to St Petersburg from small towns, and they have some chilling stories.

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Politico: How Macron gave Italian populists a boost

During a 13-minute televised address to the nation on Monday night, the French president promised a minimum wage increase and tax cuts, including for low-income pensioners, in an attempt to appease the Yellow Jacket protesters. The announced measures could push France's budget-deficit-to-GDP ratio to 3.5 percent, well over the EU's 3 percent ceiling, according to an anonymous government source quoted by French daily Les Echos. [...]

"But but but, Macron said he's cutting taxes and increasing public spending ... does [Economic and Financial Affairs Commissioner Pierre] Moscovici agree?" Claudio Borghi, a top League MP and chair of the lower house's budget committee, tweeted after Macron's announcement. [...]

However, it would be a lot more complicated for the Commission to press on with its plans to punish Rome for its extra spending while sparing France. Macron's potential EU rules breach will also prove harmful for the ongoing negotiations on a eurozone budget, which France has spearheaded.

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The Guardian: Modi's BJP suffers heavy election defeats in Hindi heartland

The governing Bharatiya Janata party’s (BJP) vote collapsed by 17 percentage points in Rajasthan state and by at least 12 points in Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh, all part of the Hindi heartland where Indian governments are traditionally made or broken.

Those losses, as well as the revival of a Congress party frequently written off in the past five years, had analysts revising their predictions for next year’s national polls, which Modi had been expected to win in a cakewalk. [...]

The government has contended with large protests in recent weeks by farmers in distress due to natural disasters and falling prices. Nearly 55% of India’s 1.25 billion population is directly or indirectly dependent on agriculture, and farmers form an important voting bloc for parties.

The BJP has also faced criticism from Hindu nationalist groups unhappy at the delay in building a temple to the deity Ram in his fabled birthplace Ayodhya. Unemployment also remains a problem despite high economic growth. [...]

Yet Modi’s personal popularity remains significant. In Mandsaur, a Madhya Pradesh rural town surrounded by yellow rapeseed fields, six farmers were shot and killed during one demonstration last year. The BJP lost surrounding districts on Tuesday but surprised analysts by holding Mandsaur, where Modi held a raucous campaign event in November.

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The Guardian: Criminalisation of sex work normalises violence, review finds

The review, by researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, found that sex workers suffering repressive policing – including arrest, imprisonment and extortion by officers – were three times more likely to experience sexual or physical violence from a client and were twice as likely to have HIV or another sexually transmitted infection as those who lived in countries where sex work was tolerated. [...]

Their health and safety were at risk not only in countries where sex work was criminalised, but also in Canada, which has introduced the “Nordic model” pioneered by Sweden, under which the client can be arrested for a criminal offence, but not the sex worker. [...]

France, Iceland, Northern Ireland, Norway, the Republic of Ireland and Sweden also criminalise the client. Guatemala, Mexico, Turkey and the US state of Nevada have regulated sex work, which allows better conditions for some, but worse for the many who operate outside the regulated arrangements. [...]

New Zealand is the only country to have decriminalised sex work, in 2003, although it is not legal for migrants. Sex workers said they were more able to refuse clients and insist on condom use, while relationships with police were better. “We always have police coming up and down the street every night,” said one woman. “We’d even have them coming over to make sure that we were all right and making sure … that we’ve got minders and that they were taking registration plates and the identity of the clients. So … it changed the whole street, it’s changed everything.”

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