Jacobin Magazine: Germany’s Governmental Crisis

In this sense, everything is at stake, as the party’s strength is increasingly challenged from the right by the Alternative for Germany (AfD), whose positions and members run the gamut from right-wing populist to outright fascist. Why, indeed, should anti-immigration voters support the CSU when a louder law-and-order, anti-immigration party is available?

For this same reason, leading figures in the CSU are practically competing with one another to prove who is more authoritarian, as Bavarian minister president Markus Söder mandates crucifixes in all public buildings and introduces a draconian new police law that has been widely criticized from various sectors of civil society.

After initial hesitation, the Social Democrats also agreed, after removing some of the agreement’s most draconian wording. Germany, it seems, will close itself off and build refugee camps. Austrian chancellor Kurz responded by announcing his intention to better “protect” Austria’s southern border — thereby shifting the border even further south and leaving it up to Matteo Salvini to decide what will happen to refugees in the Mediterranean. [...]

After all, the “migration question,” which she has styled the “question of the fate the European Union”, is really a question of the EU and its economic strength in global competition. Will multilateralism continue to prevail, or are we witnessing a return to unilateralism and strong nation-states? Katrin Göring-Eckardt of the Greens sounded quite similar to Nahles and Merkel when she observed that if the “end of multilateralism” is up for discussion, then “everything is at stake.” [...]

For the CSU, all that matters is Bavaria. The party, appealing to Bavaria’s Texas-like self-image as a culturally unique and independent state in Germany, does not contest elections anywhere else and is generally to the right of the CDU. In order to save its own regional skin, it may at some point prove more opportune to cut loose from the CDU and focus on maintaining its hegemony over Bavaria, leaving Merkel to govern with other mainstream parties or call snap elections.

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The New York Times: Britain, Time to Let Go of the ‘Anglosphere’

David Davis, the British government’s Brexit secretary until he left his post this week, said in a 2016 speech on the referendum: “This is an opportunity to renew our strong relationships with Commonwealth and Anglosphere countries. These parts of the world are growing faster than Europe. We share history, culture and language. We have family ties. We even share similar legal systems. The usual barriers to trade are largely absent.” [...]

President Trump may agree to a new trade deal with Britain, but it’s unlikely that Britain would decide the terms, a prospect that is fraught with political risks for the British government. Such a deal raises the specter of British voters eating chlorinated chicken and hormone-injected beef while watching the revered National Health Service being opened up to American multinationals.

For Australia and New Zealand, trade links with China and Asia are much more important than those with Britain. And Canada, as a member of Nafta, has long been oriented toward the massive American market. Security and intelligence cooperation among these states and Britain in the so-called Five Eyes group is critical, as is NATO membership, but this kind of cooperation does not require a new Anglosphere bloc.

In reality, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand show no inclination to join Britain in new political and economic alliances. More likely, they would rather continue to work within the existing institutions — like the European Union and the World Trade Organization — and remain indifferent to, or just perplexed by, Britain’s calls for some kind of formalized Anglosphere alliance.

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The Guardian: With criticism of May's Brexit, Trump detonates a diplomatic grenade

His outburst to the Sun – a Eurosceptic tabloid newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch, whose Fox News channel supplies many of Trump’s views and staff – could certainly be seen as bad manners, perhaps an act of revenge for the baby blimp set to take to the London sky on Friday. [...]

He is aware that May, like Merkel, is weakened and vulnerable domestically, and his past record suggests that he despises weakness. He has consistently expressed admiration, by contrast, for dictators such as Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un and Rodrigo Duterte.

More than a year into his presidency, no one is quite certain whether this is due to an instinctive fascination with autocrats and the great man theory of history – or a deeper, more sinister effort to reorder the world in favour of rightwing demagoguery. [...]

May, meanwhile, standing before the media and live TV cameras, will face calls to emulate Hugh Grant’s prime minister in the 2003 film Love Actually, who informs the American president: “A friend who bullies us is no longer a friend. And since bullies only respond to strength, from now onward I will be prepared to be much stronger.”

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Bloomberg: Trump Isn’t Getting the Brexit He Wanted

That trade deal is prized by Brexiters as proof it was all worth it. The U.S. is Britain’s largest single-country export market, though it is well behind the EU, where about 43 percent of U.K. goods and services exports go and which is the source of 54 percent of imports. But it’s difficult to believe it matters that much to Trump. The U.S. does more trade with Canada, Mexico and China. A U.K.-U.S. trade agreement would be nice, especially as a reward for Britain’s security support. But it’s not the kind of deal that is going to keep Trump up at night. [...]

It’s becoming clear now to Britons that the promised benefits of Brexit aren’t likely to materialize, and that the best they can hope for is a divorce settlement with Europe that minimizes the disadvantages of leaving. [...]

May’s plan is so offensive to hardcore Brexiters that two senior ministers resigned in the days after her plan was revealed to the cabinet, and many more have been plotting to undermine it. And yet, it’s just an opening bid in negotiations that have a long way to run. There’s every possibility that the EU — which insists that its single market freedoms of goods, labor, capital and services cannot be turned into an a la carte buffet — will reject the offer. There’s still a possibility that the U.K. and the EU will not reach a deal, in which case a very harsh Brexit that exposes Britain to hostile economic relations with longtime allies indeed is possible.  [...]

Both Brexiters and Trump channeled dissatisfaction with the status quo and capitalized on the emotional draw of a clean break with an established order. But both movements lacked a workable vision of a new order. Trump stumbles from border-control edicts to tariffs to summit-wrecking. In the same way, British hard-leavers still haven’t articulated a vision of Brexit that is workable, as the new Brexit minister Dominic Raab noted on Thursday.

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