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Prime Minister Boris Johnson told British voters Wednesday that they have to back his Conservatives if they want an end to Brexit delays, as he tried to shake off a rocky start to the governing party’s election campaign. In fact, lawmakers approved Jo…
November 6, 2019Read More
Ukraine, Virginia, College Football: Here’s what you need to know.
November 6, 2019Read More
JERUSALEM/GAZA, Nov 6 (Reuters) – The head of the U.N. agency that aids Palestinian refugees has stepped aside until the end of an investigation into misconduct allegations, the agency said on Wednesday. Commissioner General Pierre Krahenbuhl has been…
November 6, 2019Read More
Iran says it’ll start injecting uranium gas at midnight into 1,044 centrifuges at the underground Fordo facility. Kamalvandi says the centrifuges there will enrich uranium up to 4.5%. The development will mark Tehran’s latest step away from the nucle…
November 6, 2019Read More
(Bloomberg Opinion) — Germany’s dismal coalition politics may help unlock progress in talks on the European banking union. Finance Minister Olaf Scholz’s apparent mandate to negotiate a common deposit reinsurance scheme for Europe could help him win the leadership of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and keep the shaky government, in which the SPD is the junior partner, going for another two years.Scholz laid out his plan for the reinsurance scheme in an op-ed in the Financial Times. Even though he wrote it was “no small step for a German finance minister,” the proposal isn’t particularly generous. A European reinsurance fund would only step in if a national deposit insurance scheme’s resources are exhausted. In reality, if an EU member state finds itself in such dire straits, it’s already likely to receive help from the European Stability Mechanism. German taxpayers won’t be on the hook for payouts to Italian, Greek or Portuguese bank depositors, and Germany will still only agree to the scheme under certain conditions, including tough ones such as requiring banks to hold reserves against government bond purchases and the uniform taxation of banks.The scheme bears all the hallmarks of the kind of cumbersome compromise favored by Chancellor Angela Merkel — one nobody really likes but which can break the banking union deadlock. It also looks like a Merkel gift to Scholz at just the right political moment.Late last month, Scholz and his running mate Klara Geywitz won a first-round vote in the SPD’s party leadership race by a surprisingly narrow margin, garnering 22.68% of the party members’ vote against 21.04% for the runners-up. The run-off will be held between Nov. 19 and 29. It can be the undoing of the governing coalition if the wrong pair wins: one of the opposition candidates, Norbert Walter-Borjans, has said the coalition has “no future.” Many SPD members’ problem with the coalition is that it appears to have destroyed the party’s electoral support because, as the junior partner of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), it’s unable to push through its center-left agenda. All it does is prop up an increasingly fatigued and indecisive Merkel and a flailing CDU which, in turn, is losing support to the Greens and the nationalist Alternative for Germany party.Scholz’s experience within the coalition is a case in point. The European reinsurance scheme that’s really dear to his heart, one he’d have liked to be his signature project, had nothing to do with the banking union. It was a plan for a Europe-wide unemployment backstop, a fund into which all member states would pay and on which they could draw if their unemployment insurance schemes run into financial trouble. Technically, it was a lot like Scholz’s deposit insurance proposal. Last year, however, Merkel’s office and the CDU turned down the plan for the same reasons that they’ve opposed common deposit insurance — because it would put up German money to solve problems caused presumably by other countries’ poor financial management.Scholz is unhappy with the coalition. He said in a recent interview that Germany needs a government without the CDU, which “lies like mildew over the republic.” But he doesn’t want to dissolve the coalition before the scheduled 2021 election because he says the SPD can still get things done — for example, push through its version of a basic pension to be paid to everyone who’s worked for at least 35 years, on which compromise with the CDU has proved elusive so far. All the SPD leadership candidates have said the pension matter would be important for the coalition’s future. But while Merkel can’t gift a deal on that to Scholz just yet, she and her party can at least offer progress on the deposit reinsurance proposal. Its beauty is that other EU countries don’t have the time to shoot it down before the SPD leadership run-off — and in the meantime, it gives credence to Scholz’s position that the SPD can lead on important initiatives, including European-level ones.Scholz’s victory in the leadership vote should allow Merkel to serve out her final term in office; he’s a relatively comfortable partner for her in talks on matters ranging from pensions to fiscal easing in case of a recession. His banking union proposal should be read in that context; it’s more useful for Germany’s political stability in the next couple of years than for European depositors — who could, of course, also benefit in the end.To contact the author of this story: Leonid Bershidsky at [email protected] contact the editor responsible for this story: Therese Raphael at [email protected] column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Leonid Bershidsky is Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
November 6, 2019Read More
(Bloomberg) — Want to receive this post in your inbox every day? Sign up for the Balance of Power newsletter, and follow Bloomberg Politics on Twitter and Facebook for more.Donald Trump urged voters to send “radical Democrats” a message via Kentucky’s…
November 6, 2019Read More
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government awarded itself a good performance report Wednesday, halfway through its term, but it was unclear whether that will be enough to hold the fractious coalition together for another two years. Merkel’s center-r…
November 6, 2019Read More
French President Emmanuel Macron said Iran had explicitly signalled its intent for the first time to quit its nuclear deal in announcing it would start injecting uranium gas at an enrichment facility. Speaking at a press conference at the end of a vis…
November 6, 2019Read More
(Bloomberg) — Nearly six in ten Russians want “decisive and full-scale changes” in the country amid growing discontent with the authorities over living standards, according to new research.The proportion wanting change reached 59% this year, up from 4…
November 6, 2019Read More
Strategy is the art and science of setting and enforcing priorities. The Pentagon has rightly designated great-power competition as its top priority. It would make little sense to commit heavy resources to offset a secondary worry such as Iran—especial…
November 6, 2019Read More
Deadly protests in Iraq continue even after the country’s prime minister agreed to step down. NPR’s Rachel Martin talks to former Iraqi Ambassador to the U.S. Rend Al-Rahim.
November 6, 2019Read More
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