Tag: EU

And then be arrested and put on trial for treason, one would hope. But regardless, one hopes Germany will soon see the last of worst German Chancellor since Hitler:

Angela Merkel could be ousted as Chancellor by next week if she doesn’t come up with a plan for the migrant crisis, a German MP claims.

Kai Whittaker, a member of Ms Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, said infighting could weaken the ruling coalition and make her position untenable.

Ms Merkel is at war with her Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, who wants Germany to send back migrants who have registered in other EU countries. Ms Merkel is sticking to her guns, maintaining an open-door migrant policy is crucial for keeping Europe united despite the political standoff with her Bavarian ally.

In her weekly podcast, three days before talks between Ms Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron outside Berlin, she hammered home her stance. ‘This is a European challenge that also needs a European solution. And I view this issue as decisive for keeping Europe together,’ she said.

Members said Mr Seehofer would defy Merkel on Monday if no compromise has been reached by then, and go ahead with the plans alone. Such an affront to Merkel could force her to fire Seehofer, and there is even talk of the end of the 70-year conservative parliamentary alliance between the two parties. Without the CSU, the CDU and Social Democrats, the third party in her ‘grand coalition’, would lack a majority.

It’s astonishing that the outcome is even in doubt at this point.

The EU blinked and accepted the Left-Right nationalist alliance rather than risk a La Lega government.

Italy’s new populist leaders commemorated the founding of the Italian republic by attending a pomp-filled military parade Saturday — and then promised to get to work creating jobs and expelling migrants.

“The free ride is over,” League leader Matteo Salvini, Italy’s new interior minister, warned migrants at a rally in northern Italy. “It’s time to pack your bags.”

The pledge of mass deportations to come was a reminder that Italy has a staunchly anti-immigrant, right-wing party in its governing coalition — and that the European Union will face a whole new partner governing its fourth-largest economy.

Earlier, Salvini joined Premier Giuseppe Conte and the rest of the newly sworn-in Cabinet to view the Republic Day parade. Italy’s aeronautic acrobatic squad flew low and loud over downtown Rome trailing smoke in the red, white and green of the Italian flag.

The national pride on display is a feature of every Republic Day, but it took on a particular significance this year after Italy on Friday ended three months of political and financial turmoil and swore in a government whose populist and euroskeptic leanings have alarmed Europe.

Conte, a law professor plucked from relative obscurity to head an unlikely governing alliance of the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement and League, said the celebrations Saturday transcended all the tensions of recent days.

“It’s the celebration for all of us, of our republic,” he said.

Conte’s Cabinet was sworn in after a last-minute deal averted the threat of a new election that could have turned into a referendum on whether Italy stayed with the shared European euro currency. The political stability relieved financial markets on Friday but Italy’s European neighbors continued to express concerns about the euroskeptic bent and the heavy spending agenda of Italy’s new government…. The political upheaval that has created western Europe’s first populist government this week has been dubbed the start of Italy’s Third Republic.

I think I would have preferred another election, but the fact that Salvini is still the interior minister is the most important thing. And it wasn’t exactly as if the Italians took the EU’s objection to Paolo Savona lying down, instead, they took trolling to new heights by naming him to the Ministry for European Affairs in place of the Treasury. The thing is, it took a while for Italy to get into the Euro, and they’re not going to extricate the nation from it overnight. The most important thing is for the new government to deliver on the promised deportations. As long as it does that, La Lega will be in a stronger position in the next election cycle.

And, of course, this being Italy, the chances are about 85 percent that the new government won’t last a year anyhow. It is tremendously encouraging, however, to see that the eurocrats are so desperate to avoid a popular referendum on the Euro. They know they would lose, because most Italians would prefer to go back to the Lira, despite what the new Minister of the Treasury says.

Italy’s new finance minister Giovanni Tria is a political economy professor whose policies dovetail with those of the far-right League party, with one crucial exception: he wants Italy to stick with the euro. This is an important distinction from Paolo Savona who was previously touted for the job and whose hostility to Italy’s eurozone membership turned out to be a dealbreaker for Italy’s president. But although Tria wrote on the Formiche analysis website that it was “not in our interests to leave”, he also said that the eurozone needed to be reformed. “Before saying why I think that we must reply ‘no’ to the question of a euro exit, I would start from the question ‘what are the conditions for the euro’s survival’, so we can move in the opposite direction of any breakup,” Tria said.

Except that’s not quite what he said.

“Tra tutti i partiti italiani, sia all’opposizione che al governo, non ho sentito una sola forza politica che dica che voglia uscire dall’euro. Questa è la verità: il mondo deve prenderne atto” 

“Throughout all the Italian parties, including the opposition and the government, I have not heard a single political force that says it wants to exit the Euro. This is the truth: the world must take note.”

I found this statement more significant.  Sembra di essere tornati ai tempi in cui Maynard Keynes criticava i vecchi ortodossi.

“It feels as if we have returned to the times in which John Maynard Keynes criticized the old orthodoxy.”

In other words, no major political party has made it an official policy… yet. My take is that he’s warning the Eurocrats that either they shape up fast or Italy ships out. And I am quite sure that he knows they have no intention whatsoever of shaping up. And, as I’ve already mentioned, Italy intends to deal with the migrant situation first. If the EU gets in the way of that, then Italy will leave both the Euro and the European Union.

Viktor Orban and Fidesz are expected to remain in power today:

After an acrimonious campaign in which Orban projected himself as a savior of Hungary’s Christian culture against Muslim migration into Europe, all opinion polls put his Fidesz party well ahead.

A strong victory could embolden him to put more muscle into a Central European alliance against the European Union’s migration policies. Orban, Hungary’s longest-serving post-communist premier, opposes deeper integration of the bloc.

He has far-right admirers across Europe who like his tough line on migrants, while critics say he has put Hungary on an increasingly authoritarian path.

A landslide win would make Orban feel vindicated in his decision to run a single-issue campaign, arguing migration poses a security threat.

Demonstrating, once more, that the Republican strategy of pandering to immigrants in order to destroy the country a little more slowly is not only destructive, but isn’t even electorally sound. Notice that the leading opposition is to his right!

The strongest opposition party is former far-right Jobbik, which has recast its image as a more moderate nationalist force. It has been campaigning on an anti-corruption agenda and urged higher wages to lure back hundreds of thousands of Hungarians who had left Hungary to earn a better living in western Europe…. A poll by Zavech research institute published on Friday showed Fidesz had 46 percent support among decided voters, while Jobbik had 19 percent. The Socialists came in third with 14 percent. 

Now it is time for Huxit. I expect Russia will be willing to guarantee their security if the EU wants to play hardball.

Sacre bleu! I have been expecting more than a few high-level arrests to take place as a result of the Draining of the Swamp, but I was not expecting one of them to be a President of the Fifth Republic!

Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was placed in custody on Tuesday as part of an investigation that he received millions of euros in illegal financing from the regime of the late Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.

A judicial source with direct knowledge of the case told The Associated Press that Sarkozy was being held at the Nanterre police station, west of Paris. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

Sarkozy and his former chief of staff have denied wrongdoing in the case, which involves funding for his winning 2007 presidential campaign.

Though an investigation has been underway since 2013, the case gained traction some three years later when French-Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine told the online investigative site, Mediapart, that he delivered suitcases from Libya containing 5 million euros ($6.2 million) in cash to Sarkozy and his former chief of staff Claude Gueant.

A lawyer for Sarkozy did not immediately respond to a message from the AP seeking comments. Investigators are examining claims that Gadhafi’s regime secretly gave Sarkozy 50 million euros overall for the 2007 campaign.

Now, it is possible that this has nothing at all to do with Trump’s swamp-draining. But considering all the shady connections between Clinton, Obama, Libya, Gadhafi, and the death of the US Ambassador to Libya, I tend to doubt it.

Macron is certainly proving to be a more interesting, and potentially more independent, character than I expected him to be.

Regime change is coming soon to Italy.

A fortnight tomorrow, Italians will go to the polls in an election that was ill-tempered enough before the horror show in Macerata.

The EU’s failed migration policies and the arrival of hundreds of thousands of African migrants on the Italian coast had already made immigration one of the two big issues in the election on March 4. The other is Italy’s dismal economy, currently buried under £2 trillion of national debt. Macerata has raised the stakes even higher.

Most Italians I meet blame their politicians for ineptitude and the EU for abandoning them. They are in a vengeful mood…. Berlusconi’s coalition partners are the hard-Right League or ‘Lega’ (previously the breakaway Northern League) and the even-more-Right-wing neo-fascist Brothers of Italy. Despite the name, they are led by a woman and their candidates include Rachele Mussolini, granddaughter of the wartime dictator.

As for the Left, things are looking bleak. Italy’s centre-Left Democratic Party (PD) is the only one sharing the vision of ever-closer European union peddled by France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Angela Merkel. But Italians want less Europe, not more.

Even diehard supporters of the PD admit this is not their year. Their great hope, the shiny Macron-style Matteo Renzi, was prime minister for five minutes, but destroyed his career with a botched referendum on the constitution in 2016 and had to be replaced by a caretaker PM.

Once the country has voted a fortnight hence, Italy seems likely to join the EU’s anti-Brussels nationalist awkward squad of Poland, Austria, Hungary and others.

There is, though, little appetite for a Brexit-style break with Europe — there will be no ‘Quitaly’ just yet — largely because the country could not stand the economic shock.

But Brussels is viewed with utter contempt. And politicians across the board are now capitalising on the Macerata situation. Berlusconi himself has warned of a ‘social bomb’ as a result and says that just 5 per cent of Italy’s 600,000 migrants are legitimate refugees who should be allowed to stay.

The newspaper La Repubblica has carried a pre-Macerata opinion poll showing that 40 per cent of Italians ‘strongly or very strongly’ agree that migrants represent ‘a danger to public order and personal safety’.

Here in Macerata, 150 miles north of Rome, I find zero appetite for greater European integration — and this is a Left-wing university town.

Historically, it would have been firmly behind the liberal consensus.

Not any more. Even the liberals talk like Ukip, while those on the Right talk of mass deportations.

I’m definitely pro-Lega and pro-Salvini. Berlusconi is getting all the attention, of course, but Salvini is the much more serious player and he’s going to be around a lot longer than Silvio. I don’t think Italy is psychologically ready to shed the burden of the EU yet, but people dislike it a LOT more than they did back when it was Euros flooding into Italy instead of Africans.

But again, notice the difference between the strength of the reaction and the numbers involved. The European nations will defend themselves before it is too late and they will survive.

A former refugee worker in Germany regrets her assistance in welcoming the invaders:

Natalia Osten-Sacken: Rebecca, you’ve worked many years with refugees and immigrants, you’re a well-known human rights activist. Already before the big wave of immigration in 2015, you were well known for fighting for unlimited admission of these people to Germany. What influenced the change of your views?

Rebecca Sommer: I would like to point out that I have never fought for “unlimited” admission of migrants, because it is impossible for any country to adopt infinitely. I am a humanist and human rights activist. The first years I believed that people who come here are real refugees, happy that they will be safe now and that they will show a good faith in order to adapt here and to integrate. But with time, an unpleasant awakening came about step by step. The reasons for this were so complex that I just couldn’t ignore it anymore.

Rebecca, you’ve worked many years with refugees and immigrants, what influenced the change of your views?

Looking back through the years of repetitive experiences and myself in my work environment as a volunteer, I had to admit to myself that when it comes to Muslim refugees, they have grown up with completely different values, into which they have been brainwashed and are indoctrinated by Islam, and have no intention of adopting our values — worse, they look at us, unbelievers with superiority and arrogance.

You’ve also worked in refugee shelters. What caught your eye?

The sexual molesting of volunteers happens all the time, but none of us has ever reported such a case to the police because none of us wanted to be seen as an opponent of refugees and cause problems for the centre.

And what has emerged from your tracking of the progress of immigrants?

A woman has no human value, she is perceived as a sexual object and not as a partner

What would you like to convey to Poland and Poles?

Stay relentless in your resistance against the European Union breaking the rights of individual nations – in this case against the relocation of refugees forced from outside.[by the EU]. Every country and nation has the right to choose their guests. No country should have to give up the right to self-determination. People within their country have the right to rule themselves, without interference from outside. You have the right to determine your own political path and status, and be free from outside pressure. Do not lose your identity, no nation, group, ethnic group, be it Italians, French or Poles, will survive if you don’t isolate yourself in a sensible way, in accordance with your interests.

German women lament their growing social isolation. But is it enough to get them to stop virtue-signaling, stop condemning the Alt-Right, and abandon the suicidal Left in favor of nationalism and the West?

Do you still feel safe as a woman in your country and how did, what happened in Cologne, affect you?

Like many other women in Germany, I no longer feel safe. The number of women, who visit me or send me messages on Facebook about their fears or concrete experiences with migrants, is growing continuously.

The problem is that instead of publicly communicating their criticisms or protesting on the street against this policy, most people prefer private “solutions”. You do not celebrate anymore or only in male company, you don’t get dressed any more, avoid certain places etc.

It is cruel to see how women keep silent and are unnoticed by the majority of society, while much of the media attention disappears as well. It is in a weakened form what happened in many Islamic countries after the revitalization of conservative Islam.

The woman becomes invisible.

The situation is still easily dealt with. It could be handled inside of three months. But women are going to have to stop bursting into tears and falling for every stupid sob story, and trying to silence the voices and tie the hands of the men with the will to save Western civilization.

The solution is simple. Sink the ships, seal the borders, and send them back.

Most Americans are unaware of how violent Italian history is. This reprisal for the brutal murder of a young Italian woman may in time be seen as the first metaphorical ringing of the bells:

The extreme right-wing suspect in a shooting rampage that wounded six African migrants in Italy has demonstrated no remorse for his actions and was “lucid and determined, aware of what he had done,” an Italian law enforcement official said Sunday.

Luca Traini, 28, was being held in jail as police investigate him on multiple counts of attempted murder for Saturday’s shooting rampage in the central Italian city of Macerata, with the aggravating circumstance of “racial hatred.”

Traini was an unsuccessful candidate last year in a local election for the anti-migrant Northern League party and friends have been quoted by ANSA as saying he previously had ties with the neo-fascist Forza Nuova and the CasaPound political parties.

Col. Michele Roberti, the Carabineri commander in Macerata, told Sky TG24 that “it’s likely that he carried out this crazy gesture as a sort of retaliation, a sort of vendetta” after a Nigerian man was arrested in the gruesome slaying of an Italian teenager a few days previously in the same city.

The dismembered remains of Pamela Mastropietro, 18, were found in two suitcases days after she walked away from a drug rehab community. Police arrested the Nigerian suspect after finding the victim’s bloody clothes in his apartment, along with a receipt from a pharmacy where she had bought a syringe and knives that are consistent with the crime.

While the Italian government is every bit as immigrant-crazed as Angela Merkel’s lunatic German government, it lacks any credibility at all and is currently teetering on the edge of collapse and replacement by anything and everything from an independent Venice to Matteo Salvini’s Lega Nord and the anarchic Movimento Cinque Stelle.

It seems that the main thing keeping the ethnic violence at a relatively low level is that the criminal organizations have been profiting greatly from the human trafficking and sex trafficking that is part and parcel of the third-world migration. But once the capos decide that living in an Italy that remains Italian is more important to them than short-term profits, I suspect we will see an abrupt change in policy that will astonish the world.

But Salvini would be far and away the best and most civilized option. He’s smart, dedicated, and committed to Italy for Italians. The status quo is no longer viable.

Italy is heading into a general election on March 4 and the head of the rebranded League party, Matteo Salvini, had capitalized on the teen’s killing in campaign appearances even before the shooting Saturday. Salvini is pledging to deport 150,000 migrants in his first year in office if his party wins control of parliament — drawing sharp rebukes that he is using the migrant crisis to foment xenophobia for political gain.

Although the commissioners seem to think so. I have my issues with democracy, but if one has to choose between direct democracy and limited representative democracy, it is now very clear that the former is vastly to be preferred to the latter, no matter what the American Founding Fathers wrote about “mob rule”. Because a mob of people are clearly wiser and less corrupt than the sort of unsavory creatures who inevitably slither into position to “represent” them.

Although the commission likes to talk a lot about democracy as a European value, it defines this as what Brussels wants, rather than what the people want. Time and again, with a ballot paper in front of them, a majority of voters – from those in Denmark who rejected the Maastricht Treaty in a referendum in 1992, to Britain last year and now Catalonia this week – have ticked the wrong box.

I am not sure that Catalan independence is a good idea any more than Scotland’s breakaway from the UK might be, but the choice is surely for the people affected.

Nothing displayed the EU’s blithe disregard for democracy better than the reaction to the Catalan vote by the European Parliament’s Brexit co-ordinator Guy Verhofstadt. He completely ignored the fact that the three separatist parties had won a total of 70 seats in the 135-seat regional parliament – ensuring a separatist majority – and instead congratulated the pro-Spanish Citizens party which gained 37 seats, admittedly making it the largest single party but one in no position of power.

The trouble for the EU is that resentment over this ‘democratic deficit’ is growing daily. Across Europe – from Austria, where the anti-EU far-Right Freedom Party is now part of the coalition government, to Eastern European EU nations such as Poland and Hungary, which are visceral in their opposition to EU immigration policies – Brussels is increasingly coming up against the anger of voters.

In Poland, Brussels has inflamed that anger by moving to suspend the country’s voting rights in the EU after a dispute over judicial reforms that Brussels claims undermine Polish courts’ independence.

This attempt by the EU to make Warsaw its whipping boy – as though Eastern European members should take their subsidies and in return do the commission’s bidding – has appalled Hungary, which has now come out in support of Poland.

The anti-democratic EU elite well-merits being dismissed as Eurofascists.