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‘Everything comes to an end’: Sweden’s PM announces
2nd resignation in 2 months
22 Aug, 2021 12:19
Social Democrat leader Stefan Löfven speaks during a media conference after being re-elected as prime minister in
Swedish Parliament in Stockholm, Sweden July 7, 2021. © Christine Olsson/TT News Agency/via REUTERS
Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven will resign, again, following a tumultuous summer of political infighting in the Scandinavian country that ended in a no-confidence vote in his leadership.
In a speech on Sunday, Löfven announced that he would step down as the head of the Social Democrats, and would also resign as prime minister, in November.
“The decision has matured over time. I have been party chairman for ten years, prime minister for seven. These years have been amazing. But everything comes to an end. I want to give my successor the best of conditions,” he said, according to local media.
A new leader of Löfven’s center-left party will take over ahead of the country’s 2022 general election.
Center-left party? I thought they are a far-left party.
The decision comes less than two months after Löfven quit as prime minister in late June, a week after he lost a vote of no confidence. The political reprimand – marking the first time in Sweden’s history that a sitting prime minister lost a no-confidence vote – was triggered by a heated clash over housing market policy, costing Löfven the support of his long-time coalition partner, the Left Party.
At the time, Löfven said that his resignation was preferable to holding a drawn-out snap election, but it turned out that his departure was short-lived.
He was narrowly reelected as prime minister by parliament on July 7 after the leaders of Sweden’s political factions failed to form a new government.
Löfven has headed the Swedish government since 2014, but his time in office has been marred by years of shaky support. A close election in 2018 meant that it took four months to form a government after his party won 40.6% of the vote, just barely edging out the country’s center-right party, which secured 40.2%.
Echoes of Hungary as Poland to build giant barbed-wire border fence
on frontier with Belarus to stem flow of illegal migrants
24 Aug, 2021 11:32
August 23, 2021.© Reuters / Kacper Pempel
Poland intends to build a 2.5-meter-high barbed-wire fence and to double the number of troops on its frontier with Belarus, Warsaw’s defense minister revealed on Monday, following a large spike in illegal border-crossing attempts.
Speaking at a briefing, Mariusz Błaszczak revealed that the country’s frontier would be reinforced with a solid fence “two and a half meters high,” and that work on installing it would begin this week.
He also noted that more soldiers would be moved to the area to assist border guards. About 1,000 soldiers are now involved, and this number is planned to be doubled.
The total length of the Polish-Belarusian border is 418 kilometers. According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Warsaw, around 2,100 attempts to cross it illegally were made since the start of the year. In the whole of 2020, there were just 120.
The migrant crisis comes off the back of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko saying his country would no longer make any effort to stop illegal immigration. Lithuania, which also shares a border with Belarus, claims that the government in Minsk has flown in migrants from the likes of Syria and Iraq, and is shuttling them to the frontier as a form of warfare.
“We will begin building an additional physical barrier, which divides Lithuania and Belarus, which would be a certain sign and a certain deterrent to organizers of the illegal migration flows,” Prime Minister Ingrida Simonyte told a news conference in July.
Another Baltic country, Latvia, has also noted a mass increase in attempts to cross its frontier from Belarus illegally. Earlier his month, Riga also declared a state of emergency.
The EU, of which Poland, Latvia and Lithuania are members, has backed all three governments in the beefing up of their borders. This is a huge u-turn from the European bloc, which had blasted member state Hungary for doing the exact same thing in 2015, during the refugee crisis, when Budapest was branded as inhumane and immoral.
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Czech PM says Schengen not working, urges inclusion of Balkan states to protect Europe from illegal migrants
28 Aug, 2021 14:58
A migrant boat off the European shores. © AFP / Sameer al-Doumy
The Schengen area will only be able to protect Europe from illegal migrants after such countries as Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia and Croatia are included in the agreement, the Czech Republic’s prime minister, Andrej Babis, has said.
“Unfortunately, Schengen isn’t functional at the moment,” Babis said in an interview with Pravo newspaper on Saturday. With its current set of members, the 1985 agreement is unable to fulfill its task of providing “consistent protection of the external borders and free movement inside” Europe, he added.
And it was no better in 2015 when the European migrant crisis occurred as hundreds of thousands of people flocked to the continent, fleeing conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa, the PM pointed out.
“The only one to defend the Schengen borders in 2015 was [Hungarian PM] Viktor Orban, who built a fence against migrants,” said Babis, who is one of the Czech Republic’s richest men and the head of the populist ANO 2011 party.
With most migrants arriving by boat, it was “absurd” that such countries as Bulgaria and Croatia, which control Europe’s Black Sea and Adriatic Sea coastlines, respectively, weren’t part of Schengen, he said. “Let’s accept Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia and Croatia into the Schengen area; have a clear strategy towards the Western Balkans and defend Europe against illegal migration at its external borders.”
Other steps needed to solve the problem should include “fighting human traffickers and signing agreements with Turkey, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya” from where the refugees are setting off for Europe, Babis said.
He justified the need to protect Europe from refugees by claiming that “Denmark, Sweden and Austria, which all welcomed migrants in 2015, now reject them.”
The Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland were the only EU member states to refuse to fulfill the Union’s refugee quotas at the height of migrant influx six years ago. Back then, Prague was told to resettle 2,000 asylum seekers, but took in just 12 people, while Budapest and Warsaw didn’t let any in at all. Despite the countries arguing that the migrants posed a security threat, the European Court of Justice found them guilty of breaching EU laws last year. They may face hefty fines.
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