I don't spend much time reporting on American politics as most of my readers can follow that subject on many other forums. I do like to keep us up to date on political changes around the world as they affect us all in various ways.
EU elections begin Thursday and run through Sunday - June 6-9.
Final campaign rallies in Italy; new polls in France
In Italy, the main political parties contesting the EU election have held their last major rallies, outlining very different visions of the European Union. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has denounced an “increasingly technocratic and undemocratic Europe" while her main opponent, Elly Schlein of the Democratic Party, has called for a “federal Europe now".
Meanwhile a fresh opinion poll in France has confirmed a seemingly unassailable lead for the far-right National Rally, while Macron’s Renaissance, currently placed second, is threatened by the Socialists.
In our Everyday Europe segment, FRANCE 24's Luke Brown explains how the EU is wrapping up rules in order to reduce waste from packaging.
And Luke Brown also brings you our country report from Estonia, where civilians are volunteering for military training in case of a Russian incursion in the country.
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Pakistan's ex-PM Imran Khan acquitted
in state secrets case, will remain in jail
A Pakistan high court on Monday overturned a treason conviction against former prime minister Imran Khan, who remains in jail on other charges.
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The decision by a two-member bench at Islamabad High Court was announced by Chief Justice Aamer Farooq, an AFP court reporter witnessed.
"This is the first big case which was part of the political victimisation against Imran Khan and Shah Mahmood Qureshi which has been dashed to the ground," Salman Safdar, a lawyer for Khan's Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party, told AFP outside of court.
Khan was convicted along with Qureshi, his former foreign secretary, of making public a classified cable sent to Islamabad by Pakistan's ambassador in Washington in 2022.
He had touted the cypher as evidence that the United States had conspired to force him from power in 2022, when a no-confidence vote saw him replaced by the opposition.
The United States and Pakistan's military have denied the accusation.
Khan remains jailed on a seven-year sentence for breaking Islamic law by marrying his wife Bushra Bibi too soon after her divorce.
He has also been found guilty of graft over gifts he received in his time as premier between 2018 and 2022.
While his 14-year sentence was suspended in April, the conviction still stands.
Khan was ousted by a parliamentary no-confidence vote after falling out with the top generals, and in opposition he waged an unprecedented campaign of defiance against them.
Analysts regard Pakistan as a "hybrid regime", where the military establishment wields immense power to determine the course of ostensibly democratic politics.
Khan later found himself tangled in more than 200 court cases, massively complicating his attempts to mount a comeback.
Despite that, candidates loyal to PTI secured more seats than any other party in the February elections – which were marred by allegations of vote tampering.
A broad coalition of parties considered more pliable to the influence of the military kept the MPs from power.
(AFP)
Activist, scientist, progressive, president:
Claudia Sheinbaum’s path to power in Mexico
Claudia Sheinbaum, the former mayor of Mexico City, on Monday won a landslide electoral victory to become Mexico's new president and the country's first woman head of state. An environmental scientist and experienced left-wing politician, she is known for keeping a cool head in times of crisis.
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Sheinbaum won between 58.3% and 60.7% of the vote, according to the National Electoral Institute’s president, while opposition candidate Xochitl Galvez won between 26.6% and 28.6% and Jorge Alvarez Maynez won between 9.9% and 10.8%.
Sheinbaum's Morena party was also projected to hold its majorities in both chambers of Congress.
The granddaughter of Bulgarian and Lithuanian Jewish migrants, Sheinbaum is a close ally of outgoing President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
It will be interesting to see how Jewish she really is. Policies in the next few weeks should tell us a lot about her. Will she survive the narco state violence? She survived as Mayor of Mexico City. There is always hope.
Unlike her mentor, however, the 61-year-old is "not a populist", said Pamela Starr, a political scientist at the University of Southern California.
"She is much more of a mainstream leftist politician," and likely to be "less ideological" than the outgoing president, Starr added.
Activist roots
Sheinbaum was born in Mexico City to parents caught up in the turmoil of the early 1960s, when students and other activists were seeking to end the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s (PRI) long grip on power in Mexico.
"At home, we talked about politics morning, noon and night," Sheinbaum was quoted as saying in a recent biography.
In the 1980s, the future environmental scientist studied physics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where she defended her bachelor’s thesis on the energy effiency of wood-fired ovens. She sometimes went with friends to install more efficient cooking systems in particularly poor regions of Mexico such as Michoacan.
Guillermo Robles, a former university classmate, told AFP that Sheinbaum's magnetism as a young woman lay in her left-wing political convictions. "She never said 'I can't'. She always went, especially to the rallies," he said.
As a student, the projected president-elect “helped lead a movement protesting a plan to raise fees” at the university, reported the New York Times.
Sheinbaum did doctoral research at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, where she studied energy use in Mexico, according to the Wilson Center.
She has published more than 20 scientific articles on energy efficiency, a topic she wrote about as part of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in 2007, the year that the IPCC won a Nobel Peace Prize.
‘Making decisions’
Sheinbaum served as Mexico City’s environment minister in the early 2000s under then mayor Lopez Obrador, who became her political mentor. After his 2006 presidential election loss, she taught classes at her alma mater and “conducted research on engineering challenges in Mexico City, specifically on water and mobility”, according to the Wilson Center.
Sheinbaum was elected mayor of the city’s largest borough, Tlalpan, in 2015. An earthquake two years later caused the borough’s Rebsamen school to collapse, leading to the deaths of 19 children and seven teachers. Sheinbaum denied that her office was responsible for negligence concerning building permits.
Despite the incident, she was elected mayor of Mexico City in 2018. The collapse of a metro line there as a train passed on May 3, 2021 killed 27 people and injured 79. Sheinbaum rejected accusations that budget cuts were to blame for the accident, which was caused by obvious construction defects. She negotiated with the construction company, owned by magnate Carlos Slim, that built the line to obtain compensation for victims and avoid lawsuits.
"Governing is about making decisions. You have to make a decision and assume the pressures that can come from it," Sheinbaum said, according to AFP.
‘Being a scientist is an advantage’
While her mentor Lopez Obrador is known for the daily 7am press conferences he held during his presidency, Sheinbaum was an even earlier riser as Mexico City’s mayor. Three times a week at 6am sharp in a large room at City Hall, she would welcome residents who had lined up to tell her about their problems: noisy neighbourhood bars, administrative issues with pensions, public art projects, roads in need of repair. There was no filter for those who wanted an audience: all they had to do was turn up early enough to get one of the tens of “fichas” (appointments) distributed every day, reported FRANCE 24’s Laurence Cuvillier.
During the appointments, Sheinbaum listened, took notes, redirected people to her specialists or, if necessary, woke up civil servants by phone if it turned out they had not done their jobs correctly. Her focused observation of the city and direct contact with its inhabitants discreetly consolidated her reputation as a hard worker and as a humanist.
“Scientists have this quality of being trained to find the causes of a problem, and to find effective solutions,” Sheinbaum said in an interview with FRANCE 24 in 2019. “In that sense, I think being a scientist is an advantage – as much for socially oriented projects as for governance and administration. And I think there needs to be a connection between science and the political decision-making processes.”
‘This is Claudia’
In 2022, slogans and decals started to cover the walls of even the most isolated, sun-drenched villages in Mexico, proclaiming “Es Claudia” (This is Claudia) to help build a national image for a woman who had only played a political role in the nation's capital.
During a series of heated debates in the presidential campaign, an unflappable Sheinbaum avoided looking at her main opponent Galvez or even calling her by name, despite a barrage of accusations.
Galvez, an opposition candidate with Indigenous roots, branded Sheinbaum "cold and heartless", saying she lacked sympathy for child cancer patients and earthquake victims.
"I would call you the ice lady," Galvez said.
In her concession speech on Sunday, Galvez said: “I want to stress that my recognition (of Sheinbaum's victory) comes with a firm demand for results and solutions to the country's serious problems.”
Lopez Obrador congratulated Sheinbaum, a member of his ruling Morena party, with "all my affection and respect" for her projected win.
After casting her ballot, Sheinbaum revealed she had not voted for herself but for a 93-year-old veteran leftist, Ifigenia Martinez, in recognition of her struggle.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP)
Businesswoman Tomasdottir becomes Iceland's next president
Businesswoman Halla Tomasdottir was on Sunday declared the winner of Iceland's presidential election, final results showed, beating former prime minister Katrin Jakobsdottir whom critics said was too political for the post.
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Jakobsdottir conceded defeat early on Sunday and congratulated Tomasdottir, the CEO of The B Team, a global non-profit co-founded by UK business tycoon Richard Branson to promote business practices focused on humanity and the climate.
Iceland's president holds a largely ceremonial position in the parliamentary republic, acting as a guarantor of the constitution and national unity.
He or she does however have the power to veto legislation or submit it to a referendum.
Tomasdottir, 55, won 34.3 percent of votes, ahead of 48-year-old Jakobsdottir, who garnered 25.5 percent after stepping down as prime minister of a left-right government in April to run in Saturday's election.
Tomasdottir, who came second in an earlier bid for the presidency in 2016, received much broader support than opinion polls had suggested in the run-up to this year's vote, spurting in the final days of the campaign after running neck-and-neck with Jakobsdottir.
Jakobsdottir conceded defeat already in the early hours of Sunday, before the last votes were counted.
"It seems to me that Halla Tomasdottir is quickly heading towards becoming the next president of Iceland.
"I congratulate her on that and know that she will be a good president," Jakobsdottir told national broadcaster RUV at an election night rally.
Second woman president
Tomasdottir was to make a televised address to the nation later on Sunday.
During her election rally in the early hours of Sunday, she told daily Morgunbladid was "just trying to breathe".
"I feel incredibly good. I know it's not over until it's over. So I'm also just trying to stay calm and breathe," she said.
Tomasdottir is also the founder of Audur Capital, an investment firm created in 2007 aimed at promoting feminine values in the financial sector.
No one central issue dominated the campaign, where candidates traditionally run as independents without party affiliations.
In the country of 380,000 people, any citizen gathering 1,500 signatures can run for office.
While Jakobsdottir was at times seen as the favourite, political observers had suggested that her background as prime minister could weigh against her.
Among the other main candidates in the field of 13 were a political science professor, a comedian, and an Arctic and energy scholar.
Tomasdottir is set to be the second woman to serve as Iceland's president.
In 1980, Vigdis Finnbogadottir became the world's first woman democratically elected as head of state.
Tomasdottir will take over the position on August 1, succeeding the hugely popular Gudni Johannesson, who has held the job since 2016.
He announced earlier this year that he would not seek re-election.
Jakobsdottir, party leader for the Left Green Movement from 2013 until her presidential bid, has been hailed for her handling of the resurgence in volcanic eruptions on the Reykjanes peninsula since December.
The five eruptions, including one last week, have sparked a series of evacuations as well as the state's acquisition of homes from residents evacuated from the threatened fishing town of Grindavik.
(AFP)
If there was ever a reason not to celebrate the sudden death of President Raisi, the Butcher of Tehran, it is the fear of this man slithering out from under whatever rock he's been hiding under, and running for President of Iran again. If anyone is prepared to unleash nukes upon Israel, it is he...
Iranian hard-liner Ahmadinejad seeks presidency
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| You can tell by the microphones how much attention this mad man is getting |
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's hardline former President has registered to compete in the nation's elections scheduled for June 28th on the heels of the death of the former president Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash last month.
Ahmadinejad along with dozens of other candidates registered Sunday, the last day to enter the election, according to Al Jazeera. Other high-profile and contentious candidates, including moderate Ali Larijani and ultraconservative Saeed Jalili, have also entered the contest on the final day.
Ahmadinejad was first elected Iran's president in 2005 and stayed in office until 2013 when he was forced to step down by term limits. He is a former member of Iran's Revolutionary Guards.
His candidacy, however, is not a sure thing. Ahmadinejad tried to run in 2017 but was barred from doing so by the Guardian Council a year after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said entering the race was "not in his interest and that of the country."
That prompted Ahmadinejad to question Khamenei's ultimate authority and ask for checks on his power, which caused a rift between the two.
Ahmadinejad wrote to Khamenei in 2018, calling for "free" elections. It was a rare criticism of the Supreme Leader's authority.
The relationship between the two has not always been divisive. Khamenei backed Ahmadinejad in 2009 after his re-election triggered protests in which dozens of people were killed and hundreds arrested.
That incident shook the structure of the ruling theocracy at the time and security forces led by the elite Revolutionary Guards Corps stepped in to quell the unrest.
Ahmadinejad has been mostly dormant since the end of this last term and said he is only seeking office this time because he is responding to "a call from people from across the country" to run again.
He said he's confident he can resolve Iran's domestic and international issues, Al Jazeera reported.
A reporter on Sunday asked Ahmadinejad about his reaction if the Guardian Council disallows his candidacy. "Don't ask political questions," he said.
The Guardian Council will vet the presidential candidates for this month's presidential election and release a list of those who are qualified on June 11.
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