Timothy Garton Ash's Blog, page 12
May 7, 2017
The French presidency goes to Macron. But it’s only a reprieve | Timothy Garton Ash
The centrist candidate’s victory over Marine Le Pen has avoided the worst – but the daunting work of reform in France and in Europe lies ahead
French election 2017: second round – liveResults tracker – as they come inLike someone who has narrowly escaped a heart attack, Europe can raise a glass and give thanks for the victory of Emmanuel Macron. But the glass is less than half full, and if Europe doesn’t change its ways it will only have postponed the fateful day.
Related: Macron wins French presidency by decisive margin over Le Pen
If Macron fails to reform France, in 2022 we may yet have a president Le Pen – either Marine or Marion Maréchal-Le Pen
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April 11, 2017
We know the price of appeasement. That’s why we must stand up to Viktor Orbán | Timothy Garton Ash
This appeasement has to stop. If Hungary’s anti-liberal, nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orbán, persists in his attempts to close down the country’s best and most independent university, and continues to erode liberal democracy in many other ways, then the EU’s powerful grouping of centre-right parties must expel Orbán’s party from its ranks.
Otherwise, the constant declarations of fidelity to certain universal values from the European People’s party (EPP) grouping will be worth less than the paper they’re written on. And the political family of German chancellor Angela Merkel, Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy, European commission president Jean-Claude Juncker and European council president Donald Tusk, to name but a few, will look like a gaggle of temporising appeasers.
Related: Hungary has been shamed by Viktor Orbán’s government | George Szirtes
Continue reading...March 30, 2017
Brexit is a tragedy, but there’s much we can do before the final act | Timothy Garton Ash
This week opened Act III of a five-act drama called Brexit. The play will take at least five years, more likely 10, and only Act V will reveal whether it is a tragedy, a farce, or some very British theatre of muddling-through. The many millions of us in Britain who identify ourselves as Europeans must not give up now, as if the show were over. It’s not, and we’re not just the audience. We are actors in this play and our main task is to persuade our fellow actors.
Act I was the referendum, Act II the run-up to triggering article 50. Act III is the two-year negotiation that, according to the Lisbon treaty, must conclude in spring 2019. Obviously that’s an important moment, but not drama’s end.
Related: May wants security, free trade, liberal values: just what we’re throwing away | Jonathan Freedland
Related: If you think Britain is angry and divided, look at the continent | Timothy Garton Ash
Continue reading...March 27, 2017
Like Trump, the Chinese leader is pushing a political system to its limits | Timothy Garton Ash
When the two most powerful men on earth, Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, meet for the summit that’s expected to take place soon in the American emperor’s summer palace, they will have one thing in common: each is testing his country’s political system to its limits.
With independent courts blocking Trump’s travel ban, the heads of his security agencies flatly contradicting his claim that Barack Obama tapped his phones, and Congress rejecting his flagship repeal of Obamacare, the checks and balances of the world’s oldest liberal democracy are at full stretch. But will even they be enough to restrain this erratic, narcissistic, egomaniac bully?
Goldman Sachs is said to estimate the chance of a financial crisis in China this year at 25%, and in 2018 at 50%
Related: 'I'm very sceptical': residents of China's growing cities discuss life amid change
Continue reading...March 2, 2017
As Erdoğan turns the screw we must stand up for human rights in Turkey | Timothy Garton Ash
Free speech is under fire. Victims of the president’s clampdown need the same kinds of support we once offered dissidents in the Soviet Union
If this newspaper were published in Turkey the rest of this column might be entirely blank, except for an author photograph at the top and the words, printed in large type, “124 days deprived of freedom”. That’s what the country’s most important surviving oppositional newspaper, Cumhuriyet, regularly prints for its imprisoned columnists – with the tally of days in jail ticking up and up. One leading columnist, Kadri Gürsel, recently sent a moving letter that begins: “I salute you all with love from B block, ward number 25 of Silivri prison number 9.”
To travel to Turkey today is to journey into darkness: tens of thousands of state employees and thousands of academics dismissed, more journalists locked up than in any other country, and a chilly mist of fear. Hasan Cemal, one of the country’s most celebrated journalists, received a 15-month suspended sentence for a piece of investigative reporting about a leader of the Kurdish PKK – good journalism which the regime travesties as “conducting terror propaganda”. (This week he received another sentence, for “insulting the president”.) Cemal calmly tells me about conditions in Turkish jails.
Related: Angela Merkel urged to ban Erdoğan over jailed German journalist
A handout from Bosphorus University students defending free speech at their uni. sweet + message @onfreespeech pic.twitter.com/bYdVuceHNa
Related: What I’ve witnessed in Turkey is an assault on democracy itself | Owen Jones
Continue reading...January 20, 2017
Under President Trump, we’ll enter an age of global confrontation | Timothy Garton Ash
Donald Trump’s arrival in the White House reflects a wider phenomenon: a new era of nationalism. He joins Vladimir Putin of Russia, Narendra Modi of India, Xi Jinping of China, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey and a score of other nationalist leaders around the globe.
Related: Trump’s China tweets are just tough talk | Melissa Chan
Related: Australia needs a new foreign policy. Tillerson’s remarks on China make it urgent | Stuart Rollo
Continue reading...January 5, 2017
As well as protesting, Poles need to strengthen their state | Timothy Garton Ash
A year ago I wrote a column warning about political developments in Poland, headlined “The pillars of Poland’s democracy are being destroyed”. There was angry reaction from supporters of Poland’s governing Law and Justice party (PiS), but a year later it’s shocking to see how far the pillars of liberal, pluralist democracy in Poland have been battered and shaken, though not yet destroyed.
Related: The EU’s Poland problem: How will Brussels react to Warsaw’s autocracy?
Such a popular mobilisation should not be necessary in a 27-year-old parliamentary democracy
Continue reading...December 21, 2016
For Europe’s sake, Angela Merkel must hold the centre ground | Timothy Garton Ash
And really we live in dark times when “to talk about trees is almost a crime/ because it involves being silent about so many atrocities!” Thus Bertolt Brecht in the 1930s and thus Europe today. Berlin now joins Madrid, Paris, London and Nice on the memorial roll of major terrorist attacks on European soil this century.
The name of Breitscheidplatz, a somewhat dreary, elongated square in the strangely centreless centre of the old West Berlin, will now become a synecdoche for terror, joining the Bataclan in Paris, the Atocha station in Madrid and the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. At the end of one of the worst years in living memory, disgraced as 2016 has been by the massive atrocity of Aleppo, there stands “Berlin”.
Could 2017 see Merkel going the way of David Cameron? And what then?
Related: Berlin truck attack: first suspect released as driver thought to still be at large – as it happened
Continue reading...December 8, 2016
Time to think the unthinkable about President Le Pen | Timothy Garton Ash
Logic is against Marine Le Pen, as it was with Trump and Brexit. No wonder people are weighing up the possible repercussions
Could President Marine Le Pen trigger article 50 without a parliamentary vote? Article 50 of the Lisbon treaty, that is, to take France out of the European Union, following Britain. Such is the question I find myself discussing in Paris with leading French experts. Provisional conclusion: since France, unlike Britain, is a presidential democracy, she could probably do it herself initially, but it would then require parliament to vote a revision of the French constitution. The mere fact that my French friends raise the question, even very hypothetically and three-quarters-jokingly, is a sign of the times. What was it Rousseau said? “To be sane in a world of madmen is in itself a kind of madness.”
Related: François Fillon is as big a threat to liberal values as Marine Le Pen | Natalie Nougayrède
Continue reading...November 24, 2016
Soft Brexit? Hard Brexit? The EU, not Britain, will decide | Timothy Garton Ash
These days, I never travel without my Brexitometer. It measures two things: the time elapsing from the opening of any conversation to the first mention of Brexit (average: three minutes) and the proportion of all those I encounter who think Brexit is a good idea. Over the past two months, I’ve been in America, Canada, Germany, Austria and Poland and the second metric is currently running at about 1%. The other 99% think we Brits have gone stark staring bonkers. How could people known throughout the world for their pragmatism, empiricism and common sense do something so obviously contrary to their own interests? The emotional timbre of this questioning is not anger or despair but rather a kind of melancholy incredulity.
Now of course Brexiteers will jeer that my 99:1 ratio only reflects the kind of irredeemable Europhiles I consort with, but actually I have sought out the widest possible range of people. Adjust the ratio if you will – 90:10, even 80:20 – but anyone who imagines that most of the world thinks Britain has done something smart is living on another planet. The fact that it may be Planet Trump is small consolation.
Forget the Brexiteers who say 'they need us more than we need them'. The continental 'them' see it differently
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