Author: Worldcrew

Four top European leaders hold talks Monday on the future of the European Union, at a time when it faces multiple crises that are sparking doubts about its very existence. 

Hosted by French President Francois Hollande at the iconic Versailles palace outside Paris, the dinner meeting that brings together German, Italian and Spanish leaders comes amid heated discussion about how to move forward the deeply troubled European Union in the face of Brexit, rising nationalism and an EU-skeptic Trump administration in Washington. 

Those issues will be hashed out during a broader EU summit March 25, coinciding with the 60th anniversary of the Rome Treaty that lay the now-crumbling foundations for the future bloc. 

“The EU is in a very dangerous situation.It could collapse,” said analyst Philippe Moreau Defarges, of the French Institute for International Relations, in Paris, echoing the concerns of a number of other experts and politicians.

Last week, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker offered a framework for the broader European discussions, laying out five possible paths for the 28-member bloc, soon to be 27, with the departure of Britain. They range from even tighter integration, to the idea of a “multi-speed” Europe, with groups of “willing” countries moving ahead in specific areas like defense.

Yet like many other issues, EU members cannot agree on the options, and the limited-attendance Versailles meeting may not have much impact. All four leaders are in a weakened position, starting with host Hollande, who has only weeks left in his presidency. 

“It’s not a political meeting, it’s a sentimental and emotional meeting to say, ‘This European Union is very important and we must save it,” Defarges said. “Even if they agree on something practical, they don’t have the capacity to implement it.”

In Brussels, the two EU leaders also are in a fragile position.European Council President Donald Tusk’s bid for a second term this spring is opposed by his own Polish government, although many member states support it. Jean Claude Juncker, who heads the EU executive arm, says he will step down in 2019.

Speaking to the European Parliament last week, Juncker urged governments to “stop Brussels-bashing, stop EU-bashing.”

But doing so may prove challenging, and the bloc’s problems may deepen depending on the outcome of key elections in several member states. 

Populism a threat

In France and the Netherlands, far-right, anti-EU parties are leading in the polls. The results are particularly crucial when it comes to France, whose post-war coal and steel pact with Germany lay the foundations for the future bloc. 

Far-right National Front head Marine Le Pen, favored to win the first round of French presidential elections in April, calls for renegotiating France’s relationship with the EU and holding a “Frexit” referendum if that fails. 

In the Netherlands, far-right candidate Geert Wilders has pledged to leave the euro and the EU. Both populists favor closing their national borders and rejecting the kinds of global trade agreements the EU supports. 

One of the top EU champions, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, also faces rising populism and a tough election year, although her key Social Democratic rival, Martin Schulz, is the former EU parliament head and also pro-Europe.

Within the bloc, there are also deep divisions over what kinds of reforms are needed. Several Eastern European and Balkan nations oppose creating a “multi-speed” Europe, fearing they will be left behind. 

“We categorically declare ourselves against the creation of the so-called core of Europe and the rest, the periphery,” Bulgaria’s interim Deputy Prime Minister Denitsa Zlateva said last week. 

The four leaders meeting in Versailles support the concept.

“There needs to be a multi-speed Europe,” agreed analyst Moreau Defarges, offering the example of the euro currency, embraced by some but not all EU members. “The problem is are these four countries able to create a European hard core? My feeling is no.”

Whatever reforms EU members do agreed on will inevitably take time.Juncker has set out a starting calendar of 2019, by which time Britain presumably will have quit the bloc. That is too slow, some say. 

Europe “needs to go much more quickly and much more strongly,” Guillaume Klossa, founder of Europa Novaa think-tank told France’s Journal du Dimanche. 

What kind of deal the EU strikes with Britain will also be key. A so-called ‘hard Brexit’ without any trade deal between the two sides, would be deeply damaging, many say. 

“It would be a disaster,” Moreau Defarges said, “for the European Union and for Britain.
…

Sinn Fein, the Irish nationalist party, has fallen just short of becoming the largest party in elections for the Northern Ireland Assembly.

In results declared early Friday, the Democratic Unionist Party led with 28 seats, just one more than Sinn Fein’s total.

At stake in the outcome from Thursday’s snap election is the revival or demise of power-sharing between Irish Catholics and British Protestants, the central objective of the U.S.-brokered Good Friday peace accord nearly two decades ago.

Seeking to be No. 1

Sinn Fein was seeking to overtake the Protestants of the Democratic Unionists and become the No. 1 party for the first time in Northern Ireland, an achievement that would have given Sinn Fein the right to the top government post of first minister.

Sinn Fein’s new leader in Northern Ireland, 40-year-old Michelle O’Neill, was mobbed by supporters as the results rolled in.

O’Neill, the daughter of an Irish Republican Army veteran with childhood memories of the conflict that claimed 3,700 lives, represents a leadership shift within Sinn Fein to the first post-war generation following the IRA’s 1997 cease-fire and 2005 disarmament.

Thin margin of core support

Friday’s final Northern Ireland-wide total of first-preference votes, the core measure of party popularity, showed the Democratic Unionists narrowly on top with 28.1 percent, down 1 point from the last election 10 months ago. Sinn Fein trailed with 27.9 percent, up 4 points, the narrowest sectarian gap in Northern Ireland electoral history.

Commentators credited the Sinn Fein surge to Catholic voters’ anger at the Democratic Unionists, especially outgoing First Minister Arlene Foster, who was blamed for overseeing a wasteful green energy program and for fostering a culture of insults and disrespect toward Sinn Fein.

Voter turnout reached nearly 65 percent, 10 points higher than last year.

Former Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness triggered the election by resigning in January, declaring the vote a referendum on Foster’s leadership. McGuinness, a former IRA commander recently diagnosed with a rare and often fatal disease, didn’t seek re-election. 

 
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Cardinal Joseph Zen, the most senior Roman Catholic figure in China, says he is deeply skeptical about a reputedly imminent agreement between Chinese leaders in Beijing and Pope Francis in the Vatican.

Zen, the former bishop of Hong Kong, told VOA he is most concerned about the possibility that a rapprochement between China and the Vatican will give China’s government a role in the nomination of Catholic bishops there.

A deal between the church and the communist government would be seen by many as a diplomatic coup for Pope Francis, after more than six decades of difficult relations with China. But it is feared such an agreement could carry with it a resolution in China’s favor of the highly controversial issue of selecting bishops.

Pope choice of bishops is key

Reports of an agreement between the church and the Chinese leadership have been building for months, but details of what that agreement might consist of are still unverified.

Zen, who retired in 2009, freely admits he is an outspoken opponent of China’s communist-dominated system of government. 

“In the present situation,” he told VOA, “I cannot see how there might be a good deal” to be struck between the Vatican and Beijing.

In earlier interviews, the 85-year-old senior cleric has spoken more pungently, telling Britain’s Guardian newspaper, for example, that giving Beijing’s secular authorities a role in choosing Catholic bishops would be a “surrender” by the Vatican, and that “the people sooner or later will see the bishops are puppets of the government and not really the shepherds of the flock.”

Zen, interviewed by telephone from Hong Kong, told VOA the only acceptable way to include Chinese authorities in the choosing of new bishops is “if nomination starts and ends with the pope.”

If Beijing accepts the primacy of the Vatican in ecclesiastical matters, Zen said, “there’s hope to have a good agreement. But if it begins with the government, it is not acceptable.”

Troubled church-state history

China expelled Catholic missionaries after the Communist Party took power in 1949 and broke relations with the Vatican in 1957. Since then, the government has allowed Catholics to practice only in churches overseen by the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, an official organization staffed in part by communist officials.

“Patriotic Catholics” do not recognize the pope’s authority in the appointment of bishops or other church matters, despite Catholic doctrine that requires bishops to be named and appointed by the Vatican. Bishops in China are, in effect, appointed by the government.

That dilemma prompted many Chinese Catholics loyal to the pope to go underground years ago.

The Catholic News Agency reported that an agreement with China is a major effort of the current pope, and the highly charged issue of which entity will have greater say in appointing bishops is central to talks that have been under way for months. Those talks hit a bump in December, however, when a bishop supported by the Beijing government but not approved by the Vatican ordained a new group of senior Chinese clerics.

The current leader of the Hong Kong diocese, Cardinal John Tong, wrote in his diocesan newspaper three weeks ago that if Beijing and the Holy See agree that both sides have a role in appointing bishops, Chinese Catholics will have “essential freedom” but lack “entire freedom.”

‘Genuine or fake freedom’?

Zen likened this stance to elections in Hong Kong, where voters want universal suffrage and the right to directly nominate candidates for the former British territory’s chief executive. China insisted that candidates would not be chosen by a popular vote, but rather picked by a pro-Beijing committee. 

“It is the question of genuine or fake freedom, not the question of full or partial freedom,” Zen told VOA.

Zen said he believes Catholics who remain loyal to the pope and who have long worshiped underground are concerned that the Vatican may abandon them. 

“If there’s a bad agreement, the underground believers, and even some priests and believers belonging to the official church in China would feel that they have been betrayed … because they have suffered for so long just for being loyal to the Roman Church and the Holy See.”

To Zen, the key issue in China-Vatican relations centers on whether Beijing is willing to relinquish control of religious affairs.

“The government is going to control the church, which is a big problem,” he said. “The government has no plan, or will, to give up control over the church. They have been doing so for so many years, so how can they let it go? There’s absolutely no reason, right?

“The most important thing for the Communist Party is to control,” he said. “You can only do what the party allows you to do.”
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Georgia, responding to an intervention from a European court, on Friday suspended a ruling from a domestic court that had placed the country’s biggest independent TV station under the control of a close ally of the government.

The country’s supreme court on Thursday ordered broadcaster Rustavi 2 returned to its former co-owner, businessman Kibar Khalvashi, in a move critics at home and abroad called an attempt to muzzle the media.

Rustavi 2’s attorneys challenged the ruling at the European Court of Human Rights, which on Friday ordered its temporary suspension.

“We will follow this procedure,” Justice Minister Tea Tsulukiani told reporters, adding that the Strasbourg-based court had also instructed the government to abstain “from interfering with the broadcaster’s editorial policy in any manner.”

Government officials have accused the popular TV station of bias, while critics fear Khalvashi — a close supporter of the ruling Georgian Dream party — will silence the only strong media voice critical of the government.

President weighs in

President Giorgi Margvelashvili, who is at odds with the ruling party, on Friday added his voice to earlier U.S. and OSCE criticism of the ownership change.

“The international community perceives the process … not as a court case, but as a political process, which impacts media freedom and the pluralistic environment in Georgia,” he said in a televised statement.

Tsulukiani said the European court’s interim measure was in force until March 8, when it would examine the case further.

The TV station has been fighting court battles in Georgia since August 2015, when a lower court found in favor of Khalvashi, who says he was forced to give up his controlling stake under the former government of Mikheil Saakashvili.

The Supreme Court judgment confirmed that ruling Thursday.

Georgian Dream defeated Saakashvili’s party in an election in 2012 and strengthened its hold on power in another ballot in October 2016.
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Nationalist Serbian lawmakers booed the European Union’s top diplomat Federica Mogherini on Friday as she addressed their parliament during tour aimed at addressing concerns about rising tensions in the Balkans.

Mogherini’s trip to all six Western Balkans states, still scarred by wars fought in 1990s along political, ethnic and religious lines, is meant to lay the groundwork for an EU foreign ministers meeting on Monday and a summit on Thursday.

Several EU leaders have expressed alarm at a variety of problems there and some blame Russia for seeking to destabilize the region, EU officials say.

At Mogherini’s speech to the Serbian parliament, members of the Serbian Radical party chanted: “Serbia! Russia! We don’t need the [European] Union!”

Four deputies from the nationalist Dveri party held banners reading: “Serbia does not trust Brussels.”

Playing down the heckles during a speech that focused on the EU accession talks which Serbia hopes to complete by 2019, Mogherini later told reporters: “It is not nice to be rude to a lady!”

Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic’s pro-EU coalition has a comfortable majority in parliament but the popularity of pro-Russian nationalists is on the rise. In 2016, the Radicals returned to the Serbian assembly after several years.

Next Week’s Summit

At their summit next week, EU leaders are expected to reaffirm their commitment “to support stability and to deepen political and economic ties with and within the region,” according to an early draft of their joint statement.

That is despite weariness in EU states including France and the Netherlands where eurosceptic parties pose a challenge to the status quo in their own elections in coming weeks.

The EU has made Serbia’s accession conditional on normalizing its ties with Kosovo but tensions have been on the rise this year. Serbia’s ally Moscow refuses to recognize the 2008 independence of Kosovo, which has an association agreement with the EU.

Their neighbor Macedonia – which aspires to join both EU and NATO – has not been able to form a government since elections in December as the president has refused to give a mandate to a coalition that includes ethnic Albanians.

A genocide lawsuit that Bosnia lodged against Serbia at the International Court of Justice angered Bosnian Serbs as well as officials in neighboring Serbia.

In Montenegro, both pro-Western and anti-Western opposition parties are boycotting the parliament following a recent vote in which they say people were intimidated to back the government.

Russian Influence?

Russia opposes the accession of Balkan states into the EU has accused Europe and NATO of meddling in Macedonia’s political crisis.

The EU believes Moscow is encouraging Bosnia’s Serbs to seek independence and may have encouraged a move to unseat Montenegro’s leader as he seeks to join NATO.

A border dispute between ex-Yugoslav EU members Croatia and Slovenia, adds to the mix of instability, EU officials say.
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Irish government investigators said Friday that up to 800 remains of babies have been discovered in a mass grave at a former Catholic home for unmarried mothers.

The discovery confirmed a local historian’s claim that the children may be in an unmarked grave at the former Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in the western Irish town of Tuam.

Ireland’s Mother and Baby Homes Commission said excavations revealed an underground structure that contained “significant quantities of human remains.”

The commission said DNA analysis confirmed the ages of the children ranged from 35 weeks to three years. Records show the babies died between 1925 and 1961, the last year the home was open.

Burying the remains of babies in unmarked graves was a relatively common practice at Catholic-run homes in Ireland when there were high mortality rates in the early 20th century.

The government launched an investigation in 2014 after local historian Catherine Corless found death certificates for nearly 800 children who resided at the facility, but a burial record for only one baby.

“Everything pointed to this area being a mass grave,” Corless said. She recalled how boys playing in the area had reported seeing a pile of bones hidden in an underground chamber in the mid-1970s.

The Catholic church operated many of Ireland’s social services in the 20th century. Some housed tens of thousands of unmarried pregnant women, including rape victims.

Unmarried women and their babies were then viewed as a stain on Ireland’s reputation as a fervently-Catholic country.

The fathers of some of the babies were powerful figures, such as priests, the wealthy, and married men.

The Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, Katherine Zappone, said the news was “sad and disturbing.” She added that an investigation would continue and a decision would be made to determine what should happen with the remains.
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France’s next president may be a 39-year-old maverick former economy minister, affiliated with no mainstream political party and with no experience running for office.  Until now.

On Thursday, and with less than two months to go before the first round of voting, independent centrist Emmanuel Macron finally unveiled his full political platform, outlining proposals ranging from downsizing France’s parliament and slashing government bureaucracy, to embracing closer European Union cooperation, fighting nepotism and rewarding businesses that hire from low-income neighborhoods.

The former investment banker also positioned himself as a champion of the middle and working classes, as he described growing up in a midsize French town and being educated in”the schools of the Republic.”

Once dismissed as a passing fad with no tangible proposals, Macron is now in second place behind far-right National Front candidate Marine Le Pen ahead of the first round of voting April 23, but according to many surveys, he could win the May 7 runoff.

Macron’s ‘young but he really listens’

New polls out this week confirm the trend, with the latest by Elabe finding Macron behind far-right front runner Le Pen 24 percent to 27 percent in the first round, with former conservative prime minister Francois Fillon trailing in third place, with 19 percent. It found Macron beating Le Pen in the second-round with 62 percent of the vote.

Wading into a farm fair outside Paris earlier this week, a must-attend event for all presidential wannabes, Macron got a taste of deep voter discontent, as he wiped off the goo from an egg pelted at his head during the visit.

But he gets the vote of 71-year-old Joseph Rolland, whose son is a cattle farmer near Nantes, in western France.

“He’s young but he really listens,” Rolland said.  “People say he has no political experience, but he’ll surround himself with competent people. We need change.”

Hiring scandal hurts Fillon

Fillon, once-considered a shoe-in to become France’s next president, is struggling for survival amid a parliamentary jobs hiring scandal involving his family.

With Fillon’s support base vanishing, some conservatives are calling for another ex-prime minister, Alain Juppe, to step up and take his place. A Harris Interactive poll finds three-quarters of French want Fillon to abandon a race that 80 percent believe he will lose.

Le Pen’s immunity lifted

Le Pen and her party also face a corruption investigation regarding questionable hiring practices, in this case involving European Parliament funds. She refuses to pay a $300,000 parliament fine or to appear before magistrates before the elections, citing her immunity as an European Union lawmaker.

Thursday, the parliament voted to lift Le Pen’s immunity on a separate matter involving tweeting graphic images of Islamic State militant group killings in 2015.

“Emmanuel Macron wants to situate himself in the intersection of the right and left,” French analyst Bruno Cautres told Le Midi Libre newspaper in an overall assessment of his platform. “His program offers economic measures of the center right … and also social dimensions and investments in the future, like training and the environmental transition.”

Favors European Union

Macron also calls for closer ties to the European Union and for shoring up the eurozone, in sharp contrast with Le Pen, who wants to hold a Frexit referendum on leaving the bloc if it doesn’t renegotiate French membership.

“For the European Union, the best candidate is Macron,” said analyst Philippe Moreau Defarges of the French Institute of International Relations in Paris. “But can he be elected? There are a lot of question marks. He’s got no political machine. He’s a young man. He’s inexperienced, he’s never been elected.”

Macron, who speaks fluent English, also drew sharp differences with the U.S. administration on free trade and climate change.

But he also outlined areas of cooperation with the U.S., including intelligence sharing on Iraq and Syria and said he would pursue a strategic relationship with Washington as president.

Make France business friendly

Macron has long rebelled being pigeon-holed, joining the leftist government of President Francois Hollande as economy minister.  His legislation to make France more business friendly, voted in as the Macron law,’ and new labor reform proposals were watered down amid protests and strikes.

Last April, he launched his “En Marche!” or “Forward!” movement, which he describes as neither right nor left.  A few months later, he resigned to prepare for his presidential candidacy, a move critics called a betrayal to Hollande, his former mentor.  The deeply unpopular Hollande ultimately chose not to run for re-election.

Macron is the son of a doctor, who studied philosophy before graduating from the elite Ecole Nationale d’Administration, he is married to his high school French teacher, who is 20 years his senior.

 
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Serbia’s outgoing prime minister, Aleksandar Vucic, reassured European Union officials visiting Belgrade on Wednesday that his country remains committed to joining the European bloc — but he cautioned that Serbs also want to pursue traditional ties with “friends from the East.”

And in recent months, those friends in the Kremlin have been busy, say Western officials and analysts.

From offering help with disaster relief to supplying sophisticated weaponry, including warplanes, the Kremlin is seeking to expand its influence in the Balkans, a region Moscow has viewed historically as in its sphere of influence, they warn.

Moscow’s diplomatic offensive apparently is paying off. A recent Gallup poll suggests a majority of Serbs views Russia as a more dependable ally than NATO, an organization Belgrade officially wants to join.

“Serbia is on its European path, because we think that we belong to this type of society; we would like to join the countries who believe in democracy, entrepreneurship, human rights,” Vucic told the European officials.

He warned, though, that ordinary Serbs “often see the EU as a machine for pressure over Kosovo,” a reference to the as-yet-unresolved status of the onetime Serbian province, which declared formal independence in 2008.

Serbia has withheld recognition of Kosovo — as has Russia.

Many Serbs frowned on former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and cheered President Donald Trump’s election, a reflection of their residual anger over NATO’s bombing of Serbia in 1995 and 1999 during the Balkans War ordered by her husband, then-President Bill Clinton. They had hoped the new U.S. president would change course on U.S.-Balkans policy and favor Belgrade in the unresolved dispute over Kosovo’s status. 

American officials, though, have dashed Serbian hopes with recent statements indicating Washington’s support for Kosovo will remain unwavering during the Trump presidency.

Those statements included a call by the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, for the breakaway province to become a full member of the U.N.

“In Kosovo, while more must be done to strengthen governance and the rule of law, the United States believes that the international community must recognize Kosovo’s great strides since independence,” Haley said February 21 at the U.N. Security Council.

Heightened tensions

Kosovo’s status is just one issue dividing the Balkans. Others include whether to tilt geopolitically to the East or West, and border disputes. Ethnic tensions are on the rise in Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Montenegro. Bosnia remains split among Serbs, Bosnians and Croats, and the wounds of the vicious three-year-long war of the 1990s have not yet begun to heal.

All the issues are adding to tensions in the Balkans just as the region turns into a political battleground between a revanchist Russia and an uncertain West, say pro-West Balkan politicians.

Last week, neighboring Montenegro’s former prime minister accused Russia of “destructive” politics in the Balkans. His comments came in the wake of startling allegations by Montenegro officials that the Kremlin was behind an attempt in October to overthrow the country’s pro-Western government.

Milo Djukanovic, who resigned after the alleged pro-Russian plot, told Socialist Democratic Party members that Montenegro is now in the firing line of a newly assertive Russia eager to expand its influence in the Balkans. Pro-Russian opposition parties were ready to use “bloodshed and a coup” to install a pro-Kremlin government, he said.

The Kremlin has denied the allegations of Russian involvement in an election day plot that allegedly included plans to kill Djukanovic and take over the country’s parliament. Prosecutors have accused some 20 people — including two Russians — of involvement.

Russian officials have recently said Serbia, Bosnia, Macedonia and Montenegro should be seen as in Moscow’s sphere of interest and are opposed to any of them joining NATO. As with other parts of Europe, the Kremlin has been supporting openly anti-EU nationalist parties in the Balkans.

Russian ‘autocracy’

In Serbia, analysts say a clear illustration of the Kremlin’s efforts to expand its clout can be seen in the growing role Russian media are playing in the country.

In May, a report by the Center for Euro-Atlantic Studies, a pro-Western Belgrade-based policy research organization, found that 109 registered non-governmental organizations, associations and media outlets can be linked to pro-Russian lobbying efforts.

The increase in Russian media activity, according to the research group, started in 2008 in Serb areas of northern Kosovo, and increased dramatically in 2012, coinciding with pro-Serb demonstrations and the start of negotiations on the normalization of relations between Serb and Kosovo authorities under the auspices of the EU.

Pro-Russian advocacy “increased drastically in 2015 when it became clear that Serbia would begin formal negotiations with the EU, and when the intention of stronger cooperation with NATO within the Individual Partnership Action Plan [IPAP] was disclosed,” according to the authors of the study, Eyes Wide Shut.

“The replacement of democracy with autocracy, under the current Russian model, is the main goal of Russian soft power in Serbia and in the region. Other goals are the reduction of support for European integration and the discrediting of the very concept of [EU] enlargement,” the research group’s authors assert.

There also has been a noticeable increase in the influx of content sponsored by state-run Russia media outlets, such as Russia Today and Sputnik, offered for free to cash-strapped Serbian media outlets.

With elections due this year in Serbia, and the first indictments expected from an international court established in The Hague for trials of alleged historical war crimes committed during the 1990s by the ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army, tensions are likely only to increase in the Balkans.
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Serbia will hold a presidential election on April 2 that is seen as a litmus test

of Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic’s popularity, the parliamentary speaker said on Thursday.

The vote will pit Vucic, whose Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) is the largest in the ruling coalition, against the candidates of a fragmented opposition.

It will be a test of his economic reforms, which have been backed by the International Monetary Fund, as well as of efforts to bring the Balkan country of 7.3 million people closer to the European Union.

“I would like to use this opportunity to call all citizens to come out and vote and decide who will be the new president of Serbia,” speaker Maja Gojkovic said after announcing the date.

Vucic said last month he would resign several days ahead of the presidential vote. It is unclear who would be new prime minister once Vucic steps down.

The coalition, which has a comfortable majority in the 250-seat parliament, will be able to secure parliamentary approval for its candidate without calling a new election.

While the president’s role is largely ceremonial, if Vucic wins and effectively controls the parliamentary majority as party leader, he could wield huge sway over the government and a new prime minister who needs to implement restructuring reforms that could lead to job losses.

Faced with the need to cut borrowing costs and keep the deficit low, the country must sell, or make more efficient, big public companies, such as utility firms, and sell state-owned loss-making companies such as the RTB Bor copper mine.

Vucic urged Serbs to vote for a president from the same party as the government for the good of the country.

“If you have two captains each taking his side, that airplane is going straight down to abyss, and that would be a catastrophe for Serbia,” Vucic told daily Kurir on Thursday.

The SNS board decided on last month to nominate Vucic instead of incumbent Tomislav Nikolic, a former party leader who wants closer ties with Serbia’s powerful ally Russia.

The departure of Nikolic could mean quicker moves towards EU accession and a further improvement of Serbia’s ties with NATO, despite its military neutrality.
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A leading presidential candidate vowed Wednesday to press on with his campaign, despite a formal inquiry into a fake jobs scandal tainting his family and amid growing protests against political corruption in France.

Reversing an earlier promise that he would end his campaign if placed under formal investigation, conservative ex-prime minister Francois Fillon said at a press conference he would not give up despite a summons to appear before a judge March 15. He lambasted the judiciary and the media, likening the allegations against him to a political assassination.

“I won’t give up, I won’t surrender, I won’t pull out,” Fillon said, adding he counted on French voters to decide his fate rather than a biased legal procedure.”

Once considered a near shoo-in for president, the 62-year-old Fillon is now seeing his support vanish, a process that gathered tempo Wednesday as a key member of his campaign team stepped down and the center-right Union of Democrats and Independents (UDI) party allied with his campaign announced it was suspending its participation.

Shortly after Fillon’s remarks, Bruno Le Maire quit his campaign team as foreign affairs adviser, citing Fillon’s failure to keep his promise and withdraw should a formal investigation be opened.

Fillon was also booed during an afternoon visit to an agricultural fair outside Paris that is considered a must-attend event for presidential candidates.

Fillon “is losing his nerves” and “his sense of reality,” independent candidate Emmanuel Macron told French TV. Macron is running neck-and-neck with Fillon in second place, and his presidential bid will likely be boosted by his rival’s struggles.

Fillon’s announcement caps a campaign rocked by stunning upsets, with establishment favorites ousted from the race and the far-right eyeing its first real chance to capture the presidency during the April-May voting.

Fillon not alone

A French judge is investigating allegations that Fillon’s wife and two children were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for work they did not do. He is hardly the only politician mired in scandal. Far-right frontrunner Marine Le Pen and her National Front party also face allegations of misusing European Union funds to pay member of her staff for non-existent party jobs.

But the allegations targeting Fillon are particularly rankling, given his “Mr. Clean” image and his calls for public sacrifice and spending cuts – even as his family allegedly enriched itself on taxpayers’ money.

By contrast, French do not view Le Pen and her party as having personally enriching themselves from the allegedly fictitious jobs – and analysts suggest Le Pen’s anti-EU credentials may be burnished by the perceptions she has cheated the bloc.

Le Pen has also refused to be questioned by police, citing her immunity as a member of the EU parliament — although she lost that immunity this week over another matter.

Scandals have long entwined French political life, touching a slew of politicians, including former presidents Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy. Sarkozy was ordered to stand trial last month on charges of illegally financing his failed 2012 re-election bid. Chirac was given a suspended sentence six years ago after being convicted of graft when he was mayor of Paris.

But voter tolerance appears to be fading. Thousands joined recent anti-corruption protests across the country, including a small march to the National Assembly in Paris Wednesday afternoon. Those numbers pale compared with those of recent anti-corruption protests in Romania.

‘At all levels’

“The problem with corruption is [it’s] at all levels and concerns many more politicians than people think,” Greens Party lawmaker Isabelle Attard told local newspaper 20 Minutes of French corruption.  

Those sentiments are echoed by some French voters.

“He talks about equality for everyone, but according to the allegations he’s hired his wife and children for jobs they’re not necessarily qualified to do,” says 18-year-old student Solene Papegauy of Fillon. “That kind of injustice disgusts me.”

But 62-year-old Christian Humeau said he could tolerate a bit of graft.

“I’d rather have a politician who’s intelligent and good for the country, even if he robs a bit, than a stupid saint,” Humeau said, adding he would probably vote for Fillon.

But Fillon’s criticism of the judiciary drew a swift rebuttal by leftist President Francois Hollande, who is not running for re-election.

“I solemnly stand against all questioning of magistrates as they investigate and study cases in the respect of the rule of law,” Hollande said in a statement in which he described Fillon’s remarks as “extremely serious.”

Beyond questioning the impartiality of the judiciary, Fillon has also attacked the media, accusing it of having lynched and assassinated him politically.

The fake jobs allegations were first reported by satirical French newspaper Le Canard Enchaine. The scandal quickly earned the nickname “Penelopegate” in reference to Fillon’s wife, Penelope, who allegedly earned nearly $1 million as a parliamentary assistant and for editorial work that she may not have done.

Since then, new reports revealed his son and daughter also earned parliamentary salaries for questionable jobs.
…

It was his eighth failed attempt at getting into the European Union and Tahir claims that, just like half of his previous efforts, it ended in violence.

Tahir, who requested his entire name not be disclosed to protect his identity, is from Pakistan. He is among an estimated few hundred migrants and refugees camped out in scattered locations on the Serbian border with Hungary.

Unwilling to play the waiting game at the 17 official camps scattered across Serbia, he and others are trying to make their way across the heavily guarded fence.

“We were walking in Hungary for 12 hours, near to a motorway,” he told VOA from his current home, the crumbing remains of what was once a brick factory on the Serbian side of the border.

“But they must have traced us and when they caught us, they gave us a harsh punishment — they beat us,” he said.”

Tahir’s account is impossible to verify, but as Hungary takes ever more strident measures to keep refugees from crossing illegally, concerns are mounting that violent and degrading treatment is increasingly being meted out to those who take their chances.

Beaten with batons

A volunteer organization named Fresh Response, which provides water, clothing and other necessities to refugees living along the Serbian border, has been collecting testimony from refugees and migrants, who say they experienced mistreatment before being returned to Serbia.

“What we know from reading the testimonies is that phases of abuse include pepper spray into the eyes, dogs being released on people — they’re muzzled, so using their claws — and people being beaten with batons,” Dan Song, of Fresh Response, said.

“In other testimonies people claim they have been forced to remove their clothes and lay down in the snow for 20 or 30 minutes,” Song added.

He said the alleged violence was not new. After a drop during autumn, incidents of alleged abuse were seen rising again, he added.

Song estimated that refugees and migrants now caught illegally trying to cross the border faced a 50 percent chance of experiencing similar treatment if caught on the Hungarian side of the border.

Other groups have documented such incidents, too.

A report titled Pushed Back at the Door, released last month by nongovernmental organizations from five eastern European EU member states, looked at the methods used to repel migrants and refugees.

The report claimed legalization last year in Hungary legitimizing “push-backs,” which allow refugees caught within 8 kilometers of the border to be returned to the country they had just left, contravened EU obligations to those seeking protection.

Furthermore, it called the “widespread nature of reports on violence” inflicted on refugees trying to get into Hungry, as well as Bulgaria, a “serious concern.”

Slim chances

Meanwhile, the chances of crossing legally continue to decrease.

There are about 7,500 refugees and migrants in Serbia, and roughly 6,000 places in the country’s official camps.

Nearly everyone wants to move on to either Croatia or Hungary; as European nations, the refugees and migrants see them as a gateway to the rest of the EU.

Yet with the Hungarian border recently reducing the number of refugees and migrants allowed through daily down to 10, many are eschewing a formal process that by some estimates now may take years rather than months — and not even allow them to cross once they have waited.

“There is a lack of trust towards going into camps,” said Andrea Contenta of Medicins San Frontieres [Doctors Without Borders], before adding that many also feared being expelled from Serbia once they had entered camps.

“The whole system is jammed,” Contenta said.

Facing that reality, many take their chances with smugglers or by going it alone into Hungary, where the reception seems ever more hostile.​

Protecting the borders

“If we want Europe to stay the way as we know it, we must protect its outer borders, including the sea borders — with military forces, if needed,” Laszlo Toroczkai, the mayor of Assothalom, a Hungarian village near the border with Serbia that has reportedly sought to ban public practice of the Muslim faith, as well as “homosexual propaganda.”

Hungary completed the erection of a barbed-wire fence separating it from Serbia in September 2015, and, since then, has ramped up efforts to keep refugees and migrants out, including the ongoing effort to recruit 3,000 so-called “border hunters.”

Toroczkai is head of his own, strongly anti-refugee government. He set up the village’s five-person patrol team in early 2014, which works alongside national and international authorities patrolling the border.

But when it comes to charges of disproportionate use of force — something he says he only “hears about from journalists” — Toroczkai is adamant.

Emphasizing that people are crossing illegally, he says force is only used as a response to provocation.

“If one behaves violently and doesn’t obey the police order, doesn’t stop when he’s instructed to, and assaults the police officers, in the U.S. he would probably be shot,” Toroczkai said. “Here in Hungary the worst thing that can happen to him is getting sprayed with tear gas or having dogs set on them.”

Unprovoked

A former computer sciences student, Tahir claims he did nothing to provoke a beating.

As a relief from the harshness of his surroundings, Tahir scrolls through pictures of his home — Swat, the mountainous Pakistani district once controlled by the Taliban.

After three months living near the border, though, there are only so many times he is willing to endure these conditions, and risk more violence.

“This is not a life I have here. I feel like no one can help us,” Tahir said. “I feel hopeless.”
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Vladimir Jehlicka and his business partners spent 25 years building up their Czech machinery firm before deciding to call it a day.

However, they faced a problem that is growing as the first generation of post-communist entrepreneurs nears retirement.

Their children weren’t interested in running the shop but equally Jehlicka and his three partners didn’t want to sell their life’s work simply to the highest bidder: securing a future for the firm was as important as the sale price.

In the end they found a suitable buyer for STS Olbramovice, which employs 90 people making cattle feeders and other farm machinery. The sale went through in January, part of a business that is long-established in western Europe but new and rapidly expanding in former communist countries such as the Czech Republic: managing ownership succession at family firms.

“We decided to sell after a long hesitation,” 63-year-old Jehlicka said. “Our children’s focus is very varied, there was no interest to take over running the firm.”

“Our main criterion for picking a future owner was a pledge to maintain production and jobs,” he told Reuters.

Four decades of communism largely eliminated legal private enterprise in the country and its neighbors such as Hungary, Slovakia and Poland. But after 1989, managers or employees often clubbed together to buy frequently decrepit state enterprises, while other entrepreneurs started businesses from scratch.

A quarter century later, many of these owners now need to hand over what have become valuable firms. Some find successors in the family; most look for other options including management buy-ins or a sale, creating an opportunity for investors.

Sales of family firms are in vogue. Consultants KPMG said they accounted for 30-40 percent of the Czech transactions it took part in over the last two years in the 20 million-60 million euro range.

The country’s small bourse and cheap acquisition financing mean direct sales are preferred to stock market floats.

The trend is likely to accelerate in Slovakia as well.

“This is a transition from the first founder generation to the second. In several firms it is already happening, in most it will happen in the upcoming period,” said Mario Fondati, a Bratislava-based partner at Amrop consultancy.

A good match

Jehlicka’s firm, based in the village of Olbramovice about 50 km (30 miles) south of Prague, has annual sales of 5 million euros ($5.3 million) and EBITDA operating profits nearing half a million euros. In SkyLimit Industry it believes it has found a buyer that is a good match.

SkyLimit is a new Czech investment fund that targets machinery-making firms facing generational change, with up to 500 million crowns ($20 million) in annual sales. It took on another fund, RSJ Investments SICAV, as a junior partner in buying STS Olbramovice.

SkyLimit says it wants to keep its holdings for the long term, acting more like a strategic investor, and help company managements in making major decisions.

STS was its first transaction — it says only that the price was in the single millions of euros — and plans about two to three purchases a year to build a group of manufacturing firms.

The fund’s board member Michal Bakajsa told Reuters that smaller industrial companies in the sector can be found at lower multiples of their operating earnings than bigger firms. It aims to assure sellers of their businesses’ future and make sure there are managers who will stay on under the new ownership.

“Many companies reject classic financial investors, they fear what would happen with them. Many are in smaller towns, the people know each other, the owners employ people for many years, they are often friends,” Bakajsa said. “We look at companies that have in some way an independently functioning management, where the company does not stand and fall with the owner.”

Petr Kriz, head of mergers and acquisitions at consultancy EY in Prague, said there were 310 M&A transactions in the Czech market last year, up from 185 in 2015. A few dozen were related to succession, with the market in general lifted by a surplus of liquid capital.

A survey by the Czech Association of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises among 400 family-type companies last year showed 60 percent would consider a sale if an attractive offer comes.

A fund run by Genesis Capital bought 75 percent last year in Quinta-Analytica, a firm supplying analysis and clinical studies for drug makers. Genesis bought the stake from three out of five owners who wanted to exit after 20 years in the business.

“[Generation shift] is an important and large share of deal origination for us,” said Genesis Capital’s managing partner Jan Tauber. “What we can offer is creating structures allowing owners to depart gradually.”

Last year Genesis sold AZ Klima, an air conditioning and cooling systems supplier, along with the firm’s founder Jiri Cizek who still held a 30 percent stake. AZ Klima’s purchase by Czech energy firm CEZ completed a five-year ownership transition: from Cizek and his partner, who together built up the firm in the early 1990s, through the financial investor Genesis to the strategic buyer CEZ.

Money-printing contest

Some entrepreneurs are reluctant to invest their wealth outside the companies they founded at a time when the loose monetary policies of the U.S. Federal Reserve, European Central Bank and Czech National Bank make good returns hard to achieve.

Zbynek Frolik, 63, founded Linet in 1990 and now employs 900 people making hospital beds for customers in over 100 countries.

He has handed over daily business to an executive director and is considering what to do next, but is not selling his 33 percent stake for now.

One reason is that the best way he knows to manage his money is to invest it back into his own business. In his experience, putting it elsewhere doesn’t work.

“You’d have to be solving the problem of what to do with money at a time when the Czech National Bank, the ECB and the Fed are all printing money like it was a contest, and everyone is looking where to invest,” he said.

Still others are looking at a philanthropic exit, such as Dalibor Dedek, 59, who founded the Jablotron group in 1990. He sold a 40 percent stake in the firm, which employs 600 making house alarms and other electronics, to its executive manager Miroslav Jarolim last year. Dedek plans to hand the rest to a charitable body and not his children.

“I want my share to be put into some foundation or an institution that will not die with me,” he told Reuters. “I did not build the firm for the family. I do not want to punish my children by forcing them to deal with money problems.”
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