[Discussion] European Politics Discussion

Nato has condemned as "totally unacceptable" attacks by demonstrators in Kosovo that left some 25 of its peacekeepers injured.

Police and Nato troops clashed with Serb protesters in the north where there has been unrest over the installation of ethnic Albanian mayors.

Tear gas and stun grenades were used to deter protesters in Zvecan, after they tried to invade a government building.

Nato soldiers also formed a security cordon around two other town halls.

The crisis dates back to April when Kosovo Serbs boycotted local elections, allowing ethnic Albanians to take control of local councils with a turnout of less than four per cent.

Both the EU and US have criticised the Kosovan authorities for destabilising the situation in north Kosovo, and warned against any actions that could inflame ethnic tensions there.

Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in February 2008, after years of strained relations between its Serb and mainly Albanian inhabitants.

It has been recognised by the United States and major European Union countries, but Serbia, backed by its powerful ally Russia, refuses to do so, as do most ethnic Serbs inside Kosovo.

While ethnic Albanians make up more than 90% of the population in Kosovo as a whole, Serbs form the majority of the population in the northern region.

Boris Johnson is standing down as the Conservative MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip, it has been reported.

The move by the former prime minister will trigger an immediate by-election.

He took the move after the Privileges Committee of the House of Commons reportedly found he misled Parliament & recommended sanction of more than 10 days.

Johnson told the Times: “It is very sad to be leaving parliament - at least for now - but above all I am bewildered and appalled that I can be forced out, anti-democratically, by a committee chaired and managed, by Harriet Harman, with such egregious bias”

Survivors from a fishing boat that sank off southern Greece in one of Europe's worst migrant disasters say up to 100 children may have been on board.

At least 78 people have already been confirmed dead in the disaster.

But many more could still be missing at sea, with reports suggesting that up to 750 people were aboard the vessel.

At least 11 arrests have been made including several Egyptians on suspicion of people trafficking, Greek TV reports.

The coastguard has been criticised for not intervening earlier but authorities say their offers of aid were refused.

Rescuers are still searching the area where the boat capsized almost 50 nautical miles off the south-west coast, as hopes of finding more survivors dwindle.

The boat had been heading to Italy from the Libyan port of Tobruk when it went down.

Images showed the decks packed with people, but accounts of a large number of women and children in the hold of the ship have come from medics who treated the mostly male survivors.

The senior doctor at Kalamata General Hospital told the BBC as many as 100 children were on the vessel.

"[The survivors] told us there were children in the bottom of the ship. Children and women," said Dr Manolis Makaris, head of cardiology.

He said two patients had given him estimated figures.

"One told me about 100 children, the other about 50, so I don't know the truth - but it is many," he added.

Dr Makaris said he believed as many as 600 people could have died in the disaster.

"The exact number of all the people who were on the boat was 750. This is the exact number that everyone told me about this," he said.

Liz Truss with the tried and true "My ideas weren't bad (even though everyone said they were awful), it's that you all didn't understand them."

Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the leader of Greece’s New Democracy party aiming for a second term in office, is on a roll. The momentum is his, the polls are looking good, and, if anything, the opposition appears assured of only one thing in the general election on Sunday: defeat.

Five weeks after more than 6 million voters gave his centre-right party a stunning 20-point victory over Syriza, the leftwing movement that stormed to power at the height of Greece’s economic crisis, the electorate is poised to repeat the result – only this time under legislation that favours the winner.

All agree it’s a ballot that is Mitsotakis’s to lose. Opinion polls on Friday showed him heading not only towards a landslide in the repeat race but a comfortable parliamentary majority afforded by an electoral law that rewards the victor with up to 50 bonus seats.

The sense of deja vu comes days after a devastating shipwreck left more than 80 people dead and hundreds missing off the Peloponnese – a disaster that has raised awkward questions over the response of a coastguard frequently accused under Mitsotakis’s watch of repelling boats carrying asylum seekers from Greek waters.

But neither that nor a train crash in February have dented his lead, even if the head-on collision of a freight and passenger train would go down as the country’s worst-ever rail accident, claiming the lives of 57 people – including many students – and sparking furious protests nationwide.

“The latest disaster has not been a gamechanger. Its effect [on the campaign] has been precisely zilch,” said Maria Karaklioumi, a political analyst at the polling company Rass. “Voters are thinking rationally. There’s a lot of self-interest at play and again and again we see them asking: ‘Who will benefit me more?’”

In Mitsotakis, the scion of a political dynasty whose father, Constantine, was prime minister in the early 90s, Greeks had discovered “a good administrator”, she said, who had overseen the debt-burdened country’s return to economic growth, brought down unemployment and reduced taxes – the byproducts of gruelling austerity demanded in return for gargantuan EU-IMF rescue packages to stave off bankruptcy.

“Voters have opted for economic security,” noted Karaklioumi. “They want normality. Under Mitsotakis the economy has stabilised.”

By contrast, Syriza’s time in office between January 2015 and July 2019 had proved to be “full of surprises”, she said, recalling the knife-edge referendum its leader, Alexis Tsipras, had called over bailout conditions. “People don’t want any more surprises. They’re looking for solutions now,” she added.

A police officer involved in the fatal shooting of a 17-year-old boy has been placed under formal investigation – akin to being charged – for voluntary homicide, as Emmanuel Macron struggles to contain spiralling public anger over the killing.

An estimated 6,000 people marched through Nanterre on Thursday in memory of the teen, identified as Nahel M. Carrying placards reading “Justice for Nahel” and led by his mother Mounia, the marchers shouted “No justice, no peace” and “Police kill”. Police fired teargas at demonstrators on the fringes of the march.

The French president held a morning crisis meeting with senior ministers after a second night of unrest and rioting across France in which public buildings were set on fire and cars torched in cities from Lille to Toulouse, as well as in the Paris suburbs.

“The last few hours have been marked by scenes of violence against police stations but also schools and town halls, and thus institutions of the republic – and these scenes are wholly unjustifiable,” Macron said.

The government is haunted by the possibility of a repeat of the weeks of sustained violent protest sparked by the death of two young boys of African origin during a police chase in 2005.

Did a quick Google.

NYTimes wrote:

Nahel , 17, was a French citizen of Algerian and Moroccan descent

I am saddened to see that cops killing black and brown kids is not strictly an American problem now.

source

‘An even bigger margin’: Mitsotakis set to win majority in Greek election

ATHENS, June 29 (Reuters) - With backing from a politician jailed for leading a party declared a criminal gang, Greek far-right groups swept up over 12% of the vote in Sunday's election, mirroring the rise of populist and ultra-nationalist politicians across Europe.

The surge of three parties with their ultra-nationalist views - including 'Spartans' which barely registered in polls until Ilias Kasidiaris from the banned Golden Dawn party endorsed it from his prison cell -- could swing public debate at home and prove a springboard in European elections.