Sweden was plunged into political crisis last month when its prime minister, Stefan Lofven, initially called for new elections to be held in March after the populist Sweden Democrats joined with the center-right opposition coalition to vote down the ruling Social Democrat and Green Party government budget. The crisis came just two months after a general election that brought the Social Democrats back to power. With the Social Democrat-Green coalition ruling as a minority, the Sweden Democrats found themselves in the powerful position of being the deciding vote in parliament. That allowed them to act on their hardline anti-immigration platform, […]
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On Jan. 1, 2015, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s flagship geopolitical project, the Eurasian Union, formally came into existence. Building on the existing Customs Union between Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan, the Eurasian Union’s official goals are to enhance its members’ economic prosperity and political influence by promoting the free flow of capital, goods, labor and services, and by coordinating their agricultural, energy, industrial and transportation sectors. Back in the fall of 2011, when still prime minister, Putin made establishing a Eurasian Union among the former Soviet republics a major theme of his successful presidential campaign. He argued that by coordinating their […]
In a reversal of historical trends, emerging countries are now going to great lengths to buy into portions of Europe’s sluggish industrial system. In the gloomy context of an old continent struggling to overcome the crisis that has been gripping its economies since 2007, businesses from developing nations are queuing to purchase valuable European assets, often in countries that were once their colonial rulers. As a consequence of the growing importance that their own countries have gained on the world stage, private and public managers from China, India and the Persian Gulf countries are now familiar figures in the governing […]
When diplomats want to explore a way out of a crisis, they like to talk about striking a “grand bargain” and try to avoid the word “climb-down,” which tends to imply an acknowledgement of failure or defeat. Nevertheless, Russia and the United States, trapped in costly confrontations over Syria and Ukraine, may need to agree to a sort of “grand climb-down” that allows the two powers to get out of unsustainable positions as painlessly as possible. Moscow and Washington both begin 2015 stuck with the consequences of poor strategic bets. Russia’s intervention in Ukraine now looks like a truly disastrous […]
Just before Russians rang in the new year, opposition activist Alexei Navalny received a three-and-a-half-year suspended sentence for alleged fraud, while his younger brother Oleg faces imprisonment for the same term. Since Oleg is not known for his political activities, the move was widely interpreted as hostage-taking, indicating that Russian President Vladimir Putin intends to silence the elder Navalny without making him a martyr. As Masha Gessen wrote in The New Yorker, “This is a familiar tactic in a state with a long legacy of terror: in the nineteen-seventies, the Soviet government forced dissidents to leave the country by making […]