Antonio Tajani of the European People’s Party (EPP) has been elected as the European Parliament’s new president. The 63-year-old Italian defeated another Italian, S&D socialist Gianni Pitella, on Tuesday and is set to replace Germany’s Martin Schulz.

In the past, Tajani served as the spokesman for former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and as a European commissioner.

The battle among the two Italians was won by Tajani on a vote of 351-282 in the decisive final round, which only the top two candidates managed to enter.

Before voting began, the EEP, the largest group in the block’s legislature, formed a coalition with the ALDE liberals, that gave Tajani the required lead over Pittella.

“This was as democratic process and as I said today, I will be the president of all, I will respect all members of parliament and all groups,” said Tajani.

“We must devote our attention to all those who are in tough living conditions,” he added while giving a short acceptance speech, during which he also dedicated his victory to the victims of a deadly August earthquake in central Italy and all those injured by terrorism.

In a statement issued to congratulate Tajani, Pittella noted that it had been some time since the European Parliament had elected a president “in a fully transparent and open competition without any pre-arranged deals.”

“Today, the political landscape in the European Parliament is dramatically changed with the birth of a new conservative block. We will constructively oppose this block,” added Pittella.

Presstv

France’s Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, has resigned to declare himself a candidate for the presidency in an attempt to save the Socialist Party from a humiliating exit from elections next spring.

Mr Valls, 54, a reformist, launched his bid to win party primaries just four days after François Hollande announced he would not seek re-election next May.

Speaking in Evry, the gritty Paris suburb where he was long mayor, he said: “Yes, I’m candidate for the presidency.”

Culled from the Telegraph

France’s former President Nicolas Sarkozy has bid farewell to politics after conceding defeat in the first round of the country’s right-wing presidential primary.

“I did not manage to convince the voters,” said Sarkozy during a speech to his supporters given late on Sunday after partial votes showed his loss.

His former prime minister Francois Fillon took the lead in the two-round primary, which is widely expected to decide the country’s next president.

Fillon took over 43 percent of the votes while former prime minister Alain Juppe had over 26 and Sarkozy 23 percent. Sarkozy also said that he would be voting for Fillon in next Sunday’s second round, in which only two candidates progress.   “I have no bitterness, I have no sadness, and I wish the best for my country,” he added.

France’s center-right Republican Party kicked off its nominating contest earlier in the day to determine the party’s presidential candidate in the next year’s election.

With the French left remaining divided until now, the next French president will possibly either be the Republican nominee or the far-right leader Marine Le Pen.

Presstv

Jeremy Corbyn is set to be reelected as the leader of the UK’s Labour Party as polls close, his campaign says. Officials at the Corbyn campaign predicted a comfortable win for the 67-year-old despite accusations from fellow lawmakers. Corbyn, however, is predicted to gain less support than the 59.5% he managed to get in the previous round last year.

 “I think it’s going to be really tough to get the 59.5% that we got last time around because of the numbers that have been prevented from voting,” shadow chancellor John McDonnell told a meeting of supporters in Clapham, south London, on Tuesday night. “Some will argue if we dip below the 59.9% that somehow Jeremy’s mandate has lessened. If we win, no matter what, his mandate is still in place.”

The election was held after the party’s national executive committee (NEC) excluded people who joined the party since January from taking part in the leadership election. “The ruling out of 130,000 members was a disgrace, to be honest, an absolute disgrace,” McDonnell said.  “And the way it was done was even more disgraceful… We lost, I think, a large group of people who were Jeremy Corbyn supporters. I think never again should we allow that to happen.”

Corbyn himself sounded confident about the election results, set to be released before midday on Saturday. “We, all of us, have mounted a most incredible campaign, mobilized a lot of people and we’ve actually changed the political discourse in this country,” he said. According to Reuters, Owen Smith, the Labour lawmaker challenging Corbyn to the leadership, “looks set to lose.”

Presstv

Former British Prime Minister David Cameron announces his decision to resign as Conservative MP for Witney, Oxfordshire, triggering a by-election.  According to ITV news, Cameron said that he had informed Theresa May of his decision on Monday to quit and said he did not want to be a “distraction” for her.

Cameron, who was the Conservative Prime Minister in 2010-2016, had said he would continue as an MP until the next general election. The 49-year-old said he would have to “build a life outside Westminster” and said “in my view, with modern politics, with the circumstances of my resignation it isn’t really possible to be a proper backbench MP as a former prime minister.” “I think everything you do will become a big distraction and a big diversion from what the government needs to do for our country.” “I hope I will continue to contribute in terms of public service.”

He complimented May, his former home secretary, saying she had been “very understanding” and that she had “got off to a cracking start” as prime minister. Asked about his legacy, he said he hoped his time would be remembered for a strong economy and “important social reforms” and that he had transformed a Conservative Party that was “in the doldrums” into a “modernizing force”.

In June, Cameron has announced his resignation after Britons voted to leave the European Union. Cameron said he could not lead the country in the process of UK’s separation from the bloc. Theresa May was swiftly appointed as head of the UK government soon after.

Presstv

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has once again defended her stance on allowing asylum seekers into Germany despite her party’s loss at local elections apparently over the government’s refugee policy. “I consider the fundamental decisions as right, but there is much to be done to win back trust and the topic of integration will play a huge role, as well as the repatriation of those who don’t gain residency rights,” Merkel said during a speech in the lower house of the German parliament in the capital Berlin on Wednesday.

The remarks came just three days after a stunning defeat suffered by her party, the Christian Democratic Party (CDU), from an anti-refugee party in regional elections. On Sunday, Merkel’s CDU party fell to third place after the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in her home state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania. The center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) gained the first place in the contest, according to exit polls.

Merkel said her government has expedited integration measures for those refugees who are granted asylum, including by raising school funding to help their education and by trying to find solutions for local problems through working with cities and states. “The situation today is many times better than a year ago, but there remains a lot to do,” she said. Merkel has been under fire at home since last year, when she opened the country’s borders to the massive influx of asylum seekers, mostly fleeing violence in Middle Eastern and African states.

Presstv

A new poll shows Jeremy Corbyn is set to win the Labour leadership election in a landslide victory by an even bigger margin than last year. A YouGov survey  for British paper The Times found that of all those entitled to vote in the Labour leader contest, 62 percent would vote for Corbyn and only 38 percent would vote for rival Owen Smith. In a major blow to Smith, this result would represent an increase in support for Corbyn compared to the results of the 2015 leadership election – where he won 59.5 percent of the vote.

This increase in supporters would be a significant achievement given the controversial move to charge a £25 fee for new pro-Corbyn voters. The Labour Party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) ruled that only Labour members who signed up before January 12 are automatically eligible to vote. Those who joined afterwards or want a one-off vote will have to pay a fee of £25.

Corbyn has remained steadfast in staying as the party’s leader since being elected only a year ago. The 67-year-old socialist leader has been heavily criticized by the UK’s mainstream media throughout his tenure and overcame pressures to resign.

Labour has been engulfed in a bitter internal power struggle between Corbyn’s supporters in the grassroots membership and the party’s lawmakers, who overwhelmingly rejected his leadership after Britain’s vote to leave the EU. As a result, many of Corbyn’s shadow cabinet members resigned and publicly stated they had no confidence in his leadership.

Smith, a former shadow work and pension’s secretary, announced his decision to run in the Labour leadership election in June. He resigned earlier this year from Corbyn’s shadow cabinet before challenging for the leadership. Corbyn has until September 21 to appeal to voters and defeat Smith. The results will be announced in a Liverpool conference three days later.

Presstv

Nicolas Sarkozy has announced he will seek his party’s nomination to stand in next year’s French presidential election. The rightwinger, who was nicknamed “the hyper-president” for his frenetic term in power from 2007 to 2012, had made no secret of his ambition to reconquer the Élysée palace and avenge his 2012 defeat by the Socialist François Hollande

After weeks of suspense in which he grabbed media headlines by presenting an increasingly hardline stance on national identity and the place of Islam in France, Sarkozy launched his campaign with an announcement on social media and a link to the first chapter of a book, Everything for France, which he will publish this week.

“The next five years will be filled with danger but also with hope,” he wrote. He listed what he said were the five major challenges facing France, including defending French identity, restoring lost competitiveness and enforcing state authority.

Sarkozy said France’s “top battle” was over how “to defend our lifestyle without being tempted to cut ourselves off from the rest of the world”.

In his fight to win his party’s nomination, the 61-year-old candidate is putting forward a platform of policies that veer even further to the far right than in 2012, when he set out to win over voters from Marine Le Pen’s Front National.

He wants to ban the Muslim headscarf from universities and public companies, limit the French nationality rights of children born to foreign parents, and Alain Juppé meaning Muslim and Jewish children would no longer be offered a substitute meal.

He has also scoffed at what he called “legal niceties” in the fight against terrorism, prompting the left to warn that his treatment of suspected jihadis could be akin to that of Guantánamo Bay.

For the first time, the French right and centre is holding an open contest to choose its presidential candidate. Anyone on the electoral register can vote if they pay €2 (£1.72) and sign a pledge saying they adhere to “the values of the right and centre”. Up to three or four million people could turn out to vote in the two-round ballot on 20 and 27 November.

Sarkozy is the challenger and not the favourite in the right’s primary race. The leader in the polls and currently France’s favourite politician is Alain Juppé the mayor of Bordeaux and a former prime minister, who served as Sarkozy’s foreign minister.

Juppé, 71, has undergone a staggering image transformation. Twenty years ago he was the most loathed prime minister in modern times after his pension changes brought 2 million people on to the streets in protest. Now he is seen as a calm, elder statesman and a moderate, pushing pro-business structural reform and less divisive on identity issues.

Sarkozy believes that the climate of fear and anxiety in France after the deaths of more than 230 people in terrorist attack claimed by Islamists in the past 19 months means the nation needs a man of authority such as himself.

One hurdle for Sarkozy beyond winning over right and centre-right sympathisers is his lasting unpopularity among the wider French population who still dislike his abrasive personality and his hard-to-shake-off label of “president of the rich”.

He must also get around his lacklustre economic record in office – he promised to restore the values of work and reward, yet left France with many more unemployed – as well as judicial investigations into party financing relating to his 2012 presidential campaign, in which he denies any wrongdoing.

The Guardian

UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn says the challenge to his leadership has created a “massive opportunity” to unite people across the country. Addressing up to 10,000 of his supporters at a campaign event in Liverpool on Monday, Corbyn said the ongoing battle for leadership in the party provides an opportunity to unite Britons against the “Tory philosophy.”

“I don’t see this leadership contest as a distraction,” said Corbyn. “I see it as a massive opportunity to reach out to people all across this country and have the strength and confidence [to stand up to] those who tell us that nothing we’re trying to do is possible, that what we have to do is compromise with the Tory philosophy and free market ideas and all will be well.”

Corbyn, who needs to beat former BBC producer Owen Smith in order to keep his throne as the opposition leader, described the audience as the largest crowd he had at a leadership campaign rally.

“This is a campaign about, on one level, the leadership of the Labour Party, but it’s also a campaign about how we do politics in our society,” he noted, before getting more specific about issues such as mental health services, workers’ rights and homelessness.

Presstv