Germany’s navy chief stepped down on Saturday after drawing criticism for saying Russian President Vladimir Putin deserved respect and that Kyiv would never win back annexed Crimea from Moscow.

“I have asked Defence Minister Christine Lambrecht to relieve me from my duties with immediate effect,” Vice Admiral Kay-Achim Schoenbach said in a statement. “The minister has accepted my request.”

Schoenbach made the remarks to a think-tank discussion in India on Friday, and video was published on social media. The comments came at a sensitive time as Russia has amassed tens of thousands of troops on Ukraine’s borders.

Diplomatic efforts are focused on preventing an escalation. Russia denies it is planning to invade Ukraine.

Vice Admiral Kay-Achim Schönbach: “We need #Russia to counter #China. #Putin and Russia deserves respect, #Ukraine has nothing to do with #NATO and #Crimea has been permanently lost.”

In New Delhi, Schoenbach, speaking in English, said Putin seeks to be treated as an equal by the West.

“What he (Putin) really wants is respect,” Schoenbach said.

“And my God, giving someone respect is low cost, even no cost… It is easy to give him the respect he really demands – and probably also deserves,” Schoenbach said, calling Russia an old and important country.

Schoenbach conceded Russia’s actions in Ukraine needed to be addressed. But he added that “the Crimea peninsula is gone, it will never come back, this is a fact,” contradicting the joint Western position that Moscow’s annexation of the peninsula from Ukraine in 2014 cannot be accepted and must be reversed.

Apologies

Prior to Schoenbach’s resignation, the defence ministry publicly criticised his remarks, saying they did not reflect Germany’s position in either content or wording.

Schoenbach apologized for his comments.

“My rash remarks in India … are increasingly putting a strain on my office,” he said. “I consider this step (the resignation) necessary to avert further damage to the German navy, the German forces, and, in particular, the Federal Republic of Germany.”

The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry had called on Germany to publicly reject the navy chief’s comments. Schoenbach’s comments could impair Western efforts to de-escalate the situation, Ukraine said in a statement.

“Ukraine is grateful to Germany for the support it has already provided since 2014, as well as for the diplomatic efforts to resolve the Russian-Ukrainian armed conflict. But Germany’s current statements are disappointing and run counter to that support and effort,” Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said separately in tweet.

Source: REUTERS

Billionaire former premier Silvio Berlusconi announced Saturday he will not run for Italy’s presidency, ending his improbable candidacy two days before voting begins in parliament.

The 85-year-old has been campaigning behind the scenes for weeks to replace outgoing President Sergio Mattarella, although few analysts believed he had enough support to win.

In a statement as he held a virtual meeting with fellow right-wing leaders, Berlusconi insisted he had the numbers, but in the spirit of “national responsibility”, said he had asked those who put forward his name to withdraw it.

“Today, Italy needs unity,” he said, noting the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, adding:  “I will continue to serve my country in other ways.”

The leading candidate for the presidency remains Prime Minister Mario Draghi, the former European Central Bank chief who has led Italy’s national unity government for the last year.

However, Berlusconi, whose Forza Italia party is in the government, repeated his desire for Draghi to stay where he is until general elections scheduled for 2023.

“I consider it necessary for the Draghi government to complete its work until the end of the legislature,” he wrote in the statement issued by his spokesman.

That way it could implement reforms to the tax and justice systems and public administration promised in return for billions of euros in European Union post-virus recovery funds, he said.

Looking for a “broad consensus”

Instead, Berlusconi said he would work with Matteo Salvini of the anti-immigration League party and Giorgia Meloni of the far-right Brothers of Italy to agree a name that can find “broad consensus”.

Members of an electoral college comprising more than 1,000 MPs, senators and regional representatives will begin voting Monday for the new president.

In the first three rounds of voting, each of which will take a day, the winning candidate must secure two-thirds of the vote. From the fourth round, they only need an absolute majority.

Italy’s president is a largely ceremonial position but plays a crucial arbitrating role during political crises and wields significant political influence over their seven-year term.

Source: AFP

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson was fighting for his political future Friday as outrage mounted after his belated apology for attending a party during lockdown and as a fresh report emerged of other raucous gatherings at his office.

Revelations that Johnson and Downing Street staff breached restrictions at the height of Britain’s coronavirus lockdown have enraged the public, who were forced to abide by rules that prevented them from visiting sick and dying loved ones or attending funerals.

The scandal looked set to deepen Friday as the conservative-leaning Daily Telegraph published an exclusive claiming Johnson’s staff held an alcohol-fuelled party just hours before the socially distanced funeral of Prince Philip in April 2021.

The image of Queen Elizabeth sitting alone in church at her late husband’s memorial service was one of the starkest images of Britain under lockdown.

Most cabinet members have rallied around Johnson after his mea culpa, but the backing from potential successors such as powerful finance minister Rishi Sunak has been distinctly lukewarm.

While expressing “heartfelt apologies”, Johnson sparked ridicule this week by saying he had believed a May 2020 gathering in the Downing Street garden—at which more than 100 people gathered—was a work event.

He urged all sides to await the findings of an internal inquiry.

Douglas Ross, the Conservatives leader in Scotland, has joined at least four Tory backbench MPs in calling for Johnson to quit after the prime minister admitted joining the party.

“Regretfully, I have to say his position is no longer tenable,” Ross told STV.

Cabinet member Jacob Rees-Mogg dismissed Ross as a “lightweight” Tory figure, sparking rebukes from other MPs and warnings that the upper-crust Englishman was bolstering the case for Scottish independence.

Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis has insisted Johnson had been “very, very sincere” in his apology, amid warnings that Conservative MPs could be mobilising for a no-confidence vote.

‘Partygate’

But Lewis was forced to play down reports that Johnson had in the wake of his House of Commons apology told Ross and other Tories that he did not believe he had done anything wrong.

On Wednesday, Labour leader Keir Starmer for the first time joined other opposition chiefs in demanding Johnson’s resignation.

The prime minister’s poll ratings have slumped since “partygate” allegations emerged last month.

One new poll by YouGov in The Times newspaper gave Labour a 10-point lead over the Tories, its biggest margin since 2013, and said six out of 10 voters believe Johnson should resign.

London’s Metropolitan Police have not ruled out a criminal probe into the May 2020 party, which occurred at a time when Britons were banned from outdoor socialising.

But for now, Johnson’s fate appears to lie in the hands of senior civil servant Sue Gray, whom he has commissioned to look into the May 2020 event and other Downing Street gatherings that year.

Chancellor of the Exchequer Sunak, who was noticeably absent from the House of Commons on Wednesday, said Johnson had been right to apologise and urged “patience” pending Gray’s report.

Another potential contender to replace Johnson, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, also took hours to issue any public backing, but later said she stood “100 percent” behind the prime minister.

Johnson’s official spokesman insisted the cabinet was united in delivering the government’s post-Brexit and post-pandemic priorities.

“The prime minister abides by the principles of public office,” he told reporters, stressing that Johnson had promised to publish Gray’s report and then update parliament.

Source: AFP

In a presidential campaign dominated by a revanchist and nativistic far right, Christiane Taubira’s presumptive run for the Elysée Palace has more than a soupçon of poetic license, of quiet rage against the dying of the left. It may also be the last chance for her moribund camp to find a voice in an election it appears doomed to lose.

A former justice minister and icon of the French left, Taubira took another step towards a widely whispered-about presidential run on Sunday, saying she would submit to a citizen’s primary vote later this month, which she is tipped to win. The move all but confirms her second presidential run, 20 years after she became the first Black woman to seek France’s highest office.

News of Taubira’s candidacy has sent ripples of excitement among France’s increasingly despondent left-wing voters, of the kind only Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leftist firebrand, can rival. However, it also adds one more name to an already cluttered field of candidates fighting over a diminishing pool of votes, prompting many analysts to question the pertinence of her belated Elysée run.

“If she somehow manages to unite the reformist left behind her, then her candidacy could be a game-changer,” said political analyst Thomas Guénolé, though quickly cautioning: “Without unity, however, she will become just one more element in a ‘Balkanised’ (and hopeless) left.”

Talk of the left’s chronic divisions is a sensitive issue for Taubira, a maverick who has long shouldered the blame for the far right’s shocking breakthrough in the first round of the 2002 presidential election. Running as a left-wing radical at the time, Taubira picked up just 2.3% of the vote – a relatively small tally but enough to keep the Socialist favorite, Lionel Jospin, out of the run-off.

“She was made a scapegoat for Jospin’s defeat, unfairly so,” said Guénolé, noting that others on the left had siphoned away more votes from the Socialist candidate.

Twenty years on, the once mighty Socialist Party has shrunk to a minor player in France’s political landscape, leaving the left as a whole rudderless and divided. Between them, the seven left-wing candidates currently in the race for the Elysée Palace account for just over a quarter of the electorate, according to polls. Only one – the far left’s Mélenchon – has touched double digits so far, but even he remains far off the 17% to 20% threshold deemed necessary to reach the crucial second round of voting.

Both Mélenchon and Yannick Jadot, the Green candidate, have repeatedly rejected the idea of a citizen’s primary, leaving only a motley group of struggling candidates – including the Socialist Party’s mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo – among Taubira’s potential challengers. According to her supporters, Taubira, a prolific writer and passionate orator whose words have even been put into song, is the only one with the potential to energise voters.

Rebel at heart

A staunch feminist and a champion of minorities, Taubira, 69, is best known for shepherding a same-sex marriage bill into French law in 2013 when she served as justice minister in François Hollande’s Socialist government. She did so while facing an angry backlash from the conservative and far-right opposition, and with only lukewarm support from her cabinet colleagues.

“Opening marriage and adoption to same-sex couples is an act of liberty, of equality and of fraternity,” she told lawmakers in one of several fiery debates in parliament, echoing France’s Republican motto. She met the opposition’s insults with lyrical flourishes and witty put-downs, remaining calm and composed even when anti-gay-marriage protesters levelled racised slurs at her.

“Taubira is a symbol of anti-racism by virtue of who she is, what she achieved, and the vile, racist abuse she endured,” said Guénolé. “The battle over same-sex marriage also made her an icon of equality.”

Taubira had already made her mark as a champion of progressives more than a decade earlier, authoring landmark legislation in 2001 that recognised slavery as a crime against humanity. It was a personal triumph for the then little-known MP from faraway Guiana, a former French colony in South America, where convicts from metropolitan France were banished up until 1953, a year after her birth.

One of 11 siblings, Taubira was raised in Guiana’s capital Cayenne by her single mother, a nursing assistant who died at age 49. As she quipped in a 2012 memoir, she was born a “[w]oman, Black, poor, what fabulous capital! Every challenge to take up, the promise of a life of exhaustion. But life is more seditious than one thinks.”

A seditious, rebellious streak would run throughout her political career, which began in the ranks of a Guianese pro-independence faction alongside her second husband Robert Delannon, who was jailed in the late 1970s for planning to blow up an oil and gas facility. Taubira soon abandoned the separatist cause and shifted towards more moderate politics, though she never lost her independent spirit.

“Sometimes to resist is to stay, sometimes to resist is to leave,” she tweeted decades later, in January 2016, as she quit the justice ministry in protest at controversial plans to strip French-born dual nationals of their citizenship when convicted of terrorism.

Prior to her departure, Taubira had championed a divisive overhaul of prison sentencing, seeking to institute probation in place of jail terms for petty crimes in an effort to reduce overcrowding in France’s penitentiaries. But her efforts met with resistance from cabinet colleagues and eventually jarred with the mood of a nation deeply shaken by a string of jihadist terrorist attacks.

Battle of ideas

Taubira’s perceived softness as justice minister gave France’s right wing a key line of attack. So did her stances on racism and the legacy of slavery, issues some candidates in the upcoming presidential elections are keen to brush under the rug. While France’s reckoning with its colonial past is still in its infancy, for the likes of far-right pundit and presidential candidate Eric Zemmour, “repentance” has already gone too far.

An advocate of the “Great Replacement” theory, according to which elites are plotting to replace French nationals of white stock with immigrants, Zemmour has dominated the early stages of the campaign in the raucous, aggressive and iconoclastic manner of a Donald Trump – albeit with the veneer of cultured sophistication generally expected of a French presidential candidate.

Some have suggested Taubira’s main aim is to lock horns with Zemmour in a battle of ideas, knowing full well that the Elysée Palace is already out of sight. In the words of Thomas Legrand, France Inter radio’s political editorialist, Taubira’s bid “would offer an alternative narrative, one that is republican, fraternal, racially diverse and universal, as opposed to Eric Zemmour’s bleak and depressing identity politics”.

A diminutive figure, like Zemmour, Taubira is known for her lofty rhetoric and frequent literary citations – particularly from the anticolonial poets of the Négritude movement, such as Aimé Césaire and her fellow Guianan Léon-Gontran Damas. She is equally at ease with talk of Black identity as she is with the French Republic’s core, universal values – a versatility that is anathema to the far right and to others from across the political spectrum.

Having surveyed voters from the immigrant-rich Seine-Saint-Denis area northeast of Paris, mainland France’s poorest department, sociologist Marie Peretti-Ndiaye said Taubira’s candidacy has raised hopes of a less toxic divide on certain issues, such as the place of Islam in France. Among those surveyed, the former justice minister “came across as intelligent, cultured and knowledgeable, far from the cheap shots and petty controversies of the presidential campaign”, she said. “At the same time, the respect and admiration for her combativity was tempered by scepticism about the chances of a woman winning the presidency.”

In recent months, Taubira has consistently topped surveys of left-wing voters’ preferred political leaders. However, she also scores highly in surveys of politicians who are most rejected by the broader electorate.

Should it garner momentum, Taubira’s candidacy “would instantly become a hateful obsession of the far right, whose worst nightmare she embodies”, Guénolé noted. Whether she can alter the narrative of the campaign will depend on her ability to rally the reformist left behind her, he cautioned, stressing the need to flesh out a political and economic platform of which little or nothing is known – and to fulfill at least two conditions.

“The first is to embody something powerful against the far right – and Taubira certainly does. The other is to be a contender for the all-important presidential run-off,” he said. “If she fails to meet the second criteria, all the media will talk about is Taubira’s miserable polling figures. And her candidacy will go the way of others on the left.”

Source: France 24