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Peru explodes into fiery protest as anger over political crises ignites
LIMA, Dec 13 (Reuters) – As Peru careers from one political crisis to another, the country has exploded in protest, with at least seven dead in the last week and the smoke of fires and tear gas hanging over city streets. A way out seems distant.
The spark of the current unrest was the ouster and arrest of leftist leader Pedro Castillo after he tried to dissolve Congress illegally. It followed a months-long standoff where lawmakers impeached him three times, the final time removing him from office.
Peru has been one of the economic stars of Latin America in the 21st century, with strong growth lifting millions out of poverty. But the political turmoil is increasingly threatening to derail its economic stability, with ratings agencies warning of downgrades, blockades impacting major mines in the world’s no. 2 copper producer, and protesters demanding Congress and new president Dina Boluarte step down.
For those watching closely it should be little surprise. Voters are fed up with the constant political infighting that has seen six presidents in the last five years and seven impeachment attempts.
The heavily fragmented unicameral Congress is loathed – with an approval rating of just 11%, according to pollster Datum. That is below Castillo’s, which despite a string of corruption allegations was 24% just before he was removed.
“The Peruvian people are just exhausted from all the political machinations, the crime, uncertainty and stalling growth,” said Eric Farnsworth, a vice president at the Council of the Americas and Americas Society.
He said Boluarte’s pledge to hold early elections in April 2024 could help calm things in the short run, but that would not solve entrenched issues of a divided electorate and infighting between the presidency and Congress.
“It’s a toxic soup, with a weak president, a dysfunctional Congress, the deposed president seeking to generate a popular resistance to his legitimate removal, an agitated populace, and little vision from anyone on how to get out of this mess.”
Peru’s constitution makes it relatively easy for an unhappy legislature to initiate an impeachment, while a lack of dominant political parties – the largest, Popular Force, controls just 24 of 130 seats – means agreement is thin on the ground. Corruption has also been a frequent problem.
The only way many Peruvians feel they can make their voices heard is in the street. In recent days, protesters have blocked roads, set fires, and even taken over airports. Police have come under criticism from human rights groups for use of firearms and teargas. At leave seven people, mostly teenagers, have died.
There are echoes of protests in 2020, when thousands took to the streets after the impeachment and ouster of popular centrist leader Martin Vizcarra, who was succeeded by Congress leader Manuel Merino. After two died he also was forced to resign.
Castillo, less popular but with a support base in rural regions that helped him to a narrow election win last year, has looked to stoke things from jail, where he is being held while he is investigated over accusations of rebellion and conspiracy.
On Monday, he called Boluarte, his former vice president, a “usurper” in a written letter to the Peruvian people where he claimed to still be the country’s legitimate leader.
“What was said recently by a usurper is nothing more than the same snot and drool of the coup-mongering right,” he wrote, adding a call – long popular among a younger generation of Peruvians – for a new constitution.
“The people should not fall for their dirty games of new elections. Enough abuse! A Constituent Assembly now! Immediate freedom!” he wrote.
Boluarte, a former member of Castillo’s far-left party who fell out with its leader and criticized Castillo after his attempt to dissolve Congress, has called for calm around the country and pledged a government of all stripes. But she faces a tough reality, caught between protesters and a hostile parliament.
With the recent history of Peruvian leaders littered with impeachment and jail, it is questionable whether Boluarte can hang on until new elections are held.
“Dina Boluarte is a murderer. Five people have died, and they say nothing. Nothing matters to her, she is shameless, treacherous,” said Guadalupe Huaman, a Castillo supporter protesting with a Peruvian flag and hard hat in Lima.
Cutting Peru’s outlook to negative and threatening a potential downgrade, ratings agency S&P said in a report on Monday that there seemed to be little to be hopeful about.
“The way Peru’s most recent change in power occurred reflects heightened political deadlock, and it increases risks ahead,” it said.
Farnsworth voiced similar concerns. While Peru had a history of volatile politics, it was unclear how things would resolve this time, he said.
“I think this time is somehow different,” he said. “There is no real path forward it seems.”
Reporting by Marco Aquino and Adam Jourdan, Editing by Rosalba O’Brien
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Worker shortages in education, healthcare and rail jobs are fueling labor crises
Exhausted workers in education, healthcare and the railroad industry are pushing back after months of staffing shortfalls
While the railway dispute, which the White House helped resolve early Thursday, has garnered the most attention, a number of other strikes are spreading across the United States. Some 15,000 nurses walked out of the job in Minnesota this week, and health-care workers in Michigan and Oregon have recently authorized strikes. Seattle teachers called off a week-long strike, delaying the start of the school year.
At the center of each of these challenges are widespread labor shortages that have caused deteriorating working conditions. Staffing shortfalls in key industries, such as health care, hospitality and education, have put unprecedented pressure on millions of workers, igniting a wave of labor disputes as well as new efforts to organize nationwide.
Too many industries are still struggling to find workers. The share of working-age Americans who have a job or are looking for one is at 62.4 percent, a full percentage point lower than it was in February 2020, according to Labor Department data.
The reasons are complex and broad. Early retirements, a massive slowdown in immigration that began during the Trump administration, as well as ongoing child care and elder care challenges combined with covid-related illnesses and deaths have all cut into the number of available workers.
“We have approximately 2.5 million fewer people in the labor force than we were on track to have with pre-pandemic trends,” said Wendy Edelberg, director of the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution. “That’s a big number, and it means that people who are still there, who are still working these jobs, are having to do even more.”
The stress of working at a job that’s understaffed is playing a big role in workers’ demands, which often revolve around staffing — or lack of it. Seattle teachers wanted better special education teacher-to-student ratios. Railroad conductors and engineers were asking for sick leave. And the nurses who stopped work in Minnesota said they’re looking for more flexible schedules and protections against retaliation for reporting instances of understaffing.
“If you look at sectors like nursing homes, local schools, railroads — employment has fallen like a stone,” said Lisa Lynch, an economics professor at Brandeis University and former Labor Department chief economist. “And with that, you see a marked increase in labor action and strike activity. People are tired and overworked.”
Although the U.S. economy has officially recouped the 20 million jobs it lost at the beginning of the pandemic, the gains have been uneven. Major shortfalls remain, particularly in low-wage industries that have lost workers to higher-paying opportunities in warehousing, construction, and professional and business services. The hospitality and leisure industry is still down 1.2 million jobs from February 2020. Public schools are missing nearly 360,000 workers and health care has yet to recover 37,000 positions. Rail transportation, meanwhile, is down 12,500 jobs.
After months of juggling extra duties, Sabrina Montijo quit her $19-an-hour teacher’s aide job in the Bay Area in August. She now cares for her two young children full-time and says she isn’t sure when she’ll return to the workforce.
“Ever since the pandemic started, we were incredibly short-staffed,” Montijo, 33, said. “I had to work off-the-clock because there was nobody there. We couldn’t find staff and if we did, we were constantly having to train someone, always having to start over.”
Between the added pressure at work and trouble finding affordable child care, she says it just made sense to leave. Managing on just one income from her husband’s job as a butcher at Safeway hasn’t been easy, but Montijo says it’s better than the alternative.
“It got to the point where I didn’t feel like I had a choice,” she said. “I was having to set up arts and crafts, do science projects, make phone calls and talk to parents — all at the same time. There’s only so much one person can do.”
Worker burnout has become a persistent problem across the economy, though labor economists say it is especially pronounced in industries with acute labor shortages. Many front-line workers in retail, restaurants, education and health care who worked throughout the pandemic — often putting their health and well-being at risk — say their jobs are becoming even tougher as vacancies pile up.
Although employers across the economy say they’re struggling to find and keep workers, labor shortages are most pronounced in retail (where roughly 70 percent of job openings remain unfilled), manufacturing (about 55 percent) and leisure and hospitality (45 percent), according to a U.S. Chamber of Commerce analysis of Labor Department data.
“When you look at the jobs that are having trouble hiring, it’s the ones with really long hours, inflexible schedules, not great pay and limited benefits,” said Paige Ouimet, a professor at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School who focuses on finance and labor economics. “Running your workers like this — asking them to do 20, 30 percent more because you’re short staffed — it’s very much a short-term strategy. You’re going to keep losing people.”
In many cases, employers have begun raising wages in hopes of attracting new workers. The highest wages gains have been in the lowest-paying industries, like hospitality, where average hourly earnings are up 8.6 percent from a year ago. (That’s compared to an increase of 5.2 percent for all workers.)
But while those pay increases may not be going far enough in attracting or keeping workers, economists say they are contributing to inflation. Restaurants, airlines, health-care companies and transportation providers are all charging more, in part, they say, because of rising labor costs.
Aveanna Healthcare, which provides home health care and hospice services, is collaborating with the Medicaid programs it works with to increase reimbursement rates to offset higher pay for nurses.
“Inflation has driven our workforce to seek employment that can and will pay higher wages,” Tony Strange, the company’s chief executive, said in an earnings call last month. “We need to increase caregiver wages on average 15 percent to 25 percent in certain markets that we serve. We will systematically go through state by state and contract by contract and adjust reimbursement rates.”
New inflation data released this week showed that prices remained stubbornly high, in large part because of rising costs for services including health care and transportation. Unlike prices for TVs and furniture, which are largely dependent on the cost of materials and shipping, economists say service inflation tends to be closely linked to workers’ wages.
“It is clear that the tight labor market is leading to wage growth, which is leading to price growth,” said Jason Furman, an economics professor at Harvard University. “Inflation in services tends to be much more persistent and it’s much harder to bring down. Gasoline prices are very volatile. Goods prices are somewhat volatile. But in services, if prices are high one month, they’re probably going to remain high next month.”
It’s unclear whether — or when — many of the people who left the workforce during the pandemic will return. That’s particularly true for workers 55 and older, who have stopped working at higher rates. The job market is still short more than 500,000 workers from that age group.
“There’s been a very significant and persistent decline in labor force participation among workers over 55,” said Edelberg of the Brookings Institution. “The pandemic has been a moment of introspection and reevaluation, and it has led a lot of people to step out of the labor force.”
Joseph White, who lives in Nashville, lost his job at Guitar Center six months into the pandemic. But he says he’d had enough: The store was constantly short-staffed and customers were intractable. In one instance, a shopper pulled a gun on him for trying to enforce the company’s mask mandate.
“I’m tired, I’m broken down, worn out and old,” the 62-year-old said. “I was worked to death for so long that finally, I said, there’s no way I’m going back.”
He’s begun drawing on Social Security payments to make ends meet, and helps his wife run her small shop, Black Dog Beads. But White says he has no intention of joining the labor force again.
“Our quality of life is far better even though we have less income,” he said. “I got tired of being a commodity.”
Lauren Kaori Gurley and Jeff Stein contributed to this report.
Jill Biden tells donors Joe’s presidency hamstrung by crises
First lady Jill Biden told donors her husband’s political agenda has been sidetracked by unexpected crises at home and overseas.
Biden, 71, made the remarks during a private Democratic National Committee fundraiser in Nantucket, Mass., as President Joe Biden wrapped up his four-day trip to the Middle East, according to CNN.
Her comments came after pollsters recently found most Democrats don’t want the president to seek a second term. His approval rating was a dismal 33%, and only 13% of Americans thought the country was headed in the right direction, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll released Monday.
“[The President] had so many hopes and plans for things he wanted to do, but every time you turned around, he had to address the problems of the moment,” the First Lady reportedly told about two dozen people at a private home.
Jill Biden referenced gun violence, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade and opposition to signature legislation within his own party as examples of unforeseen obstacles her husband has contended with.
“He’s just had so many things thrown his way,” she reportedly said. “Who would have ever thought about what happened [with the Supreme Court overturning] Roe v. Wade? Well, maybe we saw it coming, but still we didn’t believe it. The gun violence in this country is absolutely appalling. We didn’t see the war in Ukraine coming.”
Setbacks at home and abroad had also curtailed her own agenda, Biden said, according to the network.
“I was saying to myself, ‘Okay, I was Second Lady. I worked on community colleges. I worked on military families. I’ve worked on cancer.’ They were supposed to be my areas of focus. But then when we got [in the White House,] I had to be, with all that was happening, the First Lady of the moment.”
It was the second fundraiser Biden attended during a three-day trip to the Bay State. On Thursday she reportedly spoke to donors at a private event in Andover.
Afghanistan earthquake: ‘What do we do when another disaster hits?’ Afghans face crises on all fronts
The slow response, exacerbated by international sanctions and decades of mismanagement, concerns people working in the humanitarian space, like Obaidullah Baheer, lecturer in Transitional Justice at the American University of Afghanistan. “This is a very patchwork, band-aid solution for a problem that we need to start thinking (about) mid to long term… what do we do when (another disaster) hits?” he told CNN by phone.
The magnitude 5.9 quake struck during the early hours of Wednesday near the city of Khost by the Pakistan border and the death toll is expected to rise as many of the homes in the area were flimsily made out of wood, mud and other materials vulnerable to damage.
Humanitarian agencies are converging on the area, but it might be days before aid reaches affected regions, which are among the most remote in the country.
UNICEF Afghanistan’s Chief of Communications Sam Mort told CNN that critical aid it has dispatched to help affected families is expected to only reach villages by Saturday. Teams deployed by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) have yet to arrive, according to Anita Dullard, ICRC’s Asia Pacific spokesperson.
“The challenges that we’re facing, first and foremost, are geographical, logistical challenges because the area is so remote and rural and mountainous. Already yesterday we’d had a lot of rain here and the combination of the rain and the earthquake has lead to landslides in some areas, making roads difficult to pass by,” UNICEF’s Mort told CNN from Kabul.
The quake coincided with heavy monsoon rain and wind between June 20 and 22, which has hampered search efforts and helicopter travel.
As medics and emergency staff from around the country attempt to access the site, help is expected to be limited as a number of organizations pulled out of the aid-dependent country when the Taliban took power in August last year.
Those that remain are stretched thin. On Wednesday, the World Health Organization (WHO) said it had mobilized “all of the resources” from around the country, with teams on the ground providing medicine and emergency support. But, as one WHO official put it, “the resources are overstretched here, not just for this region.”
The international community’s hesitancy to deal with the Taliban and the group’s “very messy bureaucracy where it becomes difficult to gain information from one source” has led to a communication gap in the rescue efforts, Baheer — who is also the founder of aid group Save Afghans from Hunger — said.
“At the core of everything is how the politics has translated into this gap of communication, not just between countries and the Taliban, but international aid organizations and the Taliban as well,” he added.
Baheer gives an example of how he has been acting as a conduit of information with the World Food Program and other aid organizations, informing them that Afghanistan’s Ministry of Defense were offering to airlift aid from humanitarian organizations to badly hit areas.
In the meantime, some people spent the night sleeping in makeshift outdoor shelters, as rescuers scoured for survivors by flashlight. The United Nations says 2,000 homes are thought to have been destroyed. Pictures from the badly hit Paktika province, where most of the deaths have been reported, show homes reduced to dust and rubble.
Officials say aid is reaching the affected areas.
The government has so far distributed food, tents, clothing, and other supplies to the quake-hit provinces, according to Afghanistan’s Ministry of Defense’s official Twitter account. Medical and relief teams deployed by the Afghan government are already present in the quake-hit areas, and attempting to transport the wounded to medical facilities and health centers by land and air, it added.
‘Carpet sanctioning a whole country and a whole people’
Although the economic crisis in Afghanistan has loomed for years, the result of conflict and drought, it plunged to new depths after the Taliban takeover, which prompted the United States and its allies to freeze about $7 billion of the country’s foreign reserves and cut off international funding.
The US no longer has a presence in Afghanistan following the hasty withdrawal of its troops and collapse of the previous US-backed Afghan government. Like nearly all other nations, it does not have official relations with the Taliban government.
The move has crippled the Afghan economy and sent many of its 20 million people into a severe hunger crisis. Millions of Afghans are out of work, government employees haven’t been paid, and the price of food has soared.
Baheer says sanctions “are hurting us so much” that Afghans are struggling to send money to families affected by the earthquake.
“The fact that we barely have a banking system, the fact that we haven’t had new currency printed or brought into the country in the past nine to 10 months, our assets are frozen… these sanctions don’t work,” he said.
He added: “The only sanctions that make moral sense is targeted sanctions on specific individuals rather than carpet sanctioning a whole country and a whole people.”
While “sanctions have affected a lot of the country, there’s an exemption for humanitarian aid so we’re getting it in to support those most in need,” Mort, from UNICEF, told CNN.
The Taliban “isn’t preventing us from distributing anything like that, on the contrary they are enabling us,” she added.
Experts and officials say the most pressing immediate needs include medical care and transportation for the injured, shelter and supplies for the displaced, food and water, and clothing.
The UN has distributed medical supplies and sent mobile health teams to Afghanistan — but warned that it does not have search and rescue capabilities.
Baheer told CNN on Wednesday that the Taliban were only able to send out six rescue helicopters “because when the United States was leaving it disabled most of the aircraft whether it belonged to Afghanistan forces or to them.”
Pakistan has offered to help, opening border crossings in its northern province of Khyber Pakhtunkwa and allowing injured Afghans to come into the country visa-free for treatment, according Mohammad Ali Saif, a regional government spokesperson.
“400 injured Afghans have moved into Pakistan this morning for treatment and a stream of people is continuing, these numbers are expected to rise by the end of day, Saif told CNN.
Pakistan has kept a tight limit on Afghans entering the country via the land border crossing since the Taliban took power.
Robert Shackleford, Yong Xiong, Jessie Yeung, Sophia Saifi, Mohammed Shafi Kakar and Aliza Kassim contributed to this report.
Intractable African Crises Flare as Biden’s Top Diplomat Visits Kenya
NAIROBI, Kenya — Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken’s first visit to sub-Saharan Africa was intended to be a grand gesture of American support for the continent. But his first day also illustrated the frustrating limits of American influence in a region undergoing deep turmoil.
As Mr. Blinken met with officials in Nairobi, Kenya, security forces in the capital of neighboring Sudan shot and killed at least 15 pro-democracy protesters and wounded many others in the deadliest violence since a military coup on Oct. 25 set back hopes for the country.
At the same time, a civil war continued to rage in Ethiopia, where the beleaguered prime minister Abiy Ahmed, once a darling of the West, lashed out at international critics, even as Mr. Blinken renewed his appeal for an end to the fighting — another jarring juxtaposition that raised new doubts about Washington’s powers of persuasion in a turbulent region.
It is an unhappy context for Mr. Blinken’s visit to Africa, where he plans to give a speech on Friday in Nigeria outlining the Biden administration’s vision for a continent that President Donald J. Trump often treated with a mixture of indifference and contempt.
Mr. Blinken’s team has poured much diplomatic energy into East Africa over the past year, hoping to stop the atrocity-laden war in Ethiopia and protect Sudan’s fragile transition to democracy. But as he landed in Nairobi, those efforts seemed to have achieved little.
Speaking to reporters alongside his Kenyan counterpart, Cabinet Secretary for Foreign Affairs Raychelle Omamo, Mr. Blinken said the war in Ethiopia “needs to stop,” calling on both sides to enter talks without preconditions. For more than a year Mr. Abiy has been battling rebels from Ethiopia’s northern region of Tigray in an expanding war that many fear could tear apart Africa’s second most populous nation.
Events in both Ethiopia and Sudan on Wednesday seemed to defy Mr. Blinken’s admonitions. The Ethiopian prime minister launched a thinly-veiled broadside against Western efforts to resolve the war with a Twitter message that blamed woes on a “sophisticated narrative war” led by unnamed enemies, a reference to more than just his Tigrayan antagonists. These forces, he said, were “using disinformation as a pathway for their sinister move.”
On Sudan, Mr. Blinken renewed his call for the reinstatement of Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok, who was deposed in last month’s coup and held under house arrest, and pointed to his diplomatic efforts to pressure the Sudanese military leaders who ousted Mr. Hamdok.
“I’ve been working the phones,” Mr. Blinken said.
But in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum and other areas, security forces opened fire during the latest day of mass protest against the coup, killing at least 15 people and wounding many more, medics said. It was the highest daily toll since protests began.
Many had been shot “in the head, neck or torso,” the main doctor’s association said in a statement. It brought the number of reported deaths during recent protests to at least 39.
There was even turmoil in neighboring Uganda, where residents of the capital, Kampala, where still reeling from suicide bombings by militants from a group that claims to be affiliated with the Islamic State. Four people were killed in the bombings on Tuesday.
Mr. Blinken mentioned that attack, but his main focus was the crises in Sudan and Ethiopia. Even as some call for a more aggressive U.S. approach, Mr. Blinken did not detail what further steps the United States might take to influence events in either country. But he did warn that there would be consequences for what he called “atrocities” in Ethiopia.
“There needs to be accountability, and we are determined there will be,” he said.
Mr. Blinken’s visit to East Africa came after months of intensive engagement by his regional envoy, Jeffrey D. Feltman, who has been shuttling between capitals in recent weeks in a frantic scramble for diplomatic solutions.
In Sudan, American officials are pressing for the immediate reinstatement of a transitional government that took power in 2019, following a wave of popular protest that ousted the country’s longtime dictator, Omar Hassan al-Bashir. If Sudan’s generals rolled back their coup, the country would be rewarded with renewed financial aid from the United States and other nations, Mr. Blinken said.
For now, though, his offers appear to be falling on deaf ears.
In Ethiopia, the Biden administration has turned to increasingly coercive means to pressure both sides to stop fighting, including visa restrictions on Ethiopian officials linked to alleged atrocities and threats of sanctions against leaders on both sides.
At the United Nations, American officials have issued impassioned appeals for international unity. “Do African lives not matter?” a visibly exasperated Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said in July.
Those efforts have failed to halt Ethiopia’s slide. Two million people have been forced from their homes; seven million urgently need humanitarian assistance; and human rights abuses continue unabated, according to aid organizations and international observers.
Mr. Abiy, who is facing off against ethnic Tigrayan rebels pressing toward the capital, has spurned repeated American appeals to negotiate.
Some critics blame the Biden administration for reacting too slowly to the various crises in East Africa, and in particular for not taking firm action sooner against Mr. Abiy.
The United States is also contending with a growing field of foreign countries with competing interests in the Horn of Africa — including the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Qatar and Russia — that have sometimes frustrated American diplomacy.
China’s influence in Africa is also a growing concern to U.S. officials who consider competition with Beijing as their top priority. On Wednesday, the hotel where Mr. Blinken stayed was also hosting a meeting of a China-Kenya business group.
The defense of democracy has become a defining feature of President Biden’s foreign policy, especially as the United States competes for influence with authoritarian China in Africa and around the globe.
Mr. Blinken also had cautionary words about Kenya’s political system, which human rights groups say has shown authoritarian tendencies in recent years. He began his day by meeting with Kenyan civil society leaders, who warned of threats to the country’s democratic progress as Kenya heads toward national elections in August.
“Not just in Kenya, but around the world, you’ve seen over the last decade or so what some have called a democratic recession,” Mr. Blinken said. “Even vibrant democracies like Kenya are experiencing these pressures, especially around election time.”
Such talk failed to prevent Mr. Blinken from receiving an effusive public welcome from his counterpart, Ms. Omamo. She said that Mr. Blinken’s visit showed that “the U.S. is indeed back and interested in the advancement of our continent,” an apparent implicit contrast to President Donald J. Trump, who never visited the continent and disparaged some of its nations with a vulgar epithet.
Ms. Omamo even echoed one of President Biden’s signature slogans, saying that Kenya and the United States would be “building back better” together.
EU should enable military coalitions to tackle crises, Germany says
BRDO, Slovenia, Sept 2 (Reuters) – Germany called on the European Union on Thursday to enable coalitions of the willing within the bloc to rapidly deploy a military force in a crisis as members discussed the lessons learned after the chaotic evacuation from Afghanistan.
EU efforts to create a rapid reaction force have been paralysed for more than a decade despite the creation in 2007 of a system of battlegroups of 1,500 troops that have never been used due to disputes over funding and a reluctance to deploy.
But the exit of U.S.-led troops from Afghanistan has brought the subject back into the spotlight, with the EU alone potentially unable to evacuate personnel from countries where it is training foreign troops, such as in Mali. read more
“Sometimes there are events that catalyse history, that create a breakthrough, and I think that Afghanistan is one of these cases,” EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said in Slovenia, adding that he hoped for a plan in October or November.
Borrell urged the bloc to create a rapidly deployable “first entry force” of 5,000 troops to reduce dependence on the United States. He said President Joe Biden was the third consecutive U.S. leader to warn the Europeans that his country was pulling back from interventions abroad in Europe’s backyard.
“It represents a warning for the Europeans they need to wake (up) and to take their own responsibilities,” he said after chairing a meeting of EU defence ministers in Slovenia.
DECISION DILEMMA
Diplomats in the meeting told Reuters there was no decision on the way ahead, with the EU unable to agree on how it would quickly decide to authorise a mission without involving all 27 states, their national parliaments and those wanting United Nations approval.
European Union flags flutter outside the EU Commission headquarters in Brussels, Belgium May 5, 2021. REUTERS/Yves Herman/File Photo
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The proposal from Germany, one of the strongest military powers in the EU but historically reluctant to send its forces into combat, would rely on a joint decision by the bloc but not necessarily all members deploying their forces.
“In the EU, coalitions of the willing could act after a joint decision of all,” German Defence Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer said in a tweet in Slovenia.
A rapid reaction force is seen as more likely now that Britain has exited the bloc. Britain, one of Europe’s main military powers alongside France, had been sceptical of collective defence policy.
EU diplomats say they want a final deal on design and funding by March, when France takes over its six-month presidency in January.
Kramp-Karrenbauer said the key question was not whether the EU would establish a new military unit, and the discussion must not stop there.
“The military capabilities in EU member countries do exist,” she said. “The key question for the future of the European security and defence police is how we finally use our military capabilities together.”
Slovenia Defence Minister Matej Tonin meanwhile suggested that a rapid reaction force could comprise 5,000 to 20,000 troops but deployment should not depend on a unanimous decision by the EU’s 27 states.
“If we are talking about the European battlegroups, the problem is that, because of the consensus, they are almost never activated,” Matej, whose country holds the rotating EU presidency, told reporters.
“Maybe the solution is that we invent a mechanism where the classic majority will be enough and those who are willing will be able to go (ahead).”
Reporting by Robin Emmott and Sabine Siebold; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky, Hugh Lawson, Peter Graff, Alison Williams and Mark Porter
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.