Europe's World

On 19 May Iranian voters go to the polls for the 12th presidential election since the founding of the Islamic Republic in 1979.

Contrary to the United States, where the presidential election process begins approximately one year before the election, the official election season is rather short in Iran: all is done in approximately six weeks. But political jockeying for the elections, in the form of mudslinging, begins much earlier.

This year, candidates had five days (from 11 to 15 April) to register their candidacy with Iran’s Interior Ministry, which supervises elections and reports on the results. According to the figures published in the Iranian media, 1,636 people registered to run: 1,499 men and 137 women. The vast majority had no experience in public office, so they were eliminated at the next stage of the process by the Guardian Council – a 12-member judicial body that has the power to veto legislation and which vets election candidates, often on vague and arbitrary grounds.

From this comes the criticism that Iran does not hold free and fair elections, and that the country’s leaders are running a mocked-up democracy. If only that were entirely true. Public opinion is actually rather important to those at the apex of the system precisely because it grants them a measure of legitimacy.

The vetting by the Guardian Council is essentially a process of managed competition, with the traditional clerical establishment having a preferred candidate. But that candidate does not always win. Once the vetting process is completed, the public is left with a handful of candidates to choose from. The campaigning period with live televised debates lasts three weeks.

“This year the election is essentially a referendum on the record of the sitting centrist President, Hassan Rouhani”

Since the disputed re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009, the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, has consistently called for a high voter turnout, as this is seen as a vote of confidence in the governing system. With 50 million registered voters, voter turnout tends to range from 60% to 75%.

In last year’s legislative elections, voter turnout was higher than anticipated, indicating that Iranians willingly participate in the electoral process. Not voting is one of the few ways voters can actually express their discontent with the ruling elite, but boycotts have proven to be an ineffective strategy for Iran’s reformists.

So this year the election is essentially a referendum on the record of the sitting centrist President, Hassan Rouhani, who is entitled by law to run for a second term. Until now, every president has been a two-term president, as this allows for a certain amount of stability in the system. So there is every reason for Rouhani to believe that he will govern again.

To obtain a second term, Rouhani must essentially defend his record, which is under fierce attack from his opponents. His primary problem is the promise of economic gain from the 2015 nuclear deal with world powers. Unfortunately, those expectations have not been met. This has provided the country’s hardliners with means to attack Rouhani and leverage their own position. In addition, Rouhani promised political and social reforms, but instead he invested political capital in the nuclear deal. As a consequence, he has not delivered results on key issues affecting voters – a fact that could cause citizens to cast their vote elsewhere or stay at home on election day.

Surprisingly, a contender to Rouhani is his Vice-President, Eshagh Jahangiri, a pro-reform figure. Jahangiri was a potential candidate in the 2013 presidential election but withdrew in favour of former president Ayatollah Hashemi-Rafsanjani.  Originally, his candidacy seemed like a back-up plan in case Rouhani was disqualified, and so Jahangiri is now widely anticipated to withdraw his candidacy despite emerging as a front-runner following the first two televised election debates. Such speculation was further fuelled when former president Mohammed Khatami called on his followers to vote for Rouhani.

“As Rouhani’s record is not unblemished, it will not be an easy win for him”

The hardline camp has thus far failed to unite around a single candidate, which could possibly lead to a split conservative vote – a challenge they failed to overcome in 2013. The first contender among the conservatives is the Mayor of Tehran, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who has in recent months come under fire for a number of incidents including a building collapse in Tehran that led to the deaths of 20 firefighters, and mismanagement and corruption in Tehran city council. That effectively damages his reputation among urban Iranians. Ghalibaf was the runner-up to Rouhani in 2013, and with a populist campaign, it seems unlikely that he would beat him this time either.

A second contender among the conservatives is cleric Ebrahim Raisi, the current custodian and chairman of the Astan Quds Razavi, a religious foundation that manages several of Iran’s holiest sites. Although Raisi is not viewed as a popular figure and is accused by the opposition of authorising a crackdown against them in the 1980s, he is rumoured to enjoy the support of the Supreme Leader and the traditional clerical establishment. Confronting Rouhani’s economic performance head-on, his campaign has focused on improving the economic situation by tackling unemployment and by means of the ‘resistance economy’.

As Rouhani’s record is not unblemished, it will not be an easy win for him. The outcome will depend on whether voters turn up or not. However, in case a conservative wins, an unlikely scenario, a different attitude may emerge towards the West in Tehran.

IMAGE CREDIT: CC/Flickr – Asia Society

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Many look towards Silicon Valley for the next breakthrough in low-carbon energy. There is much excitement around Google’s energy kite and Elon Musk’s pledge to solve southern Australia’s power shortage with solar batteries.

Other solutions are in still in their infancy: solar geo-engineering, or ocean fertilisation to promote algae CO2 absorption. For these technologies, unforeseen consequences for our climate system still need to be understood.

Elsewhere, established energy producers are not idle. Statoil is exploring ways to deliver energy from hydrogen using existing oil and gas infrastructure, and expects to invest between 15% and 20% of annual capital expenditure in new energy solutions by 2030.

But can business be trusted to deliver on the climate agenda? I think it is more pertinent to ask whether it is even possible to solve the challenge of climate change without a significant business involvement. In an area where governments can be slow to react, strong business leadership is essential.

“Can business be trusted to deliver on the climate agenda?”

In response to calls for greater transparency on corporate climate risk, such as the framework proposed by G20’s Financial Stability Board, the private sector is becoming more open about how climate change will affect business earnings.

These days, major oil and gas companies such as BP, Shell and Statoil are publishing forecasts of how their bottom line will be impacted by stronger government action against climate change. This should go some way towards creating openness and trust.

Right now, engineers are preparing to attach 75-metre-wide blades to towers that will rise 178 metres above sea level on floating structures in UK waters. This Hywind wind park will deliver energy to 20,000 households both from the wind and the swell of the sea – a world first.

At the same time, a 64,000 tonne subsea structure is being shipped to the Aasta Hansen field off the coast of Norway. Once installed 1,300 metres below sea level, it will deliver natural gas to Europe in the most efficient manner ever seen. These are two examples of Statoil projects which illustrate the scale of our plans to transform infrastructure and deliver low-carbon energy to millions.

“Incremental steps won’t solve the exponential problem of climate change”

Statoil’s recent strategy update and ‘2030 climate roadmap’ are further evidence of our conviction to tap into the ‘low-carbon advantage’. The strategy is based on maintaining a low cost base, reducing exposure to high-carbon projects, and making significant investments in renewables, new energy solutions and direct emission reductions in company operations.

By rebalancing its business model, Statoil is preparing for tighter regulation and a greater price on emissions. Statoil’s most recent climate stress test showed that if the world introduces policy measures to meet the 2°C target agreed at the Paris climate change conference, the future value of the company would increase by six per cent by 2030.

Incremental steps won’t solve the exponential problem of climate change. Investors, leading businesses and entrepreneurs see major opportunity in delivering energy, products and services that are fully aligned with the world we all want to live in. All parts of society, from institutions to decision-makers to consumers, need to encourage pioneer companies to use their ingenuity to deliver more energy with less carbon.

IMAGE CREDIT: CC/Flickr – World Bank Photo Collection

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A part of Poland’s history is that of divisions and partitions. Some less formal splits continue today – in the political and cultural sphere, economically, and between town cities and the countryside.

There are considerable differences between urban and rural areas in Poland, with a visible lack of common structures and instruments bridging the gap. The further you move from the urban centre of a region, the clearer those differences become. On top of that, the late-18th-century partitions, which eliminated Poland for more than a century, still have influence on the functioning of parts of the country today.

These splits create problems. They hold back the development of human capital and social trust that, according to the social psychologist Prof. Janusz Czapliński, are essential to create an equal standard of living for Polish citizens. Exclusively local development does not help to span the divide – something that has been a challenge for Poland’s use of European Union funding in rural areas, which has tended to favour the development of only local goals rather than focus on stimulating wider cooperation.

As the capital, Warsaw has a unique potential compared to other Polish cities. However the wider Mazovia region, with Warsaw at its centre has also some contrasts. Were it not for the presence of Warsaw, the Mazovia region would be ranked one of the poorest in the country. Statistically the province is now divided into two units: Warsaw and its surrounding counties, and the rest of the region. This division is also helpful: it facilitates better cooperation between Warsaw and its immediate surroundings. On the other hand the rest of the region may continue to get sufficient funds for its development, also via a more intense cooperation with Warsaw. Such cooperation is built on the combination of potential on both sides, to the benefit of both.

“Exclusively local development does not help to span the rural-urban divide”

Warsaw is cooperating with the neighbouring communes as one of the five strategic goals set in Poland’s 2020 regional development strategy. Simultaneously, in Warsaw’s own 2030 strategy we put a strong emphasis on the idea of an open city. We want Warsaw’s diversity to lay the foundations for the creation and development of new ideas – attracting and uniting people rather than dividing them.

And urban-rural cooperation is bearing fruit. In areas considered less attractive for tourism and agriculture new businesses have emerged to cater for visiting families and school groups from cities nearby. These include stud farms and thematic villages, with themes ranging from the history of bread-making or mushroom-picking, to the art of illusion, hobbits, magical gardens, labyrinths and fairy tales. Rural carpenters’ workshops are now serving urban customers looking for custom-built furniture.

In 2015, an average apartment in Warsaw measured under 58.8 square metres. In this context, customised furniture became one of the means which allowed new owners to optimise their use of space.

There is also a rising interest in purchasing fresh organic produce directly from ‘friendly farmers’. In Warsaw we have invested in the renovation of city market places. We have removed the market fee imposed on merchants to make this form of trade even more attractive to farmers and small producers from rural areas. As a result, prices have fallen even as the quality of organic food has increased.

“We want Warsaw’s diversity to lay the foundations for the creation and development of new ideas”

These examples highlight the benefits of cooperation. Partnerships need to be based on and embrace the different strengths of the different regions. Warsaw puts this idea into practice with the use of EU instruments, such as Integrated Territorial Investments (ITIs), created as part of the European Structural and Investment Funds (ESIF) launched by European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker. Recently, 40 communes in Greater Warsaw (known as the Warsaw Functional Area) formed a partnership to use the ITIs. As many as 26 of these communes are rural or urban-rural. Each commune shares responsibility for its development.

The voice of the representative of Warsaw, a metropolis of two million people, is equal to that of the representative of Jaktorów, a rural commune of 11,000. The set-up fosters long-term cooperation and a sense of partnership.

We support polycentric development in the Warsaw Functional Area and acknowledge the importance of regional cooperation to boost sustainable development. This approach is especially crucial in the field of a coherent transport infrastructure – for example, cycle paths and car parks for park-and-ride schemes – where the gap between rural and urban areas is most visible. For urban-rural cooperation to be profitable for both sides, it has to be well balanced, drawing on the potentials of different territories and understanding the various challenges each faces.

On one hand, large cities such as Warsaw benefit as centres of development that attract resources and human capital. On the other hand, they face challenges related to their scale. In order to function properly they need support that is proportional to these challenges.

Through innovative and proactive measures, Poland is addressing its rural-urban divide. But we must also ensure that cities such as Warsaw have the financial support and legal mechanisms they need to develop and to thrive in the years to come.

IMAGE CREDIT: Fotokon/Bigstock.com

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For the European Union, the value of promoting democracy and stability abroad has been proven without doubt. From Greece, Spain and Portugal to the first democratic openings in Eastern Europe the EU has an impressive track record of engaging with young democracies, strengthening their civil societies and bringing them more fully into the liberal international community.

Lately this focus has broadened to Europe’s southern neighbourhood, and the promotion of democracy has been embraced as part-value, part-interest by a more outward-looking Union. In the Middle East and North Africa the EU will need to forge partnerships with local democratic actors and learn the stories, traditions and idiosyncrasies of people of different cultures and beliefs who nevertheless desire freedom, inclusion and peaceful prosperity.

Establishing this dialogue is critical. In Arab societies around the Mediterranean and beyond the ideal partners are political parties that stand for democratic governance and give a voice to local people. But this dialogue has been impaired by a widespread misconception of an inherent incompatibility between Islam and democracy. Such an assertion is categorically incorrect and the product of stereotypes, divisive propaganda and the condemnable actions of the small and violent minority that preaches a perversion and perpetrates terrorism.

The best way to understand the compatible nature of Islam and democracy in the modern era is to examine where the two have already come together. One of the most notable success stories is that of Tunisia, a country that, as the birthplace of the Arab Spring, remains the best hope for democracy in a fragile region. Tunisia could successfully navigate the transition to an open and democratic society largely thanks to Muslim democrats, in the form of the Ennahdha Party.

“Muslim democracy has an important role to play in providing stability and fighting extremism”

Ennahdha was founded in the 1980s on the principles of guaranteed individual freedoms, liberal rule and an Arab Muslim identity, in direct opposition to a repressive regime. A decades-long track record of activism at home and in exile, in favour of individual freedoms and against dictatorship, propelled Ennahdha to first place in the first Tunisian democratic elections in generations in 2011. As such, the party was instrumental in embedding freedoms of religion and expression in the new constitution.

Under the new constitution Tunisians enjoy full freedom of worship and the right to express their convictions and beliefs without fear. With these rights guaranteed, Ennahdha no longer needs nor accepts the label of ‘Islamism’ – a concept disfigured in recent years by radical extremists for their own purposes. The new compromise enshrined in the Tunisian constitution requires religion to be free from the control of the state, but equally for politics to be free of control by religion.

Religion still has a role to play in public and political life, but at the level of values. Key to this – and to understanding Muslim democrats – is the recognition that Ennahdha does not call for a separation between religion and politics but between the religious and political fields. This subtle difference indicates that the separation is not a cognitive but a functional one; – the political field is autonomous from religion, but can be influenced by its principles. This is an approach that was ratified overwhelmingly by Ennahdha’s members in summer 2016. Ennahdha’s evolution should serve as an example to the region: Islam and democracy are indeed compatible, and Islamic movements can play a central and constructive role in successful democratic transitions.

As well as a focus on social justice, economic well-being and national development – key principles for Ennahdha – Muslim democracy has an important role to play in providing stability and fighting extremism, which promotes violence against all moderate faiths and against democratic societies. The only way to truly defeat extremism is to offer a hopeful alternative to millions of young Muslims around the world. Their frustration with social, political or economic exclusion has been exploited by extremist groups that have sought to tap into and deepen anger and resentment; tactics repeated by political demagogues and religious radicals from all backgrounds.

“There is enormous potential if partners in the Arab world, in Europe and around the world engaged in an open and honest discussion”

The EU has been in the vanguard of countering extremism through economic development and by strengthening democracy in cooperation with partners in the neighbourhood. It has correctly concluded that local democratic governments provide the best institutions to represent and respect the disenfranchised and marginalised in society. Muslim democratic parties, which hold both democratic governance and respect for local identities as core values, are natural partners and critical in ensuring long-term peace.

Ennahdha has set a strong example, not only in the domestic political landscape but in other Arab and Muslim countries. It is a party of consensus, referring to Islam and respecting Muslim heritage while championing freedom and refusing to implement sharia law. Despite having been excluded from political life for decades and vilified by the oppressive regime of Tunisia’s autocratic former president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, it has endeavoured to build an inclusive democracy, becoming a constructive and instrumental partner on the democratic stage since the revolution. Understanding Ennahdha’s ability to bridge the gaps between Islam, democracy, tradition and modernity is essential in understanding democratic Islam. It also suggests the enormous potential if partners in the Arab world, in Europe and around the world engaged in an open and honest discussion about Muslim democracy.

Tunisia’s transition has been exceptional, but its success does not have to be an exception. The values, commitments and compromises that have allowed democracy to take root and flourish can be taken and adapted to other countries in the region to help bring democracy, peace and stability to millions. Ennahdha’s values and work as Muslim democrats have helped Tunisia to become open, stable and free. When you begin with openness and understanding, you open the door to more peaceful and more prosperous world.

IMAGE CREDIT: CC/Flickr – European Parliament

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In March this year the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled that the European Union member states are not obliged, under EU law, to grant humanitarian visas to people who wish to enter their territory to apply for asylum. However, member states are free to do so on the basis of their national laws.

The background for the ruling was the case of a Syrian family challenging the refusal by Belgian authorities to grant them humanitarian visas at the Belgian embassy in Beirut, Lebanon.

Applications for humanitarian visas can indeed be made at an EU member state embassy in a non-EU country. These visas then allow asylum-seekers to legally access the state in question to lodge a formal asylum application.

The decision on the substance of the asylum application is made on that state’s territory. This practice enables asylum-seekers to reach the EU safely and legally without having to put their lives at risk by crossing the Mediterranean Sea in unseaworthy vessels and paying unscrupulous smugglers enormous amounts of money.

“Let’s face the facts: people will continue to come to Europe whether we try to shut them out or not”

There are currently no EU schemes for humanitarian visas per se. But under the EU Visa Code Regulation, which sets out the procedures for issuing short-stay and airport transit visas within the Schengen area, visas can be issued on “humanitarian grounds” at the discretion of individual states should the admissibility requirements for a visa application not be fulfilled.

Beyond the Visa Code provisions, member states can also issue national long-stay visas. But the concept of “humanitarian grounds” is undefined in the EU law and leaves it up to the individual member states to decide when ‒ or if ‒ they consider it necessary to issue a visa under such terms. In the majority of cases, as was the case with the Syrian family, this means that member states decide not to grant such a visa, neither under the Visa Code provisions nor under national schemes.

As the lead MEP (shadow rapporteur) on reform of the Visa Code Regulation for the Greens / European Free Alliance group in the European Parliament, I had hoped that the ECJ ruling would shed light on this issue, advancing the negotiations between the Parliament and national governments in the Council.

The process of reforming the Regulation has been going on for more than two years, but is now halted due to differing points of view on whether or not to include more specific provisions on humanitarian visas in the Visa Code. While the Council has argued that humanitarian visas have no place in the Visa Code due to the short-stay nature of visas, the European Parliament has tirelessly claimed the opposite.

“By securing safe and legal channels into the EU through humanitarian visas, we are saving lives that otherwise would be put at risk at sea”

I was disappointed but not surprised to learn that the court had kept status quo. The ruling does not encourage member states to take a bigger responsibility for people fleeing war and persecution, and it does not prevent refugees from taking lethal journeys to arrive on EU territory.

Let’s face the facts: people will continue to come to Europe whether we try to shut them out or not.

By securing safe and legal channels into the EU through humanitarian visas, as well as through labour migration, family reunification and academic programmes, we are saving lives that otherwise would be put at risk at sea. My conviction is that we need a fully-fledged EU humanitarian visa scheme and unified procedures for granting such visa applications. The ruling from the ECJ only confirms the need to quickly put in place common rules at the EU level.

In my own country, Sweden, politicians have realised the urgent need to create more and better legal avenues of entry into the country. That is why the government, with the Green Party as a coalition partner, has launched an inquiry into this issue. The result of the inquiry’s report is expected by the end of 2017, and I hope that the findings will not only help to improve the Swedish migration framework but provide inspiration for a reform of the EU-wide polices on legal immigration.

IMAGE CREDIT: CC/Flickr – UNHCR Photo Unit

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The European Union is finished: long live Europe! Not only can we move towards a new and completely redesigned European utopia, we must do this to save the European project from ending in a dystopia of populism and nationalism. We have forgotten that without a utopia – an ideal society – there is no chance of achieving a better future. As German philosopher Ernst Bloch once said, society needs a permanent stream of utopian thinking. The ebb of utopian energy is therefore Europe’s most serious problem.

It is high time to overcome the idea of the nation state, and rediscover what Europe once wanted to be: a true transnational democracy. Democracy is not necessarily secure when left in the hands of a single nation, as Europe experienced in the 1920s, and as we are seeing today. This was precisely the motivation for Europe: to disentangle democracy from nation states and avoid nationalism. Europe needs to return to the roots of its own idea.

The utopia is simple: a single market, a single currency, a single democracy. And two of them – the market and the currency – have already been achieved, thanks to the EU. Yet now – if we do not want to sacrifice them – we need to press on and put in place the final, most difficult piece: one democracy. For that to happen, we need to wake up from the dream that nation states will ever deliver ‘Europe’.

As much as national elites were willing to Europeanise the market and currency, they were unwilling to do the same in the political arena as it would have undermined their own power bases. In recent years they have administered their national democracies through largely neutralised grand coalitions that lack political contours, leading to a perfect erosion of state functions at a national level. It suited them to cling to fictional national power while accepting economic governance at a European level. Therein lays the reason for today’s populism.

National elites have fiercely resisted every attempt to build channels of communication, processes of mutual recognition or transnational voting and party systems – all of which would allow peoples of different nations to merge their interests. Such moves would have challenged the monopoly of representation by the national ruling classes, both internally and at the supranational level, and diminished their position as the inevitable conduits between ‘their’ people and the European institutions. In other words: the desired ‘politicisation’ of Europe, where political decision-making would be organised beyond nation-state sovereignty, never took place.

“It is time to discover the place of citizens in the European project”

The political system of the EU, with the Council at its heart, inherently mirrors this pattern: projects in the collective interest of all European citizens, whether a common refugee policy or a European unemployment scheme, are systematically torpedoed by ‘national cards’. If Europe wants to become a democracy, politics must trump national affiliation: the Council must go.

It is also time to let go of the EU and to move away from the idea of a United States of Europe. It is time to discover the place of citizens in the European project and to remember that citizens – not states – are sovereign. As French sociologist Pierre Rosanvallon put it, the EU was built on a lie. The lie is that the EU is equally a union of states and a union of citizens, as promised in the Treaty of Maastricht. But the union of citizens does not exist. Brexit is the best example: if European citizenship really existed, the United Kingdom as a country could leave the EU while Brits could remain citizens of the union. In reality, they will not. Here is the betrayal.

Upgrading citizens within the European political project ultimately means striving for a European Republic. When citizens embark together upon a political project, they don’t go for ‘united states’; they create a republic. A republic is created by people who decide to be equal before the law. Nationality is not in the definition. A republic does not have ethnic contours or prerequisites; rather it has, in the definition of Cicero, ius aequum – equal law – for all citizens.

The EU is far from offering that. European citizens remain compartmentalised by national law, and a political project can never function like this. If we want to realise one European democracy, we need to strive for the principle of political equality. If the French revolution brought legal equality beyond social class, the European revolution of the 21st century must bring legal equality beyond nations. That would be a compelling offer behind which Europeans citizens, from south to north, from east to west, could unite. This is probably the only way to heal the wounds of the cumulated European crises. And there is no reason why this should remain a utopia.

“We have forgotten that without a utopia there is no chance of achieving a better future”

The principle of political equality means voting equality, tax equality and, over time, equal access to social welfare. Europe cannot succeed if, within the same political project, the nation state is used as tool for competition, whether on taxes or on welfare. The entire reshuffling of the political system of Europe stems from the principle of political equality: this is the essential condition for a fully-fledged transnational, representative parliamentary democracy in Europe, corresponding to the principle of division of powers. The principles of political equality and division of power are two things that are never questioned in national democracies. It is time to give European democracy the same treatment.

Putting aside the myth of state sovereignty and leaping from the United States of Europe to a European Republic would just achieve what the EU’s founding fathers once aspired to. “We do not form a coalition of states, we unite people,” wrote Jean Monnet, who envisioned a radically denationalised European society.

This comes very close to what political theorist Hannah Arendt described as ‘integral federalism’. Arendt’s essay ‘What is freedom?’ could be the compass towards a European Republic – a network democracy of autonomous European regions and towns, something made easier in a digital era that offers citizens new forms of direct interaction and political participation. Arendt was in search of the hidden tradition of freedom, and in favour of spontaneous forms of political organisation, among citizens, in towns or small entities, which form republican bodies. She distinguishes between state sovereignty and freedom, because, if sovereignty is the right of non-interference, it contradicts the principle of pluralism:

“The famous sovereignty of political bodies has always been an illusion, which, moreover, can be maintained only by the instrument of violence, that is, with essentially non-political means…if men wish to be free, it is precisely sovereignty they must renounce”.

Arendt’s ‘integral federalism’ is in line with the thinking of contemporaries such as Swiss cultural theorist Denis de Rougement and French philosopher and author Albert Camus, who at the genesis of European political and economic integration in the 1950s advocated strongly against state-based, intergovernmental federalism. That would end, as Arendt predicted, in the hollowing out of European democracy, or in what German sociologist Jürgen Habermas recently has called “executive federalism”: the capture of people’s freedom by nation states.

As the EU marks its 60th birthday, this is the Union we live in. If we really want European democracy, it’s time to move out of it and to head for the utopia of a European Republic in which sovereign European citizens manage their democracy free from nation states.

IMAGE CREDIT: Jorisvo/Bigstock

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It was back in 1956 when Philip K. Dick wrote the science fiction short story ‘Minority Report’, later adapted for the cinema. The story is about a future society where three mutants attached to a machine can foresee crimes before they occur, allowing the ‘Precrime Division’ to arrest suspects before any offence is actually committed.

As it happens, science fiction sometimes becomes reality. But instead of using mutants ‒ they are as unreliable as they are imaginary ‒ today’s security solution providers rely on complex algorithms to predict the future. The principle is relatively simple; the practice way less.

In today’s world, we consume information as much as we produce it: news websites publish millions of articles daily, while billions of posts appear on social media each day. Twitter alone has an average of around 500 million tweets every day. The ‘internet of things’ revolution – devices connected to the internet – is also producing a huge amount of data.

Companies in different sectors have found ways to leverage this gold mine of information to increase sales (think Amazon, Walmart), to suggest to us what to read, watch or do (Google, Netflix), or indeed to predict the outcome of future events.

“Science fiction sometimes becomes reality: instead of mutants, today’s security solution providers rely on complex algorithms”

Predictive algorithms are all around us, although we do not fully realise it. A very simple application can be found in our smartphones: when we type a word, the phone suggests the next word or corrects a typo. This process is possible thanks to millions of sentences and corrections done previously by other users who have ‘trained’ the algorithm with their repetitive actions. The algorithm is capable of guessing what you are about write ‒ or wanted to write.

Security solution providers have been using similar, big data-related technologies for a while now. Media and social media monitoring platforms are not only capable of harvesting information and alerting us in real time when a disaster ‒ man-made or natural ‒ occurs, but can also alert us if an event is likely to happen in the future.

The Los Angeles, Atlanta and Chicago police departments, among others, are using software that allow them to perform so-called ‘predictive policing’. The system uses historical data on location, time, place and type of crime to identify patterns and give law enforcement agents clear indications on where and when criminal offences are most likely to happen. By adopting predictive policing software, the Los Angeles Police Department registered a 20% drop in crimes in the period from January 2013 to January 2014.

But crime is not the only social phenomenon that monitoring platforms can predict. By using a large set of open sources, such as tweets, news, blogs, food prices, currency rates and so on, software called EMBERS (‘Early Model Based Event Recognition using Surrogates’) is capable of forecasting civil unrest days or weeks in advance.

“Crime is not the only social phenomenon that monitoring platforms can predict”

It is important to remember that this new revolution in data-driven security intelligence is not meant to replace the role played by humans. The human factor in intelligence and policymaking will still play a major role, as no machine is currently capable of replacing human intuition and qualitative judgment.

Despite this technology still being at an initial stage of development and exploitation, monitoring solutions can provide security practitioners and decision-makers with state-of-the-art technology and help them to perform their tasks with a higher degree of efficiency. In fact, the intelligence provided by monitoring applications could be extremely useful to monitor extremism and counter online radicalisation, to prepare and respond to natural and man-made disasters, and, for the private sector, to avoid supply chain disruption and to protect facilities and employees. Monitoring applications can strongly improve the performance of budget-constrained agencies and reduce waste of human and financial resources by allocating them exactly where they are needed the most.

For this technology to reach its full potential, small and medium-sized enterprises and start-ups will need to play a key role. But Europe is still lagging behind in terms of academic research and commercial exploitation of big data technologies for the security sector, when compared to the United States.

The European Union’s framework programme for research and innovation, Horizon 2020, could be the perfect platform to foster the capabilities of European start-ups in research and development. The platform could allow them to come out with the next generation of data-driven security intelligence applications. It is also of paramount importance to foster collaboration between academia, such as data and social scientists, and the private sector.

If successful, Europe will not become trouble-free. But such steps will certainly contribute to reducing uncertainties and making our continent safer.

IMAGE CREDIT: iunewind/Bigstock

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The traditional mainstream parties in France are not dead yet, and neither is the French establishment.

Much has been made of the ways in which Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen — the two remaining candidates in the race to become the next French president — have cast themselves as anti-establishment figures.

But the reality is far more nuanced. Le Pen, although the leader of a political party not considered to be mainstream, is a well-established politician who has been a Member of the European Parliament since 2009 and is, of course, part of a political dynasty, in the form of the Le Pen family. Macron is a former investment banker and economics minister in the government of the current President, François Hollande.

Although Macron has sought to establish a new movement, En Marche!, around his presidential bid and has never actually held political office, there is no hiding the fact that his economic policy under Hollande was one that sought to reform France’s labour laws in favour of a quick-hire, quick-fire approach.

In many ways, Macron is closer to the centre-right candidate François Fillon in his economic views than he is to some within the Socialist Party, who would prefer to maintain the status quo rather than to challenge the somewhat staid French economic model. Fillon, viewed by many as a French Margaret Thatcher because of his policies of trying to slim down the size of the French state and to challenge the supremacy of the 35-hour working week, was of course more zealous than Macron in this regard.

“The traditional mainstream parties in France are not dead yet, and neither is the French establishment”

Nevertheless, despite Macron’s persistent denial of responsibility for the actions of Hollande’s government in the head-to-head debate with Le Pen on 3 May, he is essentially a figure of the establishment trying to position himself as a centrist in the hope of winning over voters from the centre-left and centre-right. The endorsements of Macron from Hollande, Fillon and former president Nicolas Sarkozy since the first round result on 23 April reinforce in many ways the sense that Macron is part of the political classes that voters on both the extreme-left and extreme-right so dislike. Having the backing of such political heavyweights may appear to be a positive, but this does not necessarily guarantee Macron the support of their electorate in the second round.

Given that one of Macron’s tactics in the period between the two rounds of voting has been to distance himself from the Hollande presidency, receiving the backing of the vastly unpopular incumbent may well dent Macron’s share of the vote.

Le Pen, by contrast, has sought to distance herself from the brand of her National Front party through her temporary retirement from the presidency of the party. In many ways, this is a cynical move designed to appeal to centrist and extreme-left voters disillusioned with precisely the aspects of Macron’s candidacy that appear to make him much more part of the establishment than he has claimed.

But Le Pen has held political office, as an MEP and member of the regional council for the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region. She is far from an outsider. The distancing between Le Pen and the party, does rather dampen down comparisons between Le Pen’s candidacy and that of the President of the United States, Donald Trump. While Trump is a multi-billionaire businessman whose lifestyle would, in many ways, associate him with the establishment, he sought to use the framework of the Republican Party to achieve elected office. Le Pen is seeking to avoid the still potentially toxic image of the National Front to gain more support in the second round, even though she remains president of the party in all but name.

“A victory for either Le Pen or Macron will result in an established party ruling the roost”

Where, then, does this leave the French political landscape? While Macron and Le Pen do not come from the two traditional mainstream parties in France, all is by no means lost for the Socialists and the centre-right Republicans.

In the face of the vast unpopularity of Hollande, it is very likely that the legislative elections in June will sweep the centre-right to a majority in the National Assembly, meaning either Macron or Le Pen will need to work with a potentially hostile ruling party. Despite the damaging image of Hollande and the catastrophic presidential campaign of Benoît Hamon, the Socialist candidate who came a lowly fifth in the first-round poll, the Socialists will look to reform and to regroup in the same way as the British Labour Party did in the 1980s and 1990s.

Macron’s connections to the Socialists mean that he is unlikely to preside over a complete disintegration of the party on his watch, if elected in Sunday’s vote. In many ways, it is the establishment parties of centre-left and centre-right that still hold the cards in shaping the future of France over the next five years.

Forget talk of the death of the establishment: a victory for either Le Pen or Macron will result in an established party (probably the centre-right) ruling the roost.

IMAGE CREDIT: RazvanPhotography/Bigstock

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Fifty-two years ago ‘Mary Poppins’ won five Oscars. Singapore, Maldives and Gambia became independent countries. West Germany and Israel established diplomatic relations. The Vietnam War raged. Malcolm X was assassinated. It’s stuff for history books.

According to the latest World Economic Forum (WEF) Global Gender Gap Report, it will take another 52 years for the world to reach gender parity in parliaments and confine inequality in political representation to history – if the past trajectory, measured by the WEF since 2006, remains at its current speed, that is. But the last three years have seen a significant roll-back; the number of years to the time that women and men have the same rights and opportunities is increasing, not decreasing. My daughter’s grandchildren might not live to see the day when it’s as likely for a girl to become President of a country as it is for a boy.

Despite some positive dynamics in the last years, having just one woman for every four men in parliaments is a clear sign of how bad societies are at tapping into the potential talent of more than 50% of the population. There are, of course, important variations: Nordic countries are the most gender equal, and the world champion for female participation in politics is Rwanda. At the other end of the scale are Arab and Gulf countries.

As in business and academia, the greater the seniority, the lower the number of women. A 2016 report by UN Women says that men make up 77% of parliamentarians, 82% of government ministers, 93% of heads of government and 94% of heads of state. Every time a woman makes it to the top, it makes global headlines. You can name all current female leaders of countries in less than 30 seconds.

“Today women need three things to accelerate their political careers: communication, connection and community”

There’s good reason to care about this imbalance. Gender equality in political participation has both intrinsic value and instrumental value. Women in political office make it a priority to advance rights, promoting equality and opportunity for women and girls (to the benefit of all society) in a way and to a degree that men in power overwhelmingly do not. It’s a matter of human rights. It’s a matter of good governance. The composition of executives and legislatures affects the quality of laws and influences the extent of their application. Women leaders are also more likely to be responsive to public needs and tend to cooperate across party lines.

A range of barriers – official and unofficial, formal and informal – limit women’s political participation. The Women Political Leaders Global Forum (WPL), the Gender and Development Unit of the World Bank, and Yale University (with support from EY) conducted a study on ‘The Female Political Career’. It analyses survey responses from 617 politicians, female and male, from 84 countries. It is designed to understand the non-legal barriers that women face in different phases of the political lifecycle.

The findings tell the same old story – one that applies globally. Women politicians tend to start their careers later, have fewer children, spend more time caring for their families, and arrange their lives to have shorter commuting times than their male counterparts. It appears that only females with supportive families run for office, whereas men are more likely to run without consulting with their families. Family commitments still constitute a major source of concern for women. “Gender equality begins in our homes,” says Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, Chair of the African Union (2010-2016) and a member of the WPL advisory board. Another said “three Ms stand in the way of women: money, media and men”.

Women and men have systematically different levels and types of political support networks. On average female politicians receive fewer private donations than their male counterparts. They rely more heavily on party sponsorship and support. Media portrayal and voter perceptions of ‘a woman’s place’ seem to cast a longer shadow over female politicians’ decisions about whether to run for office and their decisions to pursue higher office.  While both men and women express concern about the many pitfalls of political campaigning, females are more worried overall, particularly about stereotypical discrimination, the difficulty of fundraising, negative advertising, the loss of privacy and not being taken seriously.

“Every time a woman makes it to the top, it still makes global headlines”

So what can be done to address these problems? In politics, networks are key. Today women need three things to accelerate their political careers: communication, connection and community. WPL aims to increase both the number and the influence of women in political leadership positions, optimising the power of communication and connection to build new communities of knowledge for women political leaders everywhere. Progress happens by convening women political leaders who have the drive and the influence to create positive change.

And not just women. In a flagship campaign, WPL asked male presidents and prime ministers to complete the sentence “We need more women in Parliaments and as political leaders because …”. Donald Tusk, President of the European Council, was among the almost seventy respondents to date. He said: “Future generations are not going to ask whether you were a man or a woman politician, because this is simply irrelevant. What they are going to ask is, ‘what did you do when you were in a position to do anything of worth?’”

Canada’s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, said: “When women engage in the political process, societies thrive and prosper.” Werner Faymann, a former Austrian chancellor, said: “Gender equality improves the quality of our democracies. Gender diversity among political decision makers is key to good governance.” And former European Commission president José Manuel Barroso, said: “We need more women as political leaders because we are for justice.”

But the glass ceiling remains. There may be some cracks and openings, but there is still a lot to do. As Michelle Bachelet, President of Chile, rightly puts it: “When one woman is a leader, it changes her. When more women are leaders, it changes politics and policies.”

IMAGE CREDIT: palinchak/Bigstock

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The centre of Malta’s foreign policy has always been the Mediterranean. In his day, Malta’s longest-serving prime minister, Dom Mintoff, single-handedly forced a Mediterranean chapter into the Helsinki Final Act of 1975. More recently, Malta has been active on a range of Mediterranean initiatives, such as the ‘Five plus Five’ dialogue and the EU’s various policies towards its southern neighbourhood.

Malta’s interest in the Mediterranean has traditionally been multidimensional, including trade, security and stability, maritime affairs and peace (Malta is a long-standing and active supporter of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict). So it was only logical that Malta’s Foreign Minister, George Vella, stated on the first day of the country’s presidency of the Council of the European Union that “there is a definite sense of expectation in EU quarters that Malta should leave its imprint primarily on Mediterranean affairs.”

It is a measure of the extraordinary state of current European politics that the southern Mediterranean has, in practice, received only limited attention during the first months of Malta’s presidency. This is mostly due to factors far beyond Malta’s control. Looming Brexit negotiations, the strains on NATO and European security following the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, the rise of chauvinistic nationalism across Europe and its effect on European policy-making, the continuing policy failures around migration and escalating violence in Ukraine all compete for the attention of Europe’s leaders.

However, it is noteworthy that the Maltese presidency has so far been unable to stop a longer-standing EU trend towards viewing Euro-Mediterranean relations through one single lens: migration. Recent initiatives on Libya have, in practice, been focused on border control and migration, as this is perceived as being key to stabilising the so-called ‘central Mediterranean route’. The Maltese presidency has emphasised the follow-up to the Joint Valletta Action Plan on migration management and proposed new measures to disrupt the business models of human smugglers and traffickers, to mention just a few examples.

But discussing migration is not discussing the Mediterranean specifically. Migration is a much wider problem. A cursory survey of migrants’ and refugees’ origins, as well as their reasons for migrating, is enough to make that clear. And the challenges of the Mediterranean are so much vaster and deeper: peace and security, economic inequality, discrimination and intolerance, patronage-based politics, democratisation and social change. All are important in their own right – not only insofar as they affect migratory flows. Reinforcing a one-dimensional Euro-Mediterranean dimension would be an ironic and unfortunate legacy of the Maltese presidency.

IMAGE CREDIT: CC/Flickr – Juan Antonio F. Segal

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2186: according to the World Economic Forum, that’s the year we will achieve economic gender parity if progress continues at the current rate. It’s a hefty downward revision from last year’s prediction of 2133.

With these statistics, the estimate that seven out of ten women worldwide still suffer physical and/or sexual violence at some point in their lives and the rise of a world superpower ‘leader’ who has boasted of sexual assault and threatens to set back the clock on hard-won women’s rights, it is not so hyperbolic to suggest that we are on the verge of darkness.

But there are reasons for optimism; to #BeBoldForChange, to borrow the theme of this year’s International Women’s Day. Alongside the dismal shifts we have witnessed there are two immensely powerful trends — the digital megatrend and women’s empowerment — that, if leveraged together, promise to become the great game-changer of the 21st century.

ICT (information and communications technology) is a forceful catalyst for gender equality and women’s empowerment, as underscored by its inclusion in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Through my work as Director of a crowdfunding platform for women’s empowerment, I witness the transformative power of ICT every day. Solar-powered, mobile information technology classes are carried to young women from cemetery-slums in the Philippines, enabling them to obtain safe employment in the ICT sector. Women from tribal zones in Pakistan benefit from computer-assisted entrepreneurship classes. In South Africa mobile health (m-health) services are reducing mother-to-child transmission of HIV. Indigenous women in Guatemala are changing their futures thanks to mobile microfinance. In Egypt online civic education campaigns and training are promoting women’s political participation. Using ingenious apps, women farmers in Tunisia are adapting to and even resisting the impact of climate change.

Here in our ostensibly liberated, high-income countries ICT is deployed daily to advance women’s rights and equality. Innovative apps and networks help prevent violence against women and support survivors. (In Europe violence against women costs societies an estimated €228bn per year, so such technologies have additional economic benefits.) Online campaigns combat stereotypes and advance gender equity in the media. Digital platforms enable crowdfunding for female (social) entrepreneurs. Campaigns and apps promote ‘gender-lens investing’, which takes account of empowerment and economic viability. Innovative software is automating screening of job applications and human resources processes, thereby reducing gender bias. Research shows that societies’ ‘digital fluency’ reduces workplace inequality, as well as offering women in particular the flexibility of teleworking.

“Decades of research prove that women’s empowerment is a key driver of wider socioeconomic progress”

Across the world digital technologies are helping women to enjoy their human rights and realise their potential, and this in turn has far-reaching benefits. Decades of research prove that women’s empowerment is a key driver of wider socioeconomic progress. It improves business financial performance and boosts a nation’s or region’s gross domestic product. The ‘Power of Parity’ report by consulting firm McKinsey estimates that narrowing the global gender gap in labour force participation could add US$12 trillion in global annual GDP by 2025. And narrowing the gap helps to address some of today’s toughest global problems, including poverty, food insecurity, and environmental sustainability. The stability of communities depends on empowered women, who are, at a time of spreading extremism, a powerful force for peace and global security.

It’s clear that women’s empowerment is central to wider socioeconomic progress, and crucial if we are to achieve the objectives of the European Union’s Europe 2020 growth strategy and the SDGs. And it’s clear that ICTs can catalyse progress for women.

But there is a roadblock. A digital gender divide that persists across the world – and one that is widening.

3.9 billion people – around half the world’s population – are still offline, and the majority of these are girls and women. Research estimates that women’s chances of benefiting from the advantages of ICT are one-third less than men’s. Across developing countries approximately 25% fewer women than men have internet access. In Africa only 12% of women are online.

Women in low- and middle-income countries face barriers of accessibility, affordability, inadequate digital education and a consequent lack of digital literacy skills, in addition to problems of cultural bias and mobility restraints. In higher-income countries, women remain chronically underrepresented in technology fields. Europe’s gap is stark: only 30% of the ICT sector is female. Women are particularly absent from advanced technical and decision-making positions, with a paucity of females opting for ICT studies and careers. There is an alarmingly leaky pipeline, with many women dropping out of ICT jobs and education. As governments try to correct the supply-demand mismatch in digital skills in the growing ICT sector, it’s estimated that the EU will suffer a shortfall of more than 750,000 digitally-skilled professionals by 2020.

Overcoming the digital gender divide is imperative: both morally, so that girls and women can reap equal dividends in our digital societies and economies; and for the economic, development and security reasons that are growing spectacularly more pressing each day.

“Governments must prioritise gender equality issues, integrate ICT policies with gender and development policies, and move beyond rhetorical commitments towards concrete actions”

The good news is that extensive studies have diagnosed the problems and we have an abundance of recommendations, roadmaps and action plans. These include the Gender Equality Action Plan by the International Telecommunication Union, a UN agency; the European Commission’s European Code of Best Practices for Women in ICT; and UN Women’s women and technology recommendations from the 60th session of its Commission on the Status of Women (CSW60). Meanwhile, savvy governments and businesses are implementing multi-stakeholder partnership initiatives — public, private and civil-sector — to advance women’s digital inclusion, digital skills and entrepreneurship, and to attract and retain more female talent in ICT sectors. Such moves address the digital skills deficit and open up huge, multi-billion-dollar market opportunities.

But much more needs to be done. We need greater investment in girls’ and women’s equal and affordable access to ICT, as well as girls’ digital skills education from an early age. Governments must further prioritise gender equality issues, integrate ICT policies with gender and development policies, and move beyond rhetorical commitments and towards concrete actions. More needs to be done to address cybercrime and protect women’s rights and safety online where, according to the WorldWide Web Foundation, “a culture of impunity reigns”. And we need better sex-disaggregated data and analytics to track progress. As the saying goes, ‘what gets measured, gets done’.

To change today’s digital picture we need greater political will. Governments, companies, educators, and civil society: we all need to invest more in girls’ and women’s digital empowerment. We must collaborate, and we can: our increasingly interconnected, digital age offers us unprecedented opportunities to take action. And everyone stands to benefit from increased gender equality in ICT.

Europe has everything to gain by being an exemplary global leader on this front. Capitalising on women’s vast talent to meet the demand for ICT skills could give an estimated annual €9bn boost to EU GDP by 2020. It’s our best means of ensuring productivity, growth, innovation and competitiveness, thereby reaping the wider socioeconomic benefits of women’s empowerment. ICT and innovations in ICT are shaping the world we live in and determining the values we live by. Women must be equal participants in this.

Online and elsewhere, debates continue about the Women’s March on 21 January 2017 and what its significance was, is and will be. One thing is certain: the Women’s March will go down in history as a landmark date, when countless women and men across the globe made their voices heard by calling for the protection of civil rights, and women’s rights in particular. But it’s worth remembering that this worldwide mobilisation began with ICT: a single Facebook post from a grandmother in a remote community on the Hawaiian island of Maui.

Our common future can be safer, brighter and fairer. The world urgently needs empowered women, and ICTs are one of the best tools for women’s empowerment.

IMAGE CREDIT: Pramote/Bigstock

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Despite the European Union ensuring more than 60 years of peace in Europe, the EU struggles to sell its story. Most Europeans see it as boring, and often do not understand what is happening in Brussels.

In recent years the EU has spent a lot of time and money on communicating with its citizens, explaining its policies and its purpose. But this communication has been high on jargon and low on impact.

Many factors contribute to inefficient EU communication: the lack of leadership, the absence of a shared vision and a common European public sphere, poor knowledge of the EU, a hostile media, EU red tape, unethical practices in politics, the ‘blame game’ on European issues, multilingualism, scandals and austerity. All contribute to the EU’s incapability to communicate its policies and achievements in a transparent and clear way.

Today, audiences are central to the success of an organisation or a project. People no longer accept being “talked at”. But EU communication is too often based on one-way information, not genuine dialogue.

Inside the EU, communication itself is often considered as a secondary, administrative task – and is often subjected to administrative procedures. Communication projects are focused on management; they are too self-centred. To be successful, this needs to change: the European message needs to be interesting to the media and understandable to citizens.

“Despite the European Union ensuring more than 60 years of peace in Europe, the EU struggles to sell its story”

The Parliament, the Commission and the Council often express diverging and even contradictory views, resulting in a cacophony. “Europe can only work if we all work for unity and commonality, and forget the rivalry between competences and institutions. Only then will Europe be more than the sum of its parts,” said Jean-Claude Juncker in his 2016 State of the Union speech.

How can we make the failing communications of the EU succeed? I provide several key recommendations in my recently-published book, Rebranding Europe, that may help the EU find its voice and connect with citizens.

First, communicate Europe at both EU and national levels. Communicating in true partnership is paramount. It needs to be based on common values, political will, transparency and honesty. The key players should operate on an equal footing. An innovative and sustainable public-private partnership would help; involving the EU institutions, member states, civil society, the media, political parties and the private sector. They would commit to presenting the EU as a useful brand, an entity that is seeking to collaborate with the citizens and make a meaningful difference in their daily lives. The message should be adapted to the local identity of each country.

Second, go local. Over-centralisation of the communication process in Brussels is counterproductive.  Local and regional authorities should be given more responsibility and be considered as key partners in providing communication aimed at building bridges between the EU and its citizens. Engaging at the grassroots level can help people in different countries to understand that they are not as different from their neighbours as they think. Success can start with a cause that people can support, such as a specific goal that European economic, social, political and cultural cooperation would facilitate.

Third, make things easier for journalists. Quality media and press independence play an important role in communicating Europe. The EU should provide better support for media reporting, as the information distributed to the press is very technical and not always easy to understand. Adapting press releases to the specific contexts of the member states or groups of citizens and creating a helpdesk for journalists seeking background could be solutions. In addition, the EU should encourage, organise and fund specialised training for journalists in all EU countries, since there is an urgent need for training that enables the local press to communicate the relevance of the EU in an understandable manner and explain it in a clear language. Funds from the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and the social funds could be used for this purpose.

“Taking a more serious approach to the EU communication could stimulate the engagement of citizens and restore public approval”

Fourth, make EU communication a strategic priority. Strategic communication planning is a powerful management activity for identifying issues, setting priorities, defining strategies, and determining performance benchmarks as well as expectations. Unfortunately, only the first Commission of José Manuel Barroso, from 2004 to 2009, gave communication priority and a dedicated commissioner.

Fifth, send out a message of unity and recovery: the EU should show that it is coming out of the crisis and focusing on what matters to the people ‒ employment, education, security, and so on. The EU institutions have been too slow to react and not creative enough in their efforts to show local populations why a united Europe is relevant and beneficial.

Last, forget the fluff. Good communication is like good journalism: it creates transparency by making important things clear and relevant to stakeholders. Good communication helps create dialogue and is the basis of beneficial decision-making. It is necessary to make messages coherent, clear, concrete and jargon-free, and to connect them to particular human needs and expectations. Speaking with one voice at all levels ‒ EU, local and regional ‒ is fundamental.

The increase of Eurosceptic and nationalist parties in Europe, populism, Brexit and the antipathy towards institutions and politics in general are all alarm bells that should jolt us into taking immediate action. Brexit alone should have been a huge wake-up call to inspire better communication. If that is not clear to the EU leaders now, they have not understood what is happening and the EU will implode, just like the Soviet Union did.

Nevertheless, Brexit may turn the tide towards a better Europe. History, especially during periods of constant change like the one we are living in, is often shaped by random events. Taking a more serious approach to the EU communication could stimulate the engagement of citizens and restore public approval. There is no time to waste.

IMAGE CREDIT: CC/Flickr – European Parliament

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During the 2016 United States presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised to put ‘America first’ by bringing in several measures. One of them was building a “beautiful wall” along the country’s southern border in a bid to halt migration. Another was to end “unfair” trade agreements which had “left the US at a disadvantage”, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), signed in 1994 by Mexico, Canada and the US.

During his first week of government, President Trump promptly signed an executive order directing agencies to secure the Mexican frontier “through the immediate construction of a physical wall on the southern border, monitored and supported by adequate personnel so as to prevent illegal immigration, drug and human trafficking, and acts of terrorism”.

Throughout the campaign, Mexico was one of Trump’s main targets. As President, this trend is likely to continue unless common sense is brought to the discussion, and Mr Trump and his team are made to understand that Mexico is one of America’s best allies, rather than an unwanted neighbour.

“Mexico is America’s second-largest export market after Canada, and its third-largest trading partner”

So what chance of a future prosperous relationship? Following a rocky history between Mexico and the United States – war, territorial ‘sales’ and occupations included – the 1990s saw a major shift and improvement in ties. NAFTA was signed, giving the Mexican and American economies a significant boost and accelerating their integration. Cooperation has continued, albeit with some complications. While the US, in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks, focused on combatting terrorism, Mexico entered a new period of destabilisation created by the emergence of powerful drug cartels and organised crime. Economic integration flourished, but with dark undertones: the incorrect perception that labour migration harbours terrorists, and the brutal efforts of organised crime groups to supply the American appetite for illicit drugs.

Since NAFTA has been in place, the US has become Mexico’s most important trade and economic partner, accounting for about 80% of its international trade. Mexico is America’s second-largest export market after Canada, and its third-largest trading partner, after Canada and China.

However, it is not just simple trade. As the Wilson Center notes, US-Mexico trade is unique, since there is ‘production sharing’, with 40% of the content of American imports from Mexico produced in the US. The think-tank says: “40 cents of every dollar spent on imports from Mexico comes back to the United States, a quantity ten times greater that the four cents returning for each dollar paid on Chinese imports.”

According to the United States Chamber of Commerce 14 million American jobs depend on trade with Mexico. Two border states have the most jobs: California, where NAFTA’s economic contribution amounts to US$71.9bn, and Texas, with 37% of the Lone Star State’s total exports and 80% of its chicken, eggs, dairy and honey going to Mexico. All of Idaho’s malt export goes to Mexico. 65% of Utah’s minerals exports go south; 99% of Kansas’ corn; 72% of Minnesota’s car parts. The city of Detroit exports $10.9bn in cars and car parts.

“Trump needs to understand that market-driven, legal circular migration is an asset to his country”

Studies by the George W. Bush Institute suggest that North America out-competes large trading groups, even beating the European Union. And although the NAFTA is not as strong as the US alone, largely because of Mexico’s struggles to maintain the rule of law, America’s high score in the Bush Institute index is partly the result of its close trade and investment relationships with Canada and Mexico, especially in the car, technology and aerospace industries. There is also room for further cooperation and competitive advantage, such as on energy, where North America can emerge as global leaders.

Disrupting this trade partnership and overall relationship would have severe consequences for both parties. But President Trump keeps turning his eyes to Mexico, and not in a friendly way. His Twitter rhetoric continues to be vicious, not leaving much room for the Mexican government to manoeuvre constructively. Trump needs to understand that the US is not being exploited by NAFTA, and that market-driven, legal circular migration is an asset to his country, given the need for highly productive Mexican labour.

A commitment to an improved US-Mexico partnership is crucial not only in terms of economic prosperity for both countries (and Canada, for this matter), but also because it will have an important impact on US national security – which, along with ‘making America great again’, seems to be the main concern of this administration. And, although there is a real need for border security, there is no place for a “great wall”, as beautiful (and dysfunctional) as it may be.

Being great is about generating jobs through competition in trade and coproduction; it’s about a widely-shared culture that bonds the two countries together. It’s about cooperation in the mutual interest. If Trump’s administration does not understand that, it is very likely that the relationship will deteriorate. Neither side needs a bad relationship. And no one wants or needs an angry and destabilised Mexico.

IMAGE CREDIT: SherryVSmithVAB/Bigstock

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There has been conflict in Afghanistan for the past 38 years. The violation of human rights, and especially women’s rights, has continued under different regimes and has been common to every conflict. There has been no accountability, no justice; not even acknowledgement of victims’ suffering. Women in Afghanistan saw the killing and disappearance of their loved ones, the destruction and looting of their properties, the rape of their daughters, and various levels of violence. But we survived.

Under the Taliban, Afghan women were subjected to systematic discrimination and brutal and inhuman treatment by the government. Women were not allowed to go to work, receive an education or simply walk on the street unless they were accompanied by a Mahram (a close male relative). The situation was such that women were not treated as human beings. The Taliban turned Afghanistan into a vast jail imprisoning both men and women – but the treatment of women was much harsher.

But today Afghan women are striving for a better future. They can attend school, receive higher education, work and hold public office. They are politicians, representing people in provincial and national elected bodies. They serve as cabinet ministers, diplomats, and civil society and NGO leaders. They are artists and singers, and hold leading positions in the media and other industries. The unity government, for first time in our history, took the bold step of nominating a female judge, Anisa Rassouli, to be member of the Supreme Court – but due to the conservative mentality of some parliamentarians she was not able to win a vote of confidence.

“Extending freedoms to all women in Afghanistan requires a strong political will, but our country’s leaders currently lack the resolve to protect and promote women’s rights”

Our constitution and Women’s Bill of Rights guarantees equality between women and men for the first time. It obliges the state to respect, promote and protect human rights and to work for improvements in the situation of women and families. Afghanistan has ratified the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), and our Elimination of Violence against Women (EVAW) law criminalises acts of domestic violence against women. These are huge legal changes that have been complemented by gradual changes through policy and the implementation of social, political and cultural programmes.

The picture for women in Afghanistan today is very different, and much improved, from what it was fifteen years ago. But the majority of this improvement has happened in Kabul and few other major cities; women in rural areas have benefited little from the changes.

Many women still lack access to the same basic rights they were denied under the Taliban: education, healthcare, jobs. Although three million girls attend school, an equal number do not have access even to primary education. Higher education can be a ticket out of poverty, but only 22% of higher education students are female. Women’s access to healthcare is limited by a lack of facilities and a lack of female medical staff. Reproductive healthcare and contraception are unavailable to many, leaving women unable to limit the size of their families. Job shortages mean that women are often still economically dependent on male family members. Some families see child marriage or the forced marriage of adult women as a way to cope with economic hardship, and this problem is exacerbated when women are denied the opportunity to support themselves financially.

Extending freedoms to all women in Afghanistan requires a strong political will, but our country’s leaders currently lack the resolve to protect and promote women’s rights. This is partly due to the difficult security situation, where political leaders must deal with a small but powerful group of conservatives and fundamentalists who do not support women’s rights. A conservative patriarchal culture also dominates the judiciary, leading to a lack of female staff and restrictions on women’s access to justice. This, again, is particularly the case in rural areas.

“The promotion, protection and fulfilment of human rights are a shared responsibility”

With the absence of political will comes a lack of strategy: the Afghan government and their international partners have no long-term, coordinated and multidimensional strategy for female empowerment. Women are excluded from the important decision-making programmes within Afghanistan; even the international community has a tendency to relegate Afghan women’s rights to a side issue. At the Brussels Conference on Afghanistan in October 2016, for example, an event on women’s empowerment was held separately from the main event, a decision that failed to acknowledge that women’s rights are inextricably tied to Afghanistan’s security and economic wellbeing. The lack of good governance or the rule of law, and the existence of widespread corruption, are major causes of human rights violations, to which women are especially vulnerable.

By empowering Afghan women, we can unlock a great resource for solving these problems. Increased support for women, recognition of their experiences and their abilities, and greater inclusion in public life and high-level decision-making are the keys to sustainable peace and development.

Both women and men in Afghanistan face economic and security challenges, but women continue to fare worse. Decades-long gender-based discrimination and exclusion continues. While sustainable economic development is required to provide more healthcare facilities, schools and jobs, there is also a need for more force and ambition on the part of the government to defend women’s rights and encourage inclusivity.

But importantly, the promotion, protection and fulfilment of human rights are a shared responsibility. These are joint obligations of the international community, the Afghan government and the Afghan people. With a strong and honest partnership, we will be able to protect the dignity of women in Afghanistan and around the world.

IMAGE CREDIT: meunierd/Bigstock

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The United Kingdom’s momentous decision to leave the European Union will have long-lasting consequences for Australia’s relationship with both the EU and the UK. Will Brexit result in reinvigorated ties between Australia and the UK and the EU, or will it disrupt current and future engagement?

Brexit will cause much uncertainty in the coming years, but it also marks an opportunity for a revitalisation and recalibration of Australia’s European partnerships. Australia will need to continue to nurture and intensify its relationship with the EU, and at the same time develop a strategy to engage with the UK post-Brexit.

To avoid a reduction in the level and quality of engagement, Australia will need to take a pragmatic rather than nostalgic approach towards future relations with the UK. Australia must also avoid pursuing its relationship with the UK at the expense of its relationship with the EU, and creating a zero-sum dynamic.

The UK and Australia have a long and robust relationship: they share a common heritage, parliamentary traditions and the Commonwealth. But historical links and nostalgia cannot override the political and trade realities. Commonwealth ties may help recalibrate Australia-UK relations, but this Commonwealth heritage cannot replace Australia’s diversified political and trade links, especially within its own Asia-Pacific region.

The UK is the world’s fifth-largest economy, Australia’s fifth-largest trading partner and leading trade partner within the EU region. It is a valuable trade interlocutor for Australia.

But within Australia’s broader trade context, the UK accounts for only 4.1% of Australia’s total two-way trade. Compare that with the combined trade share of Australia’s four leading trade partners (China, the United States, Japan and South Korea), who collectively make up 47.4% of Australia’s two-way trade (22.7% with China alone) and the UK represents a small market for Australia. Australia (and New Zealand) accounts for less than two per cent of the UK’s two-way trade.

“There is no need for Australia to make a choice between the UK and the EU-27”

A key challenge for Australia will be to ensure that the UK gives it priority. The successful conclusion of free trade agreements (FTAs) will be a priority for the British government in the period immediately following its formal withdrawal from the EU, so Australia will need to persuade the UK to focus on Australia at a time when British resources and capacity will be pushed to their limits dealing with a plethora of deals and negotiations.

Fortunately for Australia, it finds itself in a position of strategic advantage in strengthening its economic ties with the UK: it has two years to prepare for Australia-UK trade negotiations.

Australia is not in a position of exclusive dependence on the UK as it has other trade partnerships, particularly in Asia. When it comes to negotiation strategies and preferences, Australia has extensive trade negotiation experience in comparison to the UK, as trade negotiations have been an EU competence since 1973 when the UK joined the European Economic Community.

But the significant challenges that Brexit poses for Australia cannot be ignored. It will result in the loss of access to the UK market as part of the EU, and Australian companies have already begun reconsidering the feasibility of continuing to use the UK as a base or gateway to the EU. Brexit may also lead to possible changes, restrictions or loss of access to the UK for skilled Australian workers ‒ or amendments to the numbers to be admitted.

There is no need for Australia to make a choice between the UK and the EU-27. Australia can ill afford to shift its focus to the UK at the expense of the rest of Europe, and the Australian government must ensure that Brexit will not adversely affect the progress it has made in its relations with the EU. Australia-EU engagement is far more than an extension of Australia’s relationship with the UK, and has indeed advanced from the period of Australian critiques of the EU in the areas of agricultural trade.

“Australia will need to balance ideological imperatives with practical realities, and complement values with material interests”

After decades of tension, the relationship has immeasurably improved, to the extent that the largest agreement ever signed between Australia and the EU ‒ a Framework Agreement ‒ was successfully concluded after some years of negotiation in 2015. An FTA is set to follow this accord, and a scoping exercise has just been completed, paving the way for formal negotiations.

With Brexit, Australia will lose a like-minded state on trade and will likely face a very different EU trade negotiator. But Australia’s Trade Minister Steven Ciobo has sought to ensure that the pursuit of an Australia-UK deal will not threaten an Australia-EU trade agreement. The fact that the UK will not be able to enter into its own trade negotiations until it has left the EU should help Australia focus on an EU-Australia trade deal for the next few years, without neglecting preparations for Australia-UK negotiations.

Forging political relations with an altered EU and the UK will need to be top priority for Australia in the coming years. Australia’s relations with the EU should, as much as possible, follow a ‘business as usual’ tactic amid the unusual business of Brexit. The UK’s departure from the Union should not be allowed to negatively influence the progress made in EU-Australia relations. Holding steady will be a crucial task for the government as trade agreements with both the EU and the UK are crucial to Australia’s national interests and preferences.

Within the context of British Prime Minister Theresa May’s proclamation that “Brexit means Brexit”, Australia must now face this reality head-on by preparing how it will advance and strengthen its relations with the UK, as well as the EU.

It will need to balance ideological imperatives, which often stem from history rather than present-day truths, with practical realities, and complement values with material interests.

IMAGE CREDIT: CC/Flickr – European Council President

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Some of us have been pulling the alarm for years, warning not just of the growing power of populist parties across Western democracies but of their increasingly obvious capacity to attract middle-of-the-road voters to their brand of politics.

For years, a long-held (and understandable) worry about the extreme right prevented most analysts from detecting the very real shift that was occurring on the ‘robust right’ of the political spectrum. Parties that began as heirs to mid-20th-century Nazism or fascism were starting to adopt broader, more hybrid stances. They couched their racism in talk of defending Western values. They moved away from their petty bourgeois base, broadening their appeal to the Left’s natural constituencies by focusing on joblessness and declining incomes. They converted unease with mass immigration into welfare chauvinism. A mix not so terribly different from fascism’s, but with softer rhetoric and sharper suits. Overall, they fed the anxieties of vast swathes of Western electorates who felt abandoned and fearful.

Add to this a steady stream of terror threats and the great gaping chasms created by social media channels and, suddenly, everything – Brexit; an erratic billionaire authoritarian in the White House; gloating, plotting gatherings of right-wing populists in small German cities – starts to make sense. If not ‘good’ sense.

As polls and surveys gave narrow leads to mainstream political options throughout 2016, voters went to the polls and simply turned their back on the status quo. They plumped instead for options that would have seemed near-impossible a year ago. 2017 unleashes a series of further challenges, notably the French and German elections, to see whether Europe as an idea and as a set of institutions will continue to be hollowed out by the forces of populism.

“Ordinary voters feel left behind by elites who have failed to protect them against the harsher winds of globalisation”

Populism may not be the perfect term, but it is useful enough for our purposes. The series of revolts we see across Western economies all fit quite well under this broad (and contested) heading: ordinary, middle-class or lower-income voters feeling left behind by elites who have failed to protect them against the harsher winds of globalisation. This feeling stems from falling wages and deindustrialisation, an ebbing of the comforts that many had come to expect after the Second World War, a sense of being less culturally ‘relevant’, or a combination of all three.

Regardless of the specific grievances, the sentiment voiced by a large minority, and sometimes a majority, is that a governing elite mandated to ensure their prosperity and well-being failed to do so, privileging its own more liberal interests above those of the ‘home team’. Trying to separate out the economic grievances from the cultural or social ones is a fool’s game: it is quite clear that the irrelevance felt and the ‘relegation’ experienced are about how economic power and social and cultural status are intertwined.

This populist revolt, a political chameleon, takes on the hue of its cultural and social context: bombastic, capitalist and aggressive in the US; insular, pragmatic and penny-pinching in the UK; grandiloquent, historic and paranoid in France; taboo-breaking, Kleinbürger-ish and technical in Germany. But the shared trait is that of populism: a menu of nostalgia, nationalism, outraged sentimentality, anti-elitism, suspicion of experts, all washed down with a large helping of xenophobia.

As the initial shock and consternation ebb, many on the non-populist side have been given to belated soul-searching. How could people who share a political and social space be so far apart in understanding the way forward and what would bring individual and collective well-being? The answer, of course, is that there is little shared political and social space (especially given the self-selection vice-grip of social media) and so little chance of there being a shared diagnosis, or a shared set of solutions.

The soul-searching is followed by a mea culpa phase that consists of good liberal self-flagellation. ‘We should have detected the distress earlier on’. ‘We should have paid more attention to the excluded from our own country’. ‘We should have looked out for the white-working class who missed the benefits of globalisation’. ‘We should have skilled-up our workforces more effectively to face this global workplace’.

All of this is true. It prompts all of us who have woken up to smell the Brexit coffee (and the whiff of other nationalist parochialisms) to pay more attention and range a lot more widely in our sources of information and social exchanges. And it is precisely why it is so important now to be proactive.

“The people who ‘have spoken’ are the people who speak from their guts and without hesitation”

At the moment, what seems to dominate is a sort of mantra: ‘the people have spoken and this is the kind of politics they say they want’. But are we not adding insult to injury by caving into this view, merely as a way of assuaging guilt or cutting our losses? Is this really what ‘the people’ want?

It’s a fundamental question. First, because it forces us to ask ‘who’, or ‘what’, is ‘the people’. Second, because it forces us to ask ourselves what we think ‘they’ want. And the two are, of course, intimately linked.

For most populists of the right, the people are defined in part according to a form of nativism. The true people are the natives. But some natives are ‘traitors’ (for example, the ‘elites’), so the ‘real’ people are also those who are defined by their capacity for common sense, their rejection of intellectualism, and their ability to see through the fog of expert knowledge. This knowledge is suspected of being used to bamboozle ordinary people to let an over-educated elite get its way. So the people who ‘have spoken’, as Theresa May put it, are the people who speak from their guts and without hesitation.

But what do ‘they’ want?

The current situation across Western economies suggests that what populist supporters want is a mix of better protection, wage guarantees, and the sense that their contribution both to a country’s economy and its cultural identity is valued. These understandable demands for forms of respect and recognition are interpreted and replayed by populist leaders as a need to ‘take back control’. In other words, legitimate (if not uncomplicated) demands are played back and articulated as an infantile fantasy designed to suspend any disbelief. Promising to deliver on this constructed fantasy – by building borders and walls, or limiting access – puts words into voters’ mouths, thereby limiting what they want. It is also dangerously counter-productive in economic terms.

The consequence is more uncertainty for everyone – but especially for those who the populists claim to help: those who have the most to lose from economic stagnation, a shrinking tax base, and lower investment in the skills they will need to face the world in the 21st century.

IMAGE CREDIT: michaelpuche/Bigstock

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‘May you live in interesting times’ is a phrase of dubious origin but very real meaning for Europe’s leaders. Blessing or curse, times have been perhaps too interesting recently, as leaders watch the European project being dismantled in front of their eyes. They seem unable to change course and to have learned nothing from the accumulation of crises tormenting the European Union.

Take the financial crisis, widely acknowledged to have been caused by weak regulation and poor enforcement. Instead of learning from the past, toughening up laws and enforcing them more strictly, the European Commission – under President Jean-Claude Juncker in particular – has embarked upon a course of deregulation and, through its Better Regulation programme, sought to reduce ‘regulatory burden’.

But regulation is not a burden – rather a necessary tool for governments to do their duty and act in the public interest: to protect people’s health, wellbeing, labour rights and the environment, rather than oiling the wheels for companies to make quick profits.

From this perspective, a post-Brexit EU may be marginally better-off than one that includes the United Kingdom – or at least less worse-off. While the UK is not the only member state infected by the deregulation disease, it has been one of the strongest proponents of this agenda.

Former British prime minister David Cameron negotiated a reform package that, had the UK voted to remain in the EU, would have “…establish[ed] specific targets at EU and national levels for reducing burden on business…’’. While this approach will now hopefully be off the table, it is likely to be the only positive effect of the June 2016 referendum when it comes to the environment.

“Our transport, energy and farming systems are all eating away at the Earth’s safety net”

No-one can predict at this point how organised or disorganised the Brexit negotiations will be. But it is clear the impact for both the UK and the EU27 will be significant. There is a high risk that environmental and climate goals may be traded away in the process. This is why environmental organisations like Friends of the Earth, both on the continent and in the UK, are working together to ensure that the Britain does not water-down hard-won EU environmental standards and laws. Retaining them is not only important for the UK, but also to avoid a future where environmental dumping has a negative impact on the rest of the EU.

In spite of this cross-Channel uncertainty, the environmental challenges in Europe do not stem only from Brexit. As the world approaches safe planetary boundaries, and in some cases starts to cross them, we need a radical rethink of our economic system of production and consumption. The Arctic saw unprecedented temperatures of 20°C above normal at the end of 2016. Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels officially passed the symbolic 400 parts per million mark in September last year, never to return below it in our lifetimes. Extreme weather is becoming the norm.

Large-scale impacts like these are rooted in the everyday. Our morning cup of coffee has a water footprint of 140 litres. Our throwaway cotton t-shirts require a staggering 2,700. Our transport, energy and farming systems are all eating away at the Earth’s safety net. We need a drastic change of course to avoid planetary catastrophe. Meanwhile, the world is entering the Trump era, where climate deniers and chiefs of fossil fuel companies no longer have the ear of government – they are the government.

At EU level it is no secret that Juncker has neither an understanding of nor an interest in the environment and its importance to our future. The European heads of states  pursue ‘business as usual’ politics with an unwavering zeal, unwilling or unable to see that this approach is fuelling the numerous crises in which we find ourselves, from climate and the environment to the economy and democracy itself.

These are, in my view, much bigger challenges than anything Brexit might bring.

The change we need is profound. It may appear frightening at first. No-one will be more afraid than today’s political elites, who operate and legislate to a short-termist, short-sighted electoral calendar.

But this change is inevitable. The European electorate has run out of patience and is starting to turn to dangerous populists bearing false promises of healing the unease caused by increasing inequality and job uncertainty. Further austerity, deregulation and the granting of more rights to corporations will only fuel this isolationist fire. The status quo is an option we simply cannot afford to choose.

“67% of citizens want to see more EU action on the environment”

Instead, the solution lies in a new pact for Europe based on a positive vision of global solidarity, where people are engaged towards building a society that lives within its ecological limits; one that ensures that standards of fairness and equity are applied while keeping vested corporate interests at bay.

It is important to recognise that it makes more sense to develop progressive and sustainable policies at a European level than it does to act nationally. Left to their own devices, countries will begin a race to the bottom for environmental standards (and social rights), underpinned by the hope of attracting businesses and investment. There was a time when EU legislation on the environment, and on social issues such as women’s and migrants’ rights, was progressive and forward-looking. It has been done before, and we can do it again.

This unprecedented situation calls for unprecedented action.

I am talking to activists, non-governmental organisations, scientists and politicians in many countries, both inside and outside the EU. There are rays of light on the horizon. I see people forming new groups and coalitions to work for the environment, but also volunteering to improve the situation of refugees or marching for the rights of women. People are taking control of their lives and rekindling feelings of community. Political elites need to listen to these movements and empower them to build a society based on solidarity; one that can take care of its people while recognising environmental limits.

This means managing the negative impacts of globalisation by building sustainable and resilient local economies, supporting local food and energy systems and the full circularity of our economy. This change in mindset will be possible only if we also profoundly challenge our current patriarchal system and opt for collaboration over competition.

The environment remains a popular issue with citizens: 67% want to see more action from the EU in this area. Putting the environment and citizens’ health and well-being at the centre of the EU’s future is not just the most reasonable way forward, it is the only realistic option for restoring faith in the European project.

The EU can make the most of these interesting times. It is under the spotlight. It needs to deliver.

IMAGE CREDIT: © European Union 2014 – European Parliament

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With days to go before the first round of the 2017 French presidential election, Emmanuel Macron, the frontrunner since March, has seen his commanding lead cut sharply.

Whilst still ahead in the latest polls, on a par with far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, only four points now separate him from the right-wing François Fillon and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the hard left candidate who has been rising fast in the last few weeks.

With one-third of voters still undecided and with the usual margin of error inherent to any poll, this rollercoaster of an election is clearly heading down to the wire. Can Macron hold on to his lead and reach the second round?

Macron certainly has strengths, but they might well turn into weaknesses. The reason for his appeal largely lies in the political positioning of his competitors. Unlike in previous elections, the main candidates have not sought to woo moderate voters. Instead, they are representing the ‘hard’ version of their party, leaving open a wide boulevard in the middle.

By claiming to be beyond the right and the left, by having a programme designed to appeal, broadly speaking, from the centre-right all the way to the right wing of the Socialist Party, and by being the only candidate from the centre, Macron has gained supremacy over the vast expanse of land between Fillon on the Republican right and Benoît Hamon on the Socialist left.

As the only openly pro-European candidate and with a programme mixing social liberalism, social democracy and moderate economic liberalism, Macron also stands starkly apart.

“If Macron does succeed in clearing all the obstacles facing him, he will truly deserve his moniker of the ‘wonder child’ of French politics”

However, in a country where the left and the right are still strong markers, Macron’s pretension of being neither has left him vulnerable to accusations of being ideologically flimsy and lacking coherence. Macron’s first presidential challenge, to reach the second round, has therefore become much tougher and no one at this stage can predict whether he will be able to clear this hurdle.

Assuming that Macron does succeed in the first round and then goes on to win the second round, his next challenge ‒ gathering a parliamentary majority ‒ will be no less daunting. To have any real power, a French President needs the support of a majority of members of the National Assembly. Hence the customary appeal of all newly-elected presidents to ask the French electorate to do the ‘right’ thing and vote for ‘their’ candidates in the subsequent parliamentary election. But for Macron, who has no established party, this is likely to prove a huge challenge. His movement, ‘En Marche’, has no experience of fighting what is, in effect, 577 micro-elections in each parliamentary constituency.

When you consider that centrist François Bayrou in 2007 and Marine Le Pen in 2012 each won 19% of the vote in presidential election but only managed to win three and two MPs respectively, the scale of the task Macron is faced with becomes clearer. It is true that the French electorate does tend to do the ‘right thing’ ‒ most famously in 1981, after François Mitterrand became the first Socialist president of the Fifth Republic, much to the bemusement of political commentators who thought a majority was out of his reach.

So Macron does have a point in saying that “if the French want […] change, they will vote for me and will confirm it in the parliamentary elections“. But in all previous elections the president has had a strong and well-organised party or coalition of parties behind him, which is not the case with Macron.

“This rollercoaster of an election is clearly heading down to the wire”

If Macron fails to gain a majority, he will have to engineer one ‒ either through a coalition or through ad hoc pacts on any given law. Considering that many politicians will undoubtedly see Macron’s presidency as an opportunity for their own political careers, such a majority might well be engineered, but solidity and loyalty will not be guaranteed. Macron might well end up in the situation of two former presidents, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and Mitterrand, who for parts of their presidencies lacked the full support of a majority and had their ability to run the country curtailed.

Assuming that the majority challenge is passed, the final one will be for Macron to implement his new style of presidency, which he has dubbed ‘Jupiterian’. He summarised this slightly cryptic conception of power as “a President who presides […], a Government that governs“. By focusing on setting out long-term objectives in six areas (growth, taxation, pensions, education, security, cleaner politics), whilst leaving the government to deal with the day-to-day running of the country, Macron intends to break away from the ‘hyper-presidentialisation’ that was the theory of Nicolas Sarkozy and the practice of the current president, François Hollande.

Macron finds the habit of both men to comment on every event as demeaning to the role of president. So it becomes clear that he is seeking to forge a certain mystique around the Presidency through a less involved and more aloof way of presiding. In an age of constant media attention, Macron’s ability to transform the idea of the presidency may well turn out to be his stiffest challenge.

If Macron does succeed in clearing all the obstacles facing him, he will truly deserve his moniker of the ‘wonder child’ of French politics. But with such a tight finish to the presidential race, it would take a very brave person to bet on any of this happening.

And yet, who would bet against this topsy-turvy campaign to deliver such a final twist?

IMAGE CREDIT: CC/Flickr – Mutualité Française

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Discussion in Europe about the legitimate limits to religious expression in secular states has become increasingly hysterical in recent years.

Two unreasonable strands of opinion have emerged in debates ‒ on the one extreme, a demand that even religious expression that is harming no one should be suppressed on the grounds that it is offensive to traditional culture; on the other extreme, a demand that all expression should be allowed on the grounds that the right to practice a religion trumps all others. Most people are between these two positions but, in the context of a mainstream media that ignores nuance, it may be hard to hold this middle ground.

This difficulty was made clear by the reaction to the recent European Court of Justice (ECJ) decisions regarding employer rules on religious symbols in the workplace. Despite the ruling, which was made on employment equality law, being held up as a victory for the far right and a defeat for the left, the ECJ did not allow employers to ban religious symbols in the workplace. The Court did not make a final decision on the case but said it was up to the French and Belgian courts to ultimately decide.

Indeed, the ECJ ruled only that a blanket ban on religious symbols does not constitute direct discrimination on equality grounds (which is correct), but made no final decision on indirect discrimination.

Even if the French and Belgian courts decide that such a ban does not constitute unlawful indirect discrimination on equality grounds, the case still only pertains to equality law. Human rights law also legally protects employees. In the Eweida case in 2013, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that an airline employee, Nadia Eweida, should be able to wear a cross round her neck, and that uniform is not a good enough reason to prevent this. In other words, such an approach to banning religious symbols constitutes indirect discrimination under the European Convention on Human Rights.

“Europe is becoming more diverse, and at a time of such increasing diversity, misguided media debates are extremely unhelpful”

So the widespread media headlines stating that the ECJ has ‘allowed employers to ban headscarves’ was completely inaccurate. This was also the conclusion of the United Kingdom’s national human rights institution, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), but it was completely at odds with the general media take on the case.

Part of the issue comes from the ECJ’s press release on the subject, which was extremely confusing. Nowhere does it explain the difference between direct and indirect discrimination. It starts off making clear that such a ban on religious symbols ‘does not constitute direct discrimination’. It gets to indirect discrimination only at the bottom of page two. So it is not surprising so much of the media got it wrong.

Europe is becoming more diverse, and at a time of such increasing diversity, misguided media debates such as this one are extremely unhelpful.

Those concerned with growing anti-Muslim sentiment understandably took the misleading headlines as a sign of further intolerance against Muslims, while those on the far right used it to continue to disparage Muslims and their visibility in society. In other words, the headlines unhelpfully caused polarisation on all sides.

Several steps should be taken to avoid the problems we now face.

First, specifically regarding legal rulings, courts need to work to ensure that any summaries of their decisions are clear and do not use undefined jargon that some journalists may misunderstand. European courts could consider sharing their decisions with trusted national human rights institutions ahead of their announcement so that these bodies can help ensure that any decisions are properly understood and interpreted in the diversity of domestic contexts that exist around Europe.

“Those concerned with growing anti-Muslim sentiment understandably took the misleading headlines as a sign of further intolerance against Muslims”

Second, the media should ensure that they have expert legal input before rushing to print, and that staff have proper training in equality and human rights legislation.

With respect to the UK, the EHRC has published a five-point plan – ‘Healing the divisions: a positive vision for equality and human rights in Britain’ – that emphasises the need to avoid rolling back our equality and human rights framework. We must also work to ensure that through education and the media, people come to better understand the range of religious and non-religious beliefs that are common in the UK today. While people may disagree with others’ religions or beliefs, and seek to limit the manifestation of such beliefs when they cause harm to others, this should not extend to prejudice or hatred of different individuals because of those beliefs.

An unfortunate consequence of the Brexit vote has been that a minority of people have since then been using it as an excuse to exercise prejudice against others, with official statistics showing a jump in hate crime in recent months. Even going beyond that, the vote has caused wider division between ‘Leavers’ and ‘Remainers’, and there are concerns that the UK’s departure from the EU could lead to our equality and human rights legal framework coming under threat.

If we work hard, together, we can seek to ensure that the United Kingdom and the European Union continue to uphold equality for all ‒ regardless of religion or belief ‒ in an increasingly pluralistic, yet secular, society. This is an end we all need to commit to.

IMAGE CREDIT: Angelstorm/Bigstock

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By 2050 the world’s population will grow by 40%. There will be an additional 2.5 billion people requiring food and fuel. During the same period global energy demand is likely to double. The world is facing a tremendous challenge: how to supply two very basic needs to a growing population in a context where decarbonisation is a necessity.

To respond to these huge but basic demands we have no choice but to use our finite resources more efficiently. It’s a journey Brazil started some forty years ago. In the 1970s Brazil imported almost 80% of its total oil consumption. Now the country is virtually energy independent and a leader in renewable energy (more than 40% of Brazil’s energy comes from renewable sources – the global average is less than 15%).

Brazil is the world’s largest sugar producer and exporter, but it is also a pioneer in the use of sugarcane ethanol as a motor fuel. Sugarcane ethanol and bioelectricity produced from leftover fibres make sugarcane the largest source of renewable energy in Brazil. It provides around 17% of the country’s total energy needs – second only to oil, and ahead of hydroelectricity. More than 40% of the country’s petrol needs have been replaced by sugarcane ethanol.

Brazilian policy promoting ethanol as a fuel started during the oil shock of the 1970s. But sugarcane ethanol’s popularity really took off in 2003 with the introduction of flexible-fuel vehicles (FFVs) that run on either gasoline blends or pure ethanol. FFVs give Brazilian consumers a choice at the pump when they fuel their cars, and most are choosing sugarcane ethanol for its price and environmental benefits. Due to consumer demand more than 90% of new cars sold today in Brazil are FFVs, and these vehicles now make up about 70% of the country’s entire light vehicle fleet – a remarkable accomplishment in only a decade. 16 car manufacturers offer more than 242 models of FFVs in Brazil.

“Over half of sugarcane expansion would occur on degraded pastures where cultivation would improve the land’s carbon balance”

Most of Brazil’s bioethanol production is absorbed by the domestic market, where it is sold as either pure ethanol fuel or is blended with gasoline at levels of between 18 and 27.5% ethanol. This flexibility is an important element of the food-energy integration nexus: the government decides the blending rate depending on harvest conditions, and it can be lowered when there are tensions in the agricultural market. This mechanism has been successfully used many times over the past ten years.

Free trade in biofuels is essential to guarantee adequate supply and avoid market disruption. For instance, thanks to the absence of import restrictions, the United States could import large quantities of Brazilian ethanol in 2012 and 2013 when the US was hit by a record drought, with no impact on its corn exports or fuel supply.

Brazil has emerged as a leader in providing both food and energy from its diversified and efficient agricultural sector. In the past 20 years the volume of sugarcane harvested and processed in Brazil has almost tripled to meet rising demand for sugar, ethanol and bioelectricity. During that time there has been no drop in Brazilian food production; in fact, Brazil’s grain production doubled over the last decade. Meanwhile, quality of life for many Brazilians has improved, with 36m people lifted out of extreme poverty between 2002 and 2014 as a result of government programmes aimed at eradicating hunger. Besides sugar and ethanol, Brazil is one of the world’s leading producers and exporters of beef, coffee, corn, orange juice, pork, poultry and soybean. The country is not just feeding itself but also much of the world with its high-productivity agriculture.

Over the next decade Brazilian sugarcane production is estimated to double. The country’s agro-ecological zoning regulations, passed in 2009, limit the amount of land to be used for sugarcane to 64.7m hectares, or about 7.5% of Brazil’s land mass. Still, the area available for sugarcane expansion in Brazil is almost nine times larger than what is currently under cultivation. More than half of this future expansion would occur on degraded pastures where cultivating sugarcane would actually improve the carbon balance of the land.

“More than 40% of Brazil’s petrol needs have been replaced by sugarcane ethanol”

On top of that, technological advances continue to increase productivity and yield, achieving more ethanol from the same area of land. Enhanced sugarcane varietals have already improved ethanol production by increasing sucrose levels by 20%. Productivity is expected to rise by one-third using new cellulose hydrolysis technology to make ‘second-generation’ ethanol. In this process, energy is extracted from by-products of traditional ethanol extraction methods: sugarcane straw and bagasse, which is the pulpy residue that remains after juice extraction.

Research and innovation continue to unleash the full potential of sugarcane. Brazil has the world’s largest plant for biopolyethylene, a cane-derived bioplastic used by many household names including Coca-Cola, Ecover and Toyota. In addition there are two commercial plants producing second-generation ethanol, which is promoting the vertical expansion of the industry.

But there is more to come. Tests with renewable sugarcane-based jet fuel and cane-derived diesel are extremely encouraging, as is the development of pellets from bagasse and biogas from vinasse, the final by-product of the ethanol distillation process.

The world’s growing population and the urgent need to decrease our carbon emissions create new equations, with agriculture at the centre. Smart and innovative policies can support the smooth development of both food and energy production.

In today’s world, where resources need to be maximised, we should look to countries such as Brazil, think creatively, and develop smart and sustainable alternatives.

IMAGE CREDIT: paulovilela/Bigstock

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