Category: 2. World

Emmanuel Macron is grappling with narrowing options as his fourth prime minister in two years hangs on by a thread and markets are alarmed by France’s political and fiscal crisis.

People close to the French president say he is already preparing for the likelihood that the premier, François Bayrou, will lose a confidence vote next month. Bayrou earlier this week took politicians and markets by surprise by calling for the vote, in an attempt to bolster parliamentary backing for his strategy on how to rein in the country’s ballooning deficit.

Although Macron is still publicly urging lawmakers to support Bayrou in the September 8 vote, he is also consulting allies over next steps, including options for a new prime minister able to get a 2026 budget adopted without further political turmoil.

None of Macron’s options are particularly appealing if the opposition follows through on their promise to topple Bayrou. He can name another prime minister from his own camp or a rightwing politician to try to maintain the same strategy. Or he can switch tack to name a moderate leftist, such as a Socialist, knowing that they will undo some of his reforms.

In no scenarios would any of these governments enjoy a parliamentary majority, so Macron could ultimately try to break the deadlock by calling again for new elections.

The president, whose second and last term ends in mid-2027, has sought to shift the blame on the opposition — particularly the key swing blocs of Marine Le Pen’s far right and the Socialists.

“It is up to the political parties to rise to the occasion by finding ways of compromise and stability, as is the practice throughout Europe,” Macron told Journal du Dimanche newspaper on Tuesday. “If they were to choose disorder, they would bear a heavy responsibility in the current delicate geopolitical moment.”

But the crisis is largely one of Macron’s own doing.

Since he called and lost parliamentary elections last year, his centre and right-wing alliance has been left without a majority in the assembly. His first pick for premier, the conservative politician and former EU Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier, was in office for just three months before being toppled over his unpopular 2025 budget.

Bayrou managed to get a slightly watered down budget adopted in February because he convinced the Socialists to abstain, but they have already said they will not repeat the favour on his new proposals for €44bn of spending cuts and tax rises in the 2026 budget.

Le Pen and far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon have even called on Macron to resign to pave the way for an early presidential vote, but he has repeatedly vowed he would never do so.

An Elabe opinion poll published on Tuesday showed 67 per cent wanted Macron to resign, while 72 per cent of respondents did not want Bayrou to stay on.

Erwan Balanant, an MP from Bayrou’s centrist Modem party, said voting out the prime minister would thrust France deeper into crisis. “If the government falls on September 8, we’ll find ourselves exactly in the same situation as we were in last July,” he said in an interview. “The question now is: who is ready to take responsibility today to find solutions?”

Opposition parties that hold at least 330 seats out of the 577 have said that they will not back Bayrou, so his premiership will end unless he secures an unlikely U-turn from them. Bayrou on Wednesday offered to meet with party chiefs next week to negotiate the deficit-cutting plan.

The looming election battle to succeed Macron in 2027 complicates the choice of a new prime minister as politicians are increasingly unwilling to be seen as helping an unpopular president and enabling spending cuts.

If Macron wants to attempt continuity he could pick a new prime minister from his own centrist party, or an allied party like former prime minister Edouard Philippe’s Horizons or the conservative Les Républicains party (LR), which all are represented in the current government.

Macron has previously wanted to tap Sébastien Lecornu, a longtime ally who was a former member of LR and is now serving as defence minister, but the opposition may see that as a provocation given Lecornu’s closeness to Macron.

Macron can also try a new configuration that he has taken great pains to avoid since last summer’s snap election — naming a moderate leftwing figure as prime minister.

A leftwing electoral alliance came in first in last year’s legislative election, giving them a claim to the premiership, but Macron instead chose to ally with the smaller right-wing LR party, largely because he was loath to see his pro-business economic agenda picked apart.

Philippe Brun, a senior Socialist MP, told the FT it was time for the left to be given a shot. “The only government that has a chance of surviving now is one we are running, but it would require securing an agreement with the centre not to topple us,” he said. “Macron cannot name someone from his own camp.”

Socialist party leader Olivier Faure last year threw his hat into the ring for premier and is said to be still eager for the job. Another option would be Bernard Cazeneuve, a former Socialist politician who previously served as prime minister under president François Hollande.

Geoffroy Didier, senior member of the conservative LR, told the FT that the party was unlikely to join a government led by a left-wing prime minister, but that they could be convinced not to censor them.

“That would be the fair middle ground, if [Macron] decided to turn to” the left, he said, adding that it was “idealistic” to expect another LR prime minister after Barnier.

Political volatility has already hampered efforts to begin chipping away at a national deficit that reached 5.8 per cent of GDP last year — far above EU limits of 3 per cent of GDP. Debt servicing costs are forecast to hit €66bn this year to become the government’s biggest area of spending, ahead of education and defence.

The risk for Macron is that instability drags on so long that — for the second year in a row — the budget for next year cannot be passed by late December. Investors have already pushed up the interest rates they demand to buy French government bonds, and both the bond and equity markets wavered this week after Bayrou’s announcement.

Some see another snap legislative vote as inevitable. “As long as there is no dissolving of parliament, we will have governments unable to pass laws, even ones as crucial as a budget,” said Didier.

An inveterate risk taker, Macron may agree that is the only way out of the impasse. “It is not his wish, because the Assembly is legitimate and reflects the country in both its diversity and its divisions,” said a person in his entourage. “But he has always said that he would not rule out using the power granted to him in the constitution.”

YouTube video shows ‘Annunciation’ church sketchpublished at 11:02 British Summer Time

11:02 BST

Olga Robinson and Sherie Ryder
BBC Verify

Earlier we outlined how BBC Verify found a YouTube account associated with Minneapolis shooting suspect Robin Westman and downloaded two videos before it was taken down.

The videos show someone’s hand leafing through the pages of several notebooks.

They are filled with notes written in English but using both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, along with a number of sketches and drawings.

These notebooks, which are dated, reveal the attack was planned weeks in advance and indicate a consistent interest in a school and a church called “Annunciation”.

One page, titled “Annunciation from memory” in Cyrillic, includes a rough sketch of the layout of a church, which the person in the video points to before stabbing the sketch with a knife.

The shooting took place at the Annunciation Roman Catholic Church, where children had been attending Mass during their first week of school.

While we were not able to access a floorplan of the church immediately a search for images available online indicated multiple similar features to those in the sketch.

In some of the notes analysed by BBC Verify, the writer weighs options of when and where it might be best to carry out an attack on “a large group of kids”.

At one point, the writer expresses a desire to “catch a big assembly on the first day of school” and the intention to avoid parents as they may be armed.

Image source, YouTube

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Iran’s rial currency fell to near-record lows Thursday as concerns grew in Tehran that European nations will start a process to reimpose United Nations sanctions on the Islamic Republic over its nuclear program, further squeezing the country’s ailing economy.

The move, termed the “snapback” mechanism by the diplomats who negotiated it into Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, was designed to be veto-proof before the world body and would be likely to go into effect after a 30-day window. If implemented, the measure would again freeze Iranian assets abroad, halt arms deals with Tehran and penalizes any development of its ballistic missile program, among other measures.

In Tehran on Thursday, the rial traded at over 1 million to $1. At the time of the 2015 accord, it traded at 32,000 to $1, showing the currency’s precipitous collapse in the time since. The rial hit its lowest point ever in April at 1,043,000 rials to $1.

France, Germany and the United Kingdom warned Aug. 8 that Iran could trigger snapback when it halted inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency after Israeli strikes at the start of the two countries’ 12-day war in June. Israeli attacks then killed Tehran’s top military leaders and saw Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei go into hiding.

Iran threatened to abandon all cooperation with the IAEA if “snapback” moves forward.

“We have told them if this happens, the pathway we have opened for working with the IAEA will be completely affected and the process will likely be stopped,” Kazem Gharibabadi, a deputy foreign minister, told state television. “If they opt for snapback, it makes no sense for Iran to continue working with them.”

That means seeking to use the “snapback” mechanism likely will raise tensions further between Iran and the West in a Mideast still burning over the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip.

“The U.S. and its European partners see invoking the ‘snapback’ as a means of keeping Iran strategically weak and unable to reconstitute the nuclear program damaged by the U.S. and Israeli strikes,” the New York-based Soufan Center think tank said Thursday.

“Iranian leaders perceive a sanctions snapback as a Western effort to weaken Iran’s economy indefinitely and perhaps stimulate sufficient popular unrest to unseat Iran’s regime.”

Iran initially downplayed the threat of renewed sanctions and engaged in little visible diplomacy for weeks after Europe’s warning, but has engaged in a brief diplomatic push in recent days, highlighting the chaos gripping its theocracy.

Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, speaking last week, signaled Iran’s fatalistic view of its diplomacy with the West, particularly as the Israelis started the war just as a sixth round of negotiations with the United States were due to take place.

“Weren’t we in the talks when the war happened? So, negotiation alone cannot prevent war,” Araghchi told the state-run IRNA news agency. “Sometimes war is inevitable and diplomacy alone is not able to prevent it.”

Before the war in June, Iran was enriching uranium up to 60% purity, a short, technical step away from weapons-grade levels of 90%. It also built a stockpile containing enough highly enriched uranium to build multiple atomic bombs, should it choose to do so.

Iran long has insisted its program is peaceful, though Western nations and the IAEA assess Tehran had an active nuclear weapons program up until 2003.

It remains unclear just how much the Israel and U.S. strikes on nuclear sites during the war disrupted Iran’s program.

Under the 2015 deal, Iran agreed to allow the IAEA even greater access to its nuclear program than those the agency has in other member nations. That included permanently installing cameras and sensors at nuclear sites. Other devices, known as online enrichment monitors, measured the uranium enrichment level at Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility.

The IAEA also regularly sent inspectors into Iranian sites to conduct surveys, sometimes collecting environmental samples with cotton clothes and swabs that would be tested at IAEA labs back in Austria. Others monitor Iranian sites via satellite images.

But IAEA inspectors, who faced increasing restrictions on their activities since the U.S. unilaterally withdrew from Iran’s nuclear deal in 2018, have yet to access those sites. Meanwhile, Iran has said it moved uranium and other equipment out prior to the strikes — possibly to new, undeclared sites that raise the risk that monitors could lose track of the program’s status.

On Wednesday, IAEA inspectors were on hand to watch a fuel replacement at Iran’s Bushehr nuclear reactor, which is run with Russian technical assistance.

In their Aug. 8 letter, the three European nations warned Iran they would proceed with “snapback” by the end of August if Tehran didn’t reach a “satisfactory solution” to the nuclear issues. That’s left little time for Iran to likely reach any agreement with the Europeans, who have grown increasingly skeptical of Iran over years of inconclusive negotiations over its nuclear program.

The deal’s snapback mechanism would expire Oct. 18, which put the three European nations in a situation where they likely feel now is the time to act. Under snapback, any party to the deal can find Iran in noncompliance, triggering renewed sanctions.

After it expires, any sanctions effort would face a veto from U.N. Security Council members China and Russia, nations that have provided some support to Iran in the past but stayed out of the June war. China as well has remained a major buyer of Iranian crude oil, something that could be affected in “snapback” happens.

Russia in recent days has floated a proposal to extend the life of the U.N. resolution granting the “snapback” power. Russia also is due to take the presidency of the U.N. Security Council in October, likely putting additional pressure on the Europeans to act.

___

Associated Press writers Amir Vahdat and Mehdi Fattahi in Tehran, Iran, contributed to this report.

___

The Associated Press receives support for nuclear security coverage from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and Outrider Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

___

Additional AP coverage of the nuclear landscape: https://apnews.com/projects/the-new-nuclear-landscape/

The traditional post-summer rentrée feels almost incomplete without an accompanying political crisis in France. And right on cue this year’s return from les grandes vacances has delivered – but in the form of a shock move that could collapse the government within a fortnight, plunging Europe’s second biggest economy into chaos.

Prime minister François Bayrou stunned the country on Monday by announcing he would seek a “back me or sack me” confidence vote in the national assembly on 8 September. For a minority prime minister, it is a risky gamble indeed – he has almost no chance of winning the vote, wrote Angelique Chrisafis, the Guardian’s Paris correspondent.

France is now bracing for political paralysis or destabilisation – as well as its debt crisis – at a time when geopolitical demands are intensifying: the war in Ukraine and Russia’s threat to Europe’s security; EU/US trade tensions and an escalating row with the Trump administration over France’s expected recognition of Palestine. As the EU’s biggest military power, France is co-leader of the western coalition that could potentially send troops to Ukraine in the event of a peace deal. Yet President Macron’s international focus may soon have to switch to the domestic search for a new prime minister.

Bayrou, appointed by Macron just nine months ago, vowed on Tuesday to “fight like a dog” to remain in power. But the parliamentary arithmetic is stacked against him, with opposition parties on the far right and the left already declaring they will vote against him.

The PM’s troubles escalated after he outlined proposals for a budgetary freeze in 2026 and the abolition of two public holidays, a plan that drew howls of outrage from all sides. Bayrou says austerity is imperative because France is broke and on the cusp of a “national emergency” over its deficit and debt.

By now putting his own job on the line he appears to be daring political opponents on the far right and left to press the nuclear button – hoping they won’t want the blame for the ensuing upheaval with France already facing pressure on the bond markets.

The timing suggests he is also hoping to outmanoeuvre the anonymous organisers of “Bloquons Tout”, a grassroots campaign that is threatening to bring the country to a standstill with nationwide anti-cuts protests on 10 September.

Either way, Bayrou’s days in the Matignon appear to be numbered. Angelique pointed out that the veteran politician recently achieved the distinction of becoming the most unpopular French prime minister since the start of the Fifth Republic in 1958.

A snap poll for the French TV channel TF1 published Wednesdsay morning showed that 63% are in favour of dissolving parliament – in other words, fresh elections – and 68% think Macron should resign if an election perpetuated the current parliamentary gridlock.

Paul Taylor, a France-based Guardian opinion contributor and senior visiting fellow with the European Policy Centre, says Bayrou’s calculus is that if the vote is purely on the fiscal crisis and the need to take drastic measures to reduce the debt mountain, enough opposition MPs will abstain and the government will survive with enhanced legitimacy.

“But it doesn’t look as if either the political class or the public are buying Bayrou’s argument that France is on the brink of a debt crisis,” he noted.

Bayrou was appointed after his predecessor, Michel Barnier, was ousted after using special powers to force through spending cuts after just three months in the role.

Because of the size of the French economy, the uncertainty is a concern for the eurozone more broadly. The Paris stock market tumbled after Bayrou’s announcement, shares in French banks slid and borrowing costs have risen.

Peace in Ukraine?

Talks between Kyiv and its western allies on “security guarantees” for a postwar Ukraine are said to be making progress, even if the bigger picture suggests that Donald Trump’s peace initiative is going nowhere.

skip past newsletter promotion

after newsletter promotion

Vladimir Putin has hardened his stance since his red-carpet summit with Trump in Alaska, wrote Pjotr Sauer, the Guardian’s Russia affairs reporter. Moscow is flatly rejecting the prospect of troops from countries in Europe being positioned in Ukraine.

Donald Trump has also ruled out US “boots on the ground” in Ukraine, offering only a vague, undefined US coordinating role. This means that despite the upbeat mood after last week’s Washington summit, where Macron and other European leaders flanked President Zelenskyy, the realisation is sinking in, wrote Paul Taylor, that Europe is on its own in defending Ukraine and hence its own security against Russian aggression.

There is anger but little surprise in Donetsk, from where Dan Sabbagh sent this vivid dispatch, at the lack of a breakthrough. Putin apparently demanded the industrial region’s handover during the Alaska summit.

As Ukraine prepared to mark 34 years of independence from the Soviet Union last weekend, the Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov articulated the Ukrainian fear that peace remains “a distant dream”. He writes: “Trump’s peace plans once again have turned out to be an illusion, and the only person who has not yet realised this is the US president.”

Thanks for reading: you can find a curation from our extensive Europe coverage of the last seven days and stay updated with our live blogs.

This is an edited version of the This is Europe newsletter. If you want to read the complete version every Wednesday, please sign up here.

BEIJING: Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un will join Chinese President Xi Jinping at a military parade in Beijing, their first joint public appearance in a display of defiance against Western pressure.

China’s foreign ministry said 26 foreign leaders will attend next week’s “Victory Day” parade on September 3, with Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico the sole representative from the European Union.

Set against the backdrop of China’s expanding military power, the event is expected to highlight solidarity not only with the Global South, but also with heavily sanctioned Russia and North Korea.

Russia, which Beijing counts as a strategic partner, has been battered by multiple rounds of Western sanctions imposed after its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, with its economy on the brink of slipping into recession. Putin, wanted by the International Criminal Court, last travelled in China in 2024.

North Korea, a formal treaty ally of China’s, has been under United Nations Security Council sanctions since 2006 over its development of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. Kim last visited China in January 2019.

Those attending the parade marking the formal surrender of Japan during World War II will include Belarus President Aleksandr Lukashenko, Iran’s President Masoud Pezashkian, Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto and South Korea’s National Assembly Speaker Woo Won-shik, said Chinese Assistant Foreign Minister Hong Lei at a news conference.

Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vucic will also attend the parade.

The United Nations will be represented by Under-Secretary-General Li Junhua, who previously served in various capacities at the Chinese foreign ministry, including time as the Chinese ambassador to Italy, San Marino and Myanmar.

On the day, President Xi Jinping will survey tens of thousands of troops at Tiananmen Square alongside the foreign dignitaries and senior Chinese leaders.

The highly choreographed parade, to be one of China’s largest in years, will showcase cutting-edge equipment like fighter jets, missile defence systems and hypersonic weapons.