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Greece elections: Angry voters punish major parties

Politics

Monday, 07 May 2012 06:20

ATHENS— Furious Greeks punished the two parties that have dominated politics for decades in the crisis-battered country Sunday, leaving its multibillion dollar international bailout — and even its future in the euro currency — hanging in the balance.

With more than 83 per cent of the vote counted, Greece appeared to be heading toward political stalemate. Nobody won enough votes to form a government, and the two parties that backed the bailout — the conservative New Democracy and socialist PASOK — conceded they need to win over adversaries to form a viable coalition.

“I understand the rage of the people, but our party will not leave Greece ungoverned,” said New Democracy leader Antonis Samaras.

New Democracy was leading with nearly 20 per cent of the vote, which would give it 110 seats in the 300-member parliament. PASOK, which has spent 21 years in government since 1981 and stormed to victory with more than 43 per cent in 2009, saw its support slashed to about 13.5 per cent. It will have just 41 seats, compared to 160 in the last election.

The two parties saw their support plummet to the lowest level since 1974, when Greece emerged from a seven-year dictatorship. The outcome showed widespread public anger at the harsh austerity measures imposed over the past two years in return for rescue loans from other European Union countries and the International Monetary Fund. Without the funds, Greece faced a disastrous default that could have dragged down other financially troubled European countries and seen it leave the euro.

Voters who deserted the two mainstays of Greek politics in droves headed to a cluster of smaller parties on both the left and right, including the extremist Golden Dawn, which rejects the neo-Nazi label and insists it is nationalist patriotic. The movement has been blamed for violent attacks on immigrants and ran on an anti-immigrant platform, vowing to “clean up” Greece and calling for land mines to be planted along the country’s borders. The party looked set to win about 7 per cent of the vote, giving it 21 deputies in parliament — a stunning rise for a group that earned just 0.29 per cent of the vote in 2009.

Sunday’s other big winner was Alexis Tsipras, the 38-year-old leader of the Radical Left Coalition, or Syriza, who saw his party poised for an unprecedented second place with 16.4 per cent and 51 seats — the first time in nearly 40 years that any party other than New Democracy or PASOK has held the spot.

Turnout stood at just over 64 per cent — a low figure for the country, where voting is officially compulsory, although no sanctions are applied for not casting a ballot.

Negotiations are expected to begin Monday to form a coalition. As first party, Samaras will get three days to seek partners. If he fails the mandate will go to the second party for a further three days, and then to the third party. If no agreement can be reached, the country heads to new elections.

Both Samaras and PASOK leader Evangelos Venizelos, who spent nine months as finance minister, indicated any unity government would have to include more than just their two parties.

But in a note that will likely raise alarm among Greece’s international creditors, Samaras insisted any coalition should renegotiate the terms of the country’s bailout.

“We are ready to take up the responsibility to form a new government of national salvation with two exclusive aims: For Greece to remain in the euro and to amend the terms of the loan agreements so that there is economic growth and relief for Greek society,” he said.

Riding high on his massive gains, Tsipras stuck to his anti-bailout position, saying the agreement should be overturned altogether.

“The people have rewarded a proposal made by us to form a government of the Left that will cancel the loan agreements and overturn the course of our people toward misery,” he said before heading out to meet throngs of jubilant supporters.

More than two years of repeated austerity measures that have included pension and salary cuts and waves of tax hikes have pushed Greece into a deep recession that has seen the jobless rate explode and tens of thousands of businesses close.

Venizelos insisted his party, which was in power from the start of the crisis in late 2009 until a political crisis forced it into an uneasy coalition with New Democracy, had no choice but to impose the spending cuts.

“For us at PASOK, the day is particularly painful,” he said. “We knew that we would pay the price, having taken an emotionally and political unbearable position to take the measures that were necessary.”

He called for a broad coalition of pro-European parties, regardless on their stance on the bailouts.

“A coalition government of the old two-party system would not have sufficient legitimacy or sufficient domestic and international credibility if it would gather a slim majority,” Venizelos said. “A government of national unity with the participation of all the parties that favour a European course, regardless of their positions toward the loan agreements, would have meaning.”

The political leaders, humbled by the drubbing in the polls which saw their combined support drop to about 33 per cent, compared to a historical average of 80 per cent, will have to work fast to ensure their country doesn’t slide into protracted political instability.

Hollande sweeps victory over Sarkozy

Politics

Monday, 07 May 2012 06:12

PARIS - Francois Hollande swept victory in France's presidential election on Sunday and promised to start pushback against German-led austerity policies.

Hollande led conservative incumbent Nicholas Sarkozy by 51.3 percent to 48.7 percent with 83 percent of votes counted, the Interior Ministry said, bringing the center-left back to the government in Paris after a decade in opposition.

"Europe is watching us," the president-elect said in a victory speech in his constituency of Tulle in central France. "I'm sure that in many European countries there is relief and hope at the idea that austerity doesn't have to be our only fate."

Sarkozy, punished for his failure to rein in 10-percent unemployment and for his brash personal style, was the 11th euro-zone leader in succession to be swept from power since the currency bloc's debt crisis began in 2009.

The outgoing president was defeated within 20 minutes of polls closing, telling supporters he had telephoned Hollande to wish him good luck in such trying times.

"I bear the full responsibility for this defeat," Sarkozy said, indicating that he would withdraw from frontline politics.

"My place can no longer be the same. My involvement in the life of my country will be different from now on."

Jubilant Hollande supporters celebrated outside Socialist Party headquarters and thronged Paris' Bastille square, where revelers danced the night away in 1981 when Francois Mitterrand became the only previous directly elected Socialist president. Many waved red flags and some carried roses, the party emblem.

But the rejoicing may be short-lived after a political bombshell in Greece, where mainstream parties were hammered in a parliamentary election that seemed set to leave supporters of an IMF/EU bailout without a majority, raising doubts about Athens' future in the euro zone.

Hollande's clear win should give the self-styled "Mr Normal" the momentum to press German Chancellor Angela Merkel to accept a policy shift towards fostering growth in Europe to balance the austerity that has fueled anger across southern Europe.

PARIS—François Hollande swept to victory on Sunday, becoming the first socialist to become president of France since François Mitterrand left office in 1995.

Hollande campaigned on a kinder, gentler, more inclusive France, but his victory over Nicolas Sarkozy will also be seen as a challenge to the German-dominated policy of economic austerity in the eurozone, which is suffering from a recession and record unemployment.

Many believe that Hollande maybe able to usher in a new era of an independent France through detachment from the Euro-zone, but their hopes best be short lived as the NATO alliance heads towards a collision course with itself.

Hillary Clinton to visit India next month

Politics

Monday, 30 April 2012 04:44

WASHINGTON - US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would make a trip to India early next month ahead of the US-India Strategic Dialogue in Washington co-chaired by her and Indian Minister of External Affairs S.M. Krishna.

The surprise announcement Wednesday of Clinton’s decision to visit India May 7-8 after the fourth round of US-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue in Beijing on May 3-4 was seen as an attempt to iron out differences over potentially contentious issues like Iran before the June 13 dialogue. The official announcement by State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland hinted as much saying she looked forward to the Washington dialogue and will meet with Indian government officials in New Delhi to review progress in the strategic partnership. The announcement, and timing, of the visit cane as a surprise, as Clinton was in any case scheduled to engage Krishna in Washington just five weeks later. A meeting with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is also on the cards.

The Clinton visit is also considered significant as it comes just after her high-level talks in China and ahead of the crucial mid-May NATO summit in Chicago focused on Afghanistan, where the constructive role played by India is well recognised in Washington. Clinton, who will visit Bangladesh before reaching New Delhi, will stop over in Kolkata May 7 and meet West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee “and other civil society organization representatives.” There were also reports that she might visit Pakistan after the Chiba trip to smoothen the embittered relationship with Islamabad, but India was not on the cards. However, Clinton is not visiting Pakistan this time. The announcement also led to speculation that Clinton, who has played a key role in nurturing India-US relations over the last two decades, was planning the Delhi trip as a farewell visit to India since she has indicated she would not take up the same job in the next Obama administration. Besides Clinton, several other top US leaders are expected to visit India in the next few months. Media reports said that Defence Secretary Leon Panetta may visit India in early June for talks with his counterpart A. K. Antony.

US, India to sign $8 billion defence deals: NEW DEHLI: US companies are poised to sign defence deals totalling $8 billion with India, U.S. Ambassador Nancy Powell said on Friday at her first public speech since arriving in New Delhi this month. Powell did not specify which companies she was talking about or when the deals would be signed, but embassy officials said she was referring to negotiations that include about a dozen Apache helicopters along with engines for Indian jets. “We are poised to sign an additional $8 billion in direct commercial and foreign military sales,” Powell said. “As we share more common equipment, our bilateral defence ties will become stronger.” India is the world’s largest arms importer and plans to spend close to about $100 billion over the next 10 years to upgrade its largely Soviet-era equipment. U.S. companies including Boeing Co, Lockheed Martin Corp and Raytheon Co are some of the contractors looking to grab a share of India’s planned military spending. Industrial conglomerate Honeywell International Inc. is offering engines for the Indian Airforce’s Jaguar fighter aircraft. Powell said improving bilateral trade and investment was her main objective as ambassador, mentioning U.S. concerns about tariff and non-tariff barriers and a new retroactive tax law as obstacles in the relationship.
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INP, Pakistan Today

Iraq Casts a Pall Over U.S. Effort to Fathom Iran

Politics

Sunday, 01 April 2012 09:07

By JAMES RISEN

WASHINGTON - At the nation's top spy agency, the ghosts of Iraq are never far away.

One C.I.A. analyst who had helped develop some of the intelligence about Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction had a breakdown months after the Iraq war began; he had participated in the post-invasion hunt there that found the weapons did not exist. When he eventually was given a new assignment assessing Iran's nuclear program, he confided a fear to colleagues: that the intelligence community might get it wrong again.

"He felt enormous guilt that he had gotten us into the war," said one former official who worked with the analyst. "He was afraid it was going to be déjà vu all over again."

Today, analysts and others at the C.I.A. who are struggling to understand the nuclear ambitions of Iran are keenly aware that the agency's credibility is again on the line, amid threats of new military interventions. The intelligence debacle on Iraq has deeply influenced the way they do their work, with new safeguards intended to force analysts to be more skeptical in evaluating evidence and more cautious in drawing conclusions.

Former intelligence officials say that this shows appropriate vigilance in dealing with often murky information, while some detractors argue that the agency is not just careful but also overly skittish on Iran, reluctant to be blamed for any findings that might lead the United States to bloodshed.

"For a lot of people in the intelligence community, there is a feeling that they don't want to repeat the same mistake," said Greg Thielmann, a former State Department intelligence analyst who resigned to protest what he considered the Bush administration's politicization of the prewar Iraq intelligence. "The intelligence community as a whole has better practices now partly because of the scar tissue they still have from Iraq," added Mr. Thielmann, now a senior fellow at the Arms Control Association in Washington.

Paul Pillar, a former senior C.I.A. analyst on the Middle East, says he believes that analysts are guided by the facts in making their assessments about Iran, but that they almost certainly have Iraq weighing on them.

"Because intelligence officials are human beings, one cannot rule out the possibility of the tendency to overcompensate for past errors," said Mr. Pillar, now the director of graduate studies at the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University.

Top intelligence officials have said that analysts believe that Iran has been moving to expand its infrastructure and technological ability to become a nuclear power, but that the Iranian leadership has not made a decision to build an atomic bomb.

Current and former senior American officials acknowledge, though, that there are significant gaps in their knowledge, and that they may not be able to quickly detect any decision to restart Iran's weapons program, which they concluded had been halted in 2003.

After the misjudgments on Iraq, the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies imposed new checks and balances, including a requirement that analytical work be subjected to "red teaming." That means a group of analysts would challenge the conclusions of their colleagues, looking for weaknesses or errors.

The intelligence community also now requires that analysts be told much more about the sources of the information they receive from the United States' human and technological spies. Analysts were left in the dark on such basic issues in the past, which helps explain why bogus information from fabricators was included in some prewar intelligence reports on Iraq. And, when they write their reports, they must include better attribution and sourcing for each major assertion.

"I think the Iraq experience gave them thicker skins," said one former senior intelligence official, who like several others quoted in this article would speak only on the condition of anonymity about internal agency matters. "There was a lot of work done to tighten up the tradecraft."

Unlike the prelude to the Iraq war, when many critics accused Bush White House officials of cherry-picking the intelligence to conform to their policy, some outside analysts say they do not see evidence of the Obama administration pushing intelligence officials to come up with predetermined answers.

"The intelligence was so heavily politicized on Iraq," said Joseph Cirincione, the president of the Ploughshares Fund, a global security foundation. "The higher up the chain in the government the intelligence reporting went, the more it got massaged, and the doubts and caveats got removed."

But now, he said, "I haven't heard any complaints about the administration pressuring the intelligence community to tilt the intelligence."

He added that while conservative political leaders in the United States and Israel had complained about the intelligence assessments on Iran, such outside criticism did not have the same impact it would coming from the White House.

"It's one thing to have the prime minister of another country come to town and say time is short, but it's another thing to have the vice president go to Langley and pressure people," he said, referring to former Vice President Dick Cheney's repeated visits to C.I.A. headquarters before the Iraq war.

But some conservatives who support more aggressive action to prevent Iran from gaining a nuclear weapon argue that the C.I.A.'s restraint has, in fact, been influenced by political pressure exerted by the Obama administration. President Obama has said he would use military force only as a last resort against Iran, and conservatives argue that the Obama administration does not want the intelligence community to produce any reports suggesting the Iranians are moving swiftly to build a bomb.

"The intelligence analysts I've dealt with have always been willing to engage in debates on their conclusions, but there is top-down pressure to make the assessments come out a certain way," said John R. Bolton, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a former ambassador to the United Nations in the Bush administration.

Memories of Iraq have clouded the debate on Iran ever since the United States intelligence community first concluded in 2007 that Iran had halted its weapons program four years earlier. In late 2007, Michael McConnell, then the director of national intelligence, took a new National Intelligence Estimate - the consensus of analysts at the government's 16 intelligence agencies - to the White House to brief President George W. Bush about the report's startling new findings.

Officials at the White House, still stung from the criticism on Iraq, quickly realized that they would face a firestorm of protest if they did not make the findings public, according to former administration and intelligence officials. A classified version of the new assessment would go to the Congressional intelligence committees, where lawmakers would see that analysts had reached a sharply different conclusion about Iran than they had two years earlier, when they had concluded that Iran's weapons program was still under way.

News of the shift would probably leak to the news media, and White House officials feared that the administration would then be accused of suppressing intelligence on Iran, just as it had been criticized for doing on Iraq, according to the former officials. White House officials also worried that they would be accused of tainting the intelligence process, so they pressed Mr. McConnell to have the intelligence community write and issue its own declassified summary.

Some senior intelligence officials who rushed to write the document over a weekend objected to disclosing their conclusions, but to no avail. "I was told that I didn't get it; this wasn't a request," one official recalled.

Once published, the report created an uproar. Conservative critics blasted C.I.A. officials, saying that the intelligence community was freelancing and trying to influence the political debate, and to make up for its shortcomings on Iraq by now trying to stop a war with Iran. Among them was Mr. Bolton, who dismissed the 2007 assessment as "famously distorted" and called on Congress to investigate its politicization.

Stung by those attacks, and the aftershocks of the poisonous political debate over the role of the intelligence community on Iraq and Iran, officials at the C.I.A. and other agencies did not release a public version of the 2010 assessment on the Iranian nuclear program, which concluded that while Iran had conducted some basic weapons-related research, it was not believed to have restarted the actual weapons program halted in 2003.

Thomas Fingar, who was chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the time of the 2007 assessment on Iran, said that analysts had to be willing to make tough calls based on fragmentary evidence, and not get distracted by what he called the rare instances of political pressure or their own previous lapses.

"Learning from past mistakes is imperative," he said. "Worrying about them is pointless."

Source: NYT