After six months, Gert Wilders has finally come to an agreement to form a new right-leaning coalition government for the Netherlands. Wilders has mostly run in opposition to what he claims is the EU and globalist mass migration plan for Europe to denude it of its native populations.
Exiled Catalan Independence leader Carles Puigdemont saw his Junts party finish second to Spanish PM Pedro Sanchez’s Socialist Party. Puigdemont is still convinced he can form a coalition government, but the Socialists have the inside track. A Socialist-led government would radically change Catalan’s policy from pursuing independence to embracing Spanish nationalism.
Despite his pro-independence party Junts finishing second in the elections, leader Carles Puigdemont continues to pursue his aim of leading the next Catalan government.
Pedro Sanchez’s Socialist Party won Catalonia’s elections but will still need the votes of leftist Catalan party ERC to form a progressive government. Yet, former president Carles Puigdemont, who came second, is asking the socialists to allow him to return to office. In exchange, he would give his support to Sanchez’ minority government in Madrid.
The Socialist Party is celebrating a decisive victory in the recent Catalan elections. It is widely seen as society’s validation of Pedro Sánchez’s approach towards Catalonia and his proposal to grant amnesty to political leaders involved in the 2017 independence movement, including the exiled former president Carles Puigdemont.
Croatia ruling conservatives will form government with a far-right group after inconclusive election
ZAGREB, Croatia (AP) — Croatia ’s ruling conservatives on Wednesday agreed to form a coalition with an extreme party, which would push the country further to the right ahead of next month’s European parliamentary election.
The governing Croatian Democratic Union, or HDZ, and the far-right Homeland Movement reached the agreement weeks after an inconclusive parliamentary vote that has stirred political uncertainty.
Croatia’s dominant HDZ won most votes at the election but not enough to stay in power on their own.
Ruling party officials said the new government, to be headed for a third consecutive term by Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic, could be approved in parliament as soon as next week.
The Homeland Movement, or DP, is a relatively new political party made up largely of radical nationalists and social conservatives who had left the center-right HDZ. The party is led by the hard-line mayor of the eastern town of Vukovar, which was destroyed during Croatia’s 1991 war for independence after it split from the former Yugoslavia.
For the first time in years, Croatia’s government will not include a party representing minority Serbs because DP opposed their inclusion, which has fueled some concerns about ethnic tensions stemming from the conflict in the 1990s.
On Wednesday, Honduran President Xiomara Castro expressed her support for Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who warned that his opponents are seeking to remove him from power through a coup.
“Our total and absolute support for the President of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, in his international denouncement that a coup d’état is being plotted against the people of Colombia,” Castro stated.
Previously, the Colombian president referred to the possibility of a coup against him through false accusations related to alleged contributions cap violations during his 2022 campaign.
On Wednesday, the National Electoral Council (CNE) decided to study a report recommending charges against Gustavo Petro for alleged irregular financing of his election campaign.
Russian Deputy Defense Minister Timur Ivanov has been accused of accepting a bribe “in the form of services” valued at more than 1 billion rubles ($12.2 million), Russian media reported Wednesday.
Ivanov, 48, faces up to 15 years in prison for large-scale bribe-taking, which investigators say centers around a “criminal conspiracy” to accept funds “in the form of property services during the course of contracting and subcontracting work for the Defense Ministry.”
Ivanov, who is viewed as a close ally of Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, has denied the allegations.
His attorney Murad Musayev told the state-run TASS news agency that the services his client was accused of accepting were “the cost of work and the materials spent on it,” all valued at around 1.12 billion rubles.
“The criminal case is related to construction. A number of Defense Ministry contractors are alleged to have built certain facilities for Ivanov, which we emphasize is not true,” Musayev said without elaborating.
Power companies in the AGEERA electricity generators’ association have rejected Economy Minister Luis Caputo’s proposal to use bonds to pay power wholesaler CAMMESA’s debt of over US$1 billion.
On Wednesday, the Government formalized the regime to pay CAMMESA’s debt to generator companies via resolution 58/2024 of the Energy Secretariat, which was published in the Official Gazette.
The government’s proposal, conceived by Caputo, consists of paying the debt for energy subsidies — with a 50% write-off — via a dollar-denominated bond, the AE38. This would defer overdue payments from December and January. The debt totals AR$1,100 billion (US$1.2 billion at the official rate, US$1 billion at the MEP rate), the resolution says.
Claudia Sheinbaum was the clear winner of a mock presidential election in Mexico held Tuesday at university campuses across the country, suggesting that the ruling Morena party candidate can expect strong support from young voters when the real deal takes place on June 2.
Students and university staff cast a total of 255,707 ballots in the Simulacro Electoral Universitario (SEU), or the University Electoral Simulation, which took place on around 400 campuses in all 32 of Mexico’s federal entities.
Results of SEU’s mock election at the Technological University of Southern México State mirrored results at several universities across Mexico, with candidate Claudia Sheinbaum achieving a wide lead. (SEU/Twitter)
The Directorate of Enforcement filed a sharply-worded affidavit in the Supreme Court on Thursday against the possibility of granting interim bail to Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal in the liquor policy case, saying 123 elections happened in the last five years alone and if politicians are given bail for campaigning, none of them can be even arrested as elections in India are an “all-year-round-phenomenon”.
The filing of the affidavit coincided with an announcement made in open court by Justice Sanjiv Khanna, who headed the two-judge Bench which heard the Kejriwal case, that the court would pronounce its order on the question of interim bail to the Chief Minister on May 10.
Grant of interim bail to Kejriwal to campaign for Lok Sabha elections would be anathema to the rule of law, equality and create a precedent which would permit “all unscrupulous politicians to commit crimes, avoid investigation under the garb of one election or the other, be it municipal election or panchayat elections or assembly or general elections, and thereafter, upon being arrested, seek interim bail to campaign for one election or the other”. In a federal structure, one election was as good as another.
