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EsadeGeo Daily Digest, 08/07/2024

EsadeGeo | 8 Jul, 2024

Financial Times - Leila Abboud, Anne-Sylvaine Chassany, Sarah White, Ian Johnston, Adrienne Klasa and Mary McDougall / Leftwing surge thwarts far right in French election

France is heading towards a hung parliament and rocky talks to form a government after an unexpected leftwing victory thwarted Marine Le Pen’s efforts to bring the far right to power.
The outcome represents a resounding success for the co-ordinated anti-RN strategy, under which the leftwing and centrist parties tactically withdrew their candidates from run-off ballots.
But the result will leave the Eurozone’s second-largest economy in limbo over its next government, with no single bloc near an outright majority in the 577-seat National Assembly.
Meanwhile, Le Pen’s party was pushed into third place by the tactic known as the front républicain, obtaining 143 seats. However, this was a significant increase on the 88 MPs it had in the previous assembly.

Any Gaza ceasefire deal must allow Israel to resume fighting until its objectives are met, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday, as talks over a U.S. plan aimed at ending the nine-month-old war were expected to restart.
Netanyahu was scheduled to hold consultations late on Sunday on the next steps in negotiating the three-phase plan that was presented in May by U.S. President Joe Biden and is being mediated by Qatar and Egypt.
Hamas has dropped a key demand that Israel first commit to a permanent ceasefire before it would sign an agreement. Instead, it said it would allow negotiations to achieve that throughout the six-week first phase.
More than 38,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel's military onslaught, according to Gaza health officials, and the coastal enclave has largely been reduced to rubble.

Al-Jazeera / West African leaders’ summit opens as coup-hit countries form alliance

A West African leaders’ summit has opened a day after the military rulers of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger forged a new alliance severing ties with the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).
Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger announced the pact, known as the Alliance of Sahel States, last September. It allows them to cooperate in the event of armed rebellion or external aggression. The three countries withdrew from ECOWAS in January after the regional bloc’s tough stand against the coups.
ECOWAS lifted sanctions on Niger in February in an attempt to mend relations, but little progress has been made. The bloc had imposed sanctions following the July 2023 Niger coup.
As the Sahel region shifts towards allying with Russia, the United States is set to complete its withdrawal from a key base in Niger on Sunday, which it had built to combat armed groups that pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda and ISIL (ISIS).

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary effectively endorsed Donald Trump for president in an interview and, on the eve of this week’s NATO summit, blasted the United States for having a “war policy” in Ukraine rather than a strategy for achieving peace.
In the interview, Orbán commented extensively on Trump and U.S. politics, predicting there was a “very, very high chance” that President Joe Biden would not be reelected and describing that as a positive outcome.
He further criticized the Biden administration’s stance toward the Russia-Ukraine war, calling for Europe to stop copying American foreign policy while predicting an increasingly bloody conflict in the coming months.
His comments come less than a week after his talks with Putin, as well as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The Hungarian leader said that peace is possible in the conflict when all the major players — the United States, China, Europe and the countries at war — decide to come to the negotiating table.

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