Hungary and Turkey are helping Putin

Not a single fly should escape from the besieged Azov steel works in the Ukrainian Mariupol, Russian President Vladimir Putin instructed his military in one of those who-are-who press shows. During the night, however, 260 Ukrainian soldiers left the factory, including 53 seriously injured. Those who were less injured are later to return to their home country of Ukraine via a prisoner exchange.

Even after the end of the Azov fighting, the government in Kyiv praised the defenders of the last bastion in Mariupol. For weeks they withstood the onslaught of Russian troops under the most difficult conditions in the huge industrial complex. Russia and Ukraine had been negotiating for a long time about the withdrawal of the soldiers, some of whom were seriously injured, and who had hardly any supplies or water left. “Ukraine needs living heroes,” declared President Volodymyr Zelensky.

With everything that NATO and the EU want to do against Putin’s aggression, there is “friendly fire” – total opposition in their own ranks. After the recent decision by Finland and Sweden to join NATO, Turkey announced opposition to it. His country will not agree, declared President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan: Diplomatic delegations from the two EU states should not get their hopes up, was the greeting. “Will they come to convince us? If so, no offense, they shouldn’t bother.”

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The EU foreign ministers, in turn, had to postpone the planned oil embargo against Russia yesterday because Hungary, as in other cases, is stonewalling. The Ukrainian foreign minister excitedly recalled that “every day the EU pays millions of euros for gas and oil and it is precisely this money that keeps the Russian war machine, the attacks, the atrocities running”. Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis railed that the entire EU was being held hostage by one member. Hungary gets 60 percent of its oil from Russia.

Elisabeth Borne: The previous Minister of Labor will be the new French Prime Minister.

(Photo: IMAGO/PanoramaC)

The chancellor sticks to his line of saying what is not possible. In the program “RTL Direkt”, a political town hall format close to the citizens, Olaf Scholz said almost defiantly on the subject of the trip to Kyiv: “I will not join a group of people who come in and out with a photo session for a short time what to do, but when, then it’s always about very concrete things, and they have to be ready, they have to be prepared, and we’re working on the topics.”

When asked about the power of symbolic images, which Federal Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock was just using in Ukraine, the SPD politician replied: “I don’t underestimate anything, but I still support serious politics and I stand for it.”

Regarding the election result in NRW, Scholz pointed out that the traffic light coalition parties had a majority in the state parliament, as well as in the Bundestag: “Maybe something will come of it.

Scholz is thus on the line issued by Secretary General Kevin Kühnert. Health Minister Karl Lauterbach formulated what was necessary for this on the night of the election: “We lost this election. The Union and the Greens won, so they have to conduct the talks first. Everything else comes afterwards.”

The three economic blocs in the world have very different concepts for dealing with the future. But such questions are currently disappearing behind the next, even more drastic financial report.

  • USA: Economic output fell by 1.4 percent in the first quarter, inflation is building at 8.3 percent, like King Kong behind the Empire State Building.
  • Europe: Because of the Ukraine war, the EU Commission is cutting its growth forecast for the euro area for 2022 from 4.0 to 2.7 percent. Inflation: 6.1 percent.
  • China: The former growth engine of the global economy has been maneuvered into the maintenance shed, so to speak, and Covid lockdowns are paralyzing the country. In April, retail sales fell 11.1 percent mom and industrial production fell 2.9 percent.

So there is a lot to talk about about crisis healing recipes this weekend, when the World Economic Forum (WEF) invites you to “big talk” in the mountains of Davos again after a long pandemic abstinence.

“The world economy is at a crossroads”, says WEF President Börge Brende in an interview with the Handelsblatt. The man is sure of a quip, as evidenced by his current favorite sentence: “We’re worse off than last year, but better than next year.” We can also call this a “self-fulfilling crisis”.

The US economist Kenneth Rogoff describes a “perfect storm” in our guest commentary, without naming it that. In Europe, the economic downturns in China and the US would have threatened growth anyway, but the Ukraine war had “significantly increased” risks and vulnerabilities. Should President Vladimir Putin use chemical weapons or tactical nuclear weapons, Europe would have to cut itself even further from Russia, with uncertain consequences for its own economy and the risk of further escalation. According to Rogoff, emerging economies and poorer developing countries would suffer most from a global recession.

His conclusion: With a bit of luck, the risk of a synchronous global downturn will decrease by the end of 2022 – but at the moment the probability of a recession is increasing. Anyone who dares to make forecasts at the moment is a crash prophet.

For the re-elected President Emmanuel Macron, who is in love with the success of change, it would be a nightmare if he had to work with the left-wing populist and Germany critic Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

So that the people’s tribune, who in some ways has in common with the ultra-right Marine Le Pen, doesn’t really become prime minister in the French parliamentary elections in June, the Élysée Palace is offering a left-wing front woman: Elisabeth Borne, 61, is the new prime minister. A female occupation of this post was last – for less than a year – in 1991 with the socialist Édith Cresson. Borne was a manager at the state railway SNCF and the Paris public transport company, had been close to the socialists and joined Macron’s movement “La République en Marche” in 2017. The all-rounder has already been responsible for three departments in Macron’s cabinet: transport, “ecological change” and work.

It can be built up with Albert Camus: “Man is nothing in himself. He’s just a limitless opportunity. But he is infinitely responsible for this opportunity.”

The German hotel industry reports SOS. The loans were increased during the Corona period, the congress business is not yet back in full bloom and the number of overnight stays is also flat – in this situation the companies and their association fear the rising minimum wage like the guest fears the mattress that is far too soft. Many hotel managers fear a cost trap due to the wage increase planned for October from EUR 9.82 per hour to EUR 12, reports our report.

According to a survey by the Dehoga catering association, more than half of the entrepreneurs expect an increase in personnel costs of more than 15 percent. As always in such hours of microeconomic need, the Federal Minister of Economics should help. “It must not come to this,” wrote Dorint Supervisory Board Chairman Dirk Iserlohe to Robert Habeck, “that the livelihoods of more than 30,000 employees of the large medium-sized hotel companies are endangered”.

And then there’s tech billionaire Elon Musk, who is trying every shady method to get his favorite megaphone, Twitter, at a much cheaper price. A deal at a lower bid is “not out of the question,” he now confessed himself. Musk had originally bid $44 billion for the short message service, $54.20 per share, before Musk systematically downplayed the security. Musk spread the suspicion that the number of “fake accounts” given by Twitter, from non-existent customers, would account for more than the officially stated five percent.

Now the cheerfully gambling Tesla boss just says that the fake profiles make up at least one fifth of all 229 million users. The price, which has fallen to $37.38, is likely to fall further, which makes things much cheaper for the strategic talker Musk. He had declared the Twitter purchase “temporarily suspended”.

“Nature never deceives us”, Jean-Jacques Rousseau knew: “It is always us who deceive ourselves.”

Have a cheat free enlightening day.

Her
Hans Jürgen Jakobs
Senior editor

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