Europe leads on Libya, but divisions persist

We are only in day four of the Libya War, but it doesn't seem to have taken long for confusion to settle in over where we go next and who is in charge. As the aerial bombardment tapers off and the skies clear into a no-fly zone over the Libyan desert, questions are now being asked that are not only causing disunity within the European Union but also between Europe and the United States.

"In most of the foreign policy issues we've talked about for decades, the US has been the lead player," conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks noted on PBS Newshour a few days ago. "Here we're clearly not the lead player, it's the UK and France and we're following along on the caboose. Now we feel like the UK often feels, as the secondary player. So the question is how much is the president really supporting this and how much is he being dragged along?"

So far the Obama administration has seemed disinterested in the Libya situation, and this wasn't helped by the fact that at the time military action was launched the US president was on a trip to South America and had to give comments on the war's launch from a shared podium in Brazil. Over the past few days US politicians haven't even made an effort to try to convince the American public that this war is in America's strategic interest.

Borisov to the Rescue in Bulgaria?

It’s been interesting to watch the political developments in Bulgaria since I visited the country for my article on vote-buying in February. At the time, everyone was focused on the upcoming summer election and whether any result could rescue the country’s government from the deep morass of political corruption it had sunk into.

As predicted, the newly-created reformist party of the mayor of Sofia won the vote. However though the outcome on election day wasn’t a huge shock, the formation of the government since then has been noteworthy, and can be seen as a positive sign for those both at home and in Brussels who are desperate to see the Bulgarian government change its ways. The new prime minister, Boyko Borisov, officially took the reigns yesterday and introduced the minority government he has formed – remarkably – without entering into a coalition with the hard-right parties in the parliament.

Borisov, a bit of a political celebrity in Bulgaria, formed the new party in 2006 while he was mayor of the country’s capital, calling it “Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria” (known by the acronym GERB in Bulgarian). It’s no doubt a populist party but, as a Bulgarian friend puts it, perhaps “the good kind of populism”. Borisov came to the public with an anti-establishment message, lambasting the ruling Socialists (many of whom are aging former communists) as hopelessly corrupt and saying only he, with his new and independent political party, could tackle the corruption endemic in Bulgaria’s government.

But he’s also been critical of the nationalist parties of the right, refusing to form a clear coalition with the three right-wing parties in parliament– the Blue Coalition; Order, Lawfulness, Justice; and the ultra nationalist anti-Turkish party Ataka (whose billboards, pictured, were all over Sofia when I visited). By not making a coalition he will be forced to rule as a minority government – a fragile position that will likely fall before he can serve out his full term. In practice, he will still depend on the loose support of the three right-wing parties.

Borisov has a steep hill to climb in tackling the corruption issue. Last year the EU froze over €800 million of development aid to Bulgaria because of corruption, mostly out of concern that that money was going directly to regional and local authorities which are sometimes run as fiefdoms of organised crime. EU funds are almost always distributed locally, which presents a problem for a country like Bulgaria where the national government often has little control over regional authorities.

Overall Brussels seems happy with the election result, though Borisov’s ties to the right wing may be worrying. Still, the Bulgarian socialist party has proven itself an unreliable partner for Brussels in the past, and the EU probably feels that for the moment, any change is a good one.