Side…. which side?

XULIO RIOS
The barrage of criticism surrounding Pedro Sánchez's recent trip to China has been surprising. They say it's not "our side," that "there's more to Asia" than China (although the mission also included Vietnam), that the timing couldn't have been worse... However, the trip was a complete success, both in terms of the current situation and the expectations it met, judging by the official assessment provided by Moncloa.

And which side are we on? That of Mr. "Neckcutter," who assigns unavoidable duties to Minister Cuerpo? Or that of Robert Palladino, chargé d'affaires of the US Embassy in Hungary, who has warned the Hungarian government to refrain from attracting Chinese investment?

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Germany will be the first country with a former BlackRock executive at the helm of government.

WERNER RÜGEMER 
Germany will be the first country where a former BlackRock official becomes head of government. Friedrich Merz was not a "lobbyist," as is often described. He not only received a salary, but also held a leadership role within the group: the CDU politician was Chairman of the Supervisory Board of the subsidiary BlackRock Asset Management Deutschland Aktiengesellschaft from 2016 to 2020. He reported to the New York headquarters of the largest capital organizer in the Western world, led by the United States. Merz was tasked with driving BlackRock's expansion in Germany.

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China on Pedro Sánchez's radar

XULIO RIOS
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is traveling to China again to meet with President Xi Jinping. This is his third visit in the last three years, a truly unusual development and a true reflection of the importance that the Spanish government places on its relationship with China, as an expression of a significant rebalancing of Spanish foreign policy based on the strategic interest of strengthening economic and diplomatic relations with Beijing.

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Romania awaits new presidential elections in crisis

JAYRO SANCHEZ
Romania's Central Election Bureau (CEB), the institution responsible for ensuring the security of the national elections, has finally announced: Călin Georgescu will not be able to run as a candidate for the presidential elections on May 4.

The vote to elect the new head of state in Romania was due to take place at the end of last year, but the Constitutional Court decided to annul the results of the first round of elections, held in November, and to have them repeated in 2025.

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Requiem for a country

LEO ENSEL
As the saying goes, there is no such thing as a bad thing without some good: the narrow failure of the BSW, Sahra Wagenknecht's Union, the country's only anti-war party, to break the five percent barrier (which would keep it out of parliament) has spared us at least one Minister Habeck and other permanently offended Green whiners in the new federal government.

In the future, the pitiful stuttering and cringe-inducing mutterings will no longer be sold to us as the work of great statesmen. But that is also the only really positive aspect of this “decisive election” – this hackneyed expression is actually appropriate now.

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Ukraine war and massive rearmament hidden from German elections

Michael von der Schulenburg
The war in Ukraine and its consequences will have a lasting negative impact on Germany's political, security, economic and social future. For the West, this war is already lost; Ukraine is its blood sacrifice and the EU countries, above all Germany, are the losers. Germany's leading parties, the SPD, CDU/CSU, Greens and FDP, as well as the country's established media, bear a large part of the blame for this.

However, questions about their responsibilities in this war have been mysteriously silenced during the current German election campaign. Similarly, there is hardly any talk of the German government's massive rearmament efforts and its attempts to make Germany "ready for war."

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Will Europe be able to “guide itself”?

MILLAN FERNANDEZ
If the EU has renounced active diplomacy for peace and has uncritically submitted to the US; if it has shamelessly promoted revolts and interference in the Caucasus or ignored results ranging from Romania (EU) to Venezuela or if, in short, it only aspires to impose a vision and a “democratic model” that is not very democratic, what remains of its founding spirit and values? Does it make sense to try to expand it through wars, destabilizations and promotion of coups d'état?

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A “new reactionary international”: how Elon Musk is spreading his fascist ideals in Europe

MARIUS THIRION ROSZYK
If Donald Trump began his second term as President of the United States on January 20, he owes it in part to his new friend Elon Musk. With little rancor, the American billionaire has offered the new Ministry of “Government Efficiency” to the man who, in 2022, considered him “too old to be President of anything, let alone the United States of America.”

It is worth remembering that Musk used his considerable influence to help the Republican candidate win, occupying the public space like never before.

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More than a thousand Ukrainian soldiers desert from a newly trained elite brigade in France

PASCUAL SERRANO
On November 15, the Associated Press reported that the new brigade of several thousand Ukrainian troops had been trained in France and was joining “the fight against the Russian invasion armed with tanks and artillery guns supplied by France.”

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The Kursk Race

RAFAEL POCH-DE-FELIU
The latest steps of the escalation that we have just witnessed in Ukraine, the involvement of the West in missile attacks on Russian territory and Moscow's response by launching for the first time, on November 21, an intermediate-range hypersonic missile called Oreshnik with multiple independent reentry vehicles (MIRVs), impossible to intercept and a conventional payload, have a clear and concrete logic: it is a race to define the assets for a future negotiated solution to this war.

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U.S. poll shows majority of Ukrainians want negotiations to end war

PASCUAL SERRANO
The European Union's rhetoric, from its European Commission to the German, French and Spanish governments, is that we must help the Ukrainians win the war and not allow them to lose territory to the Russian invasion. More or less, the same reasoning is used by the US government and NATO. The option of sitting down to negotiate with Russia to end the war as soon as possible and, if necessary, make territorial concessions seems to be synonymous with an accusation of complicity with Putin.

Well, someone seems to have asked Ukrainians what they think. It was the American pollster Gallup, and it discovered that this is precisely what the majority wants: to end the war as soon as possible, even with territorial concessions to Russia.

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China and the time of the BRICS

XULIO RIOS
There is a virtually unanimous perception of a worsening of the major international dilemmas, whether we are referring to issues of peace or development, manifesting itself in open discontent with the different yardsticks applied to certain conflicts and the persistence in preserving an exclusive hegemony that does not take into sufficient consideration the changes that have occurred in recent decades in the international economy and society.

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