May, EU live in interesting times: Brexit

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Hello, and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Syria's civil war has driven millions out of the country, many of them into neighboring Turkey. It seemed for a while that those refugees were faring better than their countrymen who journeyed onward to Europe. But as the war has dragged on, Syrians in Turkey are feeling less and less welcome. And a contest between nations is unfolding across Europe. And a bit beyond. National pride is at stake. Entrants are vying for prestige and for record deals. As the final of the Eurovision Song Contest approaches, we take a look at the competition's tricky politics. But first, After a simmering hiatus punctuated by cross party talks and local elections, Brexit is once more bubbling to the surface in Britain. As was clear in Parliament yesterday, Prime Minister Theresa May doesn't exactly enjoy the full support of her party.

They've lost confidence in the Prime Minister and wish her to resign before the European elections.

Mrs. May not for the first time blamed Parliament for the quagmire of Brexit delays.

This is a government that wants to deliver Brexit and has been working to deliver Brexit. Sadly, so far, so far, the House of Commons has not found a majority to do that.

Today she'll meet a group of parliamentarians from her Conservative party called the 1922 Committee on the Docket. Mrs. May's political future and she wants to get Parliament to approve tweet legislation on her plan for leaving the European Union.

So, having already failed three times to get her withdrawal agreement through the Commons, she's come back with 4.0.

Anne McElroy is one of our most dedicated followers of Brexit and she wants.

To bring that back in the week beginning the 3rd of June. But at the same time, she doesn't have much new to put in that bill. So MPs are asking themselves, why should I vote any differently if you didn't like it the first three times? Here comes serving number four among the.

Senior Tory MPs that she'll be speaking with today. What's the mood?

Well, I've spoken to a number of Conservatives this week, both at the Cabinet level, where the official message is, yes, she's on her way out, but let's not waste this good crisis. Let's get this Brexit deal through, if they're so minded and just get something done so that we're not left looking like we had a complete waste of time. Prime Minister, if you go to senior backbench Conservatives and you sit around in the Tea Rooms and bars inside the Commons or around the Commons, you hear a lot of people saying, that's not. We need to know with more clarity. We're the ones out there in the front line in our constituencies. We need a clear date. And crucially, Sir Graham Brady, who is head of the 1922 Committee, so called the most influential backbenchers, has switched from basically allowing the Prime Minister a bit more of a timeline to messaging very strongly that he wants clarity on when she intends to go.

You mentioned this 1922 committee. Who are they? What power do they wield? And what can she expect when she meets them today?

They can make or break a Conservative leader, for instance, by insisting on a vote of no confidence. They've already had one of those in Theresa Bay. She survived it, not hugely convincingly, but she did. So that's off the cards for a while. The problem with them meeting again and again in this particularly frustrated frame of mind is that there are some people there calling to change the rule book so they'd have another go at getting rid of her.

Well, the hope had been that something might emerge from these talks with Jeremy Corbyn, the Labor leader. What? That not being the case. What are his thoughts, do you think? What are his calculations?

Well, I'm giving you a bit of an eye roll on that one. There were some people who believed in these talks, but not that many, because if you think about it from the position of two parties, one of which, the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn, an insurgent hard left leader of the party, really wants an election. He wants to bring down the Conservative government. So his motivation is really to show that he was prepared to help and was rebuffed and blamed the Conservatives. The Conservative reason for holding them was really well, to fill in the gap. You know, all these Weeks when we haven't been talking much about it. It meant that something was going on and that the government could say it was trying to reach out across the divide. Often a criticism of Theresa May, but I think if you look at the motivations of these two leaders, there's not much that's going to get them to the church on time.

British voters seem to have responded to that in recent local elections. Both of the major parties got thumped. Has anybody sort of arisen to kind of take the place of these parties?

I've been out on the road looking at areas where the Conservatives need to win seats back. Kent, not so far outside London. Much more a mix Brexit and Remain than London itself. If you look at a big county like that, it's a funny mixture now of districts which are Liberal Democrat, they're green, they're independent. Where we once had red and blue, we now have all sorts of colours of the rainbow.

And the two main parties also look set to do badly in a curious election next week. Because Brexit is delayed. Brits must vote for new members of the European Parliament, even though they're due to be out of the European Union by the end of October. And perversely, it's an anti EU political group that's been one of the hardest campaigners.

Welcome to the stage, Nigel Farage. It was a rally of the new Brexit party in Pontefract, which is or near Pontefract, which is an old mining town in West Yorkshire. Very strong Labour.

John Peat is our Brexit editor.

But the Brexit party is attracting a lot of support from people who voted Leave. It was an area that voted very heavily for Leave and Nigel Farage and some of his fellow candidates of the Brexit Party were wowing the supporters.

Good morning, Featherstone.

Great to see you all here and telling them that they were being betrayed by people in Westminster.

We voted by a big clear margin.

To take back control of our own country.

We won.

The Conservative Party, Theresa May, who were all trying to stop Brexit happening and it was their duty to vote for the Brexit party to ensure they got what they wanted. And they were all cheering him on.

And what's likely to happen in the upcoming European election and what do you think that tells us about how Britons feel about their politicians?

Well, I think it is quite likely that the Brexit Party will top the polls. I'm sort of thinking they're going to get close to 30% of the vote. The Conservative Party will Do exceptionally badly, could be as low as 10%. They're not even really campaigning because they didn't want these elections to happen. And they're very embarrassed about the fact that Brexit hasn't taken place yet. Labour will also do quite badly because its ambivalence on Brexit. Is it a Remain party or a Leave party? Does it want a second referendum? Is costing its votes. And then the other smaller parties, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and the New Change UK Party, I think, would all do quite well because they are unequivocally saying we want to have a second referendum on Brexit. So the country is dividing very strongly between people who believe in Remain and people who believe in Leave, and those divisions are overriding traditional party allegiances.

And how could the outcome of the European election influence the way things go with Brexit from here on out?

It will clearly damage Theresa May as Prime minister to do very badly in a European election, and she will get a lot of criticism for having failed to deliver Brexit. But it doesn't sort of obviously feed into some way of solving the Brexit deadlock. So it may not make much difference to Parliament immediately. And I think the Brexit deadlock will continue even after the Brexit party comes top in this election. What it may do is drive many in the Conservative Party to the idea that they've really just got to get out of Europe with no deal, and that could affect how the negotiations go through the summer and into the autumn. If there's a strong consensus for leaving with no deal, the risk of it happening is greater. On the other hand, a lot of people think to leave with no deal would be a disaster. And I think that the those people will say, well, in that case, we're not going to support the Conservatives. So paradoxically, support for the Labour Party may increase. So there's no clear consensus, whatever the result of this European election, on what kind of Brexit we ought to go for. Still, still.

Thanks very much for your time, John.

Thank you.

In Idlib, the last rebel held pocket of land in the north of Syria, bomb bombing raids have intensified this month. Emergency responders posted videos online of buildings destroyed and people killed in bombing raids. President Bashar Al Assad and his allies are claiming victory in the eight year civil war. But many places are still contested and so dangerous that few refugees will return anytime soon. Millions of those refugees have ended up just over the border in Turkey. There they've often found access to labour, mostly informal and government help. With healthcare and schooling. Last year, European Council President Donald Tusk praised Turkey's efforts.

I would like to express our appreciation for the impressive work Turkey has been doing and to sincerely thank Turkey and the Turkish people for hosting more than 3 million Syrian refugees these past years.

But as the war drags on, the refugees welcome is wearing thin.

Turkey is now in the midst of an economic crisis that has seen inflation rise and unemployment grow as well. Inflation is at its highest in over a decade. Unemployment is also the highest since 2009.

Piotr Zelewski is the Economist Turkey correspondent based in Istanbul.

And that has led to a surge in resentment. Whereas the political climate has been or had been relatively calm, what we saw in the run up to the last was evidence that this was changing and that politicians, especially opposition politicians, were increasingly stoking and feeding off anti refugee sentiment. And even the ruling justice and Development AK Party has changed its tone. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's president and leader of the akp, has been nothing short of a hero to many refugees, many Syrian refugees in Turkey. And even he has sounded a slightly hostile note of late.

And tell me about where you went to see the effects of this sort of, this shifting attitude.

Well, I went to a city called Medrsin, which is a port city in Turkey, south on the Mediterranean coast. Mersin is a city of 2 million people. Over 10% of the population is Syrian. And this has bred some of the resentments that I mentioned earlier. Evidence of this to me was made clear when I looked at a poll that the then candidate for mayoralty of Mercine, the current opposition mayor, had posted online. Now, he asked residents of Mersin what their biggest grievances were. And then the number one answer by far, I think 66% answered simply, Syrians.

An overwhelming amount of concern about what they think of as the Syrian problem. I mean, when you went to Mersin, what were the Turkish people there telling you?

Well, you hear all sorts of grievances, some economic, some cultural. You hear folks saying that Syrians would undercut wages, that they would drive up rents, that Syrian entrepreneurs or small business owners were not paying taxes. And you also hear locals saying that Syrians have not assimilated. The overwhelming consensus in Masin and elsewhere is that the Syrians in a way have outworn their welcome and that after so many years they ought to go back home.

But Turkey got a lot of credit early on in this, in terms of bringing refugees into the labor market as a means of accomplishing the kind of assimilation that you were talking about it now. Seems that over the long run, that's had some negative consequences.

Well, I think Turkey still deserves plenty of credit for accommodating 3.6 million Syrians and allowing them at least some access to the job market. The overwhelming majority do work under the table in the grey economy. But, you know, the grey economy in Turkey is big enough to accommodate both Turks and Syrians. So in a way that has worked out for the better, you could argue in that Syrians have been willing to work jobs that Turks do not want to work in. So the problem might not be the model. The problem might simply be today the economic downturn in Turkey, where unemployment is growing and where there is increasing competition for jobs, also between Turks and Syrians.

And what about the Syrians that you spoke to in Mersin? What are they saying?

Well, they sense the growing resentment, but they also appreciate what Turkey has done for them. When they talk about that, they mention does everyone access to education. They also speak about access to free health care. And I think few people outside Turkey appreciate just how big a strain all of this has placed on the country and how well, comparatively speaking, Turkey has managed to cope with it. And I think what Syrians in medicine and elsewhere also see is that what they appreciate is that this kind of resentment has very rarely turned into something more sinister. There is an uptick in intercommunal violence, but such violence is still the exception rather than the rule. Finally, many, if not most Syrians will tell you that Turkey, to them, feels like home, and feels like home much more so than today's Syria.

Well, that being the case, it seems then that Syrians are kind of stuck between hardening attitudes and a hard place. I mean, how could this resolve itself if everybody is subjected to the same economic conditions and there's increasing political antipathy? What's the way out?

One way out suggested by researchers in Turkey, is for Turkey to acknowledge that most Syrians are here to stay and to grant them formality refugee status, as opposed to temporary protection status, and protect them from being returned to Syria, integrate them into Turkish society and into Turkey's economy much more comprehensively than it has done to date. And most analysts think this is also where Europe needs to step up. The EU has essentially outsourced the refugee issue to Turkey, paying the Turkish government billions of euros to keep the refugees on Turkey's side of the Mediterranean. But now it is down to Europe to make every effort and to spare no expense to help Turkey take the next step, which is to integrate the refugees.

Piotr thank you very much for your time.

Thank you very much for having me.

This weekend, singers, musicians and dry ice technicians are gathering in Israel for the Eurovision final.

Good evening.

If you haven't had the pleasure of watching Eurovision, it's an international music competition. Countries nominate an act who competes for phone in votes. The performances are often incredibly cheesy in camp. It launched the careers of ABBA and Celine Dion. Let the Eurovision Song Contest begin.

One of the most watched contestants this year is Hatari.

Anna Lankes works on the news desk here at the Economist and is our foremost expert on Eurovision, which is a.

Band from Iceland that describe themselves as an anti capitalist BDSM that stands for bondage, discipline, sadism, masochism. Techno band. It's a mix of rock and techno and metal and they're shouting and they wear spikes and leather outfits and gyrate around in cages.

They sound, I mean, confusing, if nothing else. Do you think they're going to win?

They could.

They're certainly well known. They're probably one of the most well known acts this year. But they're in the spotlight for another reason, and that is that they have said that they might use their platform to criticize Israel for its treatment of Palestinians. They've even challenged Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's Prime Minister, to a friendly match of trouser grip wrestling, which is called Glima, it's an Icelandic form of wrestling.

Why, though is Eurovision in Israel?

So Israel is a member of the European Broadcasting Union and all members of the European Broadcasting Union can compete in Eurovision and. And the contestant who wins their country gets to host the competition the next year. So last year the competition was hosted in Lisbon and it was won by Neta Barzilai, who is Israeli. So this year Israeli gets to play mc.

Why? Why is that controversial?

It's controversial for several reasons. One is the BDS movement, which is the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, has called on broadcasters and artists to withdraw from the competition because they think that Israel is using Eurovision to, they say, artwash crimes against Palestinians.

So what are relations between the EU and Israel like?

They have become more tense in recent years even as Israel moves closer to America. That's because European leaders have remained outspoken in their support for Palestine and they're critical of Israeli policies in the occupied territories. The eu, for example, requires that products made in Israeli settlements be labeled as such. So they can't say made in Israel. They have to to say made on an Israeli settlement. And the relations are even more tense this month because there's been an uptick in violence between Israelis and Palestinians.

I mean, this sounds like the sort of politicization of a thing that's supposed to just be a bit of fun.

No, it's definitely politicized every single year. So, in 2014, for example, Conchita Worst, a bearded drag queen from Austria, won the competition, and that upset conservatives in Belarus and Russia. So much so that lawmakers in Russia proposed a parallel competition. Then in 2016, Ukraine won the competition with a song about Joseph Stalin's deportation of Crimean Tatars.

They kill you all and say we're.

Not killed, with thinly veiled references to Russia's annexation of Crimea, a peninsula in Ukraine, in 2000. And that led to the year after Ukraine banning Russia's candidate because they had performed in the annex territory.

So do you think having the final in Tel Aviv will disrupt this year's Eurovision?

Actually, not that much. Unlike in previous years, nobody has withdrawn from this competition. For example, in the 1970s, several European countries boycotted Eurovision when it was held in Spain under the fascist dictatorship of Francisco Francois. But there's definitely been a lot of noise about this. And Israel has responded with a PR campaign this month that uses Google advertisements to direct people who are looking for BDS or Eurovision to a pro Israeli website that claims Israel is beautiful, diverse and sensational. So it's a play on the BDS initials.

Right. Well, one last thing, then. Who are you rooting for in the contest?

I think Atari are great. Even though they're pretty controversial, their music is pretty funky.

Anna, thanks for your time.

Thank you.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple podcasts and you can subscribe to the economist@exterator.com radio. Offer 12 issues for $12 or 12 pounds. See you back here tomorrow.