Concerns are being raised that neither the Commerce Department nor Nvidia are doing their due diligence when it comes to vetting Chinese firms cleared to handle the company's H200 AI chips. According to The New York Times, New Matrix is on the list of approved firms, yet its offices are empty, "a hollow gray shell with wires dangling from the ceiling where lights should be." In fact, the paper could find little evidence that the company exists in any meaningful way:
Only scant information can be found online about New Matrix, which was created 17 months ago. At the building that New Matrix lists as its address, a company directory does not …
I'm calling it: time of death, November 6th, 1:30 AM, by tweet.
Elon Musk's declaration Friday that Tesla would be "winding down" production of the Cybertruck next year to make room for the Cybercab was fascinating for a number of reasons. First, it was a humiliating way to kill a vehicle that was once hailed as the pinnacle of Tesla's engineering - faster than a Porsche 911, more powerful than an F-150, able to leap over the Model Y as a singular representation of Musk's Blade Runner-inspired designs for the future. "I think the Tesla Cybertruck is our best product ever," he declared during a 2019 earnings call. (He prefaced the statement …
The midterm elections were great for Democrats everywhere, but some triumphed even more decisively than others: Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, for example, cruised to reelection with roughly 63 percent of the vote.
Voters pushed Republicans out — and kept Democrats like Moore in power — in part because of their concerns over a handful of critical issues, including the rising cost of living, the Iran war, and the growing dominance of AI and data centers. The question now is how Democrats can best wield their new power to act on the currents that carried them into office.
For Moore, the stakes may be particularly high: He’s often mentioned as a potential Democratic presidential candidate in 2028, speculation that he has not exactly batted down.
America, Actually host Astead Herndon spoke with Moore about his vision for how the Democrats should proceed. As Moore put it, this is a moment in which the party will have to move quickly on the problems that motivate voters most.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full show, so listen to America, Actually wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on Vox’s YouTube channel.
Lowering cost is the top priority for voters, and, frankly, it was where they penalized Trump the most. What’s the single biggest thing Democrats could do to address folks’ cost of living concerns?
Actually move fast to fix the things. No more studies. No more 10-year research reports. Move fast. For example, in Maryland, we’ve done permitting reform to be able to speed up affordable housing, right? And I did not need a 10-year research paper to tell me that we have an issue with affordable housing.
Get more housing around transit. Do more transit-oriented development. If it’s state-owned land, don’t tell me why we can’t do something. It is state owned land. Do something on it.
The reason we made the largest investments in childcare in our state’s history is because it is insane when you’re watching the fact that people are spending thirty and forty percent of their paychecks on child care and knowing how much that’s actually going to impact [them]. So there are things that we can do right now to be able to address it.
But I also think that there are things that we need Washington to be able to do. For example, gas prices: There’s no governor that can impact gas prices. We just need to stop fighting stupid wars. There’s no governor that is impacting national energy policy or national grocery prices. What we need to do is stop allowing illegal tariff policy to happen. So I do think that there are things that Washington Democrats have got to do, and that they need to move fast on. But I also think that we don’t need to wait for them to be able to put things in place that we know that actually work.
I wonder what universal healthcare means to you. Is that the government providing insurance?
If you look at what we’ve done here in Maryland, we’ve been able to actually come up with platforms through our Total Cost of Care [Model]. We’re actually working with our hospitals. Our hospitals have a universal budget, and are then able to make sure that people are getting the care that they need.
That has done a tremendous job of being able to help to break the cost curve. Maryland is one of the only states in the country where you’re watching the cost of healthcare actually go down, [while] also being able to increase coverage.
A lot of the Democrats’ affordability message came out of Mamdani’s win. I remember him telling me the one thing he would never budge on is the belief that billionaires shouldn’t exist. I wanted to pose that question to you. Do you think billionaires should exist?
I lose no sleep over the amount of billionaires in our society. I do lose sleep over the amount of children that are growing up in poverty. And I think those who [do] have, have a responsibility to support and uplift and create pathways for those who do not.
Here in our state, we actually cut taxes for the middle class. We cut taxes for military veterans. And I said [to wealthy Marylanders], you need to invest more to make sure that we’re doing things like we’re doing: having the fastest public safety turnaround story in the United States of America, having math and reading scores in our public schools now at five-year highs. And I did ask wealthy Marylanders to invest a little bit more to make sure we can get those kinds of results.
I wanted to move on to Iran. You served in Afghanistan and are a veteran. When we think about this incoming Democratic Congress, should they continue funding a war that Americans have mostly found is not in their interest?
No, and they shouldn’t have funded in the first place.
I’ve heard the argument that that leaves soldiers behind.
No, because we’re talking about a president who unilaterally went to war without even asking Congress for authority. The president does not have the authority to just wage war by himself. That is something that the Constitution lays out. Congress is the only one that has the authority for that. And truthfully, this Congress has been so caught up in the aura of the president of the United States that they have not been leaders; they have been cheerleaders.
Part of the issue is that this Congress needs to be held to account, and that’s exactly what I think happened on Tuesday. But I think about my experiences, right? I served in Afghanistan. I led soldiers with the 82nd Airborne Division, and we went over there with what we believed was an understanding of what was at stake and what needed to happen. That this was about the Taliban, and the Taliban could not be in charge of Afghanistan after 9/11. Twenty years later, trillions of dollars spent, thousands of American service members dead, and do you know who’s in charge of Afghanistan right now? The Taliban.
And so we are dragging ourselves again into another forever war. And the problem is that we have a Congress that is not actually asserting its authority to be able to check this administration. I think that Congress needs to get this done not in the first hundred days, [but] in the first hundred hours. Congress needs to assert its authority and say to the president of the United States: This needs to end.
Data centers also had a horrible night on Tuesday. But I still hear a lot of Democrats say that AI has a place in the economy of tomorrow. Is there a place for pro-AI Democrats in this big tent?
I am very concerned about what we’ve seen from AI, and I know a lot of Americans are. I’m hopeful for what I think the promise of what AI can bring to things like health care and what I think AI can bring to things like education. But I also know that there need to be guardrails.
What we have seen from Donald Trump and these folks is that there are no guardrails. They just let it do what it does. I don’t think that’s the right answer. I think that’s remarkably dangerous.
I don’t think that the answer is telling them, “Police yourself, guys, because that’s going to get us to the right answer.” And that’s why in Maryland, we’ve actually put together guidelines as to how we’re going to be protected from AI. That includes things like protecting our workforce. That includes things like protecting our pocketbooks. That includes things like protecting our children.
We put together some of the most stringent guidelines in the country that said things like, they have to pay for all their own energy and all their own upgrades. That our taxpayers do not pay a single penny for that. That they cannot pollute our air or pollute our water. They need to follow all environmental guidelines. That they need to hire local union workers. And also really importantly, that we need to make sure that the people of Maryland have control, not the data center companies, not the Trump administration. That control belongs to us.
About half of the local jurisdictions in Maryland have either a ban or a pause on [data centers]. And I’ve said the state will never override you, ever. If you have a ban or a pause, that is done, because control goes to the locals.
Listen on
Die Welt spielt verrückt, doch im Präsidium des Bundestages herrscht überraschende Einigkeit. Bundestagsvizepräsident Bodo Ramelow (Die Linke) gibt im Gespräch mit Gordon Repinski einen seltenen Einblick in die überparteiliche Zusammenarbeit, auch bei Nachtschichten. Dabei wird deutlich, mit welcher Strategie das Gremium den Provokationen der AfD begegnet.
In seiner eigenen Partei brodelt es derweil gewaltig. Ramelow findet deutliche Worte zur Antisemitismus-Debatte innerhalb der Linken und kritisiert das taktische Lavieren einzelner Abgeordneter. Warum er trotzdem eine Gesinnungsprüfung ablehnt, aber klare rote Linien beim Existenzrecht Israels zieht, offenbart die tiefe Zerrissenheit seiner Partei.
Zudem verrät er, warum die Wahrnehmung der Linken im Bundestag derzeit auch von der Gruppe der „Silberlocken“ abhängt, wie sich die Silberlocken regelmäßig absprechen und warum er sich trotz aller Krisen nicht verrückt machen lässt.
Mit den Linken, aber auch der SPD und den Grünen beschäftigt sich auch der neue Podcast von POLITICO und WELT. In „Inside Links“ geht es jede Woche darum, wie in Deutschland womöglich eine neue linke Mehrheit entsteht, zu welchem Preis und wer künftig dabei möglicherweise am Regierungstisch sitzen könnte. „Inside Links“ gibt es auf den Podcast-Plattformen zu hören und zu sehen, unter anderem auch hier.
Das Berlin Playbook als Podcast gibt es jeden Morgen ab 5 Uhr. Rixa Fürsen, Maximilian Stascheit und das POLITICO-Team liefern Politik zum Hören – kompakt, international, hintergründig.
Für alle Hauptstadt-Profis: Der Berlin Playbook-Newsletter bietet jeden Morgen die wichtigsten Themen und Einordnungen. Jetzt kostenlos abonnieren.
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This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: President Donald Trump is doubling down after a midterm annihilation.
What happened? On Friday afternoon, Trump announced that longtime aide Stephen Miller would take over as White House chief of staff, replacing Susie Wiles. In a post to Truth Social, Trump said that Miller would start on Monday, but the change appears to be effective more or less immediately — Wiles has already resigned.
Why the change? Trump was reportedly angry with Wiles over the GOP’s collapse in the midterm elections, which saw Democrats winning up and down the ballot even in traditionally deep-red parts of the country.
Trump, for his part, told reporters on Friday that Wiles had “done a very good job.” But, he added, “we gotta make moves. Sometimes in life, you have to make moves.”
What should I know about Miller? Miller is currently the White House deputy chief of staff for policy, as well as homeland security adviser. More importantly, he’s the architect and engine of some of Trump’s most vicious immigration policies, including family separation (during the first Trump term) and ICE’s current campaign of indiscriminate, militarized immigration enforcement.
He’s also an ally of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has to be feeling a little bit better about his imperiled job (though it won’t keep Hegseth from facing impeachment in the near future).
What does this mean for the Trump presidency? More of the same, cranked up to 11. Miller is as hardline as they come, and he’s certain to push Trump to be even more aggressive on immigration and attempts to use the machinery of government to attack their shared political enemies.
It’s all going to be extraordinarily unpopular, if Tuesday’s midterm results are anything to go by — but with just over two years left in the White House, there’s little reason to believe that Miller and Trump won’t try to push the power of the presidency to its breaking point.
Let’s end the week on a high note with this piece from my colleague Christian Paz, who writes that “the decency was the point” for voters and Democratic candidates alike in the 2026 midterms. You can read it here with a gift link.
If you’d prefer something even lighter to head into the weekend, I also recommend the Smithsonian’s cheetah cam. Enjoy, have a great weekend, and we’ll see you on Monday!
This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.
Hi readers, happy Friday! What a week, right?
My colleague Caitlin Dewey has spent the last two days unpacking some of the midterm results and their implications for you, and there will be lots more of that to come. But before we head into the weekend, I’m going to take a quick second to look ahead — to 2028.
Specifically, to the future of the Republican Party, which just found itself on the wrong end of what may be the biggest electoral landslide since 1976. It’s a comprehensive, crushing repudiation — and one that has already cast the future of MAGA’s heir apparent, Vice President JD Vance, into doubt.
Vance has long looked like the presumptive Republican presidential nominee in 2028, with the clearest claim to President Donald Trump’s legacy. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, also considered a potential 2028 candidate, has previously said he would defer to Vance were Vance to run.
But that may be changing. The downside to being so closely linked to the president, after all, is that it’s hard to run very far when the president gets hit with Electoral Ragnarok. Vance didn’t help his case on Wednesday, with a strange and lengthy post on the social media site X blaming the Iran war for his party’s electoral woes.
Also implicated in questions about Vance and the 2028 primary is a bigger question about the future of the MAGA movement. Specifically: Is MAGA dead?
If you ask conservative writer and Vance ally Rod Dreher — and we did! — the answer is easy: Yes, after a historic electoral thrashing, MAGA as a political movement is dead. And it is possible that, as a vote-getting enterprise, MAGA is at the end of the road. But the Trump White House has no plans to let up on the MAGA agenda.
We got our clearest post-midterms sign of that fact on Friday afternoon, in the form of one Stephen Miller. Trump, in a post to Truth Social, announced that Miller would take over as White House chief of staff starting Monday, replacing current chief of staff Susie Wiles.
Miller’s ascension is a foreboding sign: Through one and a half Trump terms, he’s been the driving force behind many of Trump’s cruelest and least popular policies — some of the same policies, particularly around immigration, that helped Republicans lose the midterms in a blowout.
Trump’s decision to promote Miller, with just a little over two years left in the White House, means that we can expect the administration to double down on those same policies, with predictably unpopular results.
That all spells more bad news for Vance, already limping out of the midterms after tying himself tightly to failed Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who was behind one of the ugliest attack ads in recent political memory.
And it may embolden other potential contenders, like Rubio (who is reportedly eyeing an exit from the administration in an attempt to save face) and even outgoing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who Dreher described to Vox as “the only national Republican politician not tainted by Trumpism.” (Mostly because he got flattened by Trump in the 2024 Republican presidential primary, but never mind that now.)
➨ Here’s how to protect your family from convincing AI scams. “As AI gets better and cheaper,” my colleague Adam Clark Estes writes, “we’re all becoming easier targets” — even if you think of yourself as skeptical, tech-savvy, and hard to fool. But there are some straightforward steps you can take to keep yourself and your family safe, including setting up a verification system to confirm when you’re actually talking to a family member and not an eerily accurate AI replica of their voice.
Just days after big wins in the midterms, Democrats are celebrating historic victories. But what can we actually learn from these wins?
David Axelrod is a Democratic strategist and the man behind Barack Obama’s two presidential victories. He’s not a senior political commentator at CNN. He’s spent decades figuring out how Democrats can win.
On Wednesday, Axelrod joined America, Actually for a conversation with host Astead Herndon about what the blue wave in the midterms reveals about voters in the US right now, the powerful demographic shifts that are underway, and what Democrats need to do next to make good on the promises they made in their campaigns, all while Trump is still in the White House.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full show, so listen to America, Actually wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on Vox’s YouTube channel.
Is this all about Trump’s unpopularity, or an endorsement of Democrats? I heard Rahm Emanuel say that he doesn’t read this as a vindication of Democrats, but as a repudiation of Republicans.
Does that distinction matter? And do we know if people were voting for Democrats or just against the administration?
I think every midterm election in some ways is a referendum on the incumbent party. That’s been true forever. And it’s almost always the case that the verdict is: not as good as we’d like. You know, this election is the one where the people in power have to put on a button saying, “How am I doing?”
And people get to tell them, and the answer was: really, really bad.
Horrible! Two thumbs down.
Really, really bad. And obviously it was a repudiation of the president. I think it was a real response to the same thing that drove the election as much as anything in 2024, which is costs and the fact that people are struggling in this economy. The thing that made this unusual was Trump was elected to lower these costs, and instead he made decisions that palpably raised them — the war, the tariffs.
I think it’s given Democrats a chance to prove that they are who they say they are and work on these issues of cost. And they’re crippled in the sense that if they don’t have a partner in the president, all they can do is try and pass legislation and do things to reduce those costs, but they need a partner to do it.
I don’t discount the fact that Trump may do a 180 on some things and be that partner.
It is an open question who the president becomes after all of this, considering he’s, you know, the nicest way to say it is ideologically flexible. Should Democrats come in thinking accountability? Should they come in thinking, find places of bipartisan alignment? Is the answer both?
Yeah, I think the answer is both. And it’s very tricky to strike that balance. And if the price of cooperation is to lay off of accountability, I don’t think that’s a deal they can make.
But I look at the way Mayor Mamdani has handled his relationship with Trump. And there may be some instructive elements to that, because he’s certainly critical of the president. But he’s also found areas around housing, for example, on which they can work together.
Here’s what I would say to Democrats: Be willing to work with him. And I think you’ll pay a price if you don’t. If he’s willing to help you, for example, on rolling back some of these cuts to the affordable healthcare subsidies or to Medicaid cuts. I think the country would actually embrace that kind of deal.
And for that reason, I think Trump may take it because I don’t think he gives a damn about the Republican Party. The Republican Party was just a vehicle for him, and now he’s mad at them — because he’s not going to blame himself for what happened on Tuesday.
You’ve mentioned the demographic shifts. They were universal. You talk about men, Latinos, Asian voters, young people, working-class people generally moving towards Democrats in numbers that were even larger than some polls expected. I was wondering: Did we write the obituary on the Obama coalition too early? Is it back?
I’m so allergic to this because I remember when we won. I remember people talking about the coalition of the ascendant. This is the coalition that’s going to govern.
Yeah, the governing majority to come.
The message is: It matters what you do.
Democrats took Hispanic voters, for example, for granted. And they paid a big price in 2024. Republicans took Hispanic voters for granted. And in each case they’re a constituency that is deeply responsive to economic circumstances. They’re getting hammered in this economy, as they were in 2024. They are also — in the main — socially conservative communities. I think both parties have been guilty sequentially in misreading this.
By the way, everybody’s talking about who’s responsible for the Republican performance this year? I don’t think Stephen Miller is getting the credit that he deserved.
One hundred percent, yeah.
The immigration overreach is core to the collapse with Latino voters. We heard about that through the year. And just generally shocking to the conscience of the American public.
Yes! There was a vote for decency here. Decency had a big day on Tuesday, and in that vein, it’s so interesting to me that Talarico, Hamilton, candidates like that, who very much preached the gospel of the brotherhood of man and of decency, wound up triumphing in places that you never thought Democrats could triumph.
So that’s a long way of answering: I think what the Democratic coalition is and can be depends on what Democrats do now.
BERLIN — Bavarian politician Ilse Aigner is set to become Germany’s next president, making her the country’s first woman to hold the office, according to two senior conservatives with knowledge of the matter.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservative bloc and the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) will nominate Aigner to succeed outgoing German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the officials told BILD, which, like POLITICO, is part of the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network. Both officials were granted anonymity to discuss internal party matters freely. Aigner’s nomination will officially be announced Monday, according to the officials.
Aigner, who previously served as agriculture minister under former German Chancellor Angela Merkel from 2008 to 2013, is currently president of the Bavarian State Parliament. She is also a member of the Christian Social Union (CSU), the Bavarian sister party to Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
The CDU and CSU form a joint parliamentary bloc in the Bundestag and are part of the European People’s Party in the European Parliament. Merz intends to inform senior CDU politicians Sunday that Aigner will be the bloc’s candidate, the two officials said.
Steinmeier’s second five-year term ends in March 2027. He is not eligible for re-election. His successor will be elected on Jan. 30, 2027. The German presidency is largely ceremonial, with the chancellor setting the government’s policy agenda.
Bavaria’s CSU premier, Markus Söder, suggested Aigner as a candidate back in April. The CSU has long dominated Bavarian politics but has never produced a German chancellor or president. Prominent SPD and Green politicians have also signaled their support for Aigner in recent weeks.
Brandenburg’s SPD state premier, Dietmar Woidke, described Aigner as “the perfect candidate” who knows German politics “inside out,” he told POLITICO’s Berlin Playbook on Friday.
The Axel Springer Global Reporters Network harnesses the resources of the company’s newsrooms to publish ambitious scoops, investigations, interviews, opinion pieces and analysis. It allows journalists — including those from POLITICO, The Telegraph, Business Insider, WELT, BILD, Onet and Fakt — to collaborate on major stories for an international audience of hundreds of millions across platforms: online, print, TV and audio.
It’s notoriously hard to govern Los Angeles, a city that gives its mayor less direct authority over the government than in a city like New York or Chicago. But even so, it’d be hard to do much worse than Karen Bass.
Elected mayor of LA in 2022, Bass campaigned on promises to solve the city’s homelessness and housing affordability crises (which are really part of the same underlying crisis). She then spent her term undermining her own administration’s affordable housing policy and fighting the state of California’s efforts to compel cities to allow more housing production. She lost her bid for reelection this week to Nithya Raman, an LA City Council member, rising progressive star, and nationally prominent YIMBY.
Los Angeles has the highest ratio of home price to household income of any large city in America, and the second fewest homes per adult of any major city. It has a highly suburbanized and car-oriented fabric, like much of the rest of the country — all of which makes it a kind of proving ground for whether America’s sprawling cities can build their way out of their housing shortages.
Everyone in the city’s political leadership notionally agrees that LA needs to permit a lot more homes to meet demand — the only true way to make housing affordable — but not all of them have evidently had the policy discipline to follow through.
Raman may be different. She has gained a following in housing reform circles over the last few years with her brisk, direct-to-camera social videos explaining how LA’s housing shortage drives up rents and criticizing city policies that make it so difficult to build more homes (perhaps it’s no surprise that she has plenty of friends in Hollywood).
“There has been an overall lack of urgency in addressing housing supply in [Bass’s] administration,” Raman told me in an interview in July. How best to accommodate LA’s need for more housing, she said, is “a question that the city has actually turned away from.”
Even given LA’s relatively weak mayoralty, Bass’s failures on housing were often a matter of political choice. As The Atlantic’s Marc Novicoff put it, “Bass seems to have gone out of her way to exercise as little power as possible.” Where she did go out of her way to wield her influence, it was often to stop denser housing from being built. Some of her bewildering housing policy choices while in office include:
All of these point to a leader who is not serious about changing the conditions that led to LA’s housing shortage, and lacks the courage to take on what is arguably the city’s most defining political challenge.
Raman has promised to fundamentally break from that approach. That will make her mayoralty an important experiment for the rest of the country. Even modest progress in a city as resistant to housing as LA could help crack open a way forward for new approaches to housing in the many other cities that face affordability crises.
This won’t be easy for her — she’ll face the same anti-building political pressures, and will need to maintain a cooperative relationship with the city council. When I spoke to Raman over the summer, I noticed that she treaded gingerly around the topic of adding density to single-family neighborhoods. Because of the uniquely American obsession with keeping single-family homes segregated from other types of development, it can be a real political third rail in LA and nationwide. But research has suggested the city can’t fill its housing shortage without building more in those neighborhoods. Raman will, at least, have an important ally in California’s newly elected governor, Xavier Becerra, who is also a strong YIMBY.
Raman’s affiliation with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) makes her emblematic of a fusion that’s been emerging in Democratic politics, between supply-side abundance and left-wing economic populism. It’s also evident in politicians like Zohran Mamdani and some of the young Democrats who won elections across the country this week.
I think this is right.
— Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) November 5, 2026
It's not just that Talarico (et al) combines elements of left populism, abundance pragmatism, and cultural moderation. It's also that the definitions of "left" and "moderate" are in flux.
Take "left." Talarico's all-of-the-above position on energy, eg,… https://t.co/elbUP9vT11
From talking to Raman, I have the sense that she’s more at home with the YIMBY part of her politics than the DSA part. Her relationship with the DSA’s LA chapter has been strained (though it did endorse her candidacy). But her social-democratic commitments are also sincere — she’s been a strong champion of rent control and tenant protections in LA, for example, and helped shape a stronger rent stabilization law the city adopted last year.
The new political syntheses taking shape on the American left are exciting and intriguing. Whether it will finally make a breakthrough in LA’s — and California’s, and America’s — housing crisis, of course, remains to be tested. But it’s a welcome sign that American politics need not remain trapped in the same orthodoxies and failures.
A massive permitting bill that could help energy projects come online much quicker and potentially lower utility bills for Americans is advancing with bipartisan support. And while it could be a catalyst for lots of clean energy, it could also speed up polluting projects and limit oversight of new data centers.
With data centers demanding more electricity for AI, environmental advocates fear that developers could take advantage of the reforms to evade public scrutiny and rely more heavily on fossil fuels. The bill sacrifices caution for speed, limiting environmental reviews and preventing communities from stopping a project from moving forw …
BRUSSELS — Europe is once again watching the White House through gritted teeth.
An opaque Trump administration proposal for a new European-wide security arrangement with Russia has met skepticism from European capitals that fear it risks sidelining the continent and emboldening Kremlin chief Vladimir Putin.
“We already have a European security architecture in place — NATO and European Union both have their respective roles,” EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said Friday in reaction to the U.S. plan. “We must make sure Ukraine is integrated into this architecture. The problem remains that Russia keeps breaking the treaties that underpin it … Putin does not have a veto over European security.”
The latest U.S. proposal underscores growing anxiety around Trump’s fresh rapprochement with Russia as he ramps up pressure on Ukraine and his administration attempts to revive long-stalled talks to end Moscow’s full-scale war against Kyiv.
POLITICO spoke to 12 NATO diplomats, EU envoys and European government officials, all of whom were granted anonymity to speak freely on the sensitive issue. NATO allies were not briefed about the American plans in advance, according to three alliance diplomats, and many remain skeptical of the idea.
U.S. President Donald Trump late Thursday talked of a “big, beautiful agreement,” after meeting with Putin’s envoy Kirill Dmitriev, adding: “It’s going to involve more than Ukraine, and I could even say it might involve all of Europe.”
“Our objective is to develop practical arrangements that address the security concerns of all sides, reduce the risk of future conflict, and create a more stable and predictable security environment,” Trump’s son-in-law and envoy Jared Kushner added soon after.
Kushner said the arrangement would have five goals: “Permanent security consultations, reliable crisis communications, greater military transparency, reciprocal measures to reduce escalation risks, and an enduring framework for long-term European security and stability.”
“It is a bit obscure what Kushner meant,” said one NATO diplomat. “The general sentiment in Europe is that any discussion with Russia on the future architecture at the moment will just be used by Moscow to legitimize their arguments … it will not fly with the European allies.”
A senior European official added: “Literally, there’s nothing to find fault with, but we know there’s something else going on.”
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s top adviser, Björn Seibert, briefed EU ambassadors on Friday, according to two EU diplomats, following a discussion between national security advisers on the issue.
“There’s willingness to engage in Kyiv and in the rest of Europe although there’s little confidence in the Russians — but the EU is not blocking it,” one of the EU diplomats said after the meeting. But “the group around Trump underestimated how important the conflict is for Europe and how a bad outcome for Ukraine is very dangerous for Europe.”
“It’s a long-standing position for us and many others that European security architecture should not be discussed while there is a war,” said a senior European security official. “And obviously not without Europeans.”
“Europe must have a seat at the table in negotiations on peace in Ukraine and the future European security architecture,” Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda added Friday, after a meeting of the eight Nordic and Baltic countries.
This week saw two rounds of working-level meetings in Brussels on a Ukraine peace deal, ahead of U.S.-brokered working-level talks with Ukraine and Russia on Nov. 10-11 in Abu Dhabi.
“We must be realistic about the peace talks and we must be very careful when it comes to the real intentions of Russia,” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk told a group of reporters, including from POLITICO, earlier this week. “In winter, Putin might have less incentives to get a deal.”
Stefan Kornelius, spokesperson for German Chancellor Friedrich Merz — who talked to Trump on Thursday night — said: “A new sense of urgency has … emerged” on negotiations after this week’s U.S. midterm elections, adding the issue would resurface at an informal gathering of EU leaders in Dublin next week.
The meeting had been intended to focus on AI, but developments in Ukraine could overshadow the talks, a third EU diplomat said. “Things are moving pretty fast,” they said.
Still, some allies fear the U.S. may tie its new initiative to an upcoming review of American troops in Europe, expected in December.
“That’s the elephant in the room,” said a second NATO diplomat. “One thing is talking about European security architecture … with an ‘ordinary’ U.S. posture; another thing is to talk about a European security architecture ‘as things will be,’ and nobody knows how that’ll be.”
DUBLIN — Bomb threats targeting several of Ireland’s top media organizations are almost certainly linked to next week’s European Political Community summit in Dublin, a government official told POLITICO.
Newsrooms at Irish national broadcaster RTÉ, Virgin Media TV, the Irish Independent newspaper and Newstalk radio received identically worded emails Friday morning claiming bombs had been left inside their offices.
Three of the newsrooms were evacuated, disrupting RTÉ and Newstalk programs, while Virgin staff kept broadcasts running. Police confirmed they found no suspicious devices.
“We have expected a rise in hybrid threats to Ireland because of our hosting of the EU presidency, and the EPC meeting will be by far the biggest set-piece event of that presidency, so one must presume it’s no coincidence that we’re experiencing this spike in hybrid activity now,” the Irish official said.
The Irish government said the threats against media outlets were probably part of a European-wide pattern of threats that have targeted dozens of airlines this week, including Irish carriers Ryanair and Aer Lingus. Hackers also targeted supermarket refrigeration systems in at least seven European countries.
“It is not known yet who is responsible for these threats, whether it is individuals or a centralized or coordinated effort,” the Irish government said in a statement. “However, these threats come on the heels of the ongoing disruption to aviation around Europe caused by similar threats, and it seems likely that this is a coordinated campaign of disruption.”
Bomb threats also targeted at least 18 European flights Friday, after at least 22 the day before, raising concerns that the hoaxes may be part of a coordinated campaign to disrupt air traffic.
Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares told Spanish public broadcaster TVE on Friday that the bomb threats affecting flights could be “an attempt at hybrid aggression and war in some psychological way.” He added that “it cannot be a coincidence that so many identical events occur with the same modus operandi throughout Europe.”
Luis Gallego, CEO of airline group IAG, said: “It is clear that what they [the perpetrators] are looking for is to create chaos and disruption in the different airports.”
Fighter jets were scrambled in Hungary on Friday “in response to bomb threats involving three civilian passenger aircraft,” said Hungary’s Defense Minister Romulusz Ruszin-Szendi.
Prague Airport said nine flights were targeted by bomb threats Friday alone, while France reported another four threats against aircraft flying over its territory that day. The Bulgarian government told AFP that two flights bound for Sofia were targeted by bomb threats on Friday.
Aviation professionals have said no threat should be underestimated. “No matter how remote the real possibility after a call that there is a bomb on board, we will treat it as if there is a bomb on board,” said Paul Reuter, an airline captain and vice president of the European Cockpit Association.
The Irish government official told POLITICO that the sudden increase in anonymous disruptions to airlines, supermarkets and now news outlets appeared to be timed to increase tensions ahead of Dublin’s hosting next Thursday of the EPC summit.
Created in 2022 following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the EPC brings together the leaders of 47 countries and representatives of several bodies, including NATO, to discuss strategic issues. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is also attending.
The Irish official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss Friday’s threats freely, declined to identify Russia as the likely culprit. But he noted that EU partners — including Denmark, which faced a similar wave of so-called hybrid attacks in the run-up to its own 2025 hosting of the EPC — had drawn such links in the past.
Irish police Superintendent Liam Geraghty said the event posed an even tougher security challenge than hosting a U.S. presidential visit. “We have not seen a policing and security operation of this scale ever before in Ireland,” Geraghty told reporters.
BRUSSELS — The Netherlands and Spain on Friday submitted candidates to succeed Christine Lagarde, who steps down as president of the European Central Bank on Feb. 7.
Pablo Hernández de Cos, a former governor of Spain’s central bank, and the Netherlands’ Klaas Knot, a former president of the Dutch central bank, were the only candidates to emerge after the 5 p.m. deadline, as expected.
Their candidacies are part of a larger game of musical chairs that includes France and Germany, as Europe’s four economic powerhouses negotiate how to secure their seats on the ECB’s executive board.
The ECB is one of the most powerful institutions in Europe, responsible for setting interest rates to keep prices stable at 2% over the medium-term. The six-person executive board oversees the central bank’s day-to-day activities and an army of economists who scrutinize financial markets and the economy at large.
Berlin is determined to hold onto the seat that German economist Isabel Schnabel will vacate on Jan. 3, when she leaves the ECB for a job at the International Monetary Fund. Paris, meanwhile, is targeting the ECB’s chief economist role once the Irish incumbent Philip Lane concludes his eight-year term on May 31.
Eurozone finance ministers will take stock of the ECB shuffling at Monday’s Eurogroup meeting in Brussels. Neither Hernández de Cos nor Knot are scheduled to attend the closed-door meeting. But their national ministers will talk up their respective compatriots.
Diplomats expect EU leaders to engage in horse trading at an informal summit in Dublin at the end of next week. The deadline for candidates to replace Schnabel is on Nov. 27.
PARIS — A group of European ambassadors posted in Paris questioned Marine Le Pen about her plans for France and the EU over a lunch on Wednesday, four officials with direct knowledge of the meeting told POLITICO.
The lunch at the lavish neoclassical Hôtel de Beauharnais — once home to Napoleon’s stepson, and now the residence of the German ambassador in the capital — mainly covered Le Pen’s future EU agenda, officials said.
Le Pen, who is comfortably leading the polls in the 2027 election race, has pledged to fight in Brussels to downsize EU institutions, turn the European Commission into a secretariat that would no longer have any competence on foreign policy, internal security or health, and to drastically cut France’s contribution to the EU budget.
The group of ambassadors from the eight countries that share a border with metropolitan France — Germany, Spain, Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Monaco and Andorra — already met with conservative presidential candidate Bruno Retailleau in September. They are planning to host meetings with the other presidential hopefuls, including far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, at their respective embassies in the coming months.
“I don’t know if it reassured or worried them,” said an adviser to Marine Le Pen who accompanied her to the lunch. “What is sure is that they can now report back to their capitals what the National Rally wants to do,” the adviser added.
Le Pen was mainly questioned about her plans to downsize the EU and on bilateral issues, as well as U.S. President Donald Trump after his seismic defeat in the midterm elections.
While in the past, the National Rally has been supportive of Trump, the party has progressively distanced itself from the U.S. president. The National Rally’s Jordan Bardella on Wednesday said his party was not affected by the result and suggested that Trump’s popularity was undermined by the war in the Middle East and its economic consequences.
Le Pen has also been campaigning for a harsher approach on migration, which would involve stricter checks at the borders, potentially impacting countries whose envoys she met on Wednesday. All of them, apart from Andorra and Monaco, are part of the Schengen free-movement area.
“There is a general interest on what would her stance be on the key issues of mutual interest and cooperation on which we are working with France,” said one diplomat from a participating country.
“It was a very frank exchange. She told them what she says everywhere and she was able to elaborate on a number of topics a little more at length than she would do on TV,” the same adviser said, adding that Le Pen regularly meets ambassadors.
Back in December, Le Pen and her No. 2 Jordan Bardella also met with U.S. ambassador Charles Kushner. The far-right leaders are also preparing the ground for a possible election win by meeting top French business executives.
Le Pen’s team announced Friday evening that she will meet with the Ukrainian ambassador to France, Vadym Omelchenko, in Paris on Monday, Nov. 16.
Marcelo Wesfreid and Nicolas Camut contributed to this report.
This article was updated.
As various factions try to make the case about what won the midterms — moderation or progressivism, populism or the establishment — perhaps the easiest and most universal way to describe 2026 was as a contest between decency and cruelty.
For nearly a decade, bullying, scape-goating, and just plain meanness have been the dominant tone of Republican politics. From Donald Trump relentlessly picking on minority groups in the 2016 campaign, through family separations in 2018 — all while demeaning political rivals and journalists and anyone who criticized him — a generation of Republican politicians have seen the president reach new levels of nastiness in politics and be rewarded for it. Other candidates picked up on it, often attempting their own imitations: Vice President JD Vance mocked “childless cat ladies” in 2021, while other Republicans joked about political violence against Democrats or critics, their physical appearances, or their ethnicities.
And yet somehow, in the 2026 midterm campaigns, the MAGA right went even harder on cruelty up and down the ballot. Pivotal campaign moments, particularly in the closing weeks of the cycle, weren’t just about bare-knuckle politics and nasty campaigning, but actually punching down at the weak and vulnerable. Republican Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy trotted out his opponent’s estranged mother to suggest the candidate was lying about childhood abuse. Trump and GOP Sen. Tim Scott used a transphobic slur to to mock a candidate while campaigning for Darline Graham. Michigan GOP senatorial candidate Mike Rogers fanned the flames of Islamophobia, accusing his opponent of “pledging” his support to Islamist extremism, something other Republicans echoed. And in Texas, a statewide candidate doubled down on racist anti-Indian-American tweets.
In 2018, the writer Adam Serwer coined the phrase, and concept, that “the cruelty is the point” — that the easiest way to understand the MAGA movement was as a desire to inflict pain and suffering on marginalized people, specific minorities, and political opponents through political power. Cruelty wasn’t incidental; it was intentional.
For Republican candidates and campaigners this cycle, cruelty became almost a central campaign tactic. Many of them struggled to mount a serious policy case, and found themselves stuck with a historically unpopular president as party leader, so they fell back on the tried-and-true maneuver of beating up on the weak, hoping it would work as well as it seemed to throughout the Trump era.
Yet on Tuesday night, voters delivered a verdict: They were fed up with that cruelty in both the administration and Republican campaigns. Instead, decency — or, at least, voters’ impression of it — won.
Even some conservatives, as they try to sort through the wreckage and blame game post-Election Day, made that case. The Christian broadcaster Erick Erickson noted that in addition to the Iran war and affordability crisis, Republicans lost because of “the impression of cruelty. The overly aggressive deportations. The accidental arrests of American citizens who were Hispanic. The arrogance.”
And, of course, many Democrats agreed, too.
“The American people were loud and clear [Tuesday] night that they want to like their neighbor, that their neighbor is not the enemy from within, and even if they disagree politically with their neighbor, they want them to do well and they want their kids to do very well,” Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, who led the party’s efforts to elect Democratic governors around the country, told me. “People [Tuesday] night showed us that they want decency in the White House and they want decency in Congress.”
All the Republicans above lost their races. The set of people who won — and especially those who flipped seats from red to blue – noticeably embraced a more compassionate tone of politics.
It’s hard to summarize just how nasty the 2026 GOP campaign strategy was. Hate, racism, and xenophobia were the go-to tools used on the right this cycle — on top of a year of hardline immigration policies and spending cuts pushed by the Trump administration. And it all came up short, Joe Walsh, the former GOP member of Congress and current anti-Trump activist, told me.
“Republicans tried to win again this year by being as cruel and fearful and divisive as they could. That’s generally worked in the past, but there were extenuating circumstances this year,” Walsh said. “People [on the trail] would tell me, ‘This is not the kind of country we are. This is not who we are.’” They were referring, he said, to masked ICE agents, the targeting of Black and brown people, and talk of white Christian nationalism.
“There was something more profound at stake here,” Walsh continued. “And I think it was the American people recoiling against the cruelty they’ve seen.”
It was all a sharp contrast to the way Democrats talked and the policies they supported on the trail. Take Texas Sen.-elect James Talarico’s words in his Tuesday night victory speech:
We didn’t win by alienating our neighbors, or by shaming our neighbors, or by ridiculing our neighbors. We embodied a new kind of politics. A politics rooted in a deep love — for our state, for our country, and for all of our neighbors. My faith teaches me that love is the strongest force in the universe…love requires that we stand between the bullies and the bullied. Love requires that we look evil in the eye and not blink.
Beshear told me that beyond concerns about gas prices, the Iran war, and tariffs, voters’ frustrations reflected a rejection of the fear and divisiveness that Trump embodies. He said he saw this rejection of cruelty while stumping for candidates in red states, and he saw the opposite coming from the Democratic candidates who won.
“Everywhere I traveled, our gubernatorial candidates were talking about being a good neighbor,” he said. “[Iowa Gov.-elect] Rob Sand talked about it at every one of his town halls, and you could see people nodding about it. [Ohio Gov.-elect] Amy Acton talked about it in each of her speeches. People are craving decency, especially given the cruelty that this president governs with.”
This contrast was apparent in some data and focus group research, too. In polling conducted by The Argument before the election, Democrats had a 20-point advantage when voters were asked which party they thought was more “compassionate,” a 12-point lead when they were asked which party “cared” for voters, and a 10-point lead when they were asked which party was more moderate.
“The party of compassion won,” the writer Jerusalem Demsas wrote for The Argument. Republicans just couldn’t shake the association, their polling showed, with “words like ‘bold,’ “strong,’ and ‘extreme.’”
And in Ohio, perhaps the most obvious example of cruelty becoming the closing message of a Republican campaign, focus groups conducted by the political strategist Sarah Longwell for The Bulwark before the election showed how quickly the infamous ad became associated with the Republican brand. Longwell wrote about the session:
The first thing to note is that everyone in the group had heard about Ramaswamy’s ad already. The second thing to note is that several of the Ramaswamy-curious voters in the group said it was pushing them toward either supporting a third-party candidate or sitting out the election altogether. The fact that everyone had heard of or seen the ad and the universal revulsion to it suggest that this could be an all-time backfire for Ramaswamy — and it raises the possibility that Trump and Vance will also suffer politically for rushing to defend it.
In follow-up focus group conversations on Wednesday, the day after the election, voters told Longwell they wanted a hard break from this era of politics.
This rejection of cruelty was also most evident in backlash to the Trump administration’s immigration policies — in places that saw ICE raids or which saw stricter enforcement in heavily Hispanic areas of Florida, Kansas, and Texas, voters swung hard against the GOP.
“These are voters who were very supportive of securing the border, very supportive of Border Patrol, which is a huge employer down there,” the Democratic strategist Lis Smith told me. “But the cruelty of what ICE was doing, tearing apart families and communities was just a bridge too far. That’s in part why you saw a big backlash in the Hispanic community because there’s a huge element of racial profiling with it.”
In contrast, the most successful candidates this week were not the ones that tried to match Republicans by being more combative or extreme. They were those who embraced themes of decency and compassion. They seemed to offer an antidote, Smith said.
“There’s sometimes this idea, a theory in the Democratic Party, that to beat Trump, you need to be Trump,” Smith said. “And so you see Democrats going out on Twitter and calling Republicans cucks and engaging in the same sort of race to the bottom of name-calling that Trump and the Republicans do. But if you look at the top Democratic over-performers, people like [Sen.-elect] Adam Hamilton in Kansas, like Rob Sand in Iowa, like James Talarico in Texas, these were people who were going out and preaching love.” Smith pointed to a Talarico interview where he called his opponent, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a “child of God.”
“Yes, Americans were fed up with corruption, et cetera, but you can’t watch those candidates and say the defining feature of these campaigns was anger.”
Michael Wear, Center for Christianity and Public Life who once advised the Obama administration on faith outreach
A kind of broad-based compassion was specifically a hallmark of some more explicitly religious campaigns, said Michael Wear, the head of the Center for Christianity and Public Life who once advised the Obama administration on faith outreach. He pointed to Talarico in Texas, and Hamilton, a megachurch pastor poised to become Kansas’s first Democratic senator in nearly a century.
To Wear, that should offer some lessons for other Democrats as they think about preserving and expanding the new national coalition they built as they move into the 2028 election cycle.
“Yes, Americans were fed up with corruption, et cetera, but you can’t watch those candidates and say the defining feature of these campaigns was anger,” Wear said.
And that’s also how they talked about voters themselves, Smith said: trying to expand the tent by welcoming Republicans or even former Trump supporters who were fed up with this style of politics.
“They explicitly asked for their vote and said that, ‘We don’t judge you. I’m not going to judge you for how you voted in the past. And you’re welcome in my tent, you’re welcome in my coalition,’” Smith said. “That’s a different tone than you hear from a lot of Democrats.”
Smith said it was a risk — the most liberal of the Democratic base might enjoy “the sick warfare,” she said, “but most other people are really exhausted by it. … They’re really exhausted by just seeing neighbors turn against neighbors and find this approach of turning the temperature down refreshing.”
Spain shouldn’t co-host the 2030 FIFA World Cup if Morocco gets to stage the final, said Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the conservative People’s Party leader and favorite to become the next Spanish prime minister after this month’s snap election.
Speaking on the sports TV show El Chiringuito, Feijóo said it is “fair, fitting and unquestionable” that Spain, “a global football power,” hosts the final.
“If it does not host it, Spain should not take part in organizing the World Cup,” Feijóo added, before confirming, in response to a follow-up question, that he would advocate for Spain to withdraw from co-hosting duties if Morocco was awarded the flagship match.
Feijóo noted that the 2030 World Cup was originally a Spanish-Portuguese bid, until Morocco was invited at a later stage. Despite that chronology, Moroccan officials have been pushing vigorously to stage the final, which is the world’s most prestigious sports event.
Rafael Louzán, Spain’s football chief, told POLITICO in June that he was confident either Madrid or Barcelona would host the final, despite Morocco pouring vast amounts of cash into football infrastructure.
Tensions have flared between the two countries in recent months. Spanish political parties this summer accused Morocco of stoking a migrant crisis in Spain’s North African territory of Ceuta, after 80,000 people surged into the city in late July.
A Sigma Dos poll for El Mundo following the Ceuta crisis found that 84.4% of Spaniards opposed Spain continuing to co-host the World Cup with Morocco.
Leftist party Sumar, the Socialists’ junior coalition partner, said this summer that the World Cup “cannot be shared with a country that uses desperate people for its own geostrategic interests.”
The left-wing party tabled a resolution in parliament that far-right Vox backed in an unusual convergence. The text never made it to a vote because parliament was dissolved ahead of the snap election.
PARIS — French leftist presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon wants a radical overhaul of EU rules that would set him on a collision course with Brussels.
The far-left leader, who has enjoyed a recent surge in the polls ahead of the 2027 election, pitched a series of measures to fundamentally rethink the EU’s agenda in his presidential platform unveiled Friday. Mélenchon also said he would disobey current EU rules that would prevent him from implementing his platform if elected.
Proposing a “new deal” for Europe, Mélenchon wants to redraft the treaties, ditch core parts of the EU’s rulebook — including debt and deficit limits — suspend competition rules for public services such as energy, transport and telecoms, and loosen state aid laws.
“We will immediately implement our program at the national level. This will therefore require a confrontation with European institutions,” according to the manifesto from Mélenchon’s France Unbowed. “This also means disobeying rules blocking [us] whenever necessary.”
“Our logic is simple. As long as a deal on changing the treaties is not done, we negotiate with our partners and disobey […] blocking rules in parallel. If we get to an agreement, it will be put to a referendum,” the manifesto added.
The proposals, which echo Mélenchon’s earlier statements, would likely face tough opposition from France’s partners in the European Council, which is currently dominated by more conservative leaders.
The manifesto also said the European Central Bank should be “placed under democratic control and mobilized to fund the ecological and social transition.” Mélenchon triggered a flurry of criticism earlier this year when he said he would “set fire” to a large chunk of France’s public debt held by the ECB, setting off a nationwide debate on the subject.
France is among the countries hardest hit by a global surge in borrowing costs, with its fiscal situation also limiting the government’s ability to soften the impact of higher fuel and food prices, part of a larger cost-of-living crisis on the continent.
With public debt amounting to 117.5% of GDP and a public deficit above 5%, fiscal issues have become a central concern for voters. Presidential candidates are pitching radically different solutions to the problem.
Le Pen has tried to rebrand herself as a responsible steward of the economy unafraid of cuts — despite critics saying her plan is “overly optimistic” and her flagship promises are yet to be funded. Centrist candidates, such as former Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, are pitching themselves as the voice of reason on economic and fiscal issues but are struggling to gain traction.
Belgium’s King Philippe refused Prime Minister Bart De Wever’s resignation Friday, asking him to “resume budget talks immediately” after they broke down earlier this week.
“The King has decided to decline the Prime Minister’s resignation and has asked him to resume the budget negotiations immediately,” Belgium’s royal palace said in an official statement Friday.
De Wever offered his resignation to the king earlier this week after weekslong budget talks hit a deadlock.
Since then, Philippe has met with the five party leaders who make up Belgium’s coalition government and concluded that there is still a possible path for them to agree under a De Wever premiership.
“Following his discussions with the leaders of the five majority parties, the King noted that each of them wishes to conclude the budget negotiations as quickly as possible … The King also received a formal commitment from the five party leaders that their respective parties are prepared to make concessions in order to reach an agreement within the government,” the palace’s statement said.
While the government is seeking to plug a €10 billion budget gap by 2029, coalition partners are at loggerheads over where to find the cash.
Flemish Socialist party Vooruit is pushing for the highest earners to contribute more, but French-speaking center-right Reformist Movement has ruled that out, and also opposed reforming the value-added tax.
De Wever, who had previously ruled out starting the new year with an emergency budget, this week confirmed that the country would have no choice but to fall back on it again.
Under that system, the government can spend one-twelfth of the preceding year’s budget per month. “This is a terrible failure on the part of the government,” De Wever told members of parliament while announcing he would submit his resignation.
The prime minister will meet the king again in 10 days on Nov. 16 to report on progress, the palace said.
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