Month: October 2023

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(C) Reuters. People walk past an election posters ahead of the country’s parliamentary election in Bratislava, Slovakia, September 29, 2023. REUTERS/Eva Korinkova
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By Jan Lopatka and Jason Hovet

BRATISLAVA (Reuters) – Slovakia’s leftist former Prime Minister Robert Fico beat his progressive rival in a parliamentary election after campaigning to end military aid to Ukraine, but he will need to win over allies to form the next government, nearly complete results showed on Sunday.

With 98% of voting districts reporting in the Saturday election, Fico’s SMER-SSD party led with 23.37% of the vote. The liberal Progressive Slovakia (PS) followed with 16.86% and the HLAS (Voice) party, which could become the kingmaker for forming the next government, was third with 15.03%.

Former Fico colleague and leftist HLAS leader Peter Pellegrini kept his options open on future coalitions.

A government led by Fico and his SMER-SSD party would see NATO member Slovakia joining Hungary in challenging the European Union’s consensus on support for Ukraine, just as the bloc looks to maintain unity in opposing Russia’s invasion.

It would also signal a further shift in the region against political liberalism, which may be reinforced if conservative PiS wins an election in Poland later this month.

Fico’s party is more nationalist and socially conservative, criticising social liberalism, which it says is imposed form Brussels. The PS is liberal on green policies, LGBT rights, deeper European integration and human rights.

“We do want to evaluate everything, so we will wait for the final count,” said Robert Kalinak, a SMER-SSD candidate and long-time Fico ally, adding the party would comment on the full results later on Sunday.

Exit polls had favoured PS, but the results went Fico’s way, opening the prospect he may win a fourth stint as premier after leading governments in 2006-2010 and 2012-2018.

HLAS IN KEY POSITION

The first party across the line was expected to get a mandate from President Zuzana Caputova to lead talks on forming a parliamentary majority and, if successful, a government.

Fico may align with HLAS, which split away from SMER-SSD in 2020, and the nationalist Slovak National Party that won 5.68%.

“The distribution of seats confirms HLAS as a party without which any normally functioning government coalition cannot be put together,” Pellegrini said as most results were known. “If you ask me if we prefer any combination or coalition, I want to say not at all.”

PS has advocated maintaining Slovakia’s strong backing for Ukraine and would also likely follow a liberal line within the EU on issues such as majority voting to make the bloc more flexible, green policies and LGBT rights.

The party’s leader, Michal Simecka, speaking when most votes were counted, did not give up hope he could form the next government, depending how possible smaller allies end up.

“It remains our aim for Slovakia to have after this election a stable pro-European government that will care for the rule of law and which begins to solve and invest into areas key for our future,” Simecka, a former reporter and Oxford graduate, told supporters.

Any coalition that PS could potentially form would likely need HLAS and include more right-wing or socially conservative parties, which would blunt its socially progressive and EU-integration drive.

The incoming government in the nation of 5.5 million will take over a ballooning budget deficit forecast to be the highest in the euro zone.

WARMER TOWARDS RUSSIA

Fico has ridden on dissatisfaction with a bickering centre-right coalition, whose government collapsed last year, triggering the election six months early. In campaigning, he stressed concern about a rise in the number of migrants passing through Slovakia to Western Europe.

Fico’s views reflect traditionally warm sentiments towards Russia among many Slovaks, which have gathered strength on social media since the Ukraine war started.

He has also pledged to end military supplies to Ukraine and strive for peace talks – a line close to that of Hungary’s leader, Viktor Orban, but rejected by Ukraine and its allies, who say this would only encourage Russia.

The far-right Republika party, which was seen as a possible ally for Fico but unacceptable to others, failed to win any seats.

Fico was forced to resign in 2018 after mass protests against graft that followed the murder of an investigative journalist.

Pellegrini, a SMER-SSD member at the time, took over for him and led the government until 2020, when centre-right parties pledging to weed out graft swept an election. But their government collapsed last year after internal bickering, opening the way to Saturday’s early election.

Analysts and diplomats have said Fico might tame this rhetoric if he takes power, as he did in the past.

(C) Reuters. FILE PHOTO: A container ship leaves Pusan Newport Terminal in Busan, South Korea, July 1, 2021. REUTERS/Kim Hong-Ji/File Photo

SEOUL (Reuters) -South Korea’s exports slowed their fall in September, in contrast to market expectations, marking the mildest decline in a yearlong downturn, a hopeful sign for the global economy from the bellwether industrial economy.

Overseas sales by Asia’s fourth-largest economy fell 4.4% from a year earlier to $54.66 billion, trade data showed on Sunday, compared with an 8.3% loss in August and a 9.1% decline tipped in a Reuters survey of economists.

It was the 12th consecutive month of a decline in exports but the narrowest in the streak.

The decline in China-bound shipments eased to 17.6%, the slowest in 11 months, while exports to the United States rose 8.5% and those to the European Union by 6.5%.

Exports of semiconductors fell 13.6%, the slowest in a year. Exports of cars rose 9.5%, machinery gained 9.8%, and ships jumped 15.4%.

Trade Minister Bang Moon-kyu said exports continued to improve and that they were now at the “inflection point” for a transition to growth.

Imports fell 16.5% to $50.96 billion, also milder than the 22.8% drop the previous month and the median 17.6% forecast.

As a result, the country posted a trade surplus of $3.70 billion in September. It was the fourth straight month in surplus and the widest since September 2021.

(C) Reuters. FILE PHOTO: Gavin Newsom, Governor, State of California speaks at the 2023 Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California, U.S., May 2, 2023. REUTERS/Mike Blake/File Photo

(Reuters) – California Governor Gavin Newsom on Saturday vetoed a bill that would have paid unemployment benefits to striking workers, and had drawn strong support from labor unions and from his fellow Democrats in the state legislature.

In rejecting the bill, Newsom noted that the state’s unemployment trust fund is already nearing $20 billion in debt.

“Now is not the time to increase costs or incur this sizable debt,” he wrote in a message explaining his veto.

The Democratic-majority legislature passed the bill in September amid several high-profile strikes. Hollywood writers ended their nearly five-month walkout 12 days later but Hollywood actors remain out on the picket lines. Southern California hotel workers are also on strike.

The bill would have made workers out on strike for at least two weeks eligible for unemployment checks. The vast majority of states, with the exception of New York and New Jersey, do not offer unemployment benefits to striking workers.

(C) Reuters. A lottery store staff member watches the evening news in Hualien, Taiwan April 8, 2023. REUTERS/Ann Wang/File Photo

BEIJING (Reuters) – China’s lottery ticket sales in August soared to their highest for any month so far this year, amid public concern about the economy following months of mostly gloomy data including youth unemployment.

Nationwide lottery ticket sales jumped 53.6% in August from a year earlier to 52.96 billion yuan ($7.25 billion), the official Xinhua news agency reported on Saturday, citing data from the finance ministry.

From January to August, a total of 375.76 billion yuan of lottery tickets were sold nationwide, up 51.6% from a year earlier, the data showed.

The surging lottery ticket sales coincided with months of mostly soft economic data, with the unemployment rate of job seekers aged between 16 and 24 drawing particular attention from policymakers.

China’s youth unemployment rate hit a record high of 21.3% in June, according to official data.

Some social media commentators have linked the sharp rise in lottery sales in recent months to young people’s deepening economic worries.

“Young people are more likely to win 5 million yuan in the lottery than to earn 5 million from work,” one wrote on the popular Chinese microblog Weibo (NASDAQ:WB).

The country’s statistics bureau abruptly stopped publishing the youth unemployment statistic in August, saying it had been suspended as officials sought to “optimise” its data collection methodology, triggering a wave of social media criticism.

Feeling the pinch of rising housing costs and the slowing economy, jobless graduates have been forfeiting cities that have traditionally provided a stepping stone to middle-class wealth.

Earlier this year, China’s social media was alit with videos of jobless university graduates visiting temples to seek the blessings of the gods.

“The worse the economy is, the more lottery tickets will be sold,” wrote another commentator on Weibo.

(This story has been refiled to remove an extraneous ‘a’ in paragraph 7)

($1 = 7.3010 Chinese yuan renminbi)