Yesterday saw three important political events, each with an outcome that is unsatisfactory for the U.S. and its European sidekicks.
In Pakistan the Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan (MQM-P) party had left the government coalition. Additionally some members of prime minister Imran Khan's PTI party had change sides. The opposition in the parliament was preparing a no-confidence vote against him. At the same time a report by the Pakistani ambassador to the U.S. said that U.S. officials had warned that Pakistan would stay on their enemy list as long as Imran Khan was left in his position.
This was understood to be a call for regime change with rumored bribes pushing the swing votes against Khan.
Yesterday the deputy speaker of the parliament did not allow the no-confidence vote to take place. Imran Khan then asked the president of Pakistan to dissolve the parliament and announced new elections within 90 days.
The case is now in the hands of the supreme court of Pakistan which, after a session today, will continue to hear the case tomorrow.
It seems likely that the supreme court will make a 'wise' decision, blame everyone and agree to new elections.
It will then be the voters who will have to decide mainly on an issue of Pakistan's foreign policy. Should it be independent and friendly with China and Russia or should it change back to the U.S. side?
I haven't found any recent polls from Pakistan but a few days ago Khan's party had won the local elections in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The people may well be impressed with his position and give him their vote.
As usual in Pakistan the military, who's leadership tends to be pro-U.S., may intervene though I doubt that it will have sufficient public support for it.
In Hungary Prime Minister Viktor Orban has won his fourth election with his party again gaining a two-thirds majority. Hungary is in the EU and in NATO but Orban has his own ways and is friendly with Russia's president Vladimir Putin:
While Orban had earlier campaigned on divisive social and cultural issues, he dramatically shifted the tone of his campaign after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, and has portrayed the election since then as a choice between peace and stability or war and chaos.
While the opposition called for Hungary to support its embattled neighbor and act in lockstep with its EU and NATO partners, Orban, a longtime ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, has insisted that Hungary remain neutral and maintain its close economic ties with Moscow, including continuing to import Russian gas and oil on favorable terms.
At his final campaign rally Friday, Orban claimed that supplying Ukraine with weapons — something that Hungary, alone among Ukraine’s EU neighbors, has refused to do — would make the country a military target, and that sanctioning Russian energy imports would cripple Hungary’s own economy.
“This isn’t our war, we have to stay out of it,” Orban said.
Orban's win makes further EU and NATO moves against Russia more difficult.
The third event that yesterday went counter to U.S. interests was the re-election of Serbia's president Aleksandar Vucic:
The IPSOS and CESID pollsters, which have proven reliable in previous Serbian ballots, predicted Vucic would end up with nearly 60 percent of the votes. If confirmed in the official tally, Vucic would win outright a second five-year term as president and a runoff vote would not be needed.
The pollsters projected that Vucic’s Serbian Progressive Party would win the most votes in the parliamentary ballot, with around 43 percent, followed by the United for Victory of Serbia opposition group with around 13 percent.
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Vucic, a former ultranationalist who has boasted of his close ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin, has sought to portray himself as a guarantor of stability amid the turmoil raging in Europe due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Speaking after voting in Belgrade, Vucic said he expected Serbia to continue on the path of “stability, tranquility and peace.”
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In a country that went through a series of wars in the 1990s and a NATO bombing in 1999, fears of a conflict spilling over have played into Vucic’s hands. Although Serbia is formally seeking entry into the 27-nation European Union, Vucic has fostered close ties with Russia and China, counting on the Serbs’ resentment of the West over the 1999 NATO air war.Serbia has supported a U.N. resolution that condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but Belgrade has not joined Western sanctions against Moscow, a historic Slavic ally.
Another potential loss could occur in the elections in France next Sunday. President Emmanuel Macron is leading the polls but his advantage over the right-wing Marine Le Pen is narrowing. Current polls have Macron at 27% and Le Pen at 20% with socialist Jean-Luc Mélenchon following at 15%. A runoff vote, two weeks after the first round, between Macron and Le Pen could have surprising results as the people on the left will probably not vote for the neo-liberal Macron for the sole purpose of keeping Le Pen out of the Elysee.
France is a big player in the EU and NATO. Any upset in France would have major consequences.