RUTHFULLY YOURS

Friday: Steady cold rain is falling as the truth starts to sink in. Rain extinguishes the memorial candles and flattens the bouquets in front of the grieving restaurants and the horrified Bataclan and piled in terraces around the Marianne at Place de la République. The streets of Paris are forlorn, the boutiques are empty, there’s no line waiting for a seat at the falafel joints, Christmas merchandise lies on the shelves, dumbstruck.

There was a brief moment of satisfaction at the news that the “mastermind” of last week’s attacks was indeed dead several times over and beyond recognition after the 7-hour siege of his last hideout. DNA or some other tracer was matched to some shreds or drippings of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, junior Daesh executive in charge of planning jihad attacks in France and the Benelux countries. The so-called mastermind was caught by CCTV at the Croix de Chavaux métro station in Montreuil last Friday night at around 10 PM. The black Seat used by the easy riders who had finished executing people on restaurant and café terraces had been abandoned less than two blocks away. And the Big Chief ducked into the metro and jumped the turnstile. Punk!

In the midst of double-digit inflation and a stagnant economy, Argentines on Sunday handed victory in the presidential runoff election to 56-year-old Buenos Aires Mayor Mauricio Macri of the Cambiemos (Let’s Change) coalition.

With 76% of the vote counted as we went to press, Mr. Macri led with 52.87% against 47.13% for President Cristina Kirchner’s Peronist Front for Victory (FPV) candidate, Daniel Scioli.

The 58-year-old Mr. Scioli—the Peronist governor of Provincia de Buenos Aires—ought to have coasted to an easy victory. But his association with Mrs. Kirchner was a liability he couldn’t overcome. After 12 years of the Kirchners’ socialist economics, eight under this president and four before that under her late husband Néstor, Argentines want change.

Mrs. Kirchner’s uncivil rants against her political opponents, and a substantial loss of judicial independence and press freedom during kirchnerismo also contributed to Mr. Scioli’s defeat.

Sweden’s immigration catastrophe is hardly news, but, writing in the New York Times, Benjamin Teitelbaum underlines how much of the responsibility for it lies with the refusal of ‘establishment’ parties of the left, far left (well, it’s Sweden we’re talking about), center and center-right to accept that dissent could be rooted in anything other than xenophobia, racism and all the rest. That’s something that might be expected from the left, but that this was also the position taken by the Moderaterna (the largest party on the center right) under the leadership of Fredrik Reinfeldt, still—even now—remains startling. The Moderaterna, who led two successive governments between 2006-2014, have quite a bit to be proud of, but about this, not so much. In the end, I suspect that Reinfeldt, an open borders man, pur et dur, will be remembered very poorly indeed.

The aftermath of the terror attacks in Paris and heightened terror alert in Brussels is set to dominate news in the week ahead as French authorities continue their efforts to piece together details relating to the events of Nov. 13. Meanwhile European Union lawmakers are set to discuss the bloc’s responses to the attacks, including stepping up checks on its own citizens.

1) The main focus across the EU is expected to stay on Belgium and France, where police have already conducted countless raids over the past week as part of their investigation into the terrorist attacks in Paris. Authorities have already arrested several suspects in relation to the attacks as they search for further clues and try to locate the whereabouts of the attackers who made it it out alive.

2) Eurozone finance ministers will meet in Brussels on Monday to discuss their budget plans for 2016. Their meeting comes a week after the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, said the budgets submitted by Italy, Lithuania, Austria and Spain risk violating the bloc’s spending rules and urged them to ensure they will meet EU targets.The EU introduced new and stricter fiscal rules for countries using the euro in 2013 as a response to the sovereign debt crisis, which put future of the eurozone in doubt. The rules, whose main goal is to keep public debt in check, give the commission more power to oversee the bloc’s economies and to ask governments for changes in their budgets. The procedure must be signed off by the bloc’s finance ministers. Read More »

On 9/11 my husband and I and two friends were happily enjoying brunch in a Brussels Cafe. When the news of the attack broke, the patrons cheered…rsk

BRUSSELS—The terror alert that has partially locked down Brussels entered a second day as the country’s interior minister said the threat to Belgium was broader than the manhunt for a suspect involved in the Paris attacks.

Belgian officials over the weekend deployed troops, shut the city’s metro system and entreated stores and cafes to close, after raising the security threat level for the city to four, its maximum level.

The Belgian Crisis Center is slated to reassess the threat level on Sunday afternoon.

Officials said the alert level was raised after authorities developed information that an attack similar to those that shook Paris on Nov. 13, killing 130 people, was potentially imminent.
Belgian Interior Minister Jan Jambon in part attributed the elevated alert level and stepped-up police activity to the search for multiple terrorism suspects.

The only real statesman in elective office in Europe at the moment, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, is calling for fundamental change:

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban on Friday said it was high time the European Union reconsidered the basic parameters binding it together, then revamp its founding treaties, or face political radicalization across the continent. Orban has been at odds with Brussels ever since coming to power in 2010, and recently became an outspoken critic of the EU’s handling of the migration crisis and other challenges.

Asked about a Dutch proposal to create a tighter core in the EU with external passport controls, dubbed a “mini-Schengen”, Orban said not only Schengen but other aspects of the EU were ineffectual today and needed to be reformed. He said the migration crisis and heightened risk of terrorism made new security and border control regulations necessary, and the recent euro zone crisis forced questions about a joint monetary policy without a common fiscal policy.

Hungary was one of the few EU countries (Greece and Italy were the others) who bore the full brunt of the Islamic “refugee” invasion of the old Continent this past summer. Unlike his counterparts in western Europe, Orban and his fellow Hungarians understood immediately what was happening, and quickly sealed their border to prevent a further influx of young, able-bodied, overwhelmingly male Muslims from trekking illegally through their country.