Friday News Roundup - International

With guest host Celeste Headlee.

President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet in Helsinki, Finland on July 16.

“The two leaders will discuss relations between the United States and Russia and a range of national security issues,” White House says on the Trump-Putin summit.

The WH and the Kremlin coordinated the release time for summit date/place —8a in Washington/3p Moscow.

— Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) June 28, 2018

Will President Trump bring up election meddling?

In Mexico, all eyes are on this weekend’s election. NPR’s Carrie Kahn reports that voters will select a “record number” of new lawmakers when they vote on Sunday.

And as The Guardian reports, “this year's election is far more about domestic issues than foreign policy: primarily the rampant corruption and crime that have left Mexico's 88 million registered voters furious and afraid.” Since campaigning began in September, “more than 120 political candidates have been killed.”

As reported by Reuters, polls suggest Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador will win Mexico’s presidency by a wide margin. If elected, Reuters says he would become the first left-leaning Mexican president in several decades.

President Trump has often directed ire toward Latin America’s second-largest economy, and famously said “when Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best” in his 2015 presidential announcement speech. How might these new leaders change Mexico’s relationship with the U.S.?

In Germany, CNN International described this week as “make-or-break” for Chancellor Angela Merkel. Migration and Germany’s asylum policy have become huge issues for her leadership.

Der Spiegel reports that Bavarian conservatives have strongly criticized the German refugee asylum policy, which has threatened Merkel’s political coalition.

As CNN International puts it, Merkel’s dilemma looks like this:

She needs an EU migration policy that satisfies her domestic critics but also placates other EU states reeling from their own migration headaches.

Merkel needs a way to speed up the repatriation and deportation of asylum seekers but also guarantees a fair way to distribute and resettle accepted refugees across the EU, not just in the country they landed in. And she needs to do it by July 1, her self-imposed deadline.

Can she? If she can’t, what’s next for Germany?

*Text by Gabrielle Healy*.

GUESTS

James Kitfield, Senior fellow, Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress; contributing writer, Atlantic Media; author of “Twilight Warriors: The Soldiers, Spies and Special Agents Who Are Revolutionizing the American Way of War”; @JamesKitfield

Jennifer Williams, Deputy foreign editor, Vox; co-host of Vox’s foreign affairs podcast, “Worldly”; @jenn_ruth

Tom Bowman, Pentagon correspondent, NPR; @TBowmanNPR

For more, visit https://the1a.org.

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