Week of 26 October 2020
ARMENIA AND AZERBAIJAN: On Friday, representatives from the two warring countries arrived in Geneva for a round of peace talks. Representatives from France, Russia and the U.S. will also participate in this latest attempt to solve the largest military confrontation in the area since the Nagorno-Karabakh War of 1991–94. In a potential breakthrough, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that Russia would accept a return of the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region (currently occupied by Armenia) to Azerbaijan, recognising that ‘there are no simple solutions’ in sight.
FRANCE: It’s been quite a difficult week for France. On Wednesday, French President Emmanuel Macron announced a new nationwide lockdown to last at least until the end of November, hoping to curb the rapid spread of COVID-19 in the country. Under the new rules, all non-essential businesses will close but factories and schools will remain open. This is in addition to the curfews which have already been in force in most French cities since last week. Then, on Thursday, a man killed three people with a knife in the city of Nice in what has been described as a terrorist incident, prompting Mr Macron to raise the terror alert level to ‘maximum’.
GERMANY: On Saturday, Berlin’s long-awaited new international airport will finally open its doors to travellers. The delays and ballooning costs of the project have caused ample debate in Germany over the years: the airport was first scheduled to open in 2011 and construction costs have exceeded initial estimates by over €4bn. It is believed that the decrease in traffic due to the pandemic will make the opening easier: when fully operative, the airport will be able to handle 58 million passengers per year, but currently Berlin’s other two airports are serving as few as 2,500 passengers per day.
NIGERIA: The Financial Times has published a detailed special report to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of Nigeria’s independence. Nigeria became an independent state on 1 October 1960, as had been agreed with the British government two years prior, and underwent long periods of ethnic tension and military rule in the following decades before emerging as a stable (if flawed) democracy. Its booming economy is Africa’s biggest, having overtaken South Africa in recent years, and its growing population – now exceeding 200 million – is the seventh-largest in the world. The Financial Times’s report sheds an interesting light on the African superpower’s strengths and challenges going forward.
USA: Hopefully, by the time you’ll read our next weekly digest, we’ll know the name of the winner of the U.S. presidential election. President Donald Trump currently trails former Vice President Joe Biden by about nine points and might become the first sitting president to lose re-election since 1992. At the time of writing, more than 82 million early votes had already been cast in what is on track to become the highest-turnout U.S. election in a century.
