A feel-good Paris concert, a meeting with Muslim leaders and a blowout rally in Marseille – France’s presidential candidates are blanketing the country Wednesday with campaign events to try to inspire undecided voters just four days before a nail-biting election.

Crowds danced on a Paris plaza as Socialist presidential candidate Benoit Hamon held what is seen as a last-chance rally and concert. Hamon is polling a distant fifth place ahead of Sunday’s first-round election and has little chance of reaching the decisive May 7 runoff – a failure that could crush his party.

French far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, who has dominated the campaign with her anti-immigration, anti-EU proposals, is appealing to her electoral base in hopes of maintaining a shot at the runoff.

She assailed recent governments for failing to stop extremist attacks in recent years and warned on BFM television that “we are all targets. All the French.”

The candidates have increased security in recent days. Authorities announced Tuesday that they had arrested two Islamic radicals suspected of plotting a possible attack around the vote.

Independent centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron reached out to the French Muslim community Wednesday, saying it’s fighting on a “common front” alongside the state against Islamic extremism.

Macron met with the head of leading French Muslim group CFCM, Anouar Kbibech. In a statement afterward, Macron insisted on the importance of respecting France’s secular traditions but said they shouldn’t be used to target Muslims. Some Muslims feel unfairly targeted by French laws banning headscarves in schools and full-face veils in public.

Also Wednesday, the Grand Mosque of Lyon issued an appeal urging Muslims to cast ballots instead of isolating themselves, “so that all the children of France, regardless of their skin color, their origins or their religion, are fully involved in the future of their country.”

Le Pen also defended her decision to force national news network TF1 to take down the European flag during an interview Tuesday night.

She said Wednesday that “I am a candidate in the election for the French republic” and that Europe is acting like France’s “enemy.”

Accusing the EU of taking away France’s sovereignty and hurting its economy, she wants to pull France out of the EU and the euro – which would devastate the bloc and badly disrupt financial markets.
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Italy reported a measles epidemic Wednesday following a fall-off in vaccinations, as the United States issued a warning to visitors about the outbreak of the potentially fatal disease.

The Health Ministry said there had been almost 1,500 registered cases of measles so far this year, compared with 840 in all of 2016 and 250 in 2015.

“Italy and Romania have an epidemic at the moment,” said Walter Ricciardi, president of the Higher Health Institute, adding that he understood why the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had issued an advisory this week.

Ricciardi told Radio 24 that the United States, unlike Italy, had launched a massive campaign to persuade parents to vaccinate their children.

The Higher Health Institute said that only about 85 percent of Italy’s 2-year-olds were being vaccinated against measles, well below the 95 percent threshold recommended by the World Health Organization to block the illness.

The center-left government has accused the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S) of spreading concern among parents by questioning the safety of some vaccines and by loudly denouncing efforts to make vaccinations mandatory.

‘They bring a risk’

“Vaccinations have played a vital role in eradicating terrible illnesses … but nonetheless, they bring a risk associated with side effects,” M5S founder Beppe Grillo wrote in 2015, saying mandatory vaccination represented a gift for multinational pharmaceutical firms.

A leading M5S politician, Andrea Cecconi, suggested last month the jump in measles cases might be part of a natural cycle for the illness rather than a preventable epidemic.

Renewed concern over measles came amid fury among doctors over a program on state broadcaster RAI that highlighted the possible side effects of the human papillomavirus vaccine, which protects against cervical cancer.

The M5S defended the report, but health officials accused RAI of being unnecessarily alarmist.

“It is very serious that a TV program, which is supposed to be at the service of citizens, spreads fear by telling lies and giving credence to the anti-vaccine lobby,” said Giuseppe Mele, chairman of the Italian Society of Pediatricians.
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Turkey’s Supreme Election Board on Wednesday rejected all complaints and calls for a re-vote that on Sunday gave President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sweeping powers to turn the country into an executive presidency from the current parliamentary system.  

The narrow 51-49 percent referendum victory has led to protests in Istanbul and other cities over allegations of voting fraud. The unrest has focused on the board’s earlier decision to allow ballots without an official stamp. Under Turkey’s election law, all ballots and the envelope they are placed are required to have an official stamp, a measure to prevent vote-stuffing.

“Erdogan a thief, Erdogan a murderer” hundreds chanted in the Kadikoy, the center of the Asian side of Istanbul and a stronghold of the president’s opponents. “The vote was unfair. We don’t want one-man rule. We just want democracy for everyone,” a woman protestor said.

Some protestors carried placards with the viral hashtag slogans from referendum night – “The ‘No’ is not finished” and ” ‘No’ has won”.

Similar protests were held across Istanbul. The demonstrations were smaller than Monday when thousands took to the streets. Demonstrations were also held in other cities, including the capital, Ankara.

Protests have been broadly tolerated by security forces, which have sweeping powers to stop them, under emergency rules introduced after last July’s failed coup. Usually those powers are used to quell anti-government dissent.

The Kadikoy protest was devoid of the usual intimidating presence of heavily-armed riot police and armored cars. Instead, plain-clothes police filmed those participating and checked foreign media credentials as well as occasionally politely asking demonstrators not to use derogative chants against the president.

Dawn raids were made across Istanbul Wednesday, detaining dozens of people suspected of organizing and participating in the protests.

Growing numbers of unverified videos and photos have appeared on social media purporting to show vote-stuffing. Many are from Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish southeast. Much of the region has strict security as it battles Kurdish insurgents of the PKK.

Several voting districts that are traditional strongholds of the pro-Kurdish HDP that was campaigning against the referendum recorded massive ‘yes’ votes. Only one-half percent voted ‘no’ on the referendum in one district where a majority voted for the HDP in the 2015 election.

The HDP along with the main opposition CHP, Republican People’s Party, have refused to recognize the result, and had called for the narrow referendum victory to be annulled.  The CHP had submitted an annulment petition Tuesday to the Supreme Election Board.

Earlier Wednesday, before the board announced its rejection of the complaints, the CHP threatened to boycott parliament. “We do not recognize the referendum result,”said CHP spokeswoman Selin Sayek Boke. “There should be no doubt that we will exercise all our democratic rights against it.”

In a move widely seen as intended to thwart potential further legal complications over the referendum, Erdogan’s first meeting on the day after Sunday’s vote was with the head of the Constitutional Court.

The president and his ruling AK Party, under emergency rule in the aftermath of the coup, had purged and arrested thousands of the judiciary members, including those of the Supreme Election Board and the Constitutional Court.

But Sunday’s narrow margin of victory and the ongoing controversy seemed to galvanize the opposition, which has been largely influenced by the tens of thousands of arrests and purges across academia, media and within the Turkish State, under emergency rule.  

“We are standing up for our ‘no’ votes,” declared a journalist student at Wednesday’s Kadikoy protest. “All we want is fair and just referendum results.  And we will keep demanding this until we win!”

Political columnist Semih Idiz of Al Monitor notes, “It’s now a question of how the main opposition will mobilize in the lead-up to the next elections, whether it’s early elections, or in 2019.” 

 
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European Council President Donald Tusk was met at Warsaw’s main train station Wednesday by hundreds of people — both supporters and angry opponents — as he arrived to testify in an investigation.

The mood at the train station was tense, with supporters of the former Polish prime minister carrying EU and national flags and chanting “Donald, we are with you!” while opponents hurled accusations of crimes and of hurting Poland’s interests. One detractor held up a large mock-up photo depicting him in striped prison garb.

Tusk is only a witness in the current case — an investigation by military prosecutors into alleged secret illegal contacts between Polish and Russian intelligence officials at a time when he was still prime minister.

“I have no doubt this is a part of political witch hunt,” Tusk told reporters while walking to the prosecutors’ office surrounded by bodyguards. He wore a daffodil on his jacket, in honor of the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising against Nazi occupiers.

However, many see his questioning as part of a larger attempt by Poland’s nationalist government to discredit a political foe by linking him to scandals and perhaps imprison him eventually. With still strong backing in Poland, Tusk could prove to be a serious rival to the ruling party in the 2019 parliamentary elections and in the 2020 presidential election.

Tusk has also been accused by the Defense Minister Antoni Macierewicz of treason in another matter, the handling of the aftermath of the 2010 plane crash in Smolensk, Russia, that killed Polish President Lech Kaczynski.

Prosecutors have not revealed details of the alleged illegal contacts, but they are investigating whether the heads of the intelligence had neglected their obligation to seek Tusk’s approval for cooperating with foreign intelligence.

Polish media reports say the deal was aimed at allowing Polish investigators working on the Smolensk crash to operate on Russian soil.

“I have no reservations as to the work of the (special) services,” Tusk said.

Poland’s current ruling party, Law and Justice, is led by the late president’s twin brother, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, a nationalist politician who is a long-term political rival of Tusk’s.

Kaczynski drove the failed effort last month to block Tusk from getting a second term as head of the European Council. Only Poland opposed Tusk’s re-election, with 27 other EU members supporting another term for him.

In their chants, Tusk’s supporters said he beat Kaczynski 27-1.

Kaczynski and others accuse Tusk of failing to oversee proper security for the presidential flight. They also fault Tusk for letting the Russians carry out the main investigation and for failing to get the wreckage back.

Supporters of the government also blame Tusk for pro-business policies during his 2007-2014 term that they feel hurt the country. Those policies helped drive strong economic growth, but many Poles felt left out by the economic boom.

“Tusk should face justice for having brought Poland to ruins, for closing shipyards, scandals, for Smolensk, for working together with Russia. We still can’t bring the wreckage back,” said Halina Wojcicka, 74, a retired office clerk.

Those who rallied to support Tusk expressed opposition to Poland’s larger political direction under Kaczynski, which opponents view as xenophobic and having authoritarian tendencies.

“I can see that harm is being done to Poland. The state of law is gone. The country is run by one person, driven by hatred,” said Iwona Guz, a 60-year-old economist. “I am here to show that I want Poland to be in Europe, not in the East.”

 
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A senior Cuban official is warning foreign countries against meddling in the internal affairs of Venezuela, where President Nicolas Maduro is facing down mass protests.

Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez says foreigners should avoid any interference that could encourage violent extremism, including a coup.

Rodriguez, whose government has close relations with Maduro, said during an official visit to Lisbon, Portugal, on Wednesday that Venezuelans fear foreign action against their country.

Maduro late Tuesday charged the U.S. State Department with encouraging a military intervention.

Human rights organizations and countries including the United States have accused Venezuelan security forces and pro-government groups of using excessive violence against protesters.

Members of the Organization of American States have also criticized what they view as Venezuela’s turn toward authoritarianism.

 
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Turkey’s prime minister hit back Tuesday at European monitors who said more than 2 million votes could have been manipulated in Sunday’s closely contested referendum on expanding presidential powers.

Binali Yildirim, responding to criticism from the Council of Europe’s observer mission, said debate over the outcome of the referendum was “over,” and that “the people’s will had been reflected at the ballot box.”

He spoke in response to calls from the council to investigate alleged vote irregularities that several official observers said allowed as many as 2.5 million uncertified ballots to be counted.

Alev Korun, an Austrian member of the council’s observer mission, said the number of uncertified ballots would almost double the margin of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s victory — an electoral win that vastly broadens the power of the presidency.

Another observer, German lawmaker Andrej Hunko, told The New York Times “it seems credible that 2.5 million were manipulated, but we are not 100 percent sure.”

Separately, European monitors alleged that those who campaigned against Erdogan’s push for expanded powers faced numerous obstacles, including a lack of freedom of expression, intimidation and access to the media. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe also alleged misuse of administrative resources by Erdogan ahead of Sunday’s vote.

Dramatic shift signaled

Sunday’s vote created a powerful executive presidency that largely sidelines the Turkish parliament and abolishes the Cabinet and the office of prime minister. Ministers will be directly appointed by the president, who also will set the national budget. The president also will appoint judges to the high court and the constitutional court.

The constitutional amendments also end the official neutrality of the presidency, allowing a president to lead a political party and declare states of emergency.

Critics argued the reforms were tantamount to creating an elected dictatorship, while Erdogan and his supporters said they would create a fast and efficient system of government better able to confront terrorism and a sluggish economy.

Unstamped ballots

Opposition complaints and calls for a new vote centered on a decision by electoral officials to use and tally ballots that did not have an official stamp, despite a 2010 law that requires such official validation. Additional complaints included the barring of nearly 200 opposition members from serving as election monitors and the temporary detention of other election observers.

On Monday, the head of Turkey’s electoral board, Sadi Guven, strongly defended his decision to allow the controversial ballots, citing high demand for ballots and saying similar procedures had been followed in the past.

“This is not some move we’ve done for the first time,” said Guven, speaking to reporters Monday in Ankara. “Before our administration took over, there had been many decisions approving the validity of unstamped ballots.”

Trump congratulates Erdogan

U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday congratulated Erdogan on his referendum victory.

The White House said in a statement the two leaders spoke by phone, with their conversation also including the need to hold Syrian President Bashar al-Assad accountable for a recent chemical attack. It further said the two leaders discussed the fight against Islamic State and “the need to cooperate against all groups that use terrorism to achieve their ends.”
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