2022 Retrospective

A look back at the main foreign events in 2022

Newsroom, 07.01.2023, 14:00

War in Ukraine

Russian President Vladimir Putin did not hold
his traditional year-end press conference. Putin’s lavish face-to-face meetings
with journalists were held annually since 2001, except between 2008 and 2012,
when he served as prime minister, remaining the de facto master of Russia,
while The Kremlin was formally led by Dmitry Medvedev, one of the most docile
characters in his entourage. Bringing together hundreds of Russian and foreign
journalists, the conferences usually lasted several hours, and Putin answered
questions live on all kinds of topics, from geopolitics to everyday problems of
Russian society. The decision to overturn the custom comes after Russia invaded
neighboring Ukraine on February 24, suffered a series of military setbacks and
in September ordered an unpopular partial mobilization of army reservists. Both
warring sides are suspected of minimizing the real extent of the damage in
terms of casualties so as not to undermine troop morale. US Army Chief of Staff
General Mark Milley has estimated that more than 100,000 Russian soldiers have
been killed or wounded since the invasion began, and that Ukrainian losses are
likely to be similar. It is the most violent armed conflict in Europe in recent
decades.

Millions of refugees, in an increasingly poor
Europe

Because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, energy and food prices have gone up all around
the world. The food price index, calculated by the Food and Agriculture
Organization of the United Nations (FAO), reached an all-time high in March. So
has the price of gas on the European market. This explosion in prices led,
naturally, to the increase in inflation, the highest in the euro area after
1997, since this index has been calculated. The economic and energy crisis were
eclipsed only by the humanitarian drama. The war in Ukraine has caused the
largest influx of refugees in Europe since the end of the Second World War:
more than six million in neighboring countries and eight million internally
displaced, as the High Commissioner for Refugees estimated as early as May.
Over three million Ukrainians have fled through neighboring Romania. On a global
scale, the number of uprooted people has exceeded 100 million for the first
time.

Elections in Europe and the US

In April, the President of France, the
pro-European centrist Emmanuel Macron, got a new mandate, after the second
round of voting, in which he competed with the head of the radical right,
Marine Le Pen. Macron’s victory means that Europe can count on France for
another five years, the president of the European Council, the Belgian Charles
Michel jubilated, in unison with many other political leaders in Europe. In
June, however, the pro-presidential coalition won less than half of the seats
in the National Assembly, the lower house of the Paris legislature. The extreme
right of Le Pen achieved a historic score, with 89 MPs.

In France’s neighboring peninsula, the head of the post-fascist
Brotherhood of Italy party, Giorgia Meloni, placed herself at the helm of the rightest
post-war government in Rome, after her party won the parliamentary elections in
September. A former journalist, Meloni is the first female prime minister in
the history of Italy, and her motto is God, country, family. Ideologically,
she is close to the Hungarian conservative prime minister, Viktor Orban. Although
the invasion of Ukraine by Russia cast a harsh light on his close relations
with President Putin, Orban, prime minister since 2010, decisively won the
legislative elections in his country. His party, FIDESZ, prevailed against an
opposition electoral cartel, ranging from the former far-right Jobbik, which
redefined itself as center-right, to the Socialists, successors of the former
single communist party. In the United States, in the mid-term presidential
election, Joe Biden’s Democrats retained a fragile control of the Senate, but
lost the House of Representatives to the Republican right.

The Sovereign of the United Kingdom, a friend
of Romania

A history book closed with the disappearance
of Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain, who passed away in September at the age
of 96. Her reign of more than seven decades, the longest in the history of
England, marked the destiny of several generations of subjects and coincided
with the destiny of the planet, from the second half of the last century until just
recently. A constitutional monarch who reigned without governing, the Queen
worked with 15 British prime ministers, from the legendary Winston Churchill to
the ephemeral Liz Truss.

During that time, the United States, the most
important strategic partner of Great Britain, had 14 presidents, from Harry
Truman to Joe Biden. The first son of the long-lived sovereign became king, at
the age of 73, as Charles III. The Romanian media considers him a great friend of Romania,
which, in the last two decades, he visited periodically. Fascinated by the
traditions of Transylvania (center), the new British monarch consistently
contributed to their preservation and popularization. He is also a taxpayer to
the local budget, as the owner of some houses and lands in Romania.

Football in Qatar, bribe in Brussels

The World Cup of football in Qatar, the first
in history organized in an Arab state and in the autumn-winter season, ended
with the victory, anticipated by many, of Argentina. It was the last world
championship with 32 teams at the start. From 2026, there will be 48, and the
evens will be hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico. Ever since 2010,
when it was entrusted with the organization of the World Cup, Qatar has been
the constant target of numerous accusations of corruption or regarding
dehumanizing working conditions for migrants, disregarding the rights of women
or the LGBTQ+ community. The criticism was rejected both by the authorities in
the emirate and by the president of FIFA, the patron of the World Cup, the
Swiss Gianni Infantino, who disavowed what he called the patronizing lessons of
the West, terming them mere evidence of hypocrisy. In the middle of the final
round, the Greek socialist MEP Eva Kaili, one of the vice-presidents of the
European Parliament, was arrested in Brussels, as part of an investigation into
corruption suspicions regarding a bribe of hundreds of thousands of euros,
received from Qatar.

A suffering planet for eight billion people

The year 2022 has been marked by new climate
records. In Europe, the summer was the hottest ever recorded, and the areas
burned by fires – the most extensive. On a global scale, fossil CO2 emissions
have never been as high as in 2022. Earth’s population passed the 8 billion threshold
in mid-November, according to the United Nations. In 1950, there were only two
and a half billion people on Earth. (MI)