Prime minister’s questions: a shouty, jeery, very occasionally useful advert for British politics. Here’s what you need to know from the latest session in POLITICO’s weekly run-through. What they sparred about: The year that was. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Tory Leader Kemi Badenoch’s last hurrah of 2025 saw everyone’s favorite duo row about the turkey Labour’s record over the last 12 months — and who caused the nightmare before Christmas. Pull the other one: Badenoch wished everyone a festive break in the season of goodwill — but then the gloves came off. She raised the PM’s own frustration at pulling levers but struggling to get change (Labour’s favorite word). “Does he blame himself or the levers?” Cutting. Starmer used the free airtime to rattle through his achievements, stressing “I’ve got a whole list … I could go on for a very long time.” Comparisons to Santa write themselves. Jobbing off:  “The Prime Minister promised economic growth, but the only thing that’s grown is his list of broken promises,” Badenoch hit back. This list analogy was really gaining momentum. She lambasted rising unemployment under Labour, yet the PM was able to point to lower inactivity under his watch and, of course, mentioned the boost of falling inflation this morning. Backhanded compliment: Starmer, no doubt desperate for a rest, used the imminent break to “congratulate” Badenoch for breaking a record on the number of Tories defecting to Reform UK. “The question is who’s next,” he mused, enjoying the chance to focus on the Conservatives’ threat to their right, rather than Labour’s troubles to its left. Clucking their tongues: Outraged at her Shadow Cabinet getting called non-entities, Badenoch kept the seasonal attacks going by labeling the Cabinet a “bunch of turkeys.” She said Starmer was no longer a caretaker PM but the “undertaker prime minister.” Bruising stuff. Last orders: Amid all the metaphorical tinsel and bells of holly, Starmer adopted a lawyerly tone on Labour’s support for pubs (even though many greasy spoons have banned Labour MPs) and condemned ongoing industrial action by resident doctors. But the Tory leader went out on (possibly) a new low by arguing Starmer “doesn’t have the baubles” to ban medical staff from striking and said all Labour MPs want “is a new leader.” Grab the mince pies: The prime minister’s speechwriters clearly did their homework with Starmer, not a natural on the humor front, comparing the Tories to “The Muppets Christmas Carol” and joking that all the defections meant Badenoch would be “left Home Alone.” Penalty shootout: Hold the homepage — PMQs actually delivered a news line. The PM confirmed the government issued a licence to transfer to Ukraine £2.5 billion of Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich’s cash from his sale of Chelsea football club. Starmer told Abramovich to “pay up now,” or he’d be taken to court. Teal bauble: The end-of-year vibes allowed Starmer to deploy a festive jibe of advice to Reform UK: “If mysterious men from the East appear bearing gifts, this time, report it to the police!” Labour just won’t let ex-Reform UK Leader in Wales Nathan Gill’s conviction for pro-Russian bribery go. Even Nigel Farage, sat up above in the VIP public gallery, had a chuckle, admitting “that’s quite funny” to nearby hacks. Helpful backbench intervention of the week: Tipton and Wednesbury MP Antonia Bance commended the government’s efforts to support the West Midlands by striking the U.S. trade deal, ripping into Reform. The PM just couldn’t resist another attack line against his party’s main opponent. Totally unscientific scores on the doors: Starmer 8/10. Badenoch 5/10. The final PMQs exchange was never going to be a serious exchange, given the opportunity to make Christmas gags. The Tory leader followed a scattergun approach, highlighting the various broken promises, but none landed a blow. The PM, doubtless relieved to bag a few weeks away from the interrogation, brushed them off and used his pre-scripted lines to deliver a solid concluding performance.

The Bank of England is set to cut interest rates on Thursday, after lower-than-expected inflation figures and signs of a weakening jobs market. Headline inflation slowed to 3.2 percent in November, from 3.6 in October, the Office for National Statistics said on Wednesday. That was the lowest since March and a much clearer drop than predicted by analysts, who had forecast a rate of 3.5 percent. “A cut tomorrow should be a no-brainer, with another to follow in February,” Peel Hunt chief economist Kallum Pickering said via social media, pointing to “No growth since summer, a labor market that is rapidly cooling, and a big downside surprise to inflation across the board in November.” The news comes only a day after labor market data from the ONS showed the unemployment rate rising to its highest level in over four years in October. The economy has struggled for growth in the second half of this year, after a sugar rush in the first quarter in which exporters rushed to get their goods to the U.S. before President Donald Trump could impose trade tariffs. The hangover from that — and the lingering uncertainty over the global economic outlook caused by Trump’s trade policy — has been severe. But at the same time, an unwelcome rise in inflation has stopped the Bank of England from cutting interest rates more quickly to support the economy. A raft of hikes in government- controlled prices such as energy bills and rail fares meant that inflation was rising for much of the year, leading it to peak at 3.8 percent in September. That was also partly due to companies passing on increases in labor costs due to a 6.7 percent hike in the National Living Wage and an increase in employers’ National Insurance contributions. Panmure Liberum chief economist Simon French said the wide range of goods and services now showing softening price trends showed that demand is now so weak that companies are having to absorb those price increases themselves instead. The government will be particularly relieved to have seen politically sensitive food prices, which have been a constant bugbear for the last couple of years, making the biggest contribution to the slowdown in inflation in November. Prices for clothing and footwear and for discretionary services such as restaurants and hotels also fell slightly. “As Christmas gifts go, this is a most welcome one,” said Danni Hewson, head of financial analysis at AJ Bell. “It’s the time of year when people put a few more things in their supermarket trolley, so news that food and alcohol inflation has fallen will be a boon for cash-strapped families.” The Bank has consistently said that inflation would fall once those factors passed out of the annual calculations, given that the underlying weakness of the economy. However, with the worst bout of inflation in half a century still fresh in everyone’s minds, it has been forced to keep the pace of policy easing “gradual and cautious”. Peel Hunt’s Pickering said that the scale of the slowdown could be enough to have some members of the Monetary Policy Committee voting for a half-point cut in the Bank Rate to 3.5 percent on Thursday. However, the consensus remains for a quarter-point cut to 3.75 percent. The pound still fell over half a cent against the dollar in response to the numbers, as traders penciled in more scope for easing next year, while the government’s borrowing costs in the bond market also fell.

PARIS — Emmanuel Macron was on a plane to Egypt when France faced the most serious crisis of his time in office. So why did the French president leave the country early Monday morning while there was such uncertainty at home? The answer, according to several current and former French officials, was to ensure his legacy. With fewer than 20 months left in the Elysée Palace, Macron is laser-focused on cementing his place in the history books — and believes he’s earned that distinction for his work in the Middle East, they said. The French president wasn’t going to miss his chance to be there for Monday’s peace summit in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheik, even with his house on fire and irrespective of it forcing his twice hand-picked prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, to push back presenting his draft budget by a day, nearly missing the deadline. French officials in recent days have been working hard to craft a narrative that the Gaza peace plan pushed by U.S. President Donald Trump was triggered by Macron’s own proposal and his lead role in pushing for recognition of Palestinian statehood at the United Nations General Assembly last month.  That’s why Macron really wanted to make it to the summit in Egypt, said a government adviser who, like others quoted in this piece, was granted anonymity to speak candidly. An ally of Lecornu said the president was “very, very focused” on Gaza.  The French political system is designed so that the president can represent the country on the world stage while the prime minister looks after matters at home. But these are exceptional circumstances in France, with Lecornu resigning after just 14 hours before being reappointed and some politicians even speculating that Macron might not even see out his time in office. At first sight, Macron appears to be following in the footsteps of former presidents, such as François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac, who pivoted to the international stage in the later years of their terms after losing their parliamentary majorities.   But Macron hasn’t let go of domestic policy. Unlike his predecessors, he isn’t adopting a “hands-off attitude,” said an early Macron backer.      “Macron has become very attentive to his European and international visibility,” said a former French official. “It’s what he’s got left to give himself the impression that he still has influence.” At first sight, Macron appears to be following in the footsteps of former presidents. | Joel Saget/AFP via Getty Images CHARM IN SHARM The Elysée last week went into lobbying mode, ramping up briefings with academics and journalists to drive home that Macron had been key to the success of Trump’s peace plan. “The Elysée’s priority was to spread the idea that their plan was very useful,” said a former diplomat, referencing the Franco-Saudi roadmap to end the war in Gaza. At the U.N. General Assembly last month, Macron risked drawing U.S. and Israeli ire with his push for Palestinian statehood, which was followed by close to a dozen Western states doing the same. His speech on the U.N. stage drew comparisons in Paris with other occasions when France stood up to Washington, in particular former Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin’s landmark 2003 address rejecting Washington’s march to war in Iraq. While in Egypt, Macron played carefully with the optics of power, of which he is an astute reader, to avoid being seen as playing second fiddle to Trump. He chose not to stand on the podium behind the U.S. president, instead sitting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Middle Eastern leaders, a move that was noted by Trump. Talking to reporters on the sidelines of the summit, Macron spoke about the efforts needed to keep the ceasefire in Gaza alive and the contribution France could make. Asked about national politics, he presented himself as “the guarantor of French institutions,” but could not help but lash out at opposition parties for trying to destabilize his prime minister. WINNING THE BATTLE, LOSING THE WAR Many officials say the French president is trying to remain above the fray. But there are several explanations as to why he’s doing so that go beyond the legacy argument. Some attribute it to the Jupiterian strategy of shrouding his office in mystique, communicating in grand gestures, and refusing to sully himself with the mudslinging of domestic politics.  One government official said Macron is “probably letting tensions dial down” and he is remaining silent to protect the institutional checks and balances of the French state.  Macron has cycled through centrist and center-right prime ministers in the past year. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Others say the silence is strategic, even magnanimous. They say the president recognizes just how unpopular he is — a recent poll put his approval rating at 14 percent — and is trying to prevent his allies from being tarnished by his political toxicity.  But Macron never really lets go of anything. In his meeting with opposition parties last week, Macron made it very clear who calls the shots when, according to a presidential aide, he offered to partially delay his flagship pension law, which pushed back the age of retirement to 64 from 62 for most workers.  Macron has cycled through centrist and center-right prime ministers in the past year to fend off challenges to that law and other achievements such as his tax cuts. Many saw his decision to reappoint the loyal Lecornu, just days after he resigned in the aftermath of his 14-hour government, as the sharpest example of his dogged refusal to hand over power despite his camp losing last summer’s snap election.   Macron ended up being forced to sell off the crown jewel he had jealously been guarding, the pensions reform, at least for now. Lecornu announced Tuesday that he would freeze the law raising the retirement age until 2027, in order to secure support from the Socialist Party and survive a no-confidence vote on Thursday.  Macron might yet save his pensions reform as there are doubts swirling that the suspension might not pass through parliament.  But fighting tooth and nail to ensure his legacy might also destroy it if Macron can’t secure the future of his centrist movement and his potential successors, such as former prime ministers and likely presidential candidates Edouard Philippe and Gabriel Attal.   Macron’s handling of the current crisis will almost certainly affect the campaign of any centrist trying to stop Marine Le Pen, or someone else from the far-right National Rally, from winning the presidency.  “What image are we projecting? We’re in favor of pension reform, and then we give up. It’s not clear,” said the Lecornu ally quoted above. “The only one who appears to know what she represents is Marine Le Pen,” they said. “She has a populist message, but it’s simple and consistent: This circus must stop.” Pauline de Saint Remy and Giorgio Leali contributed reporting.

WARSAW — The cost of political fighting between President Karol Nawrocki and the Polish government, combined with a booming defense bill, is starting to show up in the country’s finances. Ratings agency Fitch said on Friday that the deadlock is weighing on Poland’s credit score, something that could push up the country’s borrowing costs. While the agency kept Poland’s long-term sovereign rating unchanged at A-, it cut its outlook to “negative” over concerns about public sector wages and defense spending. Those concerns are now compounded by the risk of EU funds getting frozen again. Brussels unblocked billions in cash thanks to promises from the centrist government of PM Donald Tusk that it would roll back unlawful judicial reforms pushed through under the previous populist right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party government, which ruled Poland between 2015 and 2023. But the right-wing Nawrocki, who is backed by PiS, is unlikely to sign off on such legislation. Fitch said that repeated vetoes by Nawrocki of the government’s efforts to bring Poland back in line with EU law were paralyzing policy until the next parliamentary election in 2027. Fitch’s update quickly resulted in a blame game between Tusk’s coalition government and PiS. “This decision is the consequence of President Nawrocki blocking key legislation, which limits the space to strengthen the foundations of the economy and deliver the necessary fiscal consolidation,” Finance and Economy Minister Andrzej Domański said on X. Domański argued that while the government has restored growth, kept unemployment low and overseen the fastest disinflation in Europe, the negative outlook is a “warning signal” that should be heeded by Nawrocki and his advisers. Fitch’s update quickly resulted in a blame game between Donald Tusk’s coalition government and PiS. | Adam Warzawa/EPA PiS pushed back that the fiscal deterioration predates Nawrocki’s presidency, since he has only been in office since Aug. 6. PiS’s former deputy prime minister and defense minister, Mariusz Błaszczak, further warned that Fitch’s outlook cut “signals increased risk for investors, which could lead to higher borrowing costs on international markets.” This, in turn, could squeeze the defense budget and force the government to look for savings or new funding sources, he added. GROWING DEFENSE BURDEN Poland is NATO’s top defense spender relative to economic output, with 4.7 percent of GDP currently earmarked for that purpose. The country has recently joined the $1 trillion economy club and is set to attend the G20 summit in Miami in 2026 as an observer. Fitch underlined that the start of Nawrocki’s presidency “highlights likely challenges for the coalition government to implement policy. Since early August, the president has vetoed various bills and publicly stated his opposition to tax increases and proposed tax cuts.” With political tension already running high in the wake of this year’s presidential election, domestic considerations will increasingly dominate fiscal decisions in the run-up to the parliamentary vote in 2027. The election cycle could further weaken fiscal discipline, especially as “options for raising revenue are limited and a significant share of spending is rigid,” Poland’s Bank Millennium said in a note. Fitch projects the deficit will average 6.7 percent of GDP through 2025 due to the “lack of a credible consolidation strategy” before the next election. The figure is likely to hit 6.9 percent before the end of 2025, before easing slightly to 6.8 percent in 2026, still above the government’s budget projections of 6.5 percent. “Our forecast reflects our expectation of a limited ability to increase taxes, and continued increases in public investment and defense spending … despite additional revenue from the freeze of income tax thresholds and slower growth of public sector salaries and social spending,” the agency said. Fitch expects Poland’s general government debt to rise from 49.5 percent of GDP in 2023 to 59.3 percent this year and 68.3 percent in 2027, the result of continued primary deficits and guarantees for the army fund. Meantime, it expects interest payments to grow from 5.1 percent of revenues in 2024 to 7.2 percent in 2027, well above the 4.3 percent median for countries with similar credit ratings. Fitch’s update is a “clear signal for the government that the lack of action to visibly reduce the fiscal deficit could lead to a downgrade of Poland’s credit rating,” according to Bank Millennium. This article has been updated.

Listen on * Spotify * Apple Music * Amazon Music Zwischenfall im Plenarsaal des Bundestags: Erst verweist Julia Klöckner eine Linken-Abgeordnete des Saales, weil sie ein Oberteil mit Palästina-Aufdruck trägt. Kurz danach gibt es „Free Palestine“-Rufe von der Zuschauertribüne. Rasmus Buchsteiner und Rixa Fürsen ordnen die Vorfälle ein. Außerdem geht es um die geplante Reform des Bürgergelds. Arbeitsministerin Bärbel Ba äußert sich ausführlich dazu – dabei macht sie eine Ansage an Sozialbetrüger und schickt eine Absage an die Union. Personalie: Der frühere außenpolitische Berater von Olaf Scholz wird Staatssekretär im Verteidigungsministerium. Warum sich die Begeisterung darüber in Grenzen hält, dass Jens Plötner diesen neuen Job bekommt, erklärt Hans von der Burchard. Das Berlin Playbook als Podcast gibt es morgens um 5 Uhr. Gordon Repinski und das POLITICO-Team bringen euch jeden Morgen auf den neuesten Stand in Sachen Politik — kompakt, europäisch, hintergründig. Und für alle Hauptstadt-Profis: Unser Berlin Playbook-Newsletter liefert jeden Morgen die wichtigsten Themen und Einordnungen. Hier gibt es alle Informationen und das kostenlose Playbook-Abo. Mehr von Berlin Playbook-Host und Executive Editor von POLITICO in Deutschland, Gordon Repinski, gibt es auch hier:   Instagram: @gordon.repinski | X: @GordonRepinski.

Prime minister’s questions: a shouty, jeery, very occasionally useful advert for British politics. Here’s what you need to know from the latest session in POLITICO’s weekly run-through. What they sparred about: The economy, mostly. Tory Leader Kemi Badenoch picked Keir Starmer’s brains on the U.K.’s grim economic outlook — and got an unwelcome reminder of the Liz Truss era in reply. Here we go again: There was a brief consensus as Badenoch condemned a fire at Starmer’s north London home as an attack on democracy. Then she was on the march: why is unemployment on the up? Rising to the bait: Like a stuck record, Starmer repeated his greatest hits by laying into Badenoch for the “disastrous Liz Truss mini-budget.” Labour will not let that one go. In return, the Tory leader stressed there was “no point blaming everyone else” and sung her party’s praises in power. Shutting up shop: Badenoch’s questions went from the general to the specific, highlighting department store Beales’ last shop bringing down the shutters with a “Rachel Reeves closing down sale.” “What does the prime minister have to say to all the people who have lost their jobs?” Badenoch probed. While the PM, unsurprisingly, regretted any job losses, he turned the tables back on Badenoch’s scepticism about Britain’s new trade agreements. Strong message here: It was in this answer that Starmer’s new attack line, doubtless scripted carefully by No.10 strategists, got through the waffle both leaders can be guilty of. The PM said the Tories were “sliding into brain-dead oblivion,” echoing interviews in which he has said Nigel Farage’s Reform UK will be Labour’s main opponents next time round. On yer train! As a former trade secretary, Badenoch said the government should “not over egg the pudding” of their trade agreements, while dismissing a “tiny tariff deal” with Donald Trump. Starmer sounded apoplectic, urging Badenoch to “get the train” to the Jaguar Land Rover plant in Solihull after tariffs on U.K. cars were slashed. But but but: He didn’t promise unemployment would be lower next year. Grand finale! The personality clashes didn’t let up. The Tory leader said “Labour isn’t working” (geddit?) while the PM called the Tories a “dead party walking.” Someone’s had their Weetabix. Getting personal: Badenoch ducked asking Starmer about the government’s migration reforms, leaving that to Plaid Cymru’s Westminster Leader Liz Saville-Roberts. She said “somebody here has to call … out” the PM’s change of rhetoric towards immigration. Asking Starmer if he has any belief “which survives a week in Downing Street,” he responded: “Yes, the belief that she talks rubbish.” That got laughs from colleagues, at least. Helpful backbench intervention of the week: Labour’s North Warwickshire and Bedworth MP Rachel Taylor commended Starmer’s trade agreement with the U.S., asking, in an especially hard-hitting question, whether the PM would continue standing up for all workers. In a major, possibly era-defining development, Starmer confirmed he would do exactly that. What a revelation! Totally unscientific scores on the doors: Badenoch 6/10. Starmer 7/10. Starmer was able to play off the main advantage of government — showing action, particularly on trade deals the Conservatives didn’t land. Most notable though was not his anger towards the Tories, but his sheer dismissal of their relevance. Expect those arguments to ratchet up towards the next election, as Reform and the Tories battle for the right-wing vote.

LONDON — Britain’s green revolution is coming for oil and gas workers — but a lack of clarity from politicians is leaving them in limbo. In Westminster, Labour has promised to ditch reliance on fossil fuels in favor of solar farms and wind turbines. That means phasing out environment-wrecking oil and gas drilling in the North Sea — good news for the planet, but deeply unwelcome for the thousands of people who rely on jobs in the industry’s traditional Scottish heartlands. Worse still, experts say those workers have no idea what is about to hit them. “The workers in Aberdeen did not think that oil and gas was going to decline,” Emma Pinchbeck, who advises ministers as head of the independent Climate Change Committee, told MPs earlier this year, after a visit to the heart of the drilling industry in north-east Scotland. “There has been a failure of communication to those workers about the transition that’s coming,” she warned. Advisers to the devolved government in Edinburgh, which is led by the Scottish National Party (SNP), meanwhile see the same problem ahead. Workers north of the border are falling through a “communication gap,” said the economist Ann Pettifor, who advises Scotland’s government on energy policy as a member of the Just Transition Commission (JTC.)  Neither ministers nor industry are preparing people who are about to lose their jobs for what’s coming, she warned. British Energy Secretary Ed Miliband has insisted that, as jobs linked to fossil fuels decline, the government will train up “a clean power army of engineers, welders and technicians” to slot into new climate-friendly industries springing up around the green transition. But Labour is struggling to align its policies in London and Edinburgh, and its political opponents are already waiting in the wings, prepared to take full advantage of the confusion. That includes Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, a populist party hoping to land a more attractive offer with these voters: the promise to — like Farage’s hero Donald Trump — drill, baby, drill, until the North Sea’s reserves run dry. RUDE AWAKENING Labour has pledged to overhaul the U.K. energy system by 2030. At the same time as greenlighting a steady stream of solar farms and turbines, ministers have hiked taxes on fossil fuel developers and banned new drilling licenses in the North Sea. They insist workers need not fear the resulting whiplash. British Energy Secretary Ed Miliband has insisted that, as jobs linked to fossil fuels decline, the government will train up “a clean power army of engineers, welders and technicians” to slot into new climate-friendly industries springing up around the green transition. | Pool photo by Florence Lo via AFP/Getty Images Prime Minister Keir Starmer promises he can avoid a rerun of the mass unemployment seen after the deindustrialization of northern and midlands English towns in the 1970s and ’80s. “I’m never going to allow that to happen under a Labour government,” he said shortly after taking office.  New jobs in clean energy will be filled “using the skills of our North Sea workers … to decarbonize our country,” Miliband told last year’s Labour conference. But a clutch of Labour politicians in Holyrood publicly back union campaigns to keep issuing new North Sea licenses — opposing a policy central to their colleagues’ green ambitions in Westminster.  And the rebellion goes to the very top. “To put it bluntly, if the choice is more expensive imports from despotic regimes like Russia or new oil and gas, I think the answer has to be new oil and gas,” Anas Sarwar, Labour’s leader in Holyrood, told the New Statesman last month. Some Labour MPs in Scotland hint, too, at support for more drilling. “When the proposal to drill Rosebank [oil and gas field] goes in, I think we could send a signal over that,” said Torcuil Crichton, MP for Na h-Eileanan an Iar, referring to a legal judgment threatening the future of the North Sea’s biggest untapped oil and gas field. That signal should show workers “that we are on their side,” he said. Richard Hardy, who also advises Holyrood as a member of the JTC, said such inconsistent messaging has left oil and gas workers disoriented.  “The constant to-and-fro-ing around new extraction, the Rosebank stuff, the court case,” he said, “the lack of clarity on the government’s position on future extraction … There is a level of uncertainty [for workers] about ‘Well, where do I go now?’” The North Sea is home to “very, very intelligent and switched-on workers,” said Claire Peden, an organizer at Unite the Union — but “a lot of them don’t believe that it [job losses] is an immediate threat.” The idea that the industrial switch to net zero could produce jobs just doesn’t resonate with the public, argued Steve Akehurst, director of Persuasion UK, an independent research body. “Things like jobs and growth and bills — if [ministers] could convincingly land that message about net zero helping with those things, that would be amazing. But it has a bit of a credibility problem with voters. It’s not intuitive,” Akehurst said. PLENTY TO GO AROUND The SNP, unsurprisingly, blames the Labour government in London, which it accuses of sowing “confusion” across the industry.  “We were promised that there would be no cliff-edge approach to the energy transition, yet this Labour U.K. government has done little to quell that suspicion. If you don’t have investment then you don’t have jobs, and in the real world outside of Westminster it really is that simple,” said Dave Doogan, SNP energy spokesperson.  The SNP, unsurprisingly, blames the Labour government in London, which it accuses of sowing “confusion” across the industry. | Ian Forsyth/Getty Images A DESNZ spokesperson argued that the government had invested heavily in clean teach in the North Sea, adding: “Through our North Sea consultation, we are in dialogue with North Sea communities — businesses, trade unions, workers, environmental groups and communities — to develop a plan that enables us to take advantage of the tremendous opportunities of the years ahead together.” All this is against the backdrop of the SNP’s own shifting messaging about drilling off the Scottish coast. The party pivoted suddenly last year to backing new North Sea licenses, provided developers could pass climate tests, after years of governing with a built-in assumption against new drilling. The SNP’s political opponents claim its position changed yet again earlier this year, a charge the party denies. Amid all this, the multiplier effect of job losses could be devastating, Hardy said. “A platform is a small village floating around in the North Sea,” he explained. “You have the production workers. You have the people who support the production workers. You’ve got safety, transport. You have a whole community of people living on that rig.” Greener jobs can’t fill these gaps, he argued. “The energy produced by that rig will be produced by a windmill [instead],” he argued, “which employs one person in a control room monitoring the activity of that windmill.” According to Offshore Energies UK (OEUK), which lobbies on behalf of oil and gas companies, around 120,000 jobs will be affected by the transition. The figure is disputed by some green campaigners who claim the true number is in the tens of thousands. PARCEL-PASSING Pettifor, the economist, believes the communications problem is structural. “You don’t have the communication channels that used to exist,” she said, now that many of Aberdeen’s workers are employed indirectly via agents. “That means governments have to step in to fill that communications gap. And they haven’t understood how serious the information gap — the communication gap — is, in order to fill it, in order to provide advice to people who are going to lose their jobs.” Nigel Farage, who calls Labour’s net zero policy a “catastrophe,” wants U.K. drillers to extract every last drop from the North Sea. | Finnbarr Webster/Getty Images In the absence of a clear steer from government, information is left to flow from corporations to employers. And that isn’t happening either, Pettifor said. “We’re waiting for the private sector to do that. As a result, the communication falls between the cracks.” OEUK dismissed the claim the industry was not talking to its workers. “Those operating oil and gas assets, and those involved in servicing those assets regularly, actively engage with their staff. So there’s no doubt that staff are well engaged. Contractors are well engaged with their employers,” said Mike Tholen, OEUK’s sustainability and policy director. The unions, meanwhile, blame Labour.  “They’ve lost the room completely, they’re so out of touch. They’ve built their election campaign on false promises. They’ve now been exposed and been called out,” said Unite’s Peden. “I just don’t see how they can pull this back in Scotland,” she added. REFORM RUSH IN Farage, amid this sense of alienation, eyes an opportunity to try and ambush both Labour and the SNP.  Farage, who calls Labour’s net zero policy a “catastrophe,” wants U.K. drillers to extract every last drop from the North Sea. One leading pollster predicted at the end of last year that Reform could do well enough in Holyrood elections in 2026 they will end up holding the balance of power in Edinburgh. This is borne out in YouGov polling at the end of March, which placed Reform second in Scotland, behind the SNP but comfortably outpacing Labour and the Conservatives. Reform’s second-in-command, Richard Tice, said workers are being “completely” caught off guard. “They’ve been lied to,” he said. “And people get very cross when good, skilled work [and] paid jobs get thrown in the dustbin for no good reason. And they can see that very loud and clear.” Reform’s electoral strategy in Scotland is, Tice said, to “just keep ramming home this message that you’ve been lied to, you’ve been misinformed, you’ve been misled.” The Tory opposition sees an opportunity here, too.  “We are taking down oil fields in Scotland because the [net zero] plan does not make sense,” leader Kemi Badenoch told an event in March. Pinchbeck, the climate watchdog boss, is more optimistic about the future of North Sea jobs — but told MPs that communication with those at the sharp end of the changes needs fixing, and fast. “Only about one percent of the [oil and gas] workforce are in industries that we cannot see moving over to net zero industries or new opportunities when you look at the U.K. overall,” she said. “But if you are in Aberdeen, that clearly feels different. There is a real need to have better conversations there.”

ZARQA, Jordan — The sun pounded down on a single bulldozer and steel rods — all that remained on the deserted construction site of a half-built school. Work on Safed High School, which was meant to accommodate around 1,500 students in Jordan’s second-largest city, suddenly stopped in late January when the world’s No. 1 aid provider, the United States, froze funds globally, with few exceptions.  The effect of the stoppage on this sprawling city, its inhabitants and contracted employees, home to Jordan’s first Palestinian refugee camp in the 1940s, was nearly immediate.  “Within just one day, we were laid off,” said one engineer who was granted anonymity to speak freely about the effects of the aid freeze.  U.S. President Donald Trump’s suspension of $40 billion in foreign aid days into his second administration — and subsequent large cuts — will be felt far outside Safed High School, and far beyond Jordan. Egypt, Israel and Jordan are among the top recipients of U.S. aid: In 2023, countries in the region collectively received nearly $4 billion from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The drastic move is set to weaken countries in a tumultuous region wrestling with political instability, humanitarian issues and economic woes, a dozen analysts, officials and aid workers told POLITICO. Some added it could undermine Washington’s influence in the Middle East, which aimed in part to secure goodwill with allies in the region, support democracy, and prevent the potential rise of insurgencies and extremists. Other major donors, including the United Kingdom and a handful of European countries, have decreased aid to the region in recent months, in part to make up for the U.S. threat to roll back aid to Ukraine. The Trump administration has prompted fears it might not remain a reliable ally to Europe after abandoning a long-standing Ukraine-friendly approach in favor of Russia while threatening NATO members if they don’t increase their defense spending.  Some have fallen into line immediately.  The U.K. slashed its overseas aid budget this year to its lowest level in more than 25 years in order to steer funding to defense. Germany’s new government is looking into cutting aid funding after a historic boost to defense spending. “What we’re seeing right now is a dramatic contraction of aid in a way that will likely fundamentally reshape the entire aid system [and] humanitarian operations on the ground,” said Delaney Simon, senior analyst with the U.S. program at the International Crisis Group.  ALL ROADS LEAD TO JORDAN The impact of the U.S. cuts will also be felt in Iraq, which continues to rebuild after America’s occupation and to ward off remnants of the Islamic State group; in Syria, where a new government leads a fractured country in dire need of aid; in Yemen, as a decade-long civil conflict sputters on; and further afield as Israel’s multifront war in Gaza and Lebanon continues.  Amal Hamdan, who has consulted on election monitoring programs in Iraq and Lebanon, called the cuts “genuinely concerning.” “This kind of work was truly about maintaining stability and democracy in some parts of the world where democracy and stability are not a given,” he said. Hamdan is a consultant for the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, which helps countries organize independent elections and counts USAID as one of its main partners.  Jordan, America’s key ally in the Levant, has received military and economic aid since the 1950s. In 2023, it took in more than $1.5 billion to shore up, in part, hospitals, water and electricity supply and refugee programs.  Shortly after he took office in January, Trump announced a 90-day stoppage and review of the country’s foreign aid, which makes up nearly half of all humanitarian and development funding globally. Almost 90 percent of USAID contracts were affected, according to a document obtained by POLITICO.  That economic hardship was amplified by the Trump administration’s imposition, and then sudden suspension, of certain global tariffs in recent days. Jordan, which exported more than $3 billion to the U.S. in 2023, was hit with a 20 percent tariff by its American ally.   “Jordan has been a crucial partner for the U.S. in terms of security, military support, but the U.S., by cutting this aid, has destabilized Jordan directly,” said Kelly Petillo, program manager for the Middle East and North Africa at the European Council on Foreign Relations. Since its establishment in 1961, USAID has focused on a broad range of humanitarian, peace, governance and economic programs in the Middle East, aiming to exert control and help stabilize a youthful region facing numerous challenges from conflicts to droughts and high unemployment.  The effects of the foreign aid pullback are already being felt by women in one of Amman’s free clinics. | Clothilde Goujard/POLITICO “We were really trying to use our influence to build, basically, a more stable, prosperous Middle East,” said Dave Harden, a former USAID official with over 20 years of experience working in the West Bank, Gaza, Yemen and Iraq.  Aid to Jordan is the backbone of U.S. power in the Middle East, particularly in the Levant. In recent years the long-standing partnership has been critical to fighting terrorism, in particular the Islamic State group, as part of the U.S.-led Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS. POLITICO reached out to the Jordanian government to ask about the impact of U.S. aid cuts but did not hear back. In recent weeks the U.S. cuts have compromised the management and security of camps in northeastern Syria, where tens of thousands of people including Europeans accused of links with ISIS are being detained, prompting security concerns across Europe.  While the U.S. is still sending military aid to Jordan, the economic and humanitarian aid cuts across the Levant and within the region will inevitably disrupt economies, leading to further instability in the long term. In 2023, U.S. assistance accounted for more than 2 percent of Jordan’s gross domestic product, nearly 4 percent of Syria’s and about 4.3 percent of Yemen’s GDP, according to data from the U.S. government and the World Bank. “They [will] become countries where inequality subsists, [which] become safe havens for armed groups,” said Charlotte Slente, secretary-general of the Danish Refugee Council. “These countries will be prone to create security concerns around the world.” LESS AID, MORE MIGRATION During Syria’s civil war, nearly half its population was displaced and in dire need of aid. That situation has only worsened since the formation of the new government. The need for foreign aid to fund reintegration programs for people displaced by ISIS in Iraq — or to feed nearly 15 million people in need of food assistance — will only increase. And the people impacted might be looking for those better prospects, jobs and respite from hunger and war in the very countries that have scaled back monetary support, analysts said. As Syria’s war crested Europe faced a migration crisis, with a million Syrians making their way to the bloc’s borders in 2015. The Austrian government said at the time: “To address the root causes of migration, we decided to double our direct bilateral development cooperation.” It has been common practice in Europe to use aid to deter migration to its borders. Now, however, many European governments want to pull the plug, analysts said.  “It’s also a bit like ‘We’ve provided aid for decades and decades, and yet people are still coming to Europe in search of a better life,’ and that is being seen as a reason that aid doesn’t work, hence they can cut it,” said Anita Käppeli, director of Europe’s policy outreach at the Center for Global Development.  In the Netherlands, for example, in a move reminiscent of the Trump administration, the right-wing government in February cut back on its foreign development budget, calling it a “Netherlands-first” stance. France has cut its aid budget by 35 percent under similar pressure from far-right parties. Nurse Lina Abu Shinar sits with a patient at a clinic that offers free health care, including gynecological and obstetrical consultations. | Clothilde Goujard/POLITICO The impact of that foreign aid pullback is already being felt by women in one of Amman’s free clinics.  Germany, the U.K., Spain and the Netherlands will not renew funding for some health services in Jordan, said Abu al-Haija, the deputy director of free clinics in the country. “We’re really facing a worst-case scenario,” said al-Haija, who has already had to lay off almost half of the staff at the medical center in northwestern Amman following the U.S. cuts.  It’s one of the few clinics in Amman offering free health care, including gynecological and obstetrical consultations, support for rape and domestic violence survivors, and rehabilitation for children with disabilities. “We’ve been doing this for more than 10 years, promising women and girls, especially among refugees, that they could come but [all] of a sudden, with the cuts, it will have been an empty promise,” he said. Work on Safed High School, which was meant to accommodate around 1,500 students in Jordan’s second-largest city, suddenly stopped in late January. | Clothilde Goujard/POLITICO Al-Haija is bracing for further layoffs as the U.S. drastically cuts funds for the United Nations Population Fund, a reproductive and maternal health agency. As the region recalibrates what it can offer people, the situation will continue to deteriorate, said a Washington, D.C.-based USAID official who was granted anonymity to be able to speak about the cuts.   “Less hope, more diseases, people’s children dying [due] to preventable causes, not receiving quality education, is [all] going to translate to increased vulnerabilities when it comes to ideological extremism,” the official added.

SOLANO COUNTY, California — It doesn’t take long, driving north from San Francisco past bay and sea, to remember just how new, in the scheme of things, this place is. Towns become infrequent and then disappear altogether, replaced by hills, fields and farms. The land opens up in green and yellow, a reminder of a time when California was defined in the national consciousness by verdant pastures and gold-flecked creeks, rather than by crime or unaffordability. In the mind of Jan Sramek, 38, a 6’7″-ish, Czech, new-urbanism evangelist, change comes quickly. Not so long ago, San Francisco, too, was a collection of camps and houses on an improbable spit of land at the end of the continent; Oakland, a swampy peninsula surrounded by orchards. As we built great bridges and towers, the hilly port city became the world’s center of technology and innovation. It would have seemed impossible, but then it happened. Working from a generic office park 40 miles north of San Francisco, Sramek believes it can happen again. As a child growing up in the post-Soviet Eastern bloc, Sramek became enchanted with the sparkling promise of California. And now, as an adult real estate entrepreneur, he envisions a future in which the hayfields and sleepy towns that surround him transform into a new glittering city — one divorced from the problems facing the Golden State’s older models. The name of the metropolis, California Forever, is itself an ode to what the state has achieved and could still. “The modern world was basically made in California over the last 100 years, and that meant it was built with Californian values,” Sramek said. “I think we have a responsibility to keep it going.” It is here, in an unheralded, 27 square mile swath of semi-rural Solano County, smack-dab between Sacramento and San Francisco, that Sramek intends to prove that California can still be bold. It is here, he says, where he will cut through the state’s red tape, build a model 400,000-person sustainable community, and triumphantly reestablish a tradition of dense and walkable cities dating back to the dawn of human civilization. If, at least, California lets him. The path has not been easy since Sramek announced his plans for a new city backed by tech luminaries, including Marc Andreessen, Reid Hoffman, and Laurene Powell Jobs. If 2023 was the year in which Sramek unveiled California Forever to the world, 2024 was a forced humbling from a wary — and often downright hostile — public skeptical of billionaire outsiders. 2025 will now determine whether Sramek’s sweeping, transformational, and some argue self-serving, visions for the future are compatible with the slow-moving gears of local government. Just last year, he failed to get approval for his new city via referendum, pitching an updated urban center that was affordable and devoid of sprawl. But polling showed voters weren’t convinced of the merits, and he pulled the referendum from the ballot before it could be shot down. Now, Sramek is working with the county government to hash out the details of the plan in hopes of quelling concerns, gritting his teeth while enduring the county’s rolling demands for detailed paperwork. By year’s end, he will have to decide whether to go back to voters in 2026 on the whole grand vision. This is the new stage of Sramek’s quest, as he’s forced to build a new city by collaborating with the systems he seems to resent most. While Elon Musk and David Sacks, Trump’s crypto czar, test their ability to control Washington’s machinery, Sramek faces a choice: work methodically to win over a skeptical public — or bulldoze his way through local government, public opinion be damned. Long before Sramek pulled his initiative from the 2024 ballot, there were signs that things might not go according to plan. At a town hall in late November 2023, Sramek stood at a lectern wearing a casual button-down shirt and a bewildered look as he was dressed down by Solano County residents. The event in Vallejo, a working-class city of 124,000, was the first of eight such townhalls California Forever planned over the year — an early attempt at voter outreach as California Forever organizers began campaigning for a ballot measure that would allow them to rezone thousands of acres from agricultural to “new development” and begin building their city. Backed only by renderings of colorful neighborhood scenes, California Forever’s CEO seemed somewhat wrongfooted by the level of hostility of the crowd. “I’m sick and tired of developers coming in and we don’t know nothing,” a woman shouted at Sramek, as he looked on, mouth agape, during a recording of the meeting produced by ABC7 News Bay Area. “Honestly, I’m probably more skeptical now than I was when I walked in,” a man said just before walking out. It was far from a friendly reception, and a harsh reality check for Sramek and his tech billionaire-funded team, who projected a sense of exceptionalism from the time they arrived in Solano County. After moving to California in the 2010s, Sramek became fixated on the idea of solving the state’s housing crisis. Growth in existing cities wouldn’t be enough — he needed to do something big. After spending years researching the idea, he began quietly pitching big name funders to invest in the project, which he called California Forever. Then in 2018, he set his sights on Solano County, a region with the highest unemployment and child poverty rates in the Bay Area region. There, he thought, it was possible California Forever might find a receptive audience. The land, too, was appealing — a stretch of grazing properties that had once been identified by the Army Corps of Engineers as a future location for development. Sramek and California Forever started quietly buying up tens of thousands of acres of land, suing residents who chose not to sell — accusing them of price fixing — and becoming, almost overnight, the largest landowner in the county. Then, in August 2023, following a New York Times exposé outing their efforts, Sramek and California Forever announced themselves to the world in a burst of near-messianic fervor. Within the next five years, company officials declared, they would build a new city, right there in Solano County. They promised to bring jobs and cheap homes for the financially struggling region. They pledged to build hospitals and schools and water parks and sports complexes. And they would be taking the project straight to voters. A ballot initiative would allow them to eschew traditional county planning procedures, build outside of existing jurisdictions, and rewrite the zoning code to reclassify 17,500 acres of agricultural land for a community of 400,000 residents — roughly the population of Tampa, Florida. The plan was funded by the co-founder of LinkedIn, run by the one-time chief strategist for John McCain, and featured leaders of Kamala Harris’s presidential super PAC. “They just walked in and said, ‘Here’s the plan,’” said former Solano County supervisor Duane Kromm. Soon, California Forever embarked on a months-long, $10-million charm offensive with Sramek serving as its lead pitchman, cajoling residents of Solano County to back a ballot measure allowing him to bypass a decades-old orderly growth ordinance restricting development outside of existing cities. The initiative was written in a way that would give the county and the public minimal oversight over the future city. “This would solve the housing situation in Solano County and regionally,” Sramek argued at the time. “This would fix the lack of good-paying local jobs that we have been trying to fix in Solano County for 40 years.” By June 2024, they’d gathered enough signatures to place the initiative on the local November 2024 ballot. But by then, voters had already made up their minds. Many residents were disturbed by the lawsuits against their neighbors. Others were concerned about what the new development would mean for traffic and congestion; still others about the financial impact it would have on existing cities as well as its effect on threatened species and seasonal wetland habitat. Broadly, opposition rose from the perception that wealthy outsiders were trying to manufacture a hostile takeover of their county. In late July 2024, sensing imminent defeat, Sramek and his team pulled their measure from the ballot, an unceremonious end to what they’d seen as a can’t-fail campaign. In a joint statement with the county board of supervisors, Sramek said he would instead do what the county had originally asked: study the project, come to an agreement with administrators on a detailed development plan — and then return to voters to change the zoning code. But even that did little to mollify critics. The enemies of California Forever grew to be vast and varied, from farmers to climate advocates to the county Republican Party. (Sramek himself is not publicly affiliated with either party.) The quasi-utopian renderings of California Forever, ultimately, only aggravated voters. Those onlookers argue Sramek should’ve seen this coming — as evidenced by that Vallejo town hall in November 2023, long before the ballot measure campaign screeched to a halt. But back then, although maybe taken aback by the level of vitriol from locals, Sramek quickly shrugged off residents’ concerns. “Certain people just hate development,” Sramek told reporters after that meeting. According to two people who have worked with Sramek, he has always been guided by extreme self-confidence bordering on hubris. Sramek frequently left meetings with local elected officials positive that everything went swimmingly, according to those two people who have worked with him. He told reporters that most people in the county did, in fact, support the project. Polling indicated otherwise. For months, during the ballot measure campaign, his team advised him to keep a lower profile, according to former staff who were granted anonymity to speak candidly. The various perks, like water parks and hospitals, that he promised to the county were doing more harm than good, they argued. As one former employee put it, it looked like “you are just making shit up.” Sramek’s team disputes that narrative. In an emailed statement, a California Forever spokesperson said, “This was clearly going to be a controversial project in the beginning, and while there’s always room for improvement, by the end of July 2024, a poll of likely voters in Solano County conducted by Impact Research found that 65 percent supported development in east Solano County. “This, and the continued progress since then, is a testament to the community work and relationship-building that Jan and the California Forever team have been doing,” the spokesperson said. Catherine Moy, the mayor of a nearby town called Fairfield, framed things differently. “They couldn’t have done a worse job with PR to start their campaign,” Moy said. “Suing farmers that a lot of us grew up with for a half billion dollars? And it just got worse and worse from there.” The time between the town hall in November 2023 and the ballot measure’s failure seven months later seemed to be Silicon Valley’s education in local California politics, a fascinating case study in what happens when visionaries and deep-pocketed investors run up against the realities of regional land-use debates. That tension, of civil servants versus disruptors, is currently defining national politics. Elon Musk is trying to dismantle American bureaucracy from the inside out. Silicon Valley tech billionaires, some of whom are also funding California Forever, are flexing their muscles in Washington in an effort to see how deregulation can benefit them and their companies. Many of those same instincts animate Sramek’s quest, and he has earned comparisons to Musk in the county and from observers. He wants to move quickly, and he’s frustrated that California’s regulatory structure does not allow it. Although he submitted to the hard work of environmental impact reports, traffic studies, and emissions analyses after the referendum failed, he’s still not willing to accept the decade-long horizon that has become the norm for California projects. “If we can build a bridge spanning the Golden Gate, a 400-acre island in the middle of the Bay, and a brand-new jet that will revolutionizes aviation, all in under four years, then surely we can plan a new community in less than six,” Sramek wrote to county administrators in a heated letter in late October. “It should be entirely reasonable to get local approvals done by 2026, and shovels in the ground in 2028.” Except, of course, it’s never that easy in California. Last summer, on a now well-traveled tour of the future city, Sramek sipped a can of flavored carbonated water while driving a Rivian truck through the vast fields and farms of his future kingdom. It was August 2024, a challenging time for California Forever. The ballot measure had been pulled a month earlier. There was no clear path to success before voters. It seemed like the whole project could be teetering on the precipice. During the drive, as he wound through the Solano County exurbs into open space, Sramek vacillated between acceptance and being downright perplexed by the challenges posed to his masterplan. On one hand, land use debates in California, as he put it, are “a bloodsport.” The secretive land purchases, the intense local vitriol, the dramatic, nationally televised courtship with the county — in his view, that’s just the cost of doing business in California. On the other hand, the state has a housing crisis recognized by all levels of government. As Sramek sees things, his project would build that housing in one of the best places to do so in the state. It sits at the center of the San Francisco Bay mega-region, connecting both San Francisco and Sacramento. He said the thousands of acres his company owns in the rolling hayfields near the Sacramento River Delta is a rare Western location with no risk of fires, earthquakes or floods (although some of the land now does fall within the state’s newly updated wildfire hazard zones). For almost every criticism leveled at the project, Sramek believes he has an answer — a product of good planning and a solid year under the microscope. Water supply? The development will use what is currently going to a somewhat unproductive almond orchard to meet the needs of initial residents. Environmental concerns? Sensitive habitats, like seasonal pools where certain rare species breed, will be protected and preserved. Congestion getting into and out of the city? We’ve never had a problem building highways — we’ll just build more. “If you look at every state bill that has passed in California in the last 10 years, they call for a simple zoning code, walkable neighborhoods, affordability by design, sustainability and low emissions,” Sramek said. “Everything they are calling for is in our proposal. And the bottleneck to building it is widening seven miles of highway?” Sramek approaches his dream city with an almost fanatical intensity. In his view, California Forever is a chance to revive the type of city that has been lost to time in America. For hundreds of years, we created vibrant metropolises that were based around human movement: Athens, Madrid, London, and New York. Then, during World War II, the American wartime government issued a moratorium on new development. In the United States at least, the chain was broken, and post-war housing was built to serve the automobile. Today, many of the most desirable, dense, walkable cities are also the most expensive — and they were all built before the war. (Arguably one exception: Los Angeles, which is reasonably dense but built entirely around the car.) That pitch of the walkable city, underscored by the odd dynamic of Sramek selling his idea while driving a $60,000 electric truck down ranch roads, is what has attracted some of the richest people in the world to Sramek’s project. And however unfeasible it sounds, it is true that California Forever is not the first time that someone has conceived of a master-planned community. Celebration, Florida, the Disney-built resort community drafted in the model of quaint small-town America, sprang into being from the longleaf pines south of Orlando nearly 30 years ago. Even before that, Irvine, California was developed to escape pollution and crime in Los Angeles’ urban core. Perhaps the closest analogue to California Forever is Columbia, Maryland, a community built by a man named James Rouse in the 1960s who touted the city as a “garden for growing people,” where residents would live, work and respect the land. Like California Forever, the land was secretly bought up through dummy corporations, leading to local rumors that it was going to be turned into a sprawling municipal dump. Like California Forever, it was announced with salvational overtones, with plans to eliminate religious, racial and class discrimination. Like California Forever, it faced initial zoning concerns. Later, it became an extremely desirable place to live. Beyond Sramek’s obvious financial stake in the city (he’s put a significant sum into the project personally, although he has declined to say how much, and would make a lot of money if the city comes to fruition), he is also deeply invested in the project emotionally. Raised by working-class parents in a small town in the Czech Republic, he ultimately went on to study at the University of Cambridge and the London School of Economics and Political Science. Soon after graduating, he worked as an investor at Goldman Sachs before moving to the United States to pursue a series of start-up ventures. During his apprenticeship in Silicon Valley, he began to think about how to solve California’s housing crisis. Although he first considered infill (the process of building new developments within existing cities), he quickly decided that the scale of these projects was infeasible to meet the moment. Then, slowly, the idea of California Forever began to form. That was nearly 10 years ago. “I spent eight years of my life buying this property without knowing that this would ever work,” Sramek said. “There are so many easier ways to make money than trying to build a new city.” The project, officially launched in 2017, is as much a real estate play as it is a chance to prove to himself that the California he imagined as a child still exists. As Sramek put it, the culture of post-communist Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall became enamored with all things American. California, with all its glamor and ambition and opportunity, was the outward projection of that. “There’s a really unique combination of people, natural beauty, climate, diversity, and openness to innovation that just happened in California,” Sramek said. “It’s extremely sad that we are destroying it, basically by an entirely unforced error.” As we whizzed past orchards and a small ranch house, he emphasized that the experts who support his development “weigh more heavily than a couple of angry voters who don’t know the details of the project.” He lashed out at public meetings with fuming residents as “undemocratic”; called the economic policy of California “self-inflicted suicide”; and the state’s environmental and planning regulations a “layer cake of bad ideas.” “Hollywood happened here, they found gold here in the hills, then Silicon Valley happened here, and then the countercultural revolution happened here,” Sramek said. “And then we screw it up because we can’t build enough housing?” In Sramek’s view, the state is at risk of becoming something like Florence, the ancient Italian city that was once Europe’s center of art and innovation and is now essentially a large, open-air museum. The decades of regulation and development roadblocks erected by California, in his view, could easily tumble the state in the same direction. You could build California Forever, with its commitments to advanced manufacturing and $30-billion private investment, or you could watch all those opportunities go elsewhere — essentially because of regulations. “When you take 50 good ideas and you lay them on top of each other, you don’t get an idea that’s 50 times as good as the 50 good ideas,” Sramek said. “You might actually get a really, really, terrible system.” And yet, it is that system that Sramek has pledged to work within, at least for the foreseeable future. He says working with the county doesn’t bother him (although his angry letters about the county’s pace indicate otherwise), and that pulling the ballot measure allowed his team of engineers and city planners to work out the details without the political pressure of a looming ballot measure. California Forever leaders have insisted that the decision to pull their measure was never an admission of defeat but rather a simple reorganization of steps. Voters, they said, rightfully had questions about the project. They promised to answer all of them over the next two years. Then they would return to the ballot. Last December, the grand, world-historic ideas behind California Forever landed on the desk of Solano County administrator Bill Emlen, a longtime county staffer who has been tasked with coordinating how to build America’s next great city. Emlen, who has lived in the county and worked in local government for over 30 years, epitomizes the kind of roadblock that seems to most infuriate Sramek. “Let’s face it, it’s not your average development proposal,” Emlen said. “And I don’t get the sense that governmental processes are something they particularly embrace.” According to Emlen, California Forever’s initiative never gave specific timelines for when development would occur, or how it would provide services to the community. Although he sympathized with the challenges to building new housing, he said there were always few details about how the highly touted affordable city would actually be created — no clear analysis of greenhouse gas emissions, no measurement system for tracking job creation, no nothing. After California Forever pledged to work with the county, Emlen wanted to know the answer to all those questions. And he had others, too. What about the impact on the nearby Air Force base? How would stormwater, sewage and transportation be provided? What about the loss of agricultural lands? In an October letter to Sramek, Emlen laid out the county’s needs: Submit a general plan, a rezoning plan, an environmental impact report and a development agreement. If the county and California Forever can come to an agreement, the project would still have to go before voters (presumably after having addressed their concerns). Developers usually have reams of material as they move through the permitting process. While California Forever blamed the county for its lack of motivation to move the project forward, Emlen said that even by the beginning of 2025, he had yet to receive those materials. “We’re kind of just waiting for them to file an application,” Emlen said in January. “They still haven’t done that yet.” It was an exponential demand on information for a team that leaned heavily on sweeping promises. Although Emlen recently announced he would be retiring at the end of March, the next county administrator will likely have similar questions. Sramek, meanwhile, says his team is in the process of submitting all the necessary paperwork to the county, and that he welcomes questions from elected officials and the community. He argues that he has no problem doing the regulatory work that makes a city better, safer, and more sustainable. But he refuses to accept delays that he believes will entrap his project in a bureaucratic death spiral that he argues is commonplace in California development. Edwin Okamura, the mayor of Rio Vista, a quaint river town adjacent to the California Forever property, said his conversations with Sramek have always been civil, and that it’s not so different from working with “any other businesspeople.” “You sit across from someone you may like or dislike, and when you leave the table you say, ‘OK, he’s really trying to push this project,’” Okamura said. “But you’re either at the table or you’re being cooked in the kitchen.” Okamura tries to avoid the emotional aspects of the California Forever debates, and he said that if Solano County rejected all investors simply because they were rich, no development would happen at all. That being said, there’s no part of him that believes Sramek’s city, as currently presented, is the best way forward for the county. California Forever’s success, quite likely, could come at the expense of existing cities like Rio Vista. And like Emlen, Okamura has only ever seen a vague outline of a plan, always extremely light on details. “I think many of the ideas that they have are great, better farming methods, better ranching methods, a sustainable community,” Okamura said. “But nothing has been proven.” At the end of January, after a month without rain, Northern California seemed to be held in a state of suspended animation. The familiar downpours were replaced by bluebird skies and warm days. California Forever, too, appeared to be on pause. The media attention and public developments surrounding the plan slowed to a crawl. Opponents of the project were still meeting relatively regularly, but without the intensity as during the ballot measure campaign. Sramek seemed to be getting nowhere with the county. To detractors, it appeared like David had defeated Goliath. Then, on Jan. 30, the leaders of Suisun City, a small, 28,000-person underdog city along the train tracks, dropped a bombshell in an agenda item during an otherwise routine city council meeting: They would be working with “regional partners” to explore expanding their city, and annexing the land around them. Notably, the only direction the city could expand was east, directly into the land owned by California Forever. Although Suisun City council voted only to explore the possibility of annexing the land, it shocked Solano County residents who for months viewed the project as dead in the water. Suddenly, Sramek’s plan was revived. “At only four square miles, we are Solano County’s smallest city,” Suisun City manager Bret Prebula said in a statement following the council meeting. “Now is the time to consider what more we can do to creatively grow our community and deliver more economic opportunity.” Even when they were failing to convince voters, California Forever was always trying to woo local leadership — with little to no success. For months on end, almost no elected officials had come out in support of the project. At an event for a local elected official in 2023, Suisun City Councilmember Princess Washington said she was lobbied by a representative for California Forever who demanded to know if she would support the project. (She didn’t.) Meanwhile, Moy, the mayor of the nearby town of Fairfield, said that California Forever would likely try to get their supporters into office if local officials didn’t get on board. But now, it seemed like all the California Forever team’s efforts had finally paid dividends with financially struggling Suisun City. It was also a potential end-run around voters. They would no longer have to work with the county. A countywide ballot initiative would no longer be necessary. Instead, the process would resemble a traditional municipal land-use project, and the annexation would only need the approval of a regional planning agency to proceed. The land they’ve already bought up would be incorporated into Suisun City, and California Forever could start building. It would just have a different name. “The project would stop being California Forever and it would start being the city of Suisun. That’s what was a total mind trip,” said Washington, who is the only council member who voted against exploring the annexation. “To do this was very cunning. It’s diabolical.” Sramek and California Forever, for their part, declined to confirm any agreement with the city, saying only they would be “open to discussion.” The power dynamic, again, appears to have shifted. Earlier this month, Rio Vista City Council announced that they too would be exploring a potential partnership with California Forever — formally claiming their seat at the dinner table. After Suisun City’s decision, even Moy, the mayor and a frequent critic, reached out to Sramek and California Forever to discuss ways in which her city, Fairfield, could collaborate with the project. In return, she received a letter from the company, shared with POLITICO Magazine, outlining the negative comments Moy had made in the press about Sramek and the team, accusing her of “brand damage” and a “persistent campaign of slander.” “Ms. Moy has proven herself either unable or unwilling to deal with any facts or reality,” the letter read. “Could you please let us know how the city plans to address the brand problems Ms. Moy has created?” The letter was nameless, signed, simply, California Forever. It is that spirit of vindictiveness, perhaps a natural counterpoint to Sramek’s fervent belief that this project must come to fruition, that has now cast a shadow over elected leaders in Solano County. At one point, it seemed that California Forever’s endless resources alone were not enough. Today, it seems that they are. “They’ve forced our hand,” Okamura said. “We need to be at the table, and we need to start being more forward thinking.” On the tour of Sramek’s hayfields, it’s not impossible to see the outlines of his vision. The city limits would begin here, the advanced manufacturing district there, the ring of parks and open space now here. With a little imagination, you can picture the rolling golden hills as scenic backstops for a bustling community, trails leading to a lookout point for weekend hikers glancing back down at their neighborhood, kids biking around leafy streets like all those renderings presented at town hall meetings. After all, things can change quickly out here. It’s harder to imagine, if California Forever is ultimately built, that the people of Solano County will feel like it was their decision. Should the Suisun City annexation play out as some expect, they will have watched wealthy outsiders come in and remake their county as they see fit, without ever getting to vote on it. As in Washington, Silicon Valley does not seem to be in the mood to take “no” for an answer. In conversations with Sramek, he seems little concerned with that eventuality — that Solano County residents will always oppose this plan, regardless of how good of an idea he believes it is. In February 2024, Sramek said he had a conversation with an elected official privately supportive of the project who described opposition in the county as something akin to stages of grief. First, people were angry. Then there was disappointment, then bargaining. Eventually, he said, there will come acceptance. “I pitched what I wanted to build. That’s what I pitched. I talked about what I thought California could become. I talked about what I thought Solano County could become,” Sramek said, driving the car out of the fields and back toward civilization. “The process was controversial. But I think it ended in the right spot.”

The Federal Reserve board’s forecast for the economy is running smack into President Donald Trump’s agenda. Fed Chair Jerome Powell had previously avoided commenting on Trump’s tariff threats and other sweeping moves, but those policies are increasingly shaping prospects for the economy this year. That means central bank policymakers had to at least partially show their hand on what they think new tariffs will mean for inflation, the labor market and interest rates. The early verdict they delivered on Wednesday: slightly slower growth and slightly higher inflation, a worrying scenario that the central bank may not be suited to addressing with its blunt tool of interest rate adjustments. Asked at a press conference what drove the projection for a more rapid increase in prices, Powell acknowledged, “A good part of it is coming from tariffs.” Even as the underlying economy remains strong, Fed officials projected that GDP would grow 1.7 percent in 2025, a drop from their 2.1 percent estimate in December. And they expect their preferred measure of inflation to rise 2.7 percent, up from their previous guess of 2.5 percent. “Uncertainty around the economic outlook has increased,” the central bank’s rate-setting committee said in its post-meeting statement. Fed officials met against a backdrop of anxious financial markets and sinking consumer confidence as Trump’s unpredictable tariff policies play out. The rate-setting committee held borrowing costs steady but continued to pencil in two rate cuts this year, a signal that while they expect higher tariffs to feed price increases in the short term, they don’t expect persistently higher inflation to result. Still, Powell told reporters that when it comes to inflation, “progress is probably delayed for the time being.” The Fed chief’s attempts to lay low on the impact of Trump’s policies will continue to get harder. That raises the specter of a new conflict with the president, who regularly tweeted his dissatisfaction with the Fed chief for not cutting interest rates during his first term. Higher duties on major U.S. trading partners are likely to slow economic activity, which would call for the Fed to lower rates. But they will also push up costs, fueling upward pressure on consumer prices. That could prompt the Fed to keep rates where they are — or, at worst, even begin to raise them again. Other administration moves could also affect the outlook — deregulation and tax cuts could boost growth, while deportations could shrink the pool of available labor, driving up costs. Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is pursuing deep cuts to the federal bureaucracy that could ripple out to parts of the private sector and begin to push up unemployment, further complicating the central bank’s job. For his part, Trump said the economy might go through “a period of transition” as tariffs go into place. “What we’re doing is very big,” he said on Fox Business earlier this month. “We’re bringing wealth back to America. That’s a big thing, and there are always periods of, it takes a little time. It takes a little time, but I think it should be great for us.” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CBS News last week that if the U.S. enters a recession because of Trump’s policies, it will be “worth it.” (That was days after he declared that “there’s going to be no recession in America”). “The only reason there could possibly be a recession is because the Biden nonsense that we had to live with,” Lutnick told CBS. Trump’s “policies produce revenues. They produce growth. They produce factories being built here.” Powell told reporters on Wednesday that the prospect of a recession “has moved up, but it’s not high.” But the net effect of all of this on the economy is just guesswork. “Uncertainty is heightened, and that does seem to be having some negative effects, but so far they have not seen that spill over into real economic data,” said Matthew Luzzetti, chief U.S. economist at Deutsche Bank. Luzzetti said the wide range of outcomes might mean that Powell simply underscores officials’ lack of confidence behind their projections, since the varying sizes of potential tariffs could lead to wildly disparate outcomes. In his final remarks before the Fed’s pre-meeting blackout — officials don’t comment on monetary policy before a rate decision — Powell said the central bank will be watching whether there are “a series” of trade-related policy changes that could lead to more persistently rising prices, particularly as that might make consumers and businesses expect inflation to continue, which can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. On top of that, inflation has still been hovering above the Fed’s 2 percent target, which might add to pressure on Powell to not lower rates, even if the economy begins to weaken. “Inflation is coming in hotter than they anticipated even before tariff-driven effects,” Luzzetti said. “The messaging should be one where they are kind of in a wait-and-see mode.”