The Swedish Academy which chooses the literature laureate said it had recognized Handke, 76, for a body of work including novels, essays and drama "that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience."

Follow Israel Hayom on Facebook and Twitter

Tokarczuk, 57, won for "a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life," it said.

Both have courted controversy – Handke for his portrayal of Serbia as a victim during the Balkan wars and for attending its leader's funeral, and Tokarczuk for touching on dark areas of Poland's past that contrast with the version of history promoted by the country's ruling nationalist party.

While Tokarczuk's agent said the award should not be seen in the context of a parliamentary election Poland will hold on Sunday, the author called on Poles to "vote in a right way for democracy."

"The prize goes to eastern Europe, which is unusual, incredible," Tokarczuk told a press conference in the German town of Bielefeld.

"It shows that despite all those problems with democracy in my country we still have something to say to the world."

On winning a Polish literary award in 2015 for "The Book of Jacob," which deals with Poland's relations with its Jewish minority and neighboring Ukraine, she outraged nationalists with her comments and received death threats.

Two prizes were awarded this year after last year's award was postponed over the scandal that led to the husband of an Academy member being convicted of rape.

Since then, the organization has appointed new members and reformed some of its more arcane rules after a rare intervention by its royal patron, the king of Sweden.

Handke, a native of the Austrian province of Carinthia, which borders Slovenia, established himself as one of the most influential writers in Europe after World War II, the Academy said. He also co-wrote the script of the critically-acclaimed 1987 film "Wings of Desire."

The author of books such as "The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick" and "Slow Homecoming," he attracted widespread criticism after he attended the funeral of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević in 2006.

An estimated 10,000 ethnic Albanians were killed in Kosovo and almost one million were put to flight during a brutal war waged by forces under Milošević in 1998-1999.

Kosovo's ambassador to Washington reacted angrily to Handke's win.

"Have we become so numb to racism, so emotionally desensitized to violence, so comfortable with appeasement that we can overlook one's subscription&service to the twisted agenda of a genocidal maniac?" Vlora Çitaku wrote on Twitter.

"We must not support or normalize those who spew hatred. We can do better!#Nobel."

Albania's acting Foreign Minister Gent Cakaj called the award ignoble and shameful on Twitter.

Tokarczuk trained as a psychologist before publishing her first novel in 1993. Since then, she has produced a steady and varied stream of works and her novel "Flights" won her the high-profile Man Booker International Prize last year. She was the first Polish author to do so.

"Nobel Prize for Literature! Joy and emotion took my speech away. Thank you very much for all your congratulations!" she wrote on Facebook.

She later told Polish broadcaster TVN she was proud that her books covering small towns in Poland can be read universally and be important for people elsewhere in the world.

"I believe in the novel. I think the novel is something incredible. This is a deep way of communication, above the borders, above languages, cultures. It refers to the in-depth similarity between people, teaches us empathy," she said.

Poland's culture minister, Piotr Gliński, said the award to Tokarczuk was a success for Polish culture. Earlier this week, Gliński said he had started reading Tokarczuk's books many times but never finished any of them, a failing that he said on Twitter he would now seek to correct.

The post Nobel laureate's writing probes 'dark chapter' of Polish history, outrages nationalists appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.

Right-wing nationalists who want to slash immigration into Europe and return power to national governments are expected to make gains, though mainstream parties are tipped to hold onto power in the 751-seat legislature that sits in both Brussels and Strasbourg.

The election began on Thursday, but most of the EU's 28 member states, including the biggest of all, Germany and France, are voting on Sunday, and the results are expected overnight. Some 426 million people are eligible to vote.

"I don't want to see a right-populist Europe [that] wants to destroy the idea of togetherness," said Manfred Weber, the lead candidate of the Christian Democrat center-right EPP group, currently the biggest in the legislature.

Leading the challenge to the established order is Italy's hardline interior minister, Matteo Salvini, head of the League party, who is assembling a group of like-minded parties from across Europe.

"We need to do everything that is right to free this country, this continent, from the illegal occupation organized by Brussels," Salvini told a rally in Milan last weekend that was attended by the leaders of 11 nationalist parties.

As he voted in Budapest on Sunday, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said he hopes the election will bring a shift toward political parties that want to stop migration.

The migration issue "will reorganize the political spectrum in the European Union," said Orban, who recently met with Salvini but has not yet committed to joining the Italian's group.

In the face of a more united hardline right wing in the parliament, traditional parties like the EPP and the center-left socialist S&D group want the mainstream to build a strong coalition to stave off the fringe parties.

Spanish caretaker Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called on "all the political forces to open a horizon of political stability."

Projections released by the European Parliament last month show the EPP bloc losing 37 of its 217 seats and the S&D group dropping from 186 seats to 149. On the far right flank, the Europe of Nations and Freedom group is predicted to increase its bloc from 37 to 62 seats.

Proponents of stronger EU integration, led by French President Emmanuel Macron , argue that issues like climate change and reining in immigration are simply too big for any one country to tackle alone.

Macron, whose country has been rocked in recent months by the populist yellow vest movement, has called the elections "the most important since 1979 because the [European] Union is facing an existential risk" from nationalists seeking to divide the bloc.

In Austria, Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said Sunday that he hopes the elections will strengthen the center rather than parties on the far right and left.

Austria is one of the countries where the vote also has importance to national politics, serving as a first test of support ahead of a national election in September following the collapse of Kurz's governing coalition a week ago.

In Belgium, a general election is taking place alongside the European vote, while Lithuanians will vote in the second round of their presidential election.

Britain is taking part in the vote even though it is planning to leave the bloc, after the government missed its March 29 deadline to approve divorce terms. Its EU lawmakers would lose their jobs as soon as Brexit happens.

Sunday promises to be a long day and night for election watchers – the last polls close at 11 p.m. in Italy but the European Parliament plans to begin issuing estimates and projections hours earlier with the first official projection of the makeup of the new parliament at 11:15 p.m.

As the dust settles on four days of elections, European leaders will begin the task of selecting candidates for the top jobs in the EU's headquarters in Brussels. The leaders meet for a summit over dinner Tuesday night.

Current European lawmakers' terms end July 1 and the new parliament will take their seats in Strasbourg the following day.

The post European voters elect new parliament as nationalism mounts appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.

The European Parliament elections could have a major impact on the face of the EU in coming years, given the strengthening of radical populist, nationalist parties on both the right and left of the political spectrum, a majority of whom loathe the organization and its bureaucratic and wasteful conduct.

The composition of the European Parliament, which has its headquarters in Brussels and Strasbourg, is determined once every five years in elections that up until recently have been considered either boring or bizarre. As with the Eurovision song contest, the old parties would enlist celebrities and colorful and provocative figures alongside inexperienced politicians, in the hope of garnering voters' attention. But the more Europe grew and became established, and the more the authority of the European Parliament expanded, the less European voters were interested in the continental body.

The old order begins to crack

In the first elections for European Parliament in 1979, when the organization counted nine countries as members, some 62% of those eligible to vote took part in the election. In the most recent elections in 2014, with the organization comprising 28 countries, only 42% of eligible voters showed up to the ballot box. Voter turnout in some of the newer EU member countries in Central and Eastern Europe was even lower, and in some cases, the lowest ever recorded for an EU country. In Slovakia, just 13% of eligible voters took part in the election. In the Czech Republic, voter turnout was 18% and in both Poland and Romania, it was 23%. In Portugal, the Netherlands and Britain – just two years before the Brexit referendum – voter turnout stood at under 40%. Despite the fact that the European Parliament is the only democratic tool that allows EU citizens to have some form of a direct say on what goes on in Brussels, it is still seen as a rubber stamp for the despotic and exorbitant bureaucratic mechanism that dictates to Europeans from Cyprus to Finland how to live, without regard for the day-to-day challenges those countries face.

The current election campaign appears to be different from its predecessors. The events of the last five years have shaken Europe to its core: The migrant crisis, which came to a head in 2015, created a deep social and political divide – not just between Western Europe, which prides itself on multiculturalism and secularism,and Eastern Europe, which puts the emphasis on its national and Christian identity – but also within the countries themselves, where the differences between the "natives" and the "migrants" and the residents of the periphery and the elites have grown more prominent. These increasing tensions have led to the dissolution of the old establishment parties, regardless of whether they are conservative, social democrat or socialist, and the significant strengthening of populist parties on both the Right and the Left united in their opposition to the idea of a "United States of Europe."

Populists on the Right want the EU to return to the days of the common market and maybe give up on the euro while they're at it. Populists on the Left see the EU as the culmination of the capitalist nightmare. In light of their significant growth on the political fringes in national elections held in recent years in Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, Hungary, Poland and Greece, the current election campaign in the European Parliament is not just a campaign for the future of the union, as it has been in the past, but a campaign for its very existence.

Macron wants to take control

In addition to all of this, Europe is still finding it difficult to contend with the trauma of Brexit. Britain was not supposed to be a member of the EU by this point. It was supposed to have abandoned ship some two months ago. But the Brits have yet to decide how they want to leave the union, whether entirely while maintaining close economic ties, or not at all. And because Britain has asked and received an extension until fall, when it is supposed to declare which direction it is headed, its citizens will be among the first to vote in the elections for European Parliament.

If this was not confusing enough, polls show the U.K. party that is known as "Brexit" has a significant lead over its opponents in the race for European Parliament.

If and when Britain leaves the EU, its representatives will also leave the European Parliament, and the number of delegates in its ranks will shrink from 751 to 705. But it seems that even this is unlikely to change the balance of power in the parliament's ranks, according to the polls. To date, the European Parliament has been dominated by a coalition of conservatives and socialists, which divided its members' among the positions of power in the European Commission, which is the government of the EU. The past five years have seen a conservative EU president working alongside a socialist foreign policy chief. But the hegemony of these "establishment" parties, which only contributed to the sense of distance between Europe's citizens and the union, is predicted to meet its end. This is due to the growth of populist parties and the establishment of a new bloc of centrist parties at the initiative of French President Emmanuel Macron.

Macron, who is trying to push the EU toward speedy and far-reaching reforms aimed at establishing joint institutions that would stop the nationalist drift across the continent, hoped to see a repeat of his resounding victory in the French presidential elections and the National Assembly in Paris, particularly through the establishment of the centrist La République En Marche! bloc. The "yellow vest" popular protests put a poke in his wheel and Macron has found himself dealing with more pressing issues at home.

According to French opinion polls, Macron's party could end up tying in the European elections with Marine Le Pen's National Rally party (formerly the National Front) and maybe even coming in second in the race.

Nevertheless, last week, the French president succeeded in hosting the representative of a few parties from the west of the continent that could – after the European Parliament elections – host a joint centrist party that would seek to lubricate the union's wheels and keep it moving forward. Such a bloc could, for the first time in the history of the European Parliament, break up the two largest parties' monopoly over the body. But it will not constitute the deciding factor because the expected distribution of seats will require the establishment of a coalition of conservatives, centrists and socialists in order to achieve an absolute majority.

Representatives from the liberal factions of the current European Parliament have joined Macron's "Renaissance" list, as have representatives from the ruling socialist government in Portugal, Italy's former social democratic ruling party and the Spanish centrist Ciudadanos party. The head of Macron's Renaissance list, veteran diplomat Nathalie Loiseau, has gone on the attack against her future conservative partners, in particular those from Germany, who under Chancellor Angela Merkel have stalled the reforms that Macron is interested in.

Merkel, who has already announced she will not run for re-election, has been asked by several senior members of her party to lower her profile in this election campaign. Once the strongest woman in Europe and the world, Merkel has become something of a burden for conservatives in Germany. Many of them hold her responsible for the European crisis that resulted from her push to open the continent's borders to a mass wave of refugees and migrants.

Working toward a weakened EU?

According to various polls and research carried out in recent months, the immigration problem is poised to be the top issue in the European vote, including in countries that did not take in a large number of migrants, like France, for example. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is one of the figures that would like to make the upcoming European elections a referendum on the issue of immigration. He has been sidelined by the European establishment and its conservative partners over his adamant opposition to the absorption of immigrants and its "continuing damage to the foundations of democracy." Orbán's Fidesz party, which enjoys an absolute majority in Budapest, has had its membership in the conservative faction in Hungary's government frozen. The prime minister is now looking for other allies, foremost among them Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, a man Orban has called "the most important person in Europe today."

Salvini brings with him a substantial dowry: the other far-right European group known as the Europe of Nations and Freedom, among its members are the Freedom Party of Austria, the Netherlands' Party for Freedom and France's National Rally. The faction is expected to make significant gains in the upcoming European elections.  Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini. Orbán would like to establish an alliance between the Europe of Nations and Freedom and the European conservatives, in order to break apart the conservatives' historic alliance with the socialists. But that is not going to happen. The conservatives see these parties as a return to the nationalist and fascist "demons of the past" and the end of Europe and democracy. Furthermore, these parties are stealing too many voters away from conservatives.

Orbán was invited to the White House this week for a meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump. The previous U.S. administration boycotted Orbán and the current White House is not exactly rushing to embrace him either. But two weeks ahead of the European Parliament elections, Trump has given Orbán the warmest of welcomes, and not for nothing: Trump wants to see the right-wing nationalist parties in Europe grow in strength, because he believes this will allow for the bolstering of the European identity at the expense of EU's aspirations of becoming an economic and diplomatic superpower. For its part, Moscow also supports those same parties out of a desire to weaken the EU. It seems the battle for Europe is also being waged outside of its territorial borders.

Israel should follow the European Parliament elections with interest. The expected retirement of EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, who has become an unwelcome figure in Jerusalem due to her conduct vis-à-vis Israel, will not necessarily result in positive change. The EU's foreign policy mechanism will continue to be hostile toward Israel, as will the majority of the European Parliament. But in its last term, Israel's allies, mainly from the nationalist right-wing parties, succeeded in promoting quite a few initiatives that have been to our benefit. While Israel does not officially have ties with many of these nationalist right-wing parties, given the existence of problematic streams among their ranks, the formation of new coalitions after the elections could keep the unwanted extremists out.

The post The battle for Europe appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.

The letter, posted recently on the Senate's website and reported by German media Thursday, comes amid controversy surrounding new Polish legislation, ratified earlier this month, that penalizes attributing the crimes of Nazi Germany to the Polish nation. Artistic and research work is exempted and the government insists the law is not intended to block historical research, but critics say its wording is unclear.

Israel has protested the law, saying it could limit discussion about the Holocaust and whitewash the role some Poles played during Germany's brutal occupation of Poland from 1939 to 1945. The United States has also expressed "disappointment" over the law.

Observers say the campaign, which includes a website and ads on YouTube, is an effort by the ruling Law and Justice party to consolidate its power by rallying voters around the idea that Poland needs to be defended against a hostile outside world.

In his letter, sent last week to Polish organizations worldwide, Senate Speaker Stanislaw Karczewski appealed to members to "document and react to" displays of anti-Polish sentiments and "statements and opinions that hurt" Poland's good name, and to report them to Polish diplomatic missions. He also urged them to record first-hand testimony of World War II crimes from Polish and Jewish witnesses and survivors.

The letter acknowledges that individual Poles committed shameful deeds during the war, but says they were not typical of the entire nation.

In Germany, a senior member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union party called the letter "regrettable."

"This partisan tactic aims to spread the feeling in Poland that they're being treated unjustly abroad," Norbert Roettgen was quoted as telling the German newspaper Berliner Zeitung on Thursday.

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said in an interview with Germany's Die Welt daily newspaper that Poland's point of view should be made known.

He said the debate around the law had made him aware of the need for joint research that would reveal how many Poles actually committed crimes against Jews, but would also place the facts in their "terrible" wartime context.

The post Poles abroad asked to report 'anti-Polish' displays to authorities appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.