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Turkish tensions with Europe risk spilling into Switzerland

European Union (L) and Turkish flags fly outside a hotel in Istanbul, Turkey May 4, 2016. REUTERS/Murad Sezer/File Photo

By Michael Shields

ZURICH (Reuters) – Neutral Switzerland risks getting swept up in Turkey’s political row with European countries as Swiss authorities weigh how to handle Turks’ requests for asylum and a call to ban a rally on Sunday by Turkey’s foreign minister.

The government was keeping a low profile on Thursday, saying only that it was reviewing a request by financial capital Zurich to block a planned weekend appearance by Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu for security reasons.

The Hilton hotel booked for the rally canceled the event, saying organizers could not ensure the safety of guests and visitors.

It comes amid a series of speaking engagements to galvanize support among the Turkish community for President Tayyip Erdogan’s bid to increase his powers in a referendum on April 16.

The foreign ministry declined to comment on media reports that several Turks with diplomatic passports, including the second-ranking envoy in Bern, had sought asylum after President Tayyip Erdogan’s crackdown in the wake of a failed coup last year.

The State Secretariat for Migration, which handles asylum requests, said it does not comment on individual requests for refugee status. It referred instead to a government response this week to a parliamentary query on the matter.

That note said 408 Turkish citizens had sought asylum since the July coup attempt, including some holders of diplomatic passports. It said it could not comment further on the “very few individual cases” among diplomats for fear it could give away their identities.

Turkish embassy officials in Bern were not immediately available by phone and did not respond to an email seeking comment.

During a visit to neighboring Germany on Wednesday, Cavusoglu accused Berlin of hostility towards his country and Islam as acrimony between the NATO allies showed no sign of abating.

On Thursday, Chancellor Angela Merkel told Turkey to stop comparing the German government to the Nazis over the cancellation of Turkish ministers’ rallies in Germany, only for Cavusoglu to repeat the comparison.

Ankara is furious over the cancellations. Germany has said the rallies can go ahead if the organizers respect local laws, but has canceled several rallies, citing security concerns.

In Austria, the interior minister said this week he wanted to change legislation to permit a ban on foreign officials making speeches in Austria if human rights or public order were threatened, a move aimed at Turkish politicians.

Swiss government statistics show around 68,000 Turkish citizens live in Switzerland, a nation of 8.3 million whose population is a quarter foreign. The Turkish embassy’s website refers to around 130,000 Turkish citizens.

(Additional reporting by Brenna Hughes Neghaiwi; Editing by Hugh Lawson)

EU tries to contain East-West schism as Brexit bites

European and national flags fly outside the European Parliament while European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker presents a white paper on options for shoring up unity once Britain launches its withdrawal process, in Brussels, Belgium, March 1, 2017. REUTERS/Yves Herman

By Alastair Macdonald

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – As Britain hands the European Union its formal notice to quit this month, Brussels is resigned to losing part of the EU’s western flank but is increasingly stressed that upset in the east is pulling the survivors further apart.

Poland, the biggest of the ex-communist eastern states to join after the Cold War, has picked a fight over the fairly minor matter of who chairs EU summits. Symptomatic of a mounting east-west friction, the spat will overshadow a meeting this week that was meant to forge post-Brexit unity.

Brexit has not created that friction but made it worse, as leaders struggle to quell popular disaffection with the EU that is by no means confined to Britain. Westerners are talking up faster integration, even if that means leaving nationalistic easterners behind in a “multispeed Europe”.

When Chancellor Angela Merkel, raised in East Germany and a key defender of eastern allies, joined her French, Italian and Spanish peers at Versailles on Monday to ram home a message that unless some states press ahead the EU will stall and break, Polish ruling party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski hit right back.

“The decisions made in … Versailles … aim to reinforce the process of European Union disintegration which has started with Brexit,” he said on Tuesday.

Kaczynski will not be in Brussels for Thursday’s summit but his prime minister, Beata Szydlo, will give voice to his refusal to endorse the reappointment of her centrist predecessor Donald Tusk as European Council president. Tusk and the right-wing Kaczynski are old and bitter rivals in Polish politics.

BREXIT HOLE

Brexit deprives the easterners, unwilling to see diktat from Brussels or Berlin replace rule from Moscow, of their strongest ally against EU centralization and euro zone domination.

It also leaves a big hole in the EU budget for paying the subsidies that fund a large slice of public spending in the east — cash that has kept voters there sold on EU membership and which Brussels fears London may now use to court eastern favor and divide the EU to extract better Brexit terms.

On Friday, leaders will work on plans for a March 25 summit in Rome where they hope to use 60th anniversary celebrations of the bloc’s founding treaty to pledge a new unity after Brexit.

Yet the road to Rome has been marked with division over the push by founding powers and the EU executive led by Jean-Claude Juncker for more differentiated EU integration.

“The key message of Rome must be the unity of the 27,” said a senior EU official involved in looking for compromises to ease the friction. “The political context of Brexit should not be a multispeed Europe. That would be completely out of tune.”

Neither side is pushing for a split and all insist they must pull together against challenges from Russia and uncertainty about U.S. support under President Donald Trump. For that reason, officials say, the words to come out of the Brussels and Rome summits will stress unity and soft-pedal the differences.

FRICTION GROWING

But east-west friction has heated up in the past two years.

There are rows over eastern reluctance to take in Syrian refugees and Kaczynski’s new policies that Brussels calls undemocratic. New border controls to curb migrants inside the passport-free Schengen zone have fueled eastern fears of losing travel freedoms cherished since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

And there is a brewing crisis over what eastern leaders see as hypocritical protectionism inside the EU single market by western governments trying to impose their own national minimum wages on enterprising — and cheap — eastern “posted workers”, who offer services like trucking and construction in the west.

Last week Poland and its allies demanded Brussels crack down on the “double standards” of firms that offer lower quality versions of western food brands in eastern markets.

It is not just outspoken Poland and Hungary who fret at fragmentation. The worry runs from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Eastern diplomats fear a new gap could open up along the old Iron Curtain that may never close, especially if the rich states play up to voters and refuse to fill the EU’s Brexit budget gap.

Prime Minister Robert Fico told Slovakia’s parliament on Wednesday he was skeptical of the Union’s future once Britain leaves in 2019.

“I’m afraid the EU will be divided by the money issue after 2020…In the spirit of Trump’s ‘America first’, we can expect to hear ‘Germany first’, ‘France first’ etc.”

Noting that current EU arrangements already allow for states to deepen their cooperation — the euro is just one of many examples — a senior diplomat from an eastern member state said he was suspicious of assurances from Merkel and others that any new moves would always be open to any member state to join.

“The only new thing they can mean is that this has changed,” he said. “They are saying ‘No, you are not welcome any more’.

“This is very dangerous.”

(Additional reporting by Lidia Kelly and Justyna Pawlak in Warsaw and Tatiana Jancarikova in Bratislava; Editing by Gareth Jones)

EU needs common approach on testing banks’ cyber-risks: Dombrovskis

European Commission Vice-President Valdis Dombrovskis addresses a news conference on the European Semester Winter Package in Brussels, Belgium February 22, 2017. REUTERS/Francois Lenoir

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – European Union countries should test bank defenses against cyber-attacks using a common set of requirements, a senior EU official said on Tuesday, as the bloc plans measures to boost the retail market for financial products.

Cyber attacks against banks have increased in numbers and sophistication in recent years, raising questions on lenders’ capacity to protect their customers.

Seeking to reassure savers and strengthen financial stability, several EU countries are conducting tests on banks’ security systems, but EU authorities warned national initiatives may be less effective and more costly than a common EU approach.

“We want to avoid a proliferation of testing obligations that operate in different countries,” the EU commission’s vice president Valdis Dombrovskis told a conference in Brussels.

“We believe tests that meet comparable standards should be recognized across borders,” he added. This could pave the way for common stress-tests carried out at EU level, as suggested by EU officials in past weeks.

The call for higher cyber-security comes as the Commission prepares a policy action plan on retail financial services, such as insurance, loans and payments, that will be released in the coming weeks.

Dombrovskis said the plan would encourage the use of remote identification schemes, such as e-signature and e-identification, to try to boost consumers’ access to financial services and lower costs.

It will also attempt to facilitate the take-up of new technologies in the financial sector, where emerging fintech companies are challenging traditional actors in a range of services, including payments and insurance.

“Our focus should be on removing barriers to market entry and keeping our legislation proportionate,” Dombrovskis said, noting that changes may create new risks that need to be addressed with greater sharing of information among financial firms and common testing of security systems.

(Reporting by Francesco Guarascio; Editing by Keith Weir)

UK economy picks up in late 2016 but signs of Brexit hit appear

Workers walk to work during the morning rush hour in the financial district of Canary Wharf in London, Britain, January 26, 2017. REUTERS/Eddie Keogh

By Andy Bruce and William Schomberg

LONDON (Reuters) – Britain’s economy sped up at the end of 2016, data showed, but over the whole year it was weaker than previously thought and there were signs that the Brexit vote will increasingly act as a brake on growth in 2017.

The pound fell after Wednesday’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures, which no longer showed Britain was the fastest-growing major advanced economy last year.

Gross domestic product rose by 0.7 percent in the fourth quarter, faster than the preliminary reading of 0.6 percent thanks to manufacturing and the strongest growth since the fourth quarter of 2015.

The figures are likely to reinforce finance minister Philip Hammond’s view that there is no case right now to borrow more to help the economy when he announces his annual budget on March 8.

But he will keep a close eye on warning signs in Wednesday’s data.

Business investment fell and slowing household spending growth raised questions about the outlook for 2017.

The ONS also trimmed its estimate for 2016 growth to 1.8 percent from 2.0 percent, due to businesses stockpiling fewer goods and materials in early 2016.

That pushed Britain’s economic growth rate slightly below Germany’s 1.9 percent.

Separate ONS data showed Britain’s dominant services sector expanded in December at the slowest pace in seven months.

Angus Armstrong, director of macroeconomics at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, said the familiar pattern of consumers driving the economy was likely to fade.

“The UK economy needs another driver if it is not to have a significant slowdown in 2017,” he said. “The pattern of strong consumer spending and weaker business investment can only be a limited one.”

Business investment fell 1.0 percent in the fourth quarter compared with the July-September period. Investment by companies was 0.9 percent lower compared with the fourth quarter of 2015.

Firms are expected to rein in their investment plans as Britain negotiates its departure from the EU, a process that Prime Minister Theresa May is due to kick off in coming weeks.

The outlook for wages is key for spending by households who have driven Britain’s economy since the Brexit vote. Wednesday’s data showed compensation of employees edged up by 0.1 percent in the fourth quarter, the weakest rise in more than three years.

BREXIT SQUEEZE

The ONS said household spending increased 0.7 percent on the quarter, slowing from 0.9 percent in the third quarter and marking the weakest growth in a year.

Bank of England deputy governor Minouche Shafik said after the data that the central bank still expected overall economic growth this year of 2.0 percent, much stronger than most economists polled by Reuters expect.

But the bank also predicts a growing squeeze on consumers as inflation rises due to the pound’s fall since June’s vote to leave the European Union.

There are signs this has started. Data last week showed retail sales fell in each of the three months to January.

The BoE this month signaled that it is in no hurry to raise interest rates with so much Brexit-related uncertainty ahead.

The central bank expects the economy to grow at a slower pace in subsequent years than if Britain had voted to stay in the EU.

(Editing by John Stonestreet)

‘Alarming’ superbugs a risk to people, animals and food, EU warns

By Kate Kelland

LONDON (Reuters) – Superbug bacteria found in people, animals and food across the European Union pose an “alarming” threat to public and animal health having evolved to resist widely used antibiotics, disease and safety experts warned on Wednesday.

A report on antimicrobial resistance in bacteria by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) said some 25,000 people die from such superbugs in the European Union every year.

“Antimicrobial resistance is an alarming threat putting human and animal health in danger,” said Vytenis Andriukaitis, the EU’s health and food safety commissioner.

“We have put substantial efforts to stop its rise, but this is not enough. We must be quicker, stronger and act on several fronts.”

Drug resistance is driven by the misuse and overuse of antibiotics, which encourages bacteria to evolve to survive and develop new ways of beating the medicines.

Wednesday’s report highlighted that in Salmonella bacteria – which can cause the common and serious food-borne infection Salmonellosis – multi-drug resistance is high across the EU.

Mike Catchpole, the ECDC’s chief scientist, said he was particularly concerned that some common types of Salmonella in humans, such as monophasic Salmonella Typhimurium, are showing extremely high multi-drug resistance.

“Prudent use of antibiotics in human and veterinary medicine is extremely important,” he said. “We all have a responsibility to ensure that antibiotics keep working.”

Resistance to carbapenem antibiotics – usually the last remaining treatment option for patients infected with multi-drug resistant superbugs – was detected for the first time in animals and food, albeit at low levels, as part of EU-wide annual monitoring for the report.

It said very low levels of resistance were observed in E. coli bacteria found in pigs and in meat from pigs.

Resistance to colistin, another last-resort human antibiotic – was also found at very low levels in Salmonella and E. coli in pigs and cattle, the report said.

Marta Hugas, head of EFSA’s biological hazards and contaminants unit, noted geographic variations across the European Union, with countries in northern and western Europe generally having lower resistance levels than those in southern and eastern Europe and said this was most likely due to differences in the level of use and overuse of the medicines.

“In countries where actions have been taken to reduce, replace and re-think the use of antimicrobials in animals show lower levels of antimicrobial resistance and decreasing trends,” she said.

(This story is a refile to remove extraneous word in first paragraph)

(Editing by Jeremy Gaunt)

Pence says U.S. will stand firm with Europe, NATO

By Roberta Rampton and John Irish

MUNICH (Reuters) – U.S. Vice President Mike Pence on Saturday brought a message of support for Europe from Donald Trump but failed to wholly reassure allies worried about the new president’s stance on Russia and the European Union.

In Pence’s first major foreign policy address for the Trump administration, the vice president told European leaders and ministers that he spoke for Trump when he promised “unwavering” commitment to the NATO military alliance.

“Today, on behalf of President Trump, I bring you this assurance: the United States of America strongly supports NATO and will be unwavering in our commitment to this transatlantic alliance,” Pence told the Munich Security Conference.

While Poland’s defense minister praised Pence, many others, including France’s foreign minister and U.S. lawmakers in Munich, remained skeptical that he had convinced allies that Trump, a former reality TV star, would stand by Europe.

Trump’s contradictory remarks on the value of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, scepticism of the 2015 deal to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions and an apparent disregard for the future of the European Union have left Europe fearful for the seven-decade-old U.S. guardianship of the West.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault on Twitter expressed his disappointment that Pence’s speech contained “Not a word on the European Union”, although the vice president will take his message to EU headquarters in Brussels on Monday.

U.S. Senator Chris Murphy, a member of the opposition Democrats, said he saw two rival governments emerging from the Trump administration.

Pence, Trump’s defense secretary Jim Mattis and his foreign minister Rex Tillerson all delivered messages of reassurance on their debut trip to Europe.

But events in Washington, including a free-wheeling news conference Trump gave in which he branded accredited White House reporters “dishonest people”, sowed more confusion.

“Looks like we have two governments,” Murphy wrote on Twitter from Munich. The vice president “just gave speech about shared values between US and Europe as (the U.S. president) openly wages war on those values.”

The resignation of Trump’s security adviser Michael Flynn over his contacts with Russia on the eve of the U.S. charm offensive in Europe also tarnished the message Pence, Mattis and Tillerson were seeking to send, officials told Reuters.

U.S. Republican Senator John McCain, a Trump critic, told the conference on Friday that the new president’s team was “in disarray,” breaking with the American front.

The United States is Europe’s biggest trading partner, the biggest foreign investor in the continent and the European Union’s partner in almost all foreign policy, as well as the main promoter of European unity for more than sixty years.

Pence, citing a trip to Cold War-era West Berlin in his youth, said the new U.S. government would uphold the post-World War Two order.

“This is President Trump’s promise: we will stand with Europe today and every day, because we are bound together by the same noble ideals – freedom, democracy, justice and the rule of law,” Pence said.

MUTED APPLAUSE

While the audience listened intently, Pence received little applause beyond the warm reception he received when he declared his support for NATO.

Ayrault, in a speech defending Franco-German leadership in Europe, lauded the virtues of multilateralism at a time of rising nationalism. Trump has promise ‘America First.’

“In these difficult conditions, many are attempting to look inward, but this isolationism makes us more vulnerable. We need the opposite,” Ayrault said.

Pence warned allies they must pay their fair share to support NATO, noting many lack “a clear or credible path” to do so. He employed a tougher tone than Mattis, who delivered a similar but more nuanced message to NATO allies in Brussels this week, diplomats said.

The United States provides around 70 percent of the NATO alliance’s funds and European governments sharply cut defense spending since the fall of the Soviet Union. Russia’s resurgence as a military power and its seizure of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in the Black Sea has started to change that.

Baltic states and Poland fear Russia might try a repeat of Crimea elsewhere. Europe believes Moscow is seeking to destabilize governments and influence elections with cyber attacks and fake news.

Pence’s tough line on Russia, calling Moscow to honor the international peace accords that seek to end the conflict in eastern Ukraine, were welcomed by Poland.

“Know this: the United States will continue to hold Russia accountable, even as we search for new common ground, which as you know, President Trump believes can be found,” Pence said.

Polish Defence Minister Antoni Macierewicz said Pence’s speech “highlighted on behalf of President Trump that the U.S. supports NATO, Ukraine and Europe.

“They want to show the U.S. military potential,” he said.

(Additional reporting by Noah Barkin, Andrea Shalal, Vladimir Soldatkin, John Irish and Jonathan Landay; Writing by Robin Emmott; Editing by Janet Lawrence)

Tunisia PM, in Germany, dismisses criticism over asylum deportations

Tunisia PM and Germany Chancellor to discuss refugee/migrant issue

BERLIN (Reuters) – Tunisia’s prime minister, in Germany for talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel, rejected criticism on Tuesday that his country had been slow to take back failed asylum seekers from Europe, including Berlin Christmas market attacker Anis Amri.

Youssef Chahed also rejected the idea of Tunisia setting up its own asylum centers to ease the burden on Europe.

Shortcomings in the system were exposed in December by the failure to deport Tunisian Islamic State supporter Amri, who was on a watch list and had been denied asylum six months before he killed 12 people by driving a truck through the market.

In an interview in Bild, Chahed said cooperation with Germany on asylum seekers was functioning well.

“The biggest problem for Europe is refugees who go from Libya to Italy,” he said, adding that German authorities needed to provide the correct paperwork to be able to send back failed asylum seekers to Tunisia.

It was largely a delay in getting the right documents, including identity papers, that prevented Amri from being repatriated. He was shot dead by Italian police in Milan on Dec. 23.

“Illegal immigrants who use false papers sometimes make things difficult and prolong the process,” he said.

Asked about the possibility of Tunisia building refugee centers with European help, Chahed said:

“Tunisia is a very young democracy, I don’t think that it can function or that we have capacity to create refugee camps,” he said, adding that the main focus should be finding a solution with Libya.

Merkel has been weakened by her open-door migrant policy which allowed more than a million refugees into Germany in the last two years. She is now trying to show voters she is beefing up security and cracking down on illegal migrants before a national election due in September.

Merkel needs the cooperation of countries like Tunisia to speed up deportations. She also plans to give police greater powers to detain rejected asylum seekers seen as a terrorist threat and to set up ‘federal departure centers’ near airports to house rejected applicants ahead of their deportation.

Chahed visited the site of the December attack by Amri in western Berlin and laid flowers there.

(Reporting by Madeline Chambers; Editing by Gareth Jones)

NATO allies lock in U.S. support for stand-off with Russia

By Robin Emmott and Andrius Sytas

ZAGAN, Poland/RUKLA, Lithuania (Reuters) – Immediately after Donald Trump was elected, U.S. diplomats urged Lithuania to rush through an agreement to keep American troops on its soil, reflecting alarm that the new, Russia-friendly U.S. president might try to stop more deployments in Europe.

The agreement was signed just a few days before Trump’s inauguration, according to a document from the Lithuanian defense ministry, and became the first step locking the new U.S. president into a NATO strategy to deter Russia in Poland and the Baltics, following Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.

European allies are growing confident that, with the arrival of U.S. troops in Poland, plans ordered by Barack Obama will hold. They are reassured by Trump’s remarks to U.S. forces in Florida this week, when he said: “We strongly support NATO.”

“When you put soldiers on the ground, tanks like this, that signifies a long-term commitment,” Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, the U.S. army’s top commander in Europe, said at the snow-covered base in Zagan, Poland where thousands of U.S. troops are arriving before fanning out across the region.

“I am not hearing anything that would tell me otherwise,” Hodges said when asked whether Trump might scale back deployments. The president has described NATO as “obsolete” and has praised Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

But it will be hard politically for Trump to bring troops home “on the orders of Russia”, one senior alliance diplomat said. The U.S. soldiers featured in a TV commercial seen by millions of Americans at the end of the Super Bowl on Sunday.

Worried since Russia’s seizure of Crimea that Moscow could invade Poland or the Baltic states, the Western military alliance wants to bolster its eastern flank without provoking the Kremlin by stationing large forces permanently.

The troop build-up is NATO’s biggest in Europe since the end of the Cold War, using a web of small eastern outposts, forces on rotation, regular war games and warehoused U.S. equipment ready for a rapid response force of up to 40,000 personnel.

Britain, Germany and Canada are playing major roles in the force build-up. “Every ally is locked in,” said Adam Thomson, a former British ambassador to NATO and now director of the European Leadership Network think-tank in London.

GRAND BARGAIN?

Apparently confident of Washington’s commitment to Obama’s strategy, Poland’s Defense Minister Antoni Macierewicz declared “God bless President Trump” at a welcoming ceremony for U.S. forces in Zagan last week.

But European governments remain concerned Trump could use the troop deployments as a chip with Moscow in a grand bargain. Political analysts say that could involve giving Moscow a free hand in much of the former Soviet Union in return for a commitment not to interfere in Europe.

“Trump is a businessman and he wants to negotiate from a position of strength,” a central European diplomat in Brussels said of the decision to allow U.S. deployments to continue.

Trump held an hour-long phone call with Putin in late January but avoided talk of Crimea and the rebellion in eastern Ukraine that the West accuses Moscow of sponsoring.

Trump has suggested lifting economic sanctions imposed on Russia over Crimea in return for a reduction of nuclear weapons.

He might offer to scale back NATO projects like the new Polish site set to form part of the alliance’s missile shield in the region. NATO says the system is designed to intercept Iranian rockets but Moscow says it is aimed at disabling Russian missiles.

The shield was developed by the United States and is now part of NATO. “It is impossible for Washington to act unilaterally without upsetting allies,” Thomson said.

For now, Obama’s “dialogue and deterrent” remains the NATO mantra – talking to Moscow but also sending U.S. tanks back to Europe and reopening Cold War-era storage sites.

“We stick with the facts, not the forecasts,” Salvatore Farina, the NATO commander coordinating forces in Poland and the three Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, told Reuters at the Rukla military base in Lithuania, where both a German battle group and U.S. infantry are based.

(Anditional reporting by Andrea Shalal in Berlin; editing by Andrew Roche)

More than 1,300 migrants rescued at sea in one day: Italy coast guard

ROME (Reuters) – More than 1,300 migrants were rescued in 13 separate missions in the Mediterranean on Friday, bringing the total helped over the last three days to more than 2,600, the coast guard said.

The migrants, who were aboard 13 vessels, were saved in the central Mediterranean by ships from the Italian coast guard, the Italian and British navies, merchant ships and vessels operated by non-government organizations, a statement said.

Another 1,300 were rescued on Wednesday.

The voyage from Libya across the Mediterranean to Italy is currently the main route to Europe for migrants.

A record 181,000 made the journey last year, most on flimsy boats run by people-smugglers.

More than 5,000 are believed to have died attempting the crossing in 2016.

In the latest in a series of measures pushed by the European Union to stop migrants reaching Europe, Italy launched a new fund on Wednesday to help African countries control their borders.

(Reporting By Philip Pullella; Editing by Hugh Lawson)

Businesses growing in face of upcoming risks

waiter carries food at British restaurant

By Jonathan Cable

LONDON (Reuters) – Business started 2017 on a solid footing, surveys showed on Friday, thriving ahead of a myriad of political risks in the coming year.

Fears of a growing protectionist agenda in the United States, whether national elections across Europe upset the status quo and just how fractious Britain’s divorce proceedings from the European Union become, are all expected to weigh in the months ahead.

Yet so far those risks seem to have been mostly ignored with firms from Asia to Europe increasing or at least largely maintaining activity. Similar upbeat results are expected later from the United States..

Euro zone businesses started 2017 by increasing activity at the same multi-year record pace they set in December.

China’s factory activity grew for a seventh month and while India’s services business contracted for a third month as firms struggled to recover from a government crackdown on currency in circulation, the pace slowed.

“The outlook for this year is reasonably bright despite all the risks. The numbers for January have generally been quite positive,” said Andrew Kenningham, chief global economist at Capital Economics.

Growth in Britain’s services sector slowed for the first time in four months in January, dipping just below its long-run average, as businesses battled the sharpest rise in costs in more than five years.

But on Thursday the Bank of England sharply revised up its growth forecast for 2017 to 2.0 percent, a view held by only the most optimistic forecaster in a Reuters poll of 50 economists taken last month.

Britain’s economy unexpectedly outpaced all its major peers last year, wrongfooting those who expected an immediate hit from June’s Brexit vote.

The Markit/CIPS British services Purchasing Managers’ Index dropped to a three-month low of 54.5 last month from December’s 15-month high, at the bottom end of a range of forecasts in a Reuters poll of economists, but Markit said the PMIs still point to first quarter growth of 0.5 percent.

IHS Markit’s final composite PMI for the euro zone, seen as a good guide to growth, held at 54.4. It has not been higher since May 2011 and has remained above the 50 mark dividing growth from contraction since mid-2013.

That points to first quarter expansion of 0.4 percent, Markit said, matching the median prediction in a Reuters poll.

“Despite the slightly disappointing outcome this remains a very strong report,” said James Knightley, senior economist at ING.

China’s factory activity expanded for the seventh straight month in January, giving Beijing more room to tackle chronic imbalances in the economy. The Caixin/Markit Manufacturing PMI fell to 51.0.

The world’s second largest economy has seen a broad-based pickup in recent months, with fourth-quarter GDP beating expectations due largely to a strong housing market and higher government spending on infrastructure projects.

A recovery in the country’s “smokestack” industries has also been supported by government mandates to close down outdated production capacity in the coal and steel sectors, as well as a rebound in investment in the property sector that came amid a record flood of credit.

India’s Nikkei/IHS Markit Services PMI remained below 50 registering 48.7 in January as firms still reel from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s decision in November to abolish high-value bank notes.

Modi’s policy removed 86 percent of the currency in circulation, hitting consumption and capital investments, and shattered traditional cash-reliant supply chains.

(Editing by Jeremy Gaunt)

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