LIBERALS FIGHTING BACK

IN HUNGARY: Viktor Orbán’s re-election next weekend seemed undoubted for months — until polls, and a recent local election, suggested that if turnout is high, victory might not be so secure. Here are POLITICO’s must-read stories for the last week of campaigning.

IN POLAND: European Council President Donald Tusk said this weekend he’ll resume the battle with the governing Law and Justice party after his term in Brussels ends. “I’m not going to retire,” he told Polish news channel TVN24. “In 2019 I will be back in Poland and let no one think that I will only watch TV.” He added: “I hope that Poles who dream about stable democracy and the rule of law will be able to win future elections — I will be the happiest man on earth if this materializes. If things go differently, I do not exclude anything.” He spoke at the European Center of Solidarity, a museum and cultural center built at the historic Gdańsk shipyard, where the Solidarność movement was created after a strike in 1980.

IN JAPAN: Prime Minister Shinzō Abe embraced Donald Trump faster, and with more warmth, than any other foreign leader. He’s starting to regret it, writes William Pesek for POLITICO.

IN BERLIN: Wolfgang Schäuble, president of the Bundestag still hopes the U.K. might eventually change its mind on Brexit:  “I do have hope that the Brits will remain in the EU,” he told Funke media group, saying that European solidarity with the U.K. after the Salisbury attack showed “how good it is to not stand alone in the world.” Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp, a German national, joined the chorus.

Oh, really? Opinion: Global Britain will need the EU, writes Vijay Eswaran.

IN BRUSSELS: Julian King, the EU security commissioner, is demanding a “clear game plan” for how social media companies are allowed to operate during election periods, the FT reports, citing a letter from the U.K. commissioner to Mariya Gabriel, his colleague responsible for the digital economy.

IN MUNICH: New Bavarian state premier Markus Söder made a few changes to the set-up of his government, focusing on housing construction — the lack of which is evident in Munich and other bigger cities — and announcing the establishment of a new Bavarian border police (even though this is a federal competence), among other rather practical things.

His predecessor Horst Seehofer, now Germany’s interior minister, meanwhile started his new job in Berlin at the other end of the spectrum available to policymakers — by giving interviews stating that Islam doesn’t belong to Germany (on the question of how much millions of Muslims belong to Germany or don’t, he was silent) — and presenting a leadership team for his ministry that reflects a certain social conservatism that might or might not help his party’s fortunes.

(The brown bear, though, belongs to Germany, Seehofer said this weekend, in an equally general judgment. But then, we also learned recently, the Iberian lynx have proved that they belong to Spain.)