Europe

Poland looks set to head into a month of intense coalition-building. The exit poll for the country’s parliamentary election on Sunday showed Jarosław Kaczyński’s Law and Justice party with the single biggest result of 36.8 per cent, but it still fell short of being able to form a government by itself. Donald Tusk’s Civic Coalition gained 31.6 per cent of the vote, followed by the Third Way with 13 per cent, the Left with 8.6 per cent, and Konfederacja with 6.2 per cent of the vote, respectively. The late poll released around 8 a.m. Polish time, which took account of around half of the election’s overall result, remained broadly consistent

Black Mountain, which looms above West Belfast, acts as a blank canvas for Irish republicans to plaster their thoughts across. Over the years, banners covering a range of subjects, from Irish unity to Brexit, have been draped across it. In recent days, a Palestinian flag was placed there by a group styling itself Gael Force Art, claiming it was in ‘solidarity with the Palestinian people who launched their biggest operation in fifty years against the rogue state of Israel’. Gerry Adams shared a picture of the flag on Twitter/ X. ‘The Mountain Speaks! Free Palestine,’ he wrote. Irish republicanism has always been a reliable well-spring of support for their Palestinian equivalents. In

Emmanuel Macron’s appeal for France to unite has not been heeded. Barely 12 hours after the president made his address on primetime television, a 20-year-old of Chechen origin stabbed a teacher to death and wounded two others in a high school in the northern city of Arras.   The assailant, now in custody, is reported to have shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ during his rampage. Interior minister Gérald Darmanin announced that the knifeman was on an extremist watchlist, a revelation that is politically explosive. Yet again, someone known to be radicalised has been able to commit bloody murder. Just this week, the trial concluded of an accomplice of Larossi Abballa, who in

I was proud when my son, then aged three, wore his kippa (Jewish skullcap) for the first time. We placed the kippa on his head and told him what it meant to be a Jew. ‘Mazel tov!’ we said as we hugged each other, prayed, and sung. We wondered hopefully what he might become – a rabbi, a doctor, an accountant – and we laughed and sung some more. A blessing on your head, mazel tov, mazel tov! He’s now 17, and for the first time in his life was asked this week to cover his kippa up. An email from his school in London suggested that, in light of

It’s not surprising that much mainstream French journalism is complacent, incurious and stenographic. The elite French media is lavishly subsidised and the torrent of handouts makes tenuous any claim that mainstream French journalism is independent. The most compromised are the broadcasters. Indeed there’s little pretence that they offer more than token auditing of the government. Three billion euros annually goes to French state-owned radio and television stations (which are allowed to top this up selling advertising). The French TV license was abolished so the money is paid directly by the state.  The more the media feeds at the trough, the more it can ignore the interests of readers There’s a gossamer-thin

The European Parliament hosted an event in Brussels last week entitled ‘Close Guantanamo’. It was hosted by two Irish left-wing MEPs, and among the invites were representatives of Cage, which has been described by the French government as an ‘Islamist’ organisation, an allegation Cage denies. Cage was briefly infamous in Britain in 2015 when its director, Asim Qureshi, called Islamic State butcher Mohammed Emwazi, aka ‘Jihadi John’, who made a living hacking off Westerners’ heads, a ‘beautiful young man’ and blamed security services for his radicalisation. Qureshi later said he regretted his ‘inappropriate description’ of the Isis fighter. Cage isn’t the only organisation with dubious credentials that has been courted

The staunchly pro-Russian Robert Fico is back in power for a third time in Slovakia. Fico’s Smer party clinched at least 23 per cent of the vote – enough to lead a coalition government. His victory comes five years after Fico was forced to resign following mass protests over the murder of a journalist investigation corruption in his government.  Fico has not been shy during campaigning about his views on Russia and Ukraine. His most striking pledge was to immediately end military support for Kyiv, promising to ‘not send a single round’ of ammunition to Ukraine if voted into power; now that he is, Ukraine’s allies are concerned about whether he will

Last Saturday in Paris a police officer leapt from his car and levelled his handgun at a baying mob. The thugs backed off long enough for the policeman and his colleagues to make good their escape.   The chief of the Paris police, Laurent Nunez, praised the officer’s ‘sang-froid’ in successfully extracting his team from a dangerous situation. The Green MP Sandrine Rousseau took a different view, describing the policeman’s behaviour as ‘unacceptable’.  The ambition of the progressive Left is to defund the police and give the streets over to anarchists, extremists and Islamists She made no reference to the moments leading up to the confrontation, when masked men with

This week, the right-wing Alternative for Deutschland party suffered one of its first setbacks of the year, after it failed to win the mayoral election of Nordhausen, a small town in the region of Thuringia. Normally, Germany wouldn’t have much interest in the likes of Nordhausen, population 40,000. But this election has gained outsize significance for Germans worried about the seemingly unstoppable rise of the AfD. The party is currently on 22 per cent in the polls nationally and is set to become the largest party in Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg in regional elections next year.  The AfD has been underestimated in Germany for some time. When it first came to prominence in the

The United States and Britain are at war with Russia. So said the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at a UN press conference on Saturday. ‘You can call this whatever you want,’ said Lavrov. ‘But they are directly at war with us. We call this a hybrid war but that doesn’t change the reality.’ Lavrov was answering the question: ‘At what point does this actually become a direct conflict with the United States, not simply a proxy conflict via Ukraine?’ Earlier that day it had been announced that President Biden had agreed to supply Ukraine with long-range army tactical missile systems (ATACMS), capable of hitting targets 190 miles away. Ukraine

Germans are increasingly fed up with their hapless chancellor Olaf Scholz and his traffic light coalition. Just a quarter of voters believe the government has any long-term goals for the country, according to research conducted for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung by the Allensbach Institute for Demoscopy. Seven in ten voters said they associated the coalition with poor decision making and infighting. The Green-SPD-FDP coalition has had a rocky time since it came to power less than two years ago. Scholz has had to wean the country off Russian oil and gas, deal with an economic recession and manage the dilemma of whether or not to send weapons to Ukraine. It has regularly

Poland is Ukraine’s best friend in Europe. But no alliance can ever be entirely unconditional, and this is as true of the Poland–Ukraine bond as of any other. Poland, which has supplied Ukraine with tanks and fighter jets since the start of the war with Russia, has now said it will stop supplying weapons. The reason for the fall out is one that has been simmering for months: Ukraine’s grain. Since Russia withdrew its Turkish-negotiated free pass for grain exported from Ukraine ports in July, Moscow has been targeting Ukraine’s grain infrastructure at Odesa and elsewhere. As a result, while some neutral vessels are still carrying export cargoes (a laden