Europe

France host England tonight in the final match of the 2024 Six Nations. ‘Le Crunch’, as this fixture has come to be known, is never for the faint-hearted but this evening’s atmosphere is likely to be especially febrile. The match is being played in Lyon, in the south-east of France, instead of the Stade de France in the north of Paris. There’ll be 20,000 fewer fans because of Lyon’s smaller stadium but the noise they will generate will be far greater than the corporate crowd in Paris. Lyon is rugby territory. There are several famous clubs within a 100 mile radius and the chance to barrack les Rosbifs ­– the French retort

Ukraine’s bravery and daring in the face of Russian aggression marks a stark contrast with European – or at least EU – lethargy and disinclination to take sides. A recent spat over, of all things, European trade mark law is a case in point. In early 2022, a soldier on the desolate Snake Island in the Black Sea famously added to Ukrainian folklore by greeting the Russian cruiser Moskva, which had come to take over the island, with the words ‘Russian warship, go f**k yourself’. This slogan quickly became hot merchandising property. Kyiv understandably decided to put to work to aid the war effort: it applied to register the phrase as a European

Emmanuel Macron was predictably theatrical when he introduced his Bill on the end of life yesterday. In the proposed legislation, medical staff would be authorised to help their patients to die – which Macron described as a law of ‘fraternity’. He pronounced: ‘With this text, we look death in the face.’ A guaranteed headline in the Catholic daily La Croix. The President has often favoured dark suits and I have previously described him as having a funereal mien. But he was positively bouncy extolling the Bill, which will be debated by the National Assembly this spring. Macron is swimming with the tide of popular opinion He chose to kick off the

Its an old ruse to deploy foreign policy for domestic purposes. France has a long history in that vein. General de Gaulle was adept at using popular domestic anti-Americanism on the world stage to embarrass pro-Nato political forces at home; François Mitterrand exploited the early 1980s Euromissile crisis with the Soviet Union to humiliate and isolate the French Communist party. Emmanuel Macron’s startling declaration that the West should not rule out putting troops on the ground in Ukraine is less a Damascene conversion than a strategy to stymy the Rassemblement National’s runaway 10 point poll lead for June’s EU elections. Macron has doubled down on his new-found international bellicosity by

There were lots of smiles and some awkward football banter when German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock met her British counterpart David Cameron in Berlin earlier this week. Cameron was careful to tiptoe around Berlin’s recent security blunders, after an online call between German officials discussing British military activities in Ukraine was intercepted by Russia. Alliances aren’t just about money, they are also about trust and dependability Britain’s former prime minister is good at this diplomatic dance, and he made a valiant effort to not, in his words, ‘play into the hands of some Russian narrative about divisions between allies.’ But it’s hard to paper over the cracks these recent security

Yet again the question of whether to send arms to Ukraine is plaguing Olaf Scholz’s chancellorship. The issue was once more thrown into sharp focus when Russian intelligence leaked a discussion by Bundeswehr officials on the probability of sending long-range Taurus missiles to Kyiv. A recording of the conversation was splashed across the world by Russian state media.  Scholz has spent the past week trying to get a grip on the debate over Taurus missiles and shut it down, even fielding questions from plucky students on a school visit as to why he had yet to relent: ‘I am the chancellor and that’s why’. But it seems the true reason

Britain and its government has a well deserved reputation for kow-towing to foreign investors. But even they (one hopes) would draw a line at allowing a Middle East state to set up shop in the Royal Hospital Chelsea. In France, however, Emmanuel Macron’s government is studying a request from Saudi Arabia to erect its Olympic village in the Invalides during the Paris Olympics this summer.   The site is sacred for the French military. As well as housing the country’s national army museum, it is the site of the Institution Nationale des Invalides, the equivalent of the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, and is also home to a necropolis containing the tomb of

After narrowly losing power in October’s parliamentary elections, Poland’s conservative Law and Justice Party (PiS) has spent the last four months battling the reforms of Donald Tusk’s ruling coalition. Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who co-founded PiS in 2001 and has served as its chairman since 2003, must now adapt to his role in opposition. On Saturday, Kaczynski said that he would seek another term as the leader of PiS, but this won’t be an easy task. After the excitement of the last few weeks, which has included showdowns with the government over its takeover of public media and the arrests (and subsequent presidential pardon) of two opposition figures, some members of PiS’s

Are we being ‘poisoned’ by extremism? The Prime Minister seems to think so. His speech on the steps of Downing Street following the Rochdale by-election described a country where values of tolerance and civility were being deliberately undermined by Islamists and the far right. ‘Islamist extremists and the far right feed off and embolden each other,’ he warned. But in conflating those two threats, the Prime Minister made the same mistake as his predecessors. Jews, with no connection to what is happening in Gaza, are terrified by the uptick in hatred against them Sunak followed the script, endorsed by too many institutions in Britain, that the big threat to our way

A tiny island in the Indian Ocean is the latest battleground in France’s immigration debate. High immigration into Mayotte, a French territory where around 80 per cent of people live below the poverty line, is leading to a debate over what it means to be a French citizen. The row may cause France to upend its constitution. Mayotte, a tiny archipelago measuring 374 square kilometres, has seen its population almost quadruple to around 260,000 since 1991. Around half of the population now comes from the neighbouring Comoros, which voted for independence from France in 1975. Many are attracted by the prospect of their offspring becoming French citizens. But the numbers are now so high that France’s

Alexei Navalny is being laid to rest in Moscow today, a fortnight after the Russian opposition leader was found dead in a gulag in the Arctic circle. His death prompted an outpouring of grief but also anger among Western leaders. Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak and Emmanuel Macron expressed their sadness at the news and their indignation, pointing the finger of blame for Navalny’s death at Vladimir Putin. Navalny was a courageous man who paid a heavy price for his dissidence. So, too, did Jamal Khashoggi. The Saudi journalist was a fierce critic of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, using a monthly column in the Washington Post to denounce the de

Riga, Latvia At the age of 74, Inessa Novikova, who is ethnically Russian, was told she had to learn Latvian or she’d be deported. ‘I felt physically ill when the policy was announced,’ she tells me when we meet in an office close to Riga’s city centre. ‘I’ve lived here peacefully for 20 years.’ There was no requirement for her to seek Latvian citizenship after the Cold War ended. Then, it was acknowledged that ethnic Russians, who make up a quarter of Latvia’s 1.8 million population, would co-exist with ethnic Latvians. But when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, this arrangement ended. If Latvia’s ‘non-citizens’ had Russian citizenship, as Inessa did, they now