Europe

When has a government ever offered an amnesty to fugitives from justice in order to stay in office? That’s what’s happening in Spain at the moment. Following July’s general election the only way in which the caretaker prime minister, the socialist Pedro Sánchez, can cling to power is by cutting a deal with a hodgepodge of small parties, including two Catalan separatist groups. Their price includes a general amnesty for those indicted for their involvement in the illegal referendum on independence for Catalonia in 2017 and the subsequent unilateral declaration of independence. In July’s election Sánchez’s left-wing party, PSOE, won just 121 seats. The support of the radical left party

German chancellor Olaf Scholz still doesn’t get it. ‘Der Fisch stinkt vom Kopf’ (the fish stinks from its head) is a popular German saying. It’s proven right by Scholz’s abysmal failure to lead since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He’s failing again with Israel, declaring the Jewish state is Germany’s ‘Staatsräson’, or raison d-etat, but never spelling out what this means. Scholz has flopped with his tepid attempts to explain what’s at stake for Germany and Europe in Ukraine and Israel and why Berlin should be the leadership power of the EU. This problem is partly due to Scholz’s nature. If you think you’re the smartest guy in the room

Pranked by a Kremlin-friendly comedy duo, Italy’s Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, spoke for many when she confessed her ‘fatigue’ with the war in Ukraine. But there is some bad news for all the Europeans ‘tired’ of the conflict. Europe’s real job will only begin when the current war of attrition eventually congeals along more or less static lines, with or without a formal armistice.  The task ahead will not only involve physical reconstruction, budget support, or bringing Ukraine closer to EU membership. Much more importantly, it will involve guaranteeing the stability of whatever formal or informal settlement arises from the war.  The prospect of a sizeable US deployment in post-war Ukraine

Daugavpils You can tell quite a bit about a place by the number of national flags on display. One or two on public buildings here and there is a healthy genuflection to a moderate and comfortable patriotism. But groups of the same national flag every five paces, on every building and festooning the parks and boulevards – well, there’s something going on, isn’t there? You’re in a place where trouble is surely just around the corner, a place where the national authorities may not feel entirely secure. What sort of trouble? Well, one wouldn’t want to be over-dramatic, obvs, but in this particular case, world war three. The Russian invasion

Giorgia Meloni has just marked her first year as Italy’s prime minister. When elected, she was described as a far-right leader, the most right-wing that Italy has had since Mussolini. So after a year in office, were these labels justified? What kind of leader has she been? And has she done anything to justify the ‘far-right’ label still lazily applied to her? While running for office, Meloni asked to be judged by her words and policies, not by the fact that as a teenager she had joined Italy’s long disbanded post-fascist party. ‘Usually, Italian politics are somewhat comical,’ Giovanni Orsina of Luiss University in Rome recently admitted. ‘But by Italian

Emmanuel Macron has suggested the formation of an international coalition to combat Hamas similar to the one deployed against the Islamic State several years ago. The president of France floated the idea on Tuesday during his visit to Israel. An Elysee source later fleshed out the proposal in more detail. ‘We are available to build a coalition against Hamas or to include Hamas in what we are already doing in the coalition against Isis,’ said the source, adding that as well as operations on the ground, the coalition is ‘involved in the training of Iraqi forces, the sharing of information between partners, and the fight against terrorism funding.’  Isis is far

The EU’s response to the war between Israel and Gaza has been badly muddled. While Rishi Sunak and Joe Biden have been making their view crystal clear on Israel’s right to defend itself against Hamas’s attacks, Josep Borrell, the top EU diplomat, has toed a different line. Borrell this week called for what was effectively an Israeli ceasefire to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza. Israel’s more ardent European allies are furious. ‘We cannot contain the humanitarian catastrophe if Gaza’s terrorism continues. There will be no security and no peace for either Israel or the Palestinians if this terrorism continues,’ Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s foreign minister, said. Her Austrian counterpart, Alexander Schallenberg, echoed that

When an Islamist extremist charged into his school in Arras, northern France, with a knife, Christian Berroyer could have hidden away. Instead, the caretaker decided to confront the killer. ‘I grabbed a chair without thinking and I went outside,’ said Berroyer. Asked why he did what he did, Berroyer said he was ‘just doing his duty as a Frenchman’. Berroyer returned to work last week, just a few days after that attack in which a teacher was stabbed to death. His bravery marks a stark contrast to the cowardice of France’s politicians. The school handyman joins a list of other Frenchmen who have ‘done their duty’ in the last decade.

Sahra Wagenknecht, a pivotal figure of the German left, has decided to go up against her former party by launching a new protest movement. Today, Wagenknecht gave a press conference announcing that she was leaving Die Linke party to run an organisation called the ‘Sahra Wagenknecht alliance’. She argued that Germany’s infrastructure was in a bad way and warned that the country faces a loss of prosperity if, among other things, it does not give up on its dogged pursuit of green policies. ‘Things cannot continue the way they are currently going,’ she said. Over the past decade, Wagenknecht has become one of the most well-known left-wing politicians in Germany,

Last year, a French broadcaster asked if Belgium was in danger of becoming a narco state. The question was posed in light of the news of the cocaine flooding into the country and the growing influence of Belgium’s drug cartels.   Others believe that Belgium most closely resembles an Islamic state. The former Belgian senator Alain Destexhe accused his country this week of living in denial and allowing Belgium to become ‘a laboratory of Islamism’.  France has its own grave struggle with Islamists but at least there is an awareness of the danger Belgian has undergone a radical demographic change this century, particularly in the capital. Of Brussels’s 1.2 million

For a man so keen to thrust himself onto the international stage, Emmanuel Macron has been surprisingly quiet over the last fortnight. At the beginning of 2022, the President of France shuttled across Europe in an attempt to avert conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Though his diplomatic efforts were criticised in some Anglophone quarters, Macron earned the respect of many in France for attempting to talk Vladimir Putin out of war.   Now there is another war raging but this time Macron has had little to say about the conflict between Israel and Hamas. He has offered his measured support to Israel but he has not yet followed Joe Biden, Ursula

The recent election in Poland has been presented by some as a triumph of liberalism over the dark forces of populism, but this is a misreading of events. It’s said that the Law and Justice party, which has ruled Poland for the past eight years, was trounced, but it won the largest share of votes (35 per cent) and the largest number of seats in parliament. It is nevertheless almost certain to lose power because three other parties – Donald Tusk’s Civic Platform (PO), the centre-right Third Way and the Left party – will likely form a coalition against it. The result does little to reverse Europe’s rightward drift, and

Change in Poland looks likely. A second exit poll gives the ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) the most votes, but not enough to form a majority. The nativist right-wing party Konfederacja might’ve helped them form a coalition, but even combined the two parties still don’t have the numbers. Ex-Eurocrat Donald Tusk, who leads Civic Platform (KO), says he has built a coalition with Lewica, on the left, and Third Way (TD), conservatives, that can govern Poland. The result is not particularly good for the Polish people, or for Europe, but the European Commission in Brussels, and progressives on the Continent generally, will be delighted. Brussels benefits twice over from Tusk’s

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