Europe

‘Ku Klux Klan Brandenburg’ was emblazoned across the black T-shirt on a guy in line behind me at the Total petrol station in Peitz, 90 minutes south of Berlin. I considered asking why he liked the KKK but thought better of it after noting his girth and the grimace he gave me. Popularity of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party and neo-Nazi groups is surging in eastern Germany. The AfD is now the second strongest party in nationwide opinion polls after the opposition Christian Democrats and ahead of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats. It is anti-immigrant, pro-Russian, anti-American and demands Germany quit the euro. The head of Germany’s domestic intelligence

In the last three years, Mali, Guinea, Sudan, Burkina Faso and Niger have all undergone coup d’états. The most recent regime change was last week in the west African nation of Niger, where Mohamed Bazoum was overthrown by the elements of the presidential guard.   The coup’s leader is Colonel-Major Amadou Abdramane. Last Wednesday he informed Niger’s 24 million citizens on state-run television that President Bazoum had been removed because of ‘the continuous deterioration of the security situation, the bad social and economic management’.  Islamist terrorism is just one reason why Emmanuel Macron is a deeply unpopular figure Military men were also behind the coups in the other four African

I found Jean-Pierre standing at a half-open window gulping down lungfuls of stale Dutch air as our night train chuntered, unseeing, through an expectoration of towns: Zutphen, Eefde, Gorssell. He was 79 years old, he told me, and returning to Berlin for the first time in 61 years for a meeting with an old friend. Our steward made it absolutely clear he couldn’t give a stuff that there was no buffet car Back in 1962, Jean-Pierre had been a very young Belgian Jesuit employed in smuggling hard currency from West to East Berlin, which he did by stuffing the notes inside a plaster cast which covered his right leg. There

France is preparing to evacuate its citizens from Niger following the coup d’état in the west African country on 26 July. The French embassy in Niamey – the capital of Niger – said in a statement that the air evacuation ‘will take place very soon and over a very short period of time’. Last week’s coup, in which general Abdourahamane Tchiani of the elite presidential guard seized power from president Mohamed Bazoum, is the latest turmoil in a region that has become dangerously destabilised in the last three years. There have been coups in Mali and Burkina Faso which, like Niger, were former French colonies but have turned against their

Hours after Moscow was once again attacked by unmanned drones in the early hours of Sunday, Volodymyr Zelensky has declared that the war is turning back on Russia. Speaking in his daily video address, the Ukrainian president stated that ‘Russian aggression had failed on the battlefield’. ‘Ukraine is getting stronger,’ he continued. ‘Gradually, the war is returning to the territory of Russia – to its symbolic centres and military bases, and this is an inevitable, natural and absolutely fair process.’ This is the sixth drone attack on the Russian capital in three months and the latest incident appears to mark a significant departure in tactics for Ukraine. Until now, Kyiv

Emmanuel Macron broke his silence about the recent riots in France at the start of this week. In a speech in New Caledonia in the southwest Pacific, the president of the Republic declared that the country required a ‘return to authority at every level’.  He added: ‘The lesson I draw from this is order, order, order.’ There was a certain irony to the president’s proclamation. He spoke as a crisis erupted in France, at the heart of which is a power struggle between the police and the justice system.  Resentment has been festering for a number of years within the police – among senior officers as well as the rank and

Geoffroy Lejeune knows how Nigel Farage feels. Like the former Ukip leader turned TV host, Lejeune’s ‘values’ have made him persona non grata among France’s progressive elite. The 34-year-old journalist was last month appointed editor-in-chief of Journal du Dimanche (JDD), France’s only dedicated Sunday newspaper with a circulation of 140,000.  Newspaper staff were outraged. They downed tools, and have been striking now for five weeks. The papers’ journalists remain ‘more determined than ever’, they say, to continue their industrial action.  The real danger to democracy aren’t the likes of Lejeune or Farage, whatever their opinions may be The problem is Lejeune’s politics. He is described as ‘far right’, and counts

Depending on how you look at the result of yesterday’s general election in Spain, either everyone won or no one won. It had been called five months early by outgoing Socialist prime minister Pedro Sanchez, who hoped to block a resurgent Spanish right after its emphatic victories in regional elections on 28 May. The vote drew 70.4 per cent of the population to the polls, 4.2 per cent more than in 2019. This was a surprisingly high turnout for the middle of summer, when a lot of Spaniards are either on holiday or sheltering from the intense heat.   Prolonged political freezes, sleep-walking governments and prop-up arrangements have become the norm

The world is waking up to pictures of fresh destruction in the Ukrainian port city of Odesa, which has been under constant Russian fire since the grain export deal collapsed last week. At least one person has been killed and 19 more injured following missile strikes overnight. The roof of the recently-rebuilt Transfiguration Cathedral has partially collapsed, and there have been films of local residents trying to rescue icons and other sacred artefacts. The footage is striking – but a tiny part of what’s now at stake. Back in July 2022, Russia agreed not to destroy Ukraine’s grain-exporting infrastructure given how important the foodstuff is to Africa and world food

Nearly four weeks on from his failed coup, Evgeniy Prigozhin, leader of the Wagner group, has finally resurfaced in public. A video published on the social media app Telegram shows the mercenary chief apparently greeting newly–arrived fighters at a military camp in Belarus and praising them for their efforts on the front line in Ukraine. Due to the near-darkness in which the footage was taken, only Prigozhin’s silhouette is visible; nevertheless, his distinctive bald head, faintly illuminated by the setting sun, and his voice make him confidently identifiable. It appears the video was taken in recent days at a military camp identified by some as the one at Osipovichy in the eastern Mogilev region.

Apart from the 96 arrests and 255 burned cars, Bastille Day passed off without a hitch in France. A bullish Interior Minister, Gerald Darmanin, expressed his satisfaction in a tweet, thanking the 45,000 policemen and women who had been deployed across the country. It says much for the state of France that avoiding a riot on their national day is a cause for celebration.  Still, one can understand why the government is grateful for small mercies after the trauma of the recent uprising. The financial cost of the damage caused by the rioters is predicted to top €1 billion (£858 million), a staggering sum for a country that is already dangerously