Europe

Vilnius, Lithuania This week, the world’s eyes were on the Lithuanian capital Vilnius as it welcomed global leaders for Nato’s 74th summit. The event was a logistical challenge not helped by the fact that Vilnius is only 30km away from the border with Belarus, which is now home to Russian nuclear weapons. Commercial flights were suspended for the duration of the summit. Air defence systems were stationed. Four-thousand troops, undercover police officers and bomb detection dogs roamed the streets. A Boeing E-3 Sentry – Nato’s eyes in the sky – circled the capital while a 30km radius no-fly zone was imposed.  Shuttles to and from the exhibition centre had paint

In January this year, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak outlined his five priorities for Britain against a hazy timetable. Meanwhile in France, after months of parliamentary opposition, strikes and demonstrations against his pension reforms, President Macron’s legislation gained assent by a constitutional sleight of hand. To appease the country’s heightened state of tension in May, Macron pledged to return France to stability and order within ‘one hundred days’. ‘We have before us 100 days of pacification, of unity, of ambition and action in the service of France’. That period expires on 14 July. An audit of either leader’s achievements to date has its challenges, especially given the recent most violent and widespread

Another day, another spat between Warsaw and Brussels. This time, Poland has declined to participate in the European Union’s latest plan to relocate migrants and asylum seekers within the bloc, with countries who refuse being expected to pay €20,000 per refugee. Hungary has also voted against the pact, while Malta, Lithuania, Slovakia, Bulgaria have quietly abstained.  On 15 June, the Polish parliament (the Sejm) went further and passed a resolution opposing the plan, with the ruling conservative Law and Justice party (PiS) announcing a national referendum on the matter. The referendum will take place on the same day as the general election in either October or November this year.  ‘We

As the Nato summit on international security opens this week in Vilnius, one obvious issue will be the success or otherwise of the Ukrainian counter-offensive. Apart from the liberation of a few villages, where are the victories earlier forecast by figures like head of military intelligence Kirill Budanov, who predicted the Ukrainian army would be in Crimea by the end of spring? Hopes of a quick push to the Azov sea, inspired by the retaking of Kharkhiv last September, have hit a sandbar this time round: denser Russian defence lines and widespread use of landmines. Come autumn, the weather will be against the Ukrainians too, the muddy season making a counter-offensive more

It’s satisfying when a jigsaw piece slots into place. Today we heard that Wagner leader Evgeny Prigozhin met Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin just a few days after his abortive mutiny of 23-24 June. That detail helps clear up some of the confusion of this past week. How come Prigozhin has been at liberty in Russia? We were told he would be going directly into exile in Belarus. Why is the Federal Security Service (FSB) apparently no longer seeking to arrest him? Is his Wagner mercenary army being disbanded or not?  Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov has now acknowledged that, on 29 June, Prigozhin was among 35 people invited to a three-hour meeting in Moscow held to discuss

There are 17.9 million residents in the Netherlands, and this year the country expects 45,000 requests for asylum. Barges, tents and sports halls are full of people waiting for their claim to be processed, while the country is suffering a housing crisis largely due to historic under-building. Last year the country made headlines around the world when people were forced to sleep rough outside an asylum registration centre in Ter Apel, a baby died in a crowded sports hall in the town, and the country’s own Médecins Sans Frontières stepped in to offer aid. Whoever pulled the pin, some in the Netherlands are delighted at the prospect of a general election Asylum is the

Cultural issues, or ‘Woke Wars’, have surfaced to inflame an already tense general election held in the scorching temperatures of a Spanish summer. Spain’s third largest party – the hard-right populist Vox – is fuelling a backlash among Spaniards against town halls flying LBGT flags. Vox has insisted that the symbol of the LGBT movement be removed from the regional authority office in the Balearic Islands. A new socialist law targeting male domestic violence is another central plank in the party’s campaign. Vox, which is led by Santiago Abascal, argues that the law discriminates against men and should be amended to cover all domestic violence without specifying the sex of offenders. But will

Failing to tackle immigration isn’t only a problem for Rishi Sunak. The European Union is also struggling to deal with the issue. Now, Brussels has devised a plan for dividing up among its member states the would-be migrants at the EU’s doors. But Poland and Hungary are not happy. The EU used qualified majority voting, which is intended to allow a sufficient number of its larger countries to override a small number of holdouts, to push the idea through. Essentially each member state will be given a quota and could then be charged €20,000 (£17,000) per head for falling short. This is legally fairly watertight, since, under EU law, immigration is generally

The riots that have ravaged France in recent days have given Eric Zemmour a second wind. The leader of the right wing Reconquest party has been on the airwaves and in the newspapers, saying, with a touch of schadenfreude, ‘I told you so’.  In a television interview on Saturday evening, Zemmour explained that the reason he entered politics in late 2021 was because of what he described as the Republic’s twenty-year policy of ‘crazy mass immigration’. It was the issue on which he campaigned during last year’s presidential and parliamentary elections. Unlike Marine Le Pen and her National Rally party, Zemmour barely mentioned the cost of living crisis; immigration and Islam were

How dangerous are riots to the very existence of the French state? Most commentators avoid the question and concentrate on causes. The more whimsical attribute cause to that clichéd French historical reflex of insurrection; the sociologists to poverty and discrimination in the banlieues (suburbs); the far-left to French institutional racism and right-wing policies; conservative politicians to excess immigration, the ghettoization of France and the state’s retreat from enforcing law and order. But a growing chorus now evokes an unmentionable potential consequence: civil war. Of most concern is that those voices include groups with first-hand knowledge of the state of the country: the police, the army, domestic intelligence. On Friday, following three days

The Rugby World Cup kicks off in just under ten weeks with hosts France playing New Zealand in the Stade de France. The national stadium sits squarely in Seine-Saint-Denis, a district which yesterday was smouldering after a night of anarchy. Shops were looted, cars torched and a bus station destroyed in an orgy of violence that was replicated across the republic.   President Macron cut short a trip to Brussels for a crisis meeting with ministers and security chiefs in Paris on Friday morning, and he reportedly said there will be ‘no taboos’ in doing what is necessary to restore law and order. Further details will be forthcoming but there

France endured its worst night of rioting yet on Thursday as violence continued across the country. For the third consecutive evening, youths went on the rampage in most major cities, despite the presence of 40,000 police. Shops were looted, town halls attacked, police stations firebombed and vehicles were hijacked in extraordinary scenes of urban warfare. The police fought running battles with mobs and made 421 arrests, over half of which were in the capital. The epicentre of the anarchy was in Nanterre, in the west of the city, where on Tuesday morning 17-year-old Nahel was shot dead by police as he sped away from a traffic stop.  The officer who

The government’s loss in its Rwanda appeal spells trouble for Rishi Sunak. But liberals are delighted: ‘Massive result,’ said the barrister Adam Wagner after the Court of Appeal ruled that would-be asylum seekers cannot be sent to the African country while their claims are processed. Sunak plans to seek permission to appeal to the Supreme Court – but his pledge to ‘stop the boats’ looks to be in trouble. Or is it? There is more to today’s decision than meets the eye. The victory hardly resounding. Of the five grounds of appeal, ranging from super-technical ones like retained EU law and data protection issues to more general issues of conditions in Rwanda,