Europe

‘Message me when you get there.’ This phrase became a rallying cry when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets across Greece this week, in protests sparked by the country’s deadliest train disaster which killed 57 people earlier this month. Anger against the government was palpable, with protesters shouting ‘murderers’ outside the parliament building in Athens, forcing PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis to postpone his plans to announce the date of the next elections.   To understand why this particular incident threatens to upend the ruling party’s certainties, we must unpack the phrase used by the protestors. It’s hard to understate the emotional resonance of that simple line for Greek

There was more than a whiff of ‘bromance’ between Rishi Sunak and Emmanuel Macron when they met at the Anglo-French summit in the city of love. The weather in Paris was grey and cold, but there was no denying the warmth of the greeting that Macron extended to Sunak as the PM arrived at the Elysee yesterday. This is hardly a surprise: after Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, the president was just pleased to be hosting a PM who knows how to mind his Ps and Qs.   Sunak said he was ‘fortunate’ and ‘excited’ to have the opportunity to work with Macron, whom he described in French as ‘mon ami’. Macron looked

Pandemics kill people in two ways, said Chris Whitty at the start of the Covid outbreak: directly and indirectly, via disruption. He was making the case for caution amidst strong public demand for lockdown, stressing the tradeoffs. While Covid deaths were counted daily, the longer-term effects would take years to come through. The only real way of counting this would be to look at ‘excess deaths’, i.e. how many more people die every month (or year) compared to normal. That data is now coming through.  Using the most common methodology, Sweden is at the bottom – below Australia and New Zealand, which had plenty of lockdowns but very few Covid

On 22 March 1968 the slow burn that would eventually flare into France’s ‘May ‘68’ began. The radical student movement known as ‘22 March’, with Daniel Cohn-Bendit (Dany le Rouge) at its heart, was unaware its actions on this day would lead to riots and the eventual paralysis of the French state after workers joined them. History does not repeat itself, it echoes. Even then, echoes from the past do not necessarily produce the same effects, no matter how many revolutions France has known. Nevertheless, 55 years later on this 7 March, France will be paralysed by widespread rolling strikes and demonstrations against President Macron’s proposed legislation to extend the retirement age from

After months of delay, the Hungarian parliament finally started the process of approving Finland and Sweden’s Nato membership this week. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party announced that it would back the two countries’ membership bids, but with Hungary the only country besides Turkey to have dragged its heels on the issue, he is again being accused of being the black sheep of the EU.  If western powers have an enemy in Orbán, it is arguably one they created themselves Orbán claims that despite his personal endorsement of Finnish and Swedish Nato membership, his ‘MPs aren’t very enthusiastic.’ ‘Serious discussions’ are needed to persuade his disgruntled party members, he says, even though his MPs

On 2 March in Gabon, West Africa, President Macron declared that ‘the days of France-Afrique are over’.  Since the early nineteenth century the African continent has emblazoned France’s aspiration to international power status. Like any empire it provided natural resources. It also provided manpower. Unlike other imperial powers with surplus domestic populations to deploy, France’s demography was stagnant at 40 million from the 1840s until the 1940s. Africa provided troops for her armies (tirailleurs sénégalais) to compete with Germany’s demography and growing forces. Even after the troubled decolonisation in the 1960s Africa continued to provide cheap labour to a thriving French domestic industry. France’s Francophone African empire – combined with its south-east Asian colonies

There is much excitement among western Europe’s chattering classes after Elly Schlein was elected the new leader of Italy’s left-wing Democratic party. It is the first time that a woman has led the Italian left. The Guardian quoted the 37-year-old as saying her party will now be ‘a problem’ for Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s conservative PM.  On the contrary. Schlein’s elevation to party leader is an electoral gift for Meloni, whose sex is the only thing she has in common with her new foe. Schlein has not drawn any lessons from the collapse of the French Socialists Meloni was raised by a single mum in a working-class district of Rome and

‘Look at the dates.’ That’s what I am told as I enter the State Elders Room in Tallinn. I’m here to interview the woman dubbed Europe’s new Iron Lady – Estonia’s Prime Minister Kaja Kallas. The walls in the room between her office and the cabinet room are lined with portraits. A small plaque beneath each one records the dates of their birth and, more significantly, death. The first shows that its subject died in 1941. The next I notice also reads 1941. So too the third. And the fourth. The story is soon clear. Each of those elders of this now proud independent wealthy European state died fighting in

Silvio Berlusconi has been acquitted of paying bribes worth €10 million (£8.9 million) to female guests at his notorious bunga bunga parties in return for false testimony. The verdict brings to an end a series of trials that dragged on for well over a decade – and while the 86-year-old has ‘won’ this case, the damage has been done. The political effect of the bunga bunga trials as they were called has been devastating, as has the impact on the lives of those involved. They set in train a series of events that included the forced resignation of the media tycoon in November 2011 as Italy’s prime minister and made him, and Italy, a

France’s President Macron has raised hackles time and again with his interventions on Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. For all his grandstanding bombast though, he has often raised the policy dilemmas that the West really ought to be discussing. Most recently, he warned, while returning from the Munich Security Conference, that active efforts to topple Vladimir Putin would be a mistake, because someone more dangerous would succeed him. Discussions about Russia’s future after Putin – and the advisability of outright seeking to unseat him – are in many ways a touchstone about attitudes towards Russia. For those who believe that, because they are not resisting, the majority of Russians are actively

Emmanuel Macron and Giorgia Meloni are no strangers to having a spat. The first was last autumn, about migrants; this time they have fallen out over Ukraine.  The Italian prime minister made no secret of her irritation with the French president last week on discovering he had invited Volodymyr Zelensky to Paris. It was, declared Meloni, ‘inappropriate’ for Macron to host the Ukraine president for dinner last Wednesday at the Elysee. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz received an invite too, which evidently antagonised Meloni even more.  ‘There were two European leaders, there were 25 missing,’ reflected the Italian PM. ‘When it comes to Ukraine, what interests us above everything else is

A notable feature of how the French public view the war in Ukraine is that the strongest support for its continuation is among voters who identify as Centrists and Socialists. Those most in favour of a peace settlement are backers of the left-wing Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the right-wing Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour. A poll in December revealed that 69 per cent of the former and 77 per cent of the latter would prefer that negotiations take precedence over the delivery of weapons to Ukraine, a number that rose to 88 per cent among Zemmour loyalists. These dropped to 57 per cent for Socialists and 60 per cent for

Do not take too seriously the demand of Roger Karoutchi, a Républicain who rejoices in the title of deputy speaker of the French Senate, that the mortal remains of Napoleon III, the last Emperor of France, be repatriated from Farnborough, in Hampshire, where they have lain in an immense sarcophagus since 1879, to Metropolitan France itself. ‘He is the only reigning sovereign who is buried abroad,’ Karoutchi complains. This business of moving Napoleon comes up from time to time, but there is no chance of it happening. The body, which is guarded by fierce Benedictine monks who have never forgotten or forgiven the murder of the Carmelite nuns beheaded by French

Macho Italy’s first woman prime minister Giorgia Meloni has now governed for 100 days and I cannot help but notice the enormous elephant in the room: the failure of the global media even to acknowledge, let alone apologise for, how wrong they were to warn the world that Italy was on the verge of a far-right, ergo fascist, take-over.   During the election campaign and immediate aftermath the crème de la crème of the world’s media were chock-a-block with warnings that Meloni and her party – Brothers of Italy – were the equivalent of a Biblical plague of locusts in jackboots about to engulf Italy and from there Europe.   These awful people were the heirs to the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, we