Europeans must find way to fire EU elites when they screw up
Much of the European commentariat’s theatrical horror at the re-election of Donald Trump smacks of a comfortable smugness that such a dread outcome cannot befall their beloved…
Economic liberal Lindner provokes coalition partners with free market talk
After four unhappy years shackled to a coalition of misery, the Free Democratic Party (FDP) leader and Finance Minister Christian Lindner has filed for divorce.
Germany and France lack a strategic brain on Ukraine, and here comes Trump
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz seized on Joe Biden’s final visit to Europe last week to organise a conclave of key leaders on Ukraine.
How the Greens die: suffering economy and young dump the ‘party of youth’
After another catastrophic result in yet another eastern Bundesstaat, the German Green Party has lost its leaders.
Brussels forcing production of EV cars nobody wants, sales crash 70 per cent in Germany
Some bad news for the European Union's Green New Deal: sales of electric vehicles have declined 18 per cent across the Union, led by a 33 per cent retreat in France and a…
Draghi’s plan says ‘Europe First’ and load it with debt: who thinks it will work?
Having famously saved the rickety euro from the international bond markets over a decade ago, Super Mario Draghi has now moved on to an even grander project: rescuing the…
Auto worker ‘peasants’ may force Volkswagen to stay in Germany, downplay China
Courtier: “Sire, the peasants, they’re revolting!” King Louis XVI: “I know that, they stink on ice.” – Mel Brooks, History of the World Part 1
The DSA is the EU’s enforcement arm against online free speech
It is an iron law of administrative bureaucracies that gathering power, staff and budgets is more important than providing service to the public.
Macron: can’t lead France, so can’t lead Europe, and Scholz will not help
Happy electorates prefer a stable polity and vote for parties offering to preserve it.
Workers abandoned by centre Left embrace economic nationalism
Amid the protracted battle by leading members of the EU Parliament to wrest more powers from the Council and Commission, few anticipated they would also acquire the power…
EU’s vain desire to be AI regulatory boss: 7.5bn customers say No
Brussels is again full of self-congratulation after the EU Parliament and Council passed the Artificial Intelligence Act, presented as the world’s first regulatory framework…
Germany’s Merz moves right, but enough or too much?
When Germany extended the franchise for June’s EU Parliamentary elections to 16-year-olds, it did not anticipate that some of these new voters would express their political…
Scholz’s botched China trip should be a wake-up call for Europe
You would think a European leader spooked by the prospect of transactional politics under a new Donald Trump administration might brush up on his bargaining skills while he…
The West cannot afford defeat in Ukraine: Kyiv is fighting an imperialist Russian ideology that must be seen to have lost for Europe to return to peace
Four years before he became president in 1981, Ronald Reagan announced his Cold War policy: “We win, they lose.
The tractor referendums: The EU has a choice – more democracy, or more farmer protests?
When a European leader calls a national referendum he is confident he will win, you should picture the old Road Runner villain Wile E Coyote holding a lit stick of dynamite.
Can the EU’s strategic ambitions survive its looming fiscal cliff? Without something giving, Europe won’t be able to fund and arm Ukraine
The leaders of Poland, Germany and France met earlier this month in an attempt to revive the Weimar Triangle, an attempt to coordinate defence policies that previously ran…
NATO can survive the return of Trump – and still deter Putin. It will simply mean Europe paying for more of its own defence
Much has been made recently over the prospective return of Donald Trump and his transactional style of conducting foreign relations.
Une autre grande idée, monsieur le président? European history may be facing a hinge moment – and Macron’s proposal could just turn it in the West’s favour
Judging by the bellows of discontent from his allies, French President Macron blundered badly with his suggestion that NATO countries may need to deploy combat troops in Ukraine.
Can Germany escape from Hobbiton? Berlin has had a long respite from the horrors of the twentieth century, but it must now be ready to rejoin the world
Despite Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s widely acclaimed Zeitenwende speech in the immediate aftermath of the Russian invasion, Germany remains stuck in its pre-war strategic stasis…