The Lukashenko regime in Minsk’s move against a university in Lithuania looks like part of an authoritarian playbook that Europe has already named, documented and still not fully learned how to answer.
Patriarch Kirill, the 79-year old head of the Russian Orthodox Church, has long been a steadfast supporter of president Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine. Earlier this month, he praised Russian troops for their “glorious accomplishments” in Ukraine — which killed over 2,500 civilians last year alone.
Despite years of evidence and verified reports by a senior official within the EU’s border agency Frontex, the European Commission still won’t acknowledge that Greece pushes back migrants, which is illegal under EU law.
The European Arctic is, above all, European — and it is time Brussels treated it that way. The European Arctic produces a disproportionate share of Europe’s food security, energy supply and strategic raw materials. The gap between what this region contributes and what it receives in political attention is not a detail. It is a strategic failure.
Next month two elections take place on the far north-western fringe of Europe that may, in a small way, shape the future size of the EU. Both countries are, currently, non-EU members. Both have populations keen on membership. Both would fit the accession criteria, with very few teething problems.
They are Scotland and Wales.
The European Parliament has set out its mandate. We stand ready to negotiate constructively with the Council, with a clear goal: agreement by the end of 2026, so new programmes can be launched on schedule in January 2028, write S&D MEP lead co-negotiator Carla Tavares.
In Denmark, it is already too late. The postal service has ended after 400 years and with it 1,500 jobs. Letters are now delivered at high cost by a single private logistics company with a monopoly over critical infrastructure. Danish residents, especially the 271,000 digitally exempt individuals dependent on physical letters, will suffer the consequences.
Talk of a ‘coal comeback’ in the wake of the blockade of the Persian Gulf are disproven by data showing coal generation is down globally.
Beyond the relief of seeing Viktor Orbán gone, the EU should resist premature normalisation and not give Péter Magyar a blank cheque. It should require clear commitments and wait for concrete progress before unblocking EU funds. That also means that the process should not be politicised. This will depend on the European Commission but also on the European People’s Party — the party of Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, Donald Tusk and now Magyar.
Autocrats and ‘strongmen’ want us to feel defeated on international law. But ‘the fact that certain laws are being violated does not, of course, mean those laws no longer exist’, writes Caroline de Gruyter.
€500m per day is the cost – and counting – of the Iran war to Europe’s energy bills.
Strip migration out of the equation, and Italy’s population would still be shrinking at pace. Yet politically, the country is moving in the opposite direction. Giorgia Meloni’s government has doubled down on a hard-line approach: extending detention, tightening family reunification, accelerating asylum procedures and pursuing expansive forms of externalisation beyond Italy’s borders.
For Brussels, the immediate temptation will be to read Peter Magyar’s victory as a strategic realignment: the return of Hungary to the European mainstream after years of institutional conflict. But Peter Magyar is not the political antithesis of Orbán. His emergence reflects, in part, a reconfiguration within Hungary’s conservative political space rather than its outright displacement.
Hubris takes down Hungary’s strongman. It is also a stunning blow for their backers. Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping pretended to admire Orbán. But what they really liked was that he made Hungary into a springboard for attacking the European Union.
Editors will be reaching for a thesaurus to find variants of “brutal” and “crushing” to describe the result, but the magic word is “two-thirds”.
When Europeans open a streaming app tonight, they do not simply choose entertainment. They enter an attention system that decides what is surfaced, what is sidelined, and what becomes ‘normal’ through rankings, recommendations, and autoplay. As the EU prepares for the 2026 review of the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD), this is no longer just a cultural debate. It is a question of market design, democratic resilience, and strategic capacity.
“Never interrupt your enemy whilst he is making a mistake,” Napoleon said. It is just one of the many historical lessons of warfare that US president Donald Trump and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu have ignored over the past 40 days. The result is that they have lost the war against Iran and failed to achieve any of their objectives.
The European Parliament, led by a conservative far-right alliance, endorses a drastic expansion of deportations. In effect, the far-right has used migration to break into the European political centre.
In a world that often feels as though it’s spinning out of control, Nasa’s Artemis moon mission offers a rare moment of reassurance and more personally, dreams that we are greater than the horrors inflicted onto us by the likes of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, the regime in Iran and the utter chaos and violence across Sudan.
Millions of euros worth of EU subsidies and taxpayer money is fuelling the very market that leads to spying on journalists, activitists, politicians and people in the EU, and undermines our democracies.