Europe

Greta Thunberg is in Paris. Yes, as if the French haven’t got enough on their assiettes with “youths” and “students” reducing the cradle of European civilization to smoking ruins, the overgrown Shirley Temple of Stockholm rocked up this morning outside a school in Saint-Denis. She told the crowd, “Young people are not being included in the conversation. Our future is being robbed away from us!” The clumsy structure of the latter sentence gave me an eerie sensation of an Armageddon-themed ABBA lyric. I can picture a mournful Frida singing it over flickering firelight. Few are the child stars, like Roddy McDowall or Bonnie Langford, who can sustain an adult career Greta certainly gets around, doesn’t she? Her passport must be like a tattered old dollar bill.

On September 21, students at the Lycée Saint-Exupéry in Créteil, south-east of Paris, staged a protest. They had a list of grievances. Classes were overcrowded and there was a shortage of teachers. They were also dismayed at the decaying state of some of the school buildings and the automated university admissions platform they feel deprives them of autonomy. Students filmed the protest and uploaded the footage onto social media. It went viral. Across France, children in other secondary schools joined the protest. They aired the same complaints as their peers in Créteil – and more. Some students described seeing rats in classrooms, others of enduring leaking ceilings and moldy walls. For many, memories of the summer heatwave were still painfully fresh.

Spain’s socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez could have waited until August next year before facing the voters. Instead, he has called a snap election for November 29. In Sánchez's announcement, he declared that Spain had become a global benchmark for peace, feminism and prosperity, claiming the best economic and social results achieved by any democratic government in Spain. Recognizing that his “progressive” coalition government has also made mistakes, Sánchez, who has been prime minister for eight years, explained that in order to do more he needs to “renew and broaden the support of the people.” The immediate trigger was Friday’s defeat of his emergency housing legislation.

The government of France held a crisis meeting yesterday afternoon as a school protest movement intensified in violence. On Wednesday, 625 people were arrested and 83 gendarmes and police officers were injured as youths protested outside hundreds of schools nationwide. Yesterday, a school in Nantes was severely damaged after being firebombed and a fire engine was destroyed in Marseille. In the city of Reims there were fierce clashes between protesters and police, and only the use of tear gas dispersed the demonstrators. In some cities, such as Rennes, it was reported that university students were protesting alongside the high school pupils. The government claimed yesterday that the movement has been hijacked “by LFI and its far-left proxies.

On Sunday, three suspicious trucks were spotted speeding toward the Royal Air Force airfield in Fairford, England. Shortly after, five masked men, later identified as British nationals, were detained under the Terrorism Act of 2006 and the Explosives Act of 1875. Had a bomb attack just been foiled? If so who planned it, and to what end? Then, on Monday, the five suspects were abruptly released on bail.  President Trump seemed nonplussed by the move. “I would not have released them,” he told reporters, but was full of praise for the conduct of the British authorities. The safety of RAF Fairford is a matter for the American President – it is operated by the US Air Force, the only airfield in Europe that can accommodate its heavy bombers.

“Prepare for war,” was the message from Estonian EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas to the European Defence Agency last year. And Estonia has: its 2026 defense expenditure is 5.4 percent of GDP, the second highest in Europe. Citizens are advised by the government to keep an emergency supply of 21 liters of drinking water per person permanently on hand. A survival checklist has also been published, including ready-to-eat, high-energy foods, prescription medications, a bank card, cell phone with charger and a stock of ready cash. The country’s authorities don’t mince their words.

Last Sunday, Germany saw a tale of two election victories. The right-wing Alternative for Deutschland narrowly edged out the left-ish Social Democrats to come first in the backwater state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania north of Berlin. Massive media coverage focused on the AfD’s success, its allegedly extreme views on immigration and the danger it poses to Germany’s democracy.  The next day, the huge media contingent that had camped out in Schwerin, the state capital, returned to the capital of Berlin. It’s where most domestic reporters are based and from where international reporters fly home. Most chose to ignore the results of the Berlin state election held on the same day in which Die Linke (The Left), the legal successor to the East German Communist party, also came first.

Messages circulating in Morocco are calling for another mass crossing into Ceuta, Spain’s North African exclave, on Wednesday. Spain has activated preventive measures and Morocco has reinforced the frontier with security personnel, water cannon, military vehicles and extra road controls. Perhaps nothing will happen. A similar online call for Sunday came to nothing. And Spanish foreign minister José Manuel Albares says the latest messages have not acquired the momentum on social media that preceded the extraordinary events of July 30 and 31. Forewarned may prove to be forearmed.

When Earl Spencer was interviewed by Larry King in 1997, he had nothing but words of praise for the-then Prince Charles, in the aftermath of Diana’s death and funeral. When Larry King asked if the Prince of Wales had had anything to say about Spencer’s fiery eulogy, his guest replied, “Not about the speech, no, but he was perfectly polite all day,” and went on to stress that, “Nothing nasty has ever been said about it by him to me.” Spencer attempted to claim that he was drawing a distinction between Charles as king and Charles as unpleasant brother-in-law.

"GREAT NEWS," hollered @realDonaldTrump on Truth Social yesterday. "Thanks to the bold leadership of my friend, Karol Nawrocki, President of Poland, major progress is being made toward establishing a US Army base in Poland." A lot is going on on Europe’s Eastern Front. The Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk declared around the same time that Russia is planning "hybrid strikes using drones and missiles against countries supporting Ukraine, including Poland.

The Piddington result is in. Ninety-two percent of the voters in the tiny Oxfordshire village have voted to secede from the United Kingdom – 285 yes, 26 no. Why? Because the British government plans to dump hundreds and hundreds of small boat “asylum seekers” in a military base slap bang next to the Piddingtonians.  Of course, this is a symbolic gesture. There is no legal mechanism to actually achieve secession, which is perhaps just as well. As we know, it’s hard enough to get British politicians to acknowledge the results of an official national referendum, let alone a wildcat local one.

How many of the migrants who crossed from Morocco to Ceuta at the end of July remain in the city? Madrid has suggested that “only” about 5,000 remain in its North African exclave (population 83,000). But in that case why has Spain’s socialist government promised to create reception places for 6,000? The Ceuta government, meanwhile, puts the figure at about 13,000. Other local estimates run as high as 15,000. The argument over what Madrid knew about Ceuta beforehand is becoming increasingly embarrassing Hundreds of migrants unable to find places in official accommodation have been sleeping rough. One resident told El País: “Do you know what it is like to live with hundreds of blokes outside your front door shitting and pissing on the corners?

British PM Andy Burnham’s move to impose sanctions on West Bank settlements is politically savvy – but not because it will achieve his purported aim of advancing a two-state solution. For one thing, the impact in Israel will be minimal. Ed Miliband was clear that the new sanctions regime will target those “providing services such as construction or financing for Israeli settlements,” while trade within the Green Line will continue. Yet the principal providers of such services to the settlements are Israeli banks, major companies and the Israeli government itself. Short of Miliband sanctioning them, the policy is unlikely to achieve much. The economies of the West Bank and Green Line Israel are completely intertwined.

Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing government this weekend became the longest surviving Italian government since the fall of fascism in 1945. It is a remarkable achievement for a woman who identifies as a conservative, but who has been relentlessly branded as “the heir to Mussolini” and a far-right threat to democracy because she was once a post-fascist. Regardless, Italy’s first female prime minister has become the standard bearer of the European right as the people of Europe continue to pivot right. Elections next year look likely to bring the right to power in both France and Spain.

Affable, unflappable and imposing (he was a 6ft 2in ex-Olympian), the late King Harald of Norway was also blessed with good luck for much of his life. The first notable dose of good fortune occurred at the age of three, when his mother managed to spirit him and his sisters out of their home country hours before the Nazi invasion – and away to safety in the US. He returned to a nation so devoted to its monarchy that the children of postwar Norway pooled their pocket money to help buy his grandfather, King Haakon VII, a royal yacht. The Norge remains in service to this day, funded by an uncomplaining nation. Compare that with Britain’s royal family, who had to wave farewell to their yacht Britannia back in 1997 after a long and toxic political squabble.