Europe

There was one person missing in Paris on Saturday evening as France celebrated the resurrection of Notre Dame cathedral. The original guest list included Ursula von der Leyen – but the president of the EU Commission was a no-show. According to whom one believes, Europe’s most powerful politician didn’t take her place in the pew alongside Emmanuel Macron, Donald Trump et al because of what a spokesman described as an ‘internal miscommunication’. That’s the diplomatic take. The other story is that a ‘furious’ Macron withdrew von der Leyen’s invitation after she signed off the EU Mercosur trade deal with South America on Friday. Struck with Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and

Three years ago today, Olaf Scholz was sworn in as Germany’s chancellor. He had narrowly won the election by presenting himself as Angela Merkel’s natural successor. Appearing as the continuity candidate was good enough to clinch it in 2021, but Scholz is unlikely to pull that off again in Germany’s snap election, expected to be held on 23 February next year. Scholz’s Social Democratic party (SPD) appears to have reached a nadir. Polls give it 15 or 16 per cent of the vote share, third place behind the centre-right CDU/CSU in first place and the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in second. You’d have to go back to the 19th century

Angela Merkel, who last month published her memoirs on her 16 years as German chancellor, was a great tactician. But she was dead wrong on many of the strategic questions hurled at Germany during her time in charge. Merkel is the architect of a Germany that’s again the sick man of Europe, now in a second year with a shrinking economy and surging parties on the far-right and far-left. Merkel doesn’t do mea culpas and this has annoyed some reviewers of her book. Those who hoped for admission of failures misunderstand Merkel. She’s a physicist, who disassembles problems before making, what she sees, as fact-based decisions. Her manner of deflecting

Robert Tombs joined John Keiger and Will Kingston on Spectator TV to discuss the political turmoil in France and what this means for Emmanuel Macron’s presidency. Here is an extract of what Robert had to say. Emmanuel Macron’s legacy is very likely to be disastrous. He’s a very intelligent man, a man of great qualities. I once saw him when he was newly elected when he came to England and he attended a meeting, a sort of reception, with Theresa May at the time. Poor Theresa May was standing in a corner on her own, and Macron was surrounded by admirers. Macron gave a rather brilliant improvised speech in English

It’s Green bin day! That was the general refrain of many Irish political wags as the country continues to tally the count from Friday’s election. The first indicators from the exit polls were that the Green party who had been minority, but deeply unpopular, members of the governing coalition had just been hammered by the voters. Speaking at the main count centre in Dublin’s RDS, an ashen faced party leader Roderic O’Gorman admitted that ‘this has not been a good day for us’. On this point, he is certainly correct. They are now on course to lose eight of the twelve seats they had previously held and he ruefully admitted

On a bus journey in Transylvania last summer, I got talking to a young Romanian man who works in Yorkshire and who had been back home visiting his relatives. He told me how hard it had become for Romanians, particularly elderly people like his grandmother, to make ends meet with inflation so high. He blamed the war in Ukraine for the massive spike in energy prices and said that the conflict ‘needs to end soon’. With times so hard, he told me that some people were becoming resentful of handouts to Ukrainian refugees. I thought of my bus conversation when I saw the BBC report that a ‘Far-right, pro-Russian candidate’ had taken

Nearly a year ago the EU unveiled what it called its ‘New Pact on Migration and Asylum’ with much fanfare. The Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, boasted that the pact ‘means that Europeans will decide who comes to the EU and who can stay, not the smugglers’. As is the way with the bureaucratic behemoth that is Brussels, the Pact won’t start to be implemented until the summer of 2026. So there is plenty of time for the people smugglers to ferry thousands more migrants into Europe from Africa and the Middle East. The power in Europe these days lies with the courts, and they overwhelmingly lean to the

Critics of Labour’s Assisted Dying bill fear that its vagueness means we are heading for trouble. Germany, where assisted suicide is legal, shows what happens when the law fails to spell out exactly what is allowed. In 2020, Germany’s federal constitutional court decriminalised assisted suicide, deciding that a patient’s autonomy must be the overriding concern when granting them permission to go through with it. The ruling stated that every person should be allowed to decide for themselves whether they take their own life or not and that getting help from third parties would be legalised. The German government hasn’t fully made up its mind on what it thinks of the

The head of the Valencia regional government has just attempted an impossible task – justifying his administration’s conduct before, during and after the flash floods that killed over 220 people in the Spanish region last month.  Since the catastrophe on 29 October, relentless, richly deserved criticism has been heaped on Carlos Mazón’s right-wing Partido Popular administration, which last year scrapped a special response force for natural disasters. On the day of the floods, instead of monitoring the situation, Mazón enjoyed a leisurely restaurant lunch lasting until six in the evening and then took over an hour to reach the emergency command centre. The flood warning, when it finally came, was

Since the scenes of Jews being hunted, beaten and kicked as they lay on the ground pleading for mercy in Amsterdam, antisemites have sought excuse, or that weaselly insinuator ‘context’, in the reported behaviour of a number of Maccabi Tel Aviv football hooligans, who are said to have attacked a taxi, tore down a Palestinian flag and sang anti-Arab chants. Video footage reportedly shows rioters chanting ‘kankerjoden’, Dutch for ‘Jewish cancer’ I wrote in the wake of those events that any Israeli fan who engaged in such yobbery is to be condemned but that their actions did not justify a modern-day pogrom that plunged Israelis and other Jews into a