Europe

What if the hiring of a PR expert became a PR disaster? That’s precisely what has happened in Poland. On 29 July, when Prime Minister Donald Tusk appointed Barbara Mróz-Gorgoń, a professor of marketing, as the government’s new plenipotentiary for promoting the Polish brand, this was thought to be a shrewd hire that would bolster the country’s image on the world stage. Then someone read one of her reports. Poland has managed to develop from a bankrupt communist state into one of the most successful economies in Europe The Poles’ Self-Portrait, published last year by a think tank chaired by Mróz-Gorgoń, was supposed to give a thumbnail sketch of the Polish national character.

Few in France will have been as devastated by their team’s defeat in last night’s World Cup semi-final as Emmanuel Macron. The president put on a brave face, tweeting his congratulations to Spain and thanking the French team "for carrying our colors with commitment." But how Macron must have dreamed of a French World Cup triumph in Sunday’s final. He would have been in New Jersey – as he was in Moscow in 2018 when the Bleus won the World Cup –dancing a jig as his bête noire, Donald Trump, presented the trophy to his boys. Macron's presidency is ending with a whimper In a sense the French football team are a metaphor for Macron’s presidency.

Hans-Georg Maassen is an unlikely dissident. In his trademark three-piece suits and small glasses, he looks more like a law professor. Indeed, that is what he studied, earning a doctorate on the legal status of asylum seekers in international law. This bourgeois exterior is the perfect cover for a man who was Germany’s top spy, charged with protecting the country from the far-right and Islamists. But now he is no longer under the quiet protection of the German state; he is its victim. He is under investigation from the agency he once led, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV). Like George Smiley, Maassen is a remnant of an older and more powerful country, soldiering on in spite of the decline, trying to preserve what he can.

Keir Starmer has entered what might be described as the peak delusion period of what remains of his time in Downing Street. There was fresh evidence of the Prime Minister’s all-consuming divorce from political reality in his latest comments about his fellow Labour politician and political rival Andy Burnham, who is widely predicted to win the Makerfield by-election today, and then go on to launch a leadership challenge to turf the PM out of office. The British PM just doesn’t get it Anyone and everyone knows all this and more, except Starmer apparently, who called Burnham “a great asset” and said he deserved “a big role in government.” What is Starmer smoking? The only big role in government that Burnham wants is Starmer’s job in Number 10.

Back in November, the State Department warned that “mass migration poses an existential threat to western civilization and undermines the stability of key American allies.” In February, in his address to the Munich Security Conference, Secretary of State Marco Rubio expanded on that theme. After the Berlin Wall fell, Rubio noted, many in the West thought “the end of history” had finally arrived. Utopia was nigh. Western nations opened their borders, forsook spending on defense in order to bolster the welfare state and “outsourced” their national sovereignty. This was, Rubio warned, to ignore both human nature as well as the lessons of “over 5,000 years of recorded human history. And it has cost us dearly.

Hungary in 2026 is what most developed countries were probably on their way to becoming in the 1980s and early Nineties, had mass migration not intervened: a sleazy gerontocracy with occasional bouts of moral-majority politics and ethnic nationalism. With socialism dead, the opposition is made up of liberal parties led by equally sleazy modernizers. Crime has ceased to be an issue, partly because the population is aging. The people, like pandas, do not breed. There is boredom and ennui. There is nothing analogous to, say, the killing of Iryna Zarutska. Hungary has had a dreadful century and is now a tired sort of place Such has been the work of Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s Prime Minister since 2010, who is to face the voters again on April 12.

The Russians are on the warpath – and Europe is Vladimir Putin’s next target. That was British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s alarming claim at the Munich Security Conference in February. Britons "must be ready to fight, to do whatever it takes to protect our people, our values, and our way of life," Starmer warned. Britain and Germany’s top military commanders delivered the same message in a recent article. Russia’s military posture "has shifted decisively westward," wrote Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton and General Carsten Breuer. Soon the Kremlin "may be emboldened to extend its aggression beyond Ukraine." Really? According to much western coverage in mainstream and social media, the Russian army is crumbling, corrupt and inept.