Europe

Spain won’t escape Trump’s wrath for its Nato rebellion

At yesterday’s Nato summit in The Hague, all but one of the 32 leaders agreed to increase their defence spending to 5 per cent of GDP as President Trump has been demanding. The exception was Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. His insistence that actually 2.1 per cent will be enough has enraged President Trump.  Trump described the Nato summit’s achievements as ‘tremendous’, celebrating its recognition of the need for other Nato members to take up the burden of the defence of Europe. He added that ‘it was 2 per cent [of GDP] and we’ve got it up to 5 per cent’. But he had harsh words for Spain, describing the

France wants to know the true cost of immigration

The right-wing UDR group in the French parliament, led by Eric Ciotti, has called for a parliamentary commission to calculate the true cost of immigration. Ciotti is demanding a line-by-line accounting of France’s spending on healthcare, housing, education, and emergency aid for migrants, alongside their economic contributions. The French left recoiled instantly and predictably. To move the debate on, the Socialists tabled a no-confidence motion against the Bayrou government, ostensibly over pension reform, but widely seen as a bid to deflect Ciotti’s challenge. In Paris, few are fooled: immigration is the real flashpoint. When it comes to immigration, the numbers are framed as dangerous, not because they’re made up, but

Why conservatives should embrace their Christian heritage

The heydays of Christian influence over European politics may seem long gone. In the UK, after the most recent general election, four-tenths of all MPs took secular affirmations – up from less than a quarter in 2019 – while in Europe, parties with explicitly Christian foundations often seem embarrassed about their religious heritage as they tumble down the polls. Yet Christians have not stopped turning up for those parties. To play to its strengths and resolve its identity crisis, the centre-right should embrace its Christian inheritance. By returning to this Christian inheritance, the centre-right can offer a vision that is compelling to all and re-establish its dominance Even as the

Is Dutch tolerance dying?

Campaigners across southern Europe are protesting against ‘touristification’. Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, wealthy expats are in the firing line. Businesses in Amsterdam could be asked to foot the bill for local housing if they employ highly-skilled internationals. Alongside paranoia about asylum seekers, there is a rising feeling that expats and even holidaymakers are unwelcome in parts of the continent. The Netherlands was once an outward-looking, tolerant, trader nation. Is that still the case? It’s not much fun to live in a place – or even visit somewhere – that resents your presence, especially if you have bothered to learn the local language and swallowed the high tax rates that fund

Ian Williams

Has Ursula von der Leyen seen the light on China?

Coming from an American politician, the accusations would have been unsurprising. Beijing is unwilling to ‘live within the constraints of the rules-based international system’ and its trade policy is one of ‘distortion with intent’. It splashes subsidies with abandon, undercuts intellectual property protections, and as for China’s membership of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), that was probably a mistake too. It is bold of von der Leyen to raise the WTO, and it will be intriguing to see how she is greeted at the EU-China leaders’ summit Yet this tirade came not from an acolyte of Donald Trump, but from Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission

France’s toddler screen ban is pure state overreach

The French government is preparing to ban all screen time for children under the age of three. The measure, announced by the Minister of Labour, Health, Solidarity and Families, Catherine Vautrin, will form part of a broader national plan to combat screen use among the very young. Due to be launched in the autumn, the policy will ban tablets, televisions and smartphones in nurseries, hospitals, and other childcare settings, with sanctions for anyone who breaks the rules. The aim, according to the minister, is to change behaviour around early childhood and screen use. What next? A ban on loud toys? Fines for bedtime past eight o’clock? ‘This is how you

The post-Brexit Gibraltar deal is going down badly in Spain

Conservative and Reform politicians have denounced this week’s post-Brexit Gibraltar deal as a betrayal. ‘Gibraltar is British, and given Labour’s record of surrendering our territory and paying for the privilege, we will be reviewing carefully all the details of any agreement that is reached,’ Dame Priti Patel, the shadow foreign secretary, said. Meanwhile, describing Labour as ‘the worst negotiators in history’, Nigel Farage called the agreement ‘yet another surrender’. Vox declared that ‘Gibraltar is a territory illegally colonised by the UK’ But Spain’s right-wing parties have, if possible, been even more damning. José Manuel García-Margallo, a former Minister of Foreign Affairs, described the agreement as ‘total surrender’, the ‘absolute renunciation’

What Poland can teach the Internet Right

A change in politics is coming. Until now, the progressives were the ones with networks, stemming from Joe Biden’s White House, to think tanks, and the legacy media. For the right, politics was not a fair fight. The internet has changed that. Karol Nawrocki’s win in Poland’s presidential election marked a key moment in the translation of the new right from the internet to geographical reality. Donald Trump’s backing was combined with that of Kristi Noem, the US Secretary of State for Homeland Security, at Poland’s first ever Conservative Political Action conference (CPAC). A change in politics is coming From the 1960s onwards, the progressives turned universities into a reproduction

Jonathan Miller

The battle of the Channel has been fought – and lost

Kemi Badenoch says the Conservative party will take a look at withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), freeing us at a leap and a bound from the tyranny of human rights lawyers. The Tory leader would give Britain the power to deter the cross-Channel influx of asylum seekers, by withdrawing protections from those arriving in Britain without papers. The government might as well install a gargantuan flashing neon sign on the White Cliffs of Dover: Refugees welcome here As there is unlikely to be a Conservative government in the foreseeable future, this announcement is going to have no effect now, or any time soon, on the actual

Gavin Mortimer

Britain must learn from France’s e-scooter mistake

An e-scooter revolution is coming to Britain whether the country likes it or not. “The revolution will hurt a little, but it’s necessary,” declared the vice-president of one of Europe’s leading e-scooter rental companies. Christina Moe Gjerde of Sweden’s Voi Technology has said her ambition was to have 50,000 more e-bikes and scooters on the streets of Britain. “You [Britain] are sitting on a gold mine,” said Moe Gjerde. “Get it right and there’s so much potential.” France was an early advocate of the e-scooter craze but also one of the first to fall out of love with it Private e-scooters are illegal on English roads but rental companies have been

Lisa Haseldine

Germany can’t avoid conscription for ever

Germany’s new chancellor Friedrich Merz seems serious about his pledge to make the Bundeswehr the ‘strongest conventional army in Europe’. Yet less than a month into his chancellorship, a daunting realisation is dawning on Berlin: without resorting to conscription, there is little prospect of growing the German army or fulfilling Merz’s ambitious promise.  Merz’s defence minister Boris Pistorius – the only SPD politician from Olaf Scholz’s administration to remain in the cabinet – is in Brussels today to commit Germany to raising defence spending to 5 per cent of GDP by 2032. This spending would be split, with 3.5 per cent dedicated to core military spending, and the remaining 1.5 per cent used

Europe is finally making more TNT

For Europe’s war effort, the time has come for boom or bust. Specifically, it needs more boom. On Monday, Sir Keir Starmer trumpeted the UK’s £1.5 billion investment in six new munitions factories, creating over 1,000 jobs. But we are still miles behind Russia and the rest of Europe when it comes to ammunition. Russia, with assistance from North Korea’s six explosives factories, currently produces over four million artillery shells per year. The European Union and the UK are still collectively trying to drag their production above one million combined. On the front line, this means Russia can fire 12,000 rounds per day, compared with around 7,000 fired by the Ukrainians, according to

Is the UK-EU defence pact a threat to Nato?

The Nato meeting of defence ministers in Brussels today will give its participants an opportunity to discuss the issues facing the alliance in perhaps a more cordial, if frank, manner before the inevitably more theatrical leaders’ summit in The Hague at the end of the month. Much of the focus will be on proposed defence expenditure increases, not least in Britain, where following the publication of the government’s Strategic Defence Review (SDR) this week there were suggestions that Nato would ‘force’ Keir Starmer to raise defence spending to 3.5 per cent of GDP. Next week’s spending review should cast light on how feasible this is, given current plans to reach

Can Germany control its borders?

Two days. That’s how long Friedrich Merz’s signature border policy survived before walking into a perfectly laid ambush. While international economists celebrate Germany’s potential economic resurgence under new leadership, the country’s Chancellor is discovering that electoral victories mean little when faced with opponents who don’t need votes to wield power. The weapon of choice? Legal challenges so precisely timed and coordinated they make Swiss clockwork look amateur. Just as the OECD forecasts Germany’s potential return as Europe’s economic powerhouse, Merz finds himself outmanoeuvred not by coalition partners or opposition politicians, but by advocacy organisations whose resources and coordination capabilities would impress military strategists – opposition far more sophisticated than traditional

Gavin Mortimer

France’s border patrol is playing a losing game

In a 24-hour period at the weekend, 184 migrants were rescued in the English Channel by the French coastguard. The most southerly group that got into trouble was picked up off Fort-Mahon in the Somme Department, and the most northerly were off Dunkirk, more than 80 miles up the coast. The coastguard was also called to incidents in Wimereux and Grand-Fort-Philippe. In other words, it is not just England that is being invaded. So is France, its rugged coastline saturated by thousands of predominantly young men all intent on crossing the Channel. I’ve written before of their violent desperation: the mob who last year attacked a group of hunters who

What Karol Nawrocki’s triumph means for Poland

Karol Nawrocki – the Law and Justice candidate – is the winner of Poland’s 2025 presidential election following a dramatic turn of events. Despite the final exit poll declaring Civic Platform’s Rafał Trzaskowski to be the winner by a margin of 0.6 percentage points, as the votes started coming in over the night, it was Nawrocki who ended up ahead with 51 per cent of the vote. The Law and Justice candidate managed to overcome the odds to become President, but the result will likely be a political standstill that will leave both sides unhappy. The two parties have been at each other’s throats History does not repeat itself, but

The problem with Trump’s Golden Dome project

Donald Trump did not get to where he is today by taking no for an answer. Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada, could scarcely have been clearer when he visited the White House earlier this month that the President’s notion of Canada becoming America’s 51st state was not even being entertained. ‘Canada is not for sale,’ he said bluntly. When Trump chided him that he should never say never, he mouthed silently, ‘Never, never.’ Undaunted, President Trump has tried a new tack: the proposed Golden Dome, a missile defence system covering the United States which Trump initiated by executive order in January. He announced on his Truth Social platform

Katja Hoyer

Germany’s Bundeswehr bears no resemblance to an actual army

Confusion abounded this week when the new German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said that Ukraine could use western missiles to hit targets deep within Russia. ‘There are no more range limitations for weapons delivered to Ukraine. Neither from the Brits, nor the French, nor from us. Not from the Americans either,’ he said. The problem was twofold. Firstly, that is not the official policy of western allies. Secondly, Germany has not provided Ukraine with any long-range missiles. Partly that is a political choice by Germany, but there is also the fact of the inherent weakness of the Bundeswehr itself. Merz’s new government has recognised the limited nature of his military, vowing

Lisa Haseldine

Is a mood shift on Ukraine underway in Europe?

Following years of requests, pleas and false starts, Ukraine has, it appears, definitively been given permission to fire missiles deep into Russian territory. Since the start of Moscow’s invasion in 2022, Kyiv had been banned from attacking military targets on Russian soil with western-made weapons. Now, after three years of war, it appears Ukraine’s allies have indeed decided to allow it to retaliate as it sees fit. The news of the change of tack by Ukraine’s allies came yesterday from Friedrich Merz, Germany’s new chancellor. Speaking at an event in Berlin, the Chancellor revealed that ‘there are no longer any range restrictions on weapons delivered to Ukraine. Neither by the

Jonathan Miller

Brigitte and Emmanuel – an anatomy of a slap

Some are scandalised that Brigitte Macron was seen to slap her husband in the face as they prepared to disembark from the presidential Airbus, Cotam Unité, in Hanoi this week. Unité? Not so much. The Elysée is asking us to ignore the evidence and pretend it didn’t happen. Still others may say, someone had to.   The slap was seen around the world or was it a shove, a roundhouse punch or just horsing around, disinformation spread by crazy people, as the president himself claims? The detail hardly matters.   Denial notwithstanding, we saw what we saw and lovie-dovey it wasn’t. So what does it tell us about the relationship between the president

Gavin Mortimer

Could France’s next president come from the Yellow Hats?

When Donald Trump first burst onto the political scene in 2016, comparisons were drawn with a 1950s Frenchman called Pierre Poujade. The BBC called him the ‘grandfather of populism’, the first post-war politician to lead a revolt against ‘being told what it is acceptable to think about issues like globalisation, migration and Europe’. Poujade was a provincial shopkeeper who was so fed up with what he saw as the corrupt and degenerate Paris elite that in 1953 he formed his own party, the Union de Defense des Commercants et Artisans. In the legislative elections in 1956, they won 2.4 million votes, enough to send 52 MPs to sit in the

Danes are baffled by Britain’s hatred of second-home owners

Spring has arrived on the North Coast of Zealand, and my fellow Danes are busily scrubbing down their summerhouses for the season. Villages which were nearly deserted during the winter – Danes can generally only occupy their summerhouses for 180 days a year – are gradually filling up. Sadiq Khan said London’s second homeowners ought to pay “much, much more” than a 100 per cent council tax premium Yet I rather doubt Sir Sadiq Khan, who earlier this month said London’s second homeowners ought to pay “much, much more” than a 100 per cent council tax premium, will be on anyone’s prospective guest list. The current war of expropriation on British second

Could the EU sideline Britain in its defence loan scheme?

The Security and Defence Partnership which the government agreed with the European Union this week has had more spin applied to it than a thousand cricket balls. The central argument in its favour, apart from vacuous reiki-like attempts to change the ‘mood’ of relations with the EU, was that it would allow the UK defence sector to engage with the Security Action for Europe (SAFE) loan instrument providing €150 billion (£127 billion) for defence procurement over the next five years. It does not do that. You would be hard pressed to realise that the partnership has not succeeded in what many saw as its central purpose. Weasel words came in