Europe

There’s a new book out that depicts Irish people as gurning ginger-haired imbeciles who do Irish jigs in the garden and eat bacon and cabbage every day. Who produced this offensive tome? Must have been some Neanderthal bigots, right, who wish it was still the 1970s and still acceptable to Paddy-bash? Actually, it was a leading Irish publisher of school textbooks, and the book in question was intended for Irish schoolkids. Irish schoolkids were agog at the blatant Mickphobia in their textbooks Across the Irish Sea there’s a media storm about a textbook produced by the Educational Company of Ireland. It’s a study aid in Social, Personal and Health classes

Michel Barnier is the new prime minister of France. Best known in Britain as the EU’s chief negotiator during the Brexit negotiations, the 73-year-old is the oldest premier in the history of the Fifth Republic and he was unveiled sixty days after the parliamentary elections that threw the Republic into chaos. Le Pen appears satisfied with the choice of Barnier In a statement issued from the Élysée, president Emmanuel Macron said he believed he had found the person to lead a government that ‘meets the conditions to be as stable as possible and give themselves the chances to gather the widest possible support’. The appointment brings to an end a shambolic summer

Who will be the next prime minister of France? Almost two months after the centre lost its majority in the National Assembly, the potential candidates range from the improbable to the ludicrous.   The latest semi-crazed idea is that Emmanuel Macron should call on Ségolene Royal, the former wife of François Hollande, a socialist party machine politician hated in equal measure by both the extreme left and populist right and who generates no enthusiasm from either the moderate Republicans or the residue of the president’s centre.  Admittedly, this idea is floated by Royal herself and has been met with general derision. Or perhaps Bernard Cazeneuve, a moderate socialist who was Hollande’s

The EU’s three largest economies are stuck in a deep structural slump. The budget is a mess, with money running out. And the bloc is rapidly losing competitiveness. Meanwhile, populist parties committed to overthrowing the organisation are coming closer to power all the time. You might think that the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, had enough serious problems to deal with it. Yet somehow she is finding time for something else: aiming for gender parity. There’s just one problem: jobs for the girls won’t rescue the EU. It is hard to see how carving out lucrative jobs for a handful of women is going to fix

‘We are the party of the youth!’ When the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party launched its state election campaign over the summer in the former east Germany, its lead candidate for Brandenburg Christoph Berndt confidently declared that the party would do well thanks to the legions of young voters it had seduced. Today, as the dust settles on the results of Thuringia and Saxony’s state elections, it appears that Berndt’s predictions have come to pass. According to data published by the pollsters Infratest Dimap, 38 per cent of those aged between 18 and 24 voted for the AfD in Thuringia on Sunday. In neighbouring Saxony, 31 per cent did the

The Paralympics begin in Paris tomorrow but the feel-good factor generated in France by the Olympic Games at the start of the month has long since evaporated. Anne Hidalgo, the Socialist mayor of Paris, was perhaps a little premature in declaring on August 7 that the success of the Games had ‘crushed the far-right’s message’. That message, according to Hidalgo, is one of negativity and division, challenging the prevailing progressive view of France as a country of happy multiculturalism. By far-right she meant the ten million plus people who had voted for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in July’s parliamentary elections. ‘Something incredibly positive is happening, and even good news,

Believing that membership of the European Union was undeniably beneficial for the UK economy, many Remainers struggled to understand why the majority had voted against it. One hypothesis was that ‘Leavers’ felt they’d missed out on the benefits – that perhaps people who thought the wealth hadn’t been spread around fairly had voted for Brexit in order to teach the greedy elite a lesson. Here in Spain, it’s tourism that, to the authorities’ surprise, has suddenly proved unpopular. It’s easy to see why they considered tourism to be undeniably beneficial. After all, it accounts for about 13 per cent of GNP and a quarter of the new jobs created in

It’s the rentrée politique this week in France, the start of the political year, a bit earlier than normal. It promises to be a macedoine of absurdist farce and media frenzy. On Friday President Emmanuel Macron, the principal personality in this drama, will begin to see the leaders of some (but not all) of the 14 or 15 political factions that form the dysfunctional National Assembly. A negligent wager with no upside and unlimited downside – and this from the so-called Mozart of finance His mission is to appoint a prime minister who can cobble together some semblance of a credible, durable government in the EU’s second-largest economy. An economy that already does

The sea lanes of Europe were busy last weekend. On Sunday, more than 700 migrants crossed the Channel from France to England, taking the total number this year to 18,342 – a 13 per cent increase on 2023. On the same day, 421 migrants in twelve boats disembarked on the Italian island of Lampedusa, and more have arrived since, swelling the numbers to over 500. The diversity of the nationalities of arrivals in Lampedusa is a fascinating and alarming snapshot of the crisis confronting Europe. The people stepping ashore hailed from Egypt, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Ghana, Gambia, Malaysia, Nigeria, Liberia and Syria.  There are now too many gangs operating in Asia, the Middle East

Last week saw dramatic events in Catalonia as Carles Puigdemont, wanted for almost seven years by Spanish justice for spearheading the region’s illegal declaration of independence in 2017, reappeared in the centre of Barcelona and delivered a rousing speech to some 3,500 of his adoring supporters. Then, just as suddenly, he disappeared – to the massive embarrassment of the several hundred policemen who were standing close by waiting to arrest him (though two of them, it seems, may have connived in the escape).    Puigdemont says that he’s now back in Waterloo, south of Brussels, where he’s made his home since 2017: the Belgian authorities refuse to extradite him to Spain. In