Europe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sir Keir Starmer boldly claimed in the House of Commons this week that his ‘reset’ deal with the EU would ‘release us from the tired arguments of the past’. The truth is that it will do the exact opposite. The country will need to confront yet again tired old arguments which we thought had been resolved. Brexit was all about getting back control of our laws, our borders and our money. A Brexit in which we formally leave the European Union but still follow its laws is senseless. We lose our freedom to choose our laws, and we don’t even have a vote on the shape of the laws which

The latest exit polls in Poland suggest that liberal Warsaw mayor, Rafal Trzaskowski, has won the first round of the presidential elections, with 31 per cent of the vote. Trzaskowski is a career politician, the heart-throb son of a jazz musician. He ran on a pro-European platform and has pledged to defend the independence of the judiciary and rebuild Poland’s democratic institutions. He is the candidate for Donald Tusk’s Civic Platform party, and is seen as a progressive and a ‘moderniser’ who represents a more cosmopolitan and outward-facing Poland. His rival, conservative candidate Karol Nawrocki, came in second with 29 per cent of the vote. Nawrocki, a historian with very