World

Sahra Wagenknecht, a pivotal figure of the German left, has decided to go up against her former party by launching a new protest movement. Today, Wagenknecht gave a press conference announcing that she was leaving Die Linke party to run an organisation called the ‘Sahra Wagenknecht alliance’. She argued that Germany’s infrastructure was in a bad way and warned that the country faces a loss of prosperity if, among other things, it does not give up on its dogged pursuit of green policies. ‘Things cannot continue the way they are currently going,’ she said. Over the past decade, Wagenknecht has become one of the most well-known left-wing politicians in Germany,

Last year, a French broadcaster asked if Belgium was in danger of becoming a narco state. The question was posed in light of the news of the cocaine flooding into the country and the growing influence of Belgium’s drug cartels.   Others believe that Belgium most closely resembles an Islamic state. The former Belgian senator Alain Destexhe accused his country this week of living in denial and allowing Belgium to become ‘a laboratory of Islamism’.  France has its own grave struggle with Islamists but at least there is an awareness of the danger Belgian has undergone a radical demographic change this century, particularly in the capital. Of Brussels’s 1.2 million

For a man so keen to thrust himself onto the international stage, Emmanuel Macron has been surprisingly quiet over the last fortnight. At the beginning of 2022, the President of France shuttled across Europe in an attempt to avert conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Though his diplomatic efforts were criticised in some Anglophone quarters, Macron earned the respect of many in France for attempting to talk Vladimir Putin out of war.   Now there is another war raging but this time Macron has had little to say about the conflict between Israel and Hamas. He has offered his measured support to Israel but he has not yet followed Joe Biden, Ursula