World

Sunday

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Friedrich Merz on track to win German federal election

After two torturous months of campaigning, the wait is over. Friedrich Merz, leader of the conservative CDU party, is on track to win Germany’s federal election. According to the official exit poll, published at 5pm UK time, his party has won 28.9 per cent of the vote. This means they are set to become the largest party in Berlin’s new parliament. Hot on the heels of the CDU is the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, which has achieved 19.7 per cent of the vote. While it is its highest ever result in a federal election, their projected vote share suggests the far-right party will be just shy of the

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Will Macron get tough on Algeria over the French knife attack?

Emmanuel Macron will hold talks with Donald Trump on Monday at which the President of France will attempt to ‘make Europe’s voice heard’. Still seething about being excluded from America’s peace negotiations with Russia, Macron wants to reassert the continent’s authority Stateside.  It will be a forlorn exercise. One of the reasons America – not just Trump’s administration but the one that preceded it – no longer attaches much importance to the EU is because they can see how weak it’s become. The world understands that Macron talks the talk but never walks the walk It’s timidity towards Algeria is a prime example. On Saturday, an Algerian man was arrested

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

What to look out for in Germany’s federal election

After two long months of campaigning, Germany heads to the polls today for its federal election. Approximately 60 million voters across the country’s 16 states will elect the new government. Will incumbent SPD chancellor Olaf Scholz’s party be punished for his three years in power? Will the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) cruise to its highest ever federal result? Will Friedrich Merz’s conservative CDU do well enough to only need one partner to form a coalition? This is what to watch out for tonight. To enter the Bundestag, the parties need to win at least 5 per cent of the national vote. The German proportional representation system means that everyone gets

Jonathan Spyer

Isis is filling the vacuum in Syria

‘Isis is taking huge advantage of the current situation in Syria,’ Ilham Ahmed told me, when we met in the north Syrian city of Hasakeh in mid January. ‘In the recent time, there have been many attacks on checkpoints of the SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces). They are most active in the al Badiya area. There’s no security control there, and we have confirmed intelligence information of plans for an attack on the Al Hol camp to liberate the families there.’ Ahmed chairs the foreign relations department of the Autonomous Administration of North East Syria (AANES). This is the Kurdish-dominated de facto government with which the US and its allies aligned

Matthew Lynn

How France killed its start-up culture

It would encourage digitally savvy entrepreneurs. It would be a hub for artificial intelligence. And it would encourage a wave of new companies, replacing the ageing giants of French industry. When Emmanuel Macron became president, turning the country into ‘le start-up’ nation was central to his mission to modernise the economy. In fairness, he had some success. And yet with one of the world’s most punishing wealth taxes passed by the National Assembly last week it is about to be killed stone-dead. It was always slightly implausible for a country best known for its long lunches, short working week, endless holidays, and generous early retirement ages, but Macron was determined

Saturday

Alex Klaushofer

What Lebanon’s energy crisis can teach us in Britain

“See that?” my friend pointed to a pylon on the hill opposite the window. “That’s the dawla.” The dawla (pronounced “dowleh”) is Arabic for state, and my hostess was telling me about an essential feature of life in contemporary Lebanon: the ability to understand when there is electricity and who is providing it. If the light on the pylon was orange, I would know that power was coming from the national grid. If, like good Net Zero citizens, we eschew gas, it could also mean no heating, hot meals or hot showers It was my first trip to Lebanon for almost fifteen years. In the early 2000s, I went repeatedly

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Who is responsible for the BBC’s Gaza documentary debacle?

In 2007, the BBC was engulfed in scandal for an embarrassing – if relatively trivial – misrepresentation of Queen Elizabeth II. A promotional clip for a documentary, A Year with the Queen, was edited to suggest the monarch stormed out of a photoshoot in a huff, when in reality, the sequence had been misleadingly spliced together. The outcry was immediate. Within hours, the BBC issued an apology. By the following day, an internal investigation had been launched. The corporation treated the matter with the utmost urgency, leading to resignations, extensive inquiries, and a near-existential crisis over editorial ethics. Fast-forward to 2025, and the BBC has once again been caught red-handed with

Julian Brazier

Britain’s waters are not safe

John Foreman’s recent article on the Yantar incident highlighted the Russian threat to Britain’s economically vital data cables. Data cables are, however, only part of a disturbing picture. The UK is almost the only large country whose critical national infrastructure is so heavily coastal or underwater. All of our gas comes by sea, either through pipelines from Europe, from the North and Irish Sea, or through delivery of LNG to our ports. Most of the rest of our electricity sources are coastal too: undersea cables bring offshore wind and carry power from the Continent, and every British nuclear power station has a vulnerable outflow to the sea. Yet few ports have been designated as strategic

Yascha Mounk

Europe must be stronger, or it will die

Over the last weeks, the words and actions of the Trump administration have caused the biggest rift between the United States and Europe since the end of the Cold War. Relations between the longstanding partners are more strained now than they were in the run-up to George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq or in the aftermath of Trump’s 2018 joint press conference with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. Over the last few weeks, European officials were horrified that Trump pressured the prime minister of Denmark, a longtime ally, to cede parts of its national territory to the United States. They took umbrage at a speech at the Munich Security Conference in

Friday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Hamas’s final torment of the Bibas family

So Hamas has committed yet another act of depravity against the Bibas family. It said Shiri Bibas was in one of those four coffins it put on grim display in Gaza yesterday before handing them over to the Red Cross. But she wasn’t. It was the remains of some unknown person that Hamas passed off as the mother-of-two whose return the whole of Israel has been crying out for. Truly, is there no end to the cynicism and savagery of these terrorists? Israel says forensic testing has confirmed that two of the coffins contained the bodies of the Bibas children: Ariel, who was four when he was kidnapped, and Kfir,

Hugh Schofield

Hugh Schofield, Igor Toronyi-Lalic & Michael Simmons, Lisa Haseldine, Alice Loxton and Aidan Hartley

37 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Hugh Schofield asks why there is no campaign to free the novelist Boualem Sansal (1:26); The Spectator’s arts editor, Igor Toronyi-Lalic, reacts to the magazine’s campaign against frivolous funding and, continuing the campaign, Michael Simmons wonders if Britain is funding organisations that wish us harm (8:00); Lisa Haseldine reflects on whether the AfD’s rise could mean ‘Weimar 2.0’ for Germany (17:08); reviewing Thou Savage Woman: Female Killers in Early Modern Britain, by Blessin Adams, Alice Loxton explores the gruesome ways in which women killed (25:05); and, from Kenya, Aidan Hartley reflects on how a secret half-brother impacted his relationship with his father (35:13).  Produced and presented

Sam Olsen

Why Trump doesn’t see Putin as a real threat

It turns out that Harold Wilson’s famous quote, ‘A week is a long time in politics’, is equally applicable to changes to the world order. So far this week, President Trump has extended a hand to Russia, savaged Ukraine and upended a transatlantic alliance eight decades old. In doing so, not only has he performed a 180 degree turn on established US foreign policy, but he has forced the UK and its European allies onto a new trajectory that will have ramifications for decades, if not longer. Trump’s outreach to Putin was not unexpected. During his election campaign he repeatedly stated he could bring the war in Ukraine to a

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Christoph Heusgen is just another arrogant boomer

Historians will look back on the tears of Christoph Heusgen as a defining moment of the early 21st century. When the German began blubbing as he wrapped up the Munich Security Conference last Sunday, he wasn’t just crying for himself but for all his generation who believed that the collapse of Communism had marked the ‘end of history’. The phrase was coined by the American political scientist, Francis Fukuyama, in his 1992 book of that name. He claimed that the end of the Cold War was the ‘end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government’. Fukuyama is a Baby Boomer,

Thursday

Jim Lawley

Luis Rubiales and Spain’s war on machismo

Luis Rubiales kissed player Jenni Hermoso on the lips during the medal ceremony after Spain won the Women’s World Cup in August 2023. Rubiales, at the time president of the Royal Spanish Football Federation, said the kiss was consensual but Hermoso said it wasn’t and filed a criminal complaint. Rubiales has now been found guilty of sexual assault and fined €10,800 (£8,945). He was also ordered to pay a portion of the costs and compensation of €3,000 (£2,484) to Hermoso. Rubiales has ten days to appeal the sentence. He and three ex-colleagues were acquitted on a separate charge of attempting to coerce Hermoso into changing her story. Spanish feminists are outraged by the judge’s

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Is Trump right about Ukraine?

24 min listen

Donald Trump attacked the Ukrainian President overnight, describing him as a ‘dictator’ and saying he’s done a ‘terrible job.’ In return, Zelensky has accused Trump of ‘living in a disinformation space.’ The West has invested a huge amount of capital in the fight against Russia – and failed to secure peace. Is Trump using these offensive and odious methods in order to secure an end to the conflict? Is he the only person with the power to do so? Freddy Gray discusses with The Spectator’s Russia correspondent Owen Matthews, and Sergey Radchenko, historian and author.

William Moore William Moore

New world disorder, cholesterol pseudoscience vs scepticism & the magic of Dickens

48 min listen

This week: the world needs a realist reset Donald Trump’s presidency is the harbinger of many things, writes The Spectator’s editor Michael Gove, one of which is a return to a more pitiless world landscape. The ideal of a rules-based international order has proved to be a false hope. Britain must accept that if we are to earn the respect of others and the right to determine the future, we need a realist reset. What are the consequences of this new world order? And is the Trump administration reversing the tide of decline, or simply refusing to accept the inevitable? Michael Gove joined the podcast alongside the geopolitical theorist Robert Kaplan,

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

The cruellest thing about Trump vs Zelensky? Trump’s right

And just like that, we are back in 2017. Donald Trump, the President of the United States, is posting ridiculous hyperbole on his socials and mouthing off from Mar-a-Lago, as he always has. In the last 24 hours, however, the global political and media classes have gone back to gnashing their teeth and wailing in the way they did in Trump’s first term. It’s disgraceful! It’s sub-literate! He’s Vladimir Putin’s puppet! He’s reckless and utterly out of control! And that, of course, is the point. Trump’s re-election proved that he is no aberration, so in 2025 the liberal, western world order has tried to come to terms with him. Western

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Putin is watching Trump attack Zelensky with glee

Britain might not even be close to putting boots on the ground, but proposals by Keir Starmer to send UK troops to Ukraine have already been rejected by the Kremlin. Put forward by the Prime Minister as part of a plan to send a 30,000-strong European peace-keeping force to the country in the event of a ceasefire with Russia, this idea is ‘unacceptable’, the Kremlin has said. Reacting to plans reportedly being prepared by Prime Minister Keir Starmer with leaders on the continent (some of whom have already refused to involve their countries in), Putin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said such a proposal was ‘a matter of concern’ as it would

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Holy War and Antichrist: The rise of extremist rhetoric inside the Russian Orthodox Church

35 min listen

The subject of Ukraine shattered the unity of Eastern Orthodoxy long before Russia’s full-scale invasion began. In 2018 the Ukrainian Orthodox Church declared independence from Moscow with the approval of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. In response, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow broke off all relations with Constantinople, creating arguably the greatest schism in Orthodoxy for 1,000 years. There are now two main Ukrainian Orthodox Churches: one that supports independence and one still loyal to Moscow. As The Spectator’s Ukraine correspondent Svitlana Morenets points out, Ukrainians who previously didn’t care which church they attended now have to decide which to attend. Meanwhile, Dr Yuri Stoyanov, a fellow at SOAS, describes the alarming

James Hanson

Can Britain defend itself and have a welfare state?

No one can say we weren’t warned. As early as 1971 America was warning that it could reduce its defence commitment to Europe, when the Democratic Senator Mike Mansfield proposed halving the number of US troops stationed on the continent. The Senate defeated that particular resolution, but the sentiment never went away. In 2016, Barack Obama lambasted European countries as ‘free-riders’ complacently sheltering under America’s security umbrella and throughout his first term Donald Trump was crystal clear that other Nato members needed to drastically increase their defence budgets. So when JD Vance put the message in blunter terms at the Munich Security Conference last week, no one should have been