Eu politics

It’ll be a tense Christmas in the Spanish’s PM’s household this year. Yesterday, in an election called by Mariano Rajoy last month, Catalan pro-independence parties gained a slim majority in the region’s parliament: Together for Catalonia, the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC) and the Popular Unity Party (CUP) look set to have jointly won 70 seats in the 135-seat congress. Rajoy’s conservative Popular Party, meanwhile, posted its worst result ever, losing eight of its previously-held eleven seats. The stage is set for the Spanish government’s worst nightmare: another attempt by Catalan secessionists to divorce Spain. Rajoy had been hoping for a return to normality in Catalonia after a tumultuous few

The French have long loved a beauty contest and this year’s Miss France was screened on Saturday night on prime time TV. While ITV dropped Miss World from its main schedule in 1988 in response to feminist protests, beauty pageants continue to pull in the punters in France, with a peak audience of 8.8 million watching Miss Pas-de-Calais win this year’s crown. Feminist groups claim that Miss France is an offensive anachronism that should be consigned to the past. Raphaëlle Rémy-Leleu, spokesperson for the ‘Dare to be Feminist’ organisation, said ‘it was a shame that the only night of the year dedicated to women on TV cultivates the idea of female

Today the world’s youngest leader takes his place at the top table of European politics, as Sebastian Kurz becomes Chancellor of Austria at the age of just 31. However the toasts in Brussels (and Berlin) will be distinctly muted, for Kurz and his centre-right People’s Party have formed a controversial coalition with Austria’s hard-right Freedom Party – a party shunned by centrist parties throughout the EU. It’s a sign that populism is alive and well in Central Europe. So is this new government merely an Austrian anomaly? Or does it mark the advent of a Pan-European trend? The specifics of this coalition may be peculiarly Austrian, but the generalities reveal

Now Theresa May has made it through the first round of Brexit negotiations, a bigger question becomes more pressing: what sort of Europe will Britain be dealing with in next year’s trade talks – and beyond? The answer to this question came from Martin Schulz, leader of Germany’s Social Democrats, at this week’s SPD party conference, when he called for a United States of Europe by 2025. ‘The Europe we want does not exist right now – we need to create it,’ he declared. ‘Economic, cultural, social and political integration is the best protection against fascism, war and anti-democracy.’ That Schulz should be in favour of a federal Europe is

The EU has no shame. It is a completely shame-free zone. How else do we explain the grotesque spectacle of EC President Donald Tusk cosying up to Ireland this weekend, and claiming to respect Irish sovereignty, as if the past 15 years of Brussels treating Ireland as a colonial plaything had never happened? As if the EU hadn’t time and again overridden the Irish people’s democratic wishes? As if the EU didn’t just a few years ago send financial experts to run the Irish economy above the heads of the apparently dim Irish demos? Tusk claiming to be a friend of the Irish takes EU chutzpah to dizzying new heights.

In the historic heart of Luxembourg, around the corner from the Grand Ducal Palace, there is a site which demonstrates why Britons will never be good Europeans. The Maison de l’Union Européenne houses the information centre for the various European institutions here in Luxembourg, and even British Remainers will find its attitudes entirely different from their own. The vision it presents is pan European, an entire continent without borders. These are the ‘citizens of nowhere’ that Mrs May warned us about. Since the referendum, British attitudes towards the EU have polarised. Either it’s a great force for good, and leaving will be a disaster (say some Remainers) or it’s a

The Irish government has just survived a precarious wobble which would have plunged Britain and Ireland into further chaos over a future Northern Ireland border. Until the resignation of Tánaiste (deputy prime minister) Frances Fitzgerald earlier today, there was a clear and present danger of Leo Varadkar’s minority administration falling apart – all because of a police corruption imbroglio nobody in mainstream Irish politics seems prepared to grasp with both hands. Hours ahead of a no-confidence motion Varadkar looked certain to lose, Fitzgerald declared she would be stepping aside ‘in the national interest’. Since May last year, the Fine Gael coalition, led by Varadkar, has been propped up by long-standing foe

In his column this week, James Forsyth reports there is ‘mounting anger’ inside the government at the way the Irish government are behaving over Brexit. I am sure there is, though it still surprises me that people are surprised to discover that the Irish government is defending its own interests. Doubtless this is why you will sometimes find exuberant Brexiteers suggesting that the answer to the Irish problem is for the Irish to leave the EU too. That might work in theory; it doesn’t do so in practice. I’m afraid things are a little more complicated than that. Now it is, of course, tiresome that Brexit is being complicated by

Donald Tusk’s jibe that Britain was no longer attempting to have its cake and eat it in Brexit talks was a clear dig at the Foreign Secretary. But now the EU is guilty of adopting the same approach, according to the Sun. Michel Barnier said yesterday that ‘he wants all his demands met’ on various issues, and also ‘wants a monstrous exit bung from Britain’. Theresa May has reportedly received the backing of her Cabinet to up this payment to £40bn. Yet this ‘won’t nearly suffice’ for the EU, says the Sun. And even if Brussels does agree, what will we get in return? ‘A trade deal which would still

The female leader of a prominent European country fails to win a majority in an election and then struggles to form a coalition. Meanwhile, her government limps from crisis to crisis and finally negotiations break down, leading to another general election just weeks later. Not Theresa May, obviously, because she had little difficulty in forming a workable coalition with the DUP. But it is the situation in Germany where today Angela Merkel said that she has given up on trying to create a workable government with the Free Democratic Party, the Christian Social Union and the Greens. There will now almost inevitably have to be another general election, with Angela