Eu

The British public never really warmed to Helmut Kohl. In Britain, he was always seen as too bossy, too bumptious, too… well, too Teutonic. Margaret Thatcher thought so too. ‘My God, that man is SO German,’ she told Charles Powell, after Kohl’s attempt to woo her with his favourite dish, stuffed pig’s stomach, fell horribly flat. Even the Germans were often ambivalent about their longest serving Chancellor since Bismarck. East Germans ended up disillusioned when Kohl’s lavish promises of ‘blooming landscapes’ failed to materialise. West Germans ended up disillusioned when they had to foot the bill. Yet history will judge him kindly, in Germany and Britain. For all his faults,

Had last week’s expected landslide actually occurred Philip Hammond would by now be working on his memoirs. Instead, he is still in his job and demonstrating why, according to rumours, Theresa May might have liked to have removed him from the Treasury. He has reportedly demanded that May’s policy on Brexit be watered down so that Britain remains in the customs union but not the single market. Staying in the Customs Union would be the quickest way to keep the DUP happy as it would make certain that the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic remains open. But in all other respects it is the wrong way round.

En Marche, a party created 14 months ago by Emmanuel Macron, is on course for a clear majority in the French elections – after the collapse of the socialist party. His party looks on course to win 70pc of the seats in the National Assembly – an astonishing outcome, one of the many election results that would have been dismissed out of hand by political experts a few months before it happened. It offers further proof that ‘Macronmania’ is taking hold of the French. The electorate returns to the polls next Sunday for the second round but it’s predicted that Macron will handsomely win the 289 seats needed for a majority in the

The hopes of those who want Britain to stay in the EU have been dashed by this election. There has been no Brexit backlash. The party that wanted to overturn the result, the Liberal Democrats, have had a minimal impact on the campaign. By the time Britain next goes to the polls in a general election, the deed will have been done: this country will have left both the EU and the single market. Straight after the referendum last year, some Leavers feared victory would be snatched from them. They worried that a general election could lead to a parliament that was prepared to go back on the result. Instead,

Angela Merkel has never been a showboating politician. Public speaking isn’t her forte – she prefers to work behind the scenes. That’s why her latest speech has made such big waves, on both sides of the Atlantic. The Washington Post said it marked the beginning of a ‘new chapter in US-European relations.’ The New York Times called it a ‘potentially seismic shift.’ Seasoned US diplomat Richard Haas described it as ‘a watershed’ in America’s relationship with Europe. So what did Merkel say? What did she mean by it? And what are the implications for Germany, and for Britain? Uttered by any other politician, Merkel’s speech last Sunday might not be

Last year’s Austrian presidential election looked like a turning point for the European Union. Alexander Van der Bellen, a soft left Eurofederalist (narrowly) defeated Eurosceptic Norbert Hofer, of the hard right Austrian Freedom Party, and Continental Europhiles went into 2017 with fresh hope that they might halt the tidal wave of Brexit, before it engulfed the EU. Sure enough, this year France and Holland have both returned Europhile candidates, and Germany looks set to follow suit. The tide had turned, the pundits said. 2016 had been the high water mark of Populism. 2017 would be the year the EU fought back. However, the tide in Europe may now be about

Édouard Philippe is the perfect fit to be Emmanuel Macron’s Premier Minister. A one-time Socialist who then switched to the centre-right Les Républicains, the 46-year-old mirrors the ambiguity of his president. Philippe has been the mayor of the northern port town of Le Havre since 2010 and the region’s MP for the last five years. Since his accession to the presidency last week, Macron has rechristened his party, La République en Marche [LRM], and in nominating Philippe as his PM he’s hoping to send a message to the country that he really is a centrist president who ‘is neither left, nor right’. When his party unveiled 428 of its parliamentary candidates

Never mind Eurovision. For Germany, the state election in North Rhine Westphalia on Sunday was the big one – the best indication of how Germans will vote in their national election in four months time. The result was a ‘political earthquake’ according to German media – a humiliation for Martin Schulz’s Social Democrats, and a spectacular victory for Angela Merkel’s conservative CDU. For Merkel, a dead woman walking a year ago, September’s national election now looks like hers to lose. How did she manage this remarkable comeback? And what are the implications for Britain, and the EU? Yesterday’s result may have taken German pundits by surprise, but Merkel’s support has been

Are Leavers thicker than Remainers? The short answer is: yes. At least, on average. That’s according to a paper analysing voters on both sides of the godawful Brexit referendum, which says that: ‘When compared with Remain voters, Leave voters displayed significantly lower levels of numeracy, reasoning and appeared more reliant on impulsive ‘System 1’ thinking.’ Now obviously I voted Leave and I’m super-duper clever, but this is not remotely surprising; June 23 was effectively a vote on globalisation, which favours the more intelligent and educated at the expense of the less gifted. When rising sea levels turn our little ponds into great lakes, the big fish are going to benefit a

I’m a Brexiteer and I’m glad Le Pen lost. Those Brexit-bashers who say ‘Brexit-Trump-Le-Pen’ almost as one word, as if they are the same thing, all weird, all evil, all a species of fascism, have got it utterly wrong. Brexit was democratic, optimistic, generous, a positive people’s strike for better politics. Le Pen’s programme, by contrast, is mean, nativistic, protectionist and tragic. Its motor is fear, not confidence; panic, not experimentation. It has nothing in common with Brexit. I am a Brexiteer against Le Pen, and there are many of us. Today’s Macron-loving front pages once again give the impression that Brexit was the starting pistol of a sinister new

‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ said the deputy mayor as we counted the votes in the Salle du Peuple on Sunday night. This year, as the token Brit on the municipal council, I was promoted from opening the envelopes to actually counting the votes and it was immediately apparent something odd was going on. We count the ballots by the hundred which means that after every hundred envelopes are counted, we know the percentage share immediately. It was neck-and-neck all night between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen (Macron eventually won, by a whisper) but there was a third party in the race, too. For every hundred envelopes we