India is not preparing for war, but picking up the newspapers in Delhi you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. For weeks, the papers have been blowing the horns of retribution against Islamabad after a convoy of police officers was rammed by a suicide bomber in Kashmir. Since both sides acquired nuclear weapons, neither had
There is a strange pre-revolutionary atmosphere in Brussels. At the various receptions and dinners before we broke up for Christmas, it felt a bit like the Last Supper. Elections to the European Parliament are usually predictable affairs, but this time Europhiles (like myself) fear it will be different. We have grown used to populists doing
“May Day, May Day. We are sinking.” “This is the German Coast Guard. What are you thinking?” This advert for Berlitz, the language school, is a good metaphor for German politics and the decline of Angela Merkel. After this weekend’s election blow in Hesse, where support for her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party fell by
If Theresa May feels a bit disoriented and lonely – under pressure from her own friends in parliament – she could take some comfort in that she isn’t trying to run a government in Sweden. The country’s election delivered an inconclusive result. Prime Minister Stefan Löfven and his red-green coalition government lost a lot of
Uppsala, Sweden When I dropped off my kids at school early last week, I noticed that -another parent’s car was covered in ash — it had been parked in a garage where arsonists had been at work, attacking scores of vehicles. His Volvo had got away: just. ‘My car can be cleaned,’ the father told
‘This is not about whether Mrs Merkel stays as chancellor next week or not,’ said Xavier Bettel, the Prime Minister of Luxembourg, as he came out of an emergency summit on immigration last weekend. He was joking. That was exactly what the meeting had been about, and everybody there knew it. The summit was Operation
It was a moment to cherish, not to spoil. But I wasn’t the only one at the grand Charlemagne prize ceremony for Emmanuel Macron in Aix-la-Chapelle last week to wonder if the French President has already accepted that the federalist game is up. The medal is awarded for services to the cause of European unification,
Angela Merkel will get her fourth term as Germany’s chancellor. Members of the Social Democratic Party, the SPD, voted to get into government with her again. Yet neither the SPD nor Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union are cheering the idea of four more years in power. Merkel may not be a ‘dead woman walking’, but she’s
Bankruptcy, wrote Ernest Hemingway, happens in two ways — ‘gradually and then suddenly’. By now, Angela Merkel will be beginning to fear that her remarkable career is about to move into that second motion. Barely a year ago, she was being talked about as the leader of the free world. Now she is blamed by
No leader is indispensable, but it does feel like the future of Europe stands or falls with Angela Merkel. She’s been the godmother of the European Union for almost 15 years, and other leaders have learnt to accept one unspoken rule: Merkel is the adjudicator. Her aura of supreme power infuriated Nicolas Sarkozy, who wanted
If the British Conservative party is feeling stunned, having calamitously misread the public mood in a general election, then it is in good company. Across Europe, right-wing parties are struggling to find messages that resonate. It’s not that voters have turned away from conservative ideas: polls show a huge number interested in individual liberty, lower
It sounds a bit odd these days but economics was actually invented by the Greeks. Back then, in ancient Greece, the ethos of economics was to keep the house in order and generally manage finances in a way that would make Wolfgang Schäuble blush with embarrassment for extravagant habits. Now economics is about to get
If the British Conservative party is feeling stunned, having calamitously misread the public mood in a general election, then it is in good company. Across Europe, right-wing parties are struggling to find messages that resonate. It’s not that voters have turned away from conservative ideas: polls show a huge number interested in individual liberty, lower
Most diplomats in Brussels will tell you that Theresa May has just embarked upon a fool’s errand, that Britain might wish for a free-trade deal with the European Union but will have to learn that it can’t cherry-pick. Anyway, they say, nothing of any value can be agreed in two years. This received wisdom can
Most diplomats in Brussels will tell you that Theresa May has just embarked upon a fool’s errand, that Britain might wish for a free-trade deal with the European Union but will have to learn that it can’t cherry-pick. Anyway, they say, nothing of any value can be agreed in two years. This received wisdom can
Donald Trump is not wasting any time on trade. Or is he? In his video message about what he’ll do on day one, he said he’d abandon Barack Obama’s plan to broker a 12-country free-trade agreement for the Pacific region, the so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership (or TPP). But that’s the thing with the Donald – it’s impossible to
I sometimes wonder if the EU has a death wish – that europhiles like myself, when admitted to the cause, are sworn into a secret society with the ultimate goal of destroying the European Project. For a decade or more, the EU has been veering from crisis to crisis – yet presented with an opportunity
Meet Boris Johnson, Britain’s new chief trade negotiator. I admit it is an effort to imagine Boris in that parish, haggling with dry regulators over technical barriers to trade like phytosanitary rules and mutual recognition of standards in nuclear engineering. Yet Boris has great aspirations for Britain’s future trade deals, and his gusto is certainly
European politics hardly needs more excitement, but that’s what in store after the crushing victory for the Law and Justice party (PiS) in Poland’s general election. The party is not just pretty far off the European mainstream; its politics breathe what Adam Michnik, the legendary dissident, has called ‘a combination of an inferiority and superiority
The Greek referendum will change nothing. Greek voters already expressed their great dissatisfaction with the bailout packages when they elected Syriza to power in January. The proposition they were asked to vote about now does not exist – and the referendum was just a sham. The bailout agreement that Greece and its creditors battled over for
