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French politicians can’t get enough of ‘De Gaulle’ – POLITICO

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 16:34:54 +0000

French politicians can’t get enough of ‘De Gaulle’

The five-hour-long movie captures the zeitgeist of French politics ahead of next year’s presidential election.

AI generated Text-to-speech

The film tells the tale of Charles de Gaulle's political maneuvering to maintain France’s sovereignty and fend off a domineering American president's plans for Europe. | Stephane Cardinale/Corbis via Getty Images

July 27, 2026 4:00 am CET

By Marion Solletty

PARIS — Politics in France has rarely been more divisive, but presidential candidates of various political persuasions have finally found something they agree on: The new movie about Charles de Gaulle is a masterpiece.

“De Gaulle,” a two-part, five-hour-long opus, has become an unexpected summer hit after a slow start at the box office. The film tells the lesser-known tale of the legendary general’s political maneuvering to maintain France’s sovereignty and fend off a domineering American president’s plans for Europe.

“De Gaulle” is a movie for the moment, and not just because the comfort of dark, air-conditioned theaters offers refuge from heat waves scorching France this summer.

The epic tale of a solitary, dogged patriot fighting to save his country from annihilation while standing up to an overbearing ally across the Atlantic captures the zeitgeist of French politics today.

As France again faces questions about the future of its alliance with the United States, French people find themselves forced to choose between various leaders portraying themselves as national saviors ahead of the presidential election next year.

So presidential hopefuls from across the political spectrum, including those from parties that view De Gaulle less favorably, are hailing the film’s portrayal of the wartime general’s brilliance in times of trouble — and, in thinly veiled casting attempts, trying to portray themselves as France’s next providential leader.

Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu last week said the movie’s success spoke to the French need of “meaning” and “perspectives” in a rare interview with glossy magazine Paris Match.

Perhaps the most surprising endorsement came from anticapitalist firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whose party France Unbowed opposes conservative movements that have claimed to carry on De Gaulle’s legacy, despite the general himself equally despising all political parties.

During his Bastille Day address in the western city of Paimpont, the left-wing leader, one of the top contenders in next year’s election, strongly encouraged his supporters to watch a “magnificent movie,” drawing parallels between De Gaulle’s uphill battle to build up the country’s free forces during the war and his own campaign.

“I would like us to once again shake up the order of things,” he said right before invoking the movie. “This election is so dangerous that the stakes are incredibly high.”

A political tale

The De Gaulle movie’s originality lies in its focus on political battles rather than military ones, though it does feature a generous dose of epic fights led by rogue French officers.

At the heart of it is the wartime general’s far-fetched political campaign to rally French officials, soldiers, diplomats and ordinary citizens who — initially in rather small numbers — refused to abide by the armistice with Nazi Germany struck by Marshal Philippe Pétain, then head of the French state, and De Gaulle’s parallel quest to secure support from British and American allies.

Sébastien Lecornu leaves after the weekly Cabinet meeting at the Elysée Palace in Paris on July 22, 2026. | Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images

“De Gaulle belongs to all French people, regardless of their political leanings,” said Eric Branca, an author who has written several books about De Gaulle. “Attempts to co-opt him demonstrate that he has become a mandatory point of reference for anyone who upholds — or wishes to be seen as upholding — a tradition of national and popular defense.”

The wartime leader, who rebelled against the elected government that collaborated with the Nazis, has long been a revered figure in French politics, though more so on the right end of the political spectrum.

Former Presidents Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy both headed self-described Gaullist parties, and their most direct political heir, conservative leader Bruno Retailleau, was the first high-profile presidential candidate to publicly praise the “superb” ode to De Gaulle earlier this month.

“Why is this movie so successful?” Retailleau said this month on France 2’s primetime evening news broadcast. “Of course, there’s the director’s talent, there’s the actors’ talent, but there’s something deeper … There’s a need for patriotism, there’s a need to rediscover who we are.”

Just like its main character, whose London-based operations got off to a slow start — the film depicts De Gaulle’s loneliness in his early days in the British capital, where his initial calls for rebellion fell mostly on deaf ears — the De Gaulle movie looked to be on the verge of failure before meeting success.

When the first part came out early June, ticket sales were low, portending a commercial disaster for a movie that cost roughly €75 million to make. Word of mouth helped spur viewership, as did the severe heat waves that hit the country, and as of Friday the film had sold more than 3.5 million tickets, according to CBO box office figures published by French media.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon delivers a speech in Paimpont, France, on July 14, 2026. | Fred Tanneau/AFP via Getty Images

Center-left MEP and presidential hopeful Raphaël Glucksmann urged his supporters to go and see the movie when he spoke at a French national day ceremony in the southwestern town of Izon.

“Go and see what makes France great. What freedom is worth, and what it costs: loneliness. The loneliness of the general and his first companions,” he said in what one can’t help but see as a hint at his own struggle to overcome his political camp’s deep internal divisions.

Glucksmann is the moderate left’s best-placed candidate in polls but has yet to unite like-minded partners behind him.

Branca, the author who writes extensively on De Gaulle, said the movie resonated strongly with the country’s current political situation, marked by instability and a deep fragmentation, including because it highlighted the importance of legitimacy in politics. There are currently more than 30 already declared or likely candidates in next year’s election, a number inversely proportional to the French population’s declining trust in their politicians.

“[Collaborationist regime] Vichy was legal,[but] De Gaulle was legitimate,” he said.

That legitimacy was rooted in his refusal to stop fighting and accept the humiliating defeat inflicted by the German army, which swept over the country and brought it to its knees in the Battle of France in the spring of 1940.

Bruno Retailleau is pictured in Paris on July 7, 2026. | Daniel Perron/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images

While France isn’t currently at war, the widely held perception that its leaders are either incompetent or incapable of placing public interest above their individual ambitions is fueling voter dissatisfaction and the rise of populist figures like Mélenchon and far-right candidate Marine Le Pen.

Le Pen hasn’t publicly commented on the film, but prominent figures from her party, the National Rally, have hailed it. MEP Pierre-Romain Thionnet, posting from a movie theater, said on X it was “written with a French heart.”

French-American standoff

The movie also highlights the standoff between De Gaulle, then an isolated undersecretary of state in exile, and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who doesn’t share British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s fondness for the French resistance leader. Roosevelt, appalled by France’s military defeat, saw De Gaulle as an obstacle to his own plans to fight the Axis powers and prepare for D-Day.

“From the moment the Americans step into the war, they want to do it in the best possible conditions. Dealing with a France that is … not united makes things difficult for them,” said Guillaume Lasconjarias, a military historian at the Institute for Higher National Defense Studies.

The film shows De Gaulle standing up to Roosevelt, previewing decades of French defiance toward its powerful ally, and sticking to his sovereign France mantra at the risk of jeopardizing military victories and the Allies’ fragile unity.

The strategy carried a lot of short-term pain but also long-term gains for Paris and its allies, with French free forces and the unified resistance proving a key asset in the weeks and months following D-Day. Most importantly for the French, De Gaulle-led France was able to partly erase the political stigma attached to the Vichy regime’s quick capitulation and its work with Nazi Germany.

“He was such a pain in the neck,” said centrist former Economy Minister Eric Lombard, a longtime admirer of De Gaulle. “Honestly, the fact that he managed to cast us as winners and secure us a seat on the [United Nations] Security Council … It is incredible.”

Flipping the kill switch: I survived 72 hours without US tech – POLITICO

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 10:12:20 +0000

Flipping the kill switch:
I survived 72 hours without US tech

The EU wants to decrease reliance on American technology. Here's what happened when a POLITICO reporter tried to live and work without it.

By MATHIEU POLLET

^{Illustration by Natália Delgado/POLITICO}

AI generated Text-to-speech

August 17, 2026 4:50 pm CET

The first thing I noticed when I gave up American technology was the silence.

My phone usually starts up before I get out of bed, buzzing every few minutes throughout the day with calls, messages, headlines, calendar reminders and social media alerts. It’s a constant pulse that averages nearly 200 iPhone notifications on weekends and twice as many Monday-to-Friday.

But on this warm mid-summer Sunday, my life was on an unlikely version of mute. After years of reporting on Europe’s push to wean itself off U.S. tech giants and cultivate homegrown alternatives, I had decided to test my own daily habit by cutting myself off from using any American technology for 72 hours.

No iPhone. No Mac. No Slack or Teams. No Google Search or Maps. No ChatGPT. No WhatsApp or Signal. No Facebook or Instagram feeds. No credit card payments.

I wondered if I would turn into a digital monk.

For three days, I set out to live and work in Brussels as if U.S. tech had suddenly become unavailable to me overnight. It was a purposefully fictional scenario rooted in a very real European anxiety: what happens if Washington weaponizes our continent’s Silicon Valley dependence and reaches for the tech “kill switch?”

Limited versions of that scenario have already surfaced. When U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration cut off French-born International Criminal Court judge Nicolas Guillou from U.S.-linked financial and technology services, he called it a form of “civil death.”

Meanwhile, U.S. export controls in June forced Anthropic to block foreign nationals from accessing two of its most advanced AI models, offering a glimpse of what government bans on access to cutting-edge technology can look like.

Such episodes feed into mounting fears that the Trump administration could use Europe’s overreliance on U.S. tech as leverage in trade fights or disputes over EU regulations. A Proton survey released earlier this month found that 74 percent of European business leaders worry such a cutoff could disrupt their operations.

In my own little experiment, the stakes were much lower. Yet I was about to find out that replacing American tools with those built here in Europe was going to make almost everything harder — and lonelier.

Trying to live without U.S. tech, I would find out, essentially amounts to trying to live without tech at all. That was partly because, like virtually all of my fellow Europeans, I had locked myself into those consumer choices.

Dumbphones and FOMO

The early symptoms of going cold turkey looked suspiciously like withdrawal.

On that first morning, with my iPhone shut off, I reached for a Nokia brick from Finland. The so-called dumbphone is the type of device now enjoying a second life among people detoxing from screen time and is also a favorite of drug dealers seeking to avoid getting busted by any tracking and data collection.

Several hours in, I realized there were no notifications on the Nokia. Nobody calls or texts anymore. Then came the shameful part: a sense of helplessness, followed by FOMO-fueled restlessness. The world had surely kept spinning at full speed, and I was missing it. For the next few days, I would still catch myself checking the phone compulsively like an addict.

“The phone aged you instantly,” my best friend joked later that day as we traded our now-standard FaceTime video calls for a regular one. It was unclear whether he meant the muffled audio or me struggling with a new-but-actually-old device, or both.

I did notice that I was pacing up and down my flat because my usually overstimulated brain apparently couldn’t handle focusing on a voice-only call.

One instant benefit from my dumbphone: no doomscrolling in bed.

It all took me back to my first cellphone at 13, when texting meant tapping the same tiny key several times for a single letter, every SMS cost money and abbreviations and emojis were not just stylistic choices but ways to squeeze more into a message.

Teenage girls look at their smartphones in Valence, France on July 7, 2026. | Nicolas Guyonnet / Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images

I knew my social media life would be at risk in my experiment. European alternatives such as Mastodon have gained traction since Elon Musk turned Twitter into X. But who joins a social network when none of their friends are there?

That was fine. I was actually eager to disappear for a while, well aware of the anxiety social media induces in me and the insecurities created by constantly watching other people’s supposedly perfect lives.

Online shopping was out — but so too was paying by card in stores and restaurants. The payment networks I rely on are American: Visa and Mastercard dominate card payments across Europe, meaning that even a purchase made with a European bank card often still runs over U.S.-controlled rails.

It meant I had to buy everything using cash, which I hadn’t done regularly in ages. Fortunately, unlike in some other European countries, Belgian legislation requires merchants to accept banknotes. The hard part was finding some of those stores without the help of Google Maps, which I’d come to rely on almost as much as my credit cards.

The invisible grip

Swearing off Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+ and YouTube was also part of the deal — already eliminating a sizable chunk of my leisure time. But it turned out I could barely watch anything at all, or even properly test European streaming platforms, because my television and tablet both ran on Google software.

Thankfully, an offline Nintendo Switch from Japan, good old books and the legendary Snake game kept me company.

A gamer holds a controller at a Nintendo Switch 2 booth at a trade fair in Cologne, Germany on Aug. 20, 2025. | Ina Fassbender/AFP via Getty Images

These invisible dependencies run deep. Beyond the products we use every day, U.S. systems often serve as gateways to European companies trying to take on Big Tech.

Take Sweden’s Spotify or the Estonia-based rival to Uber, Bolt. Both still heavily rely on U.S.-controlled app stores, operating systems, payment networks and other digital infrastructure.

And then there is the cloud: the data centers and servers that host websites, process data and route traffic. The vast majority of that market is dominated by Amazon, Microsoft and Google, whose infrastructure supports large parts of Europe’s digital economy.

Many corners of Europe would go dark if those services were shut down, with its economy, public administration and communications infrastructure struggling to function normally.

Working outside the stack

On Monday morning, I walked into the office with the slightly misplaced confidence that I had prepared for everything. My efficiency at work, admittedly during a very quiet summer week, took less of a hit than I expected.

I was still working from the office. I used an open-source, Linux-powered computer. I communicated by email through a Switzerland-based Proton address, browsed the web using the Norwegian browser Vivaldi and French search engine Qwant, wrote everything in LibreOffice and even tried Mistral’s generative AI assistant. And there was always a good old notebook.

I felt productive. But the workflow around me was not. The tools themselves worked perfectly well once I accepted that breaking years of habits would take time. The disruption ultimately came from stunted collaboration: meetings, messages, shared documents and the constant stream of small exchanges that keep a newsroom moving.

“It was like you disappeared,” one colleague would tell me later.

European alternatives do exist in that space. The problem is, just like for social media, they only work properly when everyone else uses them too or when competing systems are interoperable — something the EU has long tried to legislate and enforce, often against resistance from large technology platforms.

For this little while, despite technically being able to continue working, I became an outsider within my own team. I had to skip our routine video meetings on Slack and Teams, while missing messages sent over WhatsApp and Signal.

In a trade, a city and an era built around instant messaging, sending a good old SMS felt almost prehistoric — a reminder of the longstanding complaints from the European telecom industry about losing messaging and calling revenues to U.S. tech firms.

Ultimately, this underscored one of the major pinch points in Europe’s push for greater tech independence: digital sovereignty is not an individual project. It only works if people, companies and institutions move together.

On their own, individual efforts are more likely to leave people feeling digitally isolated rather than digitally sovereign.

Relax and relapse

And yet, there was something blissful about these three days.

The initial anxiety slowly gave way to a kind of peace. Of course, that feeling may only reflect that the experiment was temporary and my digital life had not been erased.

The experience nevertheless highlighted how much I had taken these tools for granted. I have placed all my eggs in the same digital basket: my communication channels, the tools I use to authenticate myself and access the digital world, my polished digital self and years of accumulated knowledge, all stored inside one sprawling digital safe.

The concern is no longer simply whether that safe could be broken into from the outside. It is also whether somebody could lock it — or empty it — from within.

Now, as you might wonder how I’ll act on what I’ve learned, I am strangely reminded of Covid.

Many of us emerged from that temporary era of lockdowns and involuntary limits full of healthy new habits and grand ideas about how our lifestyles should change, only to return remarkably quickly to our old routines.

Sadly, the same thing happened here. My iPhone came straight back into my pocket. Messages began flowing through again. My bank card returned to its usual place. Within hours, I had fallen comfortably back into the U.S. technology stack.

As I switched my smartphone back on, my screen lit up with incoming texts inquiring whether my little experiment was over. After 72 hours of old-school SMS exchanges, two different friends were both clearly eager to return to reality, sending me the same final text: “Back to WhatsApp?”

How ‘Made in Israel’ is powering European security – POLITICO

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 22:41:06 +0000

How ‘Made in Israel’ is powering European security

The EU’s sovereignty push is colliding with growing reliance on Israeli defense firms.

By ANTOANETA ROUSSI
in Brussels

^{Illustration by Ricardo Tomás for POLITICO}

AI generated Text-to-speech

September 9, 2026 6:00 am CET

On the last day of August, a group of Greek military officials arrived in Tel Aviv, led by Major General Ioannis Bouras, to sign what would become one of the largest defense export deals in both countries’ histories.

The €3 billion agreement — called Achilles Shield — will provide a suite of Israeli tech to protect Greece against a wide range of threats, including missiles, aircraft and drones.

The deal is the latest installment in a growing relationship between European governments and the Israeli defense sector. As the continent races to rearm, it has largely relied on the United States for guns, tanks and aircraft. For many of the less-visible systems now at the center of modern security — sensors, interceptors, surveillance technology — governments are increasingly turning to Israel.

That dependence is deepening even as Europe’s political relationship with Israel grows more strained. The wars in Gaza and Lebanon have fueled tensions between the European Union and Israel, even as the bloc’s governments have become increasingly dependent on the country for critical systems — but those disputes have done little to slow cooperation between Israel’s defense sector and individual countries.

“Looking right now on our relations with the EU, yes, there are challenges,” said Avi Nir-Feldklein, Israel’s ambassador to the bloc. “But when you look at what we’re doing on the bilateral level with EU member states, the constructive, practical cooperation is intensive and flourishing.”

Israel’s advantage begins with its military. Young engineers serve in elite intelligence and cyber units, where they work on real-world security threats. After leaving the Israel Defense Forces, many join defense companies or launch security start-ups. The result is a conveyor belt between the battlefield and commercial product development.

Multicopter drones hang on display at the Elbit exhibition stand at the 2026 ILA Berlin Air Show on June 11, 2026. | Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Israel’s top three defense companies — Israel Aerospace Industries, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and Elbit Systems — are either state-owned or maintain deep institutional links to the Israeli defense establishment, with senior military figures embedded in their governance structures.

“Israel is an excellent example of how defense or private companies are so well integrated,” said Kaupo Rosin, the head of Estonia’s foreign intelligence service. “And that makes them very capable.”

Israel’s broader security sector has also become a magnet for investment: Its firms attract nearly a quarter of global cyber investment, according to the Israel Innovation Authority 2025 High-Tech Report, with Google’s $32 billion purchase of Israeli start-up Wiz this year underscoring the sector’s attractiveness.

Hiba Tareef, spokesperson for Israel’s Mission to the EU and NATO, said the appeal lay in the close integration of government, academia and the private sector — and in technology shaped by real-world operations.

“By leveraging our real-time operational experience, we enable our partners to shift from a reactive to a proactive posture, significantly bolstering our collective resilience and defense,” she said.

Deepening dependence

A complete picture of Israel’s role in European defense is difficult to establish. Many contracts are undisclosed on national-security grounds, and some Israeli companies operate through European subsidiaries. But dozens of entries in the European tender database reviewed by POLITICO show Israeli firms becoming go-to suppliers for military communications, surveillance and electronic warfare.

Many of the public contracts — including the €3 billion Greek deal — were awarded directly to Israeli firms without opening the work to competing bids as is preferred by EU law, according to the tender notices.

European procurement rules treat competition as the default, even in defense and security. Direct awards are allowed only in narrow circumstances — for instance, in cases of genuine technical exclusivity or narrowly defined national-security concerns.

“‘No-tender’ routes are exceptional, evidence-based, and must be robustly justified,” said Annette Rosenkoetter and Andrea Pomana, partners at the legal firm FPS Law in Germany, which specializes in public procurement and European cases.

The pattern matters because direct awards can deepen dependence, as governments become reliant on a specific producer. The European Court of Justice ruled in January 2025 that highly specialized systems can lock in a buyer if they are designed in ways that only the original supplier can maintain or upgrade.

The Netherlands offers a glimpse of how that works in practice. In 2025, Elbit Systems’ C4I and Cyber — the company’s cyber division — won a €25 million contract to supply battlefield-management systems to the Dutch Ministry of Defense. It was a direct award, with no competition, and justified on the grounds that the ministry required additional services from the company it had originally contracted.

The Dutch Ministry of Defense did not reply to a request for comment.

An Elbit Systems employee operates systems of a combat vehicle in Elkayim, northern Israel on Aug. 4, 2019. | Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images

Similarly, in 2024, the Spanish Defense Ministry awarded Rafael Advanced Defense Systems a €1.17 million contract without an open competition, saying the Israeli company was the only supplier capable of providing the required equipment.

Other direct deals include a €6.5 million Elbit Systems Deutschland contract with Denmark’s Ministry of Defense in September 2025 for a device used to process and analyze electronic signals.

“Despite the political situation and animosity between Israel and the European Union, when it comes to the security dimension, the astonishing thing is that cooperation has always been very good,” said Sharon Pardo, a professor of international relations at Israel’s Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

Political backlash

Critics warn that Europe may be creating a new dependency at the very moment it claims to be seeking greater autonomy, just as the conflicts in the Middle East are straining relations with Israel.

France has repeatedly restricted Israeli government participation at major arms shows, while the Finnish government was criticized in May for co-organizing a defense-tech seminar with the Israeli Ministry of Defense.

“If the goal is to strengthen European autonomy and sovereignty, then you cannot replace one type of dependency with another,” said Li Andersson, a left-wing Finnish member of the European Parliament.

Li Andersson is seen at the European Parliament in Brussels on July 15, 2026. | Alain Rolland/EP

Andersson also pointed to the way that some Israeli security companies market their products as having been tested in real-life operational conditions — in some cases, against Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.

“It should be clear that we do not engage in arms trade or defense cooperation with an actor that has repeatedly been found by several different institutions to break and disregard the most fundamental rules and principles of international law,” she said.

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar hit back at European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in September 2025 after she proposed sanctions and partial suspension of EU-Israel trade over Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Sa’ar said the assessment was based on “false accusations and legal gaps,” and insisted that Israel respected international law, arguing that the measures would only strengthen Hamas.

Hannah Neumann, a German member of the Green party in the European Parliament, warned that European countries were at risk of weakening themselves geopolitically.

The more governments rely on Israel, the harder it will become to impose costs on its foreign policy, she said.

“I would prefer German resources and political energy to go into strengthening Europe’s autonomy,” she added.

Security first

The political backlash has done little to slow the deals.

In January, Germany and Israel signed a memorandum to develop a cyber dome made with Israeli technology on German territory. A month later, Israel, Greece and Cyprus launched a Maritime Cybersecurity Center in Nicosia.

Spain offers an even sharper example of the tension. Even as Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s government canceled €1 billion worth of defense contracts with Israel as part of what he called a “total arms embargo” over the “genocide” in Gaza, Madrid’s regional administration sought and received help in January from Israel’s Cyber Directorate to protect critical infrastructure.

Neither the Madrid Regional Administration nor the Cypriot authorities responded to requests for comment. The Spanish Ministry of Defense said it had “no contract relating to cybersecurity with any companies in Israel.”

Italy, meanwhile, has formally prioritized Israeli technology. In 2024, its cyber agency introduced a procurement incentive that treats Israeli cybersecurity software on par with products from the EU and NATO in public tenders.

For small countries bordering Russia, the calculation can be especially stark, said Juha Martelius, director of the Finnish Security and Intelligence Service.

Graffiti criticizing the French government is seen at the Israeli pavillion at the Paris Air Show on June 16, 2025. | Mathieu Rabechault/AFP via Getty Images

“In a country like Finland, we have never afforded to buy quantitatively as much as we would have perhaps needed or even wanted,” he said. “We always put emphasis on quality. That is, we buy the best, independent of where it comes from.”

Greece, for its part, tried to reduce its dependence on Israel. In the Achilles Shield deal, the Greek military was careful to insist on access to the system’s source code, so it could maintain and upgrade the technology independently.

“Becoming ‘hostages,’ be it even to the friendliest foreign country or ally, is absolutely impossible,” Greek Defense Minister Nikos Dendias said in July.

Niclas Herbst, a German center-right lawmaker who sits on the Delegation to Israel Committee in the Parliament, said that Israel offers what the European defense industry lacks, especially when it comes to cyber security threats and air defense.

“It’s for the benefit of Europe to have a stable and reliable relationship with Israel in this regard,” Herbst told POLITICO.

Regarding criticism that Europe was using technology that had been tested on Palestinians, he noted that governments were predominantly investing in “very specialized software and sensor suites” to be used defensively.

“It’s a question of what do we want to buy?” he said. “Do we want to buy a good conscience or do we want to buy defense products?”

Articles – POLITICO

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 16:56:34 +0000

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DECLASSIFIED

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European politics – POLITICO

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 16:39:33 +0000

Podcast

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Donald Trump – POLITICO

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 16:39:32 +0000

From Across the Pond

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Fri, 11 Sep 2026 16:39:31 +0000

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Nette Nöstlinger – POLITICO

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 16:39:30 +0000

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Europe targets homegrown nuclear deterrent as Trump sides with Putin – POLITICO

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 16:39:28 +0000

Europe targets homegrown nuclear deterrent as Trump sides with Putin

Germany’s Merz says Britain and France may need to “share” their nuclear weapons as America can’t be relied on to defend NATO.

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Friedrich Merz said his country would need to look beyond the U.S. to Britain and France for nuclear safeguards. | Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images

February 21, 2025 10:00 pm CET

By Tim Ross, Laura Kayali and Nette Nöstlinger

Europe's politicians are openly discussing how they could tackle the threat of nuclear attack without American help, in a dramatic sign of the deep crisis engulfing the transatlantic alliance under Donald Trump.

In what would be a huge shift in position, the runaway favorite to be Germany’s next leader said the continent must find new ways to defend itself without the U.S. military underpinning its nuclear protection through NATO.

Friedrich Merz, whom polls suggest is on course to become chancellor after Sunday’s German elections, said his country would need to look beyond the U.S. to Britain and France for nuclear safeguards. Under Trump, he said, America could no longer be relied on.

“We need to have discussions with both the British and the French — the two European nuclear powers — about whether nuclear sharing, or at least nuclear security from the U.K. and France, could also apply to us,” Merz said.

Merz's comment heralds a major strategic shift for Germany, which has long resisted French plans for closer European military cooperation, especially on nuclear defense. Merz's Christian Democrats have traditionally fought to protect relations with the U.S. over calls from Paris for more "strategic autonomy" in the EU.

A change of heart in Germany, fully embraced for the first time by a chancellor in Berlin, would be yet another sign of how Trump’s return to the White House a month ago has blown a hole in the relationship with America that has guaranteed European security since 1945.

On Friday, the president and his team showed no sign of backing down on their hostile rhetoric against Europe — and the leaders of Germany and Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelenskyy in particular — after a series of attacks in recent days.

With two days until the German federal elections, U.S. Vice President JD Vance even floated pulling American troops out of Germany in what would be a devastating blow to the continent’s security structures.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron will head to Washington next week in an attempt to talk Trump out of siding with Russia and abandoning American commitments to Europe and Ukraine.

NATO in doubt

On Friday, Merz said Germany would now need to look elsewhere for its defense alliances.

“We must prepare for the possibility that Donald Trump will no longer uphold NATO’s mutual defense commitment unconditionally,” Merz said in an interview with German broadcaster ZDF. “That is why, in my view, it is crucial that Europeans make the greatest possible efforts to ensure that we are at least capable of defending the European continent on our own.”

Germany is among the European countries that host U.S. nuclear weapons under NATO's nuclear sharing policy, alongside Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium.

Emmanuel Macron made a major attempt to promote the idea of a "Europeanized" French nuclear deterrence in 2020 and an Élysée official said Merz's remarks showed that support was finally growing. | Magali Cohen/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images

Paris offered to start talks on France finding a way to share its nuclear arsenal with Germany as long ago as 2007, but President Nicolas Sarkozy received a hard "no" from Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Subsequent French attempts at atomic diplomacy also failed to gain traction in Berlin.

Macron made a major attempt to promote the idea of a "Europeanized" French nuclear deterrence in 2020 and an Élysée official said Merz's remarks showed that support was finally growing. "In response to the invitation France sent its partners who want to discuss the significance of the president’s speech in February 2020 and the European dimension of [French] deterrence, we’ve noticed that interest has only increased, in particular since the war in Ukraine,” the official from the presidential office said.

Given the long history of French frustration with Berlin, Merz's comments were welcomed by politicians, officials and analysts in France, Germany and the U.K. Even some of his political opponents acknowledge privately that talking to the British and French about nuclear protection would be a sensible step.

“That a future chancellor, chief of the [Christian Democrats] should say that is a huge thing, I can't think of any equivalent in the post-World War II era, but it's commensurate with the shock that the [American] statements have caused,” said one French official working on military policy, granted anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

“In many ways, what's happening is a bit positive. For decades, under the guise of transatlanticism, we've been losing interest in defense and letting the U.S. decide. It's also an opportunity for Europe to take matters into its own hands.”

'Striking'

Jean-Louis Thiériot, a former deputy defense minister in France, now a lawmaker in the National Assembly’s defense committee, said Merz’s intervention was “striking.”

His words show “how seriously he takes the risk of decoupling from the USA, and thus the end of the American nuclear umbrella,” Thiériot said. “That's a big change from the old days, when we weren't taken very seriously, especially in terms of volume,” he added, referring to past criticism that France doesn’t have as many nuclear warheads as the U.S. or Russia.

“This shows both the seriousness of the situation within the alliance and the seriousness with which French and British deterrence is taken,” he added.

Elsewhere there was skepticism that the French public would support expanding the country’s nuclear obligations to cover Germany in the way Merz apparently imagined, although some observers still saw potential for talks with the U.K.

Merz's comments encouraged politicians in Britain's ruling Labour Party who want Starmer to go further in supporting European allies. Tan Dhesi, a senior lawmaker in Starmer's party, welcomed the debate about how the U.K. can contribute to stronger European defense, including on nuclear deterrence.

"At this critical troubling time for our continent’s defense and security, given Russia’s imperialistic designs, we as a nation must show leadership. That is what our friends and allies are also expecting of us," said Dhesi, the senior Labour MP who chairs the U.K. parliament's defense committee. "Given the potential absence or significant reduction of American presence, this is our time as a nation to step up to the plate and take leadership on defense for the European continent."

As part of Britain’s existing NATO commitments, the U.K. already provides a nuclear umbrella to European allies who are members of NATO, including Germany. The French position is different. Paris insists its so-called vital interests, which nuclear deterrence is designed to protect, have a European dimension, but has not committed to joint NATO nuclear planning in the same way as the British already have.

The British government had no immediate comment on Merz's remarks but any notion of building a new European nuclear defense regime — that would be expected to come good if the U.S. reneges on NATO — is an extremely delicate topic for the U.K., whose nuclear missile program is highly integrated with America's.

“Obviously the level of anxiety in Berlin right now is particularly high,” said Łukasz Kulesa, director of nuclear policy at the Royal United Services Institute defense think-tank in London. “At this point we still don’t have any definite indications that the U.S. will rethink its role in providing extended nuclear deterrence through NATO to the rest of the allies including Germany. So in a sense it’s more about preparation for a potential option.”

One of the many questions will be whether any new European-focused deterrent would still be devised through NATO structures, Kulesa said. “At this point I think it’s worth having a more detailed conversation of how such a U.K.- and French-led nuclear deterrence could be made credible.”

Merz's statement now "needs to be followed up in the long term at political level, on both the French and German sides," said Héloïse Fayet, a researcher at the French Institute for International Relations in Paris, who is an expert on nuclear deterrence.

“It's been on the table for five years, and if we don't talk about it now, when Europe is in danger, we'll never talk about it," she said.

Clea Caulcutt and Josh Berlinger in Paris and Esther Webber in London contributed reporting.

Trump congratulates Germany’s election winners — and himself – POLITICO

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 16:39:28 +0000

Trump congratulates Germany’s election winners — and himself

U.S. president’s praise for Friedrich Merz’s ‘conservatives’ offers a glimmer of hope after the White House’s brutal criticism of Europe.

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Somehow, Donald Trump also managed to claim some credit for himself after the right's victory in the German election. | Joe Raedle/Getty Images

February 23, 2025 10:34 pm CET

By Tim Ross

BERLIN — Donald Trump clearly likes to keep his opponents on their toes.

After spending the past two weeks trashing European politicians and ripping up America’s commitments to the continent’s security, the president of the United States offered warm congratulations to Germany’s election winners on Sunday.

And somehow, he also managed to claim some credit for himself.

The results from Germany’s most consequential election in a generation are still coming in, but Friedrich Merz’s conservative CDU/CSU is projected to win the biggest share of the vote and the most seats in the new Bundestag.

In a post on social media — written entirely in capital letters — Trump did not mention either Merz or his party by name, referring to “THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY IN GERMANY,” but argued that the country’s swing to the right was part of a political shift that Germany shared with the U.S.

“MUCH LIKE THE USA, THE PEOPLE OF GERMANY GOT TIRED OF THE NO COMMON SENSE AGENDA, ESPECIALLY ON ENERGY AND IMMIGRATION, THAT HAS PREVAILED FOR SO MANY YEARS,” Trump wrote. “THIS IS A GREAT DAY FOR GERMANY, AND FOR THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA UNDER THE LEADERSHIP OF A GENTLEMAN NAMED DONALD J. TRUMP. CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL — MANY MORE VICTORIES TO FOLLOW!!!”

After two weeks of repeated attacks from the White House on European politicians, even a bizarre post like this one probably counts as unexpectedly good news for Europe.

Trump has strained transatlantic relationships to the breaking point by opening unconditional talks on the future of Ukraine with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, and by repeating Moscow’s criticisms of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Many across the continent will be hoping Merz can convince Trump it’s worth standing by NATO and Ukraine, and not to ditch America’s historic commitments to European security.

Trump didn’t mention the far-right Alternative for Germany party favored by influential advisor Elon Musk. The tech billionaire has enthusiastically backed the AfD, including by posting several times on his X social media platform on election day.

POLITICO – European Politics, Policy, Government News

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 16:39:27 +0000

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UK ‘open to discussing’ digital services tax with Trump administration – POLITICO

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 13:25:23 +0000

UK ‘open to discussing’ digital services tax with Trump administration

Jamieson Greer said Donald Trump’s threat to slap 100% tariffs on European countries with digital services taxes is “not a bluff.”

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Andy Burnham speaks with staff at Wolverhampton bus station in England on Aug. 18, 2026. | Pool photo by Hannah McKay via AFP/Getty Images

August 19, 2026 12:15 pm CET

By Joseph Bambridge

LONDON — Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s government said the U.K. is willing to discuss American concerns over its digital services tax amid renewed pressure from the White House.

President Donald Trump in June threatened to impose 100 percent tariffs on European countries with DSTs which target U.S. tech firms, and in an interview with The Times newspaper published on Monday, Trump’s top trade official Jamieson Greer said the threat was “not a bluff” and the president’s demands that foreign governments abandon such taxes were “quite serious.”

“We remain open to discussing U.S. concerns and working with partners internationally,” a U.K. government spokesperson said when asked about Greer's comments.

“This tax is about making sure that businesses pay their fair share of U.K. tax based on the value they derive from U.K. activities,” the spokesperson said, adding that the U.K. is committed to removing it “once a global solution is in place.”

The DST raised over £1 billion last year, predominantly from American tech firms, and has repeatedly drawn Trump's ire.

The U.K. government has so far resisted calls to abandon the tax, including during trade negotiations last year. A U.K.-U.S. Economic Prosperity Deal signed by Trump and Burnham’s predecessor, Keir Starmer, did not mention the DST but said both sides would continue discussions to increase digital trade and address non-tariff barriers.

Greer added in his interview with The Times that the U.S. administration would not “set artificial timelines” and that relations with his British counterparts, including Trade Secretary Jonathan Reynolds and the prime minister’s business adviser Varun Chandra, are positive.

China slams EU foreign subsidies rules, links them to trade talks – POLITICO

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 13:25:23 +0000

China slams EU foreign subsidies rules, links them to trade talks

Beijing’s broadside against the Foreign Subsidies Regulation puts pressure on the recently relaunched trade dialogue.

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Containers and ships are seen at the port in Nanjing, China on June 9, 2026. | CN-STR/AFP via Getty Images

August 21, 2026 10:40 am CET

By Francesca Micheletti

BRUSSELS — China has dragged the EU’s foreign subsidies rules into its wider trade dispute with Brussels, just as the two sides enter a crucial stretch of negotiations.

Beijing’s Ministry of Justice has ordered Chinese companies not to hand over information to EU officials in investigations under the FSR — the bloc’s tool to ensure that players in the single market don’t receive unfair support from abroad.

The notice explicitly mentioned the European Commission’s in-depth probe into JD.com, the Chinese e-commerce giant that is trying to acquire Germany’s Ceconomy, the parent company of consumer electronics retailer MediaMarkt, in a €2 billion deal.

The move appears aimed at adding pressure on Brussels midway through a renewed trade dialogue between the EU and China, with negotiators engaged in intense closed-door discussions over how to narrow the EU’s €1 billion-a-day trade deficit in goods with China.

The Commission is expected to hold a videoconference with the Chinese Ministry of Commerce in September that would pave the way for a trip by trade chief Maroš Šefčovič to Beijing in early October.

The Commission will debrief EU leaders at a summit a few days later. That could be a make-or-break moment for the bloc to decide whether constructive engagement is enough to rebalance the trading relationship — or whether Brussels needs to defend Europe’s trade interests more forcefully.

“China has consistently opposed the EU’s abuse of unilateral tools such as the Foreign Subsidies Regulation (FSR) to suppress Chinese companies,” a spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Commerce told reporters on Thursday.

“I would like to emphasize that China and the EU have established a Trade and Investment Consultation (TIC) mechanism and reached a consensus on managing differences through dialogue and consultation,” the spokesperson added.

“We hope the EU will work with China to promptly correct its erroneous practices in the FSR investigation and strengthen communication through intergovernmental dialogue. China will closely monitor the EU’s actions and will take necessary measures to resolutely safeguard national security and the legitimate rights and interests of enterprises.”

No discrimination

The Commission maintains that the FSR does not discriminate against companies on the basis of where they’re headquartered.

“The FSR is completely, fully compliant with WTO rules as it applies to all companies irrespective of their nationality, and its objective is to ensure that all companies doing business in the EU, including Chinese ones, are treated equally and compete on an equal footing,” spokesperson Ricardo Cardoso told reporters in Brussels on Thursday.

According to Beijing, the EU is requesting too much information as it investigates whether JD.com’s deal is unfairly backed by Chinese state support.

“In the JD.com case, the EU has again arbitrarily and unreasonably demanded a wide range of information from relevant Chinese banks that is irrelevant to the investigation,” the Ministry of Commerce spokesperson said.

The Commission worries that JD.com may be benefiting from unfair advantages in the form of preferential financing, tax incentives and grants provided by the Chinese government that could give it a competitive edge in the EU market once the transaction is finalized.

JD.com offered remedies this week to address the Commission’s concerns, in what is typically a sign that talks are at an advanced stage. The company declined to comment.

Beijing’s intervention could even jeopardize the acquisition, according to Dirk Gotink, a center-right Dutch MEP and a member of the European Parliament’s International Trade Committee who is closely following the case.

“They’re being taken hostage by a political process,” he said, calling Beijing’s move “a unilateral escalation.”

Camille Gijs contributed reporting. This article has been updated.

Swarming jellyfish overrun French nuclear plant on same date two years in a row – POLITICO

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 11:53:03 +0000

Swarming jellyfish overrun French nuclear plant on same date two years in a row

The jellyfish invasion is the latest in a series of climate change-driven incidents that have affected a record number of French nuclear reactors over the summer.

AI generated Text-to-speech

A jellyfish lies on the shore near the nuclear power plant in Gravelines, northern France on Aug. 11, 2026. | Sameer Al-Doumy/AFP via Getty Images

August 11, 2026 5:45 pm CET

By Nicolas Camut

Aug. 11 is quickly becoming jellyfish invasion day at the Gravelines nuclear power plant in northern France.

Despite spending hundreds of thousands of euros to protect the plant from a jellyfish swarm like the one that saw reactors shuttered on Aug. 11, 2025, French utility provider EDF on Tuesday was again forced to bring the parts of the facility offline due to the presence of “several dozen tons” of jellyfish blocking pumping systems.

“On-site teams are fully mobilized to ensure the safety of the facilities and to reconnect the reactors to the national power grid,” EDF said in a statement.

Three fishing vessels are now “constantly patrolling off the coast of the plant" to conduct "preventive fishing operations [...] 24/7,” the company added.

Tuesday’s jellyfish invasion is the latest in a series of climate change-driven incidents that have affected French nuclear energy during a particularly infernal summer.

Nuclear power plants are typically built by rivers or on coastlines so they can use nearby water sources to cool their reactors. But a record number in France this summer have been forced to temporarily shut down due to heatwaves and droughts affecting their water supply.

Rising sea temperatures have made jellyfish swarms more common along the French coast in recent years, and those swarms can affect a plant’s ability to bring in seawater — which is what happened at Gravelines. Following last year’s incident at the plant along the North Sea, EDF installed cameras and deployed fishing boats to monitor the situation.

While the vessels “prevented a massive influx of jellyfish” on Saturday and Sunday, they were eventually overwhelmed as the swarm grew from “about 100 kilograms” to “several dozen tons,” the French state-owned utility giant said.

Opponents of nuclear energy were quick to jump on the incident.

“This only highlights that nuclear power plants are ill-equipped to deal with the consequences of climate change,” the French branch of Greenpeace said in statement.

Europe’s Trumpian nightmare – POLITICO

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 06:26:25 +0000

Europe’s Trumpian nightmare

The return of the disrupter-in-chief would further destabilize an already weakened continent.

AI generated Text-to-speech

Une victoire de Donald Trump provoquerait un tsunami de panique sur un continent en grande partie à la dérive, qui a déjà du mal à gérer les deux guerres qui se déroulent à sa périphérie. | Bill Pugliano/Getty Images

This article is also available in: French

November 4, 2024 4:01 am CET

By Tim Ross, Clea Caulcutt, Jürgen Klöckner and Hannah Roberts

The American people may be about to rip up the Western alliance, again. This time could be a whole lot worse.

Ahead of a United States presidential election that’s too close to call, top officials in European capitals are scrambling to prepare for Donald Trump’s return to the White House.

Political analysts and pollsters working for governments across the continent increasingly see the Republican former president as poised for one of the most startling comebacks in history.

Nobody thinks the Democratic Party nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, doesn’t have a chance, but her election would largely be a continuation of the status quo.

A Trump win would send a tsunami of panic across a largely rudderless continent already struggling to navigate the two wars on its periphery.

Yes, the European Union has already survived one Trump presidency; some leaders would even argue it emerged stronger because of it.

But in European capitals, a consensus is building: A return of the disrupter-in-chief would embolden Russian President Vladimir Putin, potentially trigger a destructive trade war and inflame political divisions across the continent.

Not only is Europe particularly weak at the moment, with a stuttering economy and struggling leaders in Germany and France; it would be a different Trump who would rock up at NATO summits and international gatherings from the 2016-20 version.

For one, he’d be unshackled by the U.S. officials who sought to restrain him during his first term. For another, the president who once referred to the EU as one of America’s “biggest foes” would likely be looking across the Atlantic with a serious chip on his shoulder.

“A second Trump term would be different,” said Leslie Vinjamuri, U.S. and Americas program director at Chatham House, a British think tank. “He now knows who he feels has wronged him both on the international stage and at home and has worked out with the team around him some plans for how to cut them off at the knees.”

Emboldened Putin

After Trump’s first election in 2016, European leaders could comfort themselves that, whatever was happening across the Atlantic, the continent itself was an island of stability, safe under the guiding hand of the powerful German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

This time around, European leadership is largely absent. Merkel’s successor Olaf Scholz is barely keeping his coalition together, while French President Emmanuel Macron has been shrunk to a figurehead by an emboldened far right.

In European capitals, a consensus is building: A return of the disrupter-in-chief would embolden Russian President Vladimir Putin. | Alexander Kazakov/Getty Images

Meanwhile, the region around Europe is burning. Wars in Ukraine and the Middle East are occupying leaders’ attention and draining Western military and financial resources. Without continued backing from Washington, there are serious questions about how much longer Ukraine will be able to hold out against Putin’s forces.

In London, Keir Starmer’s new government worries that Trump will pull the rug out from beneath Volodymyr Zelenskyy, cutting military aid to Kyiv or making it conditional on immediate peace talks that would cede territory to Moscow.

Trump’s promise to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of taking power is being taken with similar seriousness in other European capitals. “Aid could stop overnight,” said one European diplomat. “Putin will want to take advantage of it and say I’m taking the Donbas, Crimea and then I’ll bide my time before next time.”

That next time, the worry goes, could be a Russian attack on a country like Estonia, Lithuania or Latvia — all members of the EU and NATO — as Putin seeks to test Trump’s already lukewarm commitment to NATO and the military alliance’s mutual defense provisions.

France has seized on the possibility of a Trump presidency to urge other European countries to boost their military capabilities. “We cannot let the voters in Wisconsin decide on European security,” France’s Europe Minister Benjamin Haddad told POLITICO.

Haddad said France would work with whoever wins the U.S. election on Tuesday, but insisted Europe needed to urgently think of how to navigate a world in which Washington could no longer be counted upon. “It’s our European security,” Haddad said. “We need to be capable of supporting [the Ukrainians] whatever the result.”

The trouble is that European leaders — including in France — have been making the case for tooling up their militaries for the past two years. And yet, apart from Poland, few have carried through with actually doing it.

Trade war fears

A second European preoccupation is that Trump will reignite a transatlantic trade war. He has threatened to slap 10 percent to 20 percent tariffs on all imports to the U.S. to bring manufacturing jobs back home — and while Beijing remains the focus of his ire, he has plenty of spite to go around. Last week, Trump called the EU a “mini China.”

Top European trade officials recently told the EU’s ambassadors that they will be ready to react to potential trade disputes if necessary. In London, too, the risk of a reignited trade war is also playing on the minds of Starmer’s team. Like their European counterparts, British officials are working on contingency plans if Trump wins and decides to follow through on his tariff threats.

Trump has proposed a 100 percent tariff on all imported vehicles, which would be disastrous news for countries with significant auto industries. The German economy, for example, which is already struggling, would suffer a -0.23 percent hit to gross domestic product as a result of Trump’s trade policies, according to a study published by the London School of Economics (LSE).

“These tariffs will impact the American economy, not just Chinese and European sectors, so Donald Trump [plowing] ahead with these policies if elected would be awful for economies across the globe,” study author Aurélien Saussay, from the LSE’s Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, said.

The antagonism triggered by a trade war wouldn’t only have an economic impact. When it comes to security, London has traditionally been one of Washington’s closest allies. But political tensions are already on display.

Donald Trump has proposed a 100 percent tariff on all imported vehicles, which would be disastrous news for countries with significant auto industries. | Sebastien Bozon/Getty Images

Relations between Trump and Starmer’s new center-left government are already in trouble. The Republican slammed Starmer’s “far left” Labour Party for sending activists to campaign for Harris in the election, claiming it amounted to foreign interference in American democracy. His campaign has filed a legal complaint against the party alleging “foreign interference.”

Trump’s record in the Middle East is another reason for Europeans to fret. In his first term, he junked the Iran nuclear deal which was backed by Germany, France, the EU and the United Kingdom.

“A second Trump term would see a return of its policy of ‘maximum pressure’ on Iran, which could include the possibility of direct strikes on Iran and targeted assassinations,” according to analysis from the European Union Institute for Security Studies. “Although the administration’s plan would be to re-establish deterrence, the risk of a direct confrontation between Washington and Tehran would increase.”

European divisions

Then there’s the pressure a second Trump presidency would put on Europe itself. In the U.S, Trump is the most divisive politician of the age. He also splits European governments from each other, a factor that will make coordinating any EU-wide response on trade or security even harder for officials in Brussels.

Leaders in London, Berlin and Paris might recoil from a Trump victory. But Europe’s authoritarians and hard-right leaders like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni will see it as a vindication of their positions.

Orbán, who broke with Europe’s other leaders by traveling to Moscow to visit Putin last summer, has been a regular at Trump-dominated gatherings of ultraconservatives in the U.S. That’s led some to speculate that he might be happy to quickly extend his congratulations to the former U.S. president even if the election result is far from clear.

As for Meloni, her allies in Rome say she’d be perfectly placed to act as Europe’s new Trump whisperer.

Andrea Di Giuseppe, the member of the Italian parliament representing Italians in North America and a member of Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, said a Trump victory would be welcomed by Rome.

“If President Trump needs an intermediary with Europe, who better than Giorgia Meloni?” Di Giuseppe said. “She has been Trumpist since the first hour.”

Even in Germany, some are seeing opportunity in a Trump victory. It’s not a positive one, however. Senior figures within the government privately admit that Chancellor Scholz’s coalition would be more likely to break up if Harris wins.

That’s because the prospect of Trump back in the White House would be such a threat to global political stability that all three governing coalition parties would have to think again before breaking up their alliance.

Ukraine belongs in EU, Commission chief von der Leyen says – POLITICO

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 00:44:52 +0000

Ukraine belongs in EU, Commission chief von der Leyen says

‘They are one of us and we want them in,’ European Commission president says.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen wants Ukraine to join the European Union | Srephanie Lecocq/AFP Pool via Getty Images

February 28, 2022 1:05 am CET

By Emma Anderson

Ukraine belongs in the European Union and the bloc wants the country to join, European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said Sunday — a rebuke of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s own claims over the Eastern European country.

“We have a process with Ukraine that is, for example, integrating the Ukrainian market into the single market,” von der Leyen told Euronews in an interview after announcing plans for the Union to provide some €500 million in arms and other aid to the Ukrainian military as it battles Russia’s invasion.

“We have very close cooperation on the energy grid, for example. So many topics where we work very closely together and indeed over time, they belong to us. They are one of us and we want them in,” the Commission president said.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Twitter late Sunday night that he spoke to von der Leyen on the phone about “concrete decisions on strengthening Ukraine’s defense capabilities, macro-financial assistance and Ukraine’s membership in the #EU.”

Von der Leyen’s remarks are likely to stir anger in Moscow, where Putin has used what he claims is a historical oneness between the Russian and Ukrainian peoples as justification for his unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, as well as complaints about Kyiv’s growing ties to the West.

Still, the decision to add new countries to the EU lies with established member countries, which don’t always agree with the Commission’s views and have blocked accession talks over bilateral conflicts with candidates. Ukraine is still not an official candidate for EU accession talks.

Meanwhile, Russian and Ukrainian peace negotiators have agreed to meet near the Belarus border for talks as the fighting enters its fifth day.

Von der Leyen said of peace talks: “Of course, it is important that the Ukrainian side agrees to the peace talks and that conditions are fine for the Ukrainian side. In general, it is always better to have peace talks than to have a fight. But the trust in President Putin is completely broken and eroded.”

EU Parliament lets companies look for child abuse on their platforms, with reservations – POLITICO

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 21:31:56 +0000

EU Parliament lets companies look for child abuse on their platforms, with reservations

Privacy-conscious lawmakers say the rules are ‘legally flawed’ and endanger privacy.

Free article usually reserved for subscribers

Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson at the Parliament in Strasbourg | Fred Marvaux/European Union

July 6, 2021 7:45 pm CET

By Clothilde Goujard

The European Parliament on Tuesday approved a controversial law that would allow digital companies to detect and report child sexual abuse on their platforms for the next three years.

Tuesday's vote was the final hurdle for the bill, and will allow companies to scan their platforms for explicit material without fear of violating Europe's strict privacy laws. The bill pitted the European Commission, who proposed the bill, and children's rights activists against the Parliament and Europe's privacy regulators, who fear the bill could undermine the EU's privacy rules.

The results showed 537 MEPs voted in favor of the bill, with 133 against and 24 abstaining. Despite the result, European lawmakers warned that the rules are "legally flawed" and could crumble in front of a court.

MEPs also decried the pressure they were under to approve the bill, calling it "moral blackmail."

“Whenever we asked critical questions about the legislative proposals, immediately the suggestion was created that I wasn't sufficiently committed to fighting child sexual abuse,” Dutch MEP Sophie in ‘t Veld said a day before the vote.

It's not over

EU lawmakers were working under an unusually short deadline. The European Commission realized that the EU's new rules for private messaging would make it illegal for tech companies to voluntarily look for illegal content like child pornography, and proposed a temporary bill to allow for scanning and reporting until new permanent rules were in place.

Soon after the Commission published its proposal in September, it immediately pressured the European Parliament to approve the new rules by December, which lawmakers did not do.

The bill was stalled because of a provision that allowed companies to also scan for grooming, which does not constitute abuse, per se, but does include text and audio messages that indicate children are being manipulated by an offender. Parliament members fretted that allowing companies to scan for messages opens the door for them to monitor other communications. That view was enforced by Europe's data protection regulators, who also warned that the rules would undermine the EU's privacy rules.

Meanwhile, British, Canadian, and American ministers — and the U.S. actor Ashton Kutcher, who is also a children's rights activist — sided with the Commission and urged the Parliament to pass the bill. In the meantime, Facebook said it had stopped scanning its platforms for illicit material.

Center-left MEP Birgit Sippel, who worked on the bill, said, “There has been a lot of pressure just to do something very, very quickly and to come to an agreement.”

Despite the bill's approval, In ‘t Veld warned that the legislation would not withstand court scrutiny given Europe's strict privacy laws. Addressing Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson on Monday, she said, “I think we both know that the result on the table is legally flawed.”

MEPs also said that the blanket scanning of private messages of European citizens to look for evidence of child grooming could clash with another set of privacy rules protecting personal data, the GDPR.

To allay the Parliament's concerns, EU countries agreed to modify the Commission’s law to add additional safeguards, including bringing in Europe's network of privacy watchdogs to advise on what technologies should be used to do the scanning, and how they should be used. They also left out audio messages from the bill. The changes prompted Sippel, who was negotiating on behalf of the Parliament, to sign off on the bill.

What comes next

The temporary rules are only supposed to be applied for three years. But privacy activists are already worried about the permanent rules that will come next.

With most of the child trafficking and abuse done through encrypted communications on apps like WhatsApp and Telegram, the Commission wants to limit how secure those communications can be. Johansson, who's in charge of tackling illegal content online, has warned Facebook that its plan to introduce encryption could “give haven to the pedophiles."

That's a plan that is also unlikely to go down well with digital activists, who fear mass surveillance by law enforcement and private companies.

“Encrypted communications and services must be preserved and protected,” said Diego Naranjo, EDRi's head of policy, in an interview.

He said that the Commission's plan will create an incentive for Big Tech to break, or not develop, encryption, and will tempt companies to comb through private communications.

Children's rights activists are more optimistic about being able to assuage privacy activists' concerns.

“Children's advocates and children's groups need to engage more closely with the privacy community, so they understand the realities of children's rights and don't treat all of these privacy questions as some kind of highly theoretical issue,” said John Carr, secretary of the UK Children’s Charities’ Coalition on Internet Safety, in an interview.

Lawmakers in Parliament expressed their hope for “a significantly improved proposal” with data protection guarantees.

“We really need targeted solutions when dealing with these private communications; otherwise this won't hold up before national or European courts,” said Sippel.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this article misstated the number of votes against the bill: 133 MEPs voted no.

Ashton Kutcher: Stalling new EU privacy rules would let ‘kids be abused in the dark’ – POLITICO

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 21:31:56 +0000

Ashton Kutcher: Stalling new EU privacy rules would let ‘kids be abused in the dark’

That 70s Show actor has dived into a battle over a bill that would allow tech companies to keep tracking child sexual abuse online.

Free article usually reserved for subscribers

Ashton Kutcher | Zach Gibson/AFP via Getty Images

December 1, 2020 4:32 pm CET

By Laura Kayali

Actor-turned-tech-investor Ashton Kutcher urged the EU to agree swiftly on legislation that would allow companies to continue tracking child sexual abuse material online, he told POLITICO.

"We're talking about tens of millions of pieces of evidence of the rape of children going unseen because we can't get an interim piece of regulation that just simply says we can continue to utilise the tools that we use today," he said in an interview.

For the past few months, Kutcher has sought to raise awareness in Brussels about a draft law — the interim e-Privacy regulation, put forward in September — that would allow tech companies to keep voluntarily tracking child sexual abuse online.

EU institutions need to agree on the bill by December 21, the date of application of the EU’s telecom code — a reform that sets rules for internet communication services such as Facebook’s Messenger and Microsoft's Skype.

If they don't, scanning without user consent will become illegal because of a change of definition in the telecom code that will make internet communication services fall under the scope of another privacy law.

In July, the European Commission said that the EU had become the largest host of child sexual abuse material in the world.

“The legislators are arguing over a very relevant issue, which is privacy — we all care about privacy, for ourselves, for these kids. They're bickering over the nuances, but in the interim, while we sort out those solutions, they're about to let these kids be abused in the dark,” added the American actor, who co-founded in 2012 a non-profit called Thorn that develops tools to combat child sex trafficking and abuse online.

In November, the lead negotiator in the European Parliament Birgit Sippel poured cold water on hopes the legislation could be agreed on time. But if a crucial vote in the Parliament next week goes ahead, inter-institutional negotiations could start before the holiday break. Whether that means EU institutions will be able to agree by the deadline remains an open question.

The debate has pitted the European Commission and half of the European Parliament against the bloc’s top privacy regulator and the other half of the European Parliament.

Backers of the legislation argue the scanning tools don't infringe upon privacy. Opponents say more safeguards are needed in the interim law to protect users. Parliamentarians also argue that national governments have not taken sufficient steps to implement existing EU legislation to tackle child sexual abuse and that the Commission took too long to present its interim law.

“Privacy is important. I have lived in public for over 20 years, I understand the value of privacy,” Kutcher said. “I'm a person who's been targeted by people and had my social security number and my banking information published publicly online in the past.”

“None of these tools are looking for that content. None of these tools are being abused in those ways,” he added.

Parliament divided on grooming

Within the European Parliament’s civil liberties committee, which is in charge of the file, one of the most divisive issues is whether “solicitation of children for the purpose of engaging in sexual activities,” — also known as grooming — should be included within the scope.

“When we get to the debate around grooming, I think it's really important for people to understand that it's not a sort of carte blanche, scraping of people's data and information,” Kutcher said.

“There's a lot of nuance to it. And it certainly needs to be regulated with a scalpel and not an axe,” he added.

In her draft report, German S&D MEP Birgit Sippel clarified that the interim law should only apply to videos or images exchanged over messaging or email services and not to the scanning of text or audio communication. (She is backed by Renew Europe’s Sophie in’t Veld, among others, according to amendments tabled this week).

Sippel also wants the scope to be limited to existing definitions of “child pornography,” which would exclude grooming. The amendments show the Greens and the European United Left/Nordic Green Left group (GUE) agree.

But other MEPs within the European People’s Party, Renew Europe and Sippel’s own S&D group do want “solicitation” to be covered by the interim law.

“For me, what is important is that the rapporteur has done a very good job into taking different perspectives — but one is missing: The possibility to tackle grooming,” said Evin Incir, a Swedish MEP from the S&D.

“The biggest part that needs to be improved is therefore the possibility to prevent grooming, without that, the report and proposal will be weak in addressing child sexual abuse online,” she added.

Sippel's draft text allows for the use of technology to find videos or pictures of children being abused via hashing technology. She warned against expanding that to include text messages.

"Anti-grooming technology, in contrast, requires the indiscriminate reading of the content of every message of every user. The problem is that we do not even know if this kind of content scanning is currently taking place in the EU and how it would be legal under the GDPR or how cooperation with law enforcement could look like," she added.

Sippel said she could not discuss the details of ongoing negotiations but explained the negotiating team was "working hard to finding a legally sound solution which would allow us to start trilogues as soon as possible."

The vote in the committee is scheduled for December 7.

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POLITICO Poll of Polls — British polls, trends and election news for the United Kingdom and Scotland – POLITICO

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 13:45:06 +0000

POLLING FROM ACROSS EUROPE. UPDATED DAILY.

Jump to: National parliament voting intention ▫️ Keir Starmer’s approval rating ▫️ Scotland potential indyref and 2021 election results ▫️ Northern Ireland 2022 election results ▫️ Wales 2021 election results ▫️ United Kingdom 2024 election results

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more election news

United Kingdom — Parliament voting intention

What is Poll of Polls and how does it work? Read more here.

Reform UK

Brexit Party (relaunched as Reform UK in 2021)
Labour Party

Labour Party
Conservative and Unionist Party

Conservative and Unionist Party
The Green Party of England and Wales

The Green Party of England and Wales
Liberal Democrats

Liberal Democrats
Restore Britain

Restore Britain
Scottish National Party

Scottish National Party
Plaid Cymru – The Party of Wales

Plaid Cymru

Poll of Polls aggregates voting intention data from external polling firms, but may exclude polls that don’t meet criteria on sample size, methodology, and/or transparency on funding and commissions. These criteria are regularly reviewed. Polls are added as they become available, but displayed by fieldwork date. This means that the projections can change as more polls are added.

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UK not ‘actively’ considering Epstein public inquiry

United Kingdom — Prime minister approval rating

United Kingdom — 2024 election results

2019 2024

Click on a party to form a majority

Group	Seats	Votes
Labour Party	412	33.7 %
Conservative Party	121	23.7 %
Liberal Democrats	72	12.2 %
Scottish National Party	9	2.5 %
Sinn Féin	7	0.7 %
Independent	6	2.0 %
Democratic Unionist Party	5	0.6 %
Reform UK	5	14.3 %
Green Party	4	6.7 %
Plaid Cymru	4	0.7 %
Social Democratic and Labour Party	2	0.3 %
Alliance Party of Northern Ireland	1	0.4 %
Other parties	1	0.2 %
Ulster Unionist Party	1	0.3 %
Speaker of the House of Commons	0	0.0 %
UK Independence Party	0	0.0 %

Group	Seats	Votes
Conservative Party	365	43.6 %
Labour Party	203	32.1 %
Scottish National Party	48	3.9 %
Liberal Democrats	11	11.6 %
Democratic Unionist Party	8	0.8 %
Sinn Féin	7	0.6 %
Plaid Cymru	4	0.5 %
Social Democratic and Labour Party	2	0.3 %
Alliance Party of Northern Ireland	1	0.4 %
Green Party	1	2.6 %

Scotland — Potential second independence referendum

Scotland — 2026 election

Wales — 2026 election

Northern Ireland — 2022 election

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Operation Forrest Gump: Anti-corruption raid heaps pressure on Zelenskyy – POLITICO

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 19:52:54 +0000

Operation Forrest Gump: Anti-corruption raid heaps pressure on Zelenskyy

Ukraine’s president fires a top aide after the National Anti-Corruption Bureau alleged a group of top officials laundered money to pay a former minister’s bail.

AI generated Text-to-speech

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy takes part in a summit of the coalition of the willing in Paris on July 13, 2026. | Pool photo by Teresa Suarez via AFP/Getty Images

August 19, 2026 3:35 pm CET

By Veronika Melkozerova and Milena Wälde

KYIV — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy fired Iryna Mudra as deputy head of his office Wednesday, hours after anti-corruption watchdogs searched her workplace as part of a sweeping probe into an alleged criminal organization.

“Iryna Romanivna Mudra is hereby dismissed from the post of Deputy Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine,” Zelenskyy said in a decree published Wednesday. The one-line order gave no reason for her removal.

The firing adds to a turbulent stretch for Zelenskyy. Former Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov called Tuesday for wartime elections and denounced corruption and a systemic governance crisis, weeks after his ouster triggered prolonged street protests.

Earlier Wednesday, Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau, or NABU, announced a new operation targeting an alleged criminal organization involving current and former lawmakers and senior officials in Zelenskyy’s office. The bureau said it was carrying out searches with the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, or SAP.

The investigation, dubbed Operation Forrest Gump, alleges the group laundered around 150 million Ukrainian hryvnia, equivalent to roughly $3 million, through state-owned Sense Bank to fund bail for former Energy Minister German Galushchenko, a key figure in last year’s $100 million Midas corruption scandal.

Writing on Facebook, Mudra said: “I will defend my name in a legal manner – calmly and consistently.”

NABU did not name Mudra directly in its video statement, referring only to a deputy head of the president’s administration, but searched her office.

Ukraine’s corruption watchdog released recordings in which a woman identified in the video only as a deputy head of the president’s office can be heard saying: “Fighting corruption is a wrong approach … Corruption has to be systemized and controlled.” NABU did not identify the woman by name.

This article has been updated with a comment from Iryna Mudra.

Zelenskyy’s rival Fedorov overplays his hand with election push

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 19:52:54 +0000

KYIV — Ukraine’s popular former Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov has emerged as a new rival to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy — but his call for an election is facing immediate blowback.

In a video address on Tuesday night, he zeroed in on topics he knew would strike a public chord in one of the most direct internal challenges to Zelenskyy since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He complained that corruption was undermining the war effort and protested about centralized and opaque decision-making in the Zelenskyy administration — for which he worked until only last month.

However, Fedorov’s unexpected appeal for the nation to go to the ballot box sparked immediate retorts across the political spectrum. Critics insisted such an election would be banned by Ukraine’s martial law, would be impossible to organize in wartime, would play into Russia’s hands and would sow division when national unity remains vital.

Zelenskyy still commands broad support as a war leader, and his allies pointed out that, regardless of public frustration, there are limits to how much he can reveal about the inner workings of the state when national survival is at stake.

Fedorov’s emergence as a rival to Zelenskyy was accelerated by his shock dismissal as defense minister last month. The 35-year-old built up a strong following for spearheading Ukraine’s success in using new technologies — from cyberattacks to drones — to damage Russia.

His ejection from office sparked immediate protests, with thousands of people taking to the streets, calling for his reinstatement or for Zelenskyy to properly explain the decision to fire him.

In his address on Tuesday night, Fedorov delivered a thinly veiled criticism of Zelenskyy’s management style, referring to his peremptory approach to hiring and firing.

“People cannot endlessly live in a state where they do not understand why certain decisions are made. Why some reforms move forward while others are blocked. Why decisions needed on the frontlines today spend months circulating through government offices,” Fedorov said.

“It is dangerous when society develops the feeling that the main criterion for an appointment is not professionalism, results, or the ability to transform the country, but personal loyalty to the system,” added the former minister, who had himself been viewed as a Zelenskyy loyalist for seven years.

Election backlash

A top official in Zelenskyy’s office, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about Fedorov’s move, had little time for the criticism that the president should explain his actions publicly.

“The president cannot just explain his hiring choices to the public during war, as those are matters of national security. And it’s his right to decide whom to appoint as his defense minister and whom to fire,” they said.

The official was also scathing about the possibility of holding an election in the face of devastating Russian attacks: “Let’s wait out another massive Russian ballistic attack and then go vote,” the person added, sarcastically.

Olga Aivazovska, head of Ukraine’s election watchdog OPORA, also stressed the practical obstacles to an election, insisting that there were “hundreds of scenarios and actions” that the Russians could use to undermine the electoral process.

Roman Lozynskyi, a parliamentarian from the opposition liberal Holos party and deputy head of the state management committee, feared the call for elections could prove disastrously divisive.

“There is zero positive for the country. Don’t be happy that you will have candidates in the post-war elections. You still have to live to see them,” he said. “People understand that elections during the war are in the enemy’s hands. That it will be a war of all against all.”

Even one of the leaders of the protest movement, war veteran Dmytro Koziatysnkyi, said he didn’t want to see elections during wartime. “I am also very afraid of the disunity of society during the electoral process and how this may affect the course of the war,” he said.

Far from bolstering Fedorov’s political future, the call for an election could even count against him.

Economist Timothy Ash, who frequently writes on Ukraine, suggested the ex-minister had made “an extraordinary political error of judgement which some would likely use against him if he ever pitches in to run as president in the future.”

Volodymyr Fesenko, a political analyst based in Kyiv, conceded Zelenskyy had become accustomed to “acting like in business,” defined by “single-man leadership” and “quick decisions,” but argued that the president was hardly acting out of step with any other major international leader.

“When his critics say he should appoint professionals instead of loyalists, they sound right but naive at the same time. Even in the West, unless we are talking about coalition governments, such an approach does not work. Any serious politician … and especially in a country like ours, will appoint trusted loyalists,” Fesenko added.

Fesenko also defended Zelenskyy’s record in appointing senior officials. He noted that Prime Minister Serhii Koretskyi, new commander-in-chief, Maj. Gen. Mykhailo Drapatyi, as well as new Defense Minister Yevhenii Khmara, all had positive reputations, even among Zelenskyy’s top critics in parliament.

Indeed, Khmara was confirmed in his new role to succeed Fedorov by a parliamentary vote on Wednesday, by 312 lawmakers out of 392.

‘People want change’

Fedorov is certainly popular. A poll from the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology said earlier this month that 63 percent of people saw him as trustworthy — a score that put him second only to former military supremo Valeryi Zaluzhnyi, who is now ambassador to the U.K.

But none of that put Zelenskyy, who scored a robust 56 percent, out of the picture.

In line with Fedorov’s attack on a lack of transparency in the centralized state, another survey found dwindling sympathy for Zelenskyy using his powers to intervene over other state authorities. The poll found that 79 percent of people in 2022 — the year of Russia’s full-scale invasion — thought the president could override the constitution’s division of powers, but that had slipped to 52 percent in May 2026.

“People are placing all responsibility for the course of the war on the president. Because of this, the president feels the need to make all these decisions independently, which is against Ukraine’s constitution and legislative procedures. As a result, one person, the president, has a huge number of completely different tasks, incentives, requirements,” said Yurii Hudymenko, head of the Public Anti-Corruption Council at Ukraine’s defense ministry.

Corruption is also a hot topic, as Fedorov identified. Last year, Zelenskyy signed a law to strip Ukraine’s national anti-corruption watchdogs of their procedural independence, only to then backtrack on that decision when it faced criticism from the EU and protests at home.

Later, his former business partner and allies were implicated in a $100 million corruption scheme in the state nuclear energy sector — a scandal that forced Zelenskyy to fire his faithful No. 2, Andriy Yermak. Yermak was charged with corruption and is standing trial.

Several of Zelenskyy’s top allies are also under investigation for corruption, including former Ukrainian Ambassador to the U.S. Olga Stefanishyna, while watchdogs complain they still face tremendous pressure and surveillance when investigating top officials.

On Wednesday, Zelenskyy fired Iryna Mudra as deputy head of his office, hours after anti-corruption watchdogs searched her workplace as part of a sweeping probe into an alleged criminal organization.

Yaroslav Zheleznyak, MP from opposition party Holos, and a prominent Zelenskyy critic, said the cumulative weight of these problems would ultimately count against the president.

He predicted Zelenskyy would suffer the fate of British wartime leader Winston Churchill and lose an election during the tail end of the war.

“No matter the competitors, Zaluzhnyi, [Head of the Presidential Office Kyrylo] Budanov, Fedorov or someone else, I think we will get the situation like in 2019, when anyone but the incumbent will win in the second round. In this case, this is very much a Churchill story, when a guy who won the war got voted out,” Zheleznyak said.

“People want change,” he added.

Oleksandr Saienko, expert at the Center for Political and Legal Reforms, said it was possible to avert a political crisis even without elections, but that would mean shifting some decision-making back to parliament and other state authorities.

“The subjectivity of the parliament must be restored both in terms of the legislative process and parliamentary control. The government must become the main center for the formation of state policy,” he said. “The pause on reform of the judicial system and law enforcement agencies, public administration, must be lifted and people should get a real sense of justice and protection.”

How satellite technology can help Europe battle wildfires

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 19:52:54 +0000

BRUSSELS — In Europe’s fight against wildfires, eyes are turning toward the sky: not just looking for rain or water-dropping Canadair planes, but also for ways to exploit new satellite capabilities to help contain or even prevent new blazes.

Satellites and the images and data they gather from space are increasingly seen as a means of providing European governments and firefighters on the ground with more accurate information: to map damage and detect fires at an early stage.

Such help is more than welcome during another scorching European summer with wildfires in France, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Approximately 600,000 hectares have burned across EU countries since the start of the year. Just last weekend, Belgium was hit by one of the largest wildfires in its history, in the High Fens nature reserve.

Still, this latest use of satellites is another reminder that Europe needs to step up its game in yet another strategic arena. After Elon Musk’s Starlink showed how satellite-based services could revolutionize everything from mobile communication to waging war, space technology for disaster management offers a potential avenue for Europe to compete.

Greece, a country that seems to be battling bigger wildfires every summer, was the first to act.

In early May, a rocket of Musk’s SpaceX carried four small satellites into space with the specific task of helping the country detect and track wildfires in near real time. It was a crucial step in the build-out of the “Hellenic Fire System,” which the Greek government boasted was the first national satellite system of its kind.

The system was set up through European-wide collaboration, with the help of the European Space Agency, its Greek counterpart, German wildfire intelligence platform Ororatech and Finnish radar-based satellite provider ICEYE.

“By integrating space-based capabilities into our emergency response systems, we are equipping our fire services with the tools they need to respond faster,” Dimitrios Papastergiou, Greece’s minister of digital governance and artificial intelligence, said at the launch in May.

The satellites that were launched before the summer were equipped with two infrared imagers. Those pick up the heat energy radiated by fires, allowing satellites to detect hotspots and gauge their intensity.

The system is designed to “support early detection of emerging hotspots and continuous monitoring of fire behavior,” the European Space Agency said.

Satellites’ role in gathering vast, real-time data and images can also help with other extreme weather events. The Finnish company ICEYE offers monitoring services for governments and businesses to manage both natural catastrophes, such as floods and wildfires, and man-made ones, such as illegal deforestation.

ICEYE raised €1 billion in new financing this year, and became the first company to get backing from the Scaleup Europe Fund, a new fund backed by the European Commission to help companies expand rapidly.

“If we want to be effective in managing the environment around us, both in terms of growth and development, as well as preventing or managing natural catastrophes, these sorts of space-based systems are extremely effective,” ICEYE CEO Rafal Modrzewski told POLITICO.

He said the company has been mostly focused on “managing” wildfires, but is now “trying to push towards predicting wildfires or at least detecting them in an earlier stage.” Modrzewski says a similar offering is available for floods, and for wind damage stemming from hurricanes and typhoons.

The impact can be maximized if Brussels becomes a coordinating “buyer” of those services. “Using space-based capabilities is much more effectively done on an EU scale through [the European] Commission than on a national scale in 27 separate nations,” Modrzewski said.

The Commission is already prominent in helping governments and emergency services map and detect wildfires. The European Forest Fire Information System, which sits within the Commission’s research desk, maps both active fires and burned areas based on data from NASA’s MODIS and the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-3, an Earth observation satellite.

Currently, data and images arrive every 10 minutes, but the launch of a new satellite from the Meteosat third generation next Thursday should speed that up — with images arriving every 2.5 minutes, improving detection and even forecasting of possible wildfires.

‘No and no’: Fedorov’s wartime election call unsettles Kyiv

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 19:52:54 +0000

Former Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov’s demand to hold wartime elections has sparked consternation in Kyiv, as the ramifications of a controversial government reshuffle rumble on.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s contentious ouster of Fedorov last month triggered nationwide protests — and has now resulted in the most serious internal challenge to his leadership since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in 2022.

Politicians from across the aisle chided Fedorov after the former minister’s call on Tuesday night to find a “legal, safe, and realistic mechanism” that would allow Ukraine to “resume a full-fledged democratic process, even amidst the ongoing war.”

Martial law, which was put in place shortly after Russian tanks rolled over the border, does not allow for presidential or parliamentary elections to take place, and experts have pointed to the further difficulty of holding a vote given the millions of displaced Ukrainians, the ongoing Russian occupation of parts of the country, the continued bombing by Kremlin forces and Moscow’s penchant for interfering in democratic ballots. Martial law also prohibits amendments to Ukraine’s constitution while it is in effect.

“With all due respect to Mykhailo Fedorov, the constitution did not change because of his dismissal,” said Kira Rudik — leader of the liberal, pro-European Holos party in the Ukrainian parliament — shrugging off Fedorov’s suggestion.

“Elections cannot be held under martial law. It is wrong to call for tearing the country apart to serve anyone’s political ambitions,” added Rudik in a post on X.

Ukrainian lawmaker Mykola Kniazhytskyi, from former President Petro Poroshenko’s opposition European Solidarity party, also criticized Fedorov’s call for wartime elections, arguing that holding a vote under Russian missile and drone attacks would pose serious security and logistical challenges. “The discussion about elections must begin with an answer to the question of state security,” wrote Kniazhytskyi on Facebook.

Yaroslav Zhelezniak, another Holos lawmaker and senior member of the parliament’s finance committee, was also among those pushing back against Fedorov. “I will state my position right away: no and no,” he wrote on his Telegram channel.

“It is unrealistic, at least because of the constitution,” added Zhelezniak.

Zelenskyy axing Fedorov had sparked an outcry because, after seven months in the role, the ex-minister was widely viewed as innovating to ensure Ukraine’s military could continue resisting the Russian attack. Fedorov, who previously served as digital minister and also has close ties with American entrepreneur Elon Musk, made no secret of his displeasure at being booted from the defense job — and launched his counterattack on Tuesday night in a bombshell YouTube address.

“If the war drags on for another year, two, or three, could Russia effectively gain the right to determine when Ukrainians can once again choose their own government?” asked Fedorov. “I am convinced it cannot. Democracy cannot be held hostage by Russia. We are fighting precisely because we want to remain a free European state.”

Fedorov’s call comes at a difficult moment for Ukraine, marked by a deepening crisis of public trust thanks to snowballing corruption scandals and political tensions, noted Roman Lozynskyi — a Ukrainian lawmaker also from the Holos party — in a Facebook post addressed to Zelenskyy. The president’s office was rocked by further corruption raids on Tuesday, as Operation Forrest Gump gathers steam.

But the internal strife is giving fresh impetus to calls for elections, which could favor Moscow, warned the lawmaker.

“People understand that elections during the war play into the enemy’s hands. That it will be a war of all against all, a field for fakes and manipulation. A society already torn apart and wounded,” continued Lozynskyi. But amid the country’s problems, Ukrainians can no longer simply dismiss the idea, he said. “Now people no longer know what is worse: corruption and lies without elections, or trying to reset the country by taking the risk of holding elections during the war. And that is a catastrophe.”

Ukraine was due to hold its presidential election in March 2024 and parliamentary election in October 2023, but both were postponed due to the Russian invasion. Under pressure from the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump, Zelenskyy has not categorically ruled out wartime elections, but he has said they would require substantial international support — including from the U.S. and the EU — to ensure security and voting rights for Ukrainians at home and abroad.

Meanwhile, Fedorov isn’t completely alone in calling for elections.

Dmytro Kuleba — a former top ally of Zelenskyy — on Tuesday night backed the idea of holding elections during the conflict, arguing that in Ukraine “elections after war will not be more civilized, than during.”

“We don’t know when it will end. What if it lasts for another three years? We will be living under the political model that was formed in 2019, which is already emotionally exhausted. There is a demand among people for new members of parliament,” said Kuleba to Interfax Ukraine, referring to the election in which Zelenskyy upended Kyiv’s politics with a landslide victory.

EU moves to ease subsidy rules for small media

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 19:52:54 +0000

BRUSSELS — EU countries will be able to fund small local media without asking Brussels for permission, according to a draft of the bloc’s revised state aid rulebook obtained by POLITICO.

Government subsidies to businesses are strictly disciplined by Brussels under state aid rules, but there are exceptions. These are spelled out in frameworks, with the master one, the General Block Exemption Regulation (GBER), up for revision at the end of the year.

The European Commission put out an initial draft for public consultation in February with a view to finalizing it by year’s end. The updated, 200-page draft gives a leg-up to local and independent journalism by allowing governments to fund small- and medium-sized outlets without formal vetting by Brussels.

“SMEs active in the press sector play an essential role in safeguarding media pluralism, cultural and linguistic diversity, democratic participation and citizens’ access to reliable information, particularly at local and regional level,” the Commission writes, highlighting structural challenges arising from the digital transformation of media markets.

To qualify for assistance, beneficiaries would need to fulfil at least one item in a Commission checklist that includes preserving media pluralism and diversity of opinion, transitioning to digital content while also preserving print editions.

“The exemption covers aid pursuing cultural objectives — including linguistic diversity, the digitalization of press publications or the promotion of printed publications,” said Carole Maczkovics, of Counsel at Covington & Burling, of the press measures.

Many European media outlets are struggling to stay viable, with print readership declining and publishers complaining that online platforms, such as search giant Google, are reducing referral traffic to their websites.

Broad scope

The GBER covers most sectors of the economy, from agriculture to transport, and is the target of intense lobbying from EU capitals, traditionally torn between big government spenders led by Germany and smaller member states, including the pro-free-trade Nordics, which complain that national subsidies distort the EU single market.

Countering the stereotype, Denmark was a leading advocate to extend GBER exemptions to the media. In a consultation response last year, the Danes said the state aid framework should be broadened to include private and public media providers “to promote harmonisation and simplify the general management of state aid in the media sector.”

The latest GBER draft focuses strongly on SMEs and innovation, as well as on the social dimension of state aid — as it expands on conditions for money that governments can put in training programs and the inclusion of disadvantaged workers.

But it may not necessarily make things easier.

“Although the revision aims to simplify the State aid framework, it may ultimately make it more detailed and prescriptive,” warned Maczkovics. She added that the Commission’s gradual shift from broad aid categories to narrowly defined exemptions may sway EU countries to design measures that don’t quite fit the real needs of companies — for the sake of avoiding a notification.

Industry, for its part, is keeping a close eye on state aid exemptions, with airport lobby ACI Europe quick to react to the latest leak.

“The revised GBER remains too restrictive for Europe’s smaller regional airports,” said Philippe Sacré, the association’s secretary general. He was referring to aid exemptions that would be restricted to airports handling over 500,000 passengers a year, according to the Commission’s draft.

The Commission’s latest State aid Scoreboard shows that EU countries spent €168.2 billion in state aid in 2024, with Germany, France and Italy the top spenders. Capitals are increasingly taking advantage of block exemptions, with GBER representing close to 70 percent of all active exemption measures.

Tommaso Lecca contributed reporting.

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