Since its inception, the European project has always aimed to bring about the end of history on the continent, and to finally put the ceaseless cycle of war, extremism and imperialism that had torn Europe apart for a thousand years …
The EU’s economic war on Le Pen
With France bracing itself for the first round of its snap parliamentary election this Sunday, the near-certain prospect of victory for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) has sent French and EU elites to their panic stations. Reeling from their …
The great Brussels stitch-up
Since the results of the European elections started to trickle through, the continent’s elites have been scrambling to minimise their impact. Faced with a predictable surge in support for Right-populist parties, their strategy has been relatively simple: to fast-track the …
Europe’s insurgent Right won’t change anything
Depending on where you stand politically, you might view the Right-populist surge in the European Parliament as either a grave threat to democracy, or as a striking victory for it — and a major step forward in “taking back control” …
Keir Starmer: an ungrateful beneficiary of Brexit
A few months before the 2016 referendum, I published an article called “The Left Case for Brexit”. In it, I put forward reasons for thinking that the Labour Party might be the principal beneficiary if Britain disentangled itself from the …
Inside the Orbán insurgency
Will Viktor Orbán really march to Brussels and, as he claims, “occupy” the heart of the European Union? The EU’s enfant terrible has clashed with the bloc for years, but he is no Nigel Farage. He doesn’t want to abandon …
The EU is turning into a Remainer nightmare
With the EU elections less than a month away, one can only imagine the cognitive dissonance that the pro-EU, anti-Brexit crowd must be experiencing. In a curious twist of fate, the EU is turning into everything Remainers feared Brexit would …
China is not the answer to Nato
The timing of President Xi Jinping’s visit to Belgrade yesterday was far from accidental: exactly 25 years before, Nato forces bombed the city’s Chinese embassy during Operation Allied Force, the two-and-half month campaign against what was then the Federal Republic …
Europe faces death by decadence
The past week of Swedish politics has been a mysterious case of a dog that should have barked, but then simply didn’t. In a barely covered press release, the Riksbanken — Sweden’s central bank — announced that it had lost …
The coming civil war on Europe’s Right
With the European Parliamentary elections just two months away, the final result seems all but decided. “A far-Right takeover is underway,” warn the experts of Foreign Policy. “This time, the far-Right threat is real,” add the prophets of Politico. And, …
The EU’s American Queen
Ask most Europeans what they think about the EU, and they’ll tell you it’s relentlessly dull. It’s all bureaucrats in statement eyewear overseeing arcane regulations about the curvature of cucumbers; impenetrable corridors in the staid outposts of Luxembourg and Strasbourg; …
Flailing Germany is the future of Europe
For much of the Merkel era, Germany stood as an island of economic and political stability amid Europe’s perennially stormy waters. Those days, however, seem like a distant memory. Europe is still in crisis — but now Germany is the …
2024 is the year of the New Right
Of the torrent of elections scheduled throughout the world this year, the most transformative promises to span an entire continent. In all of the 27 nations which constitute the European Union, and which will ask their citizens to vote for …
The Eurocrats’ secret weapon
On January 1, as the European Union ushered in another year of economic chaos and not-so-distant wars, no one was in the mood to celebrate the euro’s 25th birthday. No one, that is, but the Eurocrats.
As always, the EU’s …
Jacques Delors destroyed the European Left
There’s a story European progressives like to tell themselves: that, after the horrors of the Second World War, their governments struck a quasi-utopian compromise between capitalism and socialism — only for it to be corrupted by the import of the …