Europe

"They told me that if I do not back down, they will fight to defeat me"

The plans, hatched by Sweden’s rightwing government with support of its far-right backers, made waves around the world. Politicians said they were working to strip citizenship from dual nationals who had been convicted of some crimes.

The concept also made a cameo in Germany’s February election after Friedrich Merz – whose centre-right CDU/CSU bloc emerged victorious in the ballot – told the newspaper Welt it should be possible to revoke German citizenship in the case of dual nationals who commit criminal offences.

The proposal was swiftly criticised, with one political commentator pointing out that it would result in some being “Germans on probation” for their entire lives. “They can never truly be German. One mistake, one crime – and their Germanness is gone,” the journalist and political commentator Gilda Sahebi wrote on social media. “It doesn’t matter if they were born here or if their family has lived in Germany for generations.”

Merz’s idea, she added, had laid bare the normalisation of “racist discrimination” in that, “in other words,” he was calling for remigration – the concept long-peddled by far-right, anti-immigrant parties and which, in Germany, calls for the mass deportation of migrants, including those with German citizenship.

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Berlin has reported a marked increase in attacks on asylum seekers and refugee shelters, amid a sharp rise in far-right crime and a hardening of German migration policy.

Official figures provided at the request of two local Green party lawmakers showed there were 77 assaults on asylum seekers and refugees in 2024 and eight instances of deliberate damage to residences housing them.

This compares with 32 targeted attacks on people and none on residences in 2023, one of the deputies, Ario Ebrahimpour Mirzaie, told the news agency dpa.

As a result of the assaults, 34 people needed treatment in hospital, according to the official data. These included 16 women, 14 men, two girls and two males whose age was not reported.

She had been welcomed to the White House with open arms as few other foreign visitors had been since Donald Trump’s return, and Giorgia Meloni wanted to assure her host that – at least when it came to their political worldview – they spoke a common language.

Italy’s prime minister, whose Brothers of Italy party has roots in neo-fascism, was keen to stress that she shared many things with the man who had just hailed her as a “friend” who “everybody loves … and respects”. Tariffs were a bit of problem. But between friends? Hey, we can work it out.

Even if Italy boasted one of Europe’s biggest trade surpluses with the US, such disagreements could be bridged with recourse to the previously uncoined creed of “western nationalism”, argued Meloni, speaking in confident, lightly accented English, although she admitted she did not know if it was “the right word”.

Sitting alone at the end of a dinner party, under chandeliers, next to a table with white roses and leftover wine, Giorgia Meloni and Donald Trump are locked in conversation.

Whatever was discussed, however, Meloni appears to be holding sway. Trump later described her as “a real live wire” and someone he could work with “to straighten out the world a little bit”. He may well have received positive reports on her from Elon Musk, with whom the Italian prime minister has met on several occasions and whom she has called “a brilliant man”.

As the relationship progressed, Meloni paid a flying visit to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago golf club in Florida a month later, and was the only European leader to attend his inauguration as US president.

Now her influence over Trump is to be put to the test when the pair reunite in Washington on Thursday for their first bilateral summit. Meloni is the first European leader to meet Trump since he paused some of his planned tariff hikes last week.

The UK supreme court has ruled that the terms “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act refer to a biological woman and biological sex, in a victory for gender-critical campaigners.

Five judges from the UK supreme court ruled unanimously that the legal definition of a woman in the Equality Act 2010 did not include transgender women who hold gender recognition certificates (GRCs).

In a significant defeat for the Scottish government, the court decision will mean that transgender women can no longer sit on public boards in places set aside for women.

In a recent escalation, Berlin authorities ordered the deportation of four pro-Palestine activists – three EU citizens and one American, none of whom were convicted of a crime. Rather, citing Staatsräson, their threatened deportation was for holding anti-Israel views. Although one of these deportations was later deemed invalid by the Berlin Administrative court, the move followed 18 months of cancellations, bans and dismissals of artists, academics and speakers – Palestinians, Jews, Israelis and others – for speaking out against Israel.

In a cruel historical twist, Germany, the perpetrator of the Holocaust, has enabled what numerous observers, including Amnesty International, have identified as a genocide of Palestinians. Rather than learning a universal historical lesson that applies to all people, Germany chose a particularist interpretation of its history, centered on the state's relation to Israel.

The recent deportation order suggest a dramatic escalation in the influence of Staatsräson, which now seems to extends beyond foreign policy. For example, one controversial clause in a draft of the coalition agreement leaked last month proposes stripping dual nationals of German citizenship if they are found to be "supporters of terrorism, antisemites or extremists who jeopardize the free democratic order."

The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) on Friday appeared to reject a call from Spain to hold an open debate on Israel’s participation in this Eurovision song contest amid the ongoing Gaza war.

Earlier in the day, the president of Spain’s public broadcaster RTVE sent a letter to the director general of the EBU urging the step. Several hours later, the EBU issued a brief statement in response.

In an apparent effort to assuage RTVE over the decision not to rule in its favor, EBU added that it remains in “constant contact” with the Spanish broadcaster and all other members regarding all aspects of the May singing competition.

The Algerian foreign ministry said the actions of the French prosecutor were designed to “humiliate Algeria, with no consideration for the consular status of this agent, disregarding all diplomatic customs and practices, and in flagrant violation of the relevant conventions and treaties”. In July, Macron announced that France would back Morocco's decades-long plan to give the Western Sahara limited autonomy under its sovereignty. That shift would align France with allies like the United States.

Algeria, however, backs the pro-independence Polisario Front, which acts as the Western Sahara's government in exile within Algeria's borders, the Associated Press said.

Irregular crossings at Europe’s borders have fallen by 30% in the first quarter of the year compared with the same period last year, in a decrease that rights groups partly attributed to EU policies that have emphasised deterrence while seemingly turning a blind eye to the risk of rights abuses.

The falling number of arrivals comes as the bloc has increasingly struck agreements with countries outside Europe, such as Libya and Tunisia, where practices such as beatings, sexual violence and imprisonment have been documented.

“The bottom line is that, insofar as the drop in arrivals is due to the EU’s deterrence measures, those measures are accompanied very clearly by human rights abuse that the EU is therefore complicit in,” said Sunderland.

PARIS/BERLIN, April 14 (Reuters) - More than three years after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Europe's energy security is fragile. U.S. liquefied natural gas helped to plug the Russian supply gap in Europe during the 2022-2023 energy crisis.

But now that President Donald Trump has rocked relationships with Europe established after World War Two, and turned to energy as a bargaining chip in trade negotiations, businesses are wary that reliance on the United States has become another vulnerability.

Against this backdrop, executives at major EU firms have begun to say what would have been unthinkable a year ago: that importing some Russian gas, including from Russian state giant Gazprom (GAZP.MM) could be a good idea.

That would require another major policy shift given that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 made the European Union pledge to end Russian energy imports by 2027.

So bad is the situation that local lawmakers declared a “major incident” this month in the city, where some residents say their quality of life is worse than in developing countries and hold it up as an example of “Broken Britain” — which is how some describe the perceived widespread social decay of the U.K. and the breakdown of public services in the country.

“You’re not getting little rats anymore,” Charlie Wilson, 31, said as she sat on her front porch. “They’re getting cat-size.” She added that the smell — which has only gotten worse as spring temperatures have risen — was making her sick.

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https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/eu-china-start-talks-lifting-eu-tariffs-chinese-electric-vehicles-handelsblatt-2025-04-10

I would have never ever expected that ! One more proof that i don't understand much about the state of the world.

What a world 🤯, i'm still not fully believing that we're choosing friendship with the p.r.c., it'd be too good to be true.
(we also chose friendship with the islamist Syria b.t.w., and maintained it, so i.d.k. anymore)

The EU will not rip up its tech rules in an attempt to reach a trade deal with Donald Trump, the bloc’s most senior official on digital policy has said.

Henna Virkkunen, the European Commission vice-president responsible for tech sovereignty, indicated the EU was not going to compromise on its digital rulebook to reach an agreement on trade with the US – a key demand of Trump administration officials.

“We are very committed to our rules when it comes to the digital world,” Virkkunen said in an interview with European newspapers, including the Guardian. “We want to make sure that our digital environment in the European Union … that it is fair and it’s safe and it’s also democratic.”