IT IS EASY to be optimistic about the future of Europe when running through a dystopian hellscape, machinegunning police and decapitating pedestrians with a samurai sword. Such opportunities come thanks to Cyberpunk 2077 , a Polish video game, launched before Christmas after a decade of...

WHEN GROWING up in La Courneuve, on the unfashionable fringes of Paris, Rokhaya Diallo says she didn’t feel black . The daughter of parents from Senegal and the Gambia, she recalls that being black was just not an issue, because there were so many of us. It was only as a young adult in Paris,...

SEBNEM KORUR FINCANCI, a forensic physician, and many other doctors had long insisted there was something dodgy about Turkey’s covid-19 figures. Excess deaths across the country far surpassed officially reported deaths from the virus. Case numbers seemed suspiciously low. Vindication came at the...

ON JANUARY 16TH 1,001 parliamentarians, party functionaries and small-town mayors will open their laptops, log into a virtual congress of Germany’s ruling centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and elect their party’s new leader. The winner will instantly become the favourite to succeed...

MOST PEOPLE sniggered when Donald Trump proposed buying Greenland in 2019, but he had a point. The world’s biggest island has a rich helping of rare-earth minerals, and the superpowers want them. These 17 elements, ranging from scandium to lutetium, lurk in the depths of the periodic table and turn...

A YEAR AGO Pedro Sánchez embarked on a political experiment. After two indecisive elections, he swallowed his previous qualms and formed Spain’s first coalition government since the 1930s, between his Socialists and Podemos, a hard-left party. Within weeks, this minority administration was faced...

GIBRALTAR IS a perfect synthesis of Britishness and the Mediterranean way of life , boasts Fabian Picardo, its chief minister. It has red telephone boxes and a Marks & Spencer, but its 34,000 people often lapse into Llanito, a kind of Spanglish, and their daily lives are intertwined with Spain’s....

POLITICALLY, COVID-19 has been good for Mark Rutte, the Netherlands’ prime minister. Polls show his party’s support has risen from about 15% to 25% since March. Not so for his sovereign, King Willem-Alexander. In April 76% of Dutch said they trusted the king; in December that had dropped to 47%,...

GREECE RANKS at or near the bottom of the EU class on digitisation, whether you measure it by high-speed internet connections, ownership of laptops and tablets, or online shopping. The government’s digital-transformation bible , a scheme to catch up with European peers by 2025, which includes 400...

IMAGINE THE dinner party from hell and it would look a lot like the one politicians from Forum for Democracy (FVD), a Dutch far-right party, held in November. It began with a row over the backing music, with guests torn between classical music or Ava Max’s Kings & Queens , a trashy dance hit....

TWO YEARS ago at the Munich Security Conference, an annual gabfest for buffs of geopolitics, Vice-President Mike Pence delivered to his largely European audience a stinging address, full of rebukes and America First swagger. On the same stage a few hours later, Joe Biden offered a glimpse of a...

WHAT A PRESIDENCY it has been After a gruelling all-night EU summit in mid-December, Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the European Commission, reserved her biggest smile for Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor. The summit, at which the EU’s leaders found agreement on a number of tricky issues,...

THE FRENCH, wrote George Canning, a British statesman, to a ministerial colleague in 1825, have but two rules of action: to thwart us whenever they know our object; and when they know it not, to imagine one, and to set about thwarting that. Canning’s grumble, made a decade after the end of the...

STAY ABROAD or rot in jail. That was the choice Vladimir Putin offered this week to Alexei Navalny, the opposition politician currently in Germany recovering from an attempt by Russian security agents to assassinate him last August. The new threat was delivered by Russia’s federal prison agency,...

WHEN THE trade deal between the EU and Britain was done, there was little celebration in Brussels. Instead, the moaning began. This is a dark day for the European fishing industry, declared Gerard van Balsfoort, chairman of the European Fisheries Alliance, a lobby group for fishermen. Indeed,...

AS NATIVITY SCENES go, the one in St Peter’s Square unveiled on December 11th is a startling departure from tradition. Several of the 54 giant ceramic figures would not look out of place on a Star Wars set. Ugly and demonic-looking, one appalled Catholic called them on Twitter. But the crib,...

ANGELA MERKEL, Germany’s chancellor, has long applied two operating principles in Europe: to keep the club united, and to postpone resolving crises until the last possible moment. Both were evident in an eleventh-hour deal struck on December 10th in Brussels between the European Union’s 27 heads of...

HEALTH-CARE systems everywhere are buckling because of covid-19. In south-east Europe, rising infection rates are hammering systems that were already run-down. Balkan doctors and nurses have been emigrating for years. The main reason is that conditions at home are poor. Pay is low, graft is rife...

SQUINT A LITTLE, and Boris Johnson and Ursula von der Leyen look rather alike. The British prime minister and the president of the European Commission were both children of Eurocrats, partly brought up in Brussels. Both were written off in domestic politics, only to be catapulted into the biggest...

THERE IS PLENTY of farmland in Fuzuli, one of Azerbaijan’s districts that ring the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh. But there is nothing to harvest. Where wheat and grapes once grew, unexploded rockets sprout from the ground at odd angles, reminders of the vicious fighting that tore through the...