Europe

In a 24-hour period at the weekend, 184 migrants were rescued in the English Channel by the French coastguard. The most southerly group that got into trouble was picked up off Fort-Mahon in the Somme Department, and the most northerly were off Dunkirk, more than 80 miles up the coast. The coastguard was also called to incidents in Wimereux and Grand-Fort-Philippe. In other words, it is not just England that is being invaded. So is France, its rugged coastline saturated by thousands of predominantly young men all intent on crossing the Channel. I’ve written before of their violent desperation: the mob who last year attacked a group of hunters who

Karol Nawrocki – the Law and Justice candidate – is the winner of Poland’s 2025 presidential election following a dramatic turn of events. Despite the final exit poll declaring Civic Platform’s Rafał Trzaskowski to be the winner by a margin of 0.6 percentage points, as the votes started coming in over the night, it was Nawrocki who ended up ahead with 51 per cent of the vote. The Law and Justice candidate managed to overcome the odds to become President, but the result will likely be a political standstill that will leave both sides unhappy. The two parties have been at each other’s throats History does not repeat itself, but

Following years of requests, pleas and false starts, Ukraine has, it appears, definitively been given permission to fire missiles deep into Russian territory. Since the start of Moscow’s invasion in 2022, Kyiv had been banned from attacking military targets on Russian soil with western-made weapons. Now, after three years of war, it appears Ukraine’s allies have indeed decided to allow it to retaliate as it sees fit. The news of the change of tack by Ukraine’s allies came yesterday from Friedrich Merz, Germany’s new chancellor. Speaking at an event in Berlin, the Chancellor revealed that ‘there are no longer any range restrictions on weapons delivered to Ukraine. Neither by the

When Donald Trump first burst onto the political scene in 2016, comparisons were drawn with a 1950s Frenchman called Pierre Poujade. The BBC called him the ‘grandfather of populism’, the first post-war politician to lead a revolt against ‘being told what it is acceptable to think about issues like globalisation, migration and Europe’. Poujade was a provincial shopkeeper who was so fed up with what he saw as the corrupt and degenerate Paris elite that in 1953 he formed his own party, the Union de Defense des Commercants et Artisans. In the legislative elections in 1956, they won 2.4 million votes, enough to send 52 MPs to sit in the

The Security and Defence Partnership which the government agreed with the European Union this week has had more spin applied to it than a thousand cricket balls. The central argument in its favour, apart from vacuous reiki-like attempts to change the ‘mood’ of relations with the EU, was that it would allow the UK defence sector to engage with the Security Action for Europe (SAFE) loan instrument providing €150 billion (£127 billion) for defence procurement over the next five years. It does not do that. You would be hard pressed to realise that the partnership has not succeeded in what many saw as its central purpose. Weasel words came in

Sir Keir Starmer boldly claimed in the House of Commons this week that his ‘reset’ deal with the EU would ‘release us from the tired arguments of the past’. The truth is that it will do the exact opposite. The country will need to confront yet again tired old arguments which we thought had been resolved. Brexit was all about getting back control of our laws, our borders and our money. A Brexit in which we formally leave the European Union but still follow its laws is senseless. We lose our freedom to choose our laws, and we don’t even have a vote on the shape of the laws which

The latest exit polls in Poland suggest that liberal Warsaw mayor, Rafal Trzaskowski, has won the first round of the presidential elections, with 31 per cent of the vote. Trzaskowski is a career politician, the heart-throb son of a jazz musician. He ran on a pro-European platform and has pledged to defend the independence of the judiciary and rebuild Poland’s democratic institutions. He is the candidate for Donald Tusk’s Civic Platform party, and is seen as a progressive and a ‘moderniser’ who represents a more cosmopolitan and outward-facing Poland. His rival, conservative candidate Karol Nawrocki, came in second with 29 per cent of the vote. Nawrocki, a historian with very

For years, the UK, Spain, Gibraltar and the European Union have been negotiating, on and off, to resolve the complex issue of Gibraltar’s post-Brexit land border with Spain. Now, ahead of next week’s meeting in London when Keir Starmer welcomes EU leaders to discuss a ‘reset’ in UK-EU relations, Spain’s Foreign Minister, José Manuel Albares, has brought ‘the Gibraltar issue’ firmly back into the spotlight.  Referring to the planned reset, which covers a wide range of issues including defence and security, fishing and British exports, Albares told the BBC’s Newsnight programme, ‘There are many, many things we need to talk [about], Gibraltar included.’ Emphasising that the relationship between the UK and

The great ‘EU Reset’ of 19 May – when the first formal UK-EU summit since Brexit will take place – is rapidly approaching. Yet even before Keir Starmer and EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen meet in London to thrash out an agreement, advance attempts to sell the new relationship are growing. That so much surrounding Monday’s UK-EU summit in London is being kept secret on either side of the Channel is auspicious ‘UK wins £500m in science grants from EU Horizon scheme after Brexit lockout,’ the Guardian excitedly told its readers earlier this month. It claimed that British scientists were ‘over the moon’ with Britain’s return to the EU’s flagship