Europe

I recently reported on a major partnership signed by a German tech startup. Or so I thought. Not long after publication, I got a message from the company: ‘You have wrongly said we were founded in Germany. In fact, we were founded in California. Please correct this.’  That’s strange, I thought. Everyone I spoke to sounded pretty German – and indeed the person I emailed was based at the firm’s Berlin offices. But they were adamant: this was a California-based business. The perception is that America has strong innovation, and Europe has strong regulation I did some digging and discovered the company had been registered in Germany at least a

Another day, another apparent attack by an asylum seeker in Germany. In Munich, a 24-year-old Afghan is alleged to have driven a Mini Cooper into a trade union demonstration. At least 28 people have been injured, 11 seriously, according to police. The alleged driver of the car, Farhad N, reportedly came to Germany in 2016 Bavarian Premier Markus Söder called the crash a “presumed attack”. Police say they don’t know whether there is a link to the Munich Security Conference, which is taking place in the city. The alleged driver of the car, Farhad N, reportedly came to Germany in 2016. His asylum application was rejected but he was issued

There is a wind of change blowing through the West. It emanates from Washington DC, where Donald Trump continues to dash off executive orders; more than fifty by the end of last week, the highest number in a president’s first 100 days in four decades. The liberal mainstream media is rattled. The New York Times magazine ran a piece at the weekend in which it described Trump as ‘the leading light of a spate of illiberal leaders and parties flourishing in democracies around the world’. The paper namechecked some of them: Poland, Holland, India, France, Germany, Italy, Brazil, Hungary and Russia. What unites and motivates these ‘illiberal’ parties is their

Sweden has suffered its worst mass shooting in living memory. On Tuesday, a 35-year-old gunman went to a community college in the central city of Örebro armed with a firearm. After changing into combat fatigues in one of the school toilets, he launched an attack that left 11 people (including himself) dead and several more critically wounded. What Sweden witnessed was a form of violence born from cultural atomisation and ennui As someone who’s been involved, on and off, in the debates surrounding immigration and the new patterns of violence in Sweden, an incident like this appears as a round peg in a square hole. At first, as news of

Sir Keir Starmer has been on another overseas visit. On his 18th trip in seven months as prime minister, he travelled to Brussels yesterday to talk to European Union leaders about defence and security, an area on which he is keen to expand cooperation. His mission was both practical and symbolic: he is pursuing a defence agreement with the EU, but he is also desperate to show that he has ‘reset’ the United Kingdom’s relationship with Europe and has been welcomed into the club by the leaders of the 27 member states. As well as EU leaders, including the new president of the European Council, António Costa, Starmer met Mark

Despite imposing economic sanctions on Russia, the European Union has been importing record amounts of liquefied natural gas (LNG), a report has found. Russian LNG is exempted from the EU’s sanctions. A German state-controlled energy company appears to play a major role in this circumvention of sanctions. It’s not the only indicator that Germany is more reluctant to break its old ties with Russia than it lets on. The clamour for resuming economic ties with Russia comes from many different corners According to data collated by the commodities intelligence firm Kpler and first reported on by the news outlet Politico, the EU imported 837,300 metric tons of Russian LNG in the

Friedrich Merz, chancellor candidate of Germany’s Christian Democrats, stumbled in his bid to end Social Democrat-Greens domination of migration policy. After winning a Bundestag motion to reinstate border controls with votes of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), the chamber rejected a law on to clamp down on migration. Merz’s use of the AfD drew the ire of ex-Chancellor Angela Merkel, his predecessor as CDU leader. Her stunning public stand against Merz may have convinced 12 members of his own bloc to vote against the law. The bill was defeated on Friday with 350 members voting ‘no’ and 338 in favour. The icy enmity between Merkel and Merz is legendary

Last night, Friedrich Merz, leader of the opposition and the man most likely to become the Germany’s next chancellor, came one step closer to ending freedom of movement into the country. In a tense vote in the Bundestag, Merz and his conservative CDU party managed to pass a motion designed force the government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz to tackle illegal migration head on by just three votes. Controversially, they were only able to win it with the help of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party. Merz’s motion was a political gamble. Designed to drive a wedge between his party and the centre-left SPD and Green parties in particular, Merz’s