Europe

Subterms

    Latest story

    113 Shares30 Views

    Europeans recognize Zohran Mamdani’s supposedly radical policies as ‘normal’

    by

    After New York City’s race for mayor catapulted Zohran Mamdani from state assembly member into one of the world’s most prominent progressive voices, intense debate swirled over the ideas at the heart of his campaign.His critics and opponents painted pledges such as free bus service, universal childcare and rent freezes as unworkable, unrealistic and exorbitantly expensive.But some have hit back, highlighting the quirk of geography that underpins some of this view. “He promised things that Europeans take for granted, but Americans are told are impossible,” said the Dutch environmentalist and former government adviser Alexander Verbeek in the wake of Tuesday’s election.Verbeek backed this with a comment he had overheard in an Oslo cafe, in which Mamdani was described as an American politician who “finally” sounded normal.“Normal. That’s the word,” Verbeek wrote in his newsletter, The Planet. “Here, taking care of one another through public programs isn’t radical socialism. It’s Tuesday.”That view hit on the wide differences in how Mamdani’s promises are seen by many across the Atlantic. “Europeans recognize his vision about free public transit and universal childcare. We expect our governments to make these kinds of services accessible to all of us,” said Verbeek. “We pay higher taxes and get civilized societies in return. The debate here isn’t whether to have these programs, but how to improve them.”More than a decade ago, Tallinn, the Estonian capital, became the largest city in the world to introduce fare-free public transport. Financed by the city’s resident tax, the scheme faced heavy opposition before its rollout, with some describing it as a political stunt that the city couldn’t afford.Nearly a year later, researchers found that public transport use had increased by 14% and that the mobility of low-income residents had improved. Similar schemes have since sprung up across the continent, in France’s Montpellier and Dunkirk, for example, and expanded across countries in the case of Luxembourg and Malta.When Mamdani promised to launch one city-owned grocery story in each of New York’s five boroughs, with a view to expanding if the pilot was successful, it reminded Aslı Aydıntaşbaş, a foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution, of the city-run grocery store she had visited in Istanbul in 2014.Back then, she had been surprised to see the heaving shelves, laden with products that ranged from bread to lentils to basic household appliances, much of it provided by small, little-known manufacturers. Access to these stores was limited to low-income households, with families receiving a preloaded monthly loyalty card to use at these shops, she said. “These city-run grocery stores in Istanbul were successful and replicated by other cities.”More than a decade on, the experience convinced her of the viability of Mamdani’s promise. “I was struck by the fact that New York elite and Republicans wanted to paint these proposals as sort of coming from the moon,” she said. “Things like non-profit stores or free buses, these are not outrageous ideas, nor are they socialist. They’ve been tried in different parts of the world.”For New Yorkers, precedents for city-run grocery stores can also be found closer to home. Chicago is mulling similar plans, while Atlanta and St Paul, Kansas have launched their own takes on municipal-run grocery stores.Mamdani’s campaign also promised to make childcare free for all children in the city, ages six weeks to five years. Days before the election, the state of New Mexico provided the city with a precedent-setting example, becoming the first US state to offer free childcare to all of its residents, in an effort to boost its economy and raise education and child welfare levels.Across the Atlantic, Portugal’s government began introducing free childcare in 2022, starting with children ages one and under with promises to gradually expand the program to children up to the age of three. While the program is open to all, places are limited and can be tough to access, with priority given to low-income and single-parent families.In Berlin, childcare has been free for children from their first birthday until they start school since 2018, though centres are allowed to levy additional charges for provisions such as lunches and extracurricular activities. Across the Nordic countries, free childcare is not universal, but is heavily subsidised by the state for most families.Mamdani’s platform also included a promise to provide new parents with a free baby basket that includes items such as diapers, baby wipes, nursing pads, swaddles and books. In Finland, the baby box has been a universal benefit since 1949 and has since been emulated by nearly 100 programs in 60 countries around the world.The sharp contrast in how Mamdani’s policies were seen within the US and abroad probably has much to do with the scant existence of a welfare state in the US, writer Mary Holland noted this week. “To anyone living in a western European state, the self-professed democratic socialist’s ideas probably sound entirely reasonable,” she wrote in Monocle. “But to many Americans, they’re wildly ambitious – radical, even.”Perhaps the most widely panned of Mamdani’s ideas is his vow to freeze rent for nearly 1 million rent-stabilised tenants in the city. The former US treasury secretary Larry Summers was among those who slammed the idea, writing on social media that rent control was the “second-best way to destroy a city, after bombing”.In 2020, Berlin passed a law that resulted in a five-year rent freeze, at June 2019 levels, for 90% of the flats in the city. While the law offered relief to about 1.5 million households who had seen rents rise by an estimated third in the six years prior, it was ruled as unconstitutional in 2021 after Germany’s highest court sided with landlords and property investment lobbyists who had argued it was inappropriate and illegal for the state to meddle with the private market.A 2022 paper, however, marked out an interesting impact of the short-lived measure, in that it found that while rent control was in place, residents were seemingly more receptive to new housing developments in their area. The finding suggests that if Mamdani is able to carry out the rent freezes as promised, it could help to pave the way for his promise to also triple the city’s production of affordable homes.Perhaps the strongest precedent, however, for rent freezes comes from New York’s own recent history. In the past 10 years, during Bill de Blasio’s tenure as mayor, members of the city’s rent guidelines board voted to freeze the rent four times, one former member of the New York City rent guidelines board, Leah Goodridge, noted recently in the Guardian. “This is why criticisms of Mamdani’s rent freeze ring hollow for me – it’s painted as out of touch, yet there’s already a precedent, backed by government reports and data.” More

    More stories

    • 188 Shares59 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump says Maduro’s days are numbered but ‘doubts’ US will go to war with Venezuela

      by

      Donald Trump has sent mixed signals about potential US intervention in Venezuela, playing down concerns of imminent war against the South American nation but saying its leader Nicolás Maduro’s days were numbered.The president’s remarks, made during a CBS interview released on Sunday, come as the US amasses military units in the Caribbean and has conducted multiple strikes on alleged drug-trafficking vessels, killing dozens.Asked during the 60 Minutes program if the US was going to war against Venezuela, Trump said: “I doubt it. I don’t think so.” However, when asked if Maduro’s days as president were numbered, he replied: “I would say yeah. I think so, yeah.”Maduro, who faces indictment on drug charges in the US, has accused Washington of using drug trafficking as a pretext for “imposing regime change” in Caracas to seize Venezuelan oil.More than 15 US strikes on boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific have killed at least 65 people in recent weeks, with the latest taking place on Saturday, prompting criticism from governments in the region.Washington has yet to make public any evidence that its targets were smuggling narcotics or posed a threat to the US.In the same interview, Trump alleged countries including Russia and China had conducted underground nuclear tests unknown to the public, and that the US would test “like other countries do”.“Russia’s testing, and China’s testing, but they don’t talk about it,” he told 60 Minutes.“I don’t want to be the only country that doesn’t test,” he said, adding North Korea and Pakistan to the list of nations allegedly testing their arsenals.Confusion has surrounded Trump’s order that the US begin testing, particularly if he meant conducting the country’s first nuclear explosion since 1992.Trump first made his surprise announcement in a social media post on Thursday, minutes before entering a summit with the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, in South Korea, saying he had “instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis”.The announcement came after Russia said it had tested a new nuclear-powered cruise missile, the Burevestnik, and a nuclear-powered and nuclear-capable underwater drone.Asked directly if he planned for the US to detonate a nuclear weapon for the first time in more than three decades, Trump told CBS: “I’m saying that we’re going to test nuclear weapons like other countries do, yes.”No country other than North Korea is known to have conducted a nuclear detonation for decades. Russia and China have not carried out such tests since 1990 and 1996, respectively.Pressed on the topic, Trump said: “They test way underground where people don’t know exactly what’s happening with the test. You feel a little bit of a vibration.”However, Trump’s energy secretary, Chris Wright, on Sunday downplayed any possible tests by the US, telling Fox News on Sunday: “I think the tests we’re talking about right now are system tests. These are not nuclear explosions.”The US has been a signatory since 1996 to the comprehensive nuclear-test-ban treaty, which bans all atomic test explosions, whether for military or civilian purposes.Other topics addressed in the interview included:

      Trump said he “won’t be extorted” by Democrats to reopen the government, making clear that he has no plans to negotiate as the government shutdown will soon enter its sixth week.

      Asked to clarify whether he would try to run for a third term, which is barred by the constitution, Trump said: “I don’t even think about it,”

      Trump said immigration enforcement officials hadn’t gone far enough in deporting people who were in the country without legal authorisation.
      With Agence France-Presse More

    • 150 Shares85 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump directs Pentagon to match Russia and China in nuclear weapons testing

      by

      Donald Trump has instructed the Pentagon to immediately start matching other nuclear powers in their testing of nuclear weapons, specifically citing Russia and China.In a post to Truth Social, Trump said “because of other countries’ testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately.”The post came less than an hour before Trump met the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, in South Korea on Thursday morning in an effort to come to a trade war truce. The meeting was the first between the two since 2019.The United States last held a full nuclear weapons test in 1992, and China and Russia are not known to have held any such tests since the same era. Trump’s reference to “on an equal basis” left it unclear what weapons testing could take place, or whether he was referring to displays of power similar to those recently conducted by Russia.Since 1998, no country other than North Korea is confirmed to have conducted a full explosive nuclear test. But nuclear-armed countries such as the US have subsequently carried out simulated nuclear explosions using high-powered computers, as well as related nuclear physics experiments, tests of nuclear-capable missiles, warhead mechanisms and “subcritical” tests of nuclear materials to ensure their arsenals remain viable.Pentagon officials did not immediately respond to questions about the announcement from Trump.Speaking on Air Force One after his meeting with Xi, Trump said he would “like to see” denuclearisation, adding that the US was “talking to Russia about that”.“And China would be added to that if we do something,” he said, without elaborating.On Thursday China’s foreign ministry told a regular press conference that Beijing hoped the US would honour the non-proliferation treaty “and take actions that contribute to regional peace, rather than the opposite”.“We would like to emphasise that China remains committed to the path of peaceful development, pursuing defensive national security policies and friendly diplomatic policies,” said spokesperson Guo Jiakun. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, said on Sunday that Russia had successfully tested its “unique” nuclear-propelled Burevestnik cruise missile, which can carry a nuclear warhead. The Kremlin described it as part of efforts to “ensure the country’s national security”. Trump later described Putin’s announcement as “not appropriate”. Sergei Ryabkov, a close aide to Putin, told Russian media that Moscow had notified the US in advance about the test.The timing of Russia’s Burevestnik testing is notable, coming amid the Kremlin’s intensified nuclear posturing and a break in US-Russia talks over the war in Ukraine.On Wednesday, Putin said Russia also carried out a test of a Poseidon nuclear-powered super torpedo that military analysts say is capable of devastating coastal regions by exploding a nuclear warhead and triggering vast radioactive ocean swells that would swamp and contaminate cities.Trump also falsely noted in his Truth Social post that the US had more nuclear weapons than any other country, a claim he repeated during his Air Force One press conference. Russia currently has the most confirmed nuclear weapons, with more than 5,500 nuclear warheads, while the US has 5,044 nuclear weapons, according to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.The last full nuclear test by the US, codenamed “Divider,” was carried out on 23 September 1992 at what is now called the Nevada National Security Site. The then president, George HW Bush, announced a moratorium on underground nuclear testing that same year. The US still, however, has the ability to resume tests at the Nevada National Security Site.In response to Trump’s post, Nevada congresswoman Dina Titus posted on X: “Absolutely not. I’ll be introducing legislation to put a stop to this.”Despite repeated statements from both Moscow and Washington about wanting to halt the arms race, little progress has been made. The Kremlin has recently criticised Trump’s push to develop a missile shield – known as the Golden Dome – which he claims would make the US impervious to attack.During his first term, Trump reportedly sought to increase the US nuclear arsenal “tenfold”.In December 2016, he tweeted: “The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.”Additional reporting by Helen Davidson in Taipei and Jason Tzu Kuan Lu More

    • 225 Shares88 Views

      in US Politics

      Forget diplomatic niceties: it’s beyond time Europe denounced Trump’s trashing of democracy in the US | Paul Taylor

      by

      What do you do when you discover your best friend is abusive to their partner at home? That question, or something similar, should be addressed to European leaders – and indeed to all of us in the European public space, who are watching, often speechless, as Donald Trump takes a cudgel to the institutions of American democracy.For the last nine months, European leaders have bitten their tongues, looked the other way and engaged in flattery, appeasement and wild promises to keep the US president sweet and engaged in European security. The overwhelming imperative for Trump to stand with Europe against Russia over its war on Ukraine – or at least not against us and alongside Vladimir Putin – has led them to swallow unrealistic defence spending targets and unbalanced trade terms. For what gain?No European leader has publicly contradicted Trump’s inflated claims to have ended eight wars in eight months, nor criticised his demolition of the multilateral rules-based free trade order, his assault on the United Nations, or his selective use of tariffs to pursue political vendettas around the world.The only time European leaders briefly found their voices was when JD Vance used the stage of the Munich security conference to launch a fierce attack on European democracy. Vance accused US allies of suppressing free speech and said he was more worried by “the threat from within … the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values” than by any threat from Russia or China to the continent’s freedom. To underline his support for freedom of anti-immigrant hate speech, he chose to meet the leader of the far-right German AfD Alice Weidel in Munich in the midst of an election campaign, and to snub Berlin’s then-chancellor, Olaf Scholz of the Social Democrats.With millions of Americans now taking to the streets to protest against Trump’s authoritarian drift at home, isn’t it time for European leaders to speak up and assert their moral autonomy by signalling Europe’s support for democracy in the US, and for those who are trying to defend it?This is not to suggest that an expression of European dismay would have any practical effect on the dismantling of checks and balances in the US political system, the abolition of the USAID foreign aid agency, the crackdowns on universities, law firms and science, the abuse of the justice system against political enemies, or the purging of the armed forces and, most alarmingly, the deployment of the military in American cities to combat the “enemy from within”.While the US can protect security in Europe and deserves our undying gratitude for having done so for the last 80 years, Europeans cannot protect democracy in the US. They can and must, however, protect liberal democracy in Europe, which risks becoming a collateral victim of Trump’s domestic and foreign policy agenda.What happens in America doesn’t stay in America. It is often a precursor for trends in Europe. Just as the #MeToo and “woke” movements spilled over from Hollywood studios and US campuses to European film sets and universities, so the tide of illiberalism and repression rising in Washington is already washing up on European shores in countries such as Hungary and Serbia. By speaking up about Trump’s assaults on the independence of the US civil service, judiciary, legal profession, media and armed forces, and his moves to criminalise dissent, European leaders would be asserting the values of the rule of law, the separation of powers and liberal democracy that they have a duty to preserve at home.If Elon Musk can use his social media platform and the world’s biggest fortune to intervene in German elections in favour of Weidel’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) – or in British politics in support of convicted anti-Islam extremist Tommy Robinson – then surely we, too, can make our voices heard in US politics. We can offer support and practical cooperation to states, cities and courts that share our values, and moral support to US freedom campaigners. Our governments and regions can build partnerships on climate action, civil rights and development assistance with like-minded US states and local authorities. We can offer jobs, visas and scholarships to US scientists and academics hit by Trump’s cuts to research funding. Europe stands only to gain from a self-inflicted American brain drain.The massive No Kings protests in towns and cities across the US were fortunately peaceful, despite Trump’s deployment of armed forces in Washington DC, Los Angeles, Memphis, Portland and other cities, and the attempted mobilisation of the National Guard across 19 states. But having branded his leftwing opponents “domestic terrorists”, the risk is growing that Trump will make good on his threat to invokethe 1807 Insurrection Act and claim sweeping powers to use the military against American protesters.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe last time the US military was used for domestic policing against demonstrations was under Richard Nixon in 1970, when the National Guard shot dead four students protesting, at Kent State University in Ohio, against the draft and the US military intervention in Cambodia. An earlier precedent for the deadly use of force against peaceful protesters was in Selma, Alabama in 1965, when state and local police violently broke up civil rights marches by black Americans demanding the unhindered right to vote. On both those historic occasions, European media criticised the use of force against peaceful demonstrators, but governments on this side of the Atlantic kept their mouths shut, motivated by the principle of non-interference in the affairs of an allied state.With the administration and its billionaire buddies intervening at will in support of hate speech and its proponents in Europe and against EU digital regulation, there is no longer any justification for staying silent. On the contrary, the defence of European liberal democracy starts by recognising when it is under threat in our closest ally.

      Paul Taylor is a senior visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre More

    • 213 Shares82 Views

      in US Politics

      The Guardian view on Ukraine peace talks: Europe must ensure Zelenskyy can resist Trump’s bullying | Editorial

      by

      It wasn’t quite the calamity of February, when Volodymyr Zelenskyy was publicly humiliated in the Oval Office by Donald Trump and his vice-president, JD Vance. But the Ukrainian president’s latest visit to the White House on Friday was, by all accounts, a disquieting experience. Mr Trump’s public musings before the meeting suggested that his stance had hardened towards Vladimir Putin, to the strategically significant extent of being willing to sell long-range Tomahawk missiles to Kyiv. But by the time Mr Zelenskyy arrived in Washington, the US president had changed his mind, instead lecturing his guest on the need to make territorial concessions to Russia.So far, so familiar. Since being re-elected, Mr Trump has repeatedly resiled from following up tough talk on Russia with meaningful action. Faux deadlines for Mr Putin to make substantive steps towards peace have come and gone, treated with indifference by the Kremlin. Last week, the US secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, stated that Washington was ready to “impose costs” if Russia continued the conflict. But a two-hour phone call at Mr Putin’s request was enough to defuse that threat, and for Mr Trump to once again position himself as a neutral arbitrator between two warring parties.The return of that insidious and amoral framing signifies a moment of diplomatic peril for Mr Zelenskyy. In language that is more suitable for describing a contested real-estate deal than an illegal invasion costing hundreds of thousands of lives, Mr Trump told Fox News that Mr Putin was “going to take something … he’s won certain property”. Should a planned meeting in Budapest take place between the US and Russian presidents – to be hosted by Hungary’s Putin-friendly leader, Viktor Orbán – discussion of a potential carve-up will dominate the agenda, as it did in the failed Alaska head-to-head.That prospect should concentrate minds ahead of a EU leaders’ summit later this week in Brussels. In the wake of the signing of the Gaza peace agreement – in relation to which Mr Putin was careful to offer fulsome congratulations – Mr Trump has taken to describing himself as “the mediator president”. In grimly paradoxical fashion, there is every possibility that he will try to bully Mr Zelenskyy into an unacceptable deal that rewards Russia’s aggression, in order to burnish his supposed credentials as a supreme peacemaker.It is critical that Europe provides Ukraine with the resources and staying power which allow it to resist such pressure. Progress is reportedly being made on proposals backed by the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, which would use frozen Russian assets to secure an interest-free £122bn loan to Kyiv. Such money, however it is sourced, will be fundamental to supporting Ukraine’s defence effort into next year. At a more symbolic level, there are also signs of a new determination to find ways to circumvent Mr Orbán’s opposition to advancing Ukraine’s bid for EU membership.As Mr Trump pursues his mercurial path, guided only by vanity, mercantilism and admiration for the exercise of brute force, EU leaders will need to be creative and determined in ensuring that Ukraine’s interests are adequately defended in the weeks and months to come. Mr Putin is playing the US president again, exploiting the absence of a moral compass in Washington. More than ever, a robust counterweight is required on the other side of the Atlantic. More

    • 200 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      American democracy might not survive another year – is Europe ready for that? | Alexander Hurst

      by

      Fascism is supposed to look a certain way: black-clad, uniformed, synchronised and menacing. It is not supposed to look like an overweight president who can’t pronounce acetaminophen and who bumbles, for a full minute, about how he would have renovated the UN’s New York headquarters with marble floors, rather than a terrazzo. But as Umberto Eco remarked in his timeless essay on identifying the eternal nature of fascism: “Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises.”Historians, scholars and even some insiders from the first Trump administration have seen through the comedic quality of the disguise. They appear to have seen in Donald Trump himself and those around him, Eco’s core criteria: the call to tradition and the rejection of reason, the fear of difference, the hostility towards disagreement, the ressentiment, the machismo, the degradation of language into newspeak, the cult of a “strong” leader. Almost a year ago, the historian Robert Paxton, in explaining why he had changed his mind about employing the word to describe Trumpism, remarked: “It’s bubbling up from below in very worrisome ways, and that’s very much like the original fascisms. It’s the real thing. It really is.”Since then, the Trump administration has deployed the US military and National Guard to cities against the will of their state governors. It has put pressure on state legislatures to disenfranchise opposition voters in extraordinary ways, and floated the idea of disenfranchising all voters residing outside the US by ending mail-in voting. It has used the power of the state to censor books, bully the media and “cancel” comedians who regularly make fun of Trump. It has seized executive power in alarming and potentially illegal ways, including the use of tariffs, immigration policy and targeted exemptions to generate subservience among powerful corporate actors.An over-fixation on whether actions are legal or not misses the forest for the trees: constitutionality is, practically speaking, whatever the supreme court decides. If the supreme court acquiesces to fundamental changes in the nature of what the US is, that is merely one more sign of how deep the rot goes. And from concrete policy to the decision to publicly venerate the Confederacy, the intended direction of travel is clear.The disguise dropped a little bit more, in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder – one more tragic datapoint in the merging of the US’s epidemic of gun violence and its growing political violence. At his strange funeral-rally-spectacle, Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, gave a speech dripping with everything Eco sought to warn us against, raging against a diffuse “they” who “cannot conceive of the army they have arisen in all of us”. “You are nothing,” Miller continued. “You have nothing. You are wickedness. You are jealousy. You are envy. You are hatred. You are nothing. You can build nothing. You can produce nothing.”In the past year, as Trump and those behind him have dismantled the institutions of US democracy with incredible speed, the European conversation finally moved from denial to attempts at bargaining, with some acceptance of US disengagement and disinterest going forward. But there has been almost no space for a high-level, public conversation about what to do when the US government is, for the foreseeable future, in the hands of actors hostile to the EU’s basic raison d’être and its values.I understand why European leaders don’t want to have this conversation openly with voters. They fear that alienating Trump, even slightly, will lead him to drop US support for Ukraine. The cleverest think they can buy time by flattering Trump, manipulating him just long enough to find a better footing, while the blindly optimistic look to the 2026 midterms as an inflection point, and some sort of “return to normal”. But the midterms will not save us. As the Democrats’ elections attorney Marc Elias laid out in detail for The New Yorker, the 2026 elections will probably not be wholly free and fair, and even where they are, Trump’s prior history of insurrection indicates that the results very well might not be honoured. And Trump is already laying the groundwork to drop Ukraine fully into Europe’s lap.During the first Trump administration, we heard, ad nauseam, that he should be taken seriously, but not literally. It was a mistake then, and it’s a mistake now. When Trump says, “I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them”, we in Europe (“a foe,” remember?) should take him literally. The radical authoritarian agenda the Trump administration is pursuing domestically matters to Europe. A US with a new, masked, secret immigration police with nearly unlimited funds, whose “red” government deploys its military to “blue” cities, and uses the criminal justice system to exact retribution on political opponents at the president’s behest – in short, the end of the rule of law – necessarily affects European democracy. Not least, because the Trump administration is engaged in a culture war against Europe, promoting forces that seek to destroy it as it currently exists.European voters are out in front of the politicians on this one. The spring Eurobarometer survey showed that large majorities of citizens want the EU to protect them from crises and security risks, think the EU needs more financial means to do so, and support that new funding coming from the EU as a whole, rather than member states alone. A survey of the EU’s five biggest states, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Poland, found that 52% think the EU was humiliated in the recent trade deal with the US. They blame the commission for not “defending” Europe more ardently, with a strong minority of 39% wanting the bloc to become more “oppositional” to Trump.Timothy Garton Ash recently gave Americans 400 days to save their democracy. As an American, I don’t think the country has that long. As Europeans, we should assume that it does not.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEuropeans are ready for an honest conversation about the challenge Europe faces from Trump – the same way they’ve solidified in the face of aggression from Vladimir Putin. The danger lies in Europe’s leaders fudging, hesitating and avoiding this conversation. If they cannot lead with candour, voters will conclude that European democracy and its institutions are too weak to withstand the pincer move that is building against it.

      Alexander Hurst is a Guardian Europe columnist More

    • 225 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      They fled war and sexual violence and found a safe space in Athens. Then the aid cuts hit

      by

      The night of 29 May was sombre at 15 Mitsaki Street, a women’s shelter in the centre of Athens. Shoes, winter coats, shampoo bottles and sheets lay strewn around: belongings the 30 refugee women and five children living there had worked hard to acquire, and would now have to abandon. The next day, the shelter would be shuttered for good.“I was so stressed I couldn’t sleep,” says Oksana Kutko, a Ukrainian. “I knew I had nowhere to go.”Operated by the Greek aid organisation METAdrasi since 2020, the shelter’s closure came as a shock.Kutko, 51, had been living there for three years after fleeing Russian bombs in Kharkiv. She hauled what she could carry to a nearby church.Residents could not find alternative accommodation in the short time they were given to leave. A Congolese woman with a seven-year-old son simply laid out a sheet on the pavement outside.By evening, everyone had vacated the refuge, except for one woman.Évodie*, a woman in her 20s who fled severe sexual abuse and violence in the Republic of the Congo, refused to leave. For days after the other women had gone, Évodie clung to the place: the last semblance of stability in her life of uncertainty.Already in a fragile mental and emotional state, losing her place at the shelter cast her back into memories of horrific abuse. Eventually, the police evicted Évodie. She spent the next month homeless.The shelter’s closure is the new reality brought by governments’ overseas aid funding cuts, people with fragile lives being left without lifelines, struggling to stay afloat.“These women’s need for a safe place, their need for hope for the future, their need to heal the past – all these things are connected,” says Thaleia Portokaloglou, a psychologist who knows Évodie from the Melissa Network, an organisation for refugee women in Athens.As support is withdrawn, Portokaloglou is seeing women unravel. How do you ask a person pulled apart like that to keep functioning, she asks.The closure of the Mitsaki Street shelter can be traced back to 20 January 2025, when President Donald Trump, froze the US foreign aid budget hours after his inauguration. Contracts with humanitarian organisations were terminated and over the following months support networks in many countries, including Greece, were gutted; METAdrasi lost a third of its budget, resulting in the shelter’s closure.Greece has received nearly 1.3 million refugees and migrants since 2014. The wait to be granted asylum can take years, leaving many people dependent on humanitarian organisations while their cases are being processed.View image in fullscreenEuropean governments have also been steadily slashing their overseas aid budgets, diverging sharply from the postwar global consensus on humanitarian relief.Lefteris Papagiannakis, director of the Greek Council for Refugees, says: “We are losing the whole of the international protection system that has been in place for the last 80 years in six months.”Meanwhile, Athens has hardened its stance on migration – parliament suspended asylum applications from north Africa in July and instigated laws this month that could mean rejected asylum seekers receiving prison terms if they do not leave within 14 days.Around the world, humanitarian networks have been thrown into chaos. Dimitra Kalogeropoulou, director of the International Rescue Committee in Greece, says: “We are facing an unseen crisis where people are really suffering.”On 30 June, between walls hung with Afghan tapestries, officials from Greece’s migrant-support organisations held an emergency meeting at the Melissa Network.The NGO leaders were visibly shaken. Minutes earlier, they had left an interagency meeting of the Greek branch of the refugee agency, the UN high commissioner for refugees (UNHCR).“All of us are facing an existential crisis,” says Nadina Christopoulou, director and co-founder of the Melissa Network.Before January, 90% of the UNHCR’s funding in Greece came from the US state department, says Papagiannakis. Now, half the funding and half the staff are gone. “Unfortunately, Europe is not stepping in,” he says. “They say, ‘Ah, that’s a good opportunity! We’ll stop too.’”The cuts mean aid organisations have been forced to make hard decisions. Funding for victims of sexual violence has been cut across the board.Christopoulou put it in simple terms: 970 asylum seekers would be stranded without assistance. At least 100 survivors of sexual violence would lose essential services, including emergency housing.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreen“People will no longer come to our centre because they feel it is undignified to come without having taken a shower, without having slept on a bed – and perhaps having been raped overnight,” Christopoulou says. “Because that’s what happens when you sleep in a park.”After her eviction from the METAdrasi shelter, Évodie slept rough in parks and squares for a month. Christopoulou knows from Évodie’s case worker, Irida, that homelessness plunged her into a devastating mental spiral. She has since found a space in a new refuge, but remains uncertain how long she will be able to stay there.When Évodie first came to Melissa in 2023, traumatised by her experiences in the Congo, she did not speak and, unable to find housing, spent nights in a park where she was further harassed. Eventually, Melissa secured a hostel place for her, before she moved into the METAdrasi refuge.Initially, she sat in a corner, without saying a word. It was a surprise, then, when she decided to join Melissa’s choir.On 8 March last year, Évodie stepped on stage and started to sing. Those in the audience who knew her were stunned. “I was crying,” Christiana Kyrkou, a project manager at the Melissa Network, says.“It was one of the first times I heard, loudly and clearly, her voice,” Christopoulou recalls. “Everybody was happy, but Évodie was Oscar happy!”View image in fullscreenWeekly self-defence training sessions offered a space for Évodie to open up. The class instructor, Konstantinos Koufaliotis, says she was his most frequent participant.One day, after Évodie mastered the basics, Koufaliotis taught her how to throw him to the ground. He landed on the foam mats with such a bang that Christopoulou rushed to the room asking if everything was OK.“Évodie laughed and laughed, because she created this,” Koufaliotis says. “She owned that moment.”Over the summer, she opened up to Koufaliotis about her difficulty in trusting those around her. When the conversations were too much for her, Koufaliotis would put up his boxing mitts and they would go back to training.Victims of sexual violence have every reason not to trust people. “Even if you do manage to get out of the circumstances that have created trauma, it’s such a fragile edifice,” Christopoulou says. “What you’re building is so fragile that it may easily fall apart into pieces again.”Now, as funding dries up, and services from therapy to housing face being wrenched away in an instant, hard-earned trust that NGOs have taken years to build up vanishes with it.The shelter’s closure left Évodie once again sees everything as a threat and everyone as an aggressor. She is distrustful of those trying to help her. Melissa’s staff believe this will be a commonplace reaction as since the funding cuts began, needs have turned from healing to survival.“There’s a shift from more psychological requests to more practical, more urgent ones,” Portokaloglou says. “We’re going back to those very primal, basic requests.”The prospect of future funding cuts now risks the survival of the whole Greek humanitarian network. The only certainty is that no programmes will be left unscathed. “It’s vertical, horizontal, diagonal,” says Christopoulou. “Everybody’s impacted.”* Name has been changed to protect her identity More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in UK Politics

      Trump was rude and bombastic – but spoke one sobering truth

      by

      Donald Trump has taken to the United Nations to show how pointless Britain’s courting of the US president with a state visit really was.Speaking at the UN’s annual general assembly, he told world leaders that London is heading for sharia law and issued all-too-clippable rallying cries for far-right extremists in Europe.Sir Keir Starmer’s enlistment of King Charles III in a charm offensive with carriage rides around Windsor, state dinners and three days of non-stop flattery delivered nothing but anti-British ranting and un-British extremism.Mr Trump raged: “Look at London, where you have a terrible mayor, terrible, terrible mayor, and it’s been so changed, so changed. Now they want to go to sharia law, but you’re in a different country.“You can’t do that. Both the immigration and their suicidal energy ideas will be the death of Western Europe. If something is not done immediately, they cannot, this cannot, be sustained.”Donald Trump told world leaders that London is heading for sharia law and issued all-too-clippable rallying cries for far-right extremists in Europe More

    • 188 Shares199 Views

      in UK Politics

      Trump’s attack on London and the UN are a rallying cry for the far right

      by

      Donald Trump has taken to the United Nations to show how pointless Britain’s courting of the US president with a state visit really was.Speaking at the UN’s annual general assembly, he told world leaders that London is heading for sharia law and issued all-too-clippable rallying cries for far-right extremists in Europe.Sir Keir Starmer’s enlistment of King Charles III in a charm offensive with carriage rides around Windsor, state dinners and three days of non-stop flattery delivered nothing but anti-British ranting and un-British extremism.Mr Trump raged: “Look at London, where you have a terrible mayor, terrible, terrible mayor, and it’s so been so changed, so changed. Now they want to go to Sharia law, but you’re in a different country.“You can’t do that. Both the immigration and their suicidal energy ideas will be the death of Western Europe. If something is not done immediately, they cannot, this cannot, be sustained.”Donald Trump told world leaders that London is heading for sharia law and issued all-too-clippable rallying cries for far-right extremists in Europe More