Europe is already preparing for the end of the war in Ukraine. Once the conflict is over, the Arctic will be the new security scenario on which the great powers will focus, and especially the Russian threat, community sources state. "With Russia and China increasing their footprint and ambition, the Arctic has become the new frontline of global power competition," summarized the head of European diplomacy, Kaja Kallas, who insisted that this "new reality" has forced a rethink of European strategy and made security a priority.

New setback for the European Union's climate goals. The continent's economic engines, France and Germany, reached an agreement this Friday to soften the climate requirements for the automotive sector and maintain the manufacturing of combustion vehicles beyond 2035. This was announced by the French government in a statement, in which it details that the pact also includes tools to strengthen production conditions within Europe. This proposal has been a major demand from European manufacturers, who are currently working hastily to electrify in the face of strong Chinese competition.

Salvador Illa has returned to Brussels. He maintains a busy international agenda and this week will be the fourth time that, as president of the Generalitat, he travels to the Belgian capital. The two most notable meetings he is expected to hold on Wednesday will be with the President of the European Council, António Costa, and the Vice-President of the European Commission and Commissioner for Clean, Just and Competitive Transition, Teresa Ribera, according to sources from the Catalan executive.

Vladimir Putin is intensifying both his full-scale war against Ukraine and his shadow war against the rest of Europe. His main goal against Europe is to end the support that the continent gives to Ukraine, in order to be able to subjugate the country, a milestone he considers existential both for the future of Russia and for his own future. While in Europe we must prepare as well as we can to defend ourselves against all kinds of hybrid attacks, the central axis of our response should be to redouble support for Ukraine. Ukraine is his main target. It is there – and only there, not in a struggle of a thousand small hybrid attacks – where Putin's Russia can be defeated and effectively deterred.

Justice must not kill. This idea is part of the European legal consensus built around human rights. In the 46 member states of the Council of Europe, no one has been executed since 1997, when the last execution took place in Ukraine. Abolition is today a condition for membership. The exception on the continent is Belarus, outside the Council of Europe, which maintains capital punishment. But this legal consensus coexists with a certain social erosion. According to the 2025 Barcelona Social Values Survey, 35.7% of Barcelona residents believe that the death penalty can be justified always or in some circumstances; among young people aged 15 to 24, the percentage reaches 47%. The trend is not only local. In several countries of the European Union, support for capital punishment is around 50% or higher. In the United Kingdom, in recent months, far-right groups have proposed reinstating it, also appealing to opinion polls. All of this is part of a broader context in which the European populist right advocates for increasingly harsh penal policies.

The 2015 refugee reception crisis represented a turning point for Europe. From then on comes the fear of a new migration crisis at its borders. The perception of threat is such that the overreaction is immediate, regardless of how many there are (with the Aquarius there were 630, 106 when the ship arrived in Valencia) and whether they have actually arrived (let us remember that in Ceuta they were still on the African continent).

It is the last opportunity to negotiate. Brussels already has ready trade defense measures in case China does not agree to limit its exports to Europe and reduce the trade deficit, which the European Commission estimates at 1 billion euros per day. European Commissioner for Trade, Maroš Šefčovič, meets this Thursday in Beijing with his Chinese counterpart, Wang Wentao, who is to present his counter-proposal.

Brussels wants to accelerate the entry of new partners into the European Union. Faced with growing geopolitical instability and the commercial competition posed by actors such as China, the EU executive sees the expansion of the bloc as "an investment in peace, security and stability". But this process has been almost paralyzed for years due to the various blockades imposed by member states and their reluctance.

Having a powerful residential stock at an affordable price requires not only financial resources, which it does, but also consistency and continuity in policies, according to the different models and strategies regarding housing in the European Union (EU). Paris, the city of light, has 17 times more social housing per 1,000 inhabitants than Barcelona, according to data on this type of property in both cities. Maintaining this proportion, since the municipality of the French capital has around 22% more inhabitants than the Catalan capital, in the former there are 127 social apartments per 1,000 inhabitants compared to 7.6 in Barcelona, although in recent years the drive for this type of housing has increased.

Far-right nationalist populist parties are leading the way everywhere, from Washington to Warsaw. Why, then, be so alarmed by the small electoral victories of one of these parties, Alternative for Germany (AfD)? “Because it’s Germany!” is the almost instinctive answer in many heads around the world.

The European Union has announced a new trade agreement with the Philippines. Negotiators from the European Commission and the Philippine government have closed a "substantial agreement" to facilitate trade between the two territories, as explained this Tuesday by the European Commissioner for Trade and Economic Security, Maros Sefcovic.

The Spanish Foreign Minister, José Manuel Albares, has a clear answer. One of the "greatest obstacles" to making Catalan, Basque, and Galician official in the European Union is his Italian counterpart, Antonio Tajani. Or, put another way, the pressure that the Spanish PP exerts on its partners. This is what he stated in a speech this Wednesday at the plenary session of Congress, in which he accused Alberto Núñez Feijóo's party of influencing the European People's Party to "halt" this initiative. "The gentleman from Italy whom you invite to your congresses and whom Feijóo is always hugging is one of the biggest obstacles to these languages not yet being official –he asserted–. Have you reproached him for doing this? I have".

October 13, 2021, was an important day for the protection of the Arctic: the European Union signed the political commitment to curb the opening of new fossil fuel deposits in the region. Five years later, the EU is immersed in the process of reviewing the strategic lines of its Arctic policy, which will be presented at the end of September. This week, European leaders have met in Finland to discuss maritime transport, resources, and security in the region amidst growing pressure from the USA, China, and Russia.In this scenario, Norway estimates that two-thirds of its fossil resources that are still to be exploited are located in the Arctic. Given this, it is not surprising that in recent months Norwegian politicians and members of the oil industry have been visiting Brussels very frequently. The goal of the lobbyists is to pressure the EU to lift the moratorium that would allow for new oil and gas drilling above the Arctic Circle. All this despite the fact that Norway, which is not part of the EU, does not need any permit to exploit the Arctic, but its dependence on the European market means that the moratorium directly affects the economic interests of the Scandinavian country.“Norway is very active and knows how to make itself heard,” acknowledged the EU special envoy to the Arctic, Claude Veron-Reville, in an interview with Bloomberg. According to this newspaper, since 2011, 19 ministers of the Norwegian government have met with high-ranking EU officials with a folder on the table: that the EU should now look favorably upon the expansion of Norwegian oil activities located in the Barents Sea. In parallel, the Financial Times has also echoed an internal EU document that revealed that community partners were considering abandoning the moratorium on oil and gas activity in the Arctic.The main argument that Norway has defended is that “there are no climate reasons to treat oil and gas produced north or south of a certain line differently,” in the words of the Norwegian Foreign Minister, Espen Barth Eide. Faced with these explanations from the Labour politician, voices opposed to exploring new deposits in the Arctic warn that this territory is warming four times faster than the rest of the planet, and therefore the environmental damage would be enormous in a very vulnerable ecosystem.The other reason Norway puts forward has to do with the energy crises that have exposed the EU's vulnerabilities in the supply of fossil fuels. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, the EU has made great efforts to get rid of Russia as a supplier of gas and oil. Recently, the interruption of fossil fuel exports through the Strait of Hormuz has been added to this situation.Benefits for global instability

For now, Norway already contributes 30% of the EU's gas consumption, and 12% of the oil demand, but the state company Equinor and the Norwegian oil industry want to increase supply with the argument that the Nordic country is the most reliable and secure source of fossil resources for Europeans. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs itself has argued in a memorandum that Norway can help the EU achieve greater energy security. “Norway has significant untapped oil and gas resources,” says the document, which also warns: “Continued responsible exploration and production will allow Norway to continue being a reliable supplier for Europe, but restrictions on the production or import of Arctic oil and gas from Norway would undermine this role.”

]]>

Joking or not, a European source said: on July 30, the day of the assault on Ceuta, the first thing many community advisors had to do was explain to their politicians where Ceuta was. Then, the chills came.

]]>

These are extraordinary times in Europe, and that is why the German Von der Leyen began her speech by quoting the Englishman Charles Dickens: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times". The writer from Portsmouth, who would now have to show his passport to travel to his beloved Paris, thus defined Europe in the time of sharpened guillotines in France. Von der Leyen updated Dickens's thought before the European Parliament in Strasbourg: "The European Union is stronger than ever, and the European Union may seem more precarious than ever". The paradox is the literary figure that works best in times of despair, of urgency.In the hemicycle, listening to the speech on the state of the Union by the German woman, there was an extraordinary presence, that of another non-EU citizen: Mark Carney, former Governor of the Bank of England and of Canada, now treated as a guru in many European chancelleries thanks to a brilliant speech at the last Davos forum. That day, Carney said some things that community leaders had not dared to utter: he declared the old international order dead; he called on middle powers to unite and take a step forward to stop depending on the big ones; he hinted that it was necessary to stand up to Trump; and he left a monumental phrase: "If you are not at the table, you are on the menu".

]]>

Platforms like Instagram, Tiktok or Facebook will from now on have to guarantee that they are safe if they want to operate in the European Union. The European Commission presented this Thursday the European law for the protection of children on the internet, which bans access to social networks for those under 13 years of age and limits their use for minors, in order to protect them from the associated risks. To achieve this, it has announced that it will force companies to present "compliance plans" before the rule comes into force, if they do not want to be left out of the community market.

]]>

If this political analysis of the health of the European Union were music, it would have to sound increscendo (intensity) with a few touches of ostinato (tension) and quite a few moments of tremolo (suspense).

]]>

The European Commission has acknowledged that the housing crisis is a European priority and, as a first step to address it, announced last week the proposal for the affordable housing act, the European law on affordable housing, the details of which you can read in the chronicle by Núria Sala Ventura for this newspaper. It is not that there has been a move towards Bolivarianism in Brussels. But they have indeed become aware that the fact that a million Europeans have no home to live in, while 20% of the available housing stock within the European Union is empty, is an urgent situation. The purchase price of a home in community countries has risen, in the last ten years, by more than 60%, and rental prices, by 20%. In addition to being an urgent situation, it is an unsustainable, unjust... and illegal situation: the right to decent housing is a basic social right (in the Spanish state it is a constitutional right) that is often violated, or denied, by market impositions. This European housing law –promoted by former minister Teresa Ribera, now Vice President of the Commission, and by the Commissioner for Housing, Dan Jorgensen– aims precisely at what has been said so many times was not advisable (and according to some, not even possible), and which reality now shows is necessary: to intervene in the market, to set limits and caps to prevent it from falling into speculative inertia.That is why the law proposes measures such as legal limitations on the purchase of second homes or non-habitual residences in those regions classified as stressed areas. Also, imposing penalties on owners who keep apartments or houses empty, to force them onto the market. The new proposed law insists, mind you, on boosting the construction of new housing to ease the market (although it is true that it speaks of promoting operators different from the traditional ones, such as cooperatives or non-profit entities, instead of the usual large construction companies). More interesting in this sense are advances like the ZAN law (zero artificialisation nette), from France, which proposes not to build a single more square meter of rustic land and to work, instead, on the rehabilitation, reuse, and transformation of everything that has already been built.The European proposal aligns well with the ban on tourist apartments by the Barcelona City Council, or with the penalties for having vacant flats in force in Catalonia for four years. In the Balearic Islands, on the other hand, the spokesperson for the PP parliamentary group in the Parliament, Sebastià Sagreras, has declared that “he cannot fathom” that a Majorcan “cannot buy a second residence in another municipality.” Not many things fit inside the spokesperson's head (the PISA report leaves the Balearic Islands at the tail end of the Spanish state, which in turn is at the tail end of Europe in educational matters, and this is also noticeable in the government officials). What won't he say when he finds out that the majority of Majorcans cannot even think about buying a first home in any municipality.

]]>

All activities in life are subject to norms or rules. It is one of the characteristics of civilized societies. It is evident that advances, as happened back in the day with the internet, begin by breaking some ways of doing or working, but over time they become normalized, although there are always those who find a way to go down the path of illegality or know how to take advantage of the lack of rules. We must be careful to reduce this aspect as much as possible.

]]>

In 2012, when Europe was fully immersed in the debt crisis, a group of economists, academics, and lawyers opposed to bank bailouts launched the platform Wahlalternative 2013, which the following year led to the founding of Alternative for Germany (AfD). What had begun as a movement critical of the monetary union quickly changed course. The 2015 refugee crisis accelerated its drift toward the radical right and shifted its discourse toward immigration, nationalism, and the rejection of the European liberal order.

]]>