Negotiations have begun to define what the new Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Union should look like, a vital policy for the agricultural and livestock sector in the country. The Agriculture ministers of the Twenty-seven debated this Monday the first lines of work outlined by the European Commission for the new CAP. The reform, however, proposes fewer resources and more leeway for states to decide how to distribute them. In Catalonia, the sector views the proposal with concern because it fears that this flexibility will end up cutting aid and creating inequalities between territories.

The deepest transatlantic crisis in recent times closed at the latest UN summit in New York. The handshake between United States President Donald Trump, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, and Greenland's Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen, has sealed—at least apparently—the diplomatic fire ignited in January, when Washington launched a campaign of pressure and threats against the Arctic island. "In the Kingdom of Denmark, the United States has a friend and an ally it can always rely on," the Danish leader stated.

The European automotive sector is in a difficult moment. Electrification, Chinese competition, and stagnant consumer demand have pushed the European Union to take measures to protect the sector. But they are leading the industry down the "wrong" path. Brussels is trying to protect the European industry from foreign competition instead of making it more competitive. This is the conclusion of a report by the prestigious think tank Bruegel, on European policies, published this week, in which it warns that the continent's prosperity "is at stake".

After a tough negotiation, representatives of the European Union member states managed to approve new sanctions against Russia this Tuesday evening. The agreement, which until now was renewed every six months, includes sanctions against 3,000 Russian citizens and will be extended for the next three years. However, it leaves off the list two Russian billionaires close to the Kremlin, Alisher Usmanov and Mikhail Fridman.

Brussels is once again rapping Spain's knuckles over fiscal matters. The European Fiscal Board, the body that oversees the sustainability of public finances, reproaches the Spanish executive for requesting to activate the exemption clause from fiscal rules to spend more on defense, while this item only increased by 0.1% of the gross domestic product (GDP, the indicator that measures the size of an economy). Instead, Spain deviated by 0.4% of GDP from the recommended net expenditure trajectory.

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".

Michael Ignatieff (Toronto, 1947), an intellectual specializing in human rights and democracy, was also the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, a country currently in vogue in Europe and threatened by Donald Trump. Winner of the 2024 Princess of Asturias Award for Social Sciences, he is also the author of an honest book about his failed stint in politics, Fire and Ashes. He has now been in Barcelona for the presentation of the Cidob International Yearbook. Ignatieff speaks clearly, highlighting the grave moment the international landscape is experiencing. And he insists on one idea: we must wake up.

The concatenation of sabotage, cyberattacks and drone incursions attributed to Russia is exposing the seams of the European security architecture. Faced with an intensification of these episodes, the continent's governments have begun to consider how to respond without waiting for Moscow to cross any red line.

The Spanish government wants to tax the profits of oil and gas companies in the European Union. It considers that in the midst of an energy crisis, where prices have soared, these companies are obtaining extraordinary profits derived from the context. For this reason, together with four other countries, they brought their offensive to impose a levy on them to the Ecofin meeting this Friday. This tax was discussed at the informal meeting of Finance ministers, which took place in Dublin, according to sources from the Spanish government.

The last time the Prime Minister of Canada, Mark Carney, delivered a speech before a major international forum, his message sounded like a wake-up call to the offices of European capitals. In the midst of escalating tensions with Donald Trump and a transformation of the international order, Carney proposed that middle powers join forces to gain room for maneuver against the great powers. "When we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemonic power, we negotiate from a position of weakness. (...) This is not sovereignty. It is representing sovereignty while accepting subordination," he asserted in January in Davos.

Small and medium-sized enterprises represent 99% of the European business fabric. And three out of four claim that they have difficulties finding workers with the specific skills they need. For Brussels, part of the problem is that, despite decades of integration, the European labor market remains fragmented by administrative borders.

Brussels considers the housing crisis to have become an "emergency". In the last ten years, the purchase price has risen on average by more than 60% and rent by 20% across the European Union. While one million Europeans are homeless, 20% of the housing stock in EU territory is empty.

The now-famous report published by Mario Draghi on the competitiveness of the European Union revolved around one idea: if the EU wanted to remain an economic power, it had to modernize its economy and reduce its strategic dependencies on China and the United States. Two years to the day since the report's publication, most of the homework remains to be done. Of the measures proposed by the former president of the European Central Bank, Brussels has implemented a meager 15%.

The European Commission is preparing a regulatory framework to allow municipalities to restrict tourist rentals and the purchase of second homes, with the aim of combating the housing access crisis affecting the continent. Faced with the thousand-and-one recipes applied by member states to curb what is already the main concern of the community's citizens, Brussels will present the affordable housing law on Wednesday. The regulation will set the conditions under which local bodies will be able to apply these restrictions and will offer a common methodology to provide the measures with legal certainty.

After months of tensions and direct threats from Donald Trump to take control of Greenland, the European Union has decided to move from rhetoric to action. The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, announced this Monday from Nuuk a 200 million euro investment agreement to shield the alliance with the Arctic territory and send a clear message to the White House: the future of the island "must be decided by the people of Greenland and Denmark. No one else".

The most feared forecasts for Brussels have come to pass. For the first time since the fall of Nazism, the German far-right has real options to govern a state. The results in Saxony-Anhalt have fallen like a bucket of cold water on the community capital, where the victory of Alternative for Germany (AfD) is read as a harbinger of the penetration of this intolerant ideology no longer into the hemicycle – where it has had a few reserved seats for some time – but into the front line of executive power. A reading contrary to that made by the most populist leaders, who see the results as a political springboard.

Let's talk about Ceuta, a European border, a sensitive point for the entire European Union. And here comes the first paradox: from the beginning, a cornered Pedro Sánchez has insisted on interpreting the massive crossing of July 30th as a European crisis. His European allies have done precisely the opposite: reiterating that, above all, it is an internal affair, a Spanish crisis.

The housing crisis affects all of Europe, especially in large cities and the most densely populated areas. According to a study by the Technical University of Vienna (TU Wien), 44% of Europeans with an average income level can only afford to buy a property of less than 50 square meters, that is, the equivalent of a one-bedroom apartment or a studio.

The situation in Ceuta is not the result of any “migratory crisis”, as the left maintains, nor of a “sovereignty crisis”, as the right affirms. These two readings — one focused on the humanitarian drama; the other, on border pressure — are ideological and convenient interpretations. They do not take into account demographic dysfunction: the structural fracture between two realities advancing at completely different paces. On one side of the border, the risible birth rates in Spain and other European countries, such as Italy; on the other, the fertility of some regions of the Maghreb (4.63 children per woman in Mauritania, for example). Ceuta is, in this sense, a tense point of contact between two demographic systems that can no longer balance themselves. Everyone knows how tectonic plates work (we've had a few examples this summer): there comes a point when, underground, friction and pressure eventually generate an earthquake.In Spain, the fertility rate has remained below replacement level for decades. There is an accelerated aging, with an age structure that tends towards contraction and requires migratory flows to sustain the labor market, the pension system, and even the most basic social vitality. In Morocco, on the other hand, despite the significant decline in recent years (even more pronounced in Tunisia), the birth rate remains high compared to European standards, and the demographic pyramid is expansive. The average fertility rate in the Maghreb is 2.86 children per woman; in Spain, it is 1.10, and with an average age of maternity of 32.6 years, one of the highest in the world. This asymmetry generates an inevitable pressure: a young, abundant population, often without solid economic prospects, looks towards a neighboring country that continues to be fantastically perceived as a space of opportunities.Due to its condition as a physical and symbolic border, Ceuta has become the showcase for this tension. When thousands of young people crossed the border a month ago, they were not experiencing a "migratory crisis" in the classic sense, nor an attack on Spanish sovereignty, nor an invasion. They were corroborating in an abrupt, but non-violent, way the relentless logic of the imbalance that has been developing for decades in that precise context (it doesn't have to be this way in others). Administrations can try to contain it with honeyed speeches or threatening fences, but the underlying vector is subterranean: the difference between societies that are growing in population but not in resources, and societies where the opposite is happening.

Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Sweden, Romania, Lithuania, and now also Germany. Incursions and drone threats in NATO territory have become more frequent in recent months and have intensified. In early August, a drone loaded with explosives impacted a Ukrainian cargo plane at Leipzig airport without detonating, in one of the most direct sabotage attempts recorded so far at a key NATO logistics center and further into European territory. After nearly a month of investigations, this Tuesday, for the first time, the German government has directly blamed Russian intelligence services for the incident.