The European Investment Bank is due to sign a framework agreement with Canada this week that will pave the way for investments into critical raw materials and other areas, a Bank official told POLITICO.
The deal with the long-term lending arm of the European Union is expected to be signed on the sidelines of an EU-Canada summit on Thursday in Montreal, said the official who was granted anonymity to discuss internal preparations.
Such a deal would mark a concrete step toward closer ties amid broader discussions about cooperation on arctic security and the EU’s potential offer of “associate member” status to Canada. The summit will aim to highlight deepening ties between like-minded partners.
The signing follows a September visit to Ottawa by EIB President Nadia Calviño, during which she took the first steps toward establishing a permanent Canadian presence for the bank.
The imminent framework agreement is significant given that the EIB typically operates only in developing countries or members of the EU or the European Economic Area.
Earlier this year, Canada offered G7 members “priority access” to its critical raw minerals stockpile, according to a letter seen by POLITICO. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has also said he wants to boost EU-Canada cooperation on critical raw materials.
BRUSSELS — The EU was split Tuesday over whether to offer “associate membership” status to Canada, with several countries refusing to sign off on a statement containing that phrase just 48 hours before a summit between the two sides in Montreal.
After EU capitals could not agree on the language in the statement in talks between ambassadors Monday, they used the so-called silence procedure on Tuesday. That meant a new text would be adopted automatically without a formal meeting or vote, if no countries objected by midday.
But Germany, which is leading the push to have the term “associate member” fully removed from the text, was among at least four countries that broke the silence procedure before that deadline, said two EU diplomats, granted anonymity to speak freely. That means the topic will be discussed Wednesday at another meeting of EU ambassadors, just one day before the EU-Canada summit kicks off.
The fracture shows how divided the EU remains on the idea of “associate membership,” which European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen offered to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney during her State of the Union speech in Strasbourg last month.
Four EU diplomats told POLITICO at the time that she did not consult European capitals before floating the idea.
Von der Leyen, European Council President António Costa, the EU’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas and a host of commissioners will fly to Montreal for a summit with Carney on Thursday and Friday, aiming to deepen ties and cooperation on everything from trade and energy to education and the Arctic.
Israel wählt in einer Zeit nie dagewesener Isolation und steht vor einer Richtungsentscheidung. Während Benjamin Netanjahu um sein politisches Überleben kämpft, bringt sich Ex-Generalstabschef Gadi Eisenkot als volksnaher Herausforderer in Stellung. WELT-Korrespondent Daniel-Dylan Böhmer analysiert aus Tel Aviv, warum dieser Wahlkampf tief in die israelische Seele blicken lässt und was ein Machtwechsel für Gaza und den Iran-Krieg bedeuten könnte.
Im 200-Sekunden-Interview ordnet Armin Laschet die geopolitischen Folgen der Abstimmung ein. Der Vorsitzende des Auswärtigen Ausschusses erklärt, warum er auf eine israelische Regierung ohne rechtsextreme Minister hofft und welche realistischen Chancen er aktuell noch für einen Friedensprozess sieht.
Auf landespolitischer Ebene droht der Berliner Linksfraktion derweil weiter die Zerreißprobe um die israelfeindliche Abgeordnete Vanessa Emde. Cedric Looks beleuchtet den Machtkampf zwischen Bundes- und Landespartei und zeigt auf, warum nicht nur ein ausbleibender Fraktionsausschluss die anstehenden Koalitionsverhandlungen weiter gefährdet.
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BRUSSELS — Quebec’s new separatist government is treating this week’s EU-Canada summit in Montreal as the start of a wider diplomatic push to get the province in the room whenever Ottawa and Brussels strike deals that concern its powers.
The separatist Parti Québécois returned to power this month at the head of a minority government in the province, promising to assert greater control over Quebec’s affairs and eventually hold another referendum on independence.
“Quebec has to be at the table, and Canada understands that very well,” Hélène Drainville, the province’s delegate general to the Benelux and the EU institutions, said in an interview in Brussels.
Prime Minister Mark Carney hosts Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President António Costa on Thursday and Friday for a summit the two sides have billed as a step change in relations, driven by Donald Trump’s tariffs and a shared need for new partners. Von der Leyen has even proposed to make Canada an “associate member” of the EU — an offer that goes too far even for some of the bloc’s member countries.
Early drafts of a joint summit declaration include a digital trade deal, a pact to let the European Investment Bank finance Canadian critical minerals projects, and a consignment of Canadian water bombers for Europe’s emergency services.
While Canada is responsible for negotiating the text, much of it lands in areas where its 10 provinces have extensive powers, such as over natural resources, education and health. Quebec is the second-largest province by population after Ontario and has a territory more than twice the size of France — with which three-quarters of its people share French as their mother tongue.
“Canada negotiates the umbrella agreement, and where we come in is when what’s negotiated touches our areas of jurisdiction,” said Drainville, who has been in post for a year. Natural resources are a provincial matter, she added, noting that Quebec has deposits of 22 of the 34 minerals on the EU’s critical list.
The province is already talking to the European Investment Bank and DG GROW, the European Commission’s industry department, about the bank’s entry into Canada, she noted.
Asked whether Quebec’s interests line up with those of Ottawa, Drainville said federal and provincial officials have already set up joint working groups to implement the summit’s outcomes. “Right now, all the signals are green,” she said.
New arrival
The cooperation comes at an unusual moment. Quebec’s new premier, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, won power on Oct. 5 while promising a third referendum on sovereignty, though not as long as Trump is in the White House. His cabinet includes the new position of minister for “accession to independence.”
However, support for independence in the province is the lowest it has been for three decades, around 29% in a poll from earlier this year — hardly a popular mandate for the project.
The Parti Québécois has nevertheless pledged to double Quebec’s 34 offices abroad. A party blueprint published last year would raise the number of countries with a Quebec office from 19 to 38 and, if the referendum delivers a “yes” to sovereignty, would turn those delegations into embassies and consulates.
“Quebec is going to start to exist and shine everywhere in the world,” St-Pierre Plamondon said last year, describing the representative network as a prerequisite for independence.
Drainville said the new government, which has been in office for three weeks, has not yet set its line on Europe.
“Our political leaders haven’t taken a position yet, which is normal,” she said. “But if they decide to double [the network], it’s because they believe in this partnership.” As for the associate-member label, she declined to engage: “We’re not really into semantics. That’s Canada.”
What Quebec does want from the EU, she said, is “win-win partnerships,” noting that the province and Ottawa complement each other and are stronger together when it comes to relations with Europe.
It hasn’t always been so amicable.
Quebec’s diplomatic ambitions date back to the 1960s, when the provincial government asserted the right to pursue international relations in areas under its constitutional jurisdiction.
Its international aspirations became politically contentious when French President Charles de Gaulle publicly embraced Quebec’s independence movement in 1967 — ending a speech in Montreal by proclaiming: Vive le Québec libre! (“Long live free Quebec!”)
The Brussels office opened in 1972, and the province now counts 10 posts in Europe, which Drainville called the most of any Canadian province.
Quebec never consented to the constitutional changes Canada enacted in 1982, and its 1995 independence referendum failed by the narrowest of margins (49.4% to 50.6%). A decade ago, Quebec lobbied Europe for a seat at the table in negotiations on the CETA EU-Canada trade deal.
PARIS — Top European defense ministers and EU representatives said Ukraine faces challenging months ahead, insisting they must keep supporting Kyiv despite the U.S. bid for talks with Russia.
“The new diplomatic push is there, but it’s also clear that Putin’s actions tell a different story,” the EU’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said at a press conference in Paris on Monday. Kallas said she was expecting a “brutal winter” for Kyiv and that there was “no hope for imminent peace,” reiterating the need to help Ukraine “withstand the attacks and increase the cost for Russia.”
Kallas, along with European Commissioner for Defence and Space Andrius Kubilius, joined a meeting with defense ministers from the E5 group made up of France, the U.K., Germany, Poland and Italy, hosted at the French armed forces ministry.
The meeting came amid a renewed U.S. effort to push Ukraine into peace talks with Russia and growing doubts about Washington’s support for Kyiv.
U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff said last week he would offer Russia’s Vladimir Putin direct talks with President Donald Trump and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy to secure a ceasefire.
“No results whatsoever comes for those who want to negotiate with Putin,” German defense minister Boris Pistoripus said. “The results are what? It doesn’t lead to anything. There is no signal whatsoever that Putin is looking for peace.”
The U.K.’s Wes Streeting added: “While none of us seek confrontation with Russia … We do have to be aware of the threat posed by Russia.”
While pledging “total transparency” with the U.S., France’s Catherine Vautrin said the E5 members would “work together concretely,” focusing on arms production and interoperability.
“Produce more, produce faster, produce equipment suited to today’s conflicts – but we must already be planning for the conflicts of tomorrow,” Vautrin said. “On that, EU financial initiatives can help us move in this direction.”
Canada and Europe want to reshape the global order. But whose vision will prevail?
Mark Carney’s push for a middle-powers alliance meets Ursula von der Leyen’s bid for influence.
By ZI-ANN LUM, SEBASTIAN STARCEVIC and CAMILLE GIJS
Illustration by Natália Delgado/POLITICO
Mark Carney’s pursuit of a global alliance of middle powers has a Europe problem.
Canada’s prime minister wants to help build a new world order that can counterbalance the power of the United States and China. But his vision depends on a new relationship with a Europe that doesn’t see itself as a middle power at all.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has a different vision: a Brussels-centered bloc that extends the EU’s economic and geopolitical influence, starting with Canada. The idea, according to senior European lawmaker Siegfried Mureșan, is to create an opportunity for the EU to become the “global center of gravity for liberal democracies.”
The competing visions will be tested this week when Carney and von der Leyen meet in Montreal for a summit intended to chart a new course for transatlantic relations. Both want to demonstrate they can prosper in a world upended by U.S. President Donald Trump. But they have different ideas about their curious new alliance — and face political resistance that could limit how far the partnership can go.
Von der Leyen’s offer of “associate membership” in the EU surprised officials on both sides of the Atlantic. Four diplomats told POLITICO they were not consulted before she floated the idea in the State of the Union. The officials added that they don’t understand the label, which has yet to be defined. Germany has since led pushback on the plan.
“We’ve definitely put the cart before the horse,” one of the diplomats said. “We’re announcing something and then figuring out how to flesh it out.”
Trump called the membership idea “laughable,” but also threatened “very serious tariffs” should it come to be — a reminder that leaders in pursuit of Washington workarounds must avoid provoking the White House.
The leaders are under pressure to leave Montreal with more than a liberal democratic photo-op. For starters, they need to decide what “associate membership” means — and disarm resistance in the EU capitals blindsided by von der Leyen’s plan.
Canada’s Ambassador to the EU Jonathan Wilkinson told POLITICO last month that people got too hung up on a label that was revealed prematurely. Carney called the Canada-EU relationship an “alliance for the future” when he addressed European lawmakers in Strasbourg.
Wilkinson said the Canada-EU project will show other democratic nations how to deepen partnerships. “It ties into very much what [Carney] talked about at Davos — and after Davos.”
Carney, von der Leyen and European Council President António Costa have two days to chart what’s next while American foreign policy continues to stress test geopolitical relationships in midterm campaigns that will shape Trump’s last two years in office.
The economic divide
Ottawa considers the EU an obvious partner in its push to diversify trade away from the U.S. There’s already a free-trade agreement that both sides view as being underutilized.
Leaders gathering in Montreal this week will celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Canadian-EU trade agreement, nicknamed CETA. But nine EU member countries have yet to ratify the deal, underscoring the challenge of turning rhetoric into reality.
“We have shared challenges and many more shared opportunities,” Canadian International Trade Minister Maninder Sidhu told reporters last week in Dublin, where he was invited to participate in an informal meeting of EU trade ministers, a preview of what a more integrated Canada could look like. “Canada wants to be Europe’s most reliable partner.”
Sidhu said CETA utilization rates in EU member countries range from 60% to 80%, making a point about room for improvement and perennial challenges. “We know there’s room to grow.”
Von der Leyen’s associate membership plan “has been coldly received by member states,” a senior EU official said. “It [the summit] is more about what we do, how we can use the real potential of the CETA agreement.” CETAhas been provisionally in force since 2017.
Trade talks between Canada and the bloc read like a lengthy transatlantic grievance list.
At a meeting between Brussels and Ottawa last October, the EU complained about Canadian taxes it says disproportionately hit European carmakers, opaque cheese-import quotas, cumbersome rules on cosmetics and what it considers discriminatory provincial taxes and markups on European wines and spirits.
Canada, meanwhile, warned that the EU’s deforestation rules could burden its exporters, questioned the impact of Brussels’ carbon border tax and pressed for greater recognition of Canadian standards in areas including AI.
The senior EU official described the relationship as constrained by “irritants and unfulfilled promises” that must be resolved if the two sides are to make progress.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney shakes hands with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, next to European Parliament President Roberta Metsola, in Strasbourg, eastern France, on September 17, 2026. | Jean-Christophe Verhaegen/ AFP via Getty Images
There are hurdles ahead. Even as Canada and the EU imagine a deeper economic and security partnership, both are pursuing industrial policies that could shut the other’s companies out of lucrative public contracts — death by compounded trade barriers.
Brussels has concerns about Ottawa’s “Buy Canadian” initiatives and their compatibility with the EU-Canada free trade agreement. “Some member states didn’t like the ‘Buy Canada’ thing from Carney,” the official added.
Canada is likewise uncertain whether its companies will qualify for the EU’s proposed “Made in Europe” preferences foreseen in a major industry bill that would seek to channel public procurement spending to European companies. The EU is divided over whether to extend those preferences to trusted trading partners, a topic that is expected to come up in Montreal.
Canadian business leaders recognize the domestic appeal of “Buy Canadian” in the face of Trump’s threats, but warn there will need to be concessions.
“It’s something that will have to be resolved in order to move the relationship deeper, particularly with respect to industrial cooperation or collaboration,” Mark Camilleri, president of the Canada EU Trade and Investment Association, told POLITICO.
Camilleri likened the 10-year-old CETA deal to a garden overgrown with weeds. “It pains me to see market access being eroded through Canadian and European preferences,” he said.
Pressure is on
European and Canadian leaders are under pressure to deliver wins this week that demonstrate that “non-hegemons” — a descriptor Carney used in his Davos speech — can survive and thrive in an age of great-power rivalry.
Canadians currently support closer ties with Europe. But the EU faces political headwinds of its own, from fraught budget negotiations within the bloc to right-wing populist movements that are picking up momentum in some of its biggest economies.
One likely deliverable is a new digital trade agreement. Talks launched in March and were still underway last week. But the agreement lacks substantive text on artificial intelligence, leaving the two sides to find other places to cooperate, potentially through the EU’s proposed Cloud and AI Development Act. That proposal seeks to reduce reliance on U.S. tech giants, raising the risk of a new row with Washington.
The European Commission is also pushing for Canada to join Erasmus+, the bloc’s student exchange program, according to one EU official. Carney has already publicly expressed interest.
But Brussels has bigger ambitions for the partnership. The EU is pressing Canada to increase its funding for Ukraine, a test of Canada’s willingness to take on more of the security burden.
For von der Leyen, securing that commitment would be a win. So would leaving the summit with a pledge from Carney to explore her offer of an “associate membership” — or whatever they end up calling it.
Zi-Ann Lum reported from Toronto, Sebastian Starcevic from Brussels and Camille Gijs from Dublin.
DUBLIN — EU and Chinese officials are already discussing the next sectors for trade talks as Brussels prepares to review implementation of their latest understanding in January, EU trade chief Maroš Šefčovič told POLITICO on Friday.
“In January we can assess how it worked and if it delivered all parts of our agreement,” Šefčovič said, referring to an Oct. 9 pact by which China will voluntarily reduce exports of hybrid vehicles to the EU by almost half to 350,000 units in 2027.
That deal also lowers tariffs on European goods such as auto parts and footwear, and smooths exports of rare earth elements to the EU.
After a scheduled January videoconference with his counterpart Wang Wentao, Šefčovič said he hopes the two can deliver results in March 2027 at their next round of in-person talks in Brussels.
“I would like to see that we both have an understanding of what sectors we are going to focus on next,” he said.
The intense engagement with China comes as the bloc seeks to rebalance mutual economic ties, which EU officials say have been distorted by Chinese subsidies, market barriers and a surge in imports. Šefčovič stressed the urgency of the task, given that the EU’s trade deficit with China “reached almost €197 billion in the first half of this year. At this rate, we could break the 2022 record” of €397.3 billion.
“A part of our team is working on implementing all what we agreed, and [another] part of the team is talking to our Chinese counterparts on what should be the next sectors, next areas on what we want to focus the work on. Hopefully with another [Trade and Investment Consultation] in Brussels we can actually deliver the results,” he added.
“The primary objective for us … is to rebalance the trade.”
At a press conference on Friday, the trade chief said the European Commission was looking to shield more sectors from Chinese overcapacity, with plastics the leading candidate for safeguard measures — a mix of quotas and tariffs.
“We are currently analyzing what would be the best candidates and sectors to be addressed” through safeguard measures, he said. “Currently, what I think is the closest, is the plastic sector.”
Brussels is also juggling requests from the EU’s 27 member countries, which all seek to protect the industries that are key to their economies.
Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told EU leaders last week that Brussels wants to shield the chemical and machinery sectors next, POLITICO reported.
Šefčovič added that the European Commission was looking at proposing new trade tools to nudge EU companies to diversify their suppliers, expected in early December.
“We would respect what we have heard from every single business: Keep it simple, no additional reporting,” he said.
The EU executive is also looking to incorporate a proposal by France and Germany for a new tool that would allow Brussels within days to restrict — or even close — access to Europe for countries that severely distort the bloc’s single market.
“It’s better to present a new instrument,” Šefčovič told POLITICO. “We could initiate it very quickly and … act very quickly.”
Jamie Dettmer is associate editor and a foreign affairs columnist for POLITICO.
The war in Gaza hasn’t figured much in campaigning for Israel’s upcoming election — despite the likelihood that Israel’s Arab minority, Palestinian by heritage, might well decide who gets to be prime minister.
Israel’s Arabs make up around 20% of the electorate that will be casting ballots in the Oct. 27 parliamentary election. And thanks to complex coalition math, Arab parties might well be the ones to crown Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s main rival, former military chief Gadi Eisenkot, who leads a center-right opposition bloc.
But campaigns by both the Arab parties and Jewish politicians have avoided talking about what the outcome might actually mean for Jewish-Arab relations in the region, for the possibility of a two-state solution and even for U.S. President Donald Trump’s vision for a comprehensive peace-through-prosperity deal between Israelis and the Palestinians.
“The election campaign has been bizarre,” said Michael Milshtein, a retired Israeli army colonel and former head of Palestinian affairs in Israel’s military intelligence agency. “The campaign has been focused on domestic and personal issues, and on Netanyahu.”
That means it hasn’t included “the very deep complicated issue of the critical relations between us and the Palestinians, and what kind of scenarios or solutions are left after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack and the Gaza War — for any kind of political settlement,” Milshtein said.
But outside of Israel there’s alarm — especially among Arab leaders — over the absence of any serious debate about how to end the multi-front conflicts Israel is engaged in and what that might foretell, said HA Hellyer, a geopolitical scholar specializing in the region.
“Netanyahu, or not, the Israelis are on a particular trajectory when it comes to foreign and security policies,”Hellyer told POLITICO.
“Opposition politicians blame Netanyahu for Israel’s increasing diplomatic isolation and loss of support in parts of Europe and North America. But when you look at what they’re actually saying, they’re not arguing with the policies when it comes to Gaza. They support the overall settlement project in the West Bank. They support the incursion in Southern Lebanon. Their proposition is that they could have done things in a better way,” said Hellyer, who’s a fellow at Britain’s Royal United Services Institute.
Mentions of the Gaza conflict in election campaigns have been largely limited to clashes over who was to blame for failing to prevent the Hamas attack on southern Israel, which killed more than 1,200 people.The Eisenkot-led Change bloc has focused on Netanyahu’s role in the lead-up to the Oct. 7, 2023 massacre, pointing to the failures of his government and arguing he ignored warnings of a likely big Hamas attack. But the bloc has done little to flesh out its governing policy platform.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s campaign has sought to frame Eisenkot as an appeaser and puppet of Arab party leaders — such as Mansour Abbas, leader of the Islamist Ra’am party, and Ahmad Tibi, leader of Ta’al party — arguing he would compromise on core security issues to persuade them to join or vote with his coalition bloc after the election to give him a Knesset majority.
“The lack of real content is a major problem for such a crucial election,” the Jerusalem Post lamented in an editorial this week.
Few see any chance of a negotiated peace or a two-state solution any time soon. Israelis largely view international condemnation as biased, and say critics of Israel’s conduct in Gaza fail to understand what the country has to do to survive.
People walk past election campaign banners in Jerusalem on Oct. 22, 2026. | John Wessels/AFP via Getty Images
But at some stage or another, Israelis will have to have conversations about peace, and delaying them isn’t going to help the country reduce its deepening isolation or help repair strained ties with traditional allies, including Europeans, who are starting to impose sanctions and considering arms embargoes.
Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, a fierce Netanyahu critic, said that while there has been election debate about how successful the Gaza war has been in degrading Hamas, “it’s true that the main issue of our future with the Palestinians has been ignored.” He added: “Had I been running, I would have talked about it the whole time.”
So why hasn’t peace been on the agenda?
As Olmert sees it, the root lies in “the huge trauma of Oct. 7, along with the perception that public opinion, the mainstream, has shifted from where it was before the massacre and moved further rightward politically.” That isn’t uncommon: When Israel suffers a severe psychological blow, the political center-of-gravity habitually moves sharply to the right, favoring hawkish and nationalist positions and marginalizing more conciliatory perspectives.
“Nonetheless, the perception is that general public opinion has shifted and, therefore, all of the other parties are hesitant to talk about any political process with the Palestinians or about negotiations or about a two-state solution, and so on and so forth, because they worry they’ll lose support,” Olmert said.
Sven Burgsdorff, a former EU representative and ambassador to the West Bank, doesn’t subscribe to Olmert’s view, instead arguing there’s not much difference between Netanyahu and the leaders of the center-right Change bloc when it comes to Gaza or a two-state solution — something Netanyahu dismisses out of hand regularly, saying that Palestinian sovereignty is incompatible with Israel’s security.
“Even if the right-wing Netanyahu coalition were to be replaced by the current opposition, none of its main leaders — Eisenkot, Naftali Bennett, Yair Lapid and Avigdor Lieberman — question the IDF’s conduct [in] the war on Gaza, nor are they supportive of the idea of Palestinian self-determination. Only Yair Golan of the Democrats and the coalition of Arab parties are in favor of that,” he said in an interview.
Opposition leaders don’t criticize Netanyahu for the conduct of the Gaza war, Burgsdorff continued. Their issue with him is whether he was at fault for not protecting Israel from the 2023 attack. They also accuse him of being set on dismantling Israel’s democratic system and for having no exit strategy for his forays into broader regional conflicts.
Netanyahu has made a long political career out of leveraging external crises to keep his grip on power. And even now, it would take a brave commentator to write him off and suggest that Bibi the Magician, to use one of his nicknames, has lost the magic touch. The Israeli leader has pulled off stunning turnarounds in his long political career, including in the 1990s when he beat Shimon Peres in elections held just months after the assassination of then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
Olmert still hopes for a Netanyahu defeat and says if Eisenkot is installed, he might make conciliatory moves like meeting with Mahmoud Abbas, the president of Palestinian National Authority.
“He won’t be able to do anything big or quickly with Bennett and Lieberman in his cabinet. Both of them are completely opposed to the idea of Palestinian sovereignty. They keep saying it all the time. ‘There will never be a Palestinian state,’” he said. “So the political space will be very limited.”
But without some serious movement toward a two-state solution, Israel could risk alienating more of its traditional allies in Europe and the U.S.
THE HAGUE — The European Commission should act “as soon as possible” to give clear guidance on U.S. sanctions against the International Criminal Court, its top administrative official told POLITICO in an interview.
Osvaldo Zavala Giler, who oversees the day-to-day functioning of the Hague-based court as the institution’s registrar, said his job became “preparing for sanctions” as the White House imposed an escalating regime of restrictions against it.
The Trump administration targeted prosecutors and judges from the court first in February 2025 before announcing blanket sanctions on Oct. 9 this year. The EU has repeatedly backed the Court against Washington, but it has resisted calls to activate a mechanism that would forbid firms from complying with U.S. laws.
That has agonized senior figures in The Hague. Zavala Giler said the Commission’s “lack of clarity” left private companies and NGOs in the dark over whether they should comply with sanctions decided by Washington — and what risks they face if they don’t.
Zavala Giler’s call to the Commission adds to pressure from EU lawmakers for a swift response after the Oct. 9 announcement. Kallas told the European Parliament on Tuesday that Brussels would use the next few months “to open dialogue” on the issue. The new sanctions are set to take effect in April next year.
“What I would hope is that the space for dialogue is not interpreted as a space for waiting to protect the court,” Zavala Giler said, who spoke from his glass office on the eve of a visit to the Court’s headquarters by the EU’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas.
Damocles sword
Anticipating sweeping sanctions, the Court spent six months abandoning U.S. tech providers and moving to an open-source software environment, and 20 months to make its financial transactions dollar-proof. That move has been a huge undertaking for Zavala Giler’s team,he said.
The Court initially deepened its reliance on U.S. technology after it was hit by a massive cyber attack in 2023, but what seemed a solution at that time became a problem in the face of sanctions. Even though the current regime includes a carveout for telecommunications, there is no guarantee it will remain the case.
“It becomes a sort of Damocles sword on top of our head that could be revoked at any time,” Zavala Giler said. “I cannot count on U.S. tech companies anymore.”
U.S. platforms operate as entire ecosystems, offering all-encompassing solutions under a single contract. To do without them, “you need to start creating your own architecture and systems that need to speak to each other,” the registrar said.
Financial autonomy was equally hard to achieve. The Court mapped all its suppliers’ transactions to ensure there was no U.S. nexus, meaning that no U.S. person, bank or currency is involved in a payment. “We made all of our staff members have European bank accounts. It was a very detailed process that we had to do, person by person, company by company, making sure that the contracts were in euros,” the registrar said.
The Court also went from working with tens of banks to only “a few,” since only a handful of institutions are comfortable with dollar-proof payments.
Chilling effect
That situation is likely to worsen without clear guidance from EU countries and the Commission. As Zavala Giler put it, “if the International Criminal Court cannot transact in Europe, in euros within the SEPA zone with no U.S. nexus, then there is a bigger question about European financial sovereignty.”
The Court has long called the EU to use a legislative shield — known as blocking statute — that would forbid EU firms from complying with U.S. sanctions. The request was backed by dozens of lawmakers at the European Parliament, which incidentally awarded the court its human rights Sakharov Prize on Thursday.
The blocking statute “becomes an instrument to reassert the minimum space that should not be affected by unilateral extraterritorial sanctions … that minimum space should be, at the very least, the eurozone,” Zavala Giler said. Even without it, the court needs “the reassurances that, at least within the eurozone, [it] can continue to operate,” he added.
So far, however, the Commission has taken a cautious approach, choosing dialogue with the U.S. as a way of “buying time,” as a EU diplomat put it to POLITICO.
In a balancing act, EU heads of state and government backed Brussels’ diplomatic effort at their summit last week, while also committing to do whatever is needed to support the Court.
“I hope that now that the European Council has opened this door, the Commission will feel more comfortable in taking an extra step. And at the very least, providing some kind of clear guidance,” Zavala Giler said.
As an intermediate step, the registrar suggested the use of “comfort letters” reassuring firms that they should not comply with the U.S. measures.
Zavala Giler stressed that sanctions were not only a matter to address for banks and tech operators, as the current uncertainty has already affected NGOs working with the Court. NGOs play a critical role in supporting the work of the Court, for instance “to provide reparations for victims in Uganda” or “to assist the work of the court in providing assistance to victims in Ukraine.”
“This has created an enormous chilling effect,” he said. “They don’t know if they have the legal protections or not, to continue supporting the work of the court.”
The registrar’s office overlooks the moat circling the court’s six towers across the compound’s 46,000 square meters. In one of these buildings, the trial of former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte over alleged crimes against humanity is due to begin next month. Reporters who will cover the proceeds won’t be allowed to use their phones — only paper and pen.
It is Zavala Giler’s job to oversee this huge institution, which relies on secure communications, cross-border funding for investigations and the contribution of many NGOs.
“This court has for victims the promise of the never again,” Zavala Giler said.
MADRID — The Spanish government has won a significant victory in a long-running legal dispute with international investors over its decision more than a decade ago to scrap renewable energy subsidies.
This week, a Belgian court overturned a ruling that ordered the Spanish government to pay investors nearly €76 million.
It was a major win for Spain, which has been fighting attempts to freeze its assets around the world from clean energy investors who claim they are owed at least €2 billion in subsidies.
The dispute dates back to 2013, in the middle of the European debt crisis, when cash-strapped Spain, then under a new conservative government, decided to remove subsidies for renewable energy. Investors who had poured money into Spanish renewables said this was a breach, as they had invested on the understanding they would receive the subsidies.
The International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes ruled that Spain must pay the money, but the European Commission has told Spain doing so would constitute unlawful state aid.
The standoff has played out all over the world, with investors attempting to freeze Spanish assets in multiple jurisdictions. In June, U.S. investment fund Blasket Renewable Investments LLC issued subpoenas demanding documents from Adidas, Hilton Hotels, and other entities involved in Spain’s Football World Cup participation to help with its bid to freeze Spanish assets.
In the end, the team went back home with its assets intact, along with the World Cup.
Spain also has cases going on in courts in Australia, Germany and the U.S.
In 2023, a British court ordered an embargo on an international school in London owned by the Spanish state. The Belgian court’s original decision was one of the few examples where investors were successful, and the decision this week to overturn it will set a precedent for other challenges.
The case
Spain’s defense persuaded a Belgian court to lift an embargo imposed in 2025 on state-owned air-navigation company Enaire for €75.76 million, according to documents seen by POLITICO.
The case was also brought by Blasket, which bought the dispute from an investment fund called RREEF. The European Commission intervened in support of Spain.
RREEF, which was originally linked to Deutsche Bank, invested in Spanish wind and solar power under a 2007 regulatory framework that guaranteed subsidies for renewable energy. In 2013, amid the economic crisis, the government of then-Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, of the conservative People’s Party, cut those subsidies to reduce electricity costs.
International investors turned to arbitration, arguing that the Energy Charter Treaty, an international agreement signed in the 1990s, guaranteed them fair and predictable treatment. The funds sought more than €10 billion in compensation, according to sources at Spain’s Environment Ministry.
The International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, part of the World Bank, which handled most of the arbitration cases, ruled against Spain, though it reduced the amount sought in many cases. The total awards came to about €2 billion. In its 2019 ruling, the tribunal ordered Spain to pay RREEF €59.6 million, plus interest and costs.
Most of the claims, including RREEF’s, were sold to Blasket, which began seeking to enforce the awards. The funds have searched for Spanish assets that could be seized to satisfy the claims.
Spain says it cannot pay because the European Commission has determined that doing so would constitute unlawful state aid. The funds invested through companies based in Luxembourg, and the EU’s top court ruled that the Energy Charter Treaty did not apply to disputes between EU investors and EU member states; EU law governed instead.
In August 2026, the Commission opened infringement proceedings against Spain over a €23 million payment on an award involving a Japanese company, which was not based in the EU.
On June 17, 2025, Blasket secured a Belgian court order freezing €75.76 million belonging to Enaire, the state-owned company that manages air navigation in Spain. Enaire receives payments from Eurocontrol, the Brussels-based European organization that collects air-navigation charges from airlines and distributes the proceeds.
That arrangement made it possible to freeze Spanish public funds in Belgium. After a legal dispute, Spain deposited €75,759,538 on May 4, 2026.
The freeze was a high-profile win for investors pursuing Spain. They have secured other attachments in the United Kingdom and are engaged in ongoing U.S. court disputes over enforcement of the awards.
Spain appealed, and the European Commission intervened on its behalf. The Belgian state also argued that the attachment breached EU law. The Belgian court has now ruled in Spain’s favor, lifting the freeze and ordering Blasket to pay the legal costs.
That leaves Spain in a stronger position against international investors seeking to enforce the awards — at least within the EU.
BRUSSELS — The EU’s influential competition regulators have taken on some of the planet’s most powerful companies, from Google to Gazprom. But they are steering clear of opening a case against the world soccer governing body, FIFA.
A complaint lodged by the European Leagues professional soccer association in October 2024 accused FIFA of abusing its dominant position by imposing its international match calendar on other sporting stakeholders. It argued that FIFA’s dual role as a governing body and the organizer of its own competitions creates a conflict of interest, through which it enriches itself. The leagues broadened the complaint last month to cover the women’s game — but the Commission has yet to open formal proceedings.
Brussels has left the European Leagues complaint in the “freezer,” one senior EU official with knowledge of the file told POLITICO.
The episode underscores the Directorate-General for Competition’s long-running reluctance to open investigations into sports federations, which current and former European officials say is due to sport’s special status in EU law — the treaties recognize its social and educational role — but also a deliberate policy choice to swerve potentially controversial cases in an emotionally charged sector.
Now, pressure is building against the competition department over the languishing European Leagues complaint, after a cross-party group of EU lawmakers urged the Commission to use its antitrust powers to rein in FIFA.
In a letter to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, obtained by POLITICO and copied to competition chief Teresa Ribera, MEPs called for action. Bruno Gonçalves and Hannes Heide (both from the Socialists and Democrats) and Bogdan Zdrojewski (from the conservative European People’s Party) asked the Commission to take formal action, including in relation to the complaint lodged by the European Leagues, which represents 53 men’s and women’s professional football leagues across the continent.
The MEPs say the governing body’s application of the calendar “raises concerns about FIFA’s use of regulatory powers to advance FIFA’s own commercial interests,” and that those powers “must be exercised through transparent, objective, non-discriminatory and proportionate procedures, with effective safeguards against conflicts of interest.” The EU’s top court set that test for sports bodies in its landmark 2023 Super League ruling.
“FIFA is both referee and promoter of the show,” Gonçalves told POLITICO. “We have to make sure the referee doesn’t put business before people.”
Representatives for the European Leagues pressed their case in a meeting with Competition Commissioner Teresa Ribera’s Cabinet in late April, but their overtures have so far been fruitless.
“The thinking has always been, on the one hand, that sports has a special status, so it is not a market comparable to others that normally are scrutinized by the competition directorate,” said one former senior EU official, who was granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive file in order to protect relationships.
“But also, sports cases get very political and the Commission feels that member states tend to take the side of the federations so it’s hesitant to pick this fight up,” the former official added.
The Vestager principles
Over the last 15 years, Brussels has opened blockbuster investigations into Gazprom’s behavior in Central and Eastern European gas markets; whether Google illegitimately hindered the development and market access of rival mobile operating systems; and Apple’s rules for app developers.
But the Commission’s caution on sports is long-standing.
When then-competition chief Margrethe Vestager ordered the International Skating Union in 2017 to drop rules threatening speed skaters with lifetime bans for joining money-spinning rival events, she said the decision didn’t mean the Commission was “trying to be the referee in every dispute about sport.”
Many disputes, from doping penalties to deciding the precise scheduling of games, have “little or nothing at all to do with competition rules,” Vestager said at the time. National courts and competition authorities, she added, are “usually well placed to deal with competition disputes involving a sport federation.”
Those principles have since come to guide how the Commission’s competition department decides which sports disputes to take on. There is no shortage of candidates, with controversies in sports including tennis, padel and sailing, as well as soccer.
Any investigation would test recent case law. A pair of July rulings on FIFA’s agent rules went largely the governing body’s way. In those cases, the Court of Justice of the European Union accepted that federations can impose restrictions if they pursue legitimate aims proportionately.
Ben Van Rompuy, a competition law professor at Leiden University who helped bring the original ISU complaint, said there would likely be “little appetite” in Brussels to take up the leagues’ case.
When the ISU complaint reached the Commission, courts had said little about how competition law applied to sport. Since then, “we’ve had an abundance of such guidance,” and “national enforcement in front of the courts seems to work,” Van Rompuy said. That leaves less reason for the Commission to step in. The leagues have also sued in a Brussels court, which suggests “they themselves believe that the national courts could protect their rights.”
Measured against the Commission’s own criteria for prioritizing complaints, the case looks weak, Van Rompuy said. Its impact on the EU’s internal market is “extremely limited,” he added.
FIFA declined to comment on the European Leagues complaint and the EU lawmakers’ letter.
Commission spokesperson Ricardo Cardoso said international sports bodies have “a primary responsibility” for organizing global events, and that sport is mainly a matter for national governments, with the EU playing a supporting role.
When sports organizations act as undertakings, the EU legal term for entities carrying out economic activity, they are subject to the rules of competition, Cardoso said. He added that the Commission constantly monitors markets for possible breaches, and that “if any complaint is filed, the Commission will assess according to standard practice.”
Public and political criticism of FIFA has reached fever pitch over the last 12 months due to the governing body’s cozy relationship with U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration and an ultimately aborted plot this summer to sell off parts of the World Cup tournament to private investors.
According to the letter from EU lawmakers, FIFA President Gianni Infantino’s commercial sell-off scheme “exposed serious shortcomings in transparency, accountability and institutional decision-making.”
he world is starting to understand that there is no way to fully and lastingly protect itself from President Donald Trump.
The man just can’t let things go — and he’ll get creative to get what he wants.
The latest blowup over Ukraine is emblematic of Trump’s wily persistence, and it suggests a challenging two years lie ahead for the international set even if Democrats gain some power in the midterm elections.
Not that long ago, Trump seemed to have patched up ties with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as Kyiv made gains against Russia. Trump signed legislation last month that was championed by his late friend, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), to impose heavy new sanctions and tariffs to punish Russia for its war on Ukraine.
This month, the original Trump — the one who fawns over Russian leader Vladimir Putin and despises Zelenskyy — roared back. He waived many of the legislation’s penalties on Russia, moved to buy Russian diesel and signaled he’s more interested in doing business with Moscow than seeking justice for Kyiv. Ukrainians suspect the U.S. has pressured them by throttling its satellite connections and intelligence-sharing. (The Trump administration disputes much of this.)
“Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine,” Trump said Monday as he welcomed the idea of an arms control summit with Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping that might include talks about Ukraine.
The lesson, foreign officials and others steeped in diplomacy tell me, is that you cannot truly change Trump’s mind or stop his overall trajectory. Even if Trump seems briefly chastened or stages a tactical retreat, he will eventually return in new, often-surprising modes to push his original views and goals. He will try to exhaust you into submission.
Imagine how startling it is to be Ukrainian these days as Trump pressures you to make concessions to Russia by blaming you for a global energy crisis he caused by launching a war on Iran. Or what it’s like for officials across European capitals trying to craft a response, knowing there’s never an end to the process.
“There is no immunity to Donald Trump. He makes a deal in order to make a better deal the next day,” one senior European official mused, having been granted anonymity because the topic involves sensitive diplomacy.
It’s hard to blame world leaders who think they’ve learned to manage Trump only to be bewildered by a sudden left hook on his part. Foreign policy is often driven by hope when you lack good options. And Trumpology is a confounding, but still a relatively new, subfield.
Besides, Trump’s messaging is inconsistent, incoherent and nonstrategic — characteristics that can obscure his single-minded pursuit of his goals. So the global actors dealing with him — whether it’s the Gulf Arab states who shower him with gifts or the Canadians furious over his trade and territorial threats — sometimes think they’ve come to terms with him only to find they’re fighting on a newly configured plane.
A Supreme Court ruling that gutted many of Trump’s tariffs earlier this year was good news in many capitals. But since then, the so-called Tariff Man has moved to impose the import taxes under pretexts not considered by the court, including turning to accusations involving forced labor.
The White House doesn’t dispute Trump’s aggressive tactics.
“There is no greater fighter for America First interests than President Trump — and he is willing to look anyone in the eye to deliver wins on behalf of the United States,” spokesperson Anna Kelly told me in a statement.
The Greenland saga shows the limits of trying to mollify Trump.
In his first term, Trump wanted to buy the frozen island. The idea was shelved amid global laughter, but authorities in Greenland and Denmark made it clear to Trump that they welcomed more U.S. investment in the Danish territory.
In his second term, Trump huffed and puffed about an all-out U.S. takeover of Greenland, only to agree in September to an expanded U.S. military footprint that he could have gotten anyway under existing, decades-old diplomatic accords without all the drama. The whole affair has led to lingering anger in Europe about what Canada’s leader called a “rupture” in the global order — but many European officials hoped that the saga had faded away.
Yet, it’s far from certain that Trump has given up on possessing Greenland. Just days ago, he touted on social media plans to start oil, gas and mineral exploration in “our new and beautiful Greenland.”
The use of “our” is more than a little suggestive.
Defying Trump, too, can get you only so far.
Brazilians effectively told Trump to take a hike when he used tariffs and sanctions to punish the country for charging its former president, Jair Bolsonaro, in a coup attempt.
A few months later, as Bolsonaro was about to start his prison sentence, Trump seemed to admit defeat in his effort to help his political ally. “That’s too bad,” he said in November 2025, with little emotion. (“Brazil Defied Trump and Won,” The New York Times declared.)
World leaders are doing what they can to make their countries Trump-resistant, if not all-out Trump-proof.
That has meant everything from diversifying their sources of trade and security alliances to joining Trump on ventures that, on the surface at least, can be helpful to them. (Then there are the many countries, especially in Africa, that diplomats privately tell me are happy to be off Trump’s radar.)
My takeaway from watching all of this, though, is that it’s not enough to stay one step ahead of Trump. You have to stay several steps ahead, and you have to be wildly imaginative about the lengths to which Trump and his devoted aides are willing to go to complicate your life.
The second Trump administration is filled with people who have turned to unique, bizarre and clever interpretations of law and reality to push his agenda. It’s not always clear who is behind which move, but it’s hard to imagine Trump isn’t fine with most of what’s happening.
It’s why a teenager is being held in immigration detention for the actions of his grandmother decades ago. It’s why Congress can scream and shout about its spending orders yet Trump ignores it.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said other nations should not hope that the Republican Party will shed Trump’s worldview, including his disdain for allies, once Trump’s out of power.
“I would love for our allies to know that we have consistent common adversaries that we’re going to work together to fight. I just don’t know that you can make that guarantee,” Murphy, a frequent Trump critic, told me. “That’s painful to say, but given the state of the Republican Party right now, it’s true.”
I understand why Ukraine and the European Union are trying to diversify their sources of intelligence and military industrial bases as Trump keeps chasing love from Russia.
Despite Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s claims, the reality is that the United States can no longer be trusted for such security assistance.
But it’s not enough to find new intelligence partners or weapons manufacturers. You have to ask bigger questions, like, “What are the untapped streams of intelligence that no one knows are out there? What’s a potential weapon no one has considered? How can I acquire what I need before Trump stops me?”
Governments need to have plans — now — for scenarios that seem completely crazy. Better to be wrong than unprepared.
Still, even if you do all of that … “I don’t think it’s possible to stay two or three steps ahead of Trump,” said Charles Kupchan, a former senior national security official during the Obama administration who apparently enjoys raining on parades.
“He acts on impulse,” argued Kupchan, who has a new book out on the crumbling world order. “We need to try to limit the damage he’s causing and ride him out.”
A Democratic win in November’s midterms — one or both chambers of Congress — is unlikely to do much to rein in Trump’s actions abroad during his final years, current and former U.S. and foreign officials tell me.
He still has the veto and has been willing to ignore congressional demands. There’s also the fact that presidents have significantly more power to act in unilateral ways overseas than they do domestically.
Ukraine, the European Union, the world — all will be dealing with a politically wounded Trump who’s likely to double down on what he feels he must have.
ROME — Former paratrooper General Roberto Vannacci portrays himself on social media as a Roman legionary and charioteer. He has declared he prefers women “without skirts” and posted an AI-generated image of a female junior minister with exaggerated cleavage.
None of these projections of masculinity and anti-woke culture are clumsy gaffes. The insurgent far-right star of Italian politics is making a deliberate play to the so-called manosphere to transform himself from an internet provocateur into a heavyweight political force.
For Italy’s first female prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, Vannacci now poses a serious problem as she needs to decide whether he is an asset or a liability. With elections expected next spring, his National Future party is polling at about 8%, making him a potentially crucial factor in building a right-wing coalition.
“It is disgusting to think you can manipulate the image of a woman for such deplorable propaganda,” the center-right junior minister in Meloni’s coalition whose image was manipulated, Matilde Siracusano, told POLITICO. “I don’t think we have ever sunk this low, especially from someone aspiring to be a national political leader.”
Vannacci’s provocations may look like familiar trolling from a politician who has built his reputation on saying the unsayable. But behind them lies a broader political project, tapping into the grievances of young men who feel alienated by feminism and progressive culture.
Emanuele Pozzolo, a National Future parliamentarian who defected from Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, believes young men have become increasingly constrained in their relationships with women.
“I think young Western men are very often almost castrated in their instinct for dealing with women,” he said, arguing that even legitimate romantic approaches risk being treated as aggression.
“The cultural problem is that sometimes everything seems to be harassment, everything abuse, everything violence,” he added, while stressing that genuine abuse must be punished.
Mediterranean patriarchy
Vannacci combines inflammatory online messaging and an alpha-male persona with a political program that promises to restore traditional roles for men and women. National Future even has a name for its preferred social order: “Mediterranean patriarchy.”
Its political program calls for the formation of “strong men” capable of controlling their emotions and passions, protecting women and sacrificing themselves for society. It opposes the recently introduced crime of femicide, condemns feminism, and declares the defense of life “from conception to natural death” and the “natural family” among its non-negotiable values.
The architect of this vision and principal author of the program is Lorenzo Gasperini, a conservative Catholic philosophy teacher from Tuscany, who has opposed vaccines and abortion rights on social media and blamed feminism for violence against women.
The result is a political offering that combines different traditions: conservative Catholic ideas about family and sexuality, older Italian ideas of virility and the much newer online politics of male grievance.
Giorgia Meloni speaks at a press conference in Prague on Sept. 29, 2026. | Milan Kammermayer/AFP via Getty Images
The manifesto seeks to put traditional family values into practice with proposals to pay parents who leave work to raise children, and reward parents of large families with tax exemption and public sector jobs.
Some proposals echo Benito Mussolini’s fascist-era “Battle for Births,” which offered similar incentives while promoting motherhood as a patriotic duty.
Luca Sforzini, a former Vannacci ideologue who has since broken with him, said the Mediterranean label was a clever piece of marketing.
“It’s like talking about the Mediterranean diet,” he told POLITICO. “You think of Italian food, mozzarella, tomatoes, olive oil.” The result, he said, was to conceal a patriarchal model with men above women behind “bucolic, positive images. It’s monstrous,” he said.
Pozzolo rejected the suggestion that the program advocates for male supremacy.
“It is exactly the opposite,” he said. “When we talk about Mediterranean patriarchy, the main idea is to recover, preserve and pass on the responsibilities of being a man within the family and society.” Men, he argued, had a duty to show women respect, love and protection, while rejecting violence or coercive control.
He defended the “without skirts” remark as “extremely funny” — picking up on a reference to Deputy Prime Minister Antonio Tajani advocating long skirts — and not remotely offensive, comparing Vannacci’s ability to connect with ordinary Italians to Silvio Berlusconi’s.
At a recent rally in the Umbrian city of Orvieto, Vannacci defended the Mediterranean patriarchy concept as not “oppression and possession” but “duty, fidelity, sacrifice,” and said it was the family model that had allowed “us to prevail over the last 2,000 years.”
Elisa Ercoli, president of the women’s rights organization Differenza Donna, condemned the program as “a return to the supremacy of the white, cisgender alpha male, and the woman as his handmaiden.”
Appealing to alphas
Vannacci, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, became a media sensation in 2023 with the self-published book “The World Upside Down,” a broadside against immigration, feminism and homosexuality. In it, he told gay people: “You are not normal, get over it.”
Lionized by fans as a defender of common sense against progressive politics, he received more than half a million votes as a candidate for the anti-immigration League in the 2024 European elections, before founding National Future in February.
Polling analysis suggests that about 62% of National Future’s prospective voters are male, including strong support among manual workers and the unemployed.
Vannacci speaks during the National Future’s constituent assembly in Rome on June 14, 2026. | Filippo Monteforte/AFP via Getty Images
Pozzolo denied National Future was deliberately targeting male voters, insisting the party’s ambition was to reach Italians of all backgrounds who felt unrepresented.
Federica Formato, a lecturer at Brighton University in the U.K., who studies gender and the far right, said Vannacci was “testing the waters” to see whether he can reach a younger male audience, tapping into what she described as the “aggrieved entitlement” of young men.
A career soldier, he has repeatedly portrayed himself through images of physical strength, competition and military prowess. On social media, AI-generated versions proliferate of Vannacci as an ancient Roman in scenes recalling the Ridley Scott epic Gladiator.
For Formato, the Roman imagery projects “virility and hyper-masculinity,” while Vannacci’s army background itself helps construct the image of an “alpha male.”
Humor, memes and deliberate provocation are particularly effective with a younger online audience, Formato said, allowing relatively complex ideological messages to be reduced to instantly comprehensible images. “He is not naive,” she said. “He says things to provoke and get more attention.”
That presents Meloni with a headache. Vannacci’s party is drawing voters from her Brothers of Italy and Matteo Salvini’s League, while offering a more uncompromising platform on immigration, social issues and foreign policy.
Yet Vannacci has opened the door to an alliance with Meloni if she needs his votes. He has described National Future as a natural partner for the center-right, while insisting that any deal must respect his party’s principles. With Italy’s new electoral law offering a parliamentary majority bonus to coalitions winning at least 42 percent of the vote, those votes could matter.
That presents Meloni with an uncomfortable choice: Keep Vannacci outside the coalition, or bring into her government a movement whose appeal rests partly on the grievances of men who believe feminism has gone too far.
For Formato, Vannacci is exploiting a space in Italian politics that has so far lacked a figure capable of turning those grievances into an organized political constituency.
Vannacci, with his promises to restore traditional masculinity, appears determined to occupy it.
BRUSSELS — Europe’s biggest media companies have asked regulators in Brussels and London to stop Meta from introducing new terms they say would let it copy publishers’ websites to build artificial intelligence, as a backlash that began in the U.S. spreads across Europe.
In a letter Monday, the European Publishers Council, whose members include POLITICO’s owner Axel Springer, called on EU competition boss Teresa Ribera and tech chief Henna Virkkunen to press Meta to put the terms on hold before they take effect Oct. 30.
The group wants Brussels to check them against EU copyright and competition law, and has requested an urgent meeting with the teams of both commissioners.
“The Commission remains committed to ensure that Meta’s practices fully comply with all applicable obligations under EU law, including competition rules and the Digital Markets Act,” Commission spokesperson Ricardo Cardoso told POLITICO, referring to the EU’s rulebook for Big Tech. He said Brussels was aware of both Meta’s changes and publishers’ concerns.
The U.K. competition watchdog has moved as well. British publishers have complained to the Competition and Markets Authority that Meta is so dominant they are compelled to accept its terms.
The watchdog’s chief, Sarah Cardell, told British lawmakers on Tuesday that it had asked Meta to explain the changes and would meet the company on Wednesday. She named Meta as a possible candidate for Britain’s new rules for tech giants.
Sarah Cardell, Chief Executive of the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), speaks in a panel discussion during the Annual CBI Conference, at Queen Elizabeth II Centre on November 25, 2024 in London. | Leon Neal/Getty Images
The terms cover businesses that use Meta’s tools to run Facebook pages, Instagram accounts or ads, which includes almost every newsroom.
The fight began in the U.S. last week, when Nieman Lab, a journalism research outlet at Harvard, reported on the terms after receiving a tip from a small business owner.
As first written, they let Meta send automated programs to copy websites linked to those accounts and use the material to “train” its products, Nieman Lab concluded. There is no opt-out, and a business that continues to use Meta’s tools after Oct. 30 will be deemed to have consented.
Publishers say the terms would hand Meta content for free that other AI companies pay to license.
Rapid reaction
On Friday, Meta communications chief Andy Stone responded on X that the Nieman Lab report was “false” and that there was “no change to how Meta uses web crawlers.”
Stone said the update aimed to let Meta pull accurate product information from shopping sites for ads, not to scrape news sites. The company also said the crawling language already existed in other Meta terms and was just being gathered in one place.
Late Friday, however, Meta revised the terms and deleted the word “train,” saying the terms cover only its advertising and business products.
“We’ve heard you and want to clarify,” a spokesperson for Meta told POLITICO over the weekend, adding the change was “not about scraping news sites.”
Publishers say that changes little, however.
Meta has given them verbal assurances that they can keep using its tools without surrendering their content to AI, but the terms themselves don’t guarantee that, the European Publishers Council’s letter says.
“Meta’s supposed Friday night correction is a farce,” said Jason Kint, who heads Digital Content Next, a U.S. publisher group whose members include Axel Springer. “Exactly what you’d expect from a gatekeeper notorious for abusing its market power.”
Others have gone further.
“This is unscrupulous theft,” Germany’s newspaper and magazine associations said in a joint statement on Tuesday. They want Brussels to block the terms while it reviews them, warning that once articles are copied into AI systems, they can’t be clawed back.
The EU’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas said Tuesday that Brussels would use the next months “to open dialogue” on how to counter U.S. sanctions against the International Criminal Court — resisting calls from lawmakers to take quicker action.
Nearly 60 MEPs from across the political spectrum urged the Commission to intervene swiftly after the White House announced sweeping sanctions against the Hague-based court earlier this month. They want the Commission to activate a legislative shield known as the blocking statute, which would prevent EU firms from complying with U.S. sanctions.
“We should keep all options on the table. If we use the blocking statute, we have one shot and we should do it well. So, it should be well prepared,” Kallas said, calling on firms not to overcomply with sanctions.
Multiple lawmakers continued to push for a faster response in a plenary session in Strasbourg. But while Kallas acknowledged their calls, she said the EU executive would take time “to analyze the full legal implications, to open dialogue and look for solutions.” The sanctions are expected to be implemented after a 180-day delay starting from Oct. 9.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration had already targeted nine judges and the chief prosecutor of the Court, cutting them off from all U.S. service providers, including banking services.
Irish European Affairs Minister Thomas Byrne, who represents Dublin’s presidency of the Council of the EU, told lawmakers that the sanctions delay provides “an opportunity for dialogue, which we should take advantage of while remaining ready to take all necessary measures,” as laid out by EU leaders in a statement issued after their gathering last week.
Washington is openly campaigning to dismantle the ICC “brick by brick,” and urging countries to quit the court’s founding charter. Kallas said that “decisions by Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad and Venezuela to reject or even withdraw from the ICC risk eroding the foundations of global justice.”
“The ICC is under attack at precisely the moment when we need it the most,” Kallas said, citing the Court’s investigations of Russian war crimes in Ukraine. The EU will continue to engage with partners to strengthen the court, she said, warning countries under pressure from the U.S. to leave the body: “This also has clear consequences for their relationship with the European Union.”
“The European Union has practical means to do more,” Kallas said, adding that she would be in the Hague this week.
BRUSSELS — High jet fuel prices could trigger “the biggest increase in airfares, I would say, in history in Europe” next year, Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary told reporters Tuesday.
If fuel prices remain twice as high as before the U.S. war against Iran, O’Leary warned ticket prices could rise by up to 20%.
Hedging contracts have locked in fuel prices for much of airlines’ consumption so far. This has helped European carriers avoid sharp ticket price increases, despite jet fuel prices more than doubling following disruptions to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz since the war in the Middle East began.
But O’Leary said most European airlines lack significant hedging next year. “As we go out into next year, we’re only 15% hedged at $85 a barrel. Basically, we’re unhedged into the summer of 2027,” O’Leary told POLITICO in an interview ahead of a press conference in Brussels.
Ryanair’s hedging contracts expire in April 2027. “We will still be profitable, although less profitable than currently, if oil prices remain high,” he said.
O’Leary warned that fewer available seats and higher fares could become the new normal as more airlines face financial struggles. “You’re going to see dramatically less capacity this winter and into the summer of 2027.”
Ryanair itself is cutting 20 routes from Belgium this winter as a response to an increase in national aviation taxes, from €2 in 2025 to €7 from January.
The fuel price hike is also intensifying the airline sector’s opposition to EU climate policies, which many carriers argue are adding to their already rising operating costs.
Ryanair had long advocated extending the EU’s Emissions Trading System to all flights to and from the EU, a call O’Leary reiterated on Tuesday.
“It’s indefensible that … Europe’s citizens are paying all these environmental taxes, while the Yanks, the Asians and the Chinese land and take off in Europe completely exempt from their fair share of environmental taxes.” He added that Ryanair would pay €1.5 billion in ETS compliance costs in 2026.
He argued that the ETS should also cover long-haul services operated by European rivals such as Lufthansa and Air France-KLM.
“And why not? Those are the most expensive flights in the world. They’re also the most profitable flights they have, because they’re exempt from Europe’s bullshit environmental taxation,” O’Leary said.
The EU currently applies the ETS to aviation emissions from flights within the European Economic Area, as well as flights to Switzerland and the U.K. The European Commission proposed last summer to extend carbon pricing, starting in 2029, to flights departing the EU for destinations within 5,000 kilometers of Frankfurt Airport, including to North Africa and the Middle East.
The proposal would affect Ryanair’s flights to destinations such as Morocco, while continuing to exempt most long-haul services operated by other airlines to more distant destinations like the U.S. and China.
Ein mögliches rot-grün-rotes Bündnis in Berlin schlägt bundespolitisch hohe Wellen. Während z.B. Grünen-Chef Felix Banaszak vor radikalen Kräften warnt und die Tür zur CDU taktisch offen halten will, ist Friedrich Merz wiederum hart und unerbittlich im Ton gegenüber Grünen und der SPD, wenn es um die Gespräche mit radikalen linken Kräften geht. Rasmus Buchsteiner ordnet ein, wie nun auch in der SPD der Widerstand wächst und Parteichef Lars Klingbeil sich derweil zurückhält.
Die Junge Union fordert derweil drastische Konsequenzen: Eine künftige Berliner Landesregierung soll z.B. von Geheimdienstinformationen des Bundes abgeschnitten werden. Im 200-Sekunden-Interview erklärt der CDU-Abgeordnete Johannes Volkmann, warum er Teile der Berliner Linken als Sicherheitsrisiko sieht und eine politische Ächtung der Partei verlangt.
Auf internationaler Bühne sorgt die Kehrtwende der USA für Entsetzen, nachdem Donald Trump die Sanktionen gegen Russlands Schattenflotte auf Eis gelegt hat. Hans von der Burchard analysiert, wie dieser Schritt Europa sicherheitspolitisch erneut herausfordert und welche Folgen der Wegfall amerikanischer Unterstützung für die Ukraine im nahenden Winter haben könnte.
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BRUSSELS — France and Germany said Friday they had struck a deal to favor European-made cars under a landmark EU industry bill in exchange for weakening a 2035 vehicle emissions target, ending months of wrangling between the bloc’s two biggest economies.
Under the agreement, Germany would accept stricter “Made in Europe” — or local content — requirements for the automotive industry in the proposed Industrial Accelerator Act, a longstanding French demand, while France would back Berlin’s push to relax the EU’s plan to phase out new combustion-engine cars.
The EU’s current target is for companies to reduce emissions from new vehicles by 100% from 2021 levels by 2035, with the possibility to “earn” 10% of emissions leeway through initiatives like offsets and investments.
France and Germany now want to soften the 2035 target to 90% but without having to offer investments in alternative fuels to compensate the remaining 10%, as proposed by the European Commission.
“This balanced approach will enable the European Union to pursue its climate objectives while strengthening the technological sovereignty, industrial base and international competitiveness of its automotive industry,” the two countries said in a joint statement.
“We hope that this Franco-German dynamic can swiftly lead to an agreement with our partners, for our jobs and our industry,” French President Emmanuel Macron said in a post on social media.
An Elysée official on Friday made clear that, under the Franco-German deal, the scope of Made in Europe for automotive can be extended to the U.K. and Switzerland under certain conditions. — addressing a key concern of Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s government ahead of a Nov. 20 U.K.-EU summit in Brussels.
The agreement was reached after the German Social Democratic Party, the junior partner in Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s coalition government, dropped its opposition.
“This is a modern realignment of German industrial policy that places significantly greater emphasis on preserving jobs and production sites,” said German Environment Minister Carsten Schneider, who is from the SPD.
“The clear expectation for German companies is that they will use these new opportunities to make investments and guarantee jobs here in Germany,” he added.
CORRECTION: This article was updated on Oct. 16 after an earlier version misrepresented the figures in the Franco-German proposal on the softening of 2035 targets.
Jamie Dettmer is associate editor and a foreign affairs columnist for POLITICO.
Cast your mind back to last year, when European leaders scrambled back and forth across the Atlantic, seeking to patch up tattered relations between U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
After the Oval Office brawl where a scolded Zelenskyy pushed back against Trump and his vice president before being ejected from the White House, then-U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron led the effort to engineer a call between the pair, during which the Ukrainian president expressed regret about the meeting — but fell short of apologizing.
But this time, after Trump unveiled a controversial diesel deal with Russia and called — once again — for Zelenskyy to step down, the European reaction has been less febrile. Of course, they have offered Kyiv strong rhetorical support and unveiled more Russia sanctions, but there has been no frantic, panicky outreach effort to Trump to mediate a speedy repair.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy looks on during a bilateral meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump on the sidelines of the 81st United Nations General Assembly in New York, on September 22, 2026. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images
Why not?
Because the Trump shock factor is wearing off, hazards Ukraine’s former Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba. “The primary answer is that they have got used to him,” he told POLITICO. “They have all had an immunity shot, and they don’t feel as scared as they did last year.”
“Another reason is they’re drowning in their own problems,” he added. “And I think that first they feel they have to try to figure out how what Trump is doing will impact them — how big their bill will become as a result.”
European leaders are not scrambling like they did last year because Trump is “losing his leverage,” said Lia Quartapelle, an Italian lawmaker from the opposition Democratic Party who is vice chair of the parliament’s Foreign and European Affairs Committee. “We realize he cannot be trusted and we are on our own,” so there’s little point lobbying him.
According to the Financial Times, EU officials plan to urge Zelenskyy to tone down his increasingly sharp remarks about Trump, fearing they are only inflaming the situation. Starmer’s successor, Andy Burnham, is positioning himself as someone who can “lay the ground” for a reconciliation, he explained to the House of Commons Wednesday.
Nonetheless, the calmer reaction to Trump’s maneuvers stands out, acknowledges Daniel Fried, a former senior U.S. diplomat who served as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs under U.S. President George W. Bush.
“The Europeans seem to have taken Trump’s measure,” Fried told POLITICO. “They want to avoid the worst. They want to mitigate the damage over the next two years while Trump is in office. They do work with people in the Trump administration with whom they can work. And there are such people.”
Speaking from Warsaw, fresh from attending a recent security conference in the Polish capital, he said the Europeans understand now that much of what Trump does is performative and has a short life span — like the Russian diesel deal, which has a shelf life of two or three days, he said. “I’m not sure it’s going anywhere as it is utterly impractical and legally questionable, and it isn’t clear the Russians actually can supply the diesel,” he said. In other words, why get worked up about it?
Daniel Fried, Atlantic Council speaks at The 2017 Concordia Annual Summit at Grand Hyatt New York on September 19, 2017 in New York City. | Paul Morigi/Getty Images for Concordia Summit
Fried said in his conversations with European leaders and officials, he has detected increasing exasperation with the overall inconsistency of the American position: “Trump wants Europe to do more militarily, but it must buy American,” he said. “But we can’t sell to the Europeans because of our needs, so they will have to wait even though they can’t build it themselves. Nonetheless, they have to carry the load in Ukraine without us. That’s utterly inconsistent, and they are exasperated by it.”
And they’re just tired of having Trump jerk them around, Fried added. “One thing they are trying to avoid is having Trump snap his fingers and they come flying. Because then it looks like they are at Trump’s beck and call and are his supplicants, and they don’t want to do that. Besides, if they fly out and talk him into something, how long will what he agreed to last?”
Of course, the Europeans can also console themselves with the high chance of Trump reversing himself. “There is a pattern,” said Kuleba. “He launches a cavalry attack … and then retreats. That’s what we saw in February last year. That’s what we saw in November 2025. And that’s what we will see this time too.”
BRUSSELS — EU leaders will go back to the drawing board in November as they race to finalize a deal on the bloc’s next seven-year budget by the end of the year.
During the first day of a two-day summit in Brussels on Thursday, European Council President António Costa announced he was convening an additional gathering on Nov. 26 in a bid to overcome disagreements and lay the ground for a final deal in December. To bring the sides closer to an agreement, he will present new budget figures before the meeting, according to an EU official, who was granted anonymity to discuss the confidential planning.
Costa is pressing leaders to finalize negotiations by the end of the year — before elections in France, Italy and Poland in 2027 threaten to derail the talks.
In a speech to the leaders, Costa warned that going past the end-of-year deadline will delay EU payments to farmers and researchers past Jan. 1, 2028, when the new budget is scheduled to come into force.
If leaders fail to reach a deal in December, the electoral calendar might push an agreement to May or even October 2027, Costa warned leaders in his concluding remarks, according to two EU diplomats briefed on the discussions.
Pressure on governments
Costa’s plan received a major boost on Thursday from French President Emmanuel Macron, who told fellow leaders that he won’t have a political mandate to sign a deal close to the French presidential elections in April 2027.
European Council President António Costa, Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever and French President Emmanuel Macron pictured at the European Council Summit on Oct. 15, 2026. | Nicolas Maeterlinck/Belga/AFP via Getty Images
This is a major reversal for France, which has previously been unwilling to commit to the end-of-year deadline.
Macron’s words put more pressure on governments to advance the talks over the coming weeks — although some cast doubt on his good intentions.
“There are so many elections next year. [French far-right leader Marine] Le Pen herself [said] it’s undemocratic if we were now to agree,” said one EU diplomat.
Just hours before the leaders’ gathering, Le Pen renewed calls to halve France’s contributions to the EU budget if she wins the presidential elections next year.
She said that rushing the budget agreement before the French elections would be “a democratic scandal.”
The new frugal
Costa is stuck between messy domestic politics across Europe and hardening stances among the EU’s 27 leaders.
The so-called frugal EU countries pushing for major budget cuts — Germany, Netherlands, Austria, Sweden, Denmark and Finland — have publicly said that an Irish proposal envisioning €159 billion cuts doesn’t go far enough.
On Thursday, the six hardliners were joined by Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever, who joked in a press conference after the summit that “I’m married to a Dutch person so I’m very frugal also in my personal life.”
However, behind closed doors the budget hardliners employed a more conciliatory tone.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz — the unofficial leader of the frugal camp — said that the Irish proposal has achieved progress despite reductions still being needed, said two EU diplomats briefed on the discussions.
He pointed to EU payouts to poorer regions, as opposed to farmer’s subsidies, as an avenue for cuts.
On the other side of the spectrum, Spanish Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez — who will try to cling on to power in an election on Nov. 29 — insisted that the budget is way too small.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez addresses journalists upon arriving at the European Council Summit on Oct. 15, 2026. | Nicolas Tucat/AFP via Getty Images
“It is a distribution of misery,” he told fellow leaders during the discussions, according to the diplomats. He was joined by Italy’s right-wing Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni — an ideological foe on most issues, but an ally of sorts in the budget battle. She insisted that no further cuts to the budget will be accepted.
To bring sides together closer to a deal, Costa promised to advance progress on EU-wide taxes, or own resources, to finance the next seven-year budget and reduce national contributions.
He will explore the European Parliament’s proposed taxes on crypto firms, online gambling and tech giants as well as a Greek idea to funnel future national sales of 6G mobile spectrum to the EU budget.
But given the level of opposition, getting EU countries to agree to any of these options will no be no mean feat.
“It is time to be realistic and work on what is plausible and reasonable, instead of wishful thinking,” said another EU diplomat.
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