DUBLIN — Friday’s widespread outage of Microsoft products has sparked a new wave of calls for Europe to control its own digital infrastructure — especially with the uncertain future of artificial intelligence at stake.

“Only 20% of European digital services run on European infrastructure,” Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch said in remarks Friday after he addressed EU national leaders during their first-ever meeting on artificial intelligence in Dublin.

The money spent on foreign, U.S. or Chinese, technology “could be reinvested here, on infrastructure we control and [to] finance European research and development,” said the boss of Europe’s leading AI frontier lab.

Mensch didn’t specifically address the Microsoft outage, which lasted nearly 24 hours and affected millions of users in 74 countries. Still, the shutdown of key tools like Outlook email and Teams messaging impacted plenty of the tech and government leaders gathered in Dublin to chart Europe’s AI future.

French President Emmanuel Macron closed the day with a post on X: “Our independence cannot be outsourced. It must be built here at home, in Europe,” he wrote. “When it comes to artificial intelligence, too, Europe has everything it takes to compete. We have no time to lose.”

An EU diplomat present at the leaders’ talks said that “we need to pick up speed, permitting and investment to compete on the world market, to have sovereignty.”

Tech sovereignty, including control over the cloud, chips and models that power AI, has been a rallying cry of the second mandate of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, and was one of the key agenda items at Friday’s gathering of the leaders of the EU’s 27 member countries.

“We have outsourced too much of our digital infrastructure to actors outside the EU,” Finnish European Parliament lawmaker Aura Salla said in a press release Friday following the outage. She suggested that government contracts specifically “must support European technology.”

Others zoned in on the risk created by relying on digital infrastructure controlled by a couple of large companies.

The Microsoft outage is a “reminder of the systemic risk created by concentrating digital infrastructure with a few global tech giants,” said Sebastian Toffaletti, secretary general of the Digital SME Alliance, in a statement shared with POLITICO.

In the U.K., the Liberal Democrat party’s tech spokesperson Victoria Collins said the outage demonstrated the need for a digital sovereign strategy, saying: “We need urgent action to stop relying on a handful of companies.”

In Germany, lawmaker Johannes Schätzl from the Social Democratic Party said it raised questions about public procurement. “Digital sovereignty must be measured by whether we can remain operational even during outages like this,” he said.

Joe Bambridge and Kilian Hocke contributed reporting.

LONDON — The U.K. civil service plans to hold more in-person job interviews and diminish the role of written candidate statements in an attempt to combat a surge in applications created by AI.

Recruiting managers have seen a sharp rise in the number of applications for each role without any change to the overall number of viable candidates across the system, said a U.K. government official with knowledge of the conversations not authorized to speak publicly.

Cabinet Secretary Antonia Romeo believes some applicants are using AI to generate bland personal statements, meaning they can apply for more roles but fail to show their personal skills. 

In the most extreme cases, entire applications — even virtual interviews — appeared to have been generated by bots and not human beings, the official added.

There is at least one case in which civil servants became so suspicious during a virtual video call that the candidate was not a real person that they terminated the interview early.

The official said the civil service plans to move away from personal statements — and for flagship recruitment schemes, leaders are looking at reintroducing compulsory face-to-face interviews.

Fewer personal statements

The changes are likely to form part of a wider review of Whitehall which Romeo is due to deliver to Prime Minister Andy Burnham by summer 2027.

Romeo said in her annual lecture on Tuesday that she planned to “strip back and simplify” Whitehall recruitment to attract the most talented people from all backgrounds, adding she wanted to end “formulaic job ads, generic interviews and slow processes.”

This includes scrapping “success profiles,” a core feature of the civil service’s bureaucratic recruitment process. A new selection framework is due to be launched from April 2027.

However, a rise in face-to-face interviews will also mean some recruitment takes longer — just as civil service budgets are under intense pressure.

It is also an example of the challenge facing ministers and officials who plan to embed more AI into the civil service itself. 

Romeo said on Tuesday that AI would “radically rewrite” the way Whitehall works, including with “frontier teams” in departments with looser recruitment rules and a more AI-focused “Fast Stream” program for university graduates.

Dave Penman, general secretary of the First Division Association union for senior civil servants, said he had also seen an uptick in suspected AI-generated applications to the union. “These legitimate concerns don’t mean that the whole system is broken and everyone applying for jobs is faking it. I suspect what the civil service is facing is similar to many other areas of recruitment.”

BRUSSELS — The European Union institutions kept calm and carried on regulating on Friday, as many other parts of the world muttered at their computers over a massive digital outage at U.S. tech leader Microsoft.

The European Commission, Council of the EU and European Parliament were able to carry on business as usual, with systems remaining largely unaffected.

Microsoft’s global outage, which disrupted Outlook, Teams and Copilot started on Thursday, with internet traffic monitoring site Downdetector reporting issues in at least 74 countries. The tracker logged nearly 140,000 reports of Outlook problems at its peak.

Microsoft on Friday morning said recovery was still uneven. “At this time, we have no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident. We will continue to treat this with urgency until full mitigation,” it said.

At the European Commission “the impact … is very limited and does not affect our operations,” spokesperson Thomas Regnier told POLITICO. He said the outage had a “minor impact on a limited number of applications, such as the slowness of SharePoint.” Outlook and Teams were “fully operational,” Regnier said.

The Council of the EU, which gathers representatives of national governments, also carried on work: Outlook and Teams were “working on our side,” a Council official told POLITICO, declining to give more details on the institution’s IT setup.

The Parliament’s press service said in a statement to POLITICO that it was unaffected and was monitoring the situation as a precaution.

The outage is exposing the reliance of companies and governments on Microsoft services — an issue that has also been a longstanding concern in Europe among proponents of keeping more control over IT and digital infrastructure.

In October last year, a similar outage of Amazon Web Services servers prompted immediate calls for Europe to boost its tech sovereignty.

Efforts to move away from American tech providers got a boost in the past two years due to concerns that the U.S. administration of Donald Trump could disrupt digital services in Europe for political gain. Governments across Europe have launched a wide range of initiatives to boost local competitors to U.S. Big Tech and build public services on homegrown platforms.

One example is the government of Germany’s northernmost state of Schleswig-Holstein, which in 2025 moved about 40,000 mailboxes from Microsoft Exchange and Outlook to open-source alternatives to reduce their reliance on U.S. tech.

The state’s digitalization minister, Dirk Schrödter, said in a comment to POLITICO on Friday that disruptions like the Microsoft outage “must be taken very seriously,” whether the state uses open-source software or products from individual providers. “We must be able to intervene ourselves at any time if problems arise,” he said.

Francesca Micheletti contributed to this report.

Ein historischer Paradigmenwechsel für die deutschen Geheimdienste steht im Bundestag zur Abstimmung. BND und Verfassungsschutz sollen künftig nicht mehr nur beobachten, sondern aktiv in IT-Systeme eindringen und Cyberangriffe stören dürfen. Anouk Schlung analysiert, warum diese neuen Befugnisse außenpolitisch hochriskant sind und weshalb nun sogar Wohnungseinbrüche durch den Auslandsgeheimdienst drohen.

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BRUSSELS — It takes an 80-year-old German diplomat to put the Jensen Huang spy scandal in proper historical context. 

Asked about allegations that the Nvidia CEO was lured into an intimate relationship with a Chinese spy, Wolfgang Ischinger, Germany’s former ambassador to Washington, pointed to the past. “In World War I, you had female spies who used the honey trap to talk to a general, and maybe sleep with him and extract some secrets,” he told POLITICO.

As Europe’s 27 leaders meet for their first conversation on AI the day after Huang’s resignation, his fall from grace is a reminder that it’s American tech bros — not European military men — who now hold the secrets that can decide the fate of the world.

Friday’s roundtable of European leaders in Dublin must reckon with the reality that the pursuit of AI superiority remains a two-horse race between the U.S. and China — and that Nvidia’s leadership drama doesn’t change the fact that a single American company’s chips will continue to drive the artificial intelligence boom.

With the meeting meant to help forge a new direction for Europe on AI, leaders will mostly be in listening mode, with presentations by Arthur Mensch, CEO of French AI company Mistral, and computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, considered one of the “godfathers of AI” and an advocate for more stringent safety measures. 

“We’re not going to pretend that we are experts,” an EU official said.

The session comes as Europe struggles to find its place in global AI. The rise of advanced U.S.-built proprietary models and open-weight artificial intelligence progress in China has created a new range of national security issues — and while the EU has proven to be a leader in regulating the technology, its own would-be frontier AI labs continue to play catch-up.

Although this week’s events are a reminder to European politicians that they are spectators in the AI race, an emerging split between top industry leaders in Europe is also dampening momentum on a bloc-wide effort to take on the competition.

“Switching dependency from California to France doesn’t solve Europe’s sovereignty problem, right?” Uljan Sharka, CEO of leading Italian company Domyn, said in an interview.

Sovereignty

Sovereignty and security are the main arguments for Europe not to abandon efforts to develop its own frontier AI models. In the past year, EU officials and companies have struggled to access the latest models from OpenAI and Anthropic, which drive much of the current risks around the technology. 

“How can Europe become a leading and sovereign player in strategic areas of the AI value chain?” European Council President António Costa asked EU leaders in his invitation letter. 

Yet in classic European fashion, officials disagreed ahead of the meeting on how to catch up across many layers of the AI supply chain, from chips and cloud services to cutting-edge models.

“We cannot abandon the frontier ambition. It’s an issue of our sovereignty, it’s an issue of our competitiveness,” Malgorzata Nikowska, head of unit at the European Commission’s Artificial Intelligence Office, said at an event last week. 

It was a moment of clarity in a frantic debate about whether Europe should still chase the frontier in AI, which would require ploughing billions of euros into compute power — or focus on deriving value by applying the technology in key industries. 

Mistral’s Mensch has been a key voice in that debate, warning that giving up the frontier would be “a fundamental mistake” in an essay titled “Build or Surrender.” 

Two European PMs — Finland’s Petteri Orpo and Estonian Kristen Michal — came out swinging ahead of Friday’s meeting, saying “Europe can compete at the frontier” and that the bloc’s ambition “must go beyond adoption of AI,” in a letter exclusively seen by POLITICO.

These statements, and Mensch’s presence at the table Friday, suggest EU leaders will commit to continuing to build competitive frontier models. But how to get there is a far more vexed question — and European industry executives are offering different answers. 

Mistral has taken the route of building large open models. Its latest Large 4 model crossed the 1-trillion-parameter mark, allowing it to rival some of the world’s best open models such as from China’s Moonshot AI. 

To get there, the French company relied on President Emmanuel Macron as its best-placed salesman, and multi-billion euro funding rounds valuing the company at over €21 billion. 

But Mistral’s European rivals don’t necessarily agree with Mistral’s approach of training large models through vast amounts of compute power. 

Sharka — whose company was chosen to lead an EU-backed consortium to develop an open-source AI model that can cover the 24 EU languages by next year — argues Europe should not follow the example of OpenAI and Anthropic to use ever-more compute power for ever-larger models.

Instead, Sharka argued, it should aim to optimize the training runs of the models. “To build the European frontier, we need to be original,” he said. “I think we need to shift away from the concept of copy-pasting like unfortunately some players are pushing.” 

He argued that the typical AI scaling laws, which claim that a model performs better if it is larger and has more compute power, have “plateaued.” 

“There’s only one way, and it’s not the Mistral way to be clear,” he said, adding that there’s a “lot of space for optimization.” 

Mistral did not respond to a request for comment.

The Nvidia problem

Sharka was joined in his assessment by Aldo Podestà, CEO of Swiss AI model provider Giotto.ai., who argued there are ways to be more efficient about “pre-training,” typically the most compute-intensive part of building an AI model.

“We have the opportunity to be at the frontier without having that massive pre-training cost,” Podestà said. “My bet would be to have one very strong common open-source pre-training exercise” — after which different companies can tweak the outcome to their needs.

Under any scenario, Europe will still rely on the U.S. for the hardware components that power its AI models — especially Nvidia’s AI chips — since the continent has little design or production capacity of its own. 

Podestà said the bloc shouldn’t worry merely about building its own models.

“We need to open up a serious discussion about the hardware dependency we have,” he said. “Today it’s a monopoly for a single company.”

MADRID — Trust us. We are sober, sensible — even slightly dull — managers.

It’s not the world’s catchiest election slogan, but it’s the core message that Spain’s center-right People’s Party is banking on to propel it into government on Nov. 29. Reinforcing the idea that the PP wants to run the EU’s fourth-biggest economy like a competent, unflashy corporation, one senior party official, granted anonymity to speak freely, said the PP was “offering a CEO to lead the country.”

Amid profound frustration with corruption scandals under the Socialist government of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, it’s a message with traction, and polls suggest the PP will form the next government.

But it also presents the party with an identity crisis if — as expected — it needs to team up with far-right populists from Vox to build a majority. If the next government is a business, Vox will be a maverick on the board.

Business leader

The devastating Toledo rail crash that killed 69 people on Oct. 28 offered the PP an opportunity to shift the campaign onto territory where it feels comfortable, as party leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo and his close circle doubled down on their strategy to present themselves as steady-handed executives.

Feijóo’s first move after the accident was to chair a closed-door gathering of 15 railway experts to project an image of a jefe interested in technicalities.

A second party official explained to Madrid Playbook that the party’s new mantra was: “Management, management, management.” When Sánchez called the snap election in early October, the PP rolled out posters that read “FINALLY.” In the days following the rail accident, the party added “management” to that original slogan. “Finally, management.”

While that low-drama C-suite approach may appeal to the PP, the obvious political challenge is that Vox — which is eyeing key ministries in the next administration — is running a very different type of campaign. Vox relishes political drama.

It was the only party to push on with campaign rallies immediately after the rail disaster and has accused the government of being “a bunch of crooks” who are planning to “steal the election.” Highly outspoken in its hostility to migration, Vox suggested the eviction of 87-year-old Maricarmen Abascal, which sparked nationwide protests, would never have happened if she had been North African.

Guillermo Fernández Vázquez, a political scientist at Madrid’s Carlos III University, noted that Santiago Abascal and others founded Vox in 2013 precisely in rejection of the moderate profiles that dominated Mariano Rajoy’s PP at the time.

This means the challenge for the PP is now twofold. Firstly, its cachet as calm and collected managers could be eroded by Vox’s incendiary politics. Secondly, the party could be leaving its own ideological right flank exposed to Abascal’s party.

Even facing that second risk, the PP looks set to stick to its guns. “Even if Vox were to take votes from us with more aggressive messages, we want to be the safe haven for centrist voters,” said the first PP official.

Still, the PP is clearly alive to the danger that it will have to maintain an appeal to two types of voter. That is demonstrated by the politicians Feijóo chose for the highly symbolic second and third places on the Madrid list for the election, usually seen as the praetorian guard of the leader: Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo, one of the flag bearers of the right-wing faction, and Borja Sémper, representative of the more moderate and liberal wing.

Questionable record

For its part, the Socialist Party isn’t buying the PP’s talk of prudent management.

“For the PP and Vox to try to present themselves as guarantors of good governance is a deception of the public,” said Rebeca Torró, the Socialist Party organization secretary and spokesperson. “Those who, through their denialism, their cuts and the way they weaken public services, are part of the problem and cannot be part of the solution,” Torró added.

Left-wing parties accuse the PP of hypocrisy, pointing out for example that it was a PP-led administration in Valencia that mishandled the deadly floods in October 2024 in which 229 people died. Carlos Mazón, the PP’s then-president of the Valencia region, was at a restaurant for hours as the crisis unfolded. He didn’t resign until a year later.

Alberto Ibáñez, member of parliament for the leftist Valencian party Compromís, said that the PP “is in no position to lecture anyone on public ethics.” The conservative party “is still keeping Mazón in his seat in the Valencian parliament to preserve his parliamentary protection and keep him from being tried,” said Ibáñez.

Intriguingly, however, the Socialists do look like they are trying to play the PP at its own game. After Óscar Puente resigned as minister of transport after the rail crash, Sánchez chose his most technocratic and discreet minister to lead the transport department: Economy Minister Carlos Cuerpo. The Socialists also want to look like cool-headed managers.

Division of labor

For now, the PP and Vox seem content to keep out of each other’s way, as long as it enables them to topple Sánchez.

In a recent op-ed in Diario de Cádiz, Enrique García-Máiquez, a Vox candidate for the senate, writing about a possible rightward shift by the PP, said that “it would be wise for the two parties ready to kick out Sánchez not to step on each other’s toes on the dance floor.”

Political scientist Fernández Vázquez thought there were tangible signs of cooperation. “Unlike the 2023 campaign, Catalonia is now a topic that isn’t talked about at all. Why? Because the right’s takeaway was that they didn’t get the majority three years ago due to an extraordinary voter turnout in Catalonia that heavily favored the Socialists,” he said.

But he warned that the PP-Vox truce would likely fall apart after the election.

“If they ultimately form a government, things will not be easy for Feijóo. Vox will exert significant pressure and will derive a certain satisfaction from occasionally forcing his hand and humiliating him — because that’s rooted in Vox’s origins.”

KYIV – Limitations affecting Starshield, the military version of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite system, appear to be back in Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Thursday.

“Unfortunately, our units have been recording significant disruptions to Starshield’s operations over the territory of Ukraine for several days now – along the entire front line and in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine,” Zelenskyy said in a statement.

About a month ago, Ukraine reported a drop in connectivity for objects traveling faster than 161 km/h, which prevented its defensive systems, especially its interceptors, from working properly. The restriction was lifted on Oct. 24. In his statement, Zelenskyy said the disruptions were not due to a malfunction, but once again to a systematic speed restriction.

“For us, this primarily means a significant complication in intercepting Russian jet-powered drones,” Zelenskyy said.

The latest restrictions have already allowed several Russian drones to get through Ukrainian air defense and kill more Ukrainians, he added. 

“Connectivity issues have resurfaced,” said Serhii Bezkrestnov, an advisor to Zelenskyy on defense technology, “specifically regarding communication with helicopters pursuing ‘Shahed’ drones, as well as with jet interceptors tasked with shooting down jet-powered ‘Shaheds’.”

A European official with first-hand knowledge of the situation, who was granted anonymity to discuss the matter freely, said the Starshield limits were first noticed three days ago, when negotiations between the U.S. and Russia began in Abu Dhabi. Ukrainian officials believe this is not a coincidence, but a pressure tactic, they added.

The U.S. Congress bipartisan Ukraine Caucus on Thursday demanded in a statement “a full accounting from the Trump Administration and SpaceX on how and why this occurred and immediate action to restore full access to Starshield.”

U.S. President Donald Trump said last Sunday that he couldn’t tell who slowed down Starlink for Ukraine for much of October, and wasn’t even sure it had been throttled.

“It wasn’t me …. The system is a very good system. And it was perhaps turned down. I don’t even know. It hasn’t been proven to me that it was turned down,” Trump said on 60 Minutes.

“There’s a lot of lies going on with that war. But I know this, that when I heard about it, it went back up,” Trump added.

Kyiv is seeking urgent talks to renew its contract with Starshield, which is ending in mid-2027, a Ukrainian official told reporters last week.

The U.S. Department of Defense and SpaceX, Starshield’s parent company, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

This story has been updated.

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MADRID — Trailing in the polls ahead of Nov. 29 national elections, Spain’s ruling Socialist Party is turning to TikTok. Not to use it, but to try to ban it. 

Following the publication on Monday of a Spanish investigation accusing TikTok of allowing child sexual abuse material, the youth ministry announced it would try to block the platform.

On Wednesday the prosecutor’s office opened a preliminary inquiry, prompting a triumphant post on X by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. “Great news,” he wrote. “The days of impunity on social media are over. No platform is above the law, and much less above the rights of our children.”

The bombshell report by civil society group Maldita has shocked Spain and given the government a chance to show it’s tough on Big Tech just ahead of a momentous election, with polls showing the right firmly ahead.

Over the past 72 hours the government has pulled every available legal lever against TikTok, including lodging cases with both the Data Protection Agency and the public prosecutor’s office.

The reality that EU legal thresholds for shutting off open platforms are relatively high isn’t slowing the public onslaught. In a TV interview aired Monday after Maldita’s investigation was released, Sánchez cast his government as a bulwark against Big Tech. “If we have to suspend a social media platform in Spain, have no doubt that we’ll do so,” he said.

TikTok says the company moved quickly to identify and remove content after the Maldita report was published. “CSAM (child sexual abuse material) is categorically prohibited on our platform, and we deploy advanced detection technologies alongside a dedicated Child Safety Team to aggressively identify and eliminate it,” a TikTok spokesperson said. “As bad actors continuously adapt their tactics, we work tirelessly to improve our safeguards.”

Sánchez has every reason to turn the conversation toward protecting children and holding foreign tech companies accountable after sagging in the polls following last month’s train crash in Toledo that killed 69 people. The Socialist leader explained this week that his government was pushing to enforce the “criminal liability of the leaders of these platforms.”

Still, the points Sánchez is looking to score by targeting Big Tech may be limited because his main opponent also slammed TikTok for failing to act.

Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the conservative People’s Party and current favorite to be Spain’s next prime minister, met on Tuesday with Maldita’s team. “It’s shocking, and we can’t look the other way,” he wrote on X. “We have a duty to protect children, and this is one of my top priorities for families.” 

Borja Sémper, a key PP lawmaker who attended the meeting between Feijóo and the investigative team, said: “What’s happening on TikTok is unacceptable. We’re not going to let this go.”

The Socialist Party has positioned itself as Spain’s toughest voice against the platforms, and Sánchez has made clashes with “techno-oligarchs” a key campaign calling card. 

A spokesperson for Spain’s digital ministry pointed to the PP and the far-right Vox as partly responsible for the inaction over TikTok, given that they voted against the government’s designation of the National Markets and Competition Commission as the regulator of digital services. By rejecting the motion, the spokesperson said, they deprived the state of “the tools to protect our children.”

Earlier this week, Youth Minister Sira Rego asked the country’s data protection watchdog to suspend TikTok. “If it were up to us, TikTok would have been shut down from the very moment we learned of the investigation,” said a ministry official, who was granted anonymity to discuss the issue. “But we don’t have the authority to do so.” 

The same official said the Ministry of Youth and Children had met with Spain’s TikTok team but hadn’t received a satisfactory response. “We asked them to voluntarily suspend their services in Spain,” the official said, adding the platform had only agreed to “look into it” without providing a timeline.

Bans are hard

The only way for the Spanish government to force a suspension of the service is to get a court order. The ministry has written to the State Attorney General’s Office to open an investigation that could lead to a suspension of operations, the official said. 

In 2024, Spanish judge Santiago Pedraz ordered Telegram to be blocked for three days before reversing his decision, ruling that the measure wasn’t proportionate. The precedent is there, and shows that although a ban is possible, it is also unlikely.

The current Spanish push isn’t the first time a European government facing tough elections has floated suspending an online platform in response to illegal content.

Just last month, the French government touted the suspension of social media amid widespread protests, but a constitutional court partly struck it down, saying it wasn’t in line with French law. Back in 2025 the Albanian government banned TikTok for just over a year, citing concerns over violence among children, although opposition parties accused the administration of trying to stifle criticism ahead of general elections.

But the constitutions of EU countries and bloc-wide rules don’t easily allow such measures. Laws to regulate big online platforms like TikTok are harmonized across the EU, which significantly limits what Madrid can do alone. 

The EU’s privacy rulebook, the General Data Protection Regulation, is enforced by national regulators. Ireland’s data protection authority oversees TikTok, which means the Youth Ministry’s request to Spain’s privacy regulator, the AEPD, is unlikely to go far. 

The AEPD cannot impose a permanent TikTok ban in Spain, but it could trigger what’s known as an “urgency procedure” under the GDPR. 

The emergency measure allows a privacy regulator to impose legally binding measures domestically that can last up to three months, where there is “urgent need to act” to protect people’s privacy rights.

The AEPD said that Ireland’s privacy regulator is the main authority responsible for TikTok’s compliance with privacy rules and said it will “share all available information with the Irish authority” and other European privacy regulators. 

The regulator said it has asked Maldita for a list of links to alleged unlawful processing of minors’ data, and asked TikTok what it has done to take down the reported content. 

TikTok’s wider content moderation practices are regulated by the Digital Services Act, which gives the European Commission oversight powers over big platforms. Brussels already has several probes open against TikTok and has said in preliminary findings that the Chinese-owned platform breaches the rules by failing to protect minors and by designing an addictive service, although it hasn’t issued any fines.

BRUSSELS — Top global gaming companies have blasted new EU consumer regulations they say would “cripple the competitiveness of Europe’s world-leading video games industry.”

The European Commission unveiled a new set of rules Wednesday on consumer protection, including the Digital Fairness Act, that is part of the first-ever sector-specific limits on the video-game industry, alongside the EU’s mid-September regulation to protect children online.

Under the proposed DFA, which still has to be negotiated with other EU institutions, video games would no longer be able to earn money by offering minors micro-transactions to advance in the game, known as pay-to-win or pay-to-progress. There are also restrictions on “loot boxes,” which contain surprise virtual items that players can buy with real money. The law also stipulates that in-app virtual currencies must be turned off by default for under-18s.

The Commission says these practices encourage overspending, which is especially dangerous for vulnerable consumers like kids. Violating the rules can lead to fines of up to 6% of global revenue in cases that affect more than two-thirds of the EU population.

“We want the European gaming industry to continue to thrive,” said Michael McGrath, the commissioner for consumer protection, announcing the measures. But competition, McGrath added, should be based “on creativity, innovation, and quality, and not on practices that exploit consumers.”

In a joint statement, the European Game Developer Federation, an association representing EU firms, and Video Games Europe, which includes global juggernauts like Sony and Epic Games, say that the proposed definition of pay-to-win is “fundamentally flawed, lacks clear definitions and would create huge confusion for players and developers alike” since it could cover “any purchase.”

Angry Birds & friends

While Europe has struggled to keep up with the U.S. and China in several tech sectors as AI and social media, the bloc is home to developers of some of the world’s most popular games such as Angry Birds and The Witcher. Video game spending in the bloc topped €27 billion, accounting for 17% of the global market, last year, according to the European Audiovisual Observatory.

The gaming groups argue that the industry already does a good job regulating itself with parental controls and the content rating system PEGI, which the DFA doesn’t take into account.

“Effectively, the DFA moves all decisions from parents and children to the Commission,” they wrote.

The DFA aims to regulate a slew of other industries, cracking down on manipulative practices in online commerce such as addictive design, dynamic pricing and making it difficult to unsubscribe from a digital subscription.

BRUSSELS — You know that customer-service bot that won’t let you cancel your subscription? The EU wants to kill it.  

With a new law presented Wednesday, the European Commission will take aim at the endless array of practices websites have used over the past 20 years to make more money from consumers.  

The Digital Fairness Act is the European response to a wider regulatory trend that has seen consumer authorities curb irksome and exploitative practices. These include dynamic pricing that changes ticket prices based on demand, cumbersome processes for canceling subscriptions and the near-complete surrender of customer service to automated systems.  

According to a draft of the DFA obtained by POLITICO, the Commission will address several aspects of the design, service and terms under which businesses interact with consumers online. 

“Europe should not accept a digital economy where profits depend on exploiting people’s vulnerabilities,” Spanish socialist lawmaker Laura Ballarín Cereza, a key European lawmaker on tech legislation, said in a statement.

Industry leaders have pushed back on this potential new rulebook ever since the EU executive began considering a revision of consumer law in 2022. They say current consumer protection and digital services laws already cover these practices. “Where existing rules already cover a practice, it should not be regulated or enforced a second time,” said Ben Brake, director general of tech lobby DOT Europe.  

Consumer groups say existing rules, some dating back to 2005, are not clear enough and that many unfair design practices are still rampant.  

The Commission would have the power to impose fines of up to 6% of global annual revenue for companies that violate the new law. Those penalties are similar to fines levied under the Digital Services Act, the EU’s platform rules meant to stop Big Tech platforms from provoking systemic, society-wide harms through everything from election interference to keeping minors away from violent content. The new law instead would apply to any business offering services to EU consumers online. 

Dark patterns

The DFA would ban deceptive design known as “dark patterns,” which manipulate consumers through the use of such tactics as bright-colored buttons placed prominently to get customers to buy something. It also aims to ban personalized pricing that targets vulnerable consumers, including minors.  

The practice of dynamic pricing is also targeted in the law. That’s when a seller adjusts the price based on conditions such as demand or a user’s location, and it is commonly used in the sale of concert and airline tickets. The proposed law requires transparency when customers are buying products whose prices are subject to change.  

The DFA also covers consumer rights around “agentic commerce,” when artificial intelligence agents are used to find and complete purchases. 

Four lawmakers from the conservative, socialist and liberal groups said the requirement doesn’t go far enough and that the DFA should completely ban dynamic pricing for cultural and sporting events, according to a letter obtained by POLITICO. 

Sellers offering subscriptions will have to provide an easy way to cancel, reminiscent of New York State’s “click to cancel” rules. The new EU rules also require that a human is available for after-sales customer support.  

The rules also address, for the first time, specific aspects of online gaming, including bans on video games that allow kids to pay to succeed and progress in the game.  

The DFA is also trying to make its mark on what is known as “addictive design” of online platforms. This has already been the target of enforcement action in Europe and litigation in the U.S. in cases involving minors. But the new consumer rules would apply to adults as well, requiring online platforms to offer an opt-out from addictive features like autoplay.  

Spain’s Ballarín Cereza thinks this is not enough, saying users should be opted out of these features by default. “Why should consumers carry the burden when companies deliberately design these addictive mechanisms? We must shift from consumer responsibility to corporate responsibility: safety and fairness must be the default, not an option,” she said. 

LONDON — The U.S. has evacuated refueling aircraft from an RAF base in Britain after registering an alleged threat from Iran.

At least 10 U.S. planes left RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk on Monday, according to the BBC, and landed at other American bases in Europe and at Prestwick Airport in Scotland.

The operation was first reported by the Wall Street Journal and confirmed by two U.K. officials briefed on the matter.

A Ministry of Defence spokesperson said: “We do not routinely comment on the activity of other nations. Aircraft and other assets move regularly ​according to operational ​requirements.”

It comes weeks after an Iran-linked security incident at RAF Fairford, which saw the U.S. pull its bombers out of the base and return them to America.

A major incident was declared after three suspicious vans were seen near Fairford, which led to eight arrests. Two British nationals appeared in court in October in connection with an alleged plot connected to Iran.

U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s spokesman said: “The U.S. is one of our top security partners. We’re in constant communication with them, sharing intelligence and accessing threats together. Aircraft and other assets move regularly according to operational requirements… The protection of our bases, both in the U.K. and across the world, is a top priority.”

Conservative Party Leader Kemi Badenoch said on Tuesday that the latest U.S. withdrawal of assets is “very concerning, and our government’s got absolutely nothing to say about it.”

Head of the MI5 intelligence service Ken McCallum said last month that threats from foreign adversaries against the U.K. had quadrupled in the last decade, including an increase in Iran-sponsored aggression against Jewish sites and military bases.

This story was updated to include a comment from the U.K. prime minister’s spokesperson.

BRUSSELS — Royalty descended on the European Parliament on Tuesday as Prince Harry slammed Big Tech for creating a world of “chaos.”

“A handful of very powerful people … would like to see the world as a social media world: lawless, no consequence, complete chaos, division,” the Duke of Sussex said at an event on online safety for children.

Speaking in a room packed to the brim with journalists and photographers, Harry called for stricter rules on social media platforms to protect kids from content that could lead to suicide or self-harm.

He expressed reservations about the privacy policies of social media platforms, which he said bar parents from knowing how their children died. “That cannot be right,” a visibly upset Harry said.

His wife, Meghan Markle, was present but withdrew from an address on Tuesday’s panel.

The European Commission regulates online platforms through its Digital Services Act and is planning a special regime for minors under the Kids Act.

The burden of proof that platforms are safe should be on the companies rather than on parents, and “the EU Kids Act is exactly that,” said the prince, praising an EU proposal that would bar access to social media for under-13s.

The couple brought an air of celebrity to the Parliament, with heightened security and a clamoring press pack, including many journalists from the U.K. Dozens of parliament employees and lobbyists gathered outside the room, phones in hand, to catch a glimpse of the pair.

Meanwhile, the internal market committee, which is leading negotiations for the Parliament on the Kids Act, was meeting in a far less crowded room. MEPs from the committee — including Hungarian conservative Dóra Dávid and Slovak liberal Veronika Cifrová Ostrihoňová — attended the royal event.

Cancer claims 10 million lives each year, the global shortage of health workers runs into the millions, and in some parts of the world, a single mosquito bite can be fatal.

These challenges may seem very different. Yet they share a common element in how many health systems operate: risk is often recognised only after it has become illness, outbreak or crisis. By then, a disease may have advanced, transmission of disease may be under way, or an already stretched workforce may be managing consequences that earlier action could have reduced.

The opportunity is to move that point of intervention earlier. This is what anticipatory health means in practice: using signals that already exist, at the bedside, in communities, and in routine health data, to help people and health systems act sooner. It is not prediction for its own sake. The value lies in connecting early and everyday signals to a timely, practical response.

Finding practical routes to earlier action

That principle sits at the heart of the Future Health Impact Challenge: Building Anticipatory Health Systems through Population Sensing, launched by Future Health – A Global Initiative by Abu Dhabi in collaboration with MIT Solve. The Challenge received 393 submissions from 68 countries. ThinkMD, VectorCam and Huna emerged as its three award-winning solutions: ThinkMD received the grand prize, with VectorCam and Huna recognised as distinguished finalists.

The Challenge was designed to identify practical solutions with evidence of impact and potential to scale. Each of the three selected teams demonstrated their approach to using technology to turn an early signal into decisions that support anticipatory actions a health system can take.

Frontline care as a population signal

ThinkMD starts with the interaction between a frontline health worker and a patient. Its offline mobile platform guides structured assessments aligned with clinical protocols, supporting providers where doctors, connectivity, and diagnostic tools may be scarce. Almost 10,000 frontline health workers across 885 facilities are now using it.

Each consultation also creates structured data. Across facilities, that information can reveal changes in symptoms and service demand. In Zambia, analysis of around one million encounters identified symptom patterns several months before a confirmed cholera outbreak. In Kenya, deployment data showed improvements in identifying danger signs in infants and prescribing antibiotics correctly for childhood pneumonia.

It is not prediction for its own sake.

“The utilisation of AI in healthcare is an absolute game changer. Not only can we increase access for patients, but we can also increase access to information to make correct and appropriate diagnoses and give the right treatment to the right patient at the right time. Future Health has been a really critical platform to be able to accelerate our mission of moving from reactionary to anticipatory care,” said Dr Jackie Rabec of ThinkMD.

The award has given ThinkMD support and visibility as it works to expand into new health systems and strengthen how frontline data becomes timely intelligence for decision-makers. That is one measure of the Challenge’s impact: helping proven solutions move towards sustained, wider adoption.

Earlier signals from the environment and routine data

VectorCam begins with the environment around a community. Using a low-cost smartphone imaging device and offline AI, community health workers can photograph and identify mosquitoes in the field. Each observation generates time- and location-based data that can help authorities see changing vector risk as the first signal of disease patterns, before a spread in local communities and populations.

The value lies in connecting early and everyday signals to a timely, practical response.

Field evaluations show data completeness rising from approximately 60% to more than 90%. With support from the Future Health Impact Challenge, VectorCam aims to strengthen its early-warning capability, integrate additional data sources and expand into national surveillance programmes.

Huna looks for earlier cancer-risk signals in information that health systems already generate. Its platform analyses routine complete blood count data to identify people with an elevated risk and prioritises them for screening. It does not diagnose cancer from a blood test; it helps direct limited screening capacity, and supports patients and healthcare professionals through the next steps.

In Brazil, Huna’s deployments have screened more than 500,000 people and detected hundreds of cancer cases. Its experience also highlights a critical ‘last mile’: identifying risk is not enough if a person does not complete the diagnostic pathway. Recognition and funding from the Challenge could help support further validation across new populations and facilitate new international partnerships.

Innovation is only the starting point

Together, these solutions show that useful signals can come from a variety of sources – including clinical encounters, environmental surveillance, and routine diagnostics. They also show that anticipatory approaches can be built where connectivity, specialist capacity, or access to screening is limited, and that innovation developed in those settings can share insights that can be localised and adopted globally.

But a successful technology or pilot is not the same as system-wide impact. Scaling requires local validation, integrated into existing workflows, responsible data governance, sustainable financing, workforce training, and evidence that earlier insight changes decisions and outcomes.

A successful technology or pilot is not the same as system-wide impact.

“The solutions emerging from this Challenge reflect both the urgency and the opportunity facing health systems globally. By bringing innovators together with policymakers, funders and implementers through platforms such as Future Health, we can help accelerate solutions that are locally grounded and capable of delivering impact at scale,” said Hala Hanna, Executive Director of MIT Solve.

From recognition to system-level impact

The Future Health Impact Challenge is part of Future Health’s wider role as a year-round platform for action. Together with our partners and colleagues across diverse sectors and geographies, Future Health identifies promising solutions, supports their development, builds international connections and brings together the policy, clinical, research and investment expertise needed to move from proof to concept to measurable impact.

The Future Health impact documentary film is now available to watch, and shares personal commentary from the founders of the three companies, local stories of the solutions in action, and commentary from the Challenge owners and collaborator.

Watch the full Future Health Impact Challenge Film here.

A reliable water supply, electricity when we need it and a home protected from flooding. These are the foundations of everyday life. When the infrastructure behind them fails, households bear the consequences.

As leaders gather for COP31, global progress on climate action means protecting those essential services must be central to the discussion. Investing in resilience is a national and economic security priority, and the decisions we make now will shape how well our homes, communities and essential services withstand disruption for decades to come.

Recent UK government advice urges households to ‘Be Ready’ and prepare for disruptions. It is a practical reminder of how much daily life depends on infrastructure we rarely notice until it stops working. Following the UK’s hottest summer on record, and with El Niño expected to strengthen into a very strong event, the need to prepare is clear.

The costs are already substantial. In the UK, we are particularly susceptible to flooding, and this year proved that we are not immune to heatwaves and drought. Flooding costs the UK an estimated £2.3 billion annually,¹ while the five heatwaves between May and July 2026 were estimated to have caused more than £4.4 billion in lost productivity.² For households, the consequences can include damage to their homes and disruption to work and daily life. Investing in resilience can reduce that disruption, protect essential services and support Britain’s long-term prosperity.

Flooding costs the UK an estimated £2.3 billion annually, while the five heatwaves between May and July 2026 were estimated to have caused more than £4.4 billion in lost productivity

For Lloyds Banking Group, serving households and businesses across Britain, this connects the infrastructure we help finance with the services our customers rely on. Progress will depend on filling the £11 billion annual gap in UK adaptation investment identified by the UK Climate Change Committee, with the government, infrastructure owners and financial institutions each having a role in turning that shared interest into practical investment.

The Haweswater Aqueduct Resilience Programme illustrates how long-term finance can support that goal, with replacement infrastructure designed to last for over 100 years.

The approximately £3 billion program is replacing six tunnel sections of an aqueduct that supplies drinking water to around 2.5 million people across Cumbria, Lancashire and Greater Manchester. A £300 million National Wealth Fund credit-enhancement facility, backed by a HM Treasury guarantee, helped reduce financing risk and attract private investment. Scottish Widows is supporting the program as a senior lender, with Lloyds providing banking services. Most importantly, households will benefit from a continued, reliable water supply for generations to come.

Public support and private finance can work together to fund essential infrastructure, with clear responsibilities for delivery and benefits for the communities it serves. Investment elsewhere should start with where disruption is most likely, how businesses can prepare and what protection suits local needs. The priority is fewer interruptions to daily life and the essential services communities rely on.

Insurance has an important role in making resilience investment work for households as well as businesses. Insurers’ understanding of physical climate risks can help owners, lenders and investors assess where protection is needed and the value of reducing exposure. Working with the government, the industry can explore how investment in prevention and longer-term approaches to risk can help sustain access to cover. The aim should be to reduce both the damage people experience and the financial strain that follows rather than relying on insurance alone after an event.

Businesses need to adopt commercially pragmatic mindsets that answer honestly how their assets and operations are designed for climate conditions that are already disrupting how we live and operate. Those answers carry real financial consequences: insurance costs and availability, access to capital, asset valuations, financing terms, and long-term competitiveness. Preparedness is the difference between an organization’s short-term viability and long-term prosperity.

Better data can help lenders, investors and insurers understand where infrastructure is exposed and assess the value of measures to protect it. Climate risk varies from place to place, so investment decisions need to reflect local conditions. The task is to make that understanding a routine part of financing, valuation and insurance decisions by directing investment toward the resilience needs of communities instead of waiting for disruption to reveal them.

Businesses need to adopt commercially pragmatic mindsets that answer honestly how their assets and operations are designed for climate conditions that are already disrupting how we live and operate

Finally, the public and private sectors must finance nature-based and engineered solutions together, because truly resilient infrastructure depends on both. Nature is one of our greatest assets: nature-based solutions such as wetland restoration can help protect communities from extreme weather, lower long-term costs, and generate wider economic, environmental and social value. When we look beyond individual megaprojects and take a holistic approach that includes the natural world, we can most effectively protect the critical functions of society, nature and economy alike.

The UK has deep expertize in finance and insurance. The challenge is to turn that expertize into more reliable services for households and more resilient places to live and work.

The government can provide clear frameworks that support long-term investment. Infrastructure owners should plan for future climate conditions. Lenders, investors and insurers should use their understanding of physical risks to inform where and how capital is deployed.

COP31 is an opportunity to focus attention on that task. The priority is investment that helps keep water running, power available and homes better protected from flooding. 

---

References

¹ https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/estimating-potential-economic-costs-of-flooding/estimating-potential-economic-costs-of-flooding#calculating-potential-economic-costs-aad-of-flooding

² Verdant (2006), The Cost of Heat Summer 2026 Heatwave: an economic update

PARIS — EU diplomatic chief Kaja Kallas has another enemy who wants her out: Marine Le Pen. 

The far-right French leader wants to dismantle, or at the very least drastically reduce, the EU’s diplomatic arm if she wins the 2027 presidential election, according to four National Rally officials. 

“The reality is that [Kallas’s] usefulness is very limited, and she duplicates the diplomacy of member states,” said Charles-Henri Gallois, adviser to National Rally President Jordan Bardella. “No one recognizes her legitimacy, particularly not the United States, nor China.”

The comments reveal growing tensions over the EU’s power as nationalist parties from France to Germany and Poland seek to wrest power back from Brussels, with foreign policy among their top targets. They also put extra pressure on Kallas and the European External Action Service, which has been locked in a protracted turf war on foreign policy with the European Commission headed by Ursula von der Leyen.

The view inside the National Rally is that the EU’s diplomatic service is not only a waste of taxpayer money but also gets in the way of European nations being able to flex their muscles on the world stage. 

One example is Ukraine, on which Kallas and Le Pen are deeply divided — although they have not clashed publicly. The former Estonian prime minister is one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest critics and a staunch supporter of Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, while Le Pen is pushing for an international peace conference to settle the conflict and says Europe has run out of money to give to Kyiv. 

Kallas has “used very warrior-like language on Ukraine,” said National Rally MEP Jean-Paul Garraud. “We support Ukraine but if we expressed ourselves like that we would be in total war” with Russia, he said.  

Le Pen has directed her most vicious attacks against von der Leyen, who has long been accused by the far right of exceeding her powers. But it’s Kallas and the EEAS that risk becoming collateral damage under a far-right presidency in France.

Le Pen is the front-runner ahead of next year’s presidential election. In a recent visit to Brussels, she vowed to downsize the European Union if she comes to power. 

“France will no longer accept that the Commission exercises diplomatic competences, and even less military or intelligence competencies,” she told reporters. This shrinking of EU institutions would include snipping the wings of the EEAS, according to the four National Rally officials, who were granted anonymity to speak freely.

The move would put the National Rally on a collision course with pro-European parties, which see the EU’s diplomatic arm as an essential tool as the global stage becomes more competitive and more aggressive. 

“If Marine Le Pen becomes president of France, she will quickly realise that … France is a medium-sized country on the global stage,” said Irish Renew MEP Barry Andrews, who chairs the European Parliament’s development committee.

 “Without the collective power of Europe, France has no chance going up against the U.S. or China alone,” he said.

The EEAS snapped back at the criticism. “Across Europe, the far right is against the very idea of European cooperation,” said an EEAS spokesperson. 

“EU diplomacy defends European interests, including those of France. The EU’s global delegation network is a major strategic asset,” the official told POLITICO in response to Le Pen’s comments.

Money matters

The push against Kallas and her diplomats also comes as the National Rally limbers up for a fight with the Commission over France’s EU budget contribution, if they win the election. Last month, the National Rally unveiled its plans for a €11 billion cut to France’s EU contribution for 2027, which is currently expected to total approximately €30 billion. 

POLITICO’s Poll of Polls puts Le Pen on 34% in the first round, well ahead of far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon on 17% and center-right hopeful Edouard Philippe on 16%. Polls also suggest she would beat most of her potential rivals in a runoff.

While France could not unilaterally cut the EEAS’s budget, the National Rally says it sees allies in Italy, in Spain’s nationalist party Vox (which could end up working with the center-right after this month’s election), and in Andrej Babiš’s Czech Republic. 

The offensive could get nasty as the Commission and Le Pen arm-wrestle over money. 

“The EEAS is great for friends of friends, who want jobs,” said one National Rally official. “The real estate bought or rented by the EEAS is a waste of money. I’m shocked to see the amounts involved in local contracts; it’s unbelievable,” said a National Rally MEP. 

Le Pen’s criticism coincides with criticism from European governments about the efficiency of the EU’s foreign policy apparatus, with France and Germany jointly pitching plans to reform the EEAS.

The concerns voiced by senior diplomats in both countries focus on the fact that the EEAS lacks policy tools to influence foreign relations. The Franco-German initiative suggests integrating the EEAS with the Commission, which has a larger budget as well as control over trade and tech policies.

It also coincides with proposals to severely cut back on the EU’s foreign policy budget. Commission officials have internally simulated slashing the bloc’s Global Europe budget — worth €200 billion in the last long-term budget — by as much as 40% in the next budget.

The EEAS itself, which has an annual budget of close to €1 billion and employs more than 5,200 people globally, is working on internal reforms that Secretary-General Kajsa Ollongren is expected to present to staff later this month.

Major budget cuts would have the effect of gutting the EU’s network of more than 100 global delegations, which are staffed by diplomats as well as Commission personnel from external-facing units like DG MENA (the Directorate-General for the Middle East, North Africa and the Gulf).

International organizations have pushed back forcefully against plans to slash the EU’s development aid budget, with United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres writing to the heads of the Commission and Council and urging them to preserve the funding.

Giorgio Leali contributed reporting.

Jan Marsalek, the fugitive former Wirecard executive suspected by multiple countries of spying for Russia, claimed that he had helped to bring down Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, according to documents obtained by the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network, of which POLITICO is a part. 

Marsalek said he had been involved in an operation that had “successfully toppled” Kurz, who stepped down amid corruption allegations in 2021. 

The messages, detailed in investigation files seen by the Telegraph and the Global Reporters Network, were sent to Orlin Roussev, a spy-ring leader who received instructions from Marsalek and has since been jailed in Britain for espionage. The documents contain no independent evidence of the role Marsalek says he has played in Kurz’s downfall. 

If substantiated, Marsalek’s claims would be a clear indicator of the Russian state interfering directly in the political leadership of an EU country. The Kremlin has long sought to sow division and destabilize governments across Europe, according to assessments by multiple security agencies. 

Marsalek is one of the world’s most wanted men and has been on the run since June 2020 when his company, German tech giant Wirecard, collapsed with a €1.9 billion hole in its books.

Since his escape, he has been accused of working for the Kremlin for more than a decade while British police say he is involved in espionage on an “industrial” scale. He is wanted for fraud and is being investigated for spying in several European countries, including his native Austria.

Kurz was the world’s youngest leader when he first became chancellor of Austria in 2017 at the age of 31. But his stratospheric rise, which saw him hold the post twice, was marred by corruption allegations, including that public money was used for political advertising on his behalf. 

When members of Marsalek’s spy ring, led by Roussev, were arrested in the U.K., police seized hundreds of thousands of messages detailing operations plotted from British soil.

Some of these messages were shared with authorities, including Austrian officials, who are currently investigating whether their spies provided information to Marsalek and, in turn, to Russia.

‘Messy story’

One of the investigative files, examined by the Global Reporters Network, contains messages sent by a man whom authorities have identified as Marsalek, using the alias “Rupert Ticz,” on October 22, 2021.

Marsalek mentions a “guy” who “was actually working for us for a while,” adding: “now he’s the victim of a witch-hunt by the team of the former chancellor.”

He goes on to say that “we’ve successfully toppled” the former chancellor “by confiscating the mobile phone” of a friend of the then chancellor, who, according to Marsalek, was managing his “secret campaign financing.”

Marsalek then shared a link to an article about the corruption allegations against Kurz and the phone which had been seized from one of the leader’s closest associates, Thomas Schmid, a former senior official in Austria’s Finance Ministry.

Schmid’s phone had been seized in November 2019. The extensive communications recovered from the device subsequently became important evidence in several corruption investigations.

In October 2021, prosecutors carried out raids involving Kurz’s government and his political party, the ÖVP, over allegations concerning the misuse of public money for politically favorable opinion polls and media coverage. 

Pressure from the investigation led to Kurz announcing that he was stepping down. Two weeks later, Marsalek wrote to Roussev that it was “quite a messy story”.

Later in the conversation, he referred again to the political consequences of the information recovered from the phone, saying: “And the rest of the chats ‘killed’ the chancellor.”

The documents contain no independent evidence that Marsalek actually organized the seizure of the phone.

Russian ties

Marsalek’s links to Austria’s former domestic intelligence service, the BVT, have been investigated extensively and a number of senior spies and police officers are accused of handing him information for use by the Russian state.

The messages between Marsalek and Roussev are contained in Austrian police files investigating “support for a foreign intelligence service – interference in Austrian politics.” The documents also refer to possible offenses relating to elections, breaches of official duties and corruption.

An assessment of the messages by investigators notes that “Marsalek stated unequivocally that ‘they’ had ‘toppled’ the chancellor in a successful operation.”

“Marsalek thus admitted to Roussev that he had been involved in the confiscation of this mobile phone,” the report continues

The investigators therefore interpreted the conversation as Marsalek claiming involvement in the seizure of a phone that had contributed to the chancellor’s downfall.

The same assessment notes that it remained unclear whether Marsalek’s reference to “the guy” who had worked “for us” meant Wirecard or a Russian intelligence service.

Kurz declined to comment on the messages or the investigators’ assessment.

At the time the messages were sent, Marsalek was living in Moscow and carrying out work primarily for Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), British prosecutors have said.  

Roussev was one of a number of Bulgarians arrested in the UK on suspicion of spying on behalf of Russia. They were later convicted and Roussev was jailed for ten years and eight months.

The group organized surveillance operations targeting Kremlin opponents and investigative journalists and discussed kidnapping as well as planning disinformation campaigns.

The network also had access to sensitive Austrian government information. In May 2025, The Telegraph revealed that three mobile phones belonging to senior Austrian Interior Ministry officials had ended up in Russia.

These were different phones from Thomas Schmid’s device, which Austrian investigators seized in November 2019. No connection between the two incidents has been established.

Kurz’s downfall

The reference to a confiscated phone concerns one of the most important pieces of evidence in Austrian political corruption investigations of recent years.

Schmid was a senior figure in the Finance Ministry and a close associate of Sebastian Kurz. He later became head of the state-owned holding company ÖBAG.

His mobile phone was seized by Austrian investigators on November 12, 2019, and police recovered extensive communications, including messages that had previously been deleted.

Those messages later became part of several corruption investigations concerning political appointments, government advertising and allegations about the use of public money for party-political purposes.

On October 6, 2021, Austrian prosecutors searched the Federal Chancellery, the Finance Ministry and the headquarters of Kurz’s Austrian People’s Party.

The searches were part of an investigation into allegations that taxpayer money had been used to finance politically favorable opinion polls and media coverage.

The investigations led to Kurz announcing his resignation as chancellor on October 9, 2021.

Marsalek’s message to Roussev was written 13 days later, nearly two years after Schmid’s telephone was seized.

By then, details of the case including reports about thousands of intimate photographs on Schmid’s phone, which Marsalek joked about, had already appeared in the local press.

Marsalek has been out of reach of European authorities for years, and the Global Reporters Network was also unable to contact him for comment.

“The Russian secret services like causing havoc and chaos and disruption,” Ed Arnold, senior associate fellow at Royal United Services Institute think tank, told the Global Reporters Network. “But even if they don’t cause it, they are more than happy to exploit it and make political disagreements or fissures worse.”

He said Marsalek might have been “overplaying his hand” by emphasizing his role in the downfall of Kurz, adding: “If you want to make a name for yourself in this world as some kind of fixer, you need some kudos.” 

“Russia wants to destabilize our free democracies,” Manfred Weber, the German leader of the EPP in the European Parliament, told POLITICO. “It must be unequivocally ruled out that Russian intelligence services can interfere in democratic and judicial processes … These events must be thoroughly investigated.”

A spokesperson for the Federal Ministry of the Interior said that they could not comment on ongoing investigations into Marsalek’s network. 

The spokesperson told the Global Reporters Network that the “Austrian Criminal Intelligence Service does not provide information or comment on ongoing investigations or proceedings, nor does it disclose information concerning specific individuals”. 

The Axel Springer Global Reporters Network harnesses the resources of the company’s newsrooms to publish ambitious scoops, investigations, interviews, opinion pieces and analysis. It allows journalists — including those from POLITICO, Business Insider, WELT, BILD, Onet, The Telegraph, and Fakt — to collaborate on major stories for an international audience of hundreds of millions across platforms: online, print, TV and audio.

BRUSSELS — The Netherlands and Spain on Friday submitted candidates to succeed Christine Lagarde, who steps down as president of the European Central Bank on Feb. 7.

Pablo Hernández de Cos, a former governor of Spain’s central bank, and the Netherlands’ Klaas Knot, a former president of the Dutch central bank, were the only candidates to emerge after the 5 p.m. deadline, as expected.

Their candidacies are part of a larger game of musical chairs that includes France and Germany, as Europe’s four economic powerhouses negotiate how to secure their seats on the ECB’s executive board.

The ECB is one of the most powerful institutions in Europe, responsible for setting interest rates to keep prices stable at 2% over the medium-term. The six-person executive board oversees the central bank’s day-to-day activities and an army of economists who scrutinize financial markets and the economy at large.

Berlin is determined to hold onto the seat that German economist Isabel Schnabel will vacate on Jan. 3, when she leaves the ECB for a job at the International Monetary Fund. Paris, meanwhile, is targeting the ECB’s chief economist role once the Irish incumbent Philip Lane concludes his eight-year term on May 31.

Eurozone finance ministers will take stock of the ECB shuffling at Monday’s Eurogroup meeting in Brussels. Neither Hernández de Cos nor Knot are scheduled to attend the closed-door meeting. But their national ministers will talk up their respective compatriots.

Diplomats expect EU leaders to engage in horse trading at an informal summit in Dublin at the end of next week. The deadline for candidates to replace Schnabel is on Nov. 27.

PARIS — French leftist presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon wants a radical overhaul of EU rules that would set him on a collision course with Brussels.

The far-left leader, who has enjoyed a recent surge in the polls ahead of the 2027 election, pitched a series of measures to fundamentally rethink the EU’s agenda in his presidential platform unveiled Friday. Mélenchon also said he would disobey current EU rules that would prevent him from implementing his platform if elected.

Proposing a “new deal” for Europe, Mélenchon wants to redraft the treaties, ditch core parts of the EU’s rulebook — including debt and deficit limits — suspend competition rules for public services such as energy, transport and telecoms, and loosen state aid laws.

“We will immediately implement our program at the national level. This will therefore require a confrontation with European institutions,” according to the manifesto from Mélenchon’s France Unbowed. “This also means disobeying rules blocking [us] whenever necessary.”

“Our logic is simple. As long as a deal on changing the treaties is not done, we negotiate with our partners and disobey […] blocking rules in parallel. If we get to an agreement, it will be put to a referendum,” the manifesto added.

The proposals, which echo Mélenchon’s earlier statements, would likely face tough opposition from France’s partners in the European Council, which is currently dominated by more conservative leaders.

The manifesto also said the European Central Bank should be “placed under democratic control and mobilized to fund the ecological and social transition.” Mélenchon triggered a flurry of criticism earlier this year when he said he would “set fire” to a large chunk of France’s public debt held by the ECB, setting off a nationwide debate on the subject.

France is among the countries hardest hit by a global surge in borrowing costs, with its fiscal situation also limiting the government’s ability to soften the impact of higher fuel and food prices, part of a larger cost-of-living crisis on the continent.

With public debt amounting to 117.5% of GDP and a public deficit above 5%, fiscal issues have become a central concern for voters. Presidential candidates are pitching radically different solutions to the problem.

Le Pen has tried to rebrand herself as a responsible steward of the economy unafraid of cuts — despite critics saying her plan is “overly optimistic” and her flagship promises are yet to be funded. Centrist candidates, such as former Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, are pitching themselves as the voice of reason on economic and fiscal issues but are struggling to gain traction.

The European Commission has accused TikTok of violating its online platforms rules for having designed algorithms that lead users down so-called rabbit holes.

The preliminary findings announced Friday mark the first time the Commission has focused on a social media platform’s recommender systems as a breach of its powerful Digital Services Act, under which it can issue fines up to 6% of a company’s annual global revenue.

“This is the first time that we are really tackling head-on the engagement-based recommender system model,” said one Commission official, who was granted speaking anonymity to speak freely.

This is the fifth case of the EU executive accusing TikTok of breaching EU rules, even though it has issued no fines against the Chinese-owned platform.

In Friday’s announcement, the Commission says the company didn’t adequately consider the risk of sending users down “rabbit holes” through a “continuous stream of personalised videos, even when those are related to mental health struggles and body image.”

The investigation focused on mental health impacts because “the evidence was strongest,” when asked about how these rabbit holes contribute to radicalization, said another official.

The more users interact with content, even if it’s potentially harmful, the more of that content they are recommended, the Commission said in its press release, which noted that the measures TikTok has put in place to curb the rabbit hole effect have not been effective.

TikTok should take into account “explicit” signals like buttons that say “I’m not interested” more than implicit ones, like engagement, said the first Commission official. Engagement metrics measure how much users interact with content, such as how much time they spend watching a video or the content they like. Talking about mitigation of these risks, the official said that remedies have to be effective and that TikTok’s current measures are not.

“To say ‘I’m not interested’ has to have a meaning, an effective meaning, and not only should not only be an afterthought, and then you go back to the old recommender system,” the official said.

The DSA also foresees a non-personalized feed for all users, but only 0.2% of TikTok users actually select that option, one of the officials said.

A TikTok spokesperson pushed back against the accusation, saying the company “has a strong record” of protecting its users. “The Commission has made a series of statements that are fundamentally inaccurate and distort our platform’s architecture and our commitment to user safety,” the spokesperson said

The company now can examine the evidence, defend its practices and try to come up with a plan to remedy issues that is acceptable to the regulator to avoid fines.

TikTok has managed to close a DSA investigation on advertising transparency by agreeing on fixes with the Commission.

The article has been updated with a statement from a TikTok spokesperson.