Defending human and environmental rights could get you in prison, or at least detained – as happened to Italian MEP Benedetta Scuderi. She talks to EUobserver about the double-standard in policing of left and rightwing demos, and the housing crisis sparking much of the youth unrest.
Some 23 percent of Spain’s working population were immigrants, who were “paying taxes and [contributing to] pensions for everyone,” said the MEP, ahead of a snap election dominated by its housing crisis and the Ceuta migrant crisis.
As one of Dayton’s former guardians, Schmidt fears less instability than a quiet collapse of trust, as youth reject segregated schools, politicians glorify war criminals, and Europe fails to turn Bosnia’s pro-EU mood into real opportunities.
Professor Jan Rovný argues French school protests could turn into a movment against spending cuts by a government with growing debt. He explains why private school pupils have joined publicly educated peers revolting on the streets, and how police violence will shape public mood.
Katarína Mathernová, the EU’s ambassador to Ukraine, says Putin is boiling Kyiv ‘like a frog’, but she is determined to stay. She sees parallels between Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Putin’s essay which stated that Ukraine has no right to national existence, sovereignty or identity.
From biased hiring algorithms to disappearing administrative posts, Bieliková argues that women risk being hit hardest by AI unless they seize the tools early and push for fairer, more accountable systems.
By outsourcing border control to Morocco, Turkey or Albania and then panicking when they “open the gates,” German lawyer Lena Riemer says EU capitals have handed hostile regimes a cheap, reliable way to divide and humiliate Europe.
When other empires stopped expanding, Russia refused to stop. “Perhaps Russia was too successful for too long,” argues political geographer Michael Romancov. He explained that over five centuries of land grabs worked for so long it became part of Russia’s “genetic make-up”.
![[Interview] Could musicians and dancers in Europe revolt against AI using their work? ‘It should be possible’, says performing arts boss](https://static.euobserver.com/2026/09/Orchestra-Photo-14719432-2400x1600.jpg)
Performers of works authored by others are in a particularly precarious position when it comes to AI training on their work. How can the EU protect them?
The former Italian prime minister tells EUobserver that Europe’s scale-ups in health and elsewhere are too small to survive the ‘China 2.0 shock’, and that without a finished single market Europe will keep losing out.
Lukashenko has tried to stay out of Putin’s Ukraine war as much as he could, in case Russia’s failure leaves the Belarusian leader needing Western friends.
Voters who feel “everything is going to hell” may be flocking to AfD, but a senior economist in Saxony-Anhalt warns that Germany’s greenest, fastest-ageing region could end up poorer and more isolated under their rule.
Casting the EU as the only real counterweight to a world split between Trump-style nationalism, Russian imperialism and Chinese expansionism, Wałęsa insists Europe must leap from nation-state thinking to continental power if it wants to survive.
![[Interview] Irish liberal MEP Barry Andrews: ‘Trade measures are the EU’s only real leverage over Israel’](https://static.euobserver.com/2026/07/20250827_EP-189673A_AH1_0412-e1785396809246-2400x1295.jpg)
Barry Andrews said his visit to the West Bank convinced him that what he calls Israeli “apartheid” can only be tackled by EU economic pressure.
As Iceland’s elites quietly bankroll a fiery ‘no’ campaign, a veteran pro-EU economist warns they are using money, fear and Kremlin-style talking points to shut down even the right to negotiate with Brussels.
![[Interview] Europe’s labs are chronically underfunded and sovereignty is at stake, says French Academy chief Françoise Combes](https://static.euobserver.com/2026/08/1920px-SpaceX_Crew_Dragon_More_cropped.jpg)
Françoise Combes explains why, even as AI accelerates discovery and SpaceX dominates the skies, the real battle for our future is being fought in underfunded European labs.
Intellectual property and copyright laws were developed to protect what people make. So what happens when a machine ‘makes’ something? Or when it is involved in making something? Who owns what a machine makes? How much human input is needed to make machine-generated content ‘human’? EUobserver sat down with copyright scholar Daniel Gervais to find out.
The same cheap civilian drones you can order online are being retooled into weapons faster than defences can adapt, creating a war zone where human control still exists on paper but is increasingly hollow in practice.
With the far right poised to govern parts of Germany for the first time since WWII, Boeselager warns that only bold economic fixes and fairer pension sacrifices can convince frustrated workers that democracy still delivers.
The first female president of Ireland is no stranger to marginalisation. But a trip to the West Bank proved how extreme injustice can become normalised if there is no accountability, which “the EU has levers” to change
