Thirty-six million Europeans — including more than one million in the Nordics[1] — live with a rare disease.[2] For patients and their families, this is not just a medical challenge; it is a human rights issue. Diagnostic delays mean years of worsening health and needless suffering. Where treatments exist, access is far from guaranteed. Meanwhile, breakthroughs in genomics, AI and targeted therapies are transforming what is possible in health care. But without streamlined systems, innovations risk piling up at the gates of regulators, leaving patients waiting. Even the Nordics, which have some of the strongest health systems in the world, struggle to provide fair and consistent access for rare-disease patients. Expectations should be higher. THE BURDEN OF DELAY The toll of rare diseases is profound. People living with them report health-related quality-of-life scores 32 percent lower than those without. Economically, the annual cost per patient in Europe — including caregivers — is around €121,900.[3] > Across Europe, the average time for diagnosis is six to eight years, and > patients continue to face long waits and uneven access to medications. In Sweden, the figure is slightly lower at €118,000, but this is still six times higher than for patients without a rare disease. Most of this burden (65 percent) is direct medical costs, although non-medical expenses and lost productivity also weigh heavily. Caregivers, for instance, lose almost 10 times more work hours than peers supporting patients without a rare disease.[4] This burden can be reduced. European patients with access to an approved medicine face average annual costs of €107,000.[5] Yet delays remain the norm. Across Europe, the average time for diagnosis is six to eight years, and patients continue to face long waits and uneven access to medications. With health innovation accelerating, each new therapy risks compounding inequity unless access pathways are modernized. PROGRESS AND REMAINING BARRIERS Patients today have a better chance than ever of receiving a diagnosis — and in some cases, life-changing therapies. The Nordics in particular are leaders in integrated research and clinical models, building world-class diagnostics and centers of excellence. > Without reform, patients risk being left behind. But advances are not reaching everyone who needs them. Systemic barriers persist: * Disparities across Europe: Less than 10 percent of rare-disease patients have access to an approved treatment.[6] According to the Patients W.A.I.T. Indicator (2025), there are stark differences in access to new orphan medicines (or drugs that target rare diseases).[7] Of the 66 orphan medicines approved between 2020 and 2023, the average number available across Europe was 28. Among the Nordics, only Denmark exceeded this with 34. * Fragmented decision-making: Lengthy health technology assessments, regional variation and shifting political priorities often delay or restrict access. Across Europe, patients wait a median of 531 days from marketing authorization to actual availability. For many orphan drugs, the wait is even longer. In some countries, such as Norway and Poland, reimbursement decisions take more than two years, leaving patients without treatment while the burden of disease grows.[8] * Funding gaps: Despite more therapies on the market and greater technology to develop them, orphan medicines account for just 6.6 percent of pharmaceutical budgets and 1.2 percent of health budgets in Europe. Nordic countries — Sweden, Norway and Finland — spend a smaller share than peers such as France or Belgium. This reflects policy choices, not financial capacity.[9] If Europe struggles with access today, it risks being overwhelmed tomorrow. Rare-disease patients — already facing some of the longest delays — cannot afford for systems to fall farther behind. EASING THE BOTTLENECKS Policymakers, clinicians and patient advocates across the Nordics agree: the science is moving faster than the systems built to deliver it. Without reform, patients risk being left behind just as innovation is finally catching up to their needs. So what’s required? * Governance and reforms: Across the Nordics, rare-disease policy remains fragmented and time-limited. National strategies often expire before implementation, and responsibilities are divided among ministries, agencies and regional authorities. Experts stress that governments must move beyond pilot projects to create permanent frameworks — with ring-fenced funding, transparent accountability and clear leadership within ministries of health — to ensure sustained progress. * Patient organizations: Patient groups remain a driving force behind awareness, diagnosis and access, yet most operate on short-term or volunteer-based funding. Advocates argue that stable, structural support — including inclusion in formal policy processes and predictable financing — is critical to ensure patient perspectives shape decision-making on access, research and care pathways. * Health care pathways: Ann Nordgren, chair of the Rare Disease Fund and professor at Karolinska Institutet, notes that although Sweden has built a strong foundation — including Centers for Rare Diseases, Advanced Therapy (ATMP) and Precision Medicine Centers, and membership in all European Reference Networks — front-line capacity remains underfunded. “Government and hospital managements are not providing  resources to enable health care professionals to work hands-on with diagnostics, care and education,” she explains. “This is a big problem.” She adds that comprehensive rare-disease centers, where paid patient representatives collaborate directly with clinicians and researchers, would help bridge the gap between care and lived experience. * Research and diagnostics: Nordgren also points to the need for better long-term investment in genomic medicine and data infrastructure. Sweden is a leader in diagnostics through Genomic Medicine Sweden and SciLifeLab, but funding for advanced genomic testing, especially for adults, remains limited. “Many rare diseases still lack sufficient funding for basic and translational research,” she says, leading to delays in identifying genetic causes and developing targeted therapies. She argues for a national health care data platform integrating electronic records, omics (biological) data and patient-reported outcomes — built with semantic standards such as openEHR and SNOMED CT — to enable secure sharing, AI-driven discovery and patient access to their own data DELIVERING BREAKTHROUGHS Breakthroughs are coming. The question is whether Europe will be ready to deliver them equitably and at speed, or whether patients will continue to wait while therapies sit on the shelf. There is reason for optimism. The Nordic region has the talent, infrastructure and tradition of fairness to set the European benchmark on rare-disease care. But leadership requires urgency, and collaboration across the EU will be essential to ensure solutions are shared and implemented across borders. The need for action is clear: * Establish long-term governance and funding for rare-disease infrastructure. * Provide stable, structural support for patient organizations. * Create clearer, better-coordinated care pathways. * Invest more in research, diagnostics and equitable access to innovative treatments. Early access is not only fair — it is cost-saving. Patients treated earlier incur lower indirect and non-medical costs over time.[10] Inaction, by contrast, compounds the burden for patients, families and health systems alike. Science will forge ahead. The task now is to sustain momentum and reform systems so that no rare-disease patient in the Nordics, or anywhere in Europe, is left waiting. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] https://nordicrarediseasesummit.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/25.02-Nordic-Roadmap-for-Rare-Diseases.pdf [2] https://nordicrarediseasesummit.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/25.02-Nordic-Roadmap-for-Rare-Diseases.pdf [3] https://media.crai.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/28114611/CRA-Alexion-Quantifying-the-Burden-of-RD-in-Europe-Full-report-October2024.pdf [4] https://media.crai.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/28114611/CRA-Alexion-Quantifying-the-Burden-of-RD-in-Europe-Full-report-October2024.pdf [5] https://media.crai.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/28114611/CRA-Alexion-Quantifying-the-Burden-of-RD-in-Europe-Full-report-October2024.pdf [6] https://www.theparliamentmagazine.eu/partner/article/a-competitive-and-innovationled-europe-starts-with-rare-diseases? [7] https://www.iqvia.com/-/media/iqvia/pdfs/library/publications/efpia-patients-wait-indicator-2024.pdf [8] https://www.iqvia.com/-/media/iqvia/pdfs/library/publications/efpia-patients-wait-indicator-2024.pdf [9] https://copenhageneconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Copenhagen-Economics_Spending-on-OMPs-across-Europe.pdf [10] https://media.crai.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/28114611/CRA-Alexion-Quantifying-the-Burden-of-RD-in-Europe-Full-report-October2024.pdf Disclaimer POLITICAL ADVERTISEMENT * The sponsor is Alexion Pharmaceuticals * The entity ultimately controlling the sponsor: AstraZeneca plc * The political advertisement is linked to policy advocacy around rare disease governance, funding, and equitable access to diagnosis and treatment across Europe More information here.

LONDON — In February Britain’s cash-strapped Labour government cut international development spending — and barely anyone made a noise. The center-left party announced it would slice the country’s spending on aid down to only 0.3 percent of gross domestic income — from 0.5 percent — in order to fund a hike in defense spending. MPs, aid experts and officials have told POLITICO that the scale of the cuts is on a par with — or even exceeding — those of both the previous center-right Conservative government or the United States under Donald Trump. This leaves Britain’s development arm, once globally envied as a vehicle for poverty alleviation, a shadow of its former self. The move — prompted by U.S. demands to up its NATO spending, and mirroring the Trump administration’s move to gut its own USAID development budget — shocked Labour’s progressive MPs, supporters and backers in the aid sector. But unlike attempted cuts to British welfare spending, the real-world backlash was muted, with the resignation of Britain’s development minister prompting little further dissent or change in policy. There was no mutiny in parliament, and only limited domestic and international condemnation outside of an aid sector torn between making their voices heard — and keeping in Whitehall’s good books over slices of the shrinking pie. Some fear a return grab over the aid budget could still be on the cards — but that the government will find that there is little left to cut. Gideon Rabinowitz, director of policy and advocacy at Bond, the U.K. network for NGOs, warned that, instead of “reversing the cuts by the previous Conservative government, Labour has compounded them, and lives will be lost as a result.” “These cuts will further tarnish the U.K.’s reputation as it continues to be known as an unreliable global partner, breaking Labour’s manifesto commitment,” he warned. “The Conservatives started the fire, but instead of putting it out, this Labour government threw petrol on it.” ‘IT WAS THE PERFECT TIME TO DO IT’ When Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced the cut to international aid — a bid to save over £6 billion by 2027 — Labour MPs, including those who worked in the sector before being elected, were notably silent. The move followed a 2021 Conservative cut to aid spending — from 0.7 percent in the Tory brand-rebuilding David Cameron years down to 0.5 percent. At the time, Labour MPs had met that Tory cut with howls of outrage. This time it was different. Some were genuinely shocked, while others feared retribution from a Downing Street that had flexed its muscles at MPs who rebelled on what they saw as points of conscience. “No one was expecting it, so there was no opportunity to campaign around it,” said one Labour MP. “Literally none of us had any idea it was coming.” Remaining spending is largely mandatory contributions to organizations such as the World Bank. | Daniel Slim/AFP via Getty Images The same MP noted that there are around 50 Labour MPs from the new 2024 intake who had some form of development background before coming into parliament. Yet they were put “completely under the cosh” by Downing Street and government whips. “It was the perfect time to do it,” the MP said. A number of MPs who might have been vocal have since been made parliamentary private secretaries — the most junior government role. “They have basically gagged the people who would be most likely to be outspoken on it,” the MP above said. The department’s ministerial team is now more likely to be loyal to the Starmer project. “I just felt hurt, and wounded. We were stunned. None of us saw it coming,” said one MP from the 2024 cohort, adding: “They priced in that backlash wouldn’t come.” But they added: “If we were culpable so were NGOs, too inward-looking and focused on peripheral issues.” The lack of outcry from MPs would, however, seem to put them largely in step with the wider British public. Polling and focus groups from think tank More in Common suggest that despite the majority of voters thinking spending on international aid is the right thing to do in a variety of circumstances, only around 20 percent of the public think the budget was cut too much.  The second new-intake Labour MP quoted above said the policy was therefore an “easy thing to sell on the doorstep,” and “in my area, there’s not going to be shouting from the rooftops to spend more money on aid.” DIMINISHED AND DEMORALIZED The cuts to aid come at a time when Britain’s Foreign Office is undergoing a radical overhaul. While the department describes its plans as “more agile,” staff, programs and entire areas of focus are all ripe for cuts to save money. The department is looking to make redundancies for around 25 percent of staff based in the U.K. MPs have voiced concern that development staff will be among the first to make the jump due to the government’s shift away from aid. The department insists that no final decisions have been taken over the size and shape of the organization. Major cuts are expected across work on education, conflict, and WASH (Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene.) The government’s Integrated Security Fund — which funds key counter-terror programs abroad — is also looking to scale back work abroad which does not have a clear link to Britain’s national security. The British Council — a key soft-power organization viewed as helping combat Chinese and Russian reach across the world — told MPs it is in “real financial peril” and would be cutting its presence in 35 of the 97 countries it operates. The BBC’s World Service is seeing similar cuts to its global reach. The Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI), the watchdog for aid spending, is also not safe from the ax as the government continues its bonfire of regulators. The FCDO did not refute the expected pathway of cuts. Published breakdowns of spending allocations for the next three years are due to be published in the coming months, an official said. A review of Britain’s development and diplomacy policies conducted by economist Minouche Shafik — who has since been moved into Downing Street — sits discarded in the department. The government refuses to publish its findings. Aid spending was spared a repeat visit by Chancellor Rachel Reeves in her government-wide budget last month — but that hasn’t stopped MPs worrying about a second bite. | Pool Photo by Adrian Dennis via Getty Images The second 2024 intake MP quoted earlier in the piece said that following the U.S. decisions on aid and foreign policy “there was an expectation that the U.K., as a responsible international partner, as a leader on a lot of this stuff, would fill the gap to some extent, and then take more of a leadership role on it, and we’ve done the opposite.” NOTHING LEFT TO CUT Aid spending was spared a repeat visit by Chancellor Rachel Reeves in her government-wide budget last month — but that hasn’t stopped MPs worrying about a second bite. While few MPs or those in the aid sector feel Britain will ever return to the lofty heights of its 0.7 percent commitment, they predict there will be harder resistance if the government comes back for more. “I don’t think they’re going to try and do it again, as there’s no money left,” the second 2024 intake MP said. But they pointed out that a large portion of the remaining aid budget is spent on in-country costs such as accommodation for asylum seekers. Savings identified from the asylum budget would be sent back to the Treasury, rather than put back into the aid budget, they noted. Remaining spending is largely mandatory contributions to organizations such as the World Bank or the United Nations and would, they warned, involve “getting rid of international agreements and chopping up longstanding influence at big international institutions that we are one of the leading people in.” The United Nations is already facing its own funding crisis as it struggles to adjust to the global downturn in aid spending. British diplomat Tom Fletcher — who leads the UN’s humanitarian response — said earlier this year that the organization has been “forced into a triage of human survival,” adding: “The math is cruel, and the consequences are heartbreaking.” The government still has a commitment to returning to 0.7 percent of GNI “as soon as the fiscal circumstances allow.” The tests for this ramp back up were set out four years ago. Britain must not be borrowing for day-to-day spending and underlying debt must be falling. The last two budgets have forecast that the government will not meet these tests in this parliament. FARAGE CIRCLES In the meantime, Labour’s opponents feel emboldened to go further. Both the Conservatives and Reform UK have said that they would further cut the aid budget. The Tories have vowed to slice it down to 0.1 percent of GNI, while Nigel Farage’s Reform UK is eyeing fresh cuts of at least by £7-8 billion a year. A third 2024 Labour MP said that there was a degree of pressure among some colleagues to match the Conservatives’ 0.1 percent pledge. Though no country has gone as far as Uganda’s Idi Amin in setting up a “save Britain fund” for its “former colonial masters,” Britain’s departure on international aid gives space for other countries wanting to step up to further their own foreign policy aims. The space vacated by Britain and America has prompted warnings that China will step in, while countries newer to international development such as Gulf states could try and fill the void. Many of these nations are unlikely to ever fund the same projects as the U.K. and the U.S., forcing NGOs to look to alternate donors such as philanthropists to fund their work. “There’ll be a big, big gap, and it won’t be completely filled,” the second new intake MP said. An FCDO spokesperson said the department was undergoing “an unprecedented transformation,” and added: “We remain resolutely committed to international development and have been clear we must modernize our approach to development to reflect the changing global context. We will bring U.K. expertise and investment to where it is needed most, including global health solutions and humanitarian support.”

Disclaimer: POLITICAL ADVERTISEMENT * The sponsor is Polish Electricity Association (PKEE) * The advertisement is linked to policy advocacy on energy transition, electricity market design, and industrial competitiveness in the EU. More information here The European Union is entering a decisive decade for its energy transformation. With the international race for clean technologies accelerating, geopolitical tensions reshaping markets and competition from other major global economies intensifying, how the EU approaches the transition will determine its economic future. If managed strategically, the EU can drive competitiveness, growth and resilience. If mismanaged, Europe risks losing its industrial base, jobs and global influence.  > If managed strategically, the EU can drive competitiveness, growth and > resilience. If mismanaged, Europe risks losing its industrial base, jobs and > global influence. This message resonated strongly during PKEE Energy Day 2025, held in Brussels on October 14, which brought together more than 350 European policymakers, industry leaders and experts under the theme “Secure, competitive and clean: is Europe delivering on its energy promise?”. One conclusion was clear: the energy transition must serve the economy, not the other way around.  Laurent Louis Photography for PKEE The power sector: the backbone of Europe’s industrial future  The future of European competitiveness will be shaped by its power sector. Without a successful transformation of electricity generation and distribution, other sectors — from steel and chemicals to mobility and digital — will fail to decarbonize. This point was emphasized by Konrad Wojnarowski, Poland’s deputy minister of energy, who described electricity as “vital to development and competitiveness.”  “Transforming Poland’s energy sector is a major technological and financial challenge — but we are on the right track,” he said. “Success depends on maintaining the right pace of change and providing strong support for innovation.” Wojnarowski also underlined that only close cooperation between governments, industry and academia can create the conditions for a secure, competitive and sustainable energy future.  Flexibility: the strategic enabler  The shift to a renewables-based system requires more than capacity additions — it demands a fundamental redesign of how electricity is produced, managed and consumed. Dariusz Marzec, president of the Polish Electricity Association (PKEE) and CEO of PGE Polska Grupa Energetyczna, called flexibility “the Holy Grail of the power sector.”  Speaking at the event, Marzec also stated “It’s not about generating electricity continuously, regardless of demand. It’s about generating it when it’s needed and making the price attractive. Our mission, as part of the European economy, is to strengthen competitiveness and ensure energy security for all consumers – not just to pursue climate goals for their own sake. Without a responsible approach to the transition, many industries could relocate outside Europe.”  The message is clear: the clean energy shift must balance environmental ambition with economic reality. Europe cannot afford to treat decarbonization as an isolated goal — it must integrate it into a broader industrial strategy.  > The message is clear: the clean energy shift must balance environmental > ambition with economic reality. The next decade will define success  While Europe’s climate neutrality target for 2050 remains a cornerstone of EU policy, the next five to ten years will determine whether the continent remains globally competitive. Grzegorz Lot, CEO of TAURON Polska Energia and vice-president of PKEE, warned that technology is advancing too quickly for policymakers to rely solely on long-term milestones.  “Technology is evolving too fast to think of the transition only in terms of 2050. Our strategy is to act now — over the next year, five years, or decade,” Lot said. He pointed to the expected sharp decline in coal consumption over the next three years and called for immediate investment in proven technologies, particularly onshore wind.  Lot also raised concerns about structural barriers. “Today, around 30 percent of the price of electricity is made up of taxes. If we want affordable energy and a competitive economy, this must change,” he argued.  Consumers and regulation: the overlooked pillars  A successful energy transition cannot rely solely on investment and infrastructure. It also depends on regulatory stability and consumer participation. “Maintaining competitiveness requires not only investment in green technologies but also a stable regulatory environment and active consumer engagement,” Lot said.  He highlighted the potential of dynamic tariffs, which incentivize demand-side flexibility. “Customers who adjust their consumption to market conditions can pay below the regulated price level. If we want cheap energy, we must learn to follow nature — consuming and storing electricity when the sun shines or the wind blows.”  Strategic investments for resilience  The energy transition is more than a climate necessity. It is a strategic requirement for Europe’s security and economic autonomy. Marek Lelątko, vice-president of Enea, stressed that customer- and market-oriented investment is essential. “We are investing in renewables, modern gas-fired units and energy storage because they allow us to ensure supply stability, affordable prices and greater energy security,” he said.  Grzegorz Kinelski, CEO of Enea and vice-president of PKEE, added: “We must stay on the fast track we are already on. Investments in renewables, storage and CCGT [combined cycle gas turbine] units will not only enhance energy security but also support economic growth and help keep energy prices affordable for Polish consumers.”  The power sector must now be recognized as a strategic enabler of Europe’s industrial future — on par with semiconductors, critical raw materials and defense. As Dariusz Marzec puts it: “The energy transition is not a choice — it is a necessity. But its success will determine more than whether we meet climate targets. It will decide whether Europe remains competitive, prosperous and economically independent in a rapidly changing world.”  > The power sector must now be recognized as a strategic enabler of Europe’s > industrial future — on par with semiconductors, critical raw materials and > defense. Measurable progress, but more is needed  Progress is visible. The power sector accounts for around 30 percent of EU emissions but has already delivered 75 percent of all Emissions Trading System reductions. By 2025, 72 percent of Europe’s electricity will come from low-carbon sources, while fossil fuels will fall to a historic low of 28 percent. And in Poland, in June, renewable energy generation overtook coal for the first time in history.  Still, ambition alone is not enough. In his closing remarks, Marcin Laskowski, vice-president of PKEE and executive vice-president for regulatory affairs at PGE Polska Grupa Energetyczna, stressed the link between the power sector and Europe’s broader economic transformation. “The EU’s economic transformation will only succeed if the energy transition succeeds — safely, sustainably and with attractive investment conditions,” he said. “It is the power sector that must deliver solutions to decarbonize industries such as steel, chemicals and food production.”  A collective European project  The event in Brussels — with the participation of many high-level speakers, including Mechthild Wörsdörfer, deputy director general of DG ENER; Tsvetelina Penkova, member of the European Parliament and vice-chair of the Committee on Industry, Research and Energy; Thomas Pellerin-Carlin, member of the European Parliament; Catherine MacGregor; CEO of ENGIE and vice-president of Eurelectric; and Claude Turmes, former minister of energy of Luxembourg — highlighted a common understanding: the energy transition is not an isolated environmental policy, it is a strategic industrial project. Its success will depend on coordinated action across EU institutions, national governments and industry, as well as predictable regulation and financing.  Europe’s ability to remain competitive, resilient and prosperous will hinge on whether its power sector is treated not as a cost to be managed, but as a foundation to be strengthened. The next decade is a window of opportunity — and the choices made today will shape Europe’s economic landscape for decades to come. 

The Court of Justice of the European Union ruled Thursday that pets can be considered “baggage,” dealing a setback to pet owners seeking higher compensation for animals lost during international flights. The decision comes from a case in which a dog escaped from its pet-carrier at Buenos Aires airport in October 2019 and was never recovered. Its owner had sought €5,000 in compensation from Iberia airlines, which admitted the loss but argued that liability is limited under EU rules for checked baggage. The high court concluded that the 1999 Montreal Convention, which governs airline liability for baggage, applies to all items transported in the hold, including pets. While EU and Spanish laws recognize animals as sentient beings, the Luxembourg-based court emphasized that the Montreal Convention’s framework is focused on material compensation for lost or damaged items. Airlines are therefore not obligated to pay amounts exceeding the compensation caps set under the Montreal Convention unless passengers declare a “special interest” in the item, a mechanism designed for inanimate belongings. “The court finds that pets are not excluded from the concept of ‘baggage’. Even though the ordinary meaning of the word ‘baggage’ refers to objects, this alone does not lead to the conclusion that pets fall outside that concept,” the court said in a statement. Thursday’s ruling reaffirms the current framework, limiting airlines’ liability for lost pets unless passengers make a special declaration to raise coverage. For airlines operating in Europe, it offers legal certainty and shields them from larger claims. The court’s judgment will guide national courts in balancing international air transport law with EU animal welfare standards.

LONDON — It was June 2019, and the president of the United States was taking tea with the future British king.  The meeting between Donald Trump and then Prince Charles was scheduled to last 15 minutes. It stretched to an hour and a half.   Trump could barely get a word in edgeways. Charles did “most of the talking,” the president told a TV interviewer the day after they met.   One topic dominated. “He is …” Trump said, hesitating momentarily, “… he is really into climate change.”  Without global action on the climate, Charles wrote back in 2010, the world is on “the brink of potential disaster.” At the London royal residence Clarence House during Trump’s first U.K. state visit, face-to-face with its most powerful inhabitant, Charles decided to speak on behalf of the planet.  It was tea with a side of climate catastrophe.   Six years on, the stage is set for Charles — now king — to try to sway the president again. A second term Trump — bolder, brasher, and no less destructive to global efforts to tackle climate change — is heading back to the U.K. for an unprecedented second state visit and to another meeting with the king. They meet at Windsor Castle on Wednesday.  In the years between the two visits — with extreme weather events, wildfires and flooding increasingly attributed to a changing climate — Charles’ convictions have only strengthened, say those who know him well.  “His views have not changed and will not change. If anything I think he feels it, probably, more strongly than ever,” said the broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby, a friend and biographer of the king. “It seems self-evident to me, therefore, that he would regard President Trump’s attitude towards climate change and the environment as potentially calamitous.”   But stakes are higher for the king in 2025 than in 2019. The meeting represents an extraordinary influencing opportunity for a monarch who has spent his life deploying “soft power” in the service of cherished environmental causes. But now he is head of state, any overtly political conversation about climate change risks stress-testing the U.K.’s constitutional settlement between government and monarch.  Charles has a duty, says constitutional expert Craig Prescott, to “support the [elected] government of the day in what they want to achieve in foreign relations.”  And “in a broad sense,” he added, “that means ‘getting on the good side of Trump.’”  The meeting between Donald Trump and then Prince Charles was scheduled to last 15 minutes. It stretched to an hour and a half. | Pool Photo by Toby Melville via Getty Images Labour’s focus on an ambitious green transition, though, gives the king some leeway to speak in favor of international climate action.  Both Dimbleby and Ian Skelly, a former speechwriter for Charles who co-wrote his 2010 book Harmony, expect him to do exactly that.  “I would be astonished if in this meeting, as at the last meeting , he does not raise the issue of climate change and biodiversity in any chance he has to speak privately to Trump,” said Dimbleby.   The king will be “diplomatic,” Dimbleby added, and would heed his “constitutional duty,” avoiding “saying anything that will allow Trump to think there is a bus ticket between him and the British government. … But he won’t avoid the issue. He cares about it too much.”  “He knows exactly where the limits are,” said Skelly. “He’s not going to start banging the table or anything. … He will outline his concerns in general terms, I have no doubt about that — and perhaps warn the most powerful person in the world about the dangers of doing nothing.”  Buckingham Palace and Downing Street declined to comment when asked whether the king would raise climate with Trump, or whether this has been discussed in preparations for the state visit.  HAVE YOU READ MY BOOK, MR. PRESIDENT?  In the time since that tea at Clarence House, the President has shown no sign that Charles’ entreaties on the part of the planet had any impact. (And they didn’t have much effect at the time, by one insider’s account. Trump complained the conversation “had been terrible,” wrote former White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham in her memoir.  “‘Nothing but climate change,’ he groused, rolling his eyes.”)  The U.S. has once again withdrawn from the Paris climate accords. Trump’s Department of Energy has rejected established climate science. America’s fossil fuel firms and investors — some of whom helped Trump get elected — have been invited to “Drill, baby, drill.”  With America out of the fight, the world’s chances of avoiding the direst consequences of climate change have taken a serious blow.  Charles, on the other hand, has only grown more convinced that climate change, unchecked, will cause “inevitable catastrophes,” as he put it in Harmony, his cri-de-coeur on saving the planet.  Dimbleby predicted that, this time around, one subtle way allowing the king to make his point would be to gift Trump a copy of that book — a treatise on environmentalism, traditional wisdom and sustainability that diagnoses “a spiritual void” in modern societies, a void which has “opened the way for what many people see as an excessive personal focus.”  “I’m sure [the king] won’t let [Trump] out of his sight before giving him a copy,” said Dimbleby. Chinese Premier (and Trump’s main geopolitical rival) Xi Jinping already has a copy, said Skelly.  But the meeting comes at a time when Prime Minister Keir Starmer — boxed in politically by the need to keep the U.S. on side for the sake of trade, Ukraine and European security — has avoided openly criticizing the Trump administration’s attacks on climate science or its embrace of fossil fuels.  His government will not want the king to say or do anything that upsets transatlantic relations. Even when the president, sitting next to Starmer, trashed wind energy ­— the main pillar of U.K. decarbonization plans — on a July visit to his Turnberry golf course in Scotland, the prime minister mustered no defense beyond quietly insisting the U.K. was pursuing a “mix” of energy sources.  If Trump starts railing against windmills again in his chat to the king, he might get a (slightly) more robust response, predicted Skelly. “The response to that will be: ‘What else are we going to do without destroying the Earth?’ That’s the question he’ll come back with, I’d imagine.”  HOW TO TALK TO TRUMP ABOUT CLIMATE  Some who have worked with Trump think that, because of the unique place Britain and the royals occupy in his worldview, Charles stands a better chance than most in getting the president to listen.  “President Trump isn’t going to become an environmentalist over a cup of tea with the king. But I think he’ll definitely hear him out — in a way that maybe he wouldn’t with other folks,” said Michael Martins, founder of the firm Overton Advisory, who was a political and economic specialist at the U.S. embassy in London during the last state visit.  “He likes the pageantry. He likes the optics of it. … Engaging with a king, Trump will feel he’s on the same footing. He will give him more of a hearing than if it was, I don’t know … Ed Miliband.”  Trump has even declared his “love” for Charles.  The royal admiration comes from Trump’s mother. Scottish-born Mary Anne Trump “loved the Queen,” Trump said in July. The ratings-obsessed president appears to consider the late monarch the ultimate TV star. “Whenever the queen was on television, [my mother] wanted to watch,” he said during July’s Turnberry visit.    The king could benefit from an emotional link to First Lady Melania Trump, too. She was present at the 2019 meeting and sat next to Charles at the state banquet that year. In her 2024 memoir, Melania says they “engaged in an interesting conversation about his deep-rooted commitment to environmental conservation.”  She and Trump “exchange letters with King Charles to this day,” Melania wrote. TAKING TEA AT THE END OF THE WORLD  The king will have plenty of chances to make his case.   A state visit provides “quite a lot of time to talk” for monarch and president, said one former senior British government official, granted anonymity to discuss the royals and their relationship with government.  There will be a state banquet plus at least one private meeting in between, they said. Charles may also be able to sneak some choice phrases into any speech he gives at the banquet. Trump’s chief U.K. political ally is Nigel Farage, whose anti-net-zero Reform UK currently lead opinion polls. | John Keeble/Getty Images The king receives regular briefing papers from the Foreign Office. As the meeting looms, the same person suggested, he may be preparing thoughts on how to combine a lifetime’s campaigning and reading with those briefings, to shape the opportunity to lobby a president.  “He will be reading his foreign policy material with even more interest than normal. He will probably be thinking about whether there is any way in which he can pitch his arguments to Trump that will shift him — a little bit — toward putting his shoulder to the climate change wheel,” the former senior official said.    “He won’t say: ‘You, America, should be doing stuff.’ He will say, ‘Internationally I think it is important we make progress on this and we need to be more ambitious.’ Or he might express concern about some of the impacts of climate change on global weather and all these extreme weather events.”  However he approaches it, 2019 showed how tough it is to move the dial.  After that conversation, Trump told broadcaster Piers Morgan that he thought Charles’ views were “great” and that he had “totally listened to him.” But then he demonstrated that — on the crucial points of how fossil fuels, carbon emissions and climate change are affecting the planet — he totally hadn’t.    “He wants to make sure future generations have climate that is good climate, as opposed to a disaster,” Trump said. “And I agree,” he added, before promptly pivoting to an apparent non-sequitur about the U.S. having “crystal clean” water. It was a typically Trumpian obfuscation. Asked about the king’s views during the Turnberry visit, Trump said: “Every time I met with him, he talked about the environment, how important it is. I’m all for it. I think that’s great.”  In nearly the same breath, he ranted about wind energy being “a disaster.”  GOOD LUCK, CHARLIE  “It is difficult, if not impossible, to see [Trump] change his views on climate change, because they’re not informed by his understanding of the science or consequences, but rather by naked politics,” said leading U.S. climate scientist Michael Mann in emailed remarks.   And Trump will come to the meeting prepared, said Martins, the former U.S. Embassy official. “Trump will receive the full briefing on the king’s views on environment. He won’t be going into that blind. He’ll know exactly what the king has said over his career and what his views are on it and how it affects American interests. I don’t anticipate him being surprised by anything the king says.”   He added: “Bashing net zero and President Biden … gets [Trump] political wins.”    To Charles’ long-standing domestic critics, it all highlights the pointlessness of his position.  Donald Trump has even declared his “love” for King Charles III. | Pool Photo by Richard Pohle via Getty Images “He is bound by these constitutional expectations that he does nothing that will upset the apple cart [in U.K./U.S. relations],” said Graham Smith, chief executive of campaign group Republic, which calls for the abolition of the monarchy. “If he was elected, he’d have a lot more freedom to say what he actually wants.”  “Soft power is a highly questionable concept,” added Smith. It’s only useful, he argued, when backed by something Charles lacks and Trump has by the bucket-load: “Hard power.”  And time may be running out for Charles to deploy even soft power in the climate fight.   Trump’s chief U.K. political ally is Nigel Farage, whose anti-net-zero Reform UK currently lead opinion polls. If British voters pick Reform at the next election, Charles’ potential advocacy would be restrained by a government opposed to action on climate change.  So how far will Charles go to seize his moment?  He wrote in Harmony: “If we continue to be deluded by the increasingly irresponsible clamour of sceptical voices that doubt man-made climate change, it will soon be too late to reverse the chaos we have helped to unleash.” He feared “failing in my duty to future generations and to the Earth itself” if he did not speak up.   Skelly, the former speechwriter who co-wrote the book, predicted that Charles would walk a fine diplomatic line — but was “not someone to sit on his hands or to remain silent.”   “He was warning about these things 30 years ago and nobody was listening. … He feels increasingly frustrated that time is running out.   “I’d love to be a fly on the wall — because it will be a fascinating conversation.”

LONDON — Britain’s flagship Online Safety Act has “major holes” and won’t protect against future outbreaks of public disorder fueled by misinformation, according to a report out today from the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee. Last July three young girls were killed in a knife attack in Southport and fast-spreading misinformation about the attacker fueled riots in the U.K. At that point the Online Safety Act was not yet in force, but the committee’s report says it “would have made little difference” if it had been, as it’s lacking in any meaningful enforcement powers against misinformation. The Act is still not fully in force yet and is being implemented in stages, with the next major milestone coming on July 25, when in-scope service providers will need to take extra steps to protect children online or risk penalties.  Now, even before the Act has been fully implemented, the committee is reopening a debate on legislating against “harmful but legal” content. Earlier drafts of the Online Safety Act imposed a duty on platforms to tackle material deemed “legal but harmful” to adults, but these provisions were stripped out of the bill under the previous Conservative government amid concerns about freedom of speech, to the dismay of online safety campaigners. Committee chair and Labour MP Chi Onwurah insisted that the report’s call for the government to essentially return to the drawing board doesn’t mean reopening the same can of worms on online safety versus freedom of expression.  “We have seen on the streets of Sunderland and Hartlepool and Southport the physical realization of the consequences of online misinformation, and I think that has truly concentrated the issue in people’s minds,” she told POLITICO in an interview.  The Act barely deals with misleading content, yet “ministers were reaching for [it] and saying it would address the terrible scenes we saw on the streets of this country over [last] summer,” Onwurah said, a case of “expecting something from Ofcom it wasn’t going to deliver.” The media regulator conceded in April that even the new False Communications Offence introduced by the Act “will not be easy for a company to identify,” and many legal experts have said the threshold is too high for charges to be successfully brought.  CONFUSION PLUS BIG TECH LOBBYING Part of the problem with the Online Safety Act as it currently stands is that it lacks “principles-based regulation,” Onwurah said, leading to confusion and contradiction between regulators and the government.  The Act “wasn’t based on clear principles. It took seven years to thrash out different issues without establishing what [the] principles are,” she said. Lobbying by Big Tech probably hasn’t helped either, Onwurah said: “We didn’t get a clear response [from Ofcom] in terms of how many times Ofcom has met with Big Tech companies as opposed to how many times they’ve met with user and consumer advocacy groups.”  Committee chair and Labour MP Chi Onwurah insisted that the report’s call for the government to essentially return to the drawing board doesn’t mean reopening the same can of worms on online safety versus freedom of expression. | Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA Technology Secretary Peter Kyle has also come under fire from campaigners in recent months for appearing too cosy with Big Tech. The government is starting to recognize that it “hasn’t always been listening to the diversity of voices it needs to,” Onwurah said.  “If you’re only listening to what Big Tech says, you will be told ‘it’s not possible to do this, it’s not possible to regulate that, it’s not possible to deprioritize harmful content,’” she said. One of the committee’s recommendations is that the government should compel platforms to “algorithmically demote” fact-checked misinformation “where it has the potential to cause significant harm.”  Onwurah said she was optimistic the government would sit up and listen given the strength of public feeling.  “Ultimately, political will has its legitimate roots in the views and interests of working people in this country.” 

As the Trump administration identified pro-Palestinian academics to target for deportation, it relied heavily on an anonymously-run pro-Israel website that has been criticized for doxxing, according to newly unsealed court documents and testimony at an ongoing trial. To support President Donald Trump’s deportation drive, the Department of Homeland Security assembled a “tiger team” of intelligence analysts who built dossiers on about 100 foreign students and scholars engaged in pro-Palestinian activity, the records show. More than 75 of those people were identified by the shadowy website Canary Mission, according to deposition testimony unveiled this week in a case challenging the Trump administration’s targeting of pro-Palestinian scholars. The federal judge currently overseeing a trial in the case unsealed the deposition transcripts, which contain hundreds of pages of sworn testimony by administration officials about the campus deportation effort. Some of the details in the transcripts were fleshed out in open court Wednesday as administration officials began to be called to the witness stand. In response to a query from POLITICO, Canary Mission said in a statement Wednesday that it “had no contact with this administration or the previous administration.” White House spokespeople did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Immigration lawyers and pro-Palestinian activists have previously suspected that immigration authorities were plucking the names of academics from the Canary Mission site and seeking to revoke their visas with little independent research. But the depositions reveal for the first time how broadly Trump officials relied on the website. Testifying at the trial Wednesday, Homeland Security official Peter Hatch acknowledged the site’s significance to the Trump administration effort, but said any information taken from the site was independently verified. Canary Mission says its goal is to expose anti-Israel and antisemitic sentiment on college campuses. It posts photos and social media profiles of pro-Palestinian academics and logs their protest activities. Critics accuse the group of McCarthy-like tactics by painting pro-Palestinian activists as antisemitic based on thin or irrelevant evidence. Canary Mission has not revealed its funders or details of who operates it. “We document individuals and groups that promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews. We investigate hatred across the political spectrum, including the far-right, far-left and anti-Israel activists,” the group said. The unsealed court records also reveal for the first time how deeply involved the Trump White House — in particular top Trump aide Stephen Miller — was in the effort to revoke the visas of pro-Palestinian academics studying and teaching at American colleges. The acting chief of the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs, John Armstrong, testified that he’d had “at least a dozen” conversations with White House officials about the student deportation drive and that Miller was on interagency conference calls related to the issue “at one point at least weekly.” According to Armstrong, the conference calls with Miller lasted about 15 minutes to an hour and involved other officials from the Homeland Security Council, the State Department and Homeland Security Department. The extent of the White House’s involvement in singling out particular students remains unclear because the White House asserted executive privilege to conceal the details of Miller’s exchanges with agency officials. Still, the revelations shed new light on the Trump administration’s aggressive efforts to target, detain and deport foreign academics who are living and working in the country legally. For months, Secretary of State Marco Rubio appeared to be the face of those efforts: He invoked a rarely used provision of immigration law to try to deport targeted scholars — including Mahmoud Khalil and Rumesya Ozturk — by declaring their presence in the U.S. in conflict with American foreign policy interests. ADMIN OFFICIALS REVEAL NEW DETAILS The detailed testimony about the administration’s controversial bid to deport pro-Palestinian academics emerged in more than 1,000 pages of documents and deposition transcripts made public as the trial challenging the policy began in federal court in Boston this week. U.S. District Judge William Young is presiding over the trial and will decide whether the Trump administration violated the First Amendment by targeting academics based on their speech and political views. The foreign-born academics were living and studying at American universities legally, either on student visas or green cards. But the administration has tried to revoke their legal status and force them to leave the country. Courts so far have intervened to prevent the immediate deportations of Khalil, Ozturk and others. Hatch offered new insight into the roles of outside groups in targeting academics. Called as a witness Wednesday at the ongoing trial, Hatch confirmed the key role of Canary Mission in the agency’s intelligence work related to deportations. “Many of the names or even most of the names came from that website, but we were getting names and leads from many different websites,” said Hatch, assistant director for intelligence at Homeland Security Investigations. “We received information on the same protesters from multiple sources, but Canary Mission was the most inclusive. The lists came in from all different directions.” Hatch added that he believed he was told verbally that his team needed to review the Canary Mission website and that it contained reports on more than 5,000 people. “Which shows why we needed a tiger team,” the Homeland Security official said. “A normal unit or section or group of analysts operating in a normal organizational construct couldn’t handle that workload.” Analysts assigned to a “counterterrorism intelligence” unit, among others, were re-assigned to the “tiger team,” Hatch said. Hatch also insisted that any information his analysts obtained from the Canary Mission site had to be corroborated before being included in official reports. “Canary Mission is not a part of the U.S. government,” he said. “It is not information that we would take as an authoritative source. We don’t work with the individuals who create the website. I don’t know who creates the website.” In his deposition, Hatch said “more than 75 percent” of the names his “tiger team” prepared reports on came from Canary Mission, and he believed others came from from Betar US, a group that uses the slogan “Jews fight back” and profiles pro-Palestinian activists on its website. In February, the Anti-Defamation League added Betar to a list of extremist groups, alleging that the organization “openly embraces Islamophobia and harasses Muslims online and in person.” Betar did not respond to a request for comment. However, within days of Trump’s return to the White House in January, Betar announced on X and in comments to news outlets that it had provided a “deport list” to Trump administration officials. The trial stems from a lawsuit filed in March by the American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association, claiming that the “ideological deportation” policy violates the First Amendment. Administration officials called to give sworn depositions in the lead-up to the trial struggled to give precise definitions of what sorts of advocacy or activism would be deemed antisemitism or support for Hamas, which the U.S. has designated as a terrorist group. Both grounds were primary justifications for the deportation drive and parallel efforts to deny visas to foreigners seeking to study or continue their studies in the U.S. Armstrong said in his deposition that a frequent chant at pro-Palestinian rallies, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” could be regarded as disqualifying for a U.S. visa because it could be viewed as calling for the destruction of Israel. “It could be in my opinion, because by definition, it means the elimination of Israel and the Israeli people,” the State Department official said. Armstrong went on to say that a call for institutional divestment from Israel, an arms embargo against Israel or an end to military aid to Israel could all be problematic. He added that calling the country an “apartheid state” would “probably” be considered anti-Israel activity. However, Armstrong said, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza would not be held against a visa applicant. “The president has called for a ceasefire. So no,” said Armstrong, who is scheduled to testify at the trial on Friday. Asked to explain what sort of anti-Americanism could result in denial of a visa under new Trump policies, Armstrong replied: “It would be a blanket condemnation: All Americans are fat and evil. It would not be: I hate hot dogs.” A MONTHSLONG DEPORTATION EFFORT The new details from Trump administration officials also show many aspects of the policy remain a work in progress, nearly six months after Trump returned to office promising a crackdown on foreign students he regards as troublemakers. Armstrong said he was unaware of any instructions given to consular staff about how to determine if particular speech is antisemitic. And the State Department official who oversees visa issuance, Stuart Wilson, was asked during his deposition two weeks ago whether his office has “been given any guidance about whether a student’s activism is consistent with their student visa.” “It’s still under discussion,” Wilson replied. Early reports about the student deportation drive cast Rubio as the key player in the effort and left unclear how officials at the State and Homeland Security Departments were deciding which of the roughly 1.1 million foreign students in the U.S. to zero in on for potential expulsion. Rubio has suggested a higher figure for the total number of student visas revoked than those discussed in the newly released depositions. During a March press conference, he said the number could be over 300. Rubio has also reinforced the idea that he is pivotal to the project. “Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa,” Rubio said. “Might be more than 300 at this point. Might be more. We do it every day.” However, administration officials said government discussions about revocations of visas for academics are sometimes grouped into broader discussions about revoking visas for others. At the trial this week before Young, a Reagan appointee, several professors testified about the chilling effect the administration’s crackdown has had. A Harvard philosophy professor who is a German citizen, Bernhard Nickel, testified Tuesday that due to fear instilled by the high-profile arrests of pro-Palestinian academics, he stopped attending protests, signing public letters and traveling internationally. “I actually just decided on a blanket policy that I would keep my head down completely,” Nickel said. Nickel said he defended some student activists at Harvard against university discipline. But, on the witness stand, he also expressed concern that aspects of the pro-Palestinian protests had sometimes veered into antisemitism, particularly one in Harvard Yard that featured a crude caricature of Harvard President Alan Garber, who is Jewish. “That’s just a very well known antisemitic trope,” he said. Young, who is hearing the case without a jury, shot down one aspect of the case plaintiffs hoped to present: evidence that American-citizen academics’ right to hear speech by their non-citizen colleagues was being impaired by Trump’s deportation policies. Young also raised doubts Wednesday about whether the suit brought by the academic groups can or does challenge the rarely invoked law protecting foreign-policy interests that Rubio used to set in motion many of the student deportations. “I don’t know that your clients have standing to challenge it, as the statute has never been used against any of them,” the judge said.

Russia announced Monday it would ban human rights NGO Amnesty International in the Kremlin’s latest crackdown on civil society groups opposing its war in Ukraine. The federal prosecutor’s office declared in a statement that Amnesty was the “center of preparation of global Russophobic projects” and was in league with Ukraine, which Russia has waged war on for more than a decade. “They justify the crimes of Ukrainian neo-Nazis, call for an increase in their funding, insist on the political and economic isolation of our country,” the prosecutor’s office said, designating Amnesty “undesirable,” meaning it cannot operate in Russia. Since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, Amnesty — which says it campaigns for human rights worldwide — has documented Russian war crimes and called for the perpetrators to be held to account.   But the group has also been critical of Ukraine at times, with the head of its Kyiv arm quitting in 2022 after the publication of a controversial report accusing Ukraine’s military of violating international law and endangering civilians with its wartime tactics. The report earned the organization a rebuke from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy; Amnesty later apologized for the “distress” it caused but stood by its findings. The group’s Moscow office was already shuttered by Russian authorities in the early days of the all-out invasion against Ukraine. Other advocacy groups and NGOs, such as Human Rights Watch and Hollywood actor George Clooney’s nonprofit foundation, have also been banned from operating in Russia. Moscow has branded dozens of foreign charities, think tanks and civil society groups “undesirable” since 2015, when it passed a law allowing the government to target groups that are critical of President Vladimir Putin’s regime, and has ramped up domestic suppression as its international belligerence intensifies.

BRUSSELS — Europe’s centrist political forces have an uneasy feeling that the European People’s Party is abandoning them for the far right. The center-right group — Europe’s largest political family and part of the centrist coalition that has dominated EU politics since the bloc’s inception — has been leading a political campaign against nongovernmental organizations using EU grant money to influence policymaking. By targeting civil society organizations, critics say the EPP has embraced a cause associated with the right-wing fringes of politics, in a move that is reshaping EU politics as far-right parties make significant ground across EU countries. The EPP dismisses such claims. It says it is simply demanding more transparency in how nonprofits use EU taxpayer money, having accused the European Commission of paying NGOs to lobby other EU institutions on its behalf to promote environmental laws. But others disagree, including the two other biggest centrist groups in the European Parliament — the liberal Renew Europe group and the center-left Socialists and Democrats — who believe the campaign is an attempt to restrict NGOs’ influence in EU policymaking, a cause of the far right. It’s driving a wedge between the EPP and its long-standing coalition partners — a shaky partnership that has nevertheless endured till now, keeping EU politics on the center ground. “[T]he EPP is embracing an agenda of the extreme right,” Valérie Hayer, who leads Renew, said of the group’s campaign against NGOs, which she described as “deeply worrying” and “obviously meant to shrink political and democratic space for NGO work.” Iratxe García, group chair of the S&D, said that “the right-wing forces which are currently targeting the NGOs have a clear and broader political intention that goes far beyond” and aims to “undermine the Green Deal, transparency, gender equality, LGBTQ+ rights, and fundamental freedoms, all while delegitimizing civil society’s role in democracy.” The EPP’s probe comes amid a never-slowing surge of autocratic forces making headway in EU countries including Hungary and Slovakia, but also the Netherlands, Germany and France. Emboldened by Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. election last November, populist forces are increasingly legitimized, in EU capitals and in Brussels. And that’s putting civil society organizations — whose role in the democratic policymaking process is enshrined in the Treaty on the European Union — at risk, according to a dozen lawmakers, policy experts and activists that POLITICO spoke to.  The Greens, who are further to the left than the S&D on many issues and were a significant force in the last Parliament, draw comparisons with the U.S. under President Trump, who has slashed billions of dollars of government funding for NGOs since he came to office in January. German EPP member Peter Liese said he recognizes “the very important role of NGOs” in the EU decision-making process. | Ronald Wittek/EPA “There is a certain Trumpification of the EPP, not just at the European level, but we see it at national level as well,” said German Green lawmaker Daniel Freund. “Them going after civil society is one aspect of that,” he added. Other aspects include more collaboration with the far-right by, for example, “vot[ing] for their amendments.” Conservative MEPs reject the idea that the group is collaborating with the far right.  “The EPP is absolutely out of these games of the Patriots or other extremists from the right side,” said Tomáš Zdechovský, a Czech MEP and coordinator for the EPP group in the budgetary control committee.  But according to another Parliament official, granted anonymity to speak candidly, “⁠the whole initiative started with the Patriots and … a big part, a worryingly big part of the EPP fancies the idea.” The Patriots for Europe group did not respond to POLITICO’s request for comment. A DANGEROUS DANCE Scrutinizing NGOs is the latest in a series of political fights in which the EPP has been courting parties much further to the right to serve its own interest — breaking the so-called cordon sanitaire, which historically prevented centrist groups from making alliances with the far right.   Right-wing gains in last year’s European election mean the EPP can now pass legislation in coalition with groups to its right, without the support of Renew or the S&D. It’s “the most dangerous dance in European politics,” said Daniel Kelemen, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University and an expert in EU law. Anti-democratic forces “can only really prevail … when they find centrist parties who are willing to … do deals with them and are willing to sell out their democratic values for power,” he said. Increasingly however, this dance to assert its power within Parliament has come at the expense of the very European values that the EPP itself once championed. “There is a double discourse from the EPP, saying it is seeking transparency on NGOs’ funding but actually using this narrative to attack them,” said Faustine Bas-Defossez, director at the European Environmental Bureau, an NGO.  The EPP has been “radicalizing” its narrative to try to win back far-right votes in the EU election, she added, and flirted with the idea of collaborating with far-right groups in Parliament since. “It is a dangerous game where the EPP risks undermining the democratic fabric it claims to defend.” That report had a limited impact, and its publication was derailed which came just as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán pitched a controversial law in Hungary aimed at cracking down against civil society. | Pool Photo by Nicolas Tucat via EPA The EPP rejects that it’s going after NGOs, but rather “demand[s] greater transparency in the relationship between nongovernmental organizations and EU institutions,” said the EPP’s Zdechovský. “We firmly believe that if the EU is to remain trustworthy, it must uphold impartiality and resilience against any form of pressure — whether from the business sector or so-called civil society,” he added.  German EPP member Peter Liese said he recognizes “the very important role of NGOs” in the EU decision-making process. “However, there have been clear instances of misconduct by some individual Commission officials and some NGOs,” he said, adding “it is encouraging that steps have already been taken to prevent such incidents in the future.”  An EPP group spokesperson also told POLITICO that any claims that their probe into NGO funding echoes other political groups’ agendas is “utter nonsense.”  OLD GRIEVANCES It’s not the first time the EPP has voiced its concerns about how Brussels funds NGOs. Back in 2017, German conservative MEP Markus Pieper authored a report calling for increasing the traceability of EU funds and for NGOs to disclose other sources of funding. Pieper also suggested that some Commission departments were “exploit[ing] the distribution of EU grants for their own political agenda.” Ultimately that report had a limited impact, and its publication was derailed because of timing — which came just as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán pitched a controversial law in Hungary aimed at cracking down against civil society. That prompted the EPP to try and distance itself from anti-NGO discourse championed by Orbán’s Fidesz party.  But what really changed things was a fight over new EU rules to boost nature protection across the bloc, during which the EPP suffered a crushing political defeat when it failed to block the adoption of the new rules. “The Nature Restoration Law was a turning point,” recalled the EEB’s Bas-Defossez. “It created some frustration within the group, not just over the outcome, but over the visible public mobilization around it. Since then, we’ve seen the EPP shift its political agenda in a worrying way: targeting civil society actors who advocate for environmental ambition.” NGOs and scientists spent months pushing back against misleading claims — promoted by the EPP on social media — that the rules would hurt farmers and threaten the EU’s long-term food security.  The legislation was narrowly adopted in plenary after few EPP members broke ranks. It was a significant political victory for former Green Deal chief Frans Timmermans, the headline defender of the legislation; and an equally significant defeat for EPP leader Manfred Weber as he was trying to conquer the farmers’ vote and win back voters from the far right just a few months ahead of the EU election. The fight left the EPP feeling wounded and bitter — but the group eventually came back swinging.  Germany’s incoming conservative Chancellor Friedrich Merz was criticized for his inquiry targeting NGOs. | Clemens Bilan/EPA Now, similar demands and accusations to Pieper’s are being reiterated by German EPP members including Monika Hohlmeier. As a close ally of Weber, she has been spearheading a push in the Parliament’s budgetary control committee to investigate EU funding contracts, flagged alleged irregularities and accused the Commission of paying NGOs to lobby other EU decision-makers on its behalf. Hohlmeier did not respond to POLITICO’s requests for an interview.  Since then, POLITICO revealed that NGOs had been told by the Commission to change their grant applications to comply with new guidelines — or risk losing their funding. “They were very strict about the [2025] annual grant, removed any mention of talking to MEPs,” said a senior policy officer at an NGO, granted anonymity to speak freely about the confidential contract. MEPs from other right-wing groups were quick to chime in on the topic. EU-funded NGOs are “a network of political activists who want to implement the Commission’s policies and left-wing ideologies,” the far-right Patriots for Europe group said in a statement, after the European Court of Auditors slammed the Commission for not properly monitoring how funds are distributed to NGOs, especially if they are used for lobbying activities. Changes to the EU’s transparency rules in 2021 allowing self-declared noncommercial organizations not to disclose how much money they spend on lobbying have indeed made it harder to track the extent of some NGOs’ advocacy activities. Collectively, NGOs declare spending €159 million on EU lobbying efforts according to EU data compiled by LobbyFacts. However, more than 70 percent of nongovernmental organizations in the EU Transparency Register are registered as noncommercial, and therefore don’t disclose any spending. NGOs fear that these political grievances will yield further cutbacks in the upcoming EU budget negotiations. “It is a very legitimate fear and I carry personally that worry too,” the Parliament official quoted earlier added.  THE NEW BOOGEYMAN In Europe, autocratic governments and far-right political forces have been targeting civil society groups and their donors for years. That strategy has seeped into EU politics.  “Attempts to discredit funding for civil society organizations [are] not new,” said Carlotta Besozzi, director at Civil Society Europe, but “the current attacks take place in a much more difficult climate” in which “much stronger far-right political groups” are operating in the European Parliament.  Earlier this month, Slovakia’s parliament passed a controversial law targeting NGOs’ funding structures, after its populist Prime Minister Robert Fico vowed to end “NGO supremacy” in the country after his reelection in 2023.   In Hungary, Orbán’s government has often cracked down on NGOs and other groups critical of his government with legislation aimed at slashing their funding and liberties.  Orbán famously has an axe to grind with Hungarian-born U.S. billionaire and philanthropist Geroge Soros, who founded the Open Society Foundations and supports civil society groups and grassroots movements. During the first Trump administration, anti-Soros sentiment in Eastern European countries grew.  Back in February, Germany’s incoming conservative Chancellor Friedrich Merz was criticized for his inquiry targeting NGOs. And increasingly, the discourse against NGO funding is seeping into politics in Brussels, where far-right parties are targeting the EU itself as one of the biggest donors to NGOs. For Georgetown University’s Kelemen, “What we’re seeing is, in a sense, a translation of that script to the EU level, where instead of Soros being the boogeyman, it’s the EU.”

Robert Benson is the associate director for National Security and International Policy at the Center for American Progress. Earlier this month, nearly one million Americans flooded the streets to protest U.S. President Donald Trump’s authoritarian rhetoric, as well as his radical playbook for dismantling the nation’s democratic institutions. From Washington to Wichita, demonstrators carried signs warning American democracy stands at a tipping point. They’re right. Anyone who has lived through a democracy’s collapse knows the score: Authoritarians often come to power off a wave of public anger. Their early popularity can delay resistance, making it feel risky or even anti-democratic — but that’s precisely when the real damage gets done. The longer a resistance movement hesitates, the harder democracy falls. We know from decades of research on democratic backsliding that timing and scale matter. Meaning, there’s a brief window for action before a would-be authoritarian consolidates power, and that window closes faster than most realize. Also, mass mobilization alone isn’t enough to counteract the momentum; it must be coupled with real institutional pushback. In Hungary, for example, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s ruling Fidesz party steadily hollowed out the country’s democratic institutions, capturing courts, media and universities, while their opponents hesitated. Hungarian opposition leaders now admit they moved too slowly. Many feared resisting too early on might appear anti-democratic, so they waited. They didn’t know just how fast the system would erode. In Turkey, meanwhile, we saw how mass protests can signal resistance, but don’t always stop the slide toward authoritarianism — at least, not in isolation. Even enormous demonstrations, like the 2013 Gezi Park protests, didn’t prevent President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s consolidation of power. And once authoritarian movements capture institutions, the game changes. Resistance becomes harder, and far more dangerous. Years later, Turkey now stands at the brink of what democracy scholars call the authoritarian endgame: The arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, Erdoğan’s most formidable rival, signals a new benchmark in the country’s continued backslide. Finally, in Serbia, citizens have been taking to the streets in recent months to challenge President Aleksander Vučić’s rule. But years of inaction and a fragmented opposition have similarly allowed him to tighten his grip. And much like in Turkey, while civic momentum has kept democratic ideals alive, it hasn’t been enough to reverse the damage on its own. Now, let’s consider countries where mobilization did make a difference: In Slovakia, for instance, after the 2018 murder of journalist Ján Kuciak, mass protests forced the prime minister’s resignation and ushered a reformist president into power. In Guatemala, weekly rallies against government corruption led Congress to strip the sitting president of immunity in 2015. He resigned days later. And in Romania, mass protests in 2017 against attempts to weaken anti-corruption laws forced lawmakers to reverse course. These efforts worked not just because of public anger but because mobilization aligned with elite defections, bringing pressure to bear on institutions. This same civic energy is now beginning to stir in the U.S., as seen in the recent “Hands Off!” protests. The size and passion of these demonstrations matter. They suggest Americans are alert to the present danger and are ready to act. This same civic energy is now beginning to stir in the U.S., as seen in the recent “Hands Off!” protests. | Jacek Boczarski/Anadolu via Getty Images But resistance must also be coordinated and strategic, with the singular goal of driving action in Congress, the courts and among party leaders. Hoping an autocrat will lose popularity is a trap — authoritarian regimes don’t crumble on their own. But public opinion can shift, especially when people are given a compelling alternative and real avenues to push back. This means opposition parties should use every constitutional tool at their disposal. They can block nominees, deny quorums and file lawsuits — like when Democrats recently placed a strategic hold on a U.S. Attorney nomination, proving Congress still has levers to fight the authoritarian drift. And this is where leadership matters most. Examples from around the world show us that institutions don’t move on their own — people inside must instigate the movement. That means standing up when it’s inconvenient, not just when it’s safe. So far, Democrats have shown flashes of such resolve. Senator Cory Booker’s 25-hour floor speech excoriating Trump, and the barnstorming town halls led by Senator Chris Murphy and Representative Maxwell Frost have helped galvanize public awareness and made the stakes unmistakably clear. We need more of this — members of Congress, judges and civil servants drawing clear democratic red lines before they’re erased, and doing it loud enough that others follow. We also need to build broad democratic alliances. In Slovakia and Guatemala, such coalitions helped convert public outrage into institutional pressure. Business leaders, labor unions, civil rights groups and conservatives who value rule of law must link arms here too. This isn’t about ideology — it’s about protecting the guardrails that make disagreement possible. A Turkish dissident once told me that in the early years of Erdoğan’s rule, the opposition played checkers while the government ate the pieces. “We waited too long,” they said. “We thought the rules still applied.” America can’t afford to make the same mistake.