GOVERNMENT AND CORPORATE CONTROL HAVE HOLLOWED OUT RURAL LIFE IN GREECE AND INTERNATIONALLY—BUT AN ANTI-AUTHORITARIAN, COMMONS-BASED ALTERNATIVE IS POSSIBLE ~ from Babylonia ~ The myth that the state serves the public interest is collapsing from every direction. It collapses in transport, where “safety” was measured in deaths at Tempi. It collapses in healthcare, which operates in a permanent state of crisis. It collapses in energy, surrendered to monopolies. It collapses in housing, which has been transformed from a social right into an investment product. And today it collapses in the most brutal way in agricultural production. The image of farmers on the roads is the visible outcome of a system in which political party, state, and capitalist elites manage public resources as their own property, transferring the cost of crises onto those who have no institutional power whatsoever. The scandal at OPEKEPE and the intervention of the European Public Prosecutor did not merely expose corrupt practices. They revealed the way agricultural policy has been transformed into a field of clientelist networks, political cover, and economic plunder. At the very moment when intermediaries, “insiders,” and business circles were siphoning off EU funds, thousands of real producers became fully dependent on a flow of money controlled by mechanisms to which they have no access. When this system stalls, production freezes—not because farmers are not producing. The payment crisis is a structural feature of a state that functions as an intermediary between European funds and domestic power networks. Controls, necessary for the most basic restoration of legality, are turned into weapons of mass punishment against the weakest. Corruption remains systemic, while “clean-up” is applied horizontally at the expense of those with the least power. Within this framework, the farmer is presented either as an “entrepreneur” who must adapt or as a “subsidized” actor whose legitimacy exists only through dependence on the system. In reality, however, the farmer functions as a bearer of risk. They assume the climatic, economic, and social cost of production, while the critical decisions regarding prices, inputs—water, energy, fertilizers, seeds—the value of land and products are made by multinationals, banks, concentrated trade and distribution networks, and the state mechanisms that serve them. When this regime is shaken, the state stands against society. As the climate crisis and resource scarcity erode the stability of the capitalist model, the state becomes more authoritarian, more disciplinary, more aggressive toward society. It does not protect production; it protects its institutional architecture, redistributes losses, and thus reveals the real political dead end. The question that therefore arises is who controls agricultural production, for whom, and under what terms—and whether, at this point, that control can remain in the hands of state and capitalist elites in a world of ecological collapse and social disintegration. THE HISTORICAL TRAJECTORY OF THE CAP The crisis of the agricultural sector in Greece is neither temporary nor the result of “poor implementation.” It is the outcome of a long historical trajectory of political choices implemented with the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) as their central axis. To understand today’s suffocation of the agricultural sector—economic, environmental, and social—we must view the CAP not as a technical tool for regulating production, but as a mechanism of political management and social consensus on a European scale. Historically, it was constructed to absorb crises, yet it ends up reproducing them in new forms. The climate crisis does not create this dead end; it multiplies it and makes it visible. The CAP was established in the early 1960s, within the framework of the Treaty of Rome, as a response to food security as a post-war European imperative. The stakes were clear and deeply state-centric. Agriculture was treated as a strategic security sector, on par with energy and industry. The goal was to increase production, stabilise markets, and secure farmers’ incomes through guaranteed prices and common market organisation mechanisms. In this context, the farmer was conceived more as a link in a system of mass production, while power was concentrated in planning and regulation. Already in the 1970s, with the Mansholt Plan, it became clear that the CAP did not merely aim to support existing agricultural structures, but to deeply restructure them. The pursuit of larger holdings, production concentration, and increased productivity marked the first systematic attempt to transform agriculture into a high-efficiency agro-industrial system. The emerging crisis was no longer one of scarcity, but of mismatch between traditional rural societies and a model of intensified production that required capital, technology, and scale. In the 1980s, a fundamental contradiction of the early CAP became visible. The very system designed to increase agricultural production began producing more than could be consumed or absorbed. Overproduction was not a sign of success, but a problem. Massive surpluses—known as “butter mountains” and “wine lakes”—turned agricultural policy into an issue of public cost and social legitimacy. Instead of changing the model, production continued to be centrally and hierarchically regulated through new control mechanisms such as quotas and product withdrawals. In 1992, the CAP entered a new phase with the so-called McSharry reform. This was not merely a technical adjustment, but a response to a deeper political crisis. Intensive agriculture had already caused serious environmental impacts, the cost of the policy was being socially contested, and international trade pressures made the previous model difficult to defend. To preserve it, the CAP changed its discourse. Support for farmers was no longer directly linked to product prices, but to income, and agriculture was redefined as “multifunctional.” It was now expected not only to produce food, but also to maintain landscapes, ecosystems, and social cohesion in rural areas. This expansion, however, was largely rhetorical. Power remained concentrated in European institutions, states, and technocratic mechanisms interacting with markets, input companies, and commercial networks, excluding producers from any substantive participation in decision-making. Policy increasingly took the form of technocratic management. Every social or environmental demand was translated into indicators, measures, controls, and eligibility regimes, turning consensus into a matter of compliance rather than democratic choice. With Agenda 2000, the CAP attempted to show that it concerned not only production quantity, but rural development as a whole. The so-called second pillar was introduced, ostensibly addressing local development, social cohesion, and rural infrastructure. Nevertheless, the architecture of the policy remained largely unchanged. The main flows of resources and power continued to be centrally determined, while local communities were called upon to “adapt” within predefined frameworks of administrative compliance rather than democratic planning. The period from the early 2000s to 2020 marked a deeper shift in the CAP—what can be described as the CAP of discipline. Subsidies were decoupled from production and presented as tools of modernization and competitiveness. This choice aimed to limit overproduction without changing the dominant model and to align the CAP with international trade and market rules. In practice, economic and climatic risk was transferred almost entirely to the producer. Prices were left to the market, losses were not collectively offset, and support was granted only under conditions of compliance. Income no longer depended on what and how one produces, but on whether the farmer complies with an increasingly complex web of rules, controls, and administrative requirements. Political conflict over production, prices, and markets was depoliticized and replaced by bureaucratic surveillance. Within this framework, the farmer was treated as administratively eligible or not. Production primarily served to keep them within the system, accepting individual risk and collectively accepting the depoliticization of agricultural production. The most recent phase of the CAP, for the period 2021–2027, explicitly incorporates the climate crisis into its discourse and tools. Eco-schemes, environmental commitments, and national strategic plans are presented as evidence of a new, “green” CAP. Yet environmental requirements increase without any substantive change in control over critical resources—water, land, energy, market access, and risk insurance. The climate crisis thus acts as a multiplier of all previous crises—of production, income, legitimacy, and resilience—revealing the limits of a system that reforms endlessly without redistributing power. The climate crisis, moreover, does not arrive in a neutral field. It enters an already unequal rural landscape. In Greece, extreme weather events, droughts, floods, and heatwaves disproportionately affect small and medium producers. As climatic risk increases, control over inputs remains concentrated, insurance is inadequate or expensive, compensation is delayed, and “adaptation” translates into new investments that producers must finance on their own. Thus, instead of becoming an opportunity for democratic redesign of production and common resources, the climate crisis tends to become a tool for accelerating concentration. Those who can bear the risk survive; the rest exit. WHY DOMINANT SOLUTIONS ARE INSUFFICIENT Dominant responses to the agricultural crisis appear under various names—technological modernisation, innovation, digitalisation, green transition, financial instruments—but share a common feature: they do not challenge the power structure within which agricultural production operates. Technology, for example, is presented as a neutral solution. In practice, however, the digitalisation of agriculture without data control turns the farmer into a passive information provider for third parties. Data on soil, crops, water, and climate are collected, analysed, and exploited by platforms, input companies, or financial actors, without producers having any meaningful say in their use. Knowledge is extracted from the field and reintroduced as a paid service. Similarly, innovation is promoted as a driver of transition without addressing ownership and control. When innovation is introduced as a package of technologies, certifications, and consulting services without collective ownership and management structures, producers are asked to “modernise” without co-shaping the tools that determine their production. Even cooperatives, often presented as an answer to individual weakness, are not guarantees of change. When they reproduce the same hierarchies they claim to oppose, they become subsidy management mechanisms or market intermediaries rather than tools of collective bargaining and political autonomy. The common limit of all these “solutions” is that they treat the agricultural crisis as a technical problem of efficiency, adaptation, or innovation. Yet, as the historical trajectory of the CAP shows, the crisis is primarily political. It concerns who controls resources, knowledge, value chains, and risk. As long as these questions remain off the table, every new solution—no matter how “green” or “smart”—will simply add another layer to a system that has already reached its limits. AN ANTI-AUTHORITARIAN AGRICULTURAL PERSPECTIVE The discussion of an anti-authoritarian perspective in agriculture and rural life is a political necessity. The climate crisis demands shifts in power. As long as fundamental control relations remain unchanged, every adaptation effort will translate into further burdens on the same subjects—small and medium producers and rural communities. Any planning must begin with the decentralisation of power and the return of control to producers themselves and local societies. At the core of this perspective lies collective control over critical means of production—seeds, storage, processing, and basic infrastructure. When these nodes remain fully privatised or controlled by a few powerful actors, producers are deprived of real bargaining power and trapped in relations of dependency. At the same time, rebuilding local and regional value chains is required as a political project to reduce dependence on concentrated and impersonal networks. Reconnecting production with processing and consumption at a regional scale strengthens producers’ negotiating position and creates conditions of collective resilience against increasingly unstable markets. Central to this vision are the commons. Water, land, knowledge, and data cannot be treated exclusively as commodities or investment assets, especially under conditions of climatic destabilisation. They are necessary commons, without which neither sustainable production nor social justice in rural areas is possible. Their management is not a technical issue, but a deeply political one, concerning who decides, for whom, and under what conditions. These are necessary conditions for moving forward to the questions of what crops we want to grow, by what criteria we decide, and what agricultural products we actually need. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Machine translation. Image: World Riots on Facebook The post Agriculture beyond the state and market appeared first on Freedom News.

FAR FROM BEING A TRAGEDY, THE DEMISE OF THE FILM INDUSTRY SHOULD BE CELEBRATED ~ Andrew J. Boyer ~ Netflix has proposed an $82.7bn (£62bn) deal to purchase Warner Bros, a movie studio with over 100 years of cinema history under its belt. Paramount+ has joined in on the bidding in hopes to gain further media assets, as the two streaming services fight over dominance. The proposed deals would dramatically reshape the Hollywood industry towards streaming and will likely have a detrimental effect on local cinemas. This has understandably induced anxiety amongst cinephiles and casual movie-goers alike as they fear the ‘death of cinema’ is upon us. But is it really so bad? First, let’s ascertain that Hollywood has faced many ‘threats’, from sexual abuse scandals to writers strikes, to CGI replacing practical effects etc.. All of these issues stem from the same cause: the capitalist system. While A.I. is certainly a new threat on the horizon, Hollywood’s grotesque commodification of filmmaking has been decades long. Preference for speedy overblown franchises, name recognition, and nostalgia-mongering have been issues since at least the late ‘70s when modern ‘blockbusters’ emerged. Most will recall news of Ian Mcellan’s tearful breakdown on the set of The Hobbit. After having to recite most of his lines to green screen, he lamented “This is not why I became an actor”. Art has taken a back seat to commercialism in tinsel town for a while now. A further point against cinema whilst it’s knocking on death’s door, is the sheer amount of financial and environmental waste that goes into major motion pictures. Benedict Cumberbatch commented on this in his interview with Ruth Rogers earlier in the year, stating: “It’s a grossly wasteful industry. Think about set builds that aren’t recycled, think about transport, think about food, think about housing, but also light and energy. The amount of wattage you need to create daylight and consistent light in a studio environment. It’s a lot of energy.” Plenty of energy indeed. In 2021 the Sustainable Production Alliance reported that the average feature film has a carbon footprint of 3,370 metric tons. Understandably, Hollywood actors are often the subject of scorn for their hypocrisy on preaching climate responsibility to working people. But the most damning nail in the coffin of all: most blockbuster films these days are boring. There’s a genuine sense of ennui with the film industry that has plagued it since the turn of the century. Let’s not kid ourselves that this can be fixed with unions, laws, contract negotiations or (god forbid) more franchise reboots. The movie industry has been more about stifling art than producing it, yet many people can’t imagine films without it. To this effect, Hollywood can be considered what Ivan Illich called a “radical monopoly”. In his 1973 book ‘Tools for Conviviality’ he wrote: “Above all, by depriving people of the ability to satisfy personal needs in a personal manner, radical monopoly creates radical scarcity of personal–as opposed to institutional-service.” Of course, one could argue that the institutional aspect of cinemas is its appeal. Being handed your ticket and walking into a dark room with a large screen and surround sound is what separates the experience from simply watching a film in your living room. This, however, would overlook a very grassroots solution which anarchists and cooperative communitarians have championed for years: independent community cinema. Independent grassroots cinemas are often smaller, cozier and the seating is typically sofas pulled together, or perhaps tables and chairs facing a projector screen. A stellar example of one would be Star and Shadow Cinema in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. Whilst being run by volunteers, the cinema also works as a community kitchen and concert space, but most importantly: it screens films. From classics, to modern, and even local indie productions, grassroots cinemas provide essentially the opposite, more social experience to streaming isolated at home. Furthermore, as A.I. begins to infest the entertainment industry by replacing both actors and set design in the upcoming decades, independent cinemas can champion authentic human films which grasp at the heart of what cinemagoers are longing for. These independent film scenes run far less risk of fostering sexual abuse in the way top-down hierarchical Hollywood production companies have in the past; namely Harvey Weinstein, whose abuse sparked much of the #MeToo movement. It’s tough not to become sentimental about cinemas and Hollywood. Stories of the ‘golden age’ and memories of our favourite films can enchant our senses away from remembering that it is, in fact, an industry; and a very cold and calculative one at that. With the rising costs of living combined with a loneliness epidemic plaguing the western world, perhaps our sights shouldn’t be set towards saving Hollywood, but instead towards each other. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Photo: howzey on Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 The post It’s the end of cinema as we know it… and I feel fine appeared first on Freedom News.

The leader of what was once Italy’s largest separatist party may end up being the politician who unites the boot from top to bottom.  Hemorrhaging support and risking control of the far-right party that he heads, Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini is gambling his political future on a pharaonic bridge project that will connect the Italian mainland to the island of Sicily. The project faces a critical test on Wednesday when Italy’s Court of Auditors is expected to decide whether it complies with Italian and European Union law. A negative ruling by the court, which is a sort of public financial watchdog, would not necessarily prevent the project from going ahead. But it could prove politically costly for a project already under fire from Salvini’s political opponents.  Salvini, who is infrastructure minister as well as leader of the far-right League party, has called the project “the most important public work in the world,” and said construction could start in November. If built, the 3.7-kilometer suspension bridge spanning the strait of Messina would be the longest of its kind, connecting the toe of the Italian peninsula to the northeastern tip of Sicily.  It would provide the island’s 4.8 million inhabitants, who have until now relied on ferries and planes for access to the outside world, with road and rail lines to the rest of Europe.  The firebrand politician is an unlikely champion for the project. His party was founded more than three decades ago in the hinterlands of Italy’s industrial north with a goal of breaking the region away from the rest of the country.  The League’s founder, Umberto Bossi, made stopping “Roma Ladrona” (thieving Rome) his rallying cry, pledging to put an end to the redistribution of northern tax revenue to the more impoverished south. He vocally opposed projects like the redevelopment of the former steelworks in Naples’ Bagnoli district, which he saw as a northern-funded giveaway likely to end up lining the pockets of southern politicians. Now Salvini, who vocally opposed the bridge as recently as 2016, has become the foremost proponent of the massive public work, estimated to cost €13.5 billion. That would make it among the most expensive infrastructure projects ever built in Italy — and in the country’s southernmost regions to boot, known for the mafia and corruption. “Everybody in Lombardy and in Veneto is angry at Matteo [Salvini] and his obsession with the bridge,” said one senior League official who was granted anonymity to speak candidly, referring to the League’s two heartland regions. “Some think it won’t happen, and some think it will. But almost everyone in the party in the north thinks it’s a waste of money.” BRIDGE TO SOMEWHERE The idea of a bridge connecting the Mediterranean’s biggest island to the Italian peninsula has a long history. Already in antiquity, the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder wrote of plans to span the strait with a series of interconnected boats. In 1866, five years after the unification of Italy, the future Prime Minister Giuseppe Zanardelli proclaimed: “Whether above the current or under it, let Sicily be united to the continent!” (His favored solution was an underground tunnel.) The idea of a bridge was revived in the 1970s and 1980s after scientific studies judged it was technically feasible. But it was only in 2009, under the premiership of Silvio Berlusconi, that workers symbolically broke ground on the Messina bridge. Technocrat Mario Monti, who replaced Berlusconi during the financial crisis, shelved the endeavor, citing the need to cut costs. In 2016 center-left Prime Minister Matteo Renzi briefly made his own push, which also ended up going nowhere.  Salvini — who built his political career on bold and divisive stunts, and who propelled his party into government after a Damascene conversion from regionalism to far-right nationalism — may be the politician who has come closest to seeing the millennia-old ambition realized. Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini is gambling his political future on a pharaonic bridge project that will connect the Italian mainland to the island of Sicily. | Simona Granati/Getty Images When Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni took power in 2022, Salvini was hoping to land the position of minister of the interior, a natural fit for a politician who came to prominence campaigning against immigration.  But Meloni’s landslide victory left the League with little leverage in the coalition government, and Salvini found himself shunted into the less prestigious role of infrastructure minister. The bridge is his attempt to turn that relegation into a leading role. “Salvini is something of a political animal. He lives for the hot button issue of the day,” said Nicoletta Pirozzi, who heads the EU affairs program for the pro-European Istituto Affari Internazionali think tank. “This idea of a major public work serves as his way to make his mark … to give himself a bit more centrality in the public debate.” A spokesperson for Salvini declined to comment. BETWEEN SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS Judging by the polls, Salvini’s gambit has yet to pay off. At 9 percent, the League is polling far behind its senior coalition partner, Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, which has the support of nearly a third of the electorate. The Messina bridge has divided public opinion: Supporters point to the economic benefits, while detractors cite everything from the risk of earthquakes to environmental impacts and graft in a part of the country famous for corruption.  “At the moment, Salvini is caught between regional governors who need to answer to their constituents, the SMEs that are the backbone of Italian capitalism, and a populism that I wouldn’t even define as conservative, but actually far-right,” said Teresa Coratella, deputy head of the Rome office at the European Council on Foreign Relations. Meanwhile, Salvini’s party has suffered a steady exodus of members, many from the north. Old-guard stalwarts like former Budget Minister Giancarlo Pagliarini have expressed skepticism: “It’s a bit of a mysterious object. That’s why whenever I hear about it, I say ‘Oh Lord.’” Coratella said that Salvini has so far benefited from a lack of challengers within his party. But his luck may be taking a turn for the worse. Roberto Vannacci — a former general and a member of the European Parliament who like Salvini built his reputation on colorful outbursts — has galvanized parts of the electorate uneasy with Meloni’s moderate foreign policy. Vannacci’s rising star risks eclipsing Salvini, beating him at the outrage game he pioneered. So far, however, Salvini has managed to keep his party backing the bridge, despite a previous warning from Italy’s Court of Auditors in September that raised doubts as to whether the project will be as economically advantageous as the government claims. Meanwhile, WeBuild, the company heading the consortium that is building the bridge, has started hiring the thousands of workers that will be needed for construction. The Messina bridge has divided public opinion. | aleria Ferraro/Getty Images “There are the outcasts of the League who still use the argument, ‘This is a waste of money,’” said League senator Claudio Borghi. “But most of the party understands this is something that’s been beneficial for the north.”   Borghi added that even the more old-school regionalist governors were “starting to understand” the purpose of the project. Construction was meant to start this summer, but has been delayed.  “I think it will benefit the country as a whole,” said Marco Dolfin, a League councilor in the Veneto region. He was quick to point out, however, that the project itself originated with Berlusconi, not Salvini.  “We don’t go on the streets or to rallies with a flag that says ‘Long live the bridge,’” Dolfin said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin cautioned his officials to make sure their efforts to cool down an economy driven to overheating by military spending don’t overshoot and drive it into recession. “Some specialists and experts are pointing to the risks of stagnation or even recession. This, of course, is not to be allowed under any circumstances,” Putin told the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, an annual conference to showcase the Russian economy that he had once used to attract investment from the West. The experts that Putin was referring to are led by Economy Minister Maxim Reshetnikov, who made just that warning on the first day of the conference on Thursday. Reshetnikov had said that while all the economic numbers suggest the economy is still growing, they are “just a rear-view mirror.” By contrast, he noted, business sentiment suggested very strongly that the economy is “on the brink of a recession.” Putin pointed to statistics showing that gross domestic product is still growing — by 1.5 percent in the first four months of the year. However, analysts have pointed out that that is due entirely to ever-higher volumes of output from the defense sector to fight the war in Ukraine. Civil sectors of the economy have slowed sharply, as the government has ended various subsidy programs over the past year, notably for residential mortgages. The government is being squeezed harder than at any time since the invasion by the fact that global prices for crude oil, exports of which generate a third of its revenue, have slumped to their lowest in over three years as Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies opened a battle to win back global market share from higher-cost producers in the United States and elsewhere. Putin’s public comments are often aimed at settling disputes between the various agencies, businesses and cliques that vie for influence in the Kremlin. In recent months, tension has become more obvious between big business and the central bank, which has had to raise interest rates to more than 20 percent to rein in the inflation caused by excessive government spending. Putin, who has supported the central bank throughout, again referred to its policy as “responsible” on Friday. But he warned that bringing down inflation, which is still running at nearly 10 percent, was “far from the whole picture.” “Our most important task this year is to transition the economy to balanced growth,” he said. “That is moderate inflation, and low employment, and the continuation of a positive economic dynamic. It’s important to keep in focus all the indicators of how our [various] sectors and companies are feeling.” Putin gave no indication at the conference that economic problems were about to force any kind of conciliation with the West over the fate of Ukraine. “I’ve often said that Russians and Ukraine are the same people,” he said in a panel discussion. “In that sense, all of Ukraine is ours.”

Can the European Union offset the impact of trade tariffs, accelerate economic growth and compete with China and the United States to attract large businesses, all by fiddling with labeling requirements and online paperwork?  It’s damn well going to try.  On Wednesday, the Commission will publish its single market strategy, the latest in a long line of attempts to knock down all the little obstacles that make it impossible, or at the very least difficult, for businesses in one EU country to sell their wares in another. The bloc’s single market was launched in 1987 and in theory allows businesses to operate across the entire EU. In practice, however, a host of national regulations mean the union remains very much 27 separate markets. The economics of tearing down internal barriers to trade make sense: The Commission estimates that a 2.4 percent increase in trade among EU countries would cancel out a 20 percent tariff-induced drop in U.S. exports. The political winds are also blowing in the right direction: Two landmark reports in 2024 called for more integration to boost the bloc’s competitiveness; and EU countries — which are responsible for erecting the trade barriers in the first place — specifically tasked the Commission with drawing up this strategy. The plan, at least the draft POLITICO got its hands on, is dry, boring and full of seeming trivialities. But could it actually make a difference? Here’s what to expect. WHAT’S THE PLAN?  Every time a country implements individual sets of, say, nutritional labeling on packaging, or forms to fill out to display items on grocery shelves, it makes it much harder for businesses from another EU country to enter that market. The Commission wants to hack away at these obstacles bit by bit, reducing friction everywhere it can. There’s a planned regulation on packaging that seeks to make labeling more uniform. Current divergences “are forcing producers to develop different versions of the product for different markets or to relabel or even repackage products when moving them across borders,” the draft reads.   There’s a push to digitize paperwork so companies can easily submit the checks required to place their products on a European market. The Commission wants to expand the Digital Product Passport, a kind of digital product leaflet that contains all the necessary information required by EU rules to prove compliance. Can the European Union offset the impact of trade tariffs, accelerate economic growth and compete with China and the United States to attract large businesses? | Erik Lesser/EPA There are also plans to make it easier to set up a new business across the EU, something that in many countries remains slow and expensive. The draft strategy proposed the creation of a “28th regime” that would allow entrepreneurs to opt into a common digitalized procedure to start a company. The first step will be a pilot program that aims to get companies up and running in 48 hours, with a legislative proposal planned for the first quarter of next year.  WHAT WON’T BE INCLUDED?  Banks and other providers of financial services remain highly national industries. Cross-border takeovers are rare and politically fraught. Just look at the attempt by Italy’s UniCredit to buy out German rival Commerzbank.  A more cohesive financial sector could help get badly needed capital to young, tech-savvy startups. It would also mean better deals for investors and savers. But the financial sector is for the most part excluded from the single market strategy, as the Commission has shunted standardization and simplification of finance regulation onto a separate track, known as the savings and investments union. IS IT JUST ABOUT STUFF?  It’s services, not goods, that account for about three-quarters of Europe’s gross domestic product. A lot of these services will realistically never go beyond their national borders, or even their neighborhoods. No one is traveling internationally to get a haircut, after all.  But for plenty, there is scope for cross-border selling. Think of things like supermarket chains, or consulting. The strategy does include measures to smooth access to services among member countries. Construction makes up more than 10 percent of the bloc’s economy, but only a fraction of that, 1 percent of GDP, is conducted across borders. It’s a similar story with postal deliveries, a booming sector with the rise of e-commerce, as well as retail and telecoms. The Berlaymont is planning measures in all of these areas to deepen market access and allow for more cross-border competition.  WILL IT WORK?  In theory, everyone is a fan of the single market. At the macro level it really is win-win: Consumers get more choice, businesses get more buyers, and governments benefit from greater tax revenues. But at the micro level there are losers: Firms face more competitors and people get laid off. Those losers will lobby hard not to face the brunt of competition. In the end it’s up to member countries — who asked for the single market strategy but who are also responsible for many of the barriers it aims to remove — to play ball. The Commission has included a set of measures to ensure that the strategy has teeth. The draft calls for capitals “to appoint a high level Sherpa for the Single Market in their prime minister’s or president’s office with authority towards all parts of the government.” In effect, this would be the Berlaymont’s inside person, tasked with ensuring skittish governments don’t go back on their word. The Commission is also proposing to take stock of the situation at the end of 2026, and if necessary propose a new Single Market Barriers Prevention Act in 2027.  The single market has other issues that extend beyond mere politics. The world’s mega single markets, the U.S. and China, benefit from relatively uniform language and culture. Europe, meanwhile, contains 27 different member countries, with tastes, language, culture and weather all varying dramatically from place to place. The Commission can ensure the most frictionless trade rules in the world, but it will still be a challenge to get Italians to buy Birkenstocks, or for Poles to choose bacalao over sausages. 

Microwaves, GPS, drones, duct tape, the PC. That’s just a short list of household goods that trace their origin to military research labs.  Their dual-use functionality is known as “military-civil fusion” in the parlance of the defense sector. Now, with Europe about to unleash a flood of money into its defense sector, reversing decades of underinvestment, hopes are high that the continent’s dismal productivity record could tap into similar military ingenuity to turn things around. Projects underway in Europe are already beginning to rival those of the United States in terms of ambition: from continental antimissile defenses to low Earth orbit satellite constellations that could provide alternatives to an increasingly unreliable Elon Musk’s Starlink. The hope is that eventually all the investment drives technological innovation that spills over into the civilian economy, boosting productivity and paying for itself.  But is that realistic, or just wishful thinking? There’s no doubt that in the short term, economic strain is unavoidable, and will require cuts elsewhere. “This is about spending more, spending better,” NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said in a speech at the start of the year, acknowledging Washington’s long-standing complaints about Europe not doing enough for its own security. While two-thirds of NATO members now meet the alliance’s target of spending 2 percent of gross domestic product on defense, it’s still “nowhere near enough,” Rutte said. Rutte is getting his wish. The European Commission has opened the doors to €800 billion in military spending. In parallel, Germany, Europe’s largest economy, announced a plan to spend a trillion euros to upgrade its rickety national army and repair its infrastructure.   ROBOWARS Where public money goes, private business follows, and there is a burgeoning crop of new defense players emerging to meet Europe’s defense needs. Loïc Mougeolle is a defense contractor whose ties to the military go back a generation. His father worked in nuclear deterrence for the French navy; he, in turn, worked nine years for a defense firm until co-founding his own defense company, Comand AI, in 2022, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “We will never be able to produce more than a strategic adversary like China,” said Mougeolle, who is chief executive of the Paris-based Comand AI. “What we need to do is to be able to conduct operations, 10 times, 100 times more efficiently than them. This is the starting point of Comand AI.” “This is about spending more, spending better,” NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said in a speech at the start of the year, acknowledging Washington’s long-standing complaints about Europe not doing enough for its own security. | Erdem Sahin/EFE via EPA Mougeolle said he’s developed an artificial intelligence-based platform that can parse orders, develop task sequences and analyze terrain, all with the aim of greatly accelerating military response times. With Comand AI, “one staff officer can do the job of four,” he said. For now, Comand AI only focuses on the defense sector, but Mougeolle said the technology his company has developed has civil applications as well. For example, it could help fleets of delivery robots navigate terrain to reach their destinations. Or it could help deal with coordinated cyberattacks on private businesses. OFF TO THE SPACE RACES But entrusting new inventions that benefit everyday Europeans to innovative players like Comand AI, or European satellite and missile defense initiatives, is a gamble. While there is plenty of historical precedent, there is no certainty. “Defense spending has been an important driver of technological advances in the U.S.,” said Chris Miller, professor at Tufts University and author of Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology. “The Defense Department often funded basic research and prototyping that was then picked up by private firms and turned into world-changing civilian technologies, such as [micro]chips, GPS, or display screens.”  Research from the Kiel Institute published ahead of the Munich Security Conference in February estimated that Europe’s long-term productivity could rise by as much as 0.25 percent for each 1 percent of GDP spent on military research. “There’s increasing evidence that some of the biggest breakthroughs, particularly in the high-tech area of computation, are associated with R&D that was developed during the Space Race,” said Ethan Ilzetzki, author of the paper and professor at the London School of Economics.  The competitive nature of war and the existential stakes at play encourage efficiency and innovation. While it’s perhaps not a precedent today’s EU would want to repeat (another Thirty Years’ War, anyone?), the intense rivalries of early modern Europe helped give rise to its technological supremacy in the 18th and 19th centuries. “There is an incentive here to be at the technological frontier, and even to push the technological frontier,” Ilzetzki said.   PLOWSHARES TO SWORDS Plans to boost continental defenses have already drawn criticism, notably from those on the left who stress the importance of preserving the welfare state to avoid populist backlash.  “While military expenditures no longer know fiscal limits, social benefits and support for parental leave are already on the chopping block,” economists Tom Krebs and Isabella Weber argued in a column for Project Syndicate. “This is bound to further fuel dissatisfaction.”  The United Kingdom’s Labour government is a straw in the wind. It recently announced £4.8 billion in welfare cuts even as it boosted defense spending by £2.2 billion.  It’s not all pain. Military spending will give the economy a short-term boost. Defense contractors’ revenues will rise, manufacturing jobs will increase, and workers’ wages will cycle back into the economy. Daniel Kral, lead economist at Oxford Economics, said the scale of the plans is so huge that they could help “break Europe out of stagnation through domestic demand-led growth.”  French President Emmanuel Macron has called on governments to replace U.S. Patriot missiles and F-35s with European alternatives like SAMP/T systems. | Joe Klamar/AFP via Getty Images But while the production of guns and bombs is counted in GDP figures, there is no long-term productivity boost from landmines that just lie in the ground, or howitzers under wraps in barracks. They may guarantee the system that generates GDP by protecting it from invasion, but their contribution to the final numbers is unquantifiable. That’s a problem, given that Europe’s rearmament plans are going to be funded largely through debt. Government debt is already high, and adding to it could very well damage the economy in the long run.  CHOICES, CHOICES One way to square the circle is to invest smarter. To keep as much value in Europe as possible, the bloc will need to develop the products itself that it currently buys from the U.S. — and do so without further antagonizing a protectionist White House. More than half of European spending on procurement flows to U.S. firms. French President Emmanuel Macron has called on governments to replace U.S. Patriot missiles and F-35s with European alternatives like SAMP/T systems and Rafale jets. The Berlaymont is explicitly backing local industry as part of its rearmament efforts.    But front-line countries like Poland or Finland want to prioritize immediate needs — even if that means buying from the U.S., South Korea or Israel.   “The Baltics see fire, Central Europe sees smoke, everyone else doesn’t see anything,” said one European diplomat who asked to remain anonymous to speak candidly. At present, too much of Europe’s defense spending goes to entrenched, slow-moving national champions. By contrast, Ilzetzki’s paper describes how the U.S. Department of Defense promotes competition through dual sourcing — purchasing weapon systems from more than one company at once to encourage competition. Often these tenders are more open-ended: Rather than favoring a certain technology with very fixed specifications that in effect favors established players, it will put out a call for open-ended solutions to a certain military problem.  Such tenders “reached a broader set of firms that are smaller, younger, and more technology-oriented … [and] also led to more patents and dual-use spillovers,” the Kiel report reads.  Partly because of that, about 16 percent of U.S. military spending goes to R&D, compared to only 4.5 percent in Europe. That helps U.S. companies keep their technological edge and makes them more likely to invent something useful in civilian life. As such, to succeed in the long run, any coordinated European rearmament push will require capitals to do more to embrace new entrants — many more nimble and at the technological frontier, said Dan Breznitz, an expert in state-run innovation policy at the University of Toronto.   “You need to be able to disrupt the system,” he said. “You need to have an understanding that there will be new players. And some of those new players will become the new giants. And that’s what may be something that I’m not sure that the EU is very good at doing, to be honest.” 

Britain’s economy expanded a little faster than expected in the first quarter, as a strong performance from the services sector offset a decline in industrial output. Gross domestic product (GDP) rose by 0.2 percent month-on-month in March, the Office for National Statistics said today in a preliminary estimate. Analysts had expected it to stay stagnant. That left GDP up by 0.7 percent over the first three months of the year, a little more than the 0.6 percent forecast. The Bank of England had said last week that, while it expected a solid performance in the first quarter, the U.K. economy is likely to slow again over the rest of the year. That’s due not least to a brief surge in exports as firms tried to get their goods into the U.S. before it imposed trad tariffs. The ONS data only captures economic performance ahead of President’s Trump April 2 tariff package which upset financial markets and prompted the International Monetary Fund to trim its 2025 growth outlook for advanced economies by 0.7 percentage points to 1.2 percent. The U.K. was one of the first countries to ink a trade deal with Washington — but as an open, medium-sized economy it remains exposed to any breakdown in the global trading order. BoE officials warned that the indirect effect of U.S. tariffs on the U.K.’s other trading partners, especially the EU, were likely to be larger than the direct ones on Britain.

LONDON — The Bank of England cut its key interest rate on Thursday by a quarter-point to 4.25 percent, its fourth cut in nine months, pointing to the risks of a global economic slowdown due to the trade war unleashed by the U.S. The move will ease the pressure on businesses and households who have been hurt by a barrage of tax increases since Labour took power last year. It will also help to bring down the interest bill on the government’s own borrowing, reducing the need for Reeves to find savings elsewhere in her struggle to put Britain’s public finances on a more solid footing. However, the Bank stressed that the outlook is still highly uncertain, and Governor Andrew Bailey said it will “stick to a gradual and careful approach to further rate cuts.” That language is likely to disappoint those in financial markets who had hoped for a shift to more rapid easing of policy. The move comes only hours before the U.S. and U.K. are expected to announce the outlines of a trade deal that should soften the direct impact of President Donald Trump’s trade tariffs, but which is unlikely to insulate the British economy completely from the fallout of more protracted U.S. struggles with China and the EU.  That’s because much of the work of the U.K.’s key financial and business service sectors oils the wheels of global trade, while manufacturing exports are often intermediate inputs for goods that other countries sell to the U.S. The Bank put a heavy caveat on its new forecasts, which see a 0.3 percent hit to U.K. growth this year, saying in its new quarterly Monetary Policy Report that the risks to its assumptions are “large and two-sided”. “The future constellation of trade policies is impossible to predict at this juncture,” it said. That uncertainty was reflected in a three-way split between the nine members of the Monetary Policy Committee. While five members voted for the quarter-point cut, the Bank’s chief economist Huw Pill and external member Catherine Mann voted for no change, arguing that underlying inflation is still too stubborn. At the other end of the spectrum, external members Swati Dhingra and Alan Taylor voted for a half-point cut. The Bank has gained more leeway to cut thanks to the fact that the pound has strengthened and global oil prices have slumped over the last month. In addition, the Bank said it expects some modest downward pressure on prices from the trade disruption, noting evidence of companies discounting prices to shift goods that were previously earmarked for the U.S.  Separately, the Bank expressed more confidence that businesses will swallow at least part of the increase in labor costs caused by the hike in employers’ National Insurance contributions and another 6.7 percent increase in the National Living Wage, both of which took effect last month. As a result, it now expects inflation to return to its 2 percent target by the first quarter of 2027, slightly earlier than its previous estimates. Inflation stood at 2.6 percent in March, down from a peak of over 11 percent in 2023. But the Bank expects it to rebound in the short term, due largely to some hefty increases in prices regulated by the government, such as council tax, water and energy bills. In addition, it noted the trend of falling prices for food and core goods has now reversed. This story has been updated.

BERLIN — Incoming Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservatives and their Social Democratic Party (SPD) counterparts have struck a coalition deal, but party leaders haven’t revealed who will lead key ministries in the next government. That hasn’t stopped the rumor mill in Berlin from feverishly speculating about the composition of the incoming cabinet. We have some good indications of who the main contenders are, however, particularly since the coalition blueprint lays out which party gets each ministry. Merz’s center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is set to take the foreign and economy ministries, while the SPD will have control of finance and defense. The interior ministry will fall the the CDU’s Bavarian sister-party, the Christian Social Union (CSU). Here’s a shortlist of likely candidates for some of Berlin’s key ministerial posts. FOREIGN MINISTRY Johann Wadephul A veteran CDU lawmaker and deputy parliamentary group leader focusing on foreign and defense policy, Wadephul has longstanding ties to Washington and Brussels and is seen as the most likely pick for a foreign ministry post. In a very male-dominated future cabinet, his appointment would mark a shift back to more conventional style of diplomacy following the tenure of outgoing Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, who championed a “feminist foreign policy.” Johann Wadephul | Odd Andersen/AFP via Getty Images Armin Laschet The former CDU leader and premier of the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia has remained active in international forums and is seen as seeking a high-level foreign-facing role. His appointment would represent something of a political comeback after his party’s historic loss in 2021, when Laschet was its chancellor candidate. Jens Spahn Currently a CDU deputy parliamentary group leader, Spahn is not a foreign policy specialist, but his strong U.S. network, particularly his ties to Republicans, is seen as an asset. Spahn attended the Republican National Convention last year and is being mentioned as a more unconventional option given Merz’s need to forge links to the Trump administration. DEFENSE MINISTRY Boris Pistorius Pistorius consistently ranks as one of Germany’s most popular politicians and is widely expected to keep his current role as defense minister. SPD Chancellor Olaf Scholz selected Pistorius to become his defense minister nearly a year after Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Pistorius was then seen as an unusual choice, as he had no national leadership experience. But he has since earned the respect and admiration of politicians on both sides of the political spectrum at home, and of many of his NATO counterparts abroad. Pistorius, who has a relatively hawkish stance on Ukraine and has tried to modernize Germany’s armed forces to make them “fit for war,” has said he wants to keep the job. FINANCE MINISTRY Lars Klingbeil Klingbeil, currently co-leader of the SPD, is considered one of the party’s most disciplined communicators and a key figure in steering it through its post-Scholz transition. He’s also seen as the most likely choice for the powerful post of finance minister. Klingbeil took a leading role for his party during coalition negotiations, and while he doesn’t have the technocratic skillset of other candidates for the post, his appointment would give the SPD influence and control over the purse strings just as the country is set to unleash hundreds of billions of euros in new spending for defense and infrastructure. Lars Klingbeil | Maja Hitij/Getty Images Jörg Kukies Kukies, a longtime close adviser to Scholz, took the post of interim finance minister after Scholz’s fractious three-party coalition collapsed in November. Kukies is a seasoned technocrat and former Goldman Sachs executive who has taken a higher profile in recent weeks, including a recent visit to Washington. He’s an outside choice should the SPD opt for continuity and a proven track record. ECONOMY MINISTRY Carsten Linnemann Linnemann is the CDU’s policy chief and one of Merz’s closest allies, widely credited with shaping the party’s economic agenda in recent years. An economist by training, Linnemann has built his profile as a champion of deregulation, fiscal discipline and supply-side reform, marking a clear departure from the approach of the outgoing economy minister, Robert Habeck of the Greens, who championed decarbonization and state-led industrial transformation. INTERIOR MINISTRY Alexander Dobrindt A longtime CSU figure and former transport minister, Dobrindt is known for his hardline rhetoric on migration and policing, making him a good fit for implementing Merz’s promised migration crackdown. His leadership would likely bring a more populist, law-and-order tone to the ministry. Rasmus Buchsteiner contributed reporting.

On the eve of International Women’s Day, Italy’s national government late Friday approved a draft law that introduces femicide into the country’s law following an uproar over violence against women by their former or current partners. Those convicted would face life in prison under the proposed legislation. The draft law “provides for aggravating circumstances and increases in punishment for the crimes of personal abuse, stalking, sexual violence and revenge porn,” Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said in a statement. Italy has been grappling with its long history of femicide — the killing of women — particularly after the murder of 22-year-old university student Giulia Cecchettin. She was killed by her ex-boyfriend Filippo Turetta in November 2023, prompting thousands to take to the streets demanding change. More than 8,000 people attended Cecchettin’s funeral, including Meloni. Turetta was sentenced to life in prison in December. Italy’s interior ministry recorded 117 femicides in 2023. The country ranked 14th on the EU’s Gender Equality Index in 2024, coming in below the EU as a whole. Other member countries have made more progress in equality, which has continued to move Italy down the rankings. While women have made large gains in holding positions of power, their overall status in work participation consistently ranks last among member countries, the index concluded.