PARIS — Parisian voters will in March choose a new mayor for the first time in 12 years after incumbent Anne Hidalgo decided last year against running for reelection. Her successor will become one of France’s most recognizable politicians both at home and abroad, governing a city that, with more than 2 million people, is more populous than several EU countries. Jacques Chirac used it as a springboard to the presidency. The timing of the contest — a year before France’s next presidential election — raises the stakes still further. Though Paris is not a bellwether for national politics — the far-right National Rally, for example, is nowhere near as strong in the capital as elsewehere — what happens in the capital can still reverberate nationwide. Parisian politics and the city’s transformation attract nationwide attention in a country which is still highly centralized — and voters across the country observe the capital closely, be it with disdain or fascination. It’s also not a winner-take-all race. If a candidate’s list obtains more than 10 percent of the vote in the first round, they will advance to the runoff and be guaranteed representation on the city council. Here are the main candidates running to replace Hidalgo: ON THE LEFT EMMANUEL GRÉGOIRE Emmanuel Grégoire wants to become Paris’ third Socialist Party mayor in a row. He’s backed by the outgoing administration — but not the mayor herself, who has not forgiven the 48-year-old for having ditched his former job as her deputy to run for parliament last summer in a bid to boost his name recognition. HIS STRENGTHS: Grégoire is a consensual figure who has managed, for the first time ever, to get two key left-wing parties, the Greens and the Communists, to form a first-round alliance and not run their own candidates. That broad backing is expected to help him finish first in the opening round of voting. Emmanuel Grégoire. | Thomas Samson/AFP via Getty Images His falling-out with Hidalgo could also turn to his advantage given her unpopularity. Though Hidalgo will undoubtedly be remembered for her work turning Paris into a green, pedestrian-friendly “15 minute” city, recent polling shows Parisians are divided over her legacy. It’s a tough mission, but Grégoire could theoretically campaign on the outgoing administration’s most successful policies while simultaneously distancing himself from Hidalgo herself. ACHILLES’ HEEL: Grégoire can seem like a herbivorous fish in a shark tank. He hasn’t appeared as telegenic or media savvy as his rivals. Even his former boss Hidalgo accused him of being unable to take the heat in trying times, a key trait when applying for one of the most exposed jobs in French politics. Polling at: 32 percent Odds of winning: SOPHIA CHIKIROU Sophia Chikirou, a 46-year-old France Unbowed lawmaker representing a district in eastern Paris, hopes to outflank Grégoire from further to the left. HER STRENGTHS: A skilled political operative and communications expert, Chikirou is one of the brains behind left-wing populist Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s last two presidential runs, both of which ended with the hard left trouncing its mainstream rival — Grégoire’s Socialist Party. Sophia Chikirou. | Joel Saget/AFP via Getty Images She’ll try to conjure up that magic again in the French capital, where she is likely to focus her campaign on socially mixed areas near the city’s outer boundaries that younger voters, working-class households and descendants of immigrants typically call home. France Unbowed often performs well with all those demographics. ACHILLES’ HEEL: Chikirou is a magnet for controversy. In 2023, the investigative news program Cash Investigation revealed Chikirou had used a homophobic slur to refer to employees she was feuding with during a brief stint as head of a left-wing media operation. She also remains under formal investigation over suspicions that she overbilled Mélenchon — who is also her romantic partner — during his 2017 presidential run for communications services. Her opponents on both the left and right have also criticized her for what they consider rose-tinted views of the Chinese regime. Chikirou has denied any wrongdoing in relation to the overbilling accusations. She has not commented on the homophobic slur attributed to her and seldom accepts interviews, but her allies have brushed it off as humor, or a private conversation. Polling at: 13 percent Odds of winning: ON THE RIGHT RACHIDA DATI Culture Minister Rachida Dati is mounting her third bid for the Paris mayorship. This looks to be her best shot. HER STRENGTHS: Dati is a household name in France after two decades in politics. Culture Minister Rachida Dati. | Julien de Rosa/AFP via Getty Images She is best known for her combative persona and her feuds with the outgoing mayor as head of the local center-right opposition. She is the mayor of Paris’ 7th arrondissement (most districts in Paris have their own mayors, who handle neighborhood affairs and sit in the city council). It’s a well-off part of the capital along the Left Bank of the Seine that includes the Eiffel Tower. Since launching her campaign, Dati has tried to drum up support with social media clips similar to those that propelled Zohran Mamdani from an unknown assemblyman to mayor of New York. Hers have, unsurprisingly, a right-wing spin. She’s been seen ambushing migrants, illicit drug users and contraband sellers in grittier parts of Paris, racking up millions of views in the process. ACHILLES’ HEEL: Dati is a polarizing figure and tends to make enemies. Despite being a member of the conservative Les Républicains, Dati bagged a cabinet position in early 2024, braving the fury of her allies as she attempted to secure support from the presidential orbit for her mayoral run. But the largest party supporting President Emmanuel Macron, Renaissance, has instead chosen to back one of Dati’s center-right competitors. The party’s leader, Gabriel Attal, was prime minister when Dati was first appointed culture minister, and a clash between the two reportedly ended with Dati threatening to turn her boss’s dog into a kebab. (She later clarified that she meant it jokingly.) If she does win, she’ll be commuting from City Hall to the courthouse a few times a week in September, when she faces trial on corruption charges. Dati is accused of having taken funds from French automaker Renault to work as a consultant, while actually lobbying on behalf of the company thanks to her role as an MEP. Dati is being probed in other criminal affairs as well, including accusations that she failed to declare a massive jewelry collection. She has repeatedly professed her innocence in all of the cases. Polling at: 27 percent Odds of winning: PIERRE-YVES BOURNAZEL After dropping Dati, Renaissance decided to back a long-time Parisian center-right councilman: Pierre-Yves Bournazel. HIS STRENGTHS: Bournazel is a good fit for centrists and moderate conservatives who don’t have time for drama. He landed on the city council aged 31 in 2008, and — like Dati — has been dreaming of claiming the top job at city hall for over a decade. His low profile and exclusive focus on Parisian politics could also make it easier for voters from other political allegiances to consider backing him. Pierre-Yves Bournazel. | Bastien Ohier/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images ACHILLES’ HEEL: Bourna-who? The Ipsos poll cited in this story showed more than half of Parisians said they “did not know [Bournazel] at all.” Limited name recognition has led to doubts about his ability to win, even within his own camp. Although Bournazel earned support from Macron’s Renaissance party, several high-level Parisian party figures, such as Europe Minister Benjamin Haddad, have stuck with the conservative Dati instead. Macron himself appears unwilling to back his party’s choice, in part due to Bournazel being a member of Horizons, the party of former Prime Minister Édouard Philippe — who turned full Brutus and publicly called on the president to step down last fall. “I don’t see myself putting up posters for someone whose party has asked the president to resign,” said one of Macron’s top aides, granted anonymity as is standard professional practice. Polling at: 14 percent Odds of winning: ON THE FAR RIGHT THIERRY MARIANI Thierry Mariani, one of the first members of the conservative Les Républicains to cross the Rubicon to the far right, will represent the far right National Rally in the race to lead Paris. Though the party of the Le Pen family is currently France’s most popular political movement, it has struggled in the French capital for decades. Thierry Mariani. | Bertrand Guay/AFP via Getty Images HIS STRENGTHS: The bar is low for Mariani, as his party currently holds no seats on the city council. Mariani should manage to rack up some votes among lower-income households in Parisian social housing complexes while also testing how palatable his party has become to wealthier voters before the next presidential race. ACHILLES’ HEEL: Mariani has links to authoritarian leaders that Parisians won’t like. In 2014, he was part of a small group of French politicians who visited then-President of Syria Bashar al-Assad. He has also met Russia’s Vladimir Putin and traveled to Crimea to serve as a so-called observer in elections and referendums held in the Ukrainian region annexed by Russia — trips that earned him a reprimand from the European Parliament. Polling at: 7 percent Odds of winning: SARAH KNAFO There’s another candidate looking to win over anti-migration voters in Paris: Sarah Knafo, the millennial MEP who led far-right pundit-turned-politician Éric Zemmour’s disappointing 2022 presidential campaign. Knafo has not yet confirmed her run but has said on several occasions that it is under consideration. HER STRENGTHS: Though Zemmour only racked up around 7 percent of the vote when running for president, he fared better than expected in some of Paris’ most privileged districts. The firebrand is best known for popularizing the “great replacement” conspiracy theory in France — that white populations are being deliberately replaced by non-white. She appeals to hardline libertarian conservatives whose position on immigration aligns with the far right but who are alienated by the National Rally’s protectionism and its support for the French welfare state. Sarah Knafo. | Bastien Ohier/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images Knafo, who combines calls for small government with a complete crackdown on immigration, could stand a chance of finishing ahead of the National Rally in Paris. That would then boost her profile ahead of a potential presidential bid. If she reaches the 10 percent threshold, she’d be able to earn her party seats on the city council and more sway in French politics at large. ACHILLES’ HEEL: Besides most of Paris not aligning with her politics? Knafo describes herself as being “at an equal distance” from the conservative Les Républicains and the far-right National Rally. That positioning risks squeezing her between the two. Polling at: 7 percent Odds of winning: EDITOR’S NOTE: Poll figures are taken from an Ipsos survey of 849 Parisians released on Dec. 12.

Listen on * Spotify * Apple Music * Amazon Music Der Berlin Playbook Podcast verabschiedet das Jahr 2025 mit einer Feedback-Folge. Gordon blickt zurück auf ein intensives politisches Jahr und nach vorn auf das, was 2026 bringt. Grundlage sind eure Hörer-Kommentare und Emails: Lob, Kritik, Anregungen und Fragen zum Podcast, zu Formaten, Interviews und thematischen Schwerpunkten. Im Mittelpunkt stehen dabei die Entwicklung des Podcasts, die 200-Sekunden-Interviews, die Machthaber-Serie, Spaziergang-Formate und der Umgang mit politischen Akteuren aus dem gesamten Parteienspektrum. Gordon erklärt, warum er weiter auf Experimente setzt, wie Interviews geführt werden sollen und wo er selbst Grenzen sieht. Dazu gibt es Einblick in redaktionelle Entscheidungen, den Ausbau von POLITICO-Formaten, neue thematische Schwerpunkte und die Zusammenarbeit im Team. Das Berlin Playbook als Podcast gibt es jeden Morgen ab 5 Uhr. Gordon Repinski und das POLITICO-Team liefern Politik zum Hören – kompakt, international, hintergründig. Für alle Hauptstadt-Profis: Der Berlin Playbook-Newsletter bietet jeden Morgen die wichtigsten Themen und Einordnungen. Jetzt kostenlos abonnieren. Mehr von Host und POLITICO Executive Editor Gordon Repinski: Instagram: @gordon.repinski | X: @GordonRepinski. Legal Notice (Belgium) POLITICO SRL Forme sociale: Société à Responsabilité Limitée Siège social: Rue De La Loi 62, 1040 Bruxelles Numéro d’entreprise: 0526.900.436 RPM Bruxelles info@politico.eu www.politico.eu

EUROPE’S CENTER ISN’T HOLDING ANYMORE Despite recent election wins for moderates in the Netherlands, Germany and the U.K., the far right is stronger than ever. By TIM ROSS in Jaywick, England Illustration by Merijn Hos for POLITICO In recent elections, voters in Europe have given hope to embattled centrist politicians across the Western world.   Donald Trump may have romped back into the White House, but the international movement of MAGA-aligned populists has run into trouble across the Atlantic. At elections in the U.K., France, Germany, the Netherlands, Romania — and in a sprawling vote across 27 EU countries for the European Parliament — mainstream candidates defeated populist hardliners and far-right nationalists.  “There remains a majority in the center for a strong Europe, and that is crucial for stability,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said, after the EU Parliament elections last year. “In other words, the center is holding.”   Sixteen months later, that hold is looking anything but secure.    Hard-right and far-right politicians are now leading the polls in France, the U.K. and even Germany. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s approval rating is a dire 21 percent. His French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, is even lower, at 11 percent — and the mood is so grim that this fall’s spectacular theft at the Louvre is being treated by some as a giant metaphor for a country unable to manage its challenges.   Even von der Leyen’s own EU conservatives now rely on the votes of far right lawmakers to get her plans approved in Brussels. One outraged centrist likened the shift to those German politicians who enabled Adolf Hitler to take power. Populists at the extremes, meanwhile, cast themselves as the obvious alternative for populations that want change. And now they can expect Trump to help: In a brutal rupture of transatlantic norms, a new U.S. National Security Strategy aims to use American diplomacy to cultivate “resistance” to political correctness in Europe — especially on migration — and to support parties it describes as “patriotic.” Trump himself told POLITICO he would endorse candidates he believed would move Europe in the right direction. On that rightward trajectory, in the next four years the political map of the West faces its most dramatic upheaval since the Cold War. The implications for geopolitics, from trade to defense, could be profound.   “What [Europeans are] getting from Trump is the strategy of maximum polarization that hollows out the center,” said Will Marshall from the Progressive Policy Institute, the centrist American think tank that backed Bill Clinton in the 1990s. “The old established parties of left and right that dominated the post war era have gotten weaker,” he said. “The nationalist or populist right’s revolt is against them.”  Nowhere is this recent transformation more dramatic than in the U.K.   As the sun sinks toward the horizon over a calm sea one Thursday evening in November, half a dozen regulars huddle around the bar in the Never Say Die pub, a few yards from the beach at Jaywick Sands, on the east coast of England.   Built in the 1930s as a resort 70 miles from London, Jaywick is now the most deprived neighborhood in the country. The area had such a bad image that in 2018 a U.S. MAGA ad used a photograph of a dilapidated Jaywick street to warn of the apocalyptic future facing America if Trump’s candidates were not elected.   Jaywick was named England’s most deprived neighbourhood in October — for the fourth time since 2010. | Tolga Akmen/EPA It is here among the pebbledashed bungalows and England flags hanging limp from lampposts that a new political force — Nigel Farage’s rightwing Reform UK — has built its heartland.   At the bar, Dave Laurence, 82, says he doesn’t vote, as a rule, but made an exception for Farage, who was elected to represent the area last year. “I quite like him. He’s doing the best he can,” Laurence says as he sips his pint of lager, with ’80s pop hits playing in the background. “I’ll vote for him again.”  Laurence freely describes himself as “racist” and says he would never vote for a Black person, such as the center-right Conservative Party’s leader Kemi Badenoch. What troubles him most, he says, is the number of immigrants who have arrived in the U.K. during his lifetime, especially those crossing the Channel in small boats. Soon, Laurence fears, the country will be “full of Muslims and they’ll fucking rebel against us.”  With its anti-establishment, immigration-fighting agenda, Farage’s Reform UK offers voters a program tightly in tune with far-right parties that have gained ground across the West. According to opinion polls, Farage now has a real chance of becoming the U.K.’s next prime minister if the vote were held today. (A general election is not due until 2029).   It’s startling to note that as recently as July 2024, Starmer’s Labour Party won a historic landslide and some of his triumphant election aides traveled to the U.S. to advise Democrats on strategy. Today, Starmer is derided as “First Gear Keir” as he fights off leadership rivals rumored to be trying to oust him. And Reform isn’t the only force remaking British party politics. To the left of Labour, the Greens have also made recent gains in the polls under a new leader calling himself an “eco-populist.”   Farage’s stunning rise from the sidelines to the front of a political revolution carries lessons well beyond Britain’s borders. Europeans raised in the old school of mainstream politics fear that the traditional centerground — their home turf — will not hold.   ‘DURABLY UNSTABLE’   Macron, for his part, tried to counter the rise of the hard right by calling a snap election for the French National Assembly last year. The gamble backfired, delivering a hung parliament that has been unable to agree on key economic policies ever since. Macron is now historically unpopular.   French lawmakers’ clashes over the budget have toppled three of Macron’s picks as prime minister since the summer of 2024. A backlash against his plan to raise the pension age has forced ratings agencies to mull a damaging downgrade. Macron, who himself became president by launching a new centrist movement to rival the political establishment, now has no traditional party machinery to help bolster his position. “He’ll leave a political landscape that is perhaps durably unstable. It’s unforgivable,” said Alain Minc, an influential adviser and former mentor to the French president.  The chaos gives populists their chance. The main politicians making any running in conversations about the next presidential election belong to the far-right National Rally of Marine Le Pen and its youthful party president Jordan Bardella, who are riding high in the polls at 34 percent.   In Germany, too, the center ground is steadily eroding.   Though Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservatives won a snap election in February, his ideologically uneasy coalition, which consists of his own conservative bloc and the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), holds one of the slimmest parliamentary majorities for a government since 1945, with just 52 percent of seats. That leaves the Merz coalition vulnerable to small defections within the ranks and makes it hard for him to achieve anything ambitious in government. The far-left Die Linke party and the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) both surged at the last election, too, with AfD winning the best result in a national election for any far-right party since World War II.  Merz’s attempt to defang the AfD by moving his conservatives sharply to the right on the issue of migration seems to have backfired. The AfD has only continued its rise, surpassing Merz’s conservatives in many polls.   The rise of the far-right is a cultural shock to many centrist Germans, given the country’s deeply entrenched desire to avoid repeating its past. “For a long time in Germany we thought with our history, and the way we teach in our schools, we would be a bit more immune to that,” one concerned German official said. “It turned out we are not.”   Even in the Netherlands, where centrist Rob Jetten won a famous but narrow victory over the far-right firebrand Geert Wilders in October, there are reasons for mainstream politicians to worry. Wilders’ Freedom Party is still one of the biggest forces in the land, winning the same number of seats as Jetten’s D66. He could well return next time, just as Trump did in the U.S.   WHERE DID ALL THE VOTERS GO?   According to polling firm Ipsos, a large proportion of voters in many Western democracies now have little faith in the political process. While they still believe in democratic values, they are dissatisfied with the way democracy is working for them.   A large survey questioning around 10,000 voters across nine countries found 45 percent were dissatisfied, fueling support for the extremes. Among voters on the far left (57 percent) and the far right (54 percent), levels of dissatisfaction were highest of all.   The countries with the highest rates of dissatisfaction in the Ipsos study were France and the Netherlands, where political upheaval has taken its toll on faith in the system.   Anti-riot police officers stand next to a demonstration called by far-right activist Els Rechts against the Netherlands’ current asylum policy, in September in The Hague. | Josh Walet/ANP via Getty Images Alongside the coronavirus pandemic and the aftermath of lockdowns, the biggest drivers of dissatisfaction were the cost of living, immigration and crime, according to Gideon Skinner from Ipsos. Trust in politics fell in the 90s and took another hit in the late 2000s at the time of the financial crash, he said.   “There may be specific things that have made it worse over the last couple of years but it’s also a long-term condition,” Skinner told POLITICO. “It’s something we do need to worry about and there is not a silver bullet that can fix it all.”  Perhaps the greatest problem for incumbent centrists is that in most cases their economies are so moribund that they lack the fiscal firepower to spend money addressing the issues disillusioned voters care about most — like high living costs, ailing public services and migration.  THE INEQUALITY EMERGENCY   The financial crisis of 2008 and the coronavirus lockdowns of 2020-21 left many governments strapped for cash. In the U.K., for example, the economy was 16 percent smaller than it should have been a decade after the 2008 crash if prior growth trends had continued, according to Anand Menon, professor of European politics at King’s College London.   “Crucially, the impact of the financial crisis, like the impact of so much else in our politics, was massively unequal,” Menon said. “Prosperous places with high productivity, with well-educated workforces suffered far, far less than poorer parts of the country.”   Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz submitted a study to the G20 in November warning that the world was facing an “inequality emergency.” Fueled by war, pandemic and trade disruptions, the crisis risks preparing the ground for more authoritarian leaders, his report said.   In many Western countries, the centerground is more than just a metaphor. It is in capital cities like London, Paris and Washington that power and money accumulate and the economic and political elites seek to maintain their grip on the status quo.   The further you travel from these centers out to areas in decline, the more likely you are to find support for radical politics.   As Menon notes, Britain’s 2016 revolution — the referendum vote to leave the European Union after almost half a century of membership — can be mapped onto the culinary geography of the country.   “Pret a Manger” is a smart national chain of sandwich and coffee shops, catering for hungry commuters and office workers in wealthy, successful British cities. “Places that had a Pret voted Remain,” Menon said. Parts of the U.K. where median wages were lower were disproportionately likely to vote to leave the EU.   IMMIGRATION, IMMIGRATION, IMMIGRATION   After the Brexit vote in 2016, immigration slid from the top of the priority list for British voters and Farage himself took a step back. Both have now returned, as Farage rides a wave of headlines about irregular migrants landing in small boats from France.   From January to May this year, there were a record 14,800 small boat crossings, 42 percent more than in the same period in the previous year, according to Oxford University’s Migration Observatory.   For Laurence, in the Never Say Die pub, the small boats represent the biggest issue of all. “What’s going to happen in 10 years’ time? What’s going to happen in 20 years’ time when the boat people are still coming over?” he asked.   A decade ago, German Chancellor Angela Merkel opened the doors to hundreds of thousands of refugees arriving into Europe from Syria, as well as Afghanistan and Iraq. The AfD surged in the months that followed, permanently changing German politics. At February’s election, the AfD won a record 21 percent of the vote, finishing in second place behind Merz’s conservative bloc.  “The fundamental failure that is common to the whole [centrist] transatlantic community is on immigration,” said Marshall from the Progressive Policy Institute. “All of the far-right movements have made it their top issue.”   It is the perceived threat that waves of migration pose to traditional national cultures which drives much of the support for the far right. Trump’s White House is now primed to join the European nationalists’ fight. According to a new U.S. National Security Strategy document released in December, Europe is facing “civilisational erasure” from unrestricted immigration, as well as falling birthrates. The analysis draws on the so-called great replacement theory, a racist conspiracy theory. Free speech — in the MAGA definition, at least — is another casualty of conventional centrist rule in Europe, as political correctness veers into “censorship,” the U.S. document said. Protesters demostrate under the motto “Loud against Nazis” in early February in Berlin. After years of decline, The Left party  pulled off a stunning revival in the general election later that month. | John MacDougall via AFP/Getty Images In his interview with POLITICO earlier this week, Trump aligned himself fully with the strategy paper. European nations are “decaying” and their “weak” leaders can expect to be challenged by rivals with American support, he said. “I’d endorse,” he added. In Brussels, the double-punch of the president’s interview and the strategy document left diplomats and officials feeling bruised and alarmed all over again, after a period in which they allowed themselves to hope that the transatlantic alliance wasn’t dying. One EU diplomat was blunt in assessing Trump’s new method: “It’s autocracy.” THE STOLEN JEWELS  Sometimes, it takes a random news event — ostensibly unconnected to politics — to crystalize the national mood. In Paris, the theft of France’s priceless crown jewels from the Louvre provided just such an opportunity, morphing into an indictment of an establishment that can’t get the job done, even when the job simply involves thoroughly locking the windows at the world’s most famous museum. National Rally leader Jordan Bardella called the incident a “humiliation” before asking: “How far will the breakdown of the state go?”   In Britain, just a month after Starmer’s victory last year, riots broke out across the country, fueled by far-right extremists. The catalyst was the murder of three young girls aged 6, 7 and 9, in Southport, northwest England, by a Black teenager wrongly identified at the time on social media — in posts amplified by the far-right — as a Muslim.   At the time, Farage suggested the police were withholding the truth about the suspect, earning him the fury of mainstream politicians. While stressing he did not support violence, Farage railed against what he called “two-tier policing,” a phrase popular among far-right commentators who claim police treat right-wing protesters more harshly than those on the left.  It’s an opinion that resonates in Jaywick. Chennelle Rutland, 56, is walking her two dogs along the beachfront, admiring the view as the sun sets, flaring the sky orange, then purple. The colors catch the surface of the flat sea. “It’s one rule for one and one rule for the other,” she says. “The whites have got to shut up because if you do say anything, you’re ‘racist’ and ‘far right.’”   Far-right activist Tommy Robinson invited his supporters to attend the “Unite The Kingdom” rally in September. | Christopher Furlong/Getty Images It would be wrong to characterise residents of Jaywick as simply ignorant or full of rage. Many who spoke to POLITICO there were cheerful, happy with their community and up to speed with the news. But, just as they’d soured on their country’s centrist establishment, they were also tuning out its favored news sources.   In Jaywick, some of Farage’s voters prefer GB News, Britain’s answer to Fox News, which launched in 2021, or learn about current affairs from YouTube and other social media. The BBC — for decades the mainstay of the British media landscape — has lost a portion of its audience here. Right-wing commentators and politicians attack it as biased. Trump has lately joined in, threatening to sue over a BBC edit that he said deceptively made it look as if he was explicitly inciting violence. The BBC’s director general and head of news both resigned. In the process, another piece of Britain’s onetime centerground was giving way.   WHAT NEXT?   There are reasons for centrists to hope. In Rome, Giorgia Meloni’s hard-right Brothers of Italy party has become less extreme in power, and the worst fears of moderates about a group with its historic roots in neo-fascism have not come to pass. She remains popular, and while pushing a culture war at home, she has avoided the wrath of the EU leadership and kept Trump onside.   Populists and nationalists don’t always win. Trump lost in 2020. In the Netherlands, Wilders lost in October this year, though only by a whisker. Romania’s Nicușor Dan won the presidency as a centrist in May, but again only narrowly defeating his far-right opponent.   Structural obstacles may also slow the radicals’ progress. The U.K.’s first-past-the-post voting system makes it hard for new parties to do well. The two-round French system has so far stopped Le Pen’s National Rally from gaining power as centrists combine to back moderates. In Germany, a similar “firewall” exists under which center parties keep the far-right out.   After the Brexit vote in 2016, immigration slid from the top of the priority list for British voters and Farage himself took a step back. Both have now returned. | Tolga Akmen/EPA Even as he enjoys a sustained lead in the polls and wins local elections in the U.K., Farage has not convinced voters that Reform would do a good job. Even some of his supporters worry he will be out of his depth in government.   The problem, for the centrists who are in power, is that a lot of voters seem to think they, too, are out of their depth. And, whether that involves dealing with migration, combatting inequality, or just boosting the security around the Mona Lisa, it’s a reputation they’ll need to fix in order to survive — no easy task given the intractability of the challenges facing the rich world.  The next year will see more elections at which the centrists — and their populists rivals — will be tested. In Hungary Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, long seen as the far-right bad boy of EU politics, is fighting to keep power at an election expected in April. There are regional votes in Germany where the AfD is on track to prosper. France may require yet another snap election to end its political paralysis. Trump’s diplomats and officials will be ready to intervene. Farage’s party, too, will be on the ballot in 2026: It is expected to make gains in Wales, Scotland and local votes elsewhere next spring. After that, his sights will be on the U.K. general election expected in 2029, by which time European politics may look very different.   “Of course I know Mr. Orban and of course I know Giorgia Meloni, of course I know these people,” Farage told POLITICO at a recent Reform rally. “I suspect that after the next election cycle in Europe there will be even more that I know.” Natalie Fertig in Washington, Clea Caulcutt in Paris and James Angelos in Berlin contributed to this report.  

THE HAGUE — Frans Timmermans rose to the pinnacle of European Union politics. But it was his own Brussels legacy that sabotaged his attempt to defeat the far right. Timmermans resigned as the leader of the GreenLeft-Labor alliance Wednesday night after a stunning underperformance in the Dutch general election, with the party losing five seats since the last election and ending up in fourth place. “It’s clear that I, for whatever reason, couldn’t convince people to vote for us,” Timmermans said in a speech in Rotterdam after the exit polls were published Wednesday night. “It’s time that I take a step back and transfer the leading of our movement to the next generation.” The pan-European Party of European Socialists considered Timmermans living proof that progressive, left-wing politics are in for a comeback after a decade of losing ground to the right. To them, Timmermans was an international statesman with a real a chance at scoring the Netherland’s premiership, 23 years since the last government led by Social Democrats. But for Dutch voters, he was unable to shake his reputation as an outsider and elitist. And it was precisely that international experience that doomed him as a stodgy statesman in The Hague. As a European commissioner for nearly a decade, half of it spent as Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s second-in-command, Timmermans delivered the flagship EU Green Deal package to fight climate change. The ailing GreenLeft-Labor alliance — which only recently began an official merger process — also put stock in Timmermans, bringing him back home to lead the charge against the surge of far-right Party for Freedom (PVV) in the national election of 2023. But his party failed to win the top slot, and was sidelined in government formation. Party leaders on the right demonized Timmermans and ran a hate campaign against him. | Remko de Waal/ANP/AFP via Getty Images Party leaders on the right demonized Timmermans, branding him as a green fanatic who would misspend taxpayer cash, should he be given the chance to govern. Dilan Yeşilgöz, the leader of Mark Rutte’s liberal People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), called him “arrogant” and “elitist” on several occasions — as did other leaders. Hopes for Timmerman rose again this past June when the right-wing government, led by Geert Wilders’ PVV, collapsed. With all major parties now pledging to sideline the far right, and with favorable polls placing his party second after PVV, Timmermans seemed to have another shot at leading the next Dutch government. But much as he tried, Timmermans failed to get rid of his EU past and lead his own country. BRUSSELS ARROGANCE During the EU election in 2019, Timmermans was the lead candidate of the European Socialists, campaigning across EU countries and on many occasions speaking the local tongue — as he is fluent in six languages. This impressive international flair earned him supporters in Brussels — but not so much in his home country. Since his return to Dutch politics, Timmermans’ problem has been that he is seen as an intellectual focused on foreign affairs, coming from the outside to lecture Dutch voters, campaign expert Alex Klusman and Leiden University politics professor Sarah de Lange told POLITICO ahead of the vote. “He has a handicap, because he’s perceived as this relatively well-off cosmopolitan” — an image that creates tension with the idea of defending “the interests of ordinary Dutch citizens,” said de Lange. Over the years, Timmermans has grappled with being seen as arrogant after years of keeping his head out of the country — first, as state secretary of EU affairs and minister of foreign affairs for seven years, followed by his tenure at the European Commission for nine years, said Klusman, who is the CEO of the BKB campaigning agency. When he came back to the Netherlands in 2023, Dutch citizens saw Timmermans as someone who was lecturing them — “telling them what to do, and at the same time somebody who had lost complete contact with what the Netherlands had become,” Klusman said. By that time, Klusman pointed out, the country had become widely dominated by right-wing politicians distrustful of the EU. Timmermans indeed worked hard to change his image. He sought to convey a more energetic, healthier politician campaigning across the country. | Dingena Mol/ANP/AFP via Getty Images For a man who had been in charge of devising the core of the Green Deal — now used in a counter-campaign by portraying it as killing Europe’s businesses — it was not a smooth landing. An article by Dutch newspaper NRC ahead of the vote argued that GreenLeft-Labor is increasingly associated with words like elitist, cosmopolitan and moralistic. “This image, partly the result of years of hard work by Geert Wilders, has stuck with many voters,” the analysis said. “GreenLeft-Labor is finding it difficult to shake that off.” Timmermans himself was keenly aware of that image, which he fought hard to leave behind. The perception of him as an outsider in his own country, Timmermans said when asked by POLITICO prior to the Dutch vote, “was very relevant two years ago when I came back — but last year, year-and-a-half, this has not been an issue.” “People remember that I was in government, that I was in the European Commission. But it’s no longer ‘the guy who comes to lecture us,’ because I’ve been active in Dutch politics again for two full years in the forefront of national politics,” he added. FAILED MAKEOVER Timmermans indeed worked hard to change his image. He sought to convey a more energetic, healthier politician campaigning across the country, while living in his hometown Maastricht to show he is connected to his roots. That makeover included dramatic weight loss after a gastric bypass surgery he underwent a year ago — which he descrribed at length in an interview with Dutch daily De Telegraaf, known to be especially critical of Timmermans, to try make him more palatable to right-wing voters.  But, according to Klusman, key for Timmermans were the “two years of humbleness lessons” doing parliamentary work as opposition leader after he lost the election in 2023. “In the beginning, he would never say that he wasn’t right, that he made a wrong remark or a wrong position in a debate,” said Klusman. But “now he’d think, and then he’d say, ‘no, I made a mistake.’” Timmermans began to listen instead of lecture, Klusman added. As the EU’s Green Deal architect, he brought the message home by focusing on the social aspects of climate change — for example, Timmermans tapped the narrative that building out renewable energy will reduce the energy bills for Dutch households. But despite all efforts, personal opinion ratings a few days before the election showed the wider Dutch population did not like Timmermans, giving him among the lowest grades on Oct. 27. “He is clearly not perceived as a new Timmermans,” said de Lange. “He’s very much perceived as the same figure he was in 2023” — as a party leader with strong credentials as a minister and a commissioner — “but far less as a fighter in politics and campaigning,” she concluded. Eva Hartog and Hanne Cokelaere contributed to this report.

PARIS — Emmanuel Macron was on a plane to Egypt when France faced the most serious crisis of his time in office. So why did the French president leave the country early Monday morning while there was such uncertainty at home? The answer, according to several current and former French officials, was to ensure his legacy. With fewer than 20 months left in the Elysée Palace, Macron is laser-focused on cementing his place in the history books — and believes he’s earned that distinction for his work in the Middle East, they said. The French president wasn’t going to miss his chance to be there for Monday’s peace summit in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheik, even with his house on fire and irrespective of it forcing his twice hand-picked prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, to push back presenting his draft budget by a day, nearly missing the deadline. French officials in recent days have been working hard to craft a narrative that the Gaza peace plan pushed by U.S. President Donald Trump was triggered by Macron’s own proposal and his lead role in pushing for recognition of Palestinian statehood at the United Nations General Assembly last month.  That’s why Macron really wanted to make it to the summit in Egypt, said a government adviser who, like others quoted in this piece, was granted anonymity to speak candidly. An ally of Lecornu said the president was “very, very focused” on Gaza.  The French political system is designed so that the president can represent the country on the world stage while the prime minister looks after matters at home. But these are exceptional circumstances in France, with Lecornu resigning after just 14 hours before being reappointed and some politicians even speculating that Macron might not even see out his time in office. At first sight, Macron appears to be following in the footsteps of former presidents, such as François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac, who pivoted to the international stage in the later years of their terms after losing their parliamentary majorities.   But Macron hasn’t let go of domestic policy. Unlike his predecessors, he isn’t adopting a “hands-off attitude,” said an early Macron backer.      “Macron has become very attentive to his European and international visibility,” said a former French official. “It’s what he’s got left to give himself the impression that he still has influence.” At first sight, Macron appears to be following in the footsteps of former presidents. | Joel Saget/AFP via Getty Images CHARM IN SHARM The Elysée last week went into lobbying mode, ramping up briefings with academics and journalists to drive home that Macron had been key to the success of Trump’s peace plan. “The Elysée’s priority was to spread the idea that their plan was very useful,” said a former diplomat, referencing the Franco-Saudi roadmap to end the war in Gaza. At the U.N. General Assembly last month, Macron risked drawing U.S. and Israeli ire with his push for Palestinian statehood, which was followed by close to a dozen Western states doing the same. His speech on the U.N. stage drew comparisons in Paris with other occasions when France stood up to Washington, in particular former Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin’s landmark 2003 address rejecting Washington’s march to war in Iraq. While in Egypt, Macron played carefully with the optics of power, of which he is an astute reader, to avoid being seen as playing second fiddle to Trump. He chose not to stand on the podium behind the U.S. president, instead sitting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Middle Eastern leaders, a move that was noted by Trump. Talking to reporters on the sidelines of the summit, Macron spoke about the efforts needed to keep the ceasefire in Gaza alive and the contribution France could make. Asked about national politics, he presented himself as “the guarantor of French institutions,” but could not help but lash out at opposition parties for trying to destabilize his prime minister. WINNING THE BATTLE, LOSING THE WAR Many officials say the French president is trying to remain above the fray. But there are several explanations as to why he’s doing so that go beyond the legacy argument. Some attribute it to the Jupiterian strategy of shrouding his office in mystique, communicating in grand gestures, and refusing to sully himself with the mudslinging of domestic politics.  One government official said Macron is “probably letting tensions dial down” and he is remaining silent to protect the institutional checks and balances of the French state.  Macron has cycled through centrist and center-right prime ministers in the past year. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Others say the silence is strategic, even magnanimous. They say the president recognizes just how unpopular he is — a recent poll put his approval rating at 14 percent — and is trying to prevent his allies from being tarnished by his political toxicity.  But Macron never really lets go of anything. In his meeting with opposition parties last week, Macron made it very clear who calls the shots when, according to a presidential aide, he offered to partially delay his flagship pension law, which pushed back the age of retirement to 64 from 62 for most workers.  Macron has cycled through centrist and center-right prime ministers in the past year to fend off challenges to that law and other achievements such as his tax cuts. Many saw his decision to reappoint the loyal Lecornu, just days after he resigned in the aftermath of his 14-hour government, as the sharpest example of his dogged refusal to hand over power despite his camp losing last summer’s snap election.   Macron ended up being forced to sell off the crown jewel he had jealously been guarding, the pensions reform, at least for now. Lecornu announced Tuesday that he would freeze the law raising the retirement age until 2027, in order to secure support from the Socialist Party and survive a no-confidence vote on Thursday.  Macron might yet save his pensions reform as there are doubts swirling that the suspension might not pass through parliament.  But fighting tooth and nail to ensure his legacy might also destroy it if Macron can’t secure the future of his centrist movement and his potential successors, such as former prime ministers and likely presidential candidates Edouard Philippe and Gabriel Attal.   Macron’s handling of the current crisis will almost certainly affect the campaign of any centrist trying to stop Marine Le Pen, or someone else from the far-right National Rally, from winning the presidency.  “What image are we projecting? We’re in favor of pension reform, and then we give up. It’s not clear,” said the Lecornu ally quoted above. “The only one who appears to know what she represents is Marine Le Pen,” they said. “She has a populist message, but it’s simple and consistent: This circus must stop.” Pauline de Saint Remy and Giorgio Leali contributed reporting.

BRUSSELS — With four years still to go until the end of their mandates in the European Parliament, Italy’s center-left MEPs are already breaking up with Brussels. In the cafés and pizzerias of the EU quarter, they are plotting their return to “the beautiful country” — a move only exacerbated by regional elections this fall. The left-leaning Democratic Party (PD) lawmakers’ near-total obsession with local politics is making them increasingly irrelevant in the European Parliament, where they are seen as punching below their weight.  Despite being the biggest national group in the Socialists and Democrats caucus, the PD is frequently outmaneuvered by smaller delegations with more discipline and a better knowledge of the Brussels machine. (The situation is also not helped by two of the Italians being suspended.) The future election of the S&D group leader — currently Spain’s Iratxe García Pérez — during the midterm reshuffle in 2027 will be a litmus test of who matters the most inside the Socialist party. It should be a moment for the Italian left to step up, but it is an open secret in Brussels that the PD’s heavyweights are more interested in power games back home.  Ever since its creation in 2007, the PD — currently the largest opposition party to Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing Brothers of Italy — has been ridden by tribal warfare, ideological divides and personality clashes.  This is proving a major liability in the Socialist power struggles in Brussels, where internal unity often matters more than size. “The Germans and Spaniards are fewer, but they matter more,” said a PD lawmaker who, like others quoted in this story, was granted anonymity to breach confidences. “Unlike the Spanish and German delegations, the PD don’t vote united. It’s not clear who they respond to,” echoed a non-Italian Socialist party insider. Party lifers who have made a name for themselves in Italy are seen as out of touch in a city that thrives on technical expertise and behind-the-scenes schmoozing with foreign colleagues.  “The PD have three or four microgroups within the delegation, and we notice that some have tensions with [party leader] Elly Schlein,” said a Socialist MEP from another delegation.  The future election of the Socialist group leader — currently Spain’s Iratxe García Pérez — during the midterm reshuffle in 2027 will be a litmus test for the party. | Ronald Wittek/EPA Critics say that a majority of Italy’s center-left MEPs spend more time canvassing in their domestic constituencies than operating in the rarefied backrooms of Brussels’ power centers. Only a handful have a permanent flat in the EU capital, sniped another PD insider.  “The new MEPs appear to be on loan to the European Parliament,” said David Allegranti, an Italian journalist and PD expert. “They needed a one-year placement, but they’re coming back for the regional elections this year — and potentially for the national vote in 2027,” he added.  Such is the extent of their political machinations to return to frontline national politics that the Italian daily Il Foglio compared the PD’s Brussels squad to the Count of Monte Cristo, the Alexandre Dumas character who spent years plotting his escape (and revenge) from a prison cell on a rocky fortress island.  But unlike Dumas’ hero, the MEPs are not seeking vengeance. They want a road back to political relevance.  TIME TO GO HOME The first, and so far the only, PD lawmaker to have left Brussels is Matteo Ricci, who is contesting a local election on Sept. 28 and 29 in the Marche region in central Italy.  A PD bigwig and former mayor of Bari, Antonio Decaro, chair of the European Parliament’s environment and food safety committee, has announced he will run for the presidency of his native Puglia region in the fall.  If he wins the election, his party colleague Annalisa Corrado — a Schlein loyalist — is the favorite to take up his post as the head of the European Parliament’s powerful environment committee.  Other bigwigs, such as the former mayor of Florence, Dario Nardella, and the ex-governor of Emilia-Romagna, Stefano Bonaccini, are rumored to be trying to return to Rome as national MPs in the upcoming general election in 2027, according to multiple PD insiders. It is also important to note that it is not only the Socialists who are pining for their homeland. EU lawmaker Pasquale Tridico from the anti-establishment 5Star Movement will contest the election to lead the Calabria region in October. “Few of them speak English and are interested in European topics,” the PD lawmaker said of his colleagues. “This reflects badly on the whole delegation.” The PD has “three or four microgroups within the delegation, and we notice that some have tensions with PD party leader Elly Schlein,” said one Socialist MEP. | Michele Maraviglia/EPA Despite the exodus, the PD does have some powerful and respected figures within the European Socialists, who have built a good reputation.  Disputing the notion that the PD punches below its weight, a third Socialist MEP pointed to Italian colleague Camilla Laureti’s position as vice chair of the S&D and to Fabrizia Panzetti clinching the powerful secretary-general post.  The chair of the PD’s delegation, Nicola Zingaretti, declined to be interviewed for this story. NOT PULLING THEIR WEIGHT Italian politicians with big ambitions rarely dream of becoming MEPs. What is generally seen as a second-rate job, however, became a safe haven for a handful of political has-beens who were left jobless at home — and weren’t completely in sync with PD leader Schlein’s lurch to the left. By picking a mix of party lifers, local caciques and media celebrities, the PD emerged from the 2024 European election as the largest Socialist delegation in Parliament. But this didn’t translate into real power in Brussels. To everyone’s surprise, Schlein refused to claim the Socialist leadership last summer even though this is generally awarded to the largest national delegation. In exchange, she secured an informal agreement with the other delegations that the PD would lead the group in the second half of the parliamentary mandate starting in mid-2027. However, with over a year left until the reshuffle, this promise is unlikely to materialize. The Spanish delegation is eager to retain control of the group and is pushing to extend the mandate of incumbent García Pérez to secure stability. Meanwhile, the German delegation is also expected to vie for the position — especially if it does not secure the European Parliament presidency. The Parliament president job is meant to go to a Socialist MEP in 2027, according to an informal agreement struck last year with the center-right European People’s Party. Yet, such an outcome would reignite calls to replace the incumbent Socialist European Council President António Costa with an EPP figure in the midterm reshuffle.   One high-up Socialist MEP suggested that the Italians would likely give away the presidency to a Spaniard or a German in exchange for keeping the secretary-general post. “[The PD’s group has] people that are very popular in Italy … [but they] have not managed to build beyond that [in Brussels], which limits their potential,” said a fourth Socialist MEP.

BERLIN — The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party nearly tripled its support in municipal elections in Germany’s most populous state on Sunday, according to initial results. The results in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, in Germany’s west, underscored the party’s growing appeal to voters outside its strongholds in the states of the former East Germany, where it is the strongest political force. AfD leaders now see the more populous west of the country — including the declining industrial cities of North Rhine-Westphalia, home to steel factories and a diminishing coal industry — as the key to expanding the party’s base, particularly with working-class voters increasingly defecting to the far right. The AfD won nearly 15 percent of votes in the state, coming in third place, according to the initial results. In the last municipal elections in North Rhine-Westphalia five years ago, the party won 5.1 percent of votes. In the city of Gelsenkirchen, a former center of heavy industry, the AfD candidate appeared set to face a center-left politician in a runoff for mayor. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) still came out clearly ahead of all other parties with 33 percent of the total vote, according to initial results. Merz’s coalition partners in the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) — once the dominant political power in North Rhine-Westphalia’s industrial centers — came in second with around 22 percent, according to an early tally. These vote shares are slightly lower than results for the parties in the state’s municipal elections five years ago. The elections, while having no direct effect on national politics, were widely seen as a barometer of the national mood, coming roughly four months after Merz took office. Some of Germany’s conservative and centrist politicians expressed relief that the CDU and SPD performed as well as they did, since both parties have seen their national poll numbers slump while the AfD’s have risen. “All Christian Democrats will be delighted with this result,” Hendrik Wüst, the conservative premier of North Rhine-Westphalia, said in a televised interview shortly after the polls closed. At the same time, Wüst added, the AfD’s strong result “cannot allow us sleep peacefully.” Centrist politicians must ask themselves “what the right answers are when it comes to poverty and migration,” Wüst said. “Are all parts of our welfare system really fair? What about problems with housing costs? Some issues have been allowed to drag on for a very long time.” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservative Christian Democratic Union still came out clearly ahead of all other parties with 33 percent of the total vote, according to initial results. | Andreas Arnold/Getty Images In Germany’s federal election in February, the AfD came in second with 20.6 percent of the vote, the best national result for a far-right party in Germany’s postwar history. The AfD’s success rested largely on its dominance in the former East Germany, where it came first in virtually all regions. Since then the AfD has become even more popular despite being designated as an extremist party by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, intensifying a simmering debate as to whether the party should be banned under the provisions of Germany’s constitution. AfD leaders are now intent on increasing their support in the former West Germany. Turnout in the North Rhine-Westphalia municipal elections increased significantly to 58 percent on Sunday, according to exit poll data, suggesting the party may have mobilized new voters. AfD politicians celebrated the results. “A huge success,” Alice Weidel, a national party leader, wrote on X. “We have cemented our voter base,” Enxhi Seli-Zacharias, an AfD politician in North Rhine-Westphalia, added in a televised interview. “It is no longer purely a vote of frustration.”

PARIS — Marine Le Pen is primed to play a major role in toppling French Prime Minister François Bayrou on Monday — but he will, at least, leave his post untarnished by a futile attempt to strike political trade-offs with the far-right leader. That’s a lesson Bayrou learned from his predecessor, Michel Barnier. Facing exactly the same challenge of trying to force through a painful round of billions of euros of budgetary belt-tightening, Barnier tried to haggle with Le Pen. It ended in disaster, and he became the Fifth Republic’s shortest-lived prime minister when he departed in December last year. Bayrou, who still has his eye on a long-shot bid for the presidency, is essentially exiting on his own terms, while Barnier is still smarting from being humiliated by Le Pen. Le Pen sealed Barnier’s political execution over an elegant Italian lunch in early December with her telegenic protégé Jordan Bardella.   In something of a last-minute Hail Mary to save his trimmed-down social security budget package, Barnier agreed to backtrack on cuts to medical reimbursements, something Le Pen had demanded the previous day. He even put out a cringeworthy statement, spelling out that it was a concession to Le Pen. Le Pen said she would go off and think about it. Le Pen and Bardella decided to do that thinking at the chic white-tablecloth Marco Polo restaurant in Paris’ 6th arrondissement, a favorite haunt for politicians and actors near the French Senate.  The two sat inside the dimly lit interior accented by rich wood and scarlet velvet and weighed the options in front of them. They decided it was non.  After her meal, Le Pen phoned the prime minister back to say, “I’ve got good and bad news for you,” Barnier recounted in an interview with POLITICO.  She was — confusingly — dropping a demand she had never made, Barnier remembers. But she wanted more measures that he couldn’t stomach.   “I said: Stop, this is not serious … I’m not going to belittle myself,” he said.   FRUITLESS NEGOTIATIONS For Barnier, it was a brutal defeat. Two days later he was kicked to the curb by opposition lawmakers after failing to get them to agree on a plan to put France’s social security finances in order.  Bayrou is almost certain to suffer the same ignominy. But he seems to have spared himself weeks of fruitless negotiations. For Barnier, it was a brutal defeat. Two days later he was kicked to the curb by opposition lawmakers after failing to get them to agree on a plan to put France’s social security finances in order. | Julien de Rosa/AFP via Getty Images “Barnier emerged tortured and weakened from his premiership,” said a government adviser, who was granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic. “This way he [Bayrou] spares himself the damage that was visited on Barnier.”  Though Bayrou may leave holding his head a bit higher than Barnier, it appears he too miscalculated by gambling Le Pen would be easier to control after her embezzlement conviction saw her banned from running for political office.   Le Pen’s party isn’t stopping at Bayrou. Her National Rally party is calling on President Emmanuel Macron to resign and wants a vote of no-confidence against European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.   It’s a far cry from the early days of Le Pen’s tenure at the helm of the National Rally, when she tried to remake the party’s image into one of a reasonable, respectable political force open to compromise that was ready to govern.  LE PEN’S PIVOT  During Barnier’s first weeks as prime minister, a path toward bringing the National Rally into the fold seemed both feasible and inevitable.  The surprise snap elections in 2024 ended with the National Rally holding a record number of seats, so ignoring them was impossible — especially considering that in naming Barnier prime minister, Macron had spurned the pan-left coalition that won the most seats in the contest, but fell short of an absolute majority.  Though Bayrou may leave holding his head a bit higher than Barnier, it appears he too miscalculated by gambling Le Pen would be easier to control after her embezzlement conviction saw her banned from running for political office. | Christophe Petit Tesson/EPA So Barnier began his tenure with a risky move: He told parliament that he would respect and engage with “all political forces,” effectively stepping over the invisible cordon sanitaire firewall that for years saw mainstream political parties band together against the far right.  For a long time, Barnier’s team thought the strategy was working. Le Pen’s trajectory, many thought, would follow the same path taken by Italian premier Giorgia Meloni from the post-fascist fringes of the right closer to the mainstream.  “We had a real relationship of confidence,” said one of Barnier’s advisers.  But the honeymoon in this marriage of convenience didn’t last long. There were soon disagreements about legislation and top jobs in parliament, according to insiders.  The Le Pen camp felt misled.  “Barnier assured them that they wouldn’t be despised, so National Rally lawmakers believed him — at first,” said a high-level conservative adviser who knows the National Rally well.  Le Pen sealed Barnier’s political execution over an elegant Italian lunch in early December with her telegenic protégé Jordan Bardella. | Christophe Petit Tesson/EPA But while Barnier said he would treat the National Rally like any other party, he kept them at arm’s length, meeting Le Pen only twice during his time as prime minister. His team “were afraid of being sullied” by the stain of working too closely with the far right, said the same adviser.  Barnier weathered the opprobrium of dealing with the National Rally, but never fully grasped the party’s ambitions after becoming the largest single opposition party in the National Assembly, one National Rally senior adviser said.  Everything changed on Nov. 13, with Le Pen on trial on charges of embezzling European Parliament funds, when French prosecutors called on the judges to immediately ban her from running for public office for five years if convicted. She was eventually found guilty and handed the sentence  “They needed something, a way to take vengeance,” said Antoine Vermorel-Marques, a conservative lawmaker and Barnier protégé. “Barnier suffered the blowback.”  LESSONS LEARNED  Whether Le Pen could have been convinced to go down the Meloni path with Barnier remains unclear.  Barnier never appeared to fully grasp the power dynamics within the National Rally, and at times it seemed the two sides could not bridge the apparent cultural or even class divides between them.   “There was no proximity with the National Rally,” said Marie-Claire Carrère-Gée, a former minister from the Barnier government. “Even with the Socialists we were closer.” She noted that the veteran conservative had friends and was on first-name terms with politicians across the aisle.   Could it have gone differently? Unlikely, say insiders.  Vermorel-Marques said Barnier emerged from the debacle saying Le Pen was simply “dangerous.” One former National Rally politician said Barnier suffered his fate because Macron “had it coming” after naming a prime minister from a party that won a relatively small fraction of seats in the 2024 snap election.   “Someone needed to take the fall, so I took the fall, but all of this is very far from the interests of the nation,” Barnier said himself.   He insists he has no regrets and has learned his lesson. But while Bayrou may not have stumbled across the same tripwire, it’s still Le Pen who looks set to push him out on Monday.

LONDON — One of Keir Starmer’s favorite meals is tandoori salmon curry, a dish the U.K. prime minister loves so much he once prepared it in front of the TV cameras. But if he ever finds time to whip it up in the kitchen of his Downing Street flat, he may want to pause over who is supplying the fuel to heat his gas hob.  The gas coming through the pipes is provided by TotalEnergies Gas & Power, a subsidiary of the French fossil fuel giant, TotalEnergies. And it isn’t just Downing Street it’s fueling. Much of Whitehall — the administrative center of the British state — is supplied with gas for heating, kitchens and hot water via a multi-year, multi-billion pound contract with the firm, known as ‘Supply of Energy 2,’ which could see up to £8 billion in British taxpayers’ money flowing to the energy multinational. According to data obtained through Freedom of Information requests, No. 10, the Foreign Office on King Charles Street, the Treasury’s headquarters and Ed Miliband’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero are all getting their gas from TotalEnergies’ subsidiary. So too, contract records show, are the Ministry of Defence, the Home Office and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. The Bank of England and — beyond the capital — local council offices, NHS hospitals and schools likewise buy gas from the firm via ‘Supply of Energy 2’ and other lucrative public sector procurement deals. Asked whether it could rule out that the prime minister’s flat above No. 11 Downing Street also receives gas from the contract, the government declined to comment. TotalEnergies fuels the British state. But there’s a problem. Because TotalEnergies also trades in Russian gas. THE SIBERIA CONNECTION The energy giant holds a 20 percent stake in Yamal LNG — a sprawling energy complex in the wilderness of Russia’s northern Siberia region, where huge fossil fuel reserves lie beneath the earth.  Majority-owned by Russian private energy firm Novatek, this is where gas is processed for shipment — in liquefied natural gas (LNG) tankers — to several European Union countries that are still, more than three years after Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, importing Russian LNG to fuel their economies. According to TotalEnergies, it supplies gas from Yamal under long-term contractual arrangements — pre-dating Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 — that it it cannot break. But it’s a trade flow that remains deeply controversial. EU imports of Russian LNG — in which TotalEnergies is one of the major players — were worth up to $8.5 billion (£6.3 billion) in 2024/25 according to an estimate from the Helsinki-based think tank the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. France, Spain and Belgium are the biggest importers. The LNG trade provides revenue for Russian fossil fuel companies that in turn generates tax income for the Kremlin — and helps fuel Putin’s war machine in Ukraine. Last week, the European Commission in Brussels embarked on a new push to crack down on Russian gas imports, including a ban on imports under long-term contracts — but not until January 2028. The U.K., by contrast, has already banned direct imports of Russian LNG. Its political leaders like to talk up their hardline stance on Putin’s fossil fuels. “Every family and business across the U.K. has paid the price for Russia weaponizing energy,” Prime Minister Starmer said at an energy security conference in London in April, positioning the U.K. as the chief adversary of Putin and his grip on energy markets. “We must continue to crack down on their energy revenues which are still fuelling Putin’s war chest.” Last week, Starmer said he wanted allies at the G7 summit in Canada to “squeeze Russia’s energy revenues and reduce the funds they are able to pour into their illegal war.”  But, critics say, a gas supply contract with a firm that still supplies Russian gas to the continent fatally undermines the U.K.’s claim to moral leadership on the issue. “It is outrageous that British government buildings are being heated with gas from a company still tied to Russian LNG,” said Svitlana Romanko, executive director of Razom We Stand, a Ukrainian NGO which campaigns against Russia’s fossil fuel trade. “Every contract with TotalEnergies sends a message that the U.K. is willing to look the other way as Ukrainians suffer.” ‘HYPOCRITICAL’ Gas supplied under TotalEnergies Gas & Power’s U.K. contracts is procured on the domestic market, so it is highly unlikely any of it actually originated in Russia. In line with the U.K.’s ban, the company does not import Russian LNG directly to the U.K. The gas coming through the pipes is provided by TotalEnergies Gas & Power, a subsidiary of the French fossil fuel giant, TotalEnergies. | Teresa Suarez/EPA Nonetheless, says Phuc-Vinh Nguyen, head of energy at the Jacques Delors Institute, a Paris-based think tank, it was “hypocritical” of the U.K. to have sealed such a lucrative contract with a firm that still imports Russian gas to European neighbors. The stance allows Britain to say in public “we are officially and actively banning Russian energy,” said Nguyen. “But by the back door [they] are dealing with a company that is actively working with the Russian regime.” TotalEnergies Chief Executive Patrick Pouyanné has said that “as long as the European authorities do not impose sanctions, and ask us to continue supplying the region with Russian LNG, we will do so.” Asked earlier this year about the potential for new investments in Russia in the event of a peace deal in Ukraine, Pouyanné did not rule it out. “We’ll have to take time before [re-engaging] … but at the same time, we’ll see what will happen,” he told CNBC, while branding it a “theoretical question.” He called the war “terrible” and “traumatic.” TotalEnergies said it condemned Russia’s invasion and that it operates legally in line with the energy and sanctions policies of the EU. The company only imports Russian gas to Europe under its existing contract and does not buy it on the so-called spot market for short-notice gas trades. Mai Rosner, senior fossil fuel campaigner at the Global Witness NGO, said TotalEnergies was nonetheless “one of the largest buyers of Russian gas, and a key player in bringing Putin’s fossil fuels to market.” “The U.K. government says it stands with Ukraine, is committed to energy security, and wants to lead on clean energy. So it’s deeply concerning that its highest offices are still powered by gas from TotalEnergies,” she said. PRESSURE FROM LABOUR MPS Whitehall’s contract with TotalEnergies’ U.K. subsidiary — first reported by POLITICO — was secured by the Crown Commercial Service (CCS), the government’s procurement body, under the previous Conservative administration. The contract started on Feb. 27, 2023 and was made public in March 2023. On taking office, Starmer’s government rejected calls from campaigners to scrap it. Now, for the first time, MPs in Starmer’s Labour party are raising concerns. Tan Dhesi, the Labour chair of the House of Commons Defence Committee, told POLITICO the government should “assess this particular contract to ensure we’re not undermining our steadfast support for Ukraine.” One of Keir Starmer’s favorite meals is tandoori salmon curry, a dish the U.K. prime minister loves so much he once prepared it in front of the TV cameras. | Pool Photo by Jason Alden via EPA “We must ensure any inadvertent support for the Russian war effort is eliminated and therefore target dealings with companies supporting the Russian economy,” he added. “Ensuring peace in Europe and the defense of Ukrainian sovereignty must be reflected across government policy, including in procurement.” Phil Brickell, a Labour member of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, said: “Handing taxpayer money to a company which continues to have ties with Russia, while our Ukrainian allies are indiscriminately being bombed during Putin’s relentless war of aggression, is not appropriate.” “The government should review the suitability of this supplier and exit the contract at the earliest opportunity,” Brickell added. GAS TIES RUN DEEP But any attempt to untangle the U.K. state’s deep ties with TotalEnergies might not be so easy. The CCS’s over-arching ‘Supply of Energy 2’ contract does not expire until February 2027 and some of the so-called “call-offs” from the contract secured by individual government departments run for longer still. The MoD and Home Office contracts both have end dates in 2030, according to public documents. Beyond the CCS contract, other public sector organizations are supplied by TotalEnergies Gas & Power via separate deals.  According to publicly-available records, the Bank of England and several local councils — including Lancashire, Hampshire, Bristol, and Southampton — have multi-year contracts via so-called “frameworks” arranged by the Kent County Council-owned public procurement firm, LASER. Each deal is potentially worth millions of pounds to the French fossil fuel giant. Councils in Shropshire, Herefordshire, Telford & Wrekin and Worcestershire, meanwhile, have a separate, combined contract worth up to £100 million, commencing in April next year and not expiring until 2030. TotalEnergies Gas & Power is one of only a handful of energy firms able to offer such large-scale public sector gas deals. But energy industry experts said U.K. officials would have alternative options. MONITORING DEVELOPMENTS A government spokesperson said:“We are making the U.K. a clean energy superpower to get off the roller coaster of fossil fuel markets controlled by dictators like Putin, replacing that with clean homegrown power we control — and have ended all imports of Russian fossil fuels in response to Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine.” The U.K., by contrast, has already banned direct imports of Russian LNG. Its political leaders like to talk up their hardline stance on Vladimir Putin’s fossil fuels. | Pool Photo by Alexander Kazakov via EPA A spokesperson for LASER, the procurement firm, said the company “fully recognizes the importance of ethical procurement and the concerns raised around energy supply chains.” All of its contracts “comply with the U.K. government’s sanctions regime and guidance on public procurement,” they added. “We will continue to monitor developments and act accordingly in line with government policy and sector best practice.” A Bank of England spokesperson said the Bank’s “procurement processes abide by all relevant [government] financial sanctions legislation.” A Southampton City Council spokesperson said it had been advised by LASER “that all of our energy contracts, including gas, comply with the U.K. government’s sanctions regime and guidance on public procurement.” They added: “We will continue to monitor developments with our procurement partner, Laser Energy, and act accordingly in line with government policy and sector best practice.” Other councils either declined or did not respond to a request for comment.

HOW THE EU ALWAYS GETS AWAY WITH IT From fraud to nepotism to revolving doors between the public sector and industry, the stench of impunity is pervasive. By MARI ECCLES in Brussels Illustrations by Daniel Forero for POLITICO In the swish hotel conference rooms and cafés of the Brussels EU quarter, the indignation was palpable: Why had poor Henrik been singled out? Henrik Hololei, a gregarious Estonian who had reached the heights of director-general in the EU’s civil service, had been caught accepting freebies from the government of Qatar while his department was negotiating a lucrative aviation deal ― with, ever so coincidentally, Qatar. It was fine, the European Commission said when the matter came to light in 2023: All his free flights had been signed off by a senior person in the department. Trouble was, the senior person in the department was Hololei. It caused a bit of stink in Brussels at the time, but chances are that in Europe at large, few people ever heard of it. Advertisement And that ― as well as the Commission’s muted response, the remarkable conclusion that no EU rules were broken, the fact that after stepping down Hololei simply made a lateral move to a cushy senior adviser role, and the widespread nothing-to-see-here attitude of the Brussels chatterati ― is the perfect illustration of the creeping sense of impunity infecting the system. Brussels lifers are used to the periodic splashes of scandals and “-gates,” which just this past month included a ruling on whether text messages should be scrutinized as official documents, and reports of fraudulent promotions of a “friendly circle” at an EU agency. The EU has a problem, and it’s not clear anyone wants to do anything about it. Politically, it’s “closer to how the Vatican and U.N. operate,” said Denis MacShane, a former British Europe minister, who saw up close how the bloc functioned. And both of those “have been wracked by impunity and corruption allegations in recent years.” But even the Vatican’s white smoke could be considered a transparent piece of communication when compared with the smoke and mirrors that often obscure reality in Brussels. DOWNRIGHT FRAUD To draw up a list of the bloc’s problems with corruption (both large and small, and in the broadest sense of the word) is to detail a horror show of bad practice: the revolving doors between industry and the EU, nepotism in the bloc’s most powerful institutions, harassment at work, downright fraud. The thing is, the EU has plenty of oversight bodies that are supposed to sort out this kind of stuff ― the ombudsman, the public prosecutor, the parliamentary committees, even an entire court system. But when they call out bad, or even illegal behavior (which they do), it often seems not to make a blind bit of difference. All this would be bad enough, but it also serves to compound a fall-of-Rome mood that feeds the narrative of nationalist politicians: From Budapest to Paris, the failings of Brussels, and the lack of any comeuppance, give anti-European rhetoric an easy ride. Advertisement “The EU institutions’ ethical insouciance and political unaccountability has produced a culture of impunity that not only harms EU citizens’ trust in democratic institutions, but also lends itself to be weaponized by anti-EU politicians both within and outside of the Union,” said Alberto Alemanno, a professor of EU law at HEC Paris, and founder of the Good Lobby NGO. While national governments live and die at the ballot box ― meaning that corruption and a lack of accountability often come back to bite them ― the EU’s world is murkier and more opaque.  Just in the past week or so, the bloc has been rattled (or rather, apparently not rattled in the slightest) by two scandals, each of which could easily have toppled a government if it had happened in domestic politics.  The EU’s General Court ruled that the Commission was wrong to deny journalists access to President von der Leyen’s texts with Pfizer’s CEO. | Clemens Bilan/EPA-EFE The first concerned the woman at the very top, the person with the the duty to uphold EU treaties: European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. The EU’s General Court ruled that the Commission had been wrong to withhold from the public text messages exchanged between von der Leyen and the CEO of the drug giant Pfizer, Albert Bourla, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic — and just before the company bagged the largest EU procurement contract of all time. The full details of the vaccine contract remain secret, despite protests from MEPs who (successfully) took the Commission to court in a separate transparency case — which the executive is challenging.  But will we ever see the texts? Almost certainly not. Advertisement “I’m not saying the fish stinks from the top in this case, but it’s a culture which is pervasive in that there is an attempt to block transparency,” says Herwig Hofmann, a professor of European public law at the University of Luxembourg, speaking about the EU institutions. The text message ruling, dubbed “Pfizergate” in EU circles, came around the same time as the bloc’s OLAF anti-fraud watchdog found the European asylum agency had been restructuring whole departments so senior staff could move friends into management positions. Any consequences? You must be kidding. Case closed, with no disciplinary measures taken. The EU operates within “limits” of administrative, political and judicial accountability, said Hofmann. “There are, of course, specific difficulties when it comes to the EU because of the great complexity and the amount of different bodies and agencies and actors we have nowadays.” COMMISSION ‘COUP’ While Hofmann says he doesn’t believe the culture is set by the top, you could be forgiven for reaching that conclusion. One of the biggest scandals the Commission has faced in recent times involved the 2018 fast-tracked appointment to the position of secretary general of Martin Selmayr, chief of staff to then-Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker — a man known unaffectionately as the Monster of the Berlaymont (the name of the Commission’s headquarters) for his intimidating, hierarchical approach. Selmayr was one of Juncker’s closest aides and the architect of his campaign to become president. His appointment to the top job was added to the agenda of a meeting of commissioners at the last minute to prevent them from organizing a revolt.  At the time, critics ― of which there were many ― described it as a “coup.” Martin Selmayr, then-secretary-general of the European Commission, behind then-President Jean-Claude Juncker, in 2019 | Patrick Seeger/EPA Emily O’Reilly, the then-European ombudsman, found four instances of maladministration, including a staggering sleight of hand where the Commission arranged a selection procedure for a new deputy secretary general merely to make Selmayr eligible for the chief’s position. Over at the European Parliament, the EU’s only directly elected body (so theoretically the one that might find itself most accountable), President Roberta Metsola has spoken frequently of her pride in being only the third woman to be its boss. She pledged to “make it easier” for the women who come after her. But so far she seems to have made it easier only for her brother-in-law, whom she appointed chief of staff last year. (The announcement was postponed for a few months because the “Qatargate” cash-for-influence scandal — not to be confused with the “Huaweigate” cash-for-influence scandal or the aforementioned “Pfizergate” text message transparency scandal — hit the Parliament at around the same time. “I am not sure adding the sobriquet ‘-gate’ to any story of bad behavior in the EP or Commission is helpful,” MacShane said.) Advertisement To be fair, Metsola has won some support for clamping down on harassment, but some say the sanctions placed on MEPs for bad behavior — docking their (albeit not-to-be-sniffed-at) daily allowances, rather than their salaries — are all a bit half-hearted. “That doesn’t serve as a deterrent because, as evidenced in the last mandate, when President Metsola sanctioned an MEP for psychologically harassing her assistant, she did it again a couple [of] years later,” said Nick Aiossa, director at Transparency International EU, an NGO. “And that’s a rare case when actual sanctions are given,” he said.  Except, even then they weren’t: The EU court actually reversed the decision this year because of the way the case was compiled. The MEP in question, Monica Semedo, always strongly denied any wrongdoing. SCAPEGOATS If all this sounds as if quite a lot of people are getting away with quite a lot of bad stuff, well, there might be something in that. Maybe it’s a consequence of how the EU is structured. First, there’s the sheer complexity of the setup (what even is comitology?). “The EU is particularly unaccountable,” said one Parliament official interviewed for this article. In part, the labyrinthine system is what makes it “very opaque,” they said. Then there’s the fact that power still resides with national governments. For them, having scapegoats in Brussels is handy. It also just takes too much effort to intervene. There’s a strong impulse therefore to maintain the status quo. Advertisement “Domestic ― not EU ― political representatives are those who essentially determine whether, to what extent, and when EU issues penetrate the national political debate without being subject to corresponding public scrutiny or accountability,” Alemanno said. But while that can be a “reassuring” tool for national governments, it comes with “high costs, including making the EU more vulnerable than it could be.” And there’s a further complication, which national politics doesn’t suffer from when it comes to investigating impropriety. Some conflate criticism of the institutions, or of the conduct of individuals, with an attack on the concept of the EU itself.  Ex-Ombudsman O’Reilly, who criticized what she described as a culture of “powerful consiglieri” ― a word for trusted confidants that was originally applied to advisers to Mafia bosses ― at the top of the Commission, also felt compelled to explain that she wasn’t attacking the very concept of the EU when she came after its officials for their conduct. “I know I seem very critical, but I come at it as someone with immense gratitude toward the EU,” she said.  “I would not have had the career that I’ve had as an Irish woman without our joining the EU and with[out] the EU dragging my government kicking and screaming into the 20th century in relation to women and labor laws. So I see it as a potentially amazing moral force.  “So when I see it acting in particular ways … that concerns me. And that’s where I come from, not from a wish to be critical for the sake of it,” she told POLITICO last year. It has led to a certain paranoia: In the aftermath of POLITICO’s reporting on Hololei’s flights, one reader working in the Brussels bubble said earnestly that some in the Commission thought Russia was behind the story. To eliminate any doubt, it wasn’t. (Nor this one, by the way.) SOMETHING WITH NO TEETH EU oversight bodies are putting pressure on von der Leyen, who pledged that transparency would be a core part of her mandate when she became head of the EU’s executive branch in 2019.   But she has repeatedly come under fire for backsliding on commitments, like the promise to set up a new ethics body with enforcement powers. O’Reilly wasn’t too optimistic, saying she expected “something with no teeth, something that will possibly sit there passively, wait for complaints to come in.” Indeed, in the first meeting of the Commission within her second term, which started on Dec. 1, von der Leyen signed off on a rule that will actually make it easier to block access to documents ― another decision being challenged by NGO ClientEarth in the EU court. Advertisement While EU judges have the power to reverse, or impose, huge fines on companies, on countries and even on the EU itself for breaching the bloc’s treaties, it has been far meeker when it comes to individuals. So, for example, when it comes to the Pfizergate texts scandal, despite the court ruling against the Commission saying that messaging should be treated like any other document, “I don’t expect any effect on her, or her approach,” a diplomat from an EU country said of von der Leyen. Even when it comes to transparency, the effect of the ruling might simply be that those who request documents receive a “bit more elaborate” explanations as to why they’ve been refused access, the diplomat continued. And so it continues. ‘THROW THE SCOUNDRELS OUT’ For decades, capitals and the Brussels core have been involved in a push-and-pull over where power resides and how much the EU centrally, rather than its national governments, should be democratically accountable. While there are arguments for both, a lack of accountability at the European level doesn’t help make officials feel they are answerable to a restless electorate. “Even the basic premise of representative democracy, that on election day voters can ‘throw the scoundrels out,’ that is to replace the government, does not work in the EU,” said Alemanno, the EU law professor. “Citizens are deprived not only of influence at the EU level, but also of any knowledge and understanding of EU politics that would allow for popular scrutiny and effective democratic control.” Advertisement Some believe that lack of understanding comes from weak media coverage of EU politics. “It tends to be opinion columns rather than legwork reporting,” said MacShane, the former Europe minister, who served a prison sentence in the U.K. for filing bogus expense claims. “Most Brussels reporting I see in U.K. or European papers is the traditional singleton foreign correspondent type reporting.” Despite that, he argues, Brussels isn’t so uniquely bad. “Over the years I have seen far more impunity in national governments, even local governments, than there was in Brussels.” It’s a low bar, but it is a bar. MEPs, however, aren’t doing the “necessary work” of holding the Commission to account, he said. “All Eurocrats from commissioners downwards are appointed on a party political basis, so the party groups defend their own.” For decades, capitals and the Brussels core have been involved in a push-and-pull over where power resides. | Stephanie Lecocq/EFE via EPA Aiossa, from Transparency International, also singled out the Parliament as more problematic than the Commission. “This culture that has been able to fester over the years … has allowed for a series of scandals, Qatargate, Russiagate, Huawei, without any kind of meaningful reforms to address the next scandal,” he said. He added that some “basic rules” need to be reformed, including a ban on MEPs having any side activities with organizations that lobby the EU.  “It’s a simple ask, but very controversial among MEPs, who have very lucrative side jobs with many companies and industries that are trying to influence EU policy making,” Aiossa said. Advertisement If a smaller second chamber were to be created in the Parliament consisting of national lawmakers — similar to the Ständerat in Switzerland — it might be “better placed to have oversight of full accountability,” MacShane said. But before things get better, they may get worse. Depending on whom you ask, a clampdown on NGO funding by the Commission is either a right-wing attack on the EU’s climate and health agendas, or a legitimate attempt to make their financing more transparent. There’s no doubt that Brussels NGOs are one of the few groups that try to hold the EU institutions to account, something they might find harder to do now the Commission is blocking cash for lobbying the EU. Brussels’ failings, and the lack of comeuppance, give anti-European rhetoric an easy ride. | Stephanie Lecocq/EFE via EPA “The current persecution of NGOs is only going to aggravate this situation,” the Parliament official said. “And the ones behind it know that very well.” In the meantime, you might be wondering: Whatever happened to the Estonian official, Hololei? The French paper Libération reported that OLAF found he’d exchanged confidential details about a major aviation deal with Qatar in return for gifts for himself and his inner circle, including stays in a five-star hotel in Doha. Last month, the Commission finally launched a probe into his behavior after the European Public Prosecutor’s Office opened a criminal investigation last year. Hololei did not respond to requests for comment on the opening of the probe. Has that had any impact on the aviation deal that he helped negotiate? Of course not.