BRUSSELS ― EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas privately told lawmakers the state of the world meant it might be a “good moment” to start drinking. Kallas told leaders of the political groups in the European Parliament that while she is not much of a drinker now may be the time to start given events around the globe, according to two people who were in the room. She was speaking around the same time as foreign ministers from Greenland and Denmark were meeting U.S. Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio over Donald Trump’s threats to seize the Arctic island. The EU’s top diplomat ― who coordinates the bloc’s foreign policy on behalf of the 27 governments and the European Commission ― cracked the joke in a meeting of the Conference of Presidents, a meeting of the Parliament’s group leaders. Her comments came after top MEPs started wishing each other a happy new year. The same MEPs added that global events meant it wasn’t that happy, according to people in the room. With fears in Europe that Trump might annex Greenland, mass protests against the Islamist regime in Iran, as well as the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza and the U.S. operation in Venezuela, geopolitics has become the EU’s most pressing issue. One of Kallas’ most recent moves was to tell POLITICO that she was prepared to propose fresh sanctions against Iran following the government crackdown that has reportedly killed hundreds of people. Kallas’ spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Andrea Carlo is a British-Italian researcher and journalist living in Rome. His work has been published in various outlets, including TIME, Euronews and the Independent. Last month, UNESCO designated Italian cuisine part of the world’s “intangible cultural heritage.” This wasn’t the first time such an honor was bestowed upon food in some form — French haute cuisine and Korean kimchi fermentation, among others, have been similarly recognized. But it was the first time a nation’s cuisine in its entirety made the list. So, as the U.N. agency acknowledged the country’s “biocultural diversity” and its “blend of culinary traditions […] associated with the use of raw materials and artisanal food preparation techniques,” Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni reacted with expected pride. This is “a victory for Italy,” she said. And prestige aside — Italy already tops UNESCO’s list of World Heritage Sites — it isn’t hard to see the potential benefits this designation might entail. One study even suggests the UNESCO nod alone could boost Italian tourism by up to 8 percent. But behind this evident soft power win also lies a political agenda, which has turned “Italian cuisine” into a powerful weapon for the country’s right-wing government. For Meloni’s government, food is all the rage. It permeates every aspect of political life. From promoting “Made in Italy” products to blocking EU nutrition labelling scores and banning lab-grown meat, Rome has been doing its utmost to regulate what’s on Italian plates. In fact, during Gaza protests in Rome in September, Meloni was sat in front of the Colosseum for a “Sunday lunch” as part of her government’s long-running campaign to make the coveted list. Clearly, the prime minister has made Italian cuisine one of the main courses of her political menu. And all of this can be pinpointed to a phenomenon political scientists call “gastronationalism,” whereby food and its production are used to fuel identitarian narratives — a trend the Italian far right has latched onto with particular gusto. There are two main principles involving Italian gastronationalism: The notion that the country’s culinary traditions must be protected from “foreign contamination,” and that its recipes must be enshrined to prevent any “tinkering.” And the effects of this gastronationalism now stretch from political realm all the way to the world of social media “rage-bait,” with a deluge of TikTok and Instagram content lambasting “culinary sins” like adding cream to carbonara or putting pineapple on pizza. At the crux of this gastronationalism, though, lies the willful disregard of two fundamental truths: First, foreign influence has contributed mightily to what Italian cuisine is today; and second, what is considered to be “Italian cuisine” is neither as old nor as set in stone as gastronationalists would like to admit. Europe, as a continent, is historically poor in its selection of indigenous produce — and Italy is no exception. The remarkable variety of the country’s cuisine isn’t due to some geographic anomaly, rather, it is the byproduct of centuries of foreign influence combined with a largely favorable climate: Citrus fruits imported by Arab settlers in the Middle Ages, basil from the Indian subcontinent through ancient Greek trading routes, pasta-making traditions from East Asia, and tomatoes from the Americas. Lying at the crossroads of the Mediterranean and home to major trading outposts, Italy was a sponge for cultural cross-pollination, which enriched its culinary heritage. To speak of the “purity” of Italian food is inherently ahistorical. This wasn’t the first time such an honor was bestowed upon food in some form — French haute cuisine and Korean kimchi fermentation, among others, have been similarly recognized. | Anthony Wallace/AFP via Getty Images But even more controversial is acknowledging that the concept of “Italian cuisine” is a relatively recent construct — one largely borne from post-World War II efforts to both unite a culturally and politically fragmented country, and to market its international appeal. From north to south, not only is Italy’s cuisine remarkably diverse, but most of its iconic dishes today would have been alien to those living hardly a century ago. Back then, Italy was an agrarian society that largely fed itself with legume-rich foods. Take my great-grandmother from Lake Como — raised on a diet of polenta and lake fish — who had never heard of pizza prior to the 1960s. “The mythology [of gastronationalism] has made complex recipes — recipes which would have bewildered our grandmothers — into an exercise of national pride-building,” said Laura Leuzzi, an Italian historian at Glasgow’s Robert Gordon University. Food historian Alberto Grandi took that argument a step forward, titling his latest book — released to much furor — “Italian cuisine does not exist.” From carbonara to tiramisù, many beloved Italian classics are relatively recent creations, not much older than the culinary “blasphemies” from across the pond, like chicken parmesan or Hawaiian pizza. Even more surprising is the extent of U.S. influence on contemporary Italian food itself. Pizza, for instance, only earned its red stripes when American pizza-makers began adding tomato sauce to the dough, in turn influencing pizzaioli back in Italy. And yet, some Italian politicians, like Minister of Agriculture Francesco Lollobrigida, have called for investigations into brands promoting supposedly misleadingly “Italian sounding” products, such as carbonara sauces using “inauthentic” ingredients like pancetta. Lollobrigida would do well to revisit the original written recipe of carbonara, published in a 1954 cookbook, which actually called for the use of pancetta and Gruyère cheese — quite unlike its current pecorino, guanciale and egg yolk-based sauce. Simply put, Italian cuisine wasn’t just exported by the diaspora — it is also the product of the diaspora. One study even suggests the UNESCO nod alone could boost Italian tourism by up to 8 percent. | Michael Nguyen/NurPhoto via Getty Images What makes it so rich and beloved is that it has continued to evolve through time and place, becoming a source of intergenerational cohesion, as noted by UNESCO. Static “sacredness” is fundamentally antithetical to a cuisine that’s constantly reinventing itself, both at home and abroad. The profound ignorance underpinning Italian gastronationalism could be considered almost comedic if it weren’t so perfidious — a seemingly innocuous tool in a broader arsenal of weaponry, deployed to score cheap political points. Most crucially, it appeals directly to emotion in a country where food has been unwittingly dragged into a culture war. “They’re coming for nonna’s lasagna” content regularly makes the rounds on Facebook, inflaming millions against minorities, foreigners, vegans, the left and more. And the real kicker? Every nonna makes her lasagna differently. Hopefully, UNESCO’s recognition can serve as a moment of reflection in a country where food has increasingly been turned into a source of division. Italian cuisine certainly merits recognition and faces genuine threats — the impact of organized crime and the effects of climate change on crop growth biggest among them. But it shouldn’t become an unwitting participant in an ideological agenda that runs counter to its very spirit. For now, perhaps it’s best if our government kept politics off the dinner table.

Flynn Coleman is an international human rights attorney. She is a visiting scholar in the Women, Peace, and Leadership Program at Columbia University’s Climate School and the author of “A Human Algorithm.” Roman Oleksiv was 11 years old when he stood before the European Parliament and, in a calm voice, described the last time he saw his mother. She was under the rubble of a hospital in Vinnytsia, Ukraine, hit by a Russian missile in July 2022. He could see her hair beneath the stone. He touched it. He said goodbye. That’s when Ievgeniia Razumkova, the interpreter translating his words, stopped mid-sentence. Her eyes filled with tears, she shook her head. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m a bit emotional as well.” A colleague then stepped in to finish, as Ievgeniia, still crying, placed her hand on the boy’s shoulder. He nodded and continued on. That moment is what makes us human. A translation algorithm would not have stopped. It would have rendered Roman’s testimony with perfect fluency and zero hesitation. It would have delivered the words “the last time I saw my mother” just as it would the sentence “hello, my name is Roman.” Same tone. Same rhythm. No recognition. Today, we are building a world that treats translation — and increasingly everything else — as a problem to be solved. Translation apps now handle billions of words a day. Real-time tools let tourists order coffee in any language. Babel, we are told, is finally being fixed. All of this has its place. But translation was never just a technical challenge. It is an act of witnessing. An interpreter does not merely convert words from one language to another. They carry meaning across the chasm between us. They hear what silences say. They make split-second ethical and semantic decisions over which synonym preserves dignity, when a pause holds more truth than a sentence, whether to soften a phrase that would shatter a survivor. When Ievgeniia broke down in Strasbourg, she was not failing. She was doing her job. Her face told a room full of diplomats what no algorithm could: “This matters. This child’s suffering is real. Pay attention.” I have spent years working in international human rights law, war crimes tribunals, genocide prevention — all the imperfect architecture we try to rebuild after atrocity. In these spaces, everything hinges on language. One word can determine whether a survivor is believed. The difference between “I saw” and “I was made to see,” or between “they did this” and “this happened.” Roman Oleksiv has undergone 36 surgeries. Burns cover nearly half his body. He was 7 years old when that missile hit. And when he described touching his dead mother’s hair, he needed someone in that room who could hold the weight of what he was saying — not just linguistically but humanly. Ievgeniia did that. And when she could not continue, another person stepped forward. There is a reason interpreters in trauma proceedings receive psychological support. The best ones describe their work as a sacred burden. They absorb something. They metabolize horror, so it can cross from one language to another without losing its force. Interpreters are not alone in this either. There are moments when trauma surgeons pause before delivering devastating news, journalists choose to lower their cameras, and judges listen longer than procedure requires. These are professions where humanity is not a flaw — it is the point. This is not inefficiency. It is care made visible. Algorithms process language as pattern, not communion. They have no understanding that another mind exists. They do not know that when Roman said goodbye, he was not describing a social gesture — he was performing the final ritual of love he would ever share with his mother, in the rubble of a hospital. Translation apps do serve real purposes, and generative AI is becoming more proficient every day. But we should be honest about the trade we are making. When we treat human interpreters — and any human act of care — as inefficiencies to be optimized away, we lose that pause before “the last time I saw my mother.” We lose the hand on the shoulder. We lose the tears that say: “This child is not a data point. What happened to him is an atrocity.” My work studying crimes against humanity has taught me that some frictions should not be smoothed. Some pauses are how we recognize one another as human. They are echoes in the dark, asking: “I am still here. Are you?” When an interpreter breaks, they are not breaking down. They are breaking open — making room for unbearable truth to enter, and for all of us to see it. Roman deserved someone who could help us stand in his deepest pain, so that we might all lift it together. A machine could not do that. A machine, by design, does not stop.

Listen on * Spotify * Apple Music * Amazon Music Sonst prägt sie die politische Debatte mit ihren Fragen, heute antwortet sie: In dieser Feiertags-Sonderfolge dreht Gordon Repinski den Spieß um und bittet Sandra Maischberger zum Interview. Es geht um die Rolle des Journalismus in polarisierten Zeiten: Maischberger spricht über den Neutralitäts-Druck auf die Öffentlich-Rechtlichen. Sie erklärt, warum sie konstruktive Kritik für unverzichtbar hält, die Debatten auf z.B. X aber teils nicht mehr an sich heranlässt. Der Blick nach vorn fällt realistisch aus: Für 2026 und 2027 erwartet die Moderatorin disruptive Jahre. Angesichts der Rückkehr von Donald Trump und der geopolitischen Lage dämpft sie Hoffnungen auf ein schnelles Ende des Ukraine-Krieges, sieht aber einen Lichtblick in der erstaunlichen Resilienz der jungen Generation.’ Außerdem: Ein Blick hinter die Kulissen ihrer Talkshow, warum sie persönlich auf Instagram nicht stattfindet und wieso sie in der Dauer-Alarm-Stimmung dringend Pausen braucht, um klar zu bleiben. 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

Elisabeth Braw is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, the author of the award-winning “Goodbye Globalization” and a regular columnist for POLITICO. It was hardly the kind of peace and cheer one hopes to see leading up to Christmas. But on Dec. 7, the second Sunday of Advent, a collection of telecoms masts in Sweden were the site of a strange scene, as a foreign citizen turned up and began taking photographs. The case became widely known two days later, when the CEO of Teracom, a state-owned Swedish telecom and data services provider, posted an unusual update on LinkedIn: Company employees and contracted security had helped detain a foreign citizen, CEO Johan Petersson reported. They had spotted the foreigner taking pictures of a group of Teracom masts, which are sensitive installations clearly marked with “no trespassing” signs. After being alerted by the employees, police had arrested the intruder. “Fast, resolute and completely in line with the operative capabilities required to protect Sweden’s critical infrastructure,” Petersson wrote. But his post didn’t end there: “Teracom continually experiences similar events,” he noted. “We don’t just deliver robust nets — we take full responsibility for keeping them secure and accessible around the clock. This is total defense in practice.” That’s a lot of troubling news in one message: a foreign citizen intruding into an area closed to the public to take photos of crucial communications masts, and the fact that this isn’t a unique occurrence. Indeed, earlier this year, Swedish authorities announced they had discovered a string of some 30 cases of sabotage against telecoms and data masts in the country. How many more potential saboteurs haven’t been caught? It’s a frightening question and, naturally, one we don’t have an answer to. It’s not just communications masts that are being targeted. In the past couple years, there have been fires set in shopping malls and warehouses in big cities. There have been suspicious drone sightings near defense manufacturing sites and, infamously, airports. Between January and Nov. 19 of this year, there were more than 1,072 incidents involving 1,955 drones in Europe, and as a group of German journalism students have established, some of those drones were launched from Russian-linked ships. And of course, there has been suspicious damage to undersea cables and pipelines in the Baltic Sea and off the coast of Taiwan. I’ve written before in this publication that Russia’s goal with such subversive operations may be to bleed our companies dry, and that China seems to be pursuing the same objective vis-à-vis certain countries. But when it comes to critical national infrastructure — in which I could include institutions like supermarkets — we need them to work no matter what. Imagine going a day or two or three without being able to buy food, and you’ll see what I mean. The upside to Teracom’s most recent scare was that the company was prepared and ultimately lost no money. Because its staff and security guards were alert, the company prevented any damage to their masts and operations. In fact, with the perpetrator arrested — whether prosecutors will decide to charge him remains to be seen — Teracom’s staff may well have averted possible damage to other businesses too. Moving forward, companies would do well to train their staff to be similarly alert when it comes to saboteurs and reconnaissance operators in different guises. We can’t know exactly what kind of subversive activities will be directed against our societies, but companies can teach their employees what to look for. If someone suddenly starts taking pictures of something only a saboteur would be interested in, that’s a red flag. Indeed, boards could also start requiring company staff to become more vigilant. If alertness can make the difference between relatively smooth sailing and considerable losses — or intense tangling with insurers — in these geopolitically turbulent times, few boards would ignore it. And being able to demonstrate such preparedness is something companies could highlight in speeches, media interviews and, naturally, their annual reports. Insurers, in turn, could start requiring such training for these very reasons. After serious cyberattacks first took off, insurers paid out on their policies for a long time, until they realized they should start obliging the organizations they insure to demonstrate serious protections in order to qualify for insurance. Insurers may soon decide to introduce such conditions for coverage of physical attacks too. Even without pressure from boards or insurers, considering the risk of sabotage directed at companies, it would be positively negligent not to train one’s staff accordingly. Meanwhile, some governments have understandably introduced resilience requirements for companies that operate crucial national infrastructure. Under Finland’s CER Act, for instance, “critical entities must carry out a risk assessment, draw up a resilience plan and take any necessary measures.” The social contract in liberal democracies is that we willingly give up some of our power to those we elect to govern us. These representatives are ultimately in charge of the state apparatus, and in exchange, we pay taxes and obey the law. But that social contract doesn’t completely absolve us from our responsibility toward the greater good. That’s why an increasing number of European countries are obliging 19-year-olds to do military service. When crises approach, we all still have a part to play. Helping spot incidents and alerting the authorities is everyone’s responsibility. Because the current geopolitical turbulence has followed such a long period of harmony, it’s hard to crank up the gears of societal responsibility again. And truthfully, in some countries, those gears never worked particularly well to begin with. But for companies, however, stepping up to the plate isn’t just a matter of doing the right thing — it’s a matter of helping themselves. Back in the day, the saying went that what was good for Volvo was good for Sweden, and what was good for General Motors was good for the U.S. Today, when companies do the right thing for their home countries, they similarly benefit too. Now, let’s get those alertness courses going.

Greek MEP Nikos Pappas has been thrown out of his political group after allegedly assaulting a reporter at a bar in Strasbourg. A delegation of journalists from Greece had visited Strasbourg to cover the plenary session and was in a late-night bar called Aedan Palace, which is popular with MEPs. Pappas, an MEP for the left-wing Syriza party and a former professional basketball player, was also in the bar, according to several people who were present and who were granted anonymity to speak freely. According to a description of the events on the Greek website news247.gr, which employs the reporter, Nikos Yiannopoulos, he and a colleague decided to leave at around 11:30 p.m., at which point Pappas attempted to trip him. The reporter said he asked the MEP not to touch him again, and that Pappas then proposed that they go outside. The report says Pappas followed the two journalists toward the exit and twice hit Yiannopoulos from behind, knocking him to the ground. The two journalists said they returned to the bar, and as the Greeks tried to leave they bumped into Pappas, who threatened them. An hour later Pappas sent apologies by text message and tried to reach the journalist by phone, but he did not reply. Yiannopoulos filed a complaint with local police. POLITICO reached out to Pappas, but he did not reply to a request for comment. Syriza President Socrates Famellos subsequently expelled Pappas from the party’s European Parliament group and requested that Syriza’s ethics committee also expel him from the wider ranks, according to a senior Syriza official. “This incident follows previous instances of contemptuous and aggressive behavior by the MEP in question, with many different victims, which his party chose to silence and cover up,” government spokesman Pavlos Marinakis said. “He had to resort to physical violence so that Syriza would be forced to expel him.” Thomas Shannon, spokesperson for The Left group in the European Parliament, to which Syriza belongs, said: “We take allegations of violence extremely seriously and we are aware that the member has been expelled from the Syriza delegation. A formal procedure … has been launched to take a final decision on the concerned MEP’s position in The Left group in the European Parliament.”

The European Broadcasting Union cleared Israel to take part in next year’s Eurovision Song Contest, brushing aside demands for its exclusion and sparking an unprecedented backlash. “A large majority of Members agreed that there was no need for a further vote on participation and that the Eurovision Song Contest 2026 should proceed as planned, with the additional safeguards in place,” the EBU said in a statement Thursday. Following the decision, broadcasters in Spain, Ireland, the Netherlands and Slovenia said they disagreed with the EBU and announced they would not participate in the 70th-anniversary Eurovision in Vienna because Israel was allowed to take part. The boycotting countries said their decision was based on Israel’s war in Gaza and the resulting humanitarian crisis, as they launched a historic boycott that plunges Eurovision into its deepest-ever crisis. “Culture unites, but not at any price,” Taco Zimmerman, general director of Dutch broadcaster AVROTROS, said Thursday. “Universal values such as humanity and press freedom have been seriously compromised, and for us, these values are non-negotiable.” On the other side of the debate, Germany had warned it could pull out of the contest if Israel was not allowed to take part. Before the voting took place, Golan Yochpaz, a senior Israeli TV executive, said the meeting was “the attempt to remove KAN [Israeli national broadcasters] from the contest,” which “can only be understood as a cultural boycott.” Ireland’s public broadcaster RTÉ said it “feels that Ireland’s participation remains unconscionable given the appalling loss of lives in Gaza and the humanitarian crisis there, which continues to put the lives of so many civilians at risk.” Spanish radio and television broadcaster RTVE said it had lost trust in Eurovision. RTVE President José Pablo López said that “what happened at the EBU Assembly confirms that Eurovision is not a song contest but a festival dominated by geopolitical interests and fractured.” The EBU in Geneva also agreed on measures to “curb disproportionate third-party influence, including government-backed campaigns,” and limited the number of public votes to 10 “per payment method.” RTVE called the change “insufficient.” Controversy earlier this year prompted the changes, when several European broadcasters alleged that the Israeli government had interfered in the voting — after Israel received the largest number of public votes during the final. The EBU has been in talks with its members about Israel’s participation since the issue was raised at a June meeting of national broadcasters in London. Eurovision is run by the EBU, an alliance of public service media with 113 members in 56 countries. The contest has long proclaimed that it is “non-political,” but in 2022, the EBU banned Russia from the competition following the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Palestinian militant group Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing about 1,200 people in Israel, a large majority of whom were civilians, and taking 251 hostages. The attack prompted a major Israeli military offensive in Gaza, which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, many of them civilians, displaced 90 percent of Gaza’s population and destroyed wide areas. The ceasefire brokered by U.S. President Donald Trump in October 2025 led to the release of the remaining 20 Israeli hostages. Shawn Pogatchnik contributed to this report.

A conservative lawmaker in Berlin called for action against German conductor Justus Frantz, who traveled to Moscow this week to receive the Order of Friendship from Russian President Vladimir Putin. Christian Democratic Union member of parliament Roland Theis told POLITICO’s Berlin Playbook Thursday that German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier should revoke Frantz’s Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. “Anyone who aligns themselves with a dictator whose, until now, hybrid military aggressions are directed against our country, can no longer be a bearer of the Federal Order of Merit,” Theis told POLITICO. Putin on Tuesday awarded the 81-year-old German musician, saying: “For many years, Justus Frantz has made a fruitful contribution to fostering closer relations and mutual enrichment between the cultures of Russia and the Federal Republic of Germany.” In February 2023, Frantz signed the controversial “Manifesto for Peace”, an online petition by left-wing politician Sahra Wagenknecht calling for negotiations with Russia. According to his website, Frantz has performed with the Berlin, New York and Vienna philharmonic orchestras, as well the London Symphony Orchestra. Reports say he is an admirer of legendary Russian composers Pyotr Tchaikovsky and Sergei Rachmaninoff.

PARIS — A cinematic four-man scheme to steal an estimated €88 million in jewelry from the world’s most-visited museum stunned the globe. But not those who work there. “Among colleagues, we’ve been saying for months that it’s incredible that nothing dramatic has happened yet,” Elise Muller, a room supervisor and trade unionist at the Louvre Museum, said in an interview after the robbery. France — and Paris in particular — may love to showcase the country’s cultural exceptionalism, but critics say the audacious heist is the latest proof that the state hasn’t been putting money where its mouth is when it comes to the Louvre. Complaints of underfunding at the museum had brewed for months before the robbery on Sunday, which took only minutes. Louvre General Administrator Kim Pham told lawmakers during a parliamentary hearing in February of the “poor condition, sometimes dilapidated state” of its infrastructure and said it was “absolutely necessary” to install updates, including to overhaul security. Muller said that union representatives like herself have “repeatedly and with insistence” warned the French Ministry of Culture of the severity of the problems linked to underfunding — including “reducing staff specialized in safety and surveillance” — to no avail. And a confidential report from France’s top court of auditors, which POLITICO saw parts of, highlighted “persistent” delays in replacing security equipment such as cameras — one-third of the rooms in the Louvre wing where the heist took place reportedly have none. The audit, which is conducted on a regular basis, said the rate at which the museum’s security infrastructure was becoming obsolete outpaced the investments made to address the problem. Though French President Emmanuel Macron announced plans earlier this year for a €700 million to €800 million, privately funded effort to modernize the museum, those changes aren’t expected to be finished until 2031. Peter Fowler, CEO of the British Westminster Group, which handles security for the Tower of London, said he suspected complacency was a factor that the robbers took advantage of. Complaints of underfunding at the museum had brewed for months before the robbery on Sunday, which took only minutes. | Ferdinand Knapp/POLITICO “How easy it was … shows you how lax the security was,” he said. When asked for comment on allegations of security failures, representatives for the museum referred POLITICO to an online statement, which quoted the French culture minister saying that the Louvre’s safety mechanisms had been “operational.” ‘WE WERE DEFEATED’ More than 230 years since Louis XVI was guillotined just outside the Louvre, there are again calls for heads to roll. The first scalp the Parisian left and far right are gunning for is that of Culture Minister Rachida Dati, a fiery, outspoken conservative who plans to run for Paris mayor in next year’s election. Dati admitted that the success may have been partly tied to administrative shortcomings, but she argued that responsibility was shared after “40 years of abandonment during which problems were swept under the rug.” “We always focused on the security of cultural institutions for visitors, much less for that of the artworks,” Dati said in an interview with broadcaster M6. There were also calls for the Louvre’s director, Laurence des Cars, to step down. The first scalp the Parisian left and far right are gunning for is that of Culture Minister Rachida Dati, a fiery, outspoken conservative who plans to run for Paris mayor in next year’s election. | Sadak Souici/EPA Des Cars delivered her first public remarks since the heist on Wednesday before the cultural committee in the French Senate, the upper house of parliament. Des Cars faced tough questions challenging her leadership despite being grilled in the Senate, where debates are typically more courteous than the rowdier, more powerful directly elected National Assembly. Over two hours, the stern-looking 59-year-old curator — showing the strain of what have been the most trying days of her career — spoke with gravitas, attempting, not without difficulty, to assert that the Louvre’s security procedures had been properly followed despite the break-in’s success. “Despite our efforts, we were defeated,” she said. Des Cars added that she has throughout her career tried to draw attention “to the state of deterioration and general obsolescence of the Louvre, its buildings and its infrastructure.” In the heist’s aftermath, several press reports alleged financial mismanagement by des Cars and suggested she had allocated resources to nonurgent needs, including a luxurious dining hall. Des Cars said the accusations had been “distorted” and amounted to “personal attacks.” Laurence des Cars faced tough questions challenging her leadership despite being grilled in the Senate, where debates are typically more courteous than the rowdier, more powerful directly elected National Assembly. | Pool photo by Sarah Meyssonnier The aforementioned dining room, she pushed back, was designed to be a “meeting room which is not exclusively reserved for the Louvre’s president.” She also disputed aspects of the leaked auditors’ report, insisting that there had been no delays in planned investments to upgrade security and that the document did not yet reflect new measures she intended to present. During a Cabinet meeting on Wednesday, Macron called on his ministers to “keep their cool” amid the uproar surrounding the Louvre heist while investigations continue. MACRON THE BUILDER The Louvre renovation was supposed to be, much like the restoration of the Notre-Dame Cathedral following the devastating fire there five years ago, a crown jewel of Macron’s legacy. (But one that thieves wouldn’t be able to run off with.) Earlier this year, he announced plans for a “new Louvre Renaissance” — an expensive overhaul of the museum to update its infrastructure and security as well as move its most-visited painting, Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa,” into its own dedicated room. The project has now taken on added urgency. Macron has requested proposals to accelerate implementation of its security-related aspects — including next-generation surveillance cameras, enhanced perimeter detection and a new central security control room — to be on his desk by next week, government spokesperson Maud Bregeon said Wednesday. Earlier this year, Emmanuel Macron announced plans for a “new Louvre Renaissance.” | Pool photo by Bertrand Guay/EPA That, of course, comes at a cost. And for Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu’s fragile minority government, which faces an uphill battle in its attempt to rein in public finances while also investing billions in priorities like defense and reindustrialization, museum security may not seem like the most pressing reason to dip into state coffers “There are budgetary constraints, but financial promises for the Louvre have been made, and they need to be kept,” said Valérie Baud, who represents the Louvre’s personnel on the museum’s board of directors. “The Louvre is 68 percent self-funded, which is huge. As for the rest of the budget, the state can no longer impose cuts on the museum,” she added.

Robert Redford, star of Hollywood classics such as “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and later an Oscar-winning director, has died aged 89. Redford played Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward in the 1976 political thriller “All The President’s Men,” about the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon. He also starred in the 1972 political comedy “The Candidate” as Bill McKay, a lawyer who agrees to run for the U.S. Senate. In 2016, Redford was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by former President Barack Obama. Although Redford was often a critic of Donald Trump, the U.S. president paid tribute Tuesday, telling reporters before leaving for a state visit to the U.K.: “Robert Redford had a series of years where there was nobody better. There was a period of time when he was the hottest. I thought he was great.” Away from movies, Redford was also an activist who campaigned on environmental issues, including as a trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group. Here are some of his thoughts on politics and politicians … TRUMP THE ‘DICTATOR’ As a liberal, Redford was unlikely to be a fan of Trump, although he said in 2017 that the Sundance Film Festival he founded would “stay away from politics” and remain “focused on the stories being told by artists.” However, in November 2019, Redford wrote an opinion piece for NBC about a “dictator-like attack by President Donald Trump on everything this country stands for.” He went on: “As last week’s impeachment hearings made clear, our shared tolerance and respect for the truth, our sacred rule of law, our essential freedom of the press and our precious freedoms of speech — all have been threatened by a single man.” “It’s time for Trump to go,” he added. HE ‘SHAKES THINGS UP’ Redford wasn’t always so down on Trump. In 2015, after Trump threw his hat into the ring to be the Republican candidate for the presidency, Redford told Larry King: “Look he’s got such a big foot in his mouth, I’m not sure you’re going to get it out. But on the other hand, I’m glad he’s in there. “I’m glad he’s in there because him being the way he is, and saying what he says the way he says it, I think shakes things up and I think that’s very needed. Because on the other side, it’s so bland, it’s so boring, it’s so empty.” FEELING ‘OUT OF PLACE‘ By 2018, a year into the first Trump presidency, Redford said he felt “out of place” in his country, without mentioning the president by name. “For the first time I can remember, I feel out of place in the country I was born into and the citizenship I’ve loved my whole life,” he wrote in a (since deleted) article for the Sundance Institute. “For weeks I’ve watched with sadness as our civil servants have failed us, turning toward bigotry, mean-spiritedness, and mockery as the now-normal tools of the trade. “How can we expect the next generation to step up and serve, to be interested in public life, and to aspire to get involved when all we show them is how to spar, attack, and destroy each other?” he wrote. BACKING BIDEN AND MEMORIES OF FDR In a 2020 piece for CNN, Redford urged people to vote for Joe Biden, not Donald Trump, in the upcoming election. Redford said he remembered being a child and “listening to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt talking to us over the radio. “It was a voice of authority and, at the same time, empathy. Americans were facing a common enemy — fascism — and FDR gave us the sense that we were all in it together,” he said. Redford wrote that another four years of Trump “would degrade our country beyond repair” and said “the toll it’s taking is almost biblical: fires and floods, a literal plague upon the land, an eruption of hatred that’s being summoned and harnessed, by a leader with no conscience or shame.” The star said he didn’t normally publicly say who he was voting for, “but this election year is different. And I believe Biden was made for this moment.” NIXON WAS ‘SO BORING’ Promoting his 2007 film “Lions for Lambs,” Redford told the Indie London site that he wasn’t a fan of politics when he was younger. “I grew up in Los Angeles and Richard Nixon was my state Senator and he was so boring. I thought: ‘If that’s what politics is, I don’t want to be any part of it!’ They were boring people in suits saying boring things so I never paid any attention to politics … I didn’t think about politics until I came to Europe.” Redford moved to Europe at the age of 18, spending time in Paris and Florence. In France, he “stayed in a bohemian section of Paris with a lot of other students, who were from medical school, science school, and art school. We all lived in a kind of communal way and I was challenged politically, because I didn’t have a clue and they would ask me questions about the Algerian War, which was very big in France in the late ’50s. “I was humiliated and ashamed that I didn’t know much about my own country’s politics … and so I would learn about my country from the points of view of Italy and France and from conservative and liberal newspapers. And by doing this, I realised that the point of view was very different from the point of view that I had been raised with.” REDFORD VS. REDFORD ON OIL PIPELINE Redford was a vocal critic of the planned Keystone XL pipeline, which would have transported oil from the Canadian province of Alberta to the U.S. Gulf Coast. In a video clearly aimed at the White House, Redford said the pipeline plans would bring huge profits for oil companies but make everyone else “suffer.” In response, Alberta Premier Alison Redford (no relation) said she questioned “how people who are using energy flying on planes can make these sorts of comments and assume that they’re going to have any credibility.” In 2015, Obama rejected plans for the pipeline and Redford said it marked “a huge turning point in our fight to leave a better future for our children and generations to come.”