Syriza is no longer what it used to be. This party rose to power under the charismatic Alexis Tsirpas, who led the country through the Greek debt crisis and various bailout programmes. They managed to replace the traditional Socialists as the main opposition party but already lost support under Tsipras, who then resigned to give way for a new leader. But so far the new leader, Stephanos Kassalakis, only accelerated the downhill trend, due to internal power struggles. The first poll after the summer break gave them 8.3%, putting them into fifth place.

The party is engulfed in its own version of a Greek drama. The old guard of Syriza politicians has either left to form a new party, or challenged Kassalakis over his unilateral decisions. Kassalakis is from Florida and won the leadership contest with a blitz social media campaign and a promise of reform. He reshuffled power relations inside the party, which has been contested by the old guard. But Kassalakis plays the party against its grass roots, insisting that he was voted into the leadership position by party members, not the leadership. So far he succeeded to avert a successful confidence vote against him. But for how long?

Macropolis writes that support for Kassalakis is at an all-time low in all organs of the party. His surprise move to replace the head of Syriza’s parliamentary party, Sokratis Famellos, with his close ally Nikos Pappas, did not go down well. Famellos has been standing in for Kassalakis, since the party leader does not hold a seat in parliament. Famellos insisted to put Kassalakis proposal to a vote, which he then won but only with 17 out of 35 votes.

Since then there are rumours of a confidence vote against the leader. Kassalakis warned any potential defectors that they would commit a major crime against democracy if they were to deny Syriza its democratically given place as the main opposition party. It is not the only incident. There had been walkouts in a recent meeting of the party’s political secretariat and only 34 out of 300 backed Kassalakis’ reform proposals on a recent meeting of the central committee. The next meeting on September 7-8 is likely to be the scene of another showdown, as former minister Pavlos Polakis, who was suspended from the team after an outburst in a parliamentary committee, has signalled that he will be considering a leadership challenge.

Kassalakis, meanwhile, seems to be enjoying this, saying that these frictions are part of the process of fundamental party reform. Further deflections look inevitable. The drama continues.

Migration to Europe from the Middle East and Africa may move around, but it is impossible to stop completely. This summer, migrant arrivals to Italy from northern Africa are down sharply compared to last year, having dropped by 66%. It is a political boon there for Giorgia Meloni. But it is now a political headache for Pedro Sánchez in Spain.

Arrivals to the Canary Islands have increased sharply, rising by 154% year-on-year. The islands’ regional president warned that as many as 150,000 could arrive, after 20,000 already did this year. It is now the fastest-growing irregular migration route from northern Africa into Europe. Along with Spain’s African exclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, the Canaries offer a relatively direct, but perilous, route to Europe, via Mauritania, Senegal, and the Gambia.

It becomes a source of pressure for Sánchez from both the Spanish opposition and some of his putative allies. Recently, he narrowly avoided a summons to appear in front of parliament to explain the situation. This was after a tied vote in the Spanish Congress of Deputies’ Permanent Deputation. It saw Carles Puidgemont’s Together for Catalonia side with the opposition PP and Vox parties. Sánchez also received criticism from the left-wing Podemos for the opposite reason of intimating irregular migrants. 

Both the PP and Together for Catalonia have their reasons to go after Sánchez on migration. The PP has to head off the far-right Vox party, as well as new entrant Se Acabo La Fiesta, or Salf in its short form. Vox and Salf have both adopted harder-line rhetoric on the issue. Blaming Sánchez also diverts attention from an inter-regional dispute over distribution of unaccompanied migrant minors. This issue is pitting the Canaries and Ceuta, regions where the PP are in government, against other PP-governed regions on the Spanish mainland. In Together for Catalonia’s case, they have to deal with the Catalan Alliance, a new far-right and strongly anti-immigration Catalan separatist party.

What this also goes to show is the futility of the approach we have taken in Europe so far. Sánchez has decided to respond by getting in on the act. He was recently in Mauritania, the Gambia, and Senegal. His objective was to try and find ways to work with countries and block these routes.

To be fair to Sánchez, these countries probably don’t want to be a base for organised crime either. But from a Europe-wide perspective, this, or the earlier Tunisia, Libya, and Turkey deals, are not sustainable solutions. There are simply too many routes from the Middle East and northern Africa to Europe to close all of them permanently, especially with conflict and political instability.

In Spain’s case, renewed fighting in Mali has worsened the situation. We could have a widening conflict in the Middle East next, another flare-up in Libya’s civil war, or worsening climate-related disasters in the Sahel. These of course also drive wars and migration towards Europe.

Germany’s centrist political parties have essentially given up on fighting the three east German state election, of which two are held this coming Sunday. They are focused on the terror attack that took place in the west German town of Solingen last week. A Syrian refugee is accused of committing the murder of three members of the public during a street festival on Friday night. Olaf Scholz and Friedrich Merz, the opposition leader, will get together to see whether they can agree on a tightening of immigration laws, something Scholz has so far resisted.

What happened in the Solingen was not a problem with the existing laws, but a failure by the CDU-led government of North-Rhine Westphalia to implement them. The alleged killer was on the list of refugees earmarked for expulsion, but as happens in so many cases, bureaucratic and legal delays got in the way.

Merz is demanding the following: permanent border controls, in other words an end to the Schengen free-movement, no permanent residence rights for refugees that enter from safe third countries, an end of fast-track naturalisation, and an end to dual citizenship. We know that Merz’s ideal would the abolition of the right to asylum, which would of course be a breach of the Geneva convention.

Tagesschau makes the point that the only way for Merz to implement any of this is if he went into a coalition with the AfD. Since he has ruled this out, we consider Merz’s initiative to be idle posturing.

Scholz is offering a crackdown on gun laws, which is fine, but not the reason why these attacks keep on happening. At the very least, they would need to invest in the police, another part of the public sector that has been a victim of debt brake-inspired public spending cuts.

In the meantime, the AfD and especially the Wagenknecht party are making gains in the opinion polls. The latest Insa poll has their joint support at 27.5%. These are two parties outside the political firewall. To get anything done would require all the other parties to work together.

One of the more Kafkaesque features of European politics is the profusion of bureaucracy to try and reduce the previous bureaucracy. Cutting red tape is an idea everyone likes in theory. But it is one which runs into political obstacles in practice. You come to realise that almost every rule has someone who has lobbied for it, or at the very least someone lobbying against it. Much easier to keep the red tape-cutting theoretical by setting up a committee to identify what is to be cut at some unspecified point in the future.

This is what has happened with one of Italy’s latest attempts to sort out its Byzantine administrative system. Ease of doing business is a serious problem for Italy, a fact widely recognised in Italian politics. During Mario Draghi’s premiership, the government passed a law with the intention of identifying and eliminating unnecessary duplication in the system.

No prizes for guessing what happened next. As Sabino Cassese says, the law from Draghi’s time in office delegated responsibility for doing this to the government. Giorgia Meloni’s government has subsequently kicked the can down the road to the individual administrations, who are supposed to publish reports every three years.

It’s hard to tell who this exercise really benefits on its own terms, except for the Italian paper industry. Worse yet, without action, it’s actively counterproductive. Instead of using their resources to do what they are supposed to do, now you have an extra task on top of all the other tasks.

But it also lays bare why cutting administrative burdens goes beyond just identifying it as a problem. It is a misalignment of costs and benefits. The benefits are long-term, diffuse, and in the aggregate. Costs fall on individual people and groups harder. Genuinely trying to get rid of the laws that ultimately cause bureaucratic deadlock almost always produces people, in the system or outside of it, who find some essential reason for doing something. It is easier to make it cosmetic.

Unfortunately, numerous politicians promising a simpler state, only not to deliver it, won’t just have an economically corrosive effect. It will contribute more to a feeling of disillusionment with politics. Italy is already relatively far along that process.

It will be the case elsewhere in Europe too, as this reflex is not limited to Italy. One FDP minister in the current German government, for instance, decided that his big red tape-cutting drive would involve not requiring hotels to take customers’ identification details. Aside from the fact that there are obvious reasons why this particular rule exists, it is completely trivial.

This has been an extra-ordinary election year in Europe, where election results deviated from what used to be or what had been expected by the polls. In the UK, power was handed over to Labour after 14 years of Tories. In France, Emmanuel Macron surprised everyone with his decision to dissolve the National Assembly, ending up with three large groups and no majority in the assembly. Complicated multi-party coalition talks are the norm in many European countries, but it is a first for the French Fifth republic. In Belgium, which holds the record for lengthy federal government formation talks, this year’s elections also produced some surprises. To us the most notable one is that for the first time in some 40 years, the Socialists did not win in Wallonia.

The political landscape has changed everywhere in Europe. There is a general drift towards the right in all member states. The worst fears of the far-right winning elections did not materialise neither in the European elections, nor in France or Belgium, though only just. The Rassemblement National won the European elections in France but failed to win the legislative snap elections due to tactical voting. In Belgium, Vlaams Belang came second in Flanders, despite polls predicting that it would come first. The European elections in June did see the ID and the eurosceptic ECR group advancing, though not enough to secure a majority for a coalition on the right. In Portugal where the far-right was quasi-non-existent before, it achieved a remarkable third place, jumping up 10pp from the previous election results to achieve 18% in March legislative elections. And in Austria, the upcoming elections promise the far-right Freedom party with their zero-migrant policy a victory. If all those anti-immigrant parties come to power with zero-migrant policies, this could be the end of Schengen as we know it.

But there are limits to what far-right parties can do politically. How hard it is for a far-right party to form a coalition government? Geert Wilders found out in the Netherlands, where he had to retreat into the background of the four-party coalition he managed to form, despite having won those elections. Jordan Bardella also has to revise his plan to become prime minister after an alliance between the left and the centrists prevented him from winning this summer's French legislative elections.

Germany separates between eastern states and western states, divided over the war in Ukraine. The far-right AfD and the Sahra Wagenknecht party on the left are now likely to win most votes in the upcoming local elections in Eastern Germany.

We also have seen some parties at the risk of disappearing as fast as they emerged. In Greece the left Syriza is falling apart after a new leader took over from Alexis Tsipras. The Five Star movement in Italy could face the same fate, while Ciudadanos has already been decimated in Spain. Will the same happen to Emmanuel Macron’s centrists once he is gone in 2027?

All those first-ever moments show a political landscape on the move and a volatile electorate. Welcome to turbulent times in a geopolitically challenging world. Bob Dylan's song the times they are a changin' is the closest to describe what we are about to witness.

One of the quieter diplomatic efforts in the Middle East is the one between Saudi Arabia and Israel on a normalisation deal. Less dramatic than the cease-fire talks between Israel and Hamas, those secretive talks continued despite the war in Gaza.

Efforts to normalise relations go back decades, the Abraham accords in 2020 being the furthest they have gotten so far. Then came the 7 October attack, complicating the conclusion of such an accord, though unlikely to derail it. Israel and Saudi Arabia both have a strategic interest in pursuing normalisation, in defeating Hamas and keeping Iran in check. The crucial difference now is Saudi Arabia's insist on recognition of a Palestinian state, which Israel is reluctant to give.

Despite the war, secretive talks continued to be held between the two states, with the US giving Riyadh security guarantees, plus support in civilian nuclear know-how and economic investments in technology.

Normalisation is a big deal for Israel and Saudi-Arabia. A deal would help Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the country's de facto leader, deliver on his ambitious Vision 2030 and thus secure his claim to become the next king of Saudi Arabia. It would assure Israel more security, and give it a big partner in the region.

A main tenet is security. Normalisation promises more military cooperation and arms deals between the two nations. Saudi Arabia is an interested customer in Israel’s air defence system. They also use Israel’s spy software to monitor dissidents in the kingdom.

Economically, the deal between the two would invite more investment into the kingdom. Some of the most ambitious projects under the Abraham accords are the fibre optic cable linking Tel Aviv to Persian Gulf countries, as well as a planned railway expansion that would connect Saudi Arabia to Israel via Jordan.

Culturally, normalisation has been in the making for years. Saudi Arabia has reworked its school curriculum to gradually eliminate references to Israel as the enemy and take a more neutral stance. The media has been instrumental too, inviting Israeli officials or airing programmes that promote peace with Israel. Sports plays a crucial role too, with the crown prince's vision to turn Saudi Arabia into a world class venue for sports.

Those diplomatic efforts will have to be carefully pursued not to provoke a revolt of Sunni muslims in solidarity with the Palestinians, as the war continues to cause civilian death and displacement. Saudis will need a two-state solution for normalisation to become acceptable, as Iran is watching this space.

Paola Egonu is without a doubt one of the best athletes Italy has ever produced. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to describe her as the Michael Jordan of women’s volleyball. But after helping her team win gold at the Olympics, she has unwittingly found herself at the centre of a political controversy over Italy’s citizenship laws. It reflects a European trend towards debates about citizenship that will only intensify as ageing populations necessitate more immigration, and with it more new Europeans.

Italy’s current citizenship laws make it easy to be an Italian citizen if you are descended from an Italian, but very hard to be one if you were born in Italy to non-Italian parents. Now almost 6m Italians live abroad, or somewhere around 10% of Italy’s current population. In the meantime, it is a struggle sometimes for those who are born in Italy and have lived there all their lives to gain citizenship as children, if their parents aren’t Italian. Egonu, born to Nigerian parents in Italy, only became an Italian citizen when she was 14.

The Italian centre-left opposition wants to change this law. The PD’s own proposal has been to introduce a jus soli law, which would establish citizenship by birthright. But the issue has also divided the government internally. Forza Italia wants what it has called a jus scholae. This would allow those born in Italy to foreign parents, or those who arrived as young children, to become citizens once they have completed a full five-year school cycle. Lega strongly opposes this, saying that the law is fine as it is.

Within the governing coalition, Forza Italia is fighting an uphill battle. But it helps establish the party’s image more strongly as a voice of modern Italy in the government. It is also, we think, not the last we will hear of the issue. Italy, with one of the lowest fertility rates in Europe, will need immigrants to come as much as anyone else. Many will stay for longer, and have families in the country. Some children of immigrants will be like Egonu, and achieve global renown that makes others rethink what it means to be Italian.

This is not exclusive to Italy either. In various directions, citizenship has become a major topic across Europe. Germany recently changed its previously very restrictive citizenship laws. It allows dual citizenship in more cases, and cut its qualifying period for naturalisation from eight to five years of residency. Children of non-German parents born in Germany now automatically get citizenship after at least five years of residence. Spain's fast-track naturalisation system for nationals of Latin American countries has been an aspect of its recent success with integrating newcomers. 

In others, however, the discourse has gone in the opposite direction. France’s own jus soli laws were a source of controversy, with the far-right Rassemblement National having talked about scrapping it before. The party also wanted to limit the kinds of positions dual citizens could access. Until recently, in the Netherlands Geert Wilders’ PVV wanted to restrict dual citizens’ voting rights.

On both sides of the debate, however, what we have noticed is how much focus there is on edge-cases. Proponents of changing citizenship laws often point to exceptional individuals, especially athletes like Egonu. Opponents gesture at deviants and criminals, or possible security threats. But neither of these describe the vast majority of people in this situation, who live fairly regular lives in their families’ adopted homes.  

We recall the role Donald Tusk played during the Brexit standoff in the UK, when, as president of the European Council, he personally campaigned during the 2019 election for anti-Brexit parties. We thought at the time that this act was massively counter-productive, and it may have played a role in the UK’s big pro-Brexit swing later that year.

This weekend we were reminded of Tusk’s diplomatic skills when he posted a message on social media that read as follows:

“To all the initiators and patrons of Nord Stream 1 and 2. The only thing you should do today about it is apologise and keep quiet.”

Considering that his country has not acted on the European arrest warrant by the German public prosecutor and allowed the prime suspect to leave the country, this is not something we would have advised him to write. We agree with him that the entire Nord Stream project violated Europe’s joint security interests. We said so long before Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. It also caused long-term damage to the German economy because it discouraged diversification into sectors that are less dependent on energy. But given the current political climate in Germany, we think it is counter-productive to treat German outrage about the Nord Stream bombing in that way. It is one thing to oppose Nord Stream 1 and 2. It is another to support its violent destruction. We recall Jens Stoltenberg, the former Nato general secretary, as saying that an attack on the Norwegian pipeline system would constitute a Nato Art. 5 trigger. Germany is mercifully not treating the pipeline explosions as an act of war. But it constitute an act of sabotage, that raise important political questions about Germany’s future support for Ukraine.

Handelsblatt writes that that the German public prosecutor and German and foreign security services have concluded, independently of each other, that the explosions were the work of a Ukrainian commando. Theoretically, this does not exclude the possibility of a false flag attack, but they are dismissing this possibility. The lack of concrete evidence of Russian involvement weakens the support for that theory. The German government says nothing and points to the investigation. The CDU is demanding full transparency from Germany’s allies. That’s the political scene into which Tusk launched his message to shut up and apologise.

The Wall Street Journal story last week was the first cohesive, yet still incomplete, account of what has happened. It is already starting to play into German politics. Sahra Wagenknecht has elevated German policy on Ukraine to her main campaign theme in the three eastern German elections next month. She has also shifted her previous stance on the AfD. She no longer rules out the possibility of supporting AfD legislation, as she put it, should this situation arise in one of three state parliaments. At the same time, she erected a political firewall against all parties that support US missiles on German soil. She now accuses Ukraine of terrorism. If she gets the numbers that polls are currently suggesting, we would expect her message to have a profound effect on German politics. The polls are difficult to read. Her party is new. We should prepare for results that lie well outside the error margins of opinion polling. But she is on course to displace the Left Party as the main political force to the left of the SPD. As Germany approaches a federal election next year, we would expect Ukraine to become a major campaign theme.

Could Taylor Swift influence Austria’s upcoming general elections next month? Her three concerts in Vienna were cancelled after a terror plot was foiled. The young Beran A., an Austrian citizen with North Macedonian roots, had planned to drive into the crowd of Swifties, then rampage through them with a machete and blow himself up at the end. The media refers to it as an Isis-inspired terror attack. Its political ramifications may just have started with a focus on security policies and immigration.

Austria’s intelligence service did not find out about this threat, but got tipped off by various other intelligence services, including from the US. This is a story in itself.

Austria’s former intelligence service, the BVT, was considered untrustworthy and compromised due to Russian infiltration. Western intelligence services have become reluctant to share information with the Austrians for that reason. In 2018, the BVT was raided by the police, and its boss was suspended by then-interior minister Herbert Kickl, who now heads the far-right Freedom Party. In 2021, the current government, a coalition between the conservative People's party and the Greens, closed the BVT and replaced it with the Directorate of State Security and Intelligence, the DSN.

Karl Nehammer, the Austrian chancellor, has been promoting cooperation with other intelligence services to foil the Swift plot as an example that Austria’s reputation abroad has been rebuilt. The prime minister calls to expand the intelligence service's powers to combat terrorism. One tool for this is the so-called Bundestrojaner, a software similar to the Israeli Pegasus, that allows intelligence services to monitor peoples’ desktop computers, laptops and smartphones, including their social media postings. This proposal was voted down in the Security Council meeting on Tuesday, including by its own coalition partner, the Greens. Such a law may also be ruled unconstitutional by the courts.

The far-right Freedom party, the FPÖ, is calling instead for a ban on political Islam as well as an investigation into what happened. The Greens want an investigation too, including by the Control Commission for the Protection of the Constitution into how fast the DSN passed its information on to the military to safeguard public and national security.

The elections are only a month away, and the foiled terror plot is likely to frame the debate. Kickl’s Freedom party is leading the polls with 27%, ahead of the conservative People's party with 23% and the Social Democrats with 22%. Over the past month the Freedom party has been losing while the People's party has been gaining in the polls. Could this event change their trajectory?

The People's party will continue to give itself the credit on security by undoing the old BVT intelligence service, pointing fingers at how Kickl let the old intelligence service continue. The background of the attacker matters too. He was a second-generation Muslim immigrant, born and raised in Austria, who apparently became radicalised online via sermons uploaded by hate preachers from around the German-speaking world. Immigration is important for all Austrian voters on the right, but in particular for far-right voters. Their Freedom party stands to benefit the most from this.

Wildfires have been a regular summer occurrence in Greece. This year’s mega fire may not have been the largest, but it is the first time that one has spread into the suburbs of Athens, destroying or damaging apartment blocks and businesses. This comes after the government had promised a more modern and efficient approach towards fire prevention and firefighting.

There were images of people standing on their balcony with hoses trying to prevent the fire from reaching their apartments, and fire fighters aided by volunteers extinguishing fires at businesses in normally busy streets. One woman working in a flower business did not escape the fire. The magnitude of the fire and the fact that it reached the greater Athens area, where nearly half of all Greeks live, shocked everyone. Commentators and local media already treat this as a major operational and political failure of Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s government. An assessment of why the fire could spread so fast and could not be stopped before reaching the urban neighbourhoods will ultimately determine the political costs for the government.

Mitsotakis has faced his fair share of natural disasters. During his five years in power Greece has seen not only fires, but also floods and even snow blizzards. Only last year Greece had seen the largest fire ever, destroying 96,000 hectares in Evros. This year, the fire was 10,000 hectares and reached the capital. Unlike in northern EU member states, where natural disasters are often a regional competence, in Greece it is the responsibility of the national government, and thus it gets the full blame if things go wrong. Operational mishaps can easily turn into a political crisis.

Summer is the firefighting season in all Mediterranean countries. The challenges they pose are not getting smaller due to climate change. Northern EU countries are sending some of their fire fighters to support their Greek colleagues for this period. After every fire, the government gets judged due to the level of preparedness and operational response.

Usually wildfires destroy natural habitats, which the government then promises to replant, and some houses that needs rebuilding. Mitsotakis predecessor, Alexis Tsipras, faced one of the worst political backlashes after 104 people died in a fire in Mati, a holiday seaside town close to Athens. This year’s fire was not as deadly, but it did reach the outskirts of Athens itself. A hospital had to be evacuated and people had to be notified. A new level of response was necessary.

Could the fire have been contained earlier? Government officials promised ahead of the summer better prevention using AI and drones for constant aerial patrols. Questions from the opposition parties are already piling up, amongst them whether the government spent enough on fire prevention and firefighting. Macropolis cites a think tank study suggesting that Greece only claimed €5.3m out of the earmarked €556m of the recovery fund. This low absorption rate suggests that there is clearly some unpreparedness in tapping into the recovery funds.