Friends of Europe podcasts

This is the first episode of Overcoming Polarisaton: Paths to Common Ground, a new podcast series from Debating Europe, Friends of Europe’s citizen engagement unit. Europe is feeling fractured. Whether it’s politics, climate, tech, or trust in institutions, more and more people are feeling left out, unheard, and uncertain about the future. But what if we could flip the script? What if instead of f...

Two weeks ago, the centre held in Europe after a Super Sunday of elections in Romania, Portugal and Poland. And that was in part because of Poland where the centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski narrowly beat the nationalist Karol Nawrocki in the first round of the Presidential elections. That is no longer the case. In last Sunday’s run-off, Trzaskowski failed to materialize a victory and lost a...

Next week, Friends of Europe is organizing the event “Re-imagining Europe’s health systems”. This event aims to imagine a resilient, sustainable and innovative healthcare system for Europe. Ahead of this event, host Catarina Vila Nova sat down with Anke Van Es, Head of Europe for Hospital Patient Monitoring at Philips.

After a Super Sunday in Europe, Policy Voices brings you three guests. The three consequential elections took place in Romania, Portugal and Poland and history kept repeating itself. The centre holds far from an absolute majority, the far-right continues its speedy ascent to power and the left gets handed an embarrassing defeat. In Romania, Nicusor Dan managed to turn around the results from the f...

Pete Hegseth’s decision to scrap the Women, Peace and Security agenda from the Pentagon came as a surprise given that the Women, Peace and Security Act was signed by Donald Trump in his first mandate as President of the United States. However, this decision cannot be understood in a vacuum and is part of a wider movement targeting diversity, equity and inclusion practices in the US military and el...

Today marks 75 years since the Schuman Declaration. What started first and foremost as a peace project has developed into a European Union with a single market, an official currency for 20 EU countries and freedom of movement. However, at the age of 75, the European project is being attacked from the outside by a war right at its border and an American President questioning the decades long Trans-...

It is not a new problem but the housing crisis has gotten bad enough that the European Commission created a Housing Task Force and, in the European Parliament, the Special Committee on the Housing Crisis in the EU was born. In simple economic terms: there is too much demand and not enough supply. At least not enough supply to meet the demands of lower and middle income groups. Hotels, Airbnb, digi...

In three months, EU leaders will gather once again to decide – or not – to extend sanctions to Russia for another six months. It is a dance everyone is getting used to with Hungary threatening to make good on its veto until another EU leader finds a clever or not so clever way out. But there are real concerns that next time around Hungary and Slovakia may get to lift sanctions on Russia. That is w...

Russia’s war in Ukraine, rising instability in the Middle East and North Africa and an unpredictable transatlantic alliance expose deep vulnerabilities in Europe’s defence architecture. Considering the precedent of the European Defence Community, the European Union now has the opportunity to implement changes that will create greater shared responsibility in defence and allow its security to be le...

Citizens in Europe want their governments and the EU to be more proactive on defence and cybersecurity. This is one of the conclusions of a new study soon to be published by Debating Europe, the citizens’ engagement unit of Friends of Europe. On climate, citizens still feel unheard by policymakers and corporations. They want stronger policies, more corporate accountability and they don’t want to b...

In this episode of Policy Voices, host Catarina Vila Nova is joined by Oleksandra Matviichuk, an Ukrainian human rights lawyer. She heads the Center for Civil Liberties which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in the same year Russia started the large-scale invasion of Ukraine. Since then, Matviichuk’s organization has documented more than 80 thousand war crimes committed by Russian soldiers in Ukr...

In today’s episode of Policy Voices, host Catarina Vila Nova sits down with Sirpa Rautio, the Director of the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA). In this wide ranging interview on the state of fundamental rights in the EU, they talk everything from migration and asylum, DEI, security and defence, competitiveness, justice and the rule of law. They spoke just a few days after FRA pub...

The results are in and Germany chose its new chancellor. To the surprise of no one, Friedrich Merz will succeed Olaf Scholz and Europe can finally get to work after being on hold since November. The challenges are plenty and Germany’s new chancellor has his plate full: not only he has to deliver on migration and the economy, he must do so to avoid even bigger electoral gains for the far-right AfD...

The rise of far-right politicians to power across the Western world has led to a normalization of a discourse that many would be ashamed to speak just a few years ago. The normalization of misogyny in the public sphere is just the first step that leads men to think it’s ok to rape a woman because her husband consented for her. Just like what happened to Gisele Pelicot. Ahead of International Women...

Today marks the end of what was perhaps the most consequential week for the future of Europe’s security and defence since the beginning of the Ukraine war. Still reeling from a shocking security conference in Munich over the weekend, European leaders then gathered in Paris to attempt a coordinated response to America’s provocations. Host Catarina Vila Nova is joined today by Jamie Shea, senior fel...

This year, the European Union will be working on amending the European Climate Law. The importance of this law cannot be understated: it is the European Climate Law that defines the goal set out in the European Green Deal to become climate-neutral by 2050. Of the many ways possible to become climate-neutral, in this episode of Policy Voices we are focusing on what is a rather niche topic: carbon d...

How to stay hopeful on the fight against climate change during Trump 2.0? Well, a great first step is listening to Helen Mountford. Helen Mountford is the President and CEO of ClimateWorks Foundation, a global platform for philanthropy to scale-up climate solutions, and my guest for today’s episode. Before joining ClimateWorks, Helen worked at Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development...

In just his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed a number of executive orders that threaten American democracy and are already being challenged in the courts. With the system of checks and balances in question and a Democratic Party still trying to get back on its feet, in what state is American democracy left? On what is perhaps the most difficult episode of the series on how to not...

With Trump back in power it is all too easy to lose hope. As the guest in today’s episode of Policy Voices says, the next few years are going to be “a wild ride”. Nonetheless, there may be some silver linings when it comes to peace, security and defence. For example, as Rose Gottemoeller puts it: NATO countries are in a much better place than they were in 2016 when Trump first took office. Listen...

In June, Admiral Pierre Vandier became NATO’s new Supreme Allied Commander Transformation. A few days ago, Admiral Vandier came to Friends of Europe for a conversation with our senior fellow Jamie Shea, who is also the former Deputy Assistant Secretary General for Emerging Security Challenges at NATO. In this conversation, Jamie asks the Admiral about the role of Supreme Allied Commander Transform...

It has the potential to revolutionise Europe’s AI future but in the midst of all the political drama from the past weeks, you probably didn’t hear about it. Announced in Von der Leyen’s political guidelines for the next Commission, officially it’s called the European AI Research Council, but the Commission President referred to it as the CERN for AI. CERN, of course, being one of the world’s large...

It wouldn’t have been COP if the negotiations had been completed by last Friday – the last scheduled day of the conference. It was a long and drawn out process that only ended when many negotiators were already with their suitcases packed and ready to fly out of Azerbaijan. The petrostate was the stage for the 29th United Nations Climate Change Conference and expectations were high for a finance d...

In this episode of Policy Voices, host Catarina Vila Nova speaks with Alberto Alemanno, Jean Monnet Professor in EU Law at HEC Paris, Founder of The Good Lobby, Trustee of Friends of Europe and 2014 European Young Leader (EYL40), about the “horse trading” that delivered Europe its new Commission. This conversation was recorded before the Parliament finally confirmed the last seven commissioners-de...

Final results are in and are devastating for US Democrats. Republicans not only won the White House but they also regained control of the Senate and held on to the House achieving the government trifecta. In the end, Donald Trump won the election by only 2 percentage points but looking at the electoral map it certainly doesn’t look like that. The US map has been swept by a red wave as Trump succee...

With COP29 starting in just a few days, world leaders are heading to Azerbaijan with images of Spanish towns wiped out by water and cars piled up on streets that hide the true devastation of one of the worst floods in Europe of this century. In this episode of Policy Voices released ahead of COP29, host Catarina Vila Nova speaks with two European Young Leaders (EYL40) from this year’s class: Lubom...