EU Scream

Ahdaf Soueif is a model of the politically engaged artist. She wrote the bestselling novel The Map of Love, she was a frequent commentator during the revolution in her native Egypt, and she is in the news again after resigning as a trustee of the British Museum over its reluctance to discuss issues like repatriation. Throughout her adult life, Soueif has moved between Britain and Egypt, and she gr...

André Wilkens is the director of the European Cultural Foundation , an organisation created after the Second World War to help heal the continent’s wounds. Under Wilkens the Foundation has stepped up grantmaking to arts and media aiming to strengthen democracy at another pivotal moment in Europe's history. Marta Keil is a serious figure in the Polish arts scene. She co-runs a performing arts...

A conversation with Anthony L. Gardner , the former US ambassador to the EU under President Obama. Gardner is a former director on the National Security Council who has spent much of his career in Europe. He left his ambassadorial post in Brussels when Donald Trump entered the White House, and he was succeeded by Gordon Sondland, a hotel magnate with scant government experience. Sondland has more...

Should lobbyists engage with far-right and extremist lawmakers? After the EU elections in May, about 20 percent of members of the European Parliament have far-right agendas. That's a big gain — up from 10-to-15 percent five years ago. That’s also around 150 far-right lawmakers companies can lobby for favourable votes and amendments. Many people are uncomfortable with that prospect. Far-right...

Pastors and plutocrats are sponsoring an ultra-conservative agenda in Europe. Many of them have links to Donald Trump. It’s a world that's pretty opaque. But over the past year, investigative journalists have done painstaking work to pierce the veil. We talk to Blaž Zgaga , a multi-award winning investigative journalist from Slovenia. Zgaga writes for Croatia's Nacional and publications...

Women in Romania have had the legal right to an abortion since 1990. But many women seeking care find themselves in a Kafkaesque trap. Bianca, a young Romanian, ended up obtaining abortion pills without a prescription, and she took them without medical supervision. Work done by investigative reporter Lina Vdovîi in Bucharest illustrates how politicians and priests — and even doctors — seek to shut...

Pressure on women to avoid terminating unwanted pregnancies has intensified in countries like Croatia, Poland and Romania. Michael Bird , an investigative journalist and writer in Bucharest, has been covering the situation for publications including EUobserver . He says constraints come from a variety of sources including churches, counsellors, public hospitals — even doctors. Elena Zacharenko at...

Tony Blair shares his two-pronged formula for taking on nationalist populists — and winning. He says Britain is making a "profound historical mistake” by capitulating to the Brexiteers. But he has a stern message for Europe too: do more to stand up for values, not just narrow national interests. The European Union still needs a “strong sense of itself,” Blair suggests. We begin the show with...

We speak with two Muslim millennials raising their voices against discrimination and religious misconceptions. Nas is a celebrity video blogger with 13 million followers. He's also a Palestinian-Israeli educated at Harvard who defies the far-right’s stereotypes about young Arab men. He says governments should force integration — otherwise the kinds of Islamophobia and anti-Semitism that plagu...

Estonia, a tiny Baltic state, was hit by a giant shockwave in March when a political party promoting white supremacist views won nearly 18 percent of the vote in a general election. A second shockwave hit when Jüri Ratas, the leader of the liberal-left Centre Party, invited the party, called EKRE , to form a coalition government. The powerful interior and finance ministries went to two EKRE leader...

You may have heard how large numbers of European Union citizens in Britain could not exercise their right to vote in the bloc’s elections. They were disenfranchised by British ineptitude and perhaps outright discrimination. But look beyond that group and there are 17.5 million more EU residents of voting age formally excluded because they lack a European passport. A significant number of them are...

Yanis Varoufakis is the leftist former Greek finance minister who tried and failed to end austerity. Like him or loathe him, Varoufakis is worth a look ahead of EU elections where centrists are struggling to compete with the far right’s clear and simple, if deceptive, messages. After a brief and tumultuous term in office, Varoufakis created the Democracy in Europe Movement, DiEM25 . Varoufakis wan...

Is the contest to become the next president of the European Commission just make-believe democracy? We look for answers in the Dutch city of Maastricht, where candidates held their first official debate on April 29th. Christine Neuhold , the professor of EU Democratic Governance at Maastricht University, which helped organise the event, talks about what was real, and surreal, about the debate. We...

This week we’re in conversation with Carl Dolan , the outgoing director at the EU office for anti-corruption organisation Transparency International . He explores links between populism and corruption at the European Parliament and in Hungary. We also meet civil society activist Julia Krzyszkowska. She and data geek Xavier Dutoit struggled — and succeeded — in creating an online tool called MEP Wa...

Margrethe Vestager is the European Union antitrust enforcer who's earned global recognition for pushing Silicon Valley giants like Apple, Google and Facebook to treat consumers and competitors fairly. Last month she put herself in the running to succeed Jean-Claude Juncker as president of the European Commission. That makes her a Spitzenkandidat, a German word that is EU jargon for being one...

Historian Heidi Tworek talks about her book, News From Germany , which deals with the malign influence campaigns that foretold Nazism. It’s a fascinating look at the battle to control news and information in an era of immense turmoil spanning the First World War, the Weimar Republic, and the Third Reich. One of Tworek’s core arguments is that the immense power of British, French, American and Germ...

This episode of EU Scream aired a couple of weeks ago amid expectations Europe’s conservatives would expel Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary and his Fidesz party for violating the rule of law and insulting EU leaders. Last week the European People’s Party, as the conservatives are known, agreed a mere suspension.  Rather than showing contrition, Orbán immediately resumed his belligerent stanc...

As kids worldwide strike for action on climate change, James and Tom take a look at a group who doesn’t share their sense of urgency: Europe’s far right. The UK Independence Party has a long history of denying climate science while Marine Le Pen of the French National Rally uses global warming to whip up fears about mass arrivals of refugees. In Hungary, the Fidesz party of Prime Minister Viktor O...

The regime run by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary uses smear campaigns to feed an atmosphere of political and psychological warfare. The smears are felt far beyond Hungary and could serve as a model for other strong men and autocrats in Europe.  This week we air stories and analysis from three people with direct experience of Budapest's dirty tactics: the human rights activist Márta Pa...

Manfred Weber is the leader of the conservatives in the European Parliament who wants to become the next head of the the European Commission. But has Weber tainted his candidacy — and the broader European project — by acting as an enabler for the illiberal reign of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban? To his critics, Weber has come to represent a kind of moral black hole where democratic values...

Barry Eichengreen was an early skeptic about the prospects for monetary union in Europe. Nowadays the eminent economic historian acknowledges the single currency is here to stay. But he says much more should done to prevent the return of austerity that was the price millions of Europeans paid for saving the single currency this decade. A failure to make further reforms, warns Eichengreen, who teac...

Heather Grabbe of the Open Society European Policy Institute says nationalist populists are closing the minds of Europeans to the values they have in common. She presents survey findings that could embolden centrists and moderates to drop their wishy-washy approach and confront creeping authoritarianism more directly. Look for the full set of reports here on Feb. 19. Soundous Boualam , a Moroccan...

Banners and slogans celebrating tolerance and equality make the European Quarter of Brussels look like a civil rights nirvana. The truth is more complicated. There is a critical lack of racial diversity in the institutions that run the European Union, and sexual harassment is a concern. Even before the MeToo movement exploded onto the global agenda, Jeanne Ponté , a young assistant at the European...

China, Donald Trump, and discontent after financial and debt crises that exploded last decade are buffeting trade. The European Union frequently finds itself at the center of these storms. Arancha Gonzalez , the chief of staff to Pascal Lamy when he led the World Trade Organization and a former trade spokesperson at the European Commision, makes a spirited defence of the benefits of trade. Gonzale...

With Brexit looming, James and Tom bid good riddance to two British members of the European Parliament they like the least: Daniel Hannan , a Conservative with a maniacal focus on Brexit; and Janice Atkinson , an independent who wants to Make Europe Great Again and who helps lead the far-right group created by Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders. Mujtaba Rahman , the Europe director for the Eurasia Gr...