标签： Europe

MADRID (AP) — Facing growing public anger over skyrocketing housing costs that have become one of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s biggest political liabilities ahead of next year’s national elections, Spain’s central government greenlit a far-reaching €7 billion ($8.23 billion) strategy on Tuesday to address the country’s deepening housing insecurity.

Even as Spain has posted strong macroeconomic growth in recent years, swelling rental and purchase prices have pushed access to stable, affordable housing out of reach for millions of ordinary Spaniards, whose wages have failed to keep pace with the rate of housing inflation. Industry analysts point to two key structural factors worsening the supply crunch: the persistent demand for short-term vacation rentals driven by Spain’s massive tourism sector, and rapid urban population growth fueled by immigration that has stretched available housing stock in major cities far too thin.

The newly approved plan marks a major increase in public investment, tripling the government’s total spending on public housing development over the next four years. A core guardrail included in the policy blocks the common past practice of reclassifying subsidized public housing units for private ownership after just a few years, locking these affordable units into the public stock permanently. The plan also allocates targeted financial support for young renters and first-time home buyers struggling to enter the market.

Raluca Budian, associate director of the Observatory for Decent Housing at Madrid-based Esade business school, called the plan an important milestone for the country. “It is a significant step forward. For the first time in decades, there is a serious budgetary commitment,” Budian noted.

According to government breakdowns of the budget, 40% of the total €7 billion will go toward expanding the country’s extremely limited public housing supply, which currently lags far behind the European average. Thirty percent of the funds are earmarked for residential property renovations: this includes grants to upgrade existing homes to improve energy efficiency, and incentives for new housing construction in the parts of Spain that have faced decades of rural depopulation. The remaining 30% of the budget is dedicated to direct rental and down-payment subsidies, with a specific focus on supporting young people, who are disproportionately impacted by the housing crisis.

Housing consistently ranks as the top concern for Spanish voters in public opinion polling from state survey firm CIS, and Housing Minister Isabel Rodríguez framed the reform as a direct response to public demand. “The public is demanding an agreement to address the main problem currently affecting them,” Rodríguez said Tuesday.

Official data from the European Union’s statistics agency Eurostat shows housing costs in Spain rose nearly 13% year-on-year at the end of 2024, outpacing most other EU member states. When it comes to public rental housing, Spain ranks among the lowest of all Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, with public rental housing making up less than 2% of the country’s total housing supply. The OECD average across all member states sits at 7%, with far higher shares in peer Western European nations: 14% in France, 16% in the United Kingdom, and 34% in the Netherlands.

The legacy of past policy failures has contributed heavily to Spain’s current shortage. For decades, public funds were used to build housing that was later sold off to private owners, permanently removing those units from the national affordable housing stock. The new policy’s rule blocking future reclassification directly addresses this longstanding loophole.

Associated Press journalist Joseph Wilson contributed reporting from Barcelona.

Top diplomatic leaders from across the European Union have convened in Luxembourg this week, with a newly shifted political landscape in Hungary raising hopes for unblocking stalled policy action on a range of pressing global and regional crises. The gathering comes on the heels of a landmark Hungarian election that ousted long-serving Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a habitual obstructionist of coordinated EU action on issues from Ukraine support to Middle East sanctions, whose departure has already been cited as a potential catalyst for forward movement on long-blocked initiatives.

On the agenda for the two-day meeting are a broad slate of urgent challenges: continuing military and diplomatic support for Ukraine in its defensive war against Russian invasion, countering ongoing Russian hybrid aggression across the bloc, and mitigating economic turbulence and energy market volatility amplified by the ongoing conflict in the Middle East involving Iran. But the most significant and divisive issue dominating early discussions is the bloc’s future policy toward Israel, as widespread unrest and escalating violence across Gaza, the occupied West Bank, and the Israeli-Lebanese border pushes member states to debate new pressure tactics against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

The EU’s longstanding 2000 Association Agreement, which governs bilateral trade and cooperation with Israel, sits at the center of this debate. Three member states — Spain, Slovenia, and Ireland — have tabled a formal proposal to suspend the agreement in its entirety. Spanish Foreign Minister José Albares acknowledged that a full suspension is unlikely to secure the unanimous support required for EU policy action, but noted that a targeted partial suspension focused exclusively on trade provisions could command enough backing to move forward.

“The European Union has to say today very clearly to Israel that a change is needed,” Albares told reporters ahead of the meeting. EU investigators have already documented clear indications that Israel has breached terms of the association agreement during its military campaign in Gaza, adding legal weight to calls for a policy shift.
Irish Foreign Minister Helen McEntee argued that a suite of recent Israeli actions — including the expansion of illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, the passage of legislation introducing the death penalty for some Palestinians, and escalating cross-border clashes with Hezbollah in Lebanon — leave the bloc with no choice but to ramp up pressure. “We need to act. We need to make sure that our fundamental values are protected. And we need to make sure that any agreement that we have with any other country that country is fulfilling and upholding their obligations,” McEntee said.
Swedish Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard added that France and Sweden have put forward a separate, more targeted plan to restrict trade with entities operating out of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The gathering also hosted Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, who addressed delegates on the fragile ongoing ceasefire along the Lebanese-Israeli border, international efforts to disarm the Hezbollah militant group, and the urgent need for additional EU economic and security assistance for his conflict-battered nation. “Lebanon today needs its European partners more than ever,” Salam posted on social media platform X ahead of his address.
EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas highlighted that Orbán’s recent election defeat at the hands of pro-European opposition leader Péter Magyar has cleared the way for progress on dozens of issues blocked by Hungarian vetoes in recent years. “A lot of issues … have been blocked” by Hungary, she told reporters. “We are reopening the discussions and hope that we get a positive result.”
Beyond the Middle East, diplomats also focused heavily on the ongoing conflict involving Iran, where a temporary ceasefire between Tehran and Washington is set to expire just days after the Luxembourg meeting began. Kallas called for an immediate extension of the truce “until there is a diplomatic solution,” noting that “the ceasefire is very fragile, but diplomacy should have a chance.” German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul urged Iranian leaders to accept ongoing diplomatic outreach, calling on Tehran to send negotiators to upcoming talks in Islamabad with U.S. Vice President JD Vance. “Iran should now take this outstretched hand in the interest of its own people,” Wadephul said.
The ongoing conflict has disrupted global oil and gas markets, sending energy prices soaring and creating significant economic anxiety across the EU, which relies heavily on imported energy. While foreign ministers debated geopolitical strategy in Luxembourg, EU transportation ministers held a parallel video conference to address growing energy security concerns, after the head of the International Energy Agency warned that the bloc currently faces less than six weeks of remaining jet fuel supply.
The current conflict, which has pitted Israel and the United States against Iran and allied militant groups across the region, has already claimed at least 3,375 lives in Iran, more than 2,290 in Lebanon, 23 in Israel, and more than a dozen across Gulf Arab states. Fifteen Israeli soldiers deployed in Lebanon and 13 U.S. service members operating across the region have also been killed in the fighting. The Luxembourg meeting follows a day after a major Palestinian peace conference in Brussels, which gathered representatives from 60 nations alongside Palestinian Prime Minister Mohamed Mustafa and Bulgarian diplomat Nikolay Mladenov, who leads the U.S.-backed Board of Peace established during the Trump administration. While most EU institutions are headquartered in Brussels, key bodies including the European Court of Justice remain based in Luxembourg, making the capital a regular host for high-level EU diplomatic gatherings.

Nine days after Hungarian voters ended 16 years of unbroken rule by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s nationalist government, the European Union’s highest judicial body delivered a landmark ruling that the Orbán administration’s 2021 anti-LGBTQ laws violate core European Union regulations and founding values of equality and minority protection.

Orbán’s Fidesz party, which held a two-thirds parliamentary supermajority for most of its time in power, first enacted the original law in 2021, framing the ban on so-called “promotion of homosexuality and gender transition” to minors as a necessary child protection measure. Last year, the outgoing government passed a follow-up amendment that expanded restrictions to ban all public events hosted by LGBTQ community groups, including Budapest’s long-running annual Pride march. Despite the official ban, organizers moved forward with the 2025 march, leading Hungarian prosecutors to file criminal charges against opposition-aligned Budapest Mayor Gergely Karácsony.

In its ruling, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) found that the law violated EU regulations on multiple fronts, and made an unprecedented determination that the legislation breached the core founding values outlined in Article 2 of the EU Treaty. The court concluded that the law interferes with fundamental EU rights including non-discrimination based on sex and sexual orientation, respect for private and family life, and freedom of expression and information. Beyond procedural violations, the ruling noted that the law deliberately stigmatized and marginalized transgender and non-heterosexual Hungarians, drawing an unfair and harmful parallel between LGBTQ identity and pedophilia. The court stressed that the law ran “contrary to the very identity of the Union as a common legal order in a society in which pluralism prevails.”

Legal experts described the ruling as a historic turning point for minority rights across the bloc. John Morijn, a professor of law and international relations politics at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, noted that the decision carries symbolic weight that extends far beyond Hungary’s borders, establishing that the fundamental rights of marginalized social groups are not open to political negotiation. “You cannot equate what is totally natural – that 10% of the population loves the same sex – with egregious crime,” Morijn told the BBC, adding that the ruling sets a new precedent for holding EU member states accountable for violating both the letter and spirit of EU law, particularly the core values of pluralism, equality, and rule of law enshrined in Article 2. This precedent, Morijn explained, opens the door for the European Commission to take similar legal action against other member states that roll back minority rights.

The ruling places immediate pressure on Hungary’s new governing majority, led by Péter Magyar’s Tisza Party, which defeated Fidesz in the April 12 general election. While Magyar has not released a detailed public position on the specific anti-LGBTQ laws, his election victory speech laid out a vision for a Hungary “where no-one is stigmatised for thinking differently than the majority, or loving differently than the majority.” Magyar has run on a strongly pro-European platform, promising to repair Hungary’s strained relations with Brussels, reverse Orbán’s authoritarian policies, and unlock more than €10 billion in blocked EU cohesion funding that was frozen over concerns about rule of law backsliding under the previous government. With Tisza holding a two-thirds supermajority of 141 seats in the 199-seat National Assembly, the new government has the parliamentary power to repeal the contested legislation immediately.

European Commission officials have confirmed that repealing the anti-LGBTQ law will be a top priority in discussions with the new Hungarian administration. “It’s up to the… Hungarian government to abide by the ruling and once that is done the issue is solved,” said commission spokeswoman Paula Pinho.

LGBTQ rights advocates have called for swift action from both Magyar’s government and the European Commission. Katja Štefanec Gärtner, policy advisor at pan-European LGBTQ rights group Ilga-Europe, argued that the landmark ECJ ruling removes any justification for delaying repeal. “If Péter Magyar truly aims to be pro-EU, he must place this at the top of his agenda for his first 100 days in office,” Štefanec Gärtner said.

Diplomatic activity across the Middle East is accelerating this week, with a key meeting between French President Emmanuel Macron and Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam set for Tuesday in Paris, focused on shoring up the fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah. Macron’s office confirmed that the top agenda items for the Elysee Palace talks include reaffirming France’s unwavering backing for the truce and upholding Lebanon’s full territorial sovereignty. Additional discussions will cover urgent humanitarian aid for thousands of displaced Lebanese civilians, as well as progress on the economic and financial reforms that Macron’s team says are critical to rebuilding Lebanon’s infrastructure, reinforcing its national independence and reviving its stagnant economy.

Nearly four and a half years after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, peace negotiations to end the devastating conflict remain stuck in a deadlock, and a new diplomatic controversy has added friction to the process. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has publicly criticized two senior U.S. negotiators — special envoy Steve Witkoff and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner — for repeatedly traveling to Moscow for talks without ever making an official visit to Kyiv, calling the pattern of engagement deeply disrespectful.

The two U.S. representatives first traveled to the Russian capital in late 2025, when ceasefire negotiations gained new momentum after months of stalled discussion, and returned for a second round of talks in January 2026. Witkoff, a former real estate developer and close ally of U.S. President Donald Trump, has now made eight trips to Moscow and held multiple face-to-face meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Despite this extensive engagement with Moscow, neither Witkoff nor Kushner has ever traveled to Kyiv in an official negotiating capacity.

In an interview with a Ukrainian media outlet, Zelensky emphasized that the unilateral focus on Moscow cannot be justified, even amid Ukraine’s challenging wartime logistics. “It’s disrespectful [for them] to come to Moscow and not Kyiv, it’s just disrespectful,” Zelensky said. The Ukrainian leader added that Kyiv is flexible on meeting locations, noting, “If they don’t want to, we can meet in other countries.”

Earlier this April, Zelensky confirmed that the two envoys had been expected to visit Ukraine, but the planned trip was scrapped after the U.S. and Israel launched military strikes against Iran, shifting the entirety of Washington’s diplomatic and military focus to the Middle East. Currently, Witkoff and Kushner are part of a U.S. delegation traveling to Pakistan for ceasefire negotiations with Iran, a reality Zelensky acknowledged. Even so, he reaffirmed Kyiv’s commitment to maintaining close cooperation with Washington on ending the war.

Ceasefire talks gained significant momentum in autumn 2025, after details emerged of a draft peace deal worked out behind closed doors by Russian and U.S. officials that included multiple provisions unfavorable to Ukraine. Kyiv pushed aggressively to be included in formal negotiations, leading to a series of multilateral meetings that culminated in a trilateral Russia-U.S.-Ukraine summit in mid-February 2026. By the end of that summit, both Moscow and Kyiv announced they had reached preliminary agreement on core military issues, including the demarcation of the current front line and frameworks for monitoring a potential ceasefire.

However, several critical sticking points remain unresolved, keeping the talks at an impasse. Key unresolved issues include Kyiv’s demand that Russia repatriate the thousands of Ukrainian children forcibly deported to Russia since the start of the invasion, and Russia’s non-negotiable demand for a full regime change in Kyiv. The most contentious issue, though, remains the status of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, where Russia claims sovereignty over large swathes of Ukrainian territory that it currently occupies. Kyiv has repeatedly rejected any territorial concessions to end the war, and neither side has shown willingness to back down from their core positions on the Donbas.

“We are looking for a compromise between two completely polar positions,” Kyrylo Budanov, Zelensky’s chief of staff, told reporters in February. “We have not yet found it.” Budanov added that the two sides face a stark choice: “Either we find a solution and end this war, or we all equally take responsibility for admitting that we didn’t find a solution and continue to kill one another — something we do quite efficiently and professionally.”

Over more than four years of full-scale war, constant violence has become an everyday reality for millions of Ukrainians. Russia currently controls large portions of eastern and southern Ukraine, and daily artillery and infantry clashes continue along the thousand-kilometer front line stretching from the northeastern Luhansk region to the southern Kherson region. Ukrainian cities face regular large-scale aerial attacks, with Russia launching waves of drones and missiles that kill civilian bystanders and destroy critical civilian infrastructure.

Just last week, for example, Russia launched a massive multi-wave attack involving more than 700 drones and missiles across Ukraine that killed at least 18 civilians, according to Ukrainian officials. In response, Ukraine has ramped up its own long-range drone attacks on Russian energy and industrial infrastructure deep inside Russian territory, targeting ports, military depots, factories, and oil export terminals. Calculations from Reuters show that as of early April 2026, at least 20 percent of Russia’s total oil export capacity has been taken offline by these attacks.

Paradoxically, the global energy market disruption sparked by the U.S.-Iran conflict has delivered unexpected financial gains for Russia, boosting the country’s oil export revenue in recent months despite the export infrastructure damage. Even so, long-term economic indicators show Russia’s gross domestic product continues to contract amid sustained international sanctions and wartime economic pressures.

On Tuesday, the European Union’s highest judicial body delivered a landmark ruling against Hungary, concluding that a 2021 national law restricting LGBTQ+ content access for minors directly contradicts EU legislation and violates the bloc’s core founding treaty commitments to human rights and equal treatment.

The challenged legislation was pushed through by the outgoing nationalist-populist administration of long-serving Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. In its official judgment, the European Court of Justice (ECJ), based in Luxembourg, emphasized that the law unfairly stigmatizes and pushes LGBTQ+ people to the margins of Hungarian society, failing to meet the EU’s strict requirement to bar discrimination on the grounds of sex and sexual orientation.

Hungary’s 2021 statute banned public display of content depicting homosexuality or gender transition to underage people, while also introducing harsher legal punishments for pedophilia-related offenses. The Orbán government defended the policy, framing it as a necessary measure to shield children from what it labeled “sexual propaganda”. This stance was extended in subsequent actions: a later law and constitutional change effectively outlawed Budapest’s annual Pride parade, a major public gathering for the Hungarian LGBTQ+ community.

Critics of the policy have long drawn parallels between the Hungarian legislation and Russia’s 2013 anti-LGBTQ+ “gay propaganda” law, arguing that the Hungarian rule deliberately conflates same-sex relationships with child sexual abuse. Despite the ban on the event last year, more than 100,000 Hungarians joined the Budapest Pride march in an open act of civil disobedience against the Orbán government’s policy.

Tuesday’s ruling marks a historic first for EU judicial oversight: it is the first time the court has found a 27-nation EU member state in breach of Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union, the foundational document that enshrines the bloc’s core values of respect for human dignity, individual freedom, democratic governance, equality, rule of law, and protection of human rights for marginalized minority groups. The ECJ additionally determined that the Hungarian law also runs afoul of EU internal market regulations for digital and media services, as well as bloc-wide data protection standards.

The ruling comes just weeks after Orbán, who led Hungary for 16 consecutive years, suffered a landslide defeat in the April 12 national parliamentary election. His party was ousted by the center-right Tisza party, led by newcomer Péter Magyar, who has pledged to reset Hungary’s often strained relationship with the European Union through a more collaborative approach. Magyar’s new government is set to take office in mid-May.

While Magyar maintained a cautious stance on the culture-war LGBTQ+ rights debates championed by Orbán throughout his election campaign, he signaled a shift in tone during his post-election victory address. He told supporters that under his leadership, Hungary would become a nation “where no one is stigmatized for loving someone differently than the majority.”

The escalating political scandal over former UK prime minister Keir Starmer’s appointment of Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the United States has entered a new phase, with the top former civil servant who oversaw the approval process telling lawmakers that his team was pushed to rush the selection despite formal security red flags.

In testimony delivered Tuesday to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, Olly Robbins, the former head of the UK Foreign Office who was fired by Starmer last week over the affair, clarified critical details: the initial security concerns that triggered vetting warnings were not connected to Mandelson’s long-documented friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who died in prison in 2019. When pressed by parliamentarians, Robbins declined to specify what issue led the government’s official vetting body to flag Mandelson as a risk.

Robbins told the committee that the UK’s vetting agency had classified Mandelson as a “borderline case” that leaned toward a recommendation against granting him high-level security clearance. Despite this formal assessment, the Foreign Office ultimately approved the clearance, a decision that has now cost Robbins his position.

Widening his account of the internal pressure that preceded the approval, Robbins said an “atmosphere of pressure” originated directly from Starmer’s Downing Street office, with a “very, very strong expectation” that Mandelson needed to be installed in the Washington post as quickly as possible. He added that there was a “generally dismissive attitude” toward the security vetting process among political officials back in January 2025, just before Mandelson traveled to the U.S. to take up the role.

Starmer has already publicly acknowledged he made a misjudgment in appointing Mandelson, but has pushed back against growing opposition calls to step down from the premiership. He claims that he was never informed by Foreign Office officials of the failed security vetting assessment, saying he only learned of the red flags last week. He has called the failure to disclose this information “frankly staggering”, placing full blame for the affair on career civil servants rather than his own political leadership.

Mandelson’s appointment was terminated by Starmer back in September 2025, nine months after he took up the ambassador post, when new details about his long-running ties to Epstein came to light. In response to the unfolding crisis, Starmer has ordered an official review to assess what security risks may have emerged from Mandelson’s nine months of access to top-secret UK government information while serving in Washington.

Critics argue the entire affair is just the latest example of poor decision-making from Starmer, who led the centre-left Labour Party to a landslide general election victory in July 2024, but has been plagued by repeated missteps in office. Records show Starmer went ahead with the appointment even after his own internal staff warned him that Mandelson’s friendship with Epstein created major “reputational risk” for the government. Additional concerns were also raised about Mandelson’s past business ties to both Russia and China, but political leaders ultimately pushed forward with the selection, citing his experience as a former European Union trade chief and his deep network of connections among global political and business elites as valuable assets for working with U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration.

The scandal has deepened unease within the parliamentary Labour Party, where lawmakers already faced anxiety over the party’s poor standing in national opinion polls. Starmer previously defused one wave of internal pressure back in February 2025, when multiple backbench Labour MPs called on him to resign over the unfolding controversy.

Separately, Mandelson is currently the subject of an active criminal investigation by UK police over suspected misconduct in public office. The probe was launched after the U.S. Department of Justice released a large trove of Epstein-related documents in January 2025, which included emails suggesting Mandelson passed sensitive, market-moving UK government information to Epstein back in 2009 in the wake of the global financial crisis. British law enforcement arrested Mandelson in February 2025 as part of the inquiry; he has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, has not been formally charged with any criminal offense, and faces no allegations of sexual misconduct connected to the Epstein case.