标签： Europe

MADRID – Spain’s minority socialist government led by Pedro Sánchez suffered a major parliamentary defeat Friday, when Congress voted down two emergency decree laws crafted to address the country’s escalating affordable housing crisis. The outcome has amplified widespread speculation that Sánchez will be forced to call an early general election, months ahead of the scheduled vote next summer.

The crisis that forced the government’s hand began last week, when 87-year-old Maricarmen Abascal was evicted from her long-term central Madrid apartment after being unable to absorb a steep rent hike imposed by property owner Urbagestión. Mass public outrage over the eviction quickly spread nationwide, with thousands of protesters mobilizing to demand systemic reform of Spain’s unregulated rental market, where prices have surged to unaffordable levels for millions of working and low-income households in recent years. Under intense public pressure, Urbagestión later reversed course and agreed to allow Abascal to return to her home at a reduced rate, but the protest movement only gained momentum, spreading to city squares across the country and organizers called for a national strike over housing affordability.

In a rushed response to the growing social backlash, Sánchez’s left-wing coalition government pushed through two executive decrees packed with tenant protection measures, which required parliamentary approval to remain in force. The first decree included sweeping provisions: a moratorium on evictions for vulnerable renters through 2030, a two-year extension for rental leases set to expire before 2028, higher taxes on short-term tourist apartments, and new restrictions on residential property purchases by large investment firms the government labels “vulture funds.” The second, more contentious decree proposed automatic renewal of existing rental contracts, a core demand of tenant activists and left-wing organizers.

With the conservative People’s Party (PP) and far-right Vox already committed to voting against both measures, Sánchez’s minority government relied on the support of small regional nationalist parties from Catalonia and the Basque Country to pass the reforms. However, centre-right pro-independence party Together for Catalonia (JxCat) announced it would oppose the decrees in the lead-up to the vote, dooming the government’s proposals to defeat. The final vote tallies reflected the narrow divide: the first decree was rejected 178 to 172, while the second failed by a wider margin of 184 to 166.

In a last-ditch emotional appeal moments before the vote, Sánchez pleaded with undecided lawmakers to back the measures, framing the reform as a moral and existential issue for Spanish society. “I don’t ask you, I beg you to be brave and consistent,” he said. “Because they are not just ambitious measures, they are necessary. We have to put order and humanity into this market, because if we don’t, it will bring down our society.” Social Affairs Minister Pablo Bustinduy, representing junior coalition partner Sumar, framed the vote as a choice between working-class Spaniards and wealthy foreign interests. “Today is about defending an international oligarchy which is extracting rent from salaries earned with the effort of working classes of this country,” he argued. “Voting against these decrees today means defending the interests of this oligarchy and turning your back on your own people.”

Critics of the decrees pushed back on both policy and procedural grounds. JxCat lawmaker Miriam Nogueras argued the reforms had been hastily drafted and would ultimately backfire, saying “these two decrees will allow [vulture] funds to keep buying, keep speculating and evictions to keep happening… they will provoke the opposite effect of what they aim to achieve.” The opposition PP echoed the criticism, arguing that government intervention in the rental market would discourage private homeowners from listing properties for rent, further reducing supply and driving up prices. “Housing doesn’t get cheaper with decrees, it gets cheaper with more homes,” said PP representative Juan Bravo.

As the vote unfolded inside Congress, hundreds of housing activists gathered outside the building, and angry demonstrations broke out after the results were announced. Protesters chanted “shame on you” and “your profits, our misery” to condemn the rejection of the reforms. The leading activist group coordinating the national movement, the Sindicato de Inquilinas (Tenants’ Union), announced during the congressional debate that it would end its week-long tent encampment in central Madrid to refocus its efforts on neighborhood organizing. “We will take the struggle to all the neighbourhoods, residential blocks and homes of Madrid, wherever there are rental increases, expulsions and abuses each day, and turn the energy of the last few days into a permanent organisation,” the group said. It has already scheduled a new series of mass marches for this weekend and continues to call for a national general strike over the housing crisis.

Friday’s defeat highlights the fragility of Sánchez’s minority government, which has already been weakened by a series of ongoing scandals and judicial investigations affecting the Socialist Party and its close allies. Political analysts now widely expect Sánchez to call a snap general election, rather than continue to govern without a working majority, more than eight months before the scheduled election in summer 2026.

For more than five decades, every French administration has carried a hard-earned lesson etched into policy by the 1968 May student uprisings: mass youth mobilization on the streets poses an existential threat to sitting governments. Then-President Charles de Gaulle infamously dismissed the chaotic movement as chienlit – a crude term for unbridled disorder – and ever since, leaders have approached youth protests with extreme caution. Today, that long-held wariness has curdled into open anxiety for President Emmanuel Macron’s government, as a new youth-led protest movement that erupted just two weeks ago has swept across the nation, leaving widespread disruption, property damage, and political uncertainty in its wake.

The unrest first ignited in Seine-Saint-Denis, a low-income, diverse northern suburb of Paris long marked by systemic underinvestment. What began as a local outcry over underfunded education has rapidly expanded, reaching every corner of France in less than a fortnight. At the peak of mobilization last Thursday, hundreds of lycées – France’s secondary schools for 15 to 18-year-old students – were blocked by protesters. By Friday, roughly 400 lycées remained shuttered, closed by administrative order to protect staff and learners, and university student unions have begun joining the movement, amplifying its scale.

The protests have not remained peaceful. On Thursday, arson destroyed the main assembly hall of a Nantes lycée, and hundreds of small blazes were set at school entrances across the country, with total damage estimated in the millions of euros. According to Education Minister Édouard Geffray, 65 education staff, including 40 school principals, have sustained injuries, with most injured employees reporting that their attackers were not their own students. Government data also shows 300 police officers and firefighters have required medical treatment for injuries, and roughly 2,000 people, the vast majority of whom are minors, have been taken into police custody. Protesters and student groups push back on this official narrative, compiling their own list of injuries at the hands of police, including two teenagers who suffered severe permanent eye damage and another who lost multiple teeth.

Beyond the immediate chaos of street protests and blockades, the movement presents a uniquely thorny challenge for Macron’s government, rooted in both social and political context. While the core demands of protesters remain loosely defined, they center on a single, broadly resonant grievance: chronic underfunding of France’s public education system. Protesters are calling for increased education spending, more teaching staff, smaller class sizes, and critical infrastructure upgrades to crumbling school buildings. This grievance has broad public sympathy: most French observers acknowledge that education conditions have deteriorated steadily as public budgets have tightened, and mass protest to demand government investment is a long-accepted norm in French political culture.

Yet the timing of the unrest could not be more politically charged, coming just months ahead of France’s 2026 presidential election. Last week, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu unveiled his 2027 draft national budget, anchored by a pledge to cut €54 billion in public spending to reduce France’s chronic deficit. For Macron’s government, the era of large-scale public spending to defuse social unrest is effectively over, meaning any major concessions to student demands are all but off the table. That leaves the administration with few tools to de-escalate the crisis.

The far greater political fear, however, is that the protests are being intentionally stoked by the hard-left France Unbowed (LFI) party and its presidential candidate, veteran leftist leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, as part of an election strategy to mobilize young voters ahead of the May vote. Centrist and right-wing political observers, as well as a leaked internal Paris police intelligence report, point to evidence of far-left coordination: the presence of non-student protesters at blockades, the loose framing of demands, the display of Palestinian and Algerian flags at rallies, and the use of radical-left protest tactics such as organizing secondary demonstrations outside police stations. The police report concludes the unrest could be part of a deliberate “flame-kindling strategy” to advance LFI’s political agenda ahead of the elections.

LFI has repeatedly denied manipulating the movement, saying it is merely offering principled support to a legitimate grassroots protest of young people. Mélenchon himself has publicly called on students to avoid violence, arguing that unrest only plays into the hands of political opponents. Even so, his political rivals are convinced the 75-year-old candidate is deliberately leveraging the protests to shore up his already strong base among young French voters. Polling bears out the scope of his support: Mélenchon captures roughly 40% of the vote among 18 to 24-year-olds, and his messaging around a “new France” and “creolization” – a framework that celebrates France’s diverse, changing population and linguistic landscape – resonates deeply in the working-class, high-immigration suburbs that are the epicenter of the current unrest.

A key challenge for Mélenchon, however, is that young people are the demographic with the lowest voter turnout in French elections. Political analysts broadly see the current unrest as a way for LFI to energize this disengaged base, reminding young voters that the party aligns with their grievances and that their votes can shift the outcome of the election. Even so, polling consistently shows that Mélenchon would lose heavily to hard-right candidate Marine Le Pen in a head-to-head runoff election – a result that would plunge France into unprecedented political instability. For Macron’s government and centrist voters across the country, the current wave of youth protests is not just a temporary public disruption: it is seen as a potential early warning sign of the deepening polarization and instability that could follow next spring’s election.

Against the backdrop of vibrant cross-cultural exchange at Barcelona’s iconic La Merce festival, a deeper geopolitical shift is playing out across the European Union, as individual member states increasingly prioritize their own national strategic and economic interests over collective bloc unity. This week, Shanghai made history as the first Asian city of honor at the festival, where flamboyant traditional Chinese dragon dancers weaved through cheering crowds, acrobats performed mesmerizing rolling lantern acts that left audiences gasping, and centuries-old Catalan pipe music blended with traditional Chinese scores along Barcelona’s central boulevards. Speaking at the opening ceremony, Shanghai Vice Mayor Lu Shan noted that while Chinese and Catalan cultural traditions take distinct forms, they are bound together by a shared creative spirit.

This cultural exchange is just one visible marker of the warming relationship between Spain and China, a partnership that has put Madrid at odds with many of its European allies. Over the past four years, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has traveled to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping four times, and has repeatedly called on the entire EU to strengthen diplomatic and economic ties with Beijing – a stance that has gained new traction in the two years since Donald Trump won re-election as U.S. president.

Many of Spain’s EU partners, who view Beijing as a strategic rival and potential geopolitical threat to the bloc, have pushed back hard against Madrid’s approach. Privately, critics question whether Spain’s open-door policy to Chinese businesses is allowing Beijing to gain undue economic influence within the EU’s single market. Germany and France, the bloc’s two largest economies, have already joined forces to adopt a harder line on China, pushing for new powers that would allow Brussels to block subsidized Chinese firms from accessing the EU market, to address a daily bilateral trade deficit that Brussels puts at nearly €1 billion. Other member states also point to China’s deep economic and technological ties to Russia, which they argue enable Moscow’s ongoing war in Ukraine – a charge Beijing denies.

Yet Spain is far from alone in shifting its alliances to meet what it sees as its own unique national needs. Growing uncertainty over U.S. commitment to European security, driven by Trump’s unpredictable trade and defense policies, has left many EU and NATO member states feeling exposed and unwilling to rely exclusively on Washington. This shift has opened rifts within the bloc, as countries pursue independent partnerships that often irritate or alienate fellow members.

For Spain, the economic logic of closer ties to China is clear. Data from Spain’s trade and investment agency ICEX shows Chinese investment in Spain is surging, with particular growth in electric vehicle manufacturing and large-scale battery gigafactory projects. Chinese investment in the country doubled over just the past year, following an announcement from major automaker Chery that it would open its first European production hub in Spain, reviving the defunct Spanish auto brand Ebro. Battery firms Hithium and CATL also have major gigafactory projects underway across the country. Victor Cortizo, an academic and legal expert specializing in Sino-Spanish relations, notes that with U.S. net investment in Spain falling by roughly €1 billion recently, China has filled the gap – and could become Beijing’s top investment destination in Europe now that pro-China former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is no longer in office.

Public opinion in Spain also backs this shift. A Pew Research Center poll published this summer found 54% of Spaniards hold a favorable view of China, compared to just 30% who view the U.S., Spain’s long-time traditional ally, positively. Cortizo explains this gap: China has lowered barriers to Spanish trade, while Trump’s tariffs and spillover effects from the U.S.’s conflict with Iran have made trade with America far costlier. Many Spaniards also resent Trump’s threats to impose economic sanctions on Spain if Sanchez refused to meet demands to increase defense spending to 5% of GDP and allow U.S. bases in Spain to be used for strikes on Iran, leaving many in the country seeing Beijing as a more reliable partner.

Critics, however, warn that Spain’s approach carries serious security and economic risks. They argue that Chinese firms are building local production facilities in Spain to evade tariffs on imported Chinese electric vehicles, threatening the integrity of the EU single market. More alarmingly, last year Spain’s interior ministry awarded Chinese tech giant Huawei a €12.3 million contract to store and manage sensitive judicial wiretap data, a decision that drew widespread condemnation across the EU. MEPs from multiple political blocs warned that allowing a high-risk vendor access to sensitive data could compromise the entire European intelligence sharing network, with Spain’s center-right opposition arguing the decision puts the whole bloc at risk. While Madrid denies any security risk, former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Julianne Smith warns that moves like this erode collective European cohesion.

“When EU countries hedge against an unpredictable United States, they must be careful not to rush into partnerships that weaken the EU’s collective negotiating and security position,” Smith explained. “Partnerships with like-minded countries like Canada offer clear benefits, but deepening ties with China risks further undermining the EU’s ability to speak with one voice and creates new security vulnerabilities for the entire continent.”

Spain is not an outlier in this trend. In Finland, which shares a 1,300-kilometer border with Russia and joined NATO in 2022 after abandoning decades of neutrality, growing doubt over U.S. commitment to the alliance’s mutual defense clause has led the government to turn to Israel for advanced military hardware, including David’s Sling air defense systems and Spike anti-tank missiles. Finland renewed its major defense deal with Israel even during the height of the Gaza war, when the Finnish government and much of the EU had publicly raised serious concerns over Israeli military actions in the occupied Palestinian territories. Minna Alander, a fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, notes that for Finns, national survival takes priority over ideological alignment: “Finns have a less sentimental mentality. There is a widespread understanding that we cannot always afford moral superiority when our security is on the line.”

Greece has followed a similar path. Facing long-running territorial disputes with NATO neighbor Turkey, and with the U.S. increasingly perceived as an uninterested mediator under the Trump administration, Athens signed a massive landmark defense deal, dubbed the “Achilles Shield”, with Israel in late August to acquire advanced drone, aircraft and missile defense technology. While Greece has a long history of public sympathy for the Palestinian cause, public pushback on the deal has been muted, as Greeks broadly agree that strengthening national security against Turkey takes priority over all other concerns. Like Finland, Greece wants to be seen as a cooperative member of the EU, but its independent alliance building adds to the growing fragmentation of bloc positions.

Nick Malkoutzis, co-founder of political analysis outlet MacroPolis, explains that this scramble by individual EU states to pursue their own security and economic interests makes it far harder for the bloc to unite around common positions – directly counter to the goals of Brussels and NATO leadership. While small groups of European countries have long collaborated on specific issues – from the E3 group of the UK, Germany and France focused on Iran diplomacy to the Nordic defense cooperation bloc and the former Visegrad Group – current shifts are unprecedented in their scope.

Today, both EU and NATO leaders warn that the continent faces greater geopolitical pressure than any time since the end of World War II. An aggressive Russia is positioned along the bloc’s eastern border, backed by China, while the U.S., long Europe’s closest security ally, is increasingly distracted by other global priorities. Brussels and Washington warn that growing fragmentation, splintering and the rise of “mini-lateralism” among European states only plays into the hands of Europe’s adversaries, who are closely watching for signs of fracture within the Western alliance.

Escalating tensions between Russia and the Western military alliance NATO have taken a sharp turn, after Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a stark warning that Moscow will deploy every weapon in its arsenal — including nuclear arms — if Russia faces a direct assault on its Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad.

Speaking at the annual Valdai Discussion Club, a high-profile Russian foreign policy forum, Putin pushed back against recent Western claims that Russia is planning for a large-scale war between 2029 and 2030, emphasizing that Moscow has no aggressive intentions toward Europe. “We are not threatening anyone. We do not intend to attack anyone in 2029, in 2030, in 2050,” he told attendees. “But if we come across an aggression we will have to respond. Citizens of European countries should be fully aware of that.”

Kaliningrad, a strategically vital Russian territory sandwiched between NATO members Lithuania and Poland, has emerged as a major flashpoint in recent weeks. For days, Russian officials have leveled accusations that NATO is planning a naval and land blockade of the exclave, cutting it off from connections to mainland Russia. Putin doubled down on those warnings during his speech, noting that ongoing NATO naval drills in the Baltic Sea already pose a substantial threat to the region. “If it comes to a direct attack on the Russian Federation, in this case we are talking about Kaliningrad but possibly some other territories, of course the issue of use by the Russian Federation of all arms at the disposal of our country will inevitably and immediately be on the agenda,” he said.

The warning comes amid a steady surge in hybrid warfare incidents across the Baltic region and Eastern Europe that Western nations have blamed on Moscow in recent months. Just last week, Poland reported that a Russian military helicopter strayed into Polish airspace near the Kaliningrad border, while Lithuanian officials stated that the country’s population feels “constantly threatened” by repeated Russian drone incursions. On Thursday, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz confirmed that Germany is bracing for additional hybrid attacks — including major high-stakes incidents — after an explosive-laden drone was discovered in August on the tarmac of Leipzig Airport, near parking spots for Ukrainian cargo aircraft.

In his wide-ranging address, Putin also revisited longstanding Russian justifications for the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, repeating his claim that Moscow was forced into action by Western provocation and had no other choice but to defend itself. He argued that recent Russian strikes on Ukrainian economic infrastructure were a direct retaliation for Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil refineries and Black Sea naval assets, noting “they started it” in response to global calls for a ceasefire. Putin admitted that Ukraine’s attacks on Russian energy infrastructure had yielded limited results, cutting Russia’s gross domestic product by roughly 1 percent. Ukraine has countered that its strikes on Russian oil facilities are a targeted effort to disrupt the Kremlin’s ability to fund its ongoing war effort.

Russia has repeatedly targeted Ukrainian energy and civilian infrastructure since the invasion began, ramping up deadly airstrikes on energy networks every winter ahead of cold weather. Just on Thursday, a key bridge in central Kyiv was struck by a Russian drone attack, marking the latest in a long string of assaults on critical civilian infrastructure.

Putin also used the forum to criticize Western geopolitical dominance, claiming that while global conflicts will likely persist in the near term, tensions will ease as “Western hegemony” declines. He also warned of growing risks associated with the modernization of warfare, particularly the integration of artificial intelligence into military systems. “The automation and digitalisation of warfare leads to its gamification. This leads to degradation and sliding back of humanity to barbarity,” he said. Drawing a reference to Chekhov’s famous theatrical trope, he noted that if a gun is placed on stage at the start of a production, it will almost certainly fire by the final act — a parallel he drew to the global presence of mass destructive weapons that could “swipe away all life or at least push the Earth to catastrophic consequences.”

NATO has moved quickly to de-escalate the situation, pushing back against Putin’s claims and dismissing the Kremlin’s nuclear threats as unnecessary and unhelpful. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte reaffirmed Wednesday that none of the alliance’s military exercises or activities pose any offensive threat to Russia. Alliance officials have repeatedly stressed that NATO is a strictly defensive military bloc, and have called on Moscow to abandon its aggressive rhetorical posturing. “Nato is a defensive alliance. We have no intention to attack Russia,” a spokesperson repeated in the aftermath of Putin’s speech, urging dialogue to reduce regional tensions.

Despite the alliance’s calming efforts, regional leaders remain on edge, as small-scale incursions and hybrid attacks continue to raise fears of broader escalation between the world’s largest nuclear power and the 32-member Western military alliance.

One of Russia’s most high-profile exiled opposition figures, former world chess champion Garry Kasparov, has publicly confirmed he received joint warnings from U.S. and Lithuanian security agencies about an imminent threat to his life, amid a broader federal indictment that exposes a coordinated Kremlin-linked assassination network targeting dissidents abroad.

Kasparov, who has lived in exile in the United States since fleeing Russia in 2013, revealed that he and Ivan Tyutrin, co-founder of the opposition Free Russia Forum, were both advised to increase security precautions following the intelligence alert – advice he confirmed he has already implemented. His statement comes just weeks after the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed a criminal indictment charging five individuals with working on behalf of Russian intelligence to carry out transnational attacks and assassinations, with a specific focus on exiled Russian dissidents and defectors operating in the U.S. and other allied countries.

In a post published to his Substack newsletter, Kasparov noted that intelligence officials did not explicitly confirm he and Tyutrin were named targets, but both received clear warnings to shore up their personal safety. Spanish newspaper El Mundo first reported the threat in recent coverage, stating that U.S. authorities had alerted both Kasparov and another exiled opposition figure, Ilya Ponomarev, to the plot over the summer. Citing anonymous sources close to Kasparov, the outlet added that the former chess grandmaster was placed under enhanced security protection this summer, marking the first time such measures have been implemented since he relocated to the U.S.

Unbowed by the threat, Kasparov issued a defiant statement rejecting any attempt to silence his activism. “I will not stop and I will not hide, even if I thought it was possible to do so,” he wrote. “My family and I will not truly be safe as long as [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is in power in Russia – a circumstance shared by millions.”

Kasparov stepped away from professional competitive chess in 2005 to shift into Russian politics, founding multiple opposition movements that openly challenged Putin’s rule before he was forced into exile. Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russian authorities have designated Kasparov a “foreign agent,” and added him to the country’s official list of terrorists and extremists in 2024 – designations Kasparov has repeatedly rejected as politically motivated.

The second named opposition figure, Ilya Ponomarev, holds a unique place in Russian anti-Kremlin history: he was the only member of Russia’s parliament to vote against Moscow’s illegal annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in 2014, and has lived in exile in Ukraine ever since. When contacted by The Moscow Times, Ponomarev declined to explicitly confirm or deny that he had received a warning about the alleged plot, but noted that the exposed assassination scheme represents “a new level of escalation” by the Russian government.

The U.S. Justice Department’s indictment outlines that the network, dubbed the RIS Network, has been operating under the direction of Russian intelligence services since at least the start of 2024. Prosecutors say the group has coordinated a global campaign of conspiracies, violent attacks, and targeted assassinations against Russian dissidents and defectors across multiple continents. John A. Eisenberg, Assistant Attorney General for the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Security Division, confirmed in an official statement that the five charged individuals are accused of operating “as part of a global assassination network that reached into the United States, attempting to recruit U.S. citizens and foreigners to carry out killings at the behest of the Kremlin.”

The five men named in the indictment are Yuri Khrameev, Kirill Khrameev, Oemis Romagoza Durruthy, Yaidel Delgado Suarez, and Angel Eduardo Castro. All five remain at large as of the latest updates, and no arrests have been reported in connection with the case. When the indictment was first unsealed earlier this month, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to comment on the charges, telling reporters he would not address the claims until he had reviewed “any credible evidence” or “tangible facts” supporting the accusations.