标签： Europe

As eastern Germany’s Saxony-Anhalt region prepares for state elections on September 6, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) holds a substantial lead in polling, putting it on the cusp of becoming the first post-war far-right party to control a German state government. Its campaign, centered on a sweeping “patriotism” agenda that seeks to downplay Germany’s Nazi past and reshape national memory, has ignited fierce national debate over the country’s long-standing moral commitment to confronting its 20th-century atrocities.

At the core of the AfD’s platform is a rejection of Germany’s established culture of remembrance, Erinnerungskultur, which the party dismisses in its official manifesto as a harmful “guilt complex.” If it wins a parliamentary majority, the party has pledged to overhaul state school history curricula, shifting focus away from the crimes of the Nazi regime to highlight centuries of pre-World War II German history, framed as a legacy of “poets and thinkers.” While AfD leaders insist education on National Socialism will remain part of the curriculum, the party’s blueprint sums up its approach as “More Bismarck, less Hitler” – a reference to 19th-century German unifier Otto von Bismarck. Additional policy pledges include daily flying of the German flag at public schools, expanded preservation of German war memorials, and cuts to public funding for art the party labels “anti-German.”

On the campaign trail in the small town of Querfurt, long-time AfD supporter Gerd, 70, summed up the view held by many of the party’s backers. Attached to the handlebars of his mobility scooter is a frayed German flag, a deliberate display of national pride that Gerd says modern Germany has suppressed for too long. “You can’t wipe away history, but the Second World War has nothing to do with us any more,” he told reporters, arguing that younger and even post-war generations should not carry perpetual collective responsibility for Nazi crimes, and that the nation should embrace its full historical legacy with pride.

Ulrich Siegmund, the 35-year-old AfD candidate who would become Saxony-Anhalt’s state premier if the party wins a majority, defended the agenda in an interview with the BBC. A former air freshener salesman who has risen to become one of the party’s most popular figures thanks to his energetic campaigning and savvy social media strategy, Siegmund framed the push for renewed national pride as an entirely ordinary, unremarkable goal. “We want to get that back,” he said. “We have a diverse history, stretching back many hundreds of years, and we want to teach that history in its entirety, with all its highs and lows but with pride and a positive outlook.” Siegmund dismissed widespread allegations of extremism against the party, and denied ongoing connections to Austrian far-right activist Martin Sellner, who has a documented neo-Nazi past. Siegmund said he only met Sellner once at a 2023 gathering outside Berlin, and has had no contact since.

Critics, however, warn that the AfD’s agenda amounts to dangerous historical revisionism that echoes the cultural control tactics of the Nazi regime itself. For Frank Martin Widmaier, director of a state-funded regional theatre in Eisleben, the party’s pledge to cut funding for “anti-German” art echoes the 1937 Nazi “Degenerate Art Exhibition,” where the regime labeled and banned works it deemed ideologically unacceptable. “How can somebody say it’s not German enough, and what does it mean?” Widmaier asked, noting that most German cultural institutions rely heavily on state funding. “This is playing with Nazi propaganda. To threaten people, to threaten the institutions.” Widmaier rejected the AfD’s core claim that Germany’s culture of remembrance has created a national guilt complex, arguing that confronting the Nazi past is a core part of modern German national identity, not a source of shame for generations born after the war. “You don’t have to feel guilty,” he said. “But you have to deal with all of that to make it never happen again. That’s part of our DNA in Germany.”

The AfD has long faced official scrutiny: German domestic intelligence has classified the Saxony-Anhalt AfD branch as a right-wing extremist anti-democratic movement permeated by racist ideology, a designation the party dismisses as a politically motivated smear. All major established German parties have ruled out entering any coalition government with the AfD, meaning the party’s only path to power is winning an outright majority in the state parliament – a historic outcome that polls indicate is possible, though not guaranteed. If successful, the victory would give the AfD control over core state portfolios including education, policing, and cultural policy, allowing it to implement its full agenda for the first time.

The growing popularity of the AfD’s nationalist agenda is not limited to Saxony-Anhalt: the party currently leads national polling as well, though its advantage at the federal level is less dramatic. The September 6 election is widely viewed as a watershed moment for post-war German politics, marking the first real test of whether a far-right party committed to rewriting Germany’s founding post-war moral consensus can seize state power.

On a singular day in Washington that blended mourning and urgent diplomacy, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy arrived at the U.S. Capitol just hours after the funeral of the late Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham to make a direct, personal appeal for sweeping new sanctions against Russia — a last legislative effort spearheaded by Graham to cut off Moscow’s war-fighting revenue.

A rare show of bipartisan attention greeted the Ukrainian leader: half of all U.S. senators packed into a closed-door meeting, setting aside their usual mobile phone distractions to focus on Zelenskyy’s briefing. Joined by House members, attendees heard Zelenskyy lay out Ukraine’s ongoing strategy in its years-long defensive war against Russia’s full-scale invasion, detailing how Kyiv’s forces have held back Russian advances and even taken offensive action while outlining urgent unmet needs. Those needs include additional Patriot interceptor missiles, expanded access to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet, updated defense licensing agreements, and, most pressingly, immediate passage of the sanctions package Graham spent a full year negotiating to advance.

Zelenskyy made the stakes clear to lawmakers, according to Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, the top Democratic member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “He said, ‘We need this legislation,’” Shaheen recalled in an interview, adding that the bill’s passage is critical to the morale of both Ukraine’s frontline troops and its civilian population.

Multiple lawmakers in attendance described a palpable shift in the room, buoyed by Zelenskyy’s quiet confidence in Ukraine’s ability to persevere. “You could feel palpably in the room a sense that — Zelenskyy’s confidence of their ability to hold and to persevere,” said Rep. Steny Hoyer, Maryland’s veteran Democratic congressman and former House Democratic leader. “There was a sense in the room that, look, we can be successful.”

The legislation, later named the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia Act, marks the most ambitious pro-Ukraine policy initiative from Congress since Donald Trump reclaimed the White House in 2025. After two years of gridlock on Ukraine policy — the last major congressional action was 2024’s supplemental aid package — the bill advanced out of the Senate the very night of Zelenskyy’s visit, with the Ukrainian leader taking an unprecedented seat in the Senate chamber to observe the vote. Lawmakers smiled, waved, and gave encouraging gestures as they cast their ballots, and the bill ultimately passed days later by a lopsided 86-11 margin, sending it to the House of Representatives for consideration.

Despite that strong Senate showing, the bill’s future remains deeply uncertain. House Speaker Mike Johnson leads a narrow Republican majority overwhelmingly reluctant to commit to new overseas initiatives aligned with U.S. foreign policy goals. Even among many Democratic lawmakers who have long supported Ukraine, concerns have emerged about the bill’s structure: it grants Trump sweeping authority to impose tariffs of up to 100 percent on any country that continues to import Russian energy, with no explicit congressional checks on how that power is used.

At its core, the legislation is designed to cut off the Kremlin’s primary source of funding for its war machine by pressuring major Russian energy customers including China and India to halt purchases of Moscow’s oil and gas. But critics across the Democratic caucus warn the open-ended tariff authority gives the Trump administration too much unregulated power, which could be used against U.S. allies and ultimately raise costs for American consumers.

“It’s important not to underestimate symbolically what this would mean,” said Daniel Balson, a policy advocate with Razom for Ukraine, a pro-Ukraine pro-democracy organization. Balson urged Congress to maintain momentum on the bill, arguing that passage would send a critical message to Kyiv that “hiccups and all, there is still an international alliance that stands behind Ukraine’s fight.”

Zelenskyy’s 2025 Capitol Hill visit marks the latest chapter in a years-long diplomatic outreach to U.S. lawmakers that has seen dramatic high points and deep periods of uncertainty. In March 2022, just days after Russia launched its full-scale invasion, Zelenskyy addressed Congress via a dramatic private video call, pleading for warplanes to defend Ukraine’s skies. That December, he traveled to Washington for a historic Christmas address to Congress, drawing comparisons to Winston Churchill’s World War II visits to Washington to rally allied support.

But by 2023, as then-Republican front-runner Trump aligned with critics of continued aid, congressional Republicans abandoned plans for a new round of Ukraine funding. After Trump won the 2024 election and returned to the Oval Office in 2025, all progress on new Ukraine aid ground to a halt. A high-profile Oval Office meeting saw Trump publicly berate Zelenskyy, blaming the Ukrainian leader’s opposition to Putin for blocking a negotiated peace. As Republican Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, a former Air Force brigadier general, put it: Republican support for the bill is largely held back by Trump’s stance. “This has largely hinged on President Trump,” Bacon said, noting that more Republicans would back Ukraine publicly if Trump signaled his approval.

Graham, who spent a full year negotiating with the White House to win Trump’s backing for the sanctions package, shared the news of his breakthrough with colleagues at the NATO summit in Turkey last month, before traveling on to Kyiv for a final visit to Ukraine. He died just days after returning to Washington, from an apparent torn aorta. His Democratic partner on the bill, Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, recalled that Graham called winning Trump’s approval a “BFD” — a nod to how critical the breakthrough was for the legislation.

Top House Democrats have already raised formal objections to the bill’s open-ended tariff provisions. House Foreign Affairs Committee top Democrat Gregory Meeks of New York and Ways and Means Committee top Democrat Richard Neal of Massachusetts have both publicly pushed back on the language. More than 30 Senate Democrats supported a failed amendment to rein in the president’s tariff authority before the bill’s passage.

“This is not so much a sanctions bill as it is a massive backdoor authority for President Trump to impose more tariffs, including on our European allies, that hurt American families,” Meeks said in a statement. Even so, Hoyer, who worked with Meeks on a separate pro-Ukraine security bill that passed the House earlier this year over Johnson’s objections, is urging lawmakers not to let the opportunity slip. He argued that existing congressional and judicial checks are sufficient to limit any potential abuse of the tariff authority, and that passing the bill is critical to sending a message of support to Ukraine.

“You know there was so much negative vibes that we were sending,” Hoyer said. “We’ve got to send a letter to these courageous Ukrainians that we’re with them.”

On a small North Atlantic island with a population of just under 400,000, Icelanders are heading to the polls this Saturday to settle one of the most consequential and long-running debates in their modern history: whether to restart frozen negotiations to join the European Union. Latest polling shows the race is a statistical dead heat, with neither side holding a decisive lead, making the final outcome impossible to call with any certainty.

Inside a sunlit waterfront fish processing plant outside Reykjavik, workers in hairnets and heavy blue overalls sort through freshly caught cod and haddock, with most of the finished fillets destined for European markets. For Pétur Pálsson, head of the Visir fishing firm, the threat of EU membership hangs heavy over his operation. He warns that joining the bloc would mean ceding control of Iceland’s lucrative fishing waters to Brussels policymakers, risking thousands of domestic jobs and pushing processing facilities overseas. “If we are in the EU, they will be the ones who make the policy,” Pálsson says.

The push for a new referendum comes after Prime Minister Kristrún Frostadóttir’s centre-left government won a snap 2024 election on a pledge to revisit the EU question by 2027. That timeline was accelerated dramatically by shifting global geopolitics: Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has sharpened great power rivalries in the Arctic, while unpredictable trade policy from former U.S. President Donald Trump, including tariff threats and repeated public remarks about his desire to acquire Greenland, has pushed the question of Iceland’s global standing to the top of the national agenda.

“Things have been moving very rapidly with respect to geopolitical challenges,” Finance Minister Daði Már Kristófersson, whose Liberal Reform Party leads the pro-accession campaign, told the BBC. “That has pushed Iceland’s place in the world up the agenda.” Iceland occupies a strategically critical position at the mouth of the GIUK Gap, a key North Atlantic shipping and surveillance corridor where Western militaries closely monitor Russian maritime activity. A founding member of NATO, Iceland has no standing military of its own, relying instead on a 1951 bilateral defense pact with the U.S. and collective security commitments from its NATO allies.

Polling has shifted dramatically in the lead-up to the vote: one recent survey put the Yes camp ahead by a slim 51.3% to 48.7% margin, while earlier polls showed the two sides deadlocked. “It’s impossibly hard to predict,” said Eirikur Bergmann, a professor of politics at Bifröst University. “Both camps are throwing everything they have at it.” For supporters, the case for EU membership rests on two core pillars: security and economic stability. Kristófersson argues that joining the bloc would strengthen Iceland’s position against competing great powers, while adopting the euro would tame the country’s notoriously volatile currency and curb sky-high living costs that have left many struggling. “We see the opportunity of joining the EU and adopting the euro as a very significant benefit to Icelandic companies and to the Icelandic general public,” he says.

A Yes vote this weekend will only restart negotiations with Brussels: any final membership deal would require a second national referendum and approval from all 27 existing EU member states. A No vote would shelve the accession question for the foreseeable future. Many voters planning to back Yes say they support restarting talks precisely because the final decision remains down the line. “We have to know what’s in the package from the EU,” said Reykjavik resident Anna Ragnarsdottir. “If we say no, we won’t ever know.”

The biggest sticking point, both when Iceland first began accession talks in 2010 and today, is fishing. Marine industries account for nearly 40% of Iceland’s total exports, and the country’s fishing waters are woven into its national identity and political culture. Opponents warn that joining the EU would force Iceland to share access to its waters under the bloc’s Common Fisheries Policy, eroding national sovereignty and threatening the core of the country’s economy. Opposition leader Guðrún Hafsteinsdóttir, who leads the No campaign, has vowed that Iceland’s waters will never be opened to foreign fleets. Prof Bergmann notes that no Icelandic politician could survive making such a concession: “Fishing is inseparable from Iceland’s culture and political identity, and no politician ever could make that concession. They’d be expelled from the country.”

The No campaign’s slogan, “Iceland for sale? No thanks,” has resonated with voters who prioritize protecting national control over key industries. Margrét Ágústa Sigurðardóttir, head of the Icelandic Farmers’ Association, is skeptical of the government’s promise to secure a special exemption for Iceland’s fishing and agricultural sectors. “No member state has been granted a permanent opt-out,” she says, arguing that EU policy would always prioritize the interests of 450 million EU consumers over the unique needs of a small 400,000-person nation.

Iceland’s government argues that a special arrangement is achievable, pointing to precedent: Norway secured favorable terms even before it abandoned its own accession bid, while existing EU members Finland and Sweden won carve-outs for northern agricultural sectors. But economic concerns remain top of mind for most voters, regardless of their position: Iceland ranks among the most expensive countries in the world, with recent analysis showing prices are 84% higher than the EU average, and interest rates have climbed to 8% to curb persistent inflation. “We get higher salaries, and it goes straight to the cost of everything,” said Snærós Sindradóttir, a leading Yes supporter with the European Movement in Iceland. “It’s like a dog chasing its own tail constantly.”

Ironically, while the referendum was called largely because of shifting security concerns, geopolitics has barely featured in public debate. For Sindradóttir, that omission is deeply frustrating: the referendum is happening now “100% because of security matters,” she says. Recent events have heightened security anxieties: in June, Icelandic authorities tracked a Russian intelligence ship passing through the country’s exclusive economic zone, and Trump’s repeated gaffes — including mistaking Iceland for Greenland during a Davos speech, and a joke from his ambassador that Iceland could become the 51st U.S. state — have left many Icelanders questioning the long-term reliability of their security alliance with the U.S. While the “special relationship” remains formally unchanged, Kristófersson argues that EU membership adds a critical additional pillar of security, a position that led the government to sign a new defense partnership with the bloc in March.

On the streets of downtown Reykjavik, voters are split between economic anxiety and concerns over sovereignty. “The biggest problem right now is for the generation who are trying to buy their own housing,” said 62-year-old Adolf Fridriksson. “The mortgage rates are terrifying.” For 22-year-old Helga, the cost of membership and loss of control are too great a risk: “The fishing industry, and everything else, should be in our control.”

The result will be closely watched across Europe. When Iceland abandoned accession talks in 2013, 11 of the 35 negotiation chapters were already completed, meaning a Yes vote could restart talks in months rather than years. The outcome is also being closely monitored in neighboring Norway, another Eurosceptic EEA member where support for EU accession is growing. For Hallgrímur Oddsson, head of EU-Iceland think tank European Currents, a Yes vote would be a much-needed boost for the EU’s stalled enlargement agenda. “But a No vote could also be perceived as a loss,” he says.

TORONTO – In a clear demonstration of Canada’s strategic shift away from heavy economic reliance on the United States amid an escalating bilateral trade conflict, Prime Minister Mark Carney is set to address the European Parliament next month, his office confirmed in an official announcement Wednesday. The high-stakes diplomatic visit will also see Carney attend the European Union’s annual State of the Union address, delivered by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who is scheduled to give her address on September 16. Carney’s speech to European lawmakers will follow one day after von der Leyen’s remarks.

This landmark trip comes on the heels of collapsed trade negotiations between Washington and Ottawa, a breakdown that pushed US President Donald Trump to enact steep 50% tariffs on roughly $20 billion worth of Canadian exports. In direct response to the unilateral American trade action, the Canadian government quickly moved forward with retaliatory tariffs of its own, deepening the rift between the two neighboring North American allies.

For the Carney administration, Europe has emerged as the cornerstone of a long-term strategy to diversify Canada’s trade and foreign policy partnerships, cutting the country’s overreliance on its southern neighbor. Since taking office in March 2025, Carney has prioritized European engagement, making no fewer than 11 trips to the continent to advance bilateral cooperation. He has repeatedly laid out his vision for global cooperation among middle powers, arguing that these nations should collaborate directly rather than jockey for influence with larger global powers.

Beyond trade, Canada has steadily deepened political and security ties with the European bloc over recent months. The country secured a landmark security and defense partnership with the EU, and earlier this year became the first non-European nation to join the bloc’s Security Action for Europe initiative, a signal of growing alignment on regional and global security priorities.

Carney has set an ambitious economic target to back this strategic shift: doubling the volume of Canada’s exports to markets outside the United States over the next ten years. The prime minister brings personal and professional context to this European outreach, having previously served as governor of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, giving him longstanding, deep-rooted professional and personal connections across European institutions.

KYIV, Ukraine – In a striking moment that blends soft cultural diplomacy, wartime symbolism, and ongoing geopolitical tensions, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy received a three-month-old American pit bull terrier this week from legendary U.S. former boxing champion Terence Crawford, a gift layered with meaning that extends far beyond a casual photo opportunity. The tender video footage, captured Tuesday inside Zelenskyy’s Kyiv office, shows the Ukrainian leader cuddling, cooing over, and cradling the floppy, reddish-yellow puppy named Freya – a gentle scene that unfolds against the harsh backdrop of Ukraine’s four-year defensive war against Russia’s full-scale invasion.

Crawford, a long-time public supporter of Ukraine and an enthusiast of the American pit bull terrier breed, arranged the gifting through a chain of connections that traces directly back to one of the war’s worst atrocities. Freya is the granddaughter of Athos, a dog who survived the 2022 Russian siege of Bucha, where Russian forces carried out mass civilian killings before being pushed out by Ukrainian troops. After surviving the siege on a street where Ukrainian forces destroyed a major Russian military convoy, Athos was eventually rescued and transferred to Francisco Lopez, a professional American dog breeder and Ukraine supporter who is a friend of Crawford’s. When Athos’ daughter remained in Ukraine amid the ongoing conflict, Lopez arranged to fly a breeding dog to Ukraine to mate with her, resulting in Freya’s birth.

The puppy’s name carries intentional strategic resonance as well: it is taken from Project Freyja, a Ukrainian-led initiative to develop a new pan-European ballistic missile defense system, launched amid growing shortages of critical American-made Patriot air defense interceptors. Supplies of Patriots have grown increasingly stretched amid concurrent conflict demands in the Middle East, and recent remarks from former U.S. President Donald Trump have cast new uncertainty over U.S. commitments to sharing Patriot production licensing with Ukraine.

Vadym Danylchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s minister of youth and sports who helped coordinate the visit, told the Associated Press that Crawford specifically requested that Zelenskyy receive this particular puppy. Danylchenko noted that while he initially had reservations about gifting the president a new pet amid the overwhelming demands of wartime leadership, the symbolic weight of the gesture made it unavoidable. “This little girl is a symbol of the fact that her grandfather survived and was a direct witness to the events in Bucha. So it was very symbolic for them,” Danylchenko explained.

The moment of soft warmth in Zelenskyy’s office is far from an accidental photo op: it is the latest entry in a parallel public battle of imagery that runs alongside Ukraine’s military campaign against Russian aggression, with animals long emerging as powerful symbols of Ukrainian national resilience and endurance through hardship. This trend stretches back to the early months of the full-scale invasion, when a Jack Russell terrier named Patrone rose to national fame for his work assisting Ukrainian mine-clearing teams in the Chernihiv region. Patrone became the official mascot of Ukraine’s emergency services, earned a state medal from Zelenskyy, and was even named the first ever UNICEF “Goodwill AmbassaDOG,” with a mural in a Kyiv park immortalizing his service.

Other examples of animals as wartime symbols are woven across Ukraine’s public landscape: a Kyiv mural depicts fallen volunteer fighter Oleksii Movchan holding the grey-and-white cat he rescued alongside 11 civilians in Donetsk region, shortly before Movchan and three fellow soldiers were killed by Russian shelling in 2022. Countless stories have also emerged of Ukrainian civilians risking their own safety to rescue pets and stray animals trapped in war zones, with one woman organizing the evacuation of hundreds of animals to safer territory in western Ukraine and foster homes overseas.

The gesture also carries subtle geopolitical weight, coming at a moment of ongoing uncertainty over long-term U.S. military and political support for Ukraine. Last year, Zelenskyy received a high-profile public rebuke from Donald Trump and U.S. Vice President JD Vance during a meeting in the Oval Office, though the two sides have since sought to frame relations as mended. On Tuesday, the gift of an American dog breed from a beloved American sports figure offered a quiet display of ongoing public support from across the Atlantic, even as official policy commitments remain in flux.

For a few minutes on Tuesday, the heavy burdens of war, geopolitical negotiation, and global politics gave way to the quiet charm of a puppy curling up in the president’s arms, her white-tipped paws dangling as she relaxed against his chest. The happy, gentle scene may seem unconnected to the brutal fighting across eastern and southern Ukraine, but for Ukraine, it carries a layered message: that even amid four years of invasion, life persists, resilience is passed from one generation to the next, and symbols of survival can hold as much power in the global information war as weapons do on the battlefield.