PARIS — After a summer of extreme, climate change-driven heat, France must spend billions of euros to help the country rebuild and ensure it is better prepared the next time the mercury rises and records fall.

Money, however, is hard to come by.

France is sitting on more than €3.5 trillion in public debt, which is becoming increasingly expensive to finance and is well above the European Union’s limit. Paris has already committed to billions in increased defense spending over the next several years, ruled out significant tax hikes and promised to slash its budget deficit, which came in at 5.1 percent of gross domestic product last year, to 3 percent by 2029 to comply with EU rules.

Crafting a budget for next year that can achieve those goals while also allocating enough resources to prepare France for the next summer of extreme heat that cooks livestock alive, plunges the country into drought and fuels wildfires that drive thousands from their homes is like trying to square the circle. But getting a hung parliament to agree on spending in the run-up to a presidential election will make the exercise even more difficult.

“We need billions — let’s be clear-eyed about this,” said Sophie Panonacle, a centrist, pro-government lawmaker who represents the fire-hit southwestern Bassin d’Arcachon area. “We really must urgently consider this issue of adaptation. We are making no progress at all on this matter.”

Budget crunch, meet climate crisis

Visiting the southwestern town of La Porge on Monday, where hundreds of people saw their homes go up in flames last month, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu listed a series of measures crafted to help residents rebuild their homes and keep businesses hit hardest by the fires afloat.

These included a total of €12 million in direct assistance for the two local administrations most affected by the fire, Gironde and the Landes, as well as rebates on property taxes and social security contributions in those areas and more funding to replant forests. Later that evening, President Emmanuel Macron announced that the proposals would also apply to the southern region of Var.

Lecornu said the measures would add up to €100 million, though it’s unclear whether that figure covers costs only in the towns he visited or also in the Var region.

Ecological Transition Minister Monique Barbut said last week that the total immediate cost of the summer’s heat, including lost homes and incomes, could reach €10 to €15 billion — the equivalent of 0.5 percent of GDP — though she cautioned that those figures were a rough estimate. When asked by French daily Libération about Barbut’s estimate, Economy Minister Roland Lescure later said it was too early to quantify the damage.

Whatever the final total comes to, there’s little doubt it will be difficult to pay given the need to get the country’s finances in order.

In a report commissioned by the French finance ministry, top economists last month said France must cut spending and raise taxes by €125 billion by 2032 to prevent its budget deficit from reaching 7 percent of GDP by the end of the decade.

A comprehensive strategy

Critics of the government say it has failed to provide specific details on how it intends to fund immediate and future budget needs for adaptation and climate change mitigation, frustrating lawmakers.

“We need to respond to climate-related events, but first we need a comprehensive strategic review regarding resources already allocated and promises made around fighting wildfires,” said Jean-François Husson, the Senate’s budget watchdog. “We’re addicted to making announcements which aren’t followed by results, and meanwhile the debt levels are spiraling.”

Husson said that he intends to summon government officials to provide clearer figures in the coming days.

“They cannot treat Parliament the way they do, specifically regarding budgetary matters,” Husson said.

That criticism cuts across party lines. Eric Coquerel, the left-wing head of the finance committee in the French National Assembly, has asked the government to urgently present a revised version of this year’s budget to parliament to address the need for more funds.

With state coffers so depleted, Barbut floated in an interview with Libération tapping private savings to help cover costs, as the French rank fairly high among EU countries in terms of savings but, like the rest of Europe, don’t invest much in stocks and bonds.

Panonacle, the centrist lawmaker, is one of 50 MPs pushing a proposal to use €50 billion in private savings to fund costly adaptation policies, including making buildings more resilient to extreme heat, installing more air conditioning in public facilities, and reinforcing flood defenses.

However, that money is already used to finance public projects, particularly social housing, and the economy ministry last year shot down a similar proposal to use money from a popular savings account to bolster defense spending.

Some ministries are focusing on efficiency gains. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez will present a bill in September meant to modernize France’s civil security providers for example by rethinking its emergency dispatch system so firefighters are no longer deployed for every minor emergency.

“It’s not just about the amounts allocated, but also about how you use resources,” said an interior ministry official, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly.

Once summer ends, the clock starts ticking. Lecornu’s government is expected to present lawmakers with a draft budget to be debated by October. The goal is to get the process done by the end of the year — a goal lawmakers failed to meet in 2024 and 2025.

President Donald Trump’s Tuesday backpedal from threats to impose 50 percent tariffs on Canada sparked a round of cries of TACO — that “Trump always chickens out.”

But even the administration’s adversaries concede Trump’s latest maximalist menace accomplished something important: unsticking more than a year-and-a-half of stalled trade talks between the two nations and pushing them into serious negotiations.

After months of fitful talks, Canadian and U.S. officials have in the weeks since Trump made his threat made significant headway toward resolving disputes over aluminum, dairy, alcohol and other key trade issues, potentially with some significant concessions from the administration.

That wouldn’t have happened without the president’s July threat to slap new and massive tariffs on items like beer, furs and hockey equipment, Canadian officials, former Democratic administration officials, business representatives and others told POLITICO.

“This was seen as, ‘Well, this is kind of outrageous, so we better pay more attention to it,’” said Canadian Sen. Peter Boehm, chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade. “There was always a sense that there have to be talks, but invoking [the tariffs] did provide the leverage to do that, at 50 percent.”

And Véronique Proulx, the president and CEO of the Quebec Chambers of Commerce Federation, said that the threat “put pressure on the Canadian government to come to the table.”

“Very little had been happening over the past year,” Proulx said.

The prospect of punishing new levies, which could have hobbled the Canadian economy, is the latest example of a uniquely Trumpian negotiating ploy that relies on an ultimatum to gain leverage. The president touted the tactic for decades including in his book “Art of the Deal” and he’s used it repeatedly in his second term — and not just on trade.

To push NATO countries to increase their defense spending, he threatened to withdraw from the alliance and upend eight decades of global world order. When Trump wanted Panama to lower fees on U.S. ships passing through its canal, he threatened to retake the waterway. That threat was withdrawn only after the country approved a deal that allowed U.S. firms – instead of Chinese companies — to control ports on opposite ends of the canal.

And when Trump wanted Canada to drop a digital services tax targeting U.S. tech companies in 2025, he threatened to terminate all trade discussions with Canada, a move that scuttled the tax push.

“This is one case where his maximalist demand worked,” said one person close to the White House. “I don’t think this was [a TACO] actually. I think this is going to end up being an example of a successful negotiation.”

The tactic hasn’t always been successful, though. France still has a digital services tax despite Trump’s threat to impose a 100 percent tariff on wine. And threats to bomb Iran to the “Stone Ages” have not forced Tehran to capitulate to his demands.

Still, the latest threat on Canada appears to have produced some movement between the two countries. While it remains to be seen if Trump officially signs off on a deal, the two sides are negotiating. Canadian and American officials met once again on Wednesday to hash out a formal deal before Friday at midnight, the new deadline to reach an agreement.

Among the proposals are lower U.S. tariffs on metals, which risk backlash from protectionist circles in Washington, according to three people close to the process. On the Canada side, concessions on programs to protect their dairy and lumber industries and a commitment to back off streaming taxes — as an expected rollback remains in flux — are under consideration, while negotiators remain in talks over other long-standing irritants including tariff on automobiles.

And three days is a lifetime in trade negotiations.

White House spokesperson Kush Desai said that Trump has “consistently proven skeptics wrong” and “leveraged the power and might of the U.S. economy – the world’s biggest and best consumer market – to secure nearly 20 trade deals with historic market-access concessions from Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, and the EU.”

Trump’s trade threats are existential for Canada, which sends roughly 72 percent of its exports to the United States.

While the U.S. tariff threat was targeted toward specific industries and only hit about 5 percent of U.S. imports from Canada, Wilbur Ross, Trump’s first-term Commerce secretary, said he believes it will force Canadian concessions.

“The 50 percent would have been a real burden because 50 percent is more than the exporter can absorb. It’s more than the importer can absorb, so it would have been a real penalty for them,” Ross said.

Canadian negotiators made repeated trips to Washington ahead of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreements July renewal deadline. But they have largely been kept on the sidelines so far regarding the USMCA update, as U.S. officials insisted that they would not negotiate unless Canada dropped its retaliation on U.S. liquor and automobiles.

When Ottawa offered what it saw as concessions — like peeling back a digital services law that would have raked in billions from U.S. tech giants — the Trump administration dismissed them as irrelevant to the negotiations. U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said Canada doesn’t “really get credit for doing something bad and then undoing it.”

“What [the Americans] are telling me — and they’ve been telling me for the last 18 months — is first of all, ‘Canada, get over it. You’re not special. I know you think you are. We are now including tariffs on everyone. There’s no exemptions for anybody,’” said one Canadian business official, also granted anonymity to discuss sensitive dynamics around the trade talks.

Productive talks between the U.S. and Canada could also pave the way to begin trilateral discussions with Mexico on the future of the trade agreement.

“They have struggled for a while to get the same attention as Mexico. A deal this week would in a way present the opportunity to move ahead bilaterally,” said Kate Kalutkiewicz, who served as a top trade adviser during Trump’s first administration.

Even as Trump has regularly reached for tariffs as a way to bully countries, the threat against Canada marked a new frontier. The president relied on Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, a Great Depression-era law that had never been used to impose tariffs, to threaten about $20 billion worth of Canadian goods.

A Democrat working as a lobbyist for Canadian interests, granted anonymity to speak candidly about the political dynamics of the trade talks, added that there is “no question” the tariffs “got Canada to the table.”

“Canada was so reluctant to put a deal on the table because they felt that they would be put on the clock to make more concessions above and beyond what they already did.”

That’s why Trump’s threat was needed to push Ottawa to the table, said Kelly Ann Shaw, who served as deputy assistant for international economic affairs during Trump’s first term.

“The two sides appear to have accomplished more in three weeks than in a year of discussion,” she said.

The fact that the threat spurred Canada to the table may encourage the Trump administration to use it again, particularly because these tariffs never went into effect and therefore won’t face legal challenges.

“To me, the 338s, are in some ways, the new IEEPA tariffs,” said one trade lobbyist, granted anonymity to speak candidly about the negotiations, referring to a law Trump used to impose global tariffs, which were struck down by the Supreme Court in February.

Some U.S. businesses are already growing more comfortable with the reality that tariff threats are here to stay — particularly as they’ve watched other countries make concessions that would have been unlikely under previous administrations.

One business official, granted anonymity to speak candidly about private discussions with industry colleagues, said that the administration’s threats are bringing trading partners to the table and opening discussions on longstanding issues.

“Depending on the sector, you’re certainly seeing more understanding of how this is working and how this is being implemented, and you are seeing some of those historic logjam issues being broken,” the official said. “As industry gets more understanding of how this America First trade policy can create those opportunities, I think that there is more acceptance for being able to move forward in this way.”

Oliver Ward, Michael Blanchfield, Zi-Ann Lum and Mickey Djuric contributed to this report.

LONDON — Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s government said the U.K. is willing to discuss American concerns over its digital services tax amid renewed pressure from the White House.

President Donald Trump in June threatened to impose 100 percent tariffs on European countries with DSTs which target U.S. tech firms, and in an interview with The Times newspaper published on Monday, Trump’s top trade official Jamieson Greer said the threat was “not a bluff” and the president’s demands that foreign governments abandon such taxes were “quite serious.”

“We remain open to discussing U.S. concerns and working with partners internationally,” a U.K. government spokesperson said when asked about Greer’s comments.

“This tax is about making sure that businesses pay their fair share of U.K. tax based on the value they derive from U.K. activities,” the spokesperson said, adding that the U.K. is committed to removing it “once a global solution is in place.”

The DST raised over £1 billion last year, predominantly from American tech firms, and has repeatedly drawn Trump’s ire.

The U.K. government has so far resisted calls to abandon the tax, including during trade negotiations last year. A U.K.-U.S. Economic Prosperity Deal signed by Trump and Burnham’s predecessor, Keir Starmer, did not mention the DST but said both sides would continue discussions to increase digital trade and address non-tariff barriers.

Greer added in his interview with The Times that the U.S. administration would not “set artificial timelines” and that relations with his British counterparts, including Trade Secretary Jonathan Reynolds and the prime minister’s business adviser Varun Chandra, are positive.

A full three decades ago, as Bill Clinton turned 50 in the midst of his successful 1996 reelection campaign, he was sounding even then in an autumnal mood.

“I have more yesterdays than tomorrows” he used to say often that year, a wistfulness that caused those of us who covered him to puzzle. What’s with this misty nostalgia? It was literally true, unless he expected to live 100, that he probably had more yesterdays than tomorrows. But fifty is typically the point when people realize they are no longer exactly young. It is hardly an age that merits a self-conception as old. Clinton’s perspective, however, doubtless left him with an appreciation of the fragility of life. He never met his biological father — a traveling salesman who married five times and died at age 28 in a car accident, three months before the future president was born.

Yet Clinton himself has proved reasonably durable, especially for a man who had serious heart surgery at age 58. The 42nd president turns 80 today — at last at an age that amply justifies a more searching look back on life.

Rest assured that no one in 1996 was contemplating the possibility that the president 30 years later would be a man who is actually two months older than Clinton — much less that this man would be President Donald Trump, who at that time had already been famous as a real estate magnate and professional self-promoter for 15 years or so.

Above all, I think few people then were imagining that the country in 2026 would itself be feeling so old — or, at a minimum, so surly and so bereft of a unifying vision of the future. The very essence of the most powerful and divisive political movement since former President Ronald Reagan’s is expressly backward-looking — Make America Great Again.

Many of the habits that today infuse American politics — the ones that make it so remorseless and infused with indignation and disdain — were present in nascent form in Clinton’s presidency. At the time, those developments seemed exotic — there was scant notion that they represented a shabby new norm.

In the early days, this brand of contempt-driven politics often revolved around arguments about Bill Clinton’s public and private character. This was a theme of his 1992 election against George H.W. Bush, his 1996 election against Bob Dole, and it even shadowed the 2004 dedication of his presidential library in Little Rock, Ark.

I am hardly a Clinton intimate. I haven’t been in his company in a decade. At one time, however, I probably knew as much about his presidency — its animating ideas, its decisive moments, its distinctive personalities — as anyone who had not actually served in it. This came from six years covering his White House for the Washington Post, and another two working on a book that aimed to synthesize his years in office and take a preliminary cut at assessing their historical weight. In both journalistic and historical terms, much of this time was devoted to thinking about competing appraisals of Clinton’s character.

It is an argument without end in part because the positive and negative elements of Clinton’s character, the light and the shadows, seemingly flow from the same source: an intense need to win, to matter, to seduce, to prove himself in the world. Imagine if people around Bill Clinton in 1974, the year he ran unsuccessfully for Congress — Hillary Rodham, then a girlfriend but not yet a spouse, showed up in Arkansas to help — had been given a crystal ball to peer into the future. These people would not be surprised to learn that a future president was in their midst; His talent, ambition, and idealism were that obvious. Nor would they be surprised to learn how his campaigns and presidency would at various turns be nearly derailed. As early biographer David Maraniss documented, even then Clinton had a reputation for sexual vagrancy, and the patterns of heedlessness, deception, and hypocrisy such a lifestyle inevitably requires.

He’s been out of political office for more than a quarter-century — as long as he was ever in it, beginning with his first victory as Arkansas attorney general in 1976. By my lights, the years since he yielded the Oval Office to George W. Bush (who turned 80 last month) in January 2001 have abundantly ratified the proposition that the country could do worse — at key junctures plainly has done worse–than Clinton’s character or his record, the strengths and infirmities alike.

As he turns 80, and the country contemplates a post-Trump future two years from now, it seems to me there are at least four ways in which Clinton has prevailed in the great character argument woven throughout his life.

Responsibility

This is a place where my views have not changed much from what I thought at the time and what I think now. A paradox of Clinton’s presidency is that, however reckless he was in his personal life — culminating in the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal and Republicans’ unsuccessful attempt to evict him from office through impeachment — he was supremely responsible in his use of power and his willingness to take sober risks for what he thought was right. Yes, he would over-agonize on hard choices — on issues from trade to welfare to war in the Balkans. But at the end of the day — sometimes it could be a very long day — on big subjects there was rarely much variance between what Clinton genuinely thought was the right decision and what he did.

A good many of his policies are out of favor now within his own party. But the political and policy landscape he was navigating was much different than today. Clinton was a thoroughly political creature, but he was not an unduly cynical one — he was willing frequently to risk his political self-interest on behalf of what he conceived of as the public interest.

Persuasion

One reason Bill Clinton and his brand of centrist politics can seem antiquated is that the past generation has been defined by a whole different emphasis: the politics of mobilization. Under this later school of politics, elections are won principally by sharpening divisions and elevating the moral stakes. The aim is not to win over skeptics through the power of reasoned argument. It is to convince your own side that the other side is so repugnant in its character and aims that they should rally behind you and turn out in the biggest possible numbers.

Clinton would in most of his campaigns give a nod to trying to explain what the other side believed, and why he believed his approach is better. “I think one of the ways you win elections is by talking straight with people and giving them permission to vote against you,” Clinton said a few years ago on a podcast. What he meant was that effective arguments don’t hector audiences or assert moral superiority, or the other side’s moral iniquity. They invite or even inspire people to think about an issue differently.

In short, the politics of mobilization harnesses the power of contempt; the politics of persuasion employs the language of respect. Mobilization politics tends to deal in ideological and cultural abstractions like free markets versus socialism, or “traditional values” versus sexual freedom — the kind of debates that are especially potent at pushing people to decide “which side are you on?” Persuasion politics is more likely to center on the concrete human dimensions of policy choices — here’s what an expansion of childcare tax credits might mean for you.

You could argue which brand of politics is more effective, and for the most part advocates of mobilization politics in recent years on left and right have been prevailing. But it’s hard to see how the politics of persuasion is not a more inspiring expression of American character, and also more likely to resolve serious long-term debates.

The fight for power

When Clinton opened his presidential library in Little Rock in 2004, the late Peter Jennings of ABC News in an interview baited Clinton about a recent survey of historians that rated his presidency reasonably well overall, but second to last (ahead only of Richard Nixon) in “moral authority.” Clinton said curtly that the historians were wrong, adding, “I don’t really care what they think.” Jennings replied: “Excuse me, Mr. President. I can feel it across the room. You care very deeply.”

Clinton then snapped: “You don’t want to go here, Peter. You don’t want to go here. Not after what you people did. And the way you — your network — what you did with [Whitewater prosecutor] Kenneth Starr. The way your people repeated every little sleazy thing he leaked. No one has any idea of what that’s like.”

The new library had an alcove about Clinton’s 1998 impeachment and subsequent acquittal called, “The Fight for Power.” The scandal, the exhibit argued, was simply the Republicans’ effort to overturn an election they lost.

At the time, I believed this was mostly Clinton’s tortured rationalization for his own mistakes. Events since then, however, have swung the historical argument irrefutably in his favor. In the 1990s we spent months and even years covering such inane issues as whether the newly elected Clinton acted properly to fire long-term employees of the office that booked White House charter flights and hotels for the media. Now, Trump asserts the right to eliminate cabinet departments and agencies without congressional approval — and the stories often get lost in the rush of other news. There is not a credible argument that says Bill and Hillary Clinton’s Whitewater land investments in the 1970s were a worthy subject for ethics inquiries and criminal probes but the Trump family’s crypto investments and overseas deals while the company founder is in the Oval Office are no big deal.

Clinton was right that the attacks on his character were often simply not on the level—but a proxy for other agendas.

Perseverance

In 2000, as Bill Clinton’s presidency was winding down and Hillary Clinton was waging a successful campaign for New York Senate, there was a political skull session at the White House involving a trusted roster of aides and strategists. As one of them described it to me later, Bill Clinton brought up the elephant in the room. Female voters in particular, he noted, wanted to understand why Hillary had stayed with Bill during the sex scandal. The mood was briefly awkward until Hillary Clinton said good-naturedly that she wanted to know the answer too.

“Because you’re a sticker!” the president replied, jabbing the air for emphasis.

Actually, it seems to me, both Clintons are. Across many decades, they have stayed married, and stayed in the fight over the issues they care about—amid plenty of victories and setbacks alike. That is a kind of character, too.

These days, Bill Clinton’s public appearances are fewer. At times he looks frail. His skeptics include many people in his own party. Yet, on his 80th birthday, the main question seems to be less about his character than the country’s: Is there a pathway to a destination in which more people believed with him that politics can illuminate the best and most generous and inspiring parts of national identity? Clinton may be getting old, but that idea should be made young again.

ATHENS — Greece’s attempt to lure top scientists back to their homeland after the trauma of the financial crisis has stalled after an ambitious program to reverse the brain drain descended into fiasco.

A group of professors who hoped to bring back young researchers through a much-advertised program financed with EU funds are now feeling betrayed, having been left waiting for years only to find out the program won’t happen.

To rub salt into the wound, no one from the government bothered to inform them that the scheme was dead, they said.

“All this ‘brain gain’ talk isn’t just a joke; it’s a massive step backward,” Aristides Hatzis, a professor at the University of Athens, said. “During the financial crisis, there was only one area where there was money invested: research, as the EU prioritized this. Now there’s nothing; it’s at the very bottom of the list of priorities — a complete abandonment.”

An estimated 500,000 people moved abroad during Greece’s financial crisis, which began in 2008, shrinking the country’s economy by a quarter and driving unemployment to 28 percent. Greece had experienced mass migration before, including in the decades after World War II, but this time it was many citizens with high levels of education and skills who emigrated.

“Brain Regain,” an initiative by the ruling conservative New Democracy government to reverse the mass exodus of scientists and professionals, comprises several schemes, such as offering a 50 percent income tax exemption for seven years, and is expanding to include high-skilled public sector roles.

And overall, the situation has improved since the crisis era.

According to the survey OECD Diaspora Review Greece, from 2021 onward, there has been a steady increase in the number of citizens returning to Greece, with 2023 marking a milestone year when — for the first time since the start of the crisis — more people returned than left. Specifically, during the two-year period of 2023–2024, 69,000 Greeks left their country while 98,000 returned.

But when it comes to scientists, there is still a major problem.

Star-crossed project

The current fury of many researchers and scientists hinges on a Greek government project called “Trust your Stars” — an €80 million research funding program backed by funds from EU’s post-Covid recovery fund, the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF).

Research teams were called to submit their proposals, with 145 out of a total 1,241 submissions selected. Thirteen months later, after several complaints regarding the delay, the selected list of projects was finally published on July 22, 2025.

Then, it all started to unravel.

Those not selected for funding reacted fiercely, with some 203 submitted objections and calls for reevaluation. Scientists raised their concerns over the evaluation process itself, and some even submitted complaints to the European Public Prosecutor’s Office.

In January 2026, Greece’s development ministry then issued a statement, saying payments of some €40 million had already been made, and that the remaining half of the program’s budget was earmarked for completion by Dec. 31, 2029. But complaints only escalated, with some of those selected for funding sending formal legal notices to the education ministry, seeking details about where the money had been spent since the program had not yet started.

Then, the final bombshell dropped: Trust your Stars was not going to receive the EU funds anymore.

In a statement published in May, Greece’s education ministry said the country’s finance ministry had decided to “remove the project during the review of Greece’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan.” It was later revealed that on the day the list of selected proposals was officially published, the government also delisted the program — but no one informed the applicants for 10 months.

“It was ultimately not possible to implement the project ‘Trust your Stars’ within the time frame set out by the RRF,” said an official from the education ministry. “For this reason, the project was removed, as part of a review of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan by the Council of the European Union.”

“As regards the funds linked to the actions in question, these were redirected to finance other actions undertaken by the RRF and the Education Ministry. Consequently, under no circumstances was there any loss of resources from the RRF,” added the official.

Shattered hopes

On July 15, Greece’s finance ministry issued a statement, saying it was trying to secure funds “to settle any outstanding financial obligations arising from legal commitments entered into at the time of the revocation of the program.”

While the statement rekindled hopes that a solution would be found, Hatzis argues that it was just a legal trick and that the education ministry has no legal commitment since no contracts were signed following the initial announcement of accepted proposals.

“What happened violates a fundamental principle, one that is sacrosanct in states governed by the rule of law: ‘reliance,’ the citizen’s legitimate trust in the state,” he said. “There may be no contractual liability, since we did not sign an agreement, but there is a political, moral and even legal obligation. Many young people turned down other offers or did not take up jobs elsewhere because they hoped they would be paid through the program.”

Hatzis added that with its handling of the situation, the government had managed to turn the entire scientific community against it — both those who had been successful and those who had not.

“If you’re a young scientist and you’re abroad, stay there! If you’re a young scientist and you’re thinking of moving abroad, go for it. Don’t wait a minute!” he wrote in a lengthy social media post.

Pantelis Kammas, an associate professor at the Athens University of Economics and Business who was co-leading one of the teams that had a successful proposal, said the program was a chronicle of a death foretold.

“The perception within the scientific community was that this was EU money and that it could be handed out hastily through nontransparent procedures. There was a sense of mistrust because this was a one-off emergency program,” said Kammas. “The ministry lacked an organized framework for evaluation, the academic community’s objections were based on these well-known shortcomings, and media that seek to oppose the government jumped on that. This was the perfect storm, so the government decided to backtrack and cancel the program.”

Petros Bouras-Vallianatos, an associate professor of the history of science at the University of Athens, said he had gathered a team of 25 young scientists to come to Greece from countries like the U.K. and Germany for a study of medicines used during the Byzantine period, which could serve as inspiration for new pharmaceutical formulations. Fortunately, they had not already traveled by the time the project was canceled.

“The most offensive thing is that the government never bothered to meet us or give us a reasonable explanation about what happened,” he said, noting the government’s handling created even greater problems with the scientific community than those that already existed.

Bouras-Vallianatos himself returned to Greece in 2022 after a 15-year career in Edinburgh, and has not regretted the decision, as he wanted to raise his children in his homeland. However, he added that while many others wanted to return to Greece, the conditions for doing so were not in place. Some of them do but only for sentimental, personal reasons, he said.

“There has been no serious policy by the Greek state to get its scientists back.”

According to preliminary statistics, research spending in Greece has declined, dropping to €1.27 billion — or 0.51 percent of GDP — in 2025, from €1.30 billion in 2024.

“Funding and low salaries is a big issue,” continued Bouras-Vallianatos. “An independent body should be set up, which would allocate funds for research and adheres to international standards in terms of evaluation. We are a small country; we all know each other, so a large proportion of the evaluators should be foreigners.”

LONDON — Britain’s Liberal Democrats are holding fire against Andy Burnham — for now.

The centrist party has studiously avoided criticizing the new Labour prime minister during his first weeks in power, instead pushing the same “constructive opposition” approach followed during predecessor Keir Starmer’s early stint in Downing Street.

“I like what he’s doing,” says 2024-intake Lib Dem MP Martin Wrigley. “I like the way he’s going, focusing on things that matter.” The question is: how long can it last?

A person familiar with Lib Dem Leader Ed Davey’s thinking, granted anonymity because their job does not authorize them to speak publicly, says the party hopes Burnham removes the “performative hostility” from Westminster.

“That style of politics really suits the populist parties, both on the left and the right, and it isn’t the sort of politics that we as Liberal Democrats want to do,” they argued.

But while not rocking the boat has landed well with Lib Dem MPs, there is still a call for a distinctive identity for the party in a highly competitive political environment, with Labour enjoying a “Burnham bounce” in the opinion polls on the left, and Tory Leader Kemi Badenoch’s personal brand on the up.

Duty of care

Davey — whose party enjoyed its best-ever result at the 2024 election but remains only just in double digits in national polls — has already made one big play in the Burnham era: being helpful on reforming social care.

The creaking social care system in England is a policy challenge governments of all stripes have failed to meet — leaving families with drained finances and cash-strapped local authorities plugging the gaps.

The Lib Dem leader, who cares for his disabled son, attended a virtual cross-party meeting after Burnham, whose own father is in a care home with Alzheimer’s, called for an open conversation on a fix.

This proactive approach has so far landed well with Davey’s troops. “I don’t think we’re going to sink the process if we don’t get everything we want,” says Lib Dem Shadow Commons Leader Bobby Dean. “If we can get cross-party consensus on one element, then we should get on with that element straight away.” 

Indeed, Mike Storey, the Lib Dems’ co-deputy leader in the House of Lords, says the party will “cooperate fully on social care … and we’ll do it with no strings attached.” 

The person familiar with Davey’s thinking laid out the approach, saying “People are put off” by opposition parties that “decide to just immediately say ‘oh, they’re terrible. They’re breaking everything again’” when a new government arrives.

Tom Lubbock, co-founder of polling agency J.L. Partners, agrees a conciliatory approach makes sense for now as “you just look a bit mad if you just go in studs-up within the first couple of months.”

But there’s some angst about making sure the Lib Dems clearly separate themselves from Labour.

Party of the countryside 

It’s not the first time the Lib Dems have tried to play nice with a Labour prime minister.

But Davey’s party soon found ways to differentiate themselves from the increasingly unpopular Keir Starmer.

After Starmer’s government changed inheritance tax rules for farmers, the Lib Dems spied an opening — dubbing it the “family farm tax” and ramping up campaigning.

The party has an “extraordinary niche and an extraordinary opportunity” to pose as the “Countryside Alliance arm of the Labour Party,” argues Lubbock — in other words, a progressive rival to Labour that rural voters can still get behind.

Burnham’s focus on reviving urban areas may lend itself to this approach, with Lib Dem figures poised to exploit any perception “Avanti Andy” is shuttling between London and Manchester, another major city.

Adam Dance, who represents the rural constituency of Yeovil, warns Burnham “can’t be a prime minister just for Manchester and the biggest cities” and says “he needs to understand rural areas.” 

Northern MP Tom Gordon also challenges the prime minister’s claim to represent northern England, arguing this “does feel slightly performative.” He reckons voters “don’t hate him [Burnham] yet” as “he’s not had long enough to make any really unpopular decisions.”

Left vs. right blocs 

Much of the Lib Dems’ success under Davey has come from wooing disillusioned Conservatives, targeting Tory-held seats in the home counties — dubbed the “blue wall.”

But winning remaining Tory areas next time round could be harder if the Lib Dems appear too closely aligned with a Labour government. 

Lubbock argues the Lib Dems will do “much worse” if supporters of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK “get on the Conservative bandwagon” to help defeat Labour nationally. That would be a mirror of the way some Labour supporters tactically backed the Lib Dems in 2024 to oust the Tories.

Though the Tories are still stuck below 20 percent in most polls, there are signs of recovery. YouGov data last month put Badenoch’s net favorability score at the highest of any Conservative leader for more than five years. Her position is undeniably more stable than it was 12 months ago.

While Lib Dems are optimistic Badenoch’s moves to the right on net zero and human rights will push more One Nation, centrist Conservatives in their direction, their Tory rivals sound bullish.

Tory MP Gregory Stafford, who saw off a challenge by the Lib Dems to win Farnham and Bordon two years ago, doesn’t think there are more Tories left for the Lib Dems to poach.

“All I’m seeing is those people coming back, not the other way round,” says Stafford about voters who bid the Tories farewell in 2024. Despite his narrow win, he thinks some of the 6,000 Reform UK voters in his seat will return — thanks to Badenoch.

“They see demonstrably in Kemi a leader that both they like as a person, but also speaks their language and speaks to the policies that they’re concerned about,” he argues.

As such, the Lib Dems may settle for a stronger attack against the right.

“People just don’t feel listened to,” says the party’s Scotland spokesperson Susan Murray. “When they don’t feel listened to, they are open to populism.” She argues that both the Lib Dems and Labour are “not succeeding in getting that message [of hope and opportunities] across.” Dean adds, “There’s a massive demand out there for a liberal party to make a bold offer to the country and at the moment that space feels vacated.” 

It’s a perceived weakness Stafford, the Conservative MP, plans to leap on at the next election. “The real danger for the Liberal Democrats is that they are seen as a patsy party that might champion local issues locally, but actually have nothing to say distinctive on the national stage,” he argues.

Roz Savage, who entered the Commons for the Lib Dems in 2024, recognizes the outfit has a “PR challenge that people think of us as the nice party.” Instead, a “bigger story” is required about a future Lib Dem government, she says.

“When we talk to Lib Dem voters in focus groups, they don’t really have a clear vision for what the Lib Dem party should stand for,” says Merlin Strategy’s Head of Research, Julian Gallie. People often back them as a vote against other parties, the political analyst says.

MPs also want the Lib Dems to reach beyond their traditional strongholds and target historically Labour areas — including Newcastle and Hull. Both have Lib Dem-run city councils, but are the kind of areas in which Burnham will fancy he can improve Labour’s standing. Meral Hussein-Ece, the Lib Dems’ Lords equality spokesperson, says the party must also do more to understand “the diversity of this country, which I don’t think we’ve done very well so far.” 

Lib Dem conference in Brighton next month will give the party a chance to lay a marker for the expected general election in 2029. But MPs want more than set-piece events to present a distinctive vision. 

“We do have to do better at utilizing the likes of social media and capturing the attention all the time, not just when we get the spotlight shined on us,” argues Gordon, the Harrogate and Knaresborough MP.

The Lib Dems, he says, have to drive “conversation on our own terms, rather than always having to just respond.” 

A bipartisan House delegation met with top Vatican officials on Wednesday to discuss artificial intelligence during a visit that briefly included Pope Leo XIV, according to two people with knowledge of the trip granted anonymity to disclose details of the private meetings.

The delegation’s visit, which has not been previously reported, included nine lawmakers and was coordinated by the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, the person said. Committee member Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.) and California Rep. Ro Khanna, the panel’s top Democrat, led the trip.

A spokesperson for the committee declined to comment.

In an interview confirming the visit, Khanna said the topics of discussion included religious freedom, AI’s economic and geopolitical risks, as well as broader ethical and existential implications. It centered on two key principles: human dignity and equality.

“Human dignity means that human beings need to be responsible for any key decisions involving health, involving finances, involving individual freedom, involving public services,” he said.

The Silicon Valley Democrat said that in this context, equality means preventing automation from causing mass unemployment, and ensuring AI cannot be used to exclude people from social services. Khanna said it also means guarding against a concentration of power in which “a few billionaires can make decisions about data and algorithms.”

The Vatican did not respond to a request for comment about the meeting. But Pope Leo has taken a special interest in the technology and used a May encyclical to call on countries to “safeguard humanity” as AI develops, warning that the technology could deepen inequality, fray the social fabric and erode moral responsibility if it doesn’t have ethical guardrails. Congress, meanwhile, has introduced dozens of AI bills and held several hearings, but has failed to agree on a comprehensive federal framework for governing the technology.

The pope previously cast the global race to develop cutting-edge AI technology in stark terms. As the U.S., China and other powers compete for an edge, he warned against a “dehumanizing ambition to develop ever more powerful technologies or to secure control over them,” describing a contest between “opposing imperialisms” seeking either to preserve or seize technological supremacy.

Khanna told POLITICO he plans to introduce legislation that would tax the use of autonomous AI agents to incentivize companies to hire human workers.

The group also discussed AI’s implications for human mortality and the limits of human knowledge — boundaries some developers have long imagined technology might overcome by uploading human consciousness and accumulated wisdom to the cloud.

Following the meetings, Khanna sent letters to top executives at OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, and Amazon, asking how they intend to align their technology with the tenets of human dignity and equality.

An OpenAI spokesperson pointed POLITICO to prior policy documents outlining the AI company’s commitment to safety and to ensuring benefits from the technology are distributed equitably. The other companies did not respond to requests for comment.

The lawmakers traveled to Berlin to discuss China’s rising global influence, before picking up on the topic during their Vatican visit and in meetings with Italian government officials a few days later.

Alongside Khanna and Newhouse, Reps. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.), Buddy Carter (R-Ga.), John Rutherford (R-Fla.), Randy Feenstra (R-Iowa), Shontel Brown (D-Ohio), Jill Tokuda (D-Hawaii) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) took part in the discussions, according to one of the people familiar with the trip.

Spokespeople for the members did not respond to requests for comment.

German commentators are calling it a modern-day “miracle.”

Hundreds of thousands of worshippers in the country are walking away from their churches each year. The money, however, keeps rolling in.

Some 660,000 people formally quit the country’s Catholic and Protestant churches in 2025, freeing them from a levy automatically charged to registered members as a percentage of their income tax bill.

Despite the exodus, the two institutions collected more than €12.5 billion through the church tax for the 2025 fiscal year, up from around €12.4 billion in 2024.

The apparent miracle has a decidedly earthly explanation: Rising wages and Germany’s progressive tax system mean the shrinking pool of members is paying more.

“At first glance, the development may seem contradictory,” a spokesperson for the Evangelical Church in Germany — the umbrella organization representing Germany’s regional Protestant churches — said. “The reason is that church tax is calculated based on individual income tax.”

Members of Germany’s Catholic and Protestant churches and some Jewish communities pay an additional religious tax equal to 8 or 9 percent of their income tax liability, even if they don’t attend services.

In 2021, the most recent year for which comprehensive data is available, more than 29 million people paid church tax in Germany, amounting to almost half of all income taxpayers in Europe’s largest economy.

The German Finance Ministry’s 2025 payroll tax tables suggests that a single employee without children earning €50,000 gross a year pays approximately €600 in church tax annually on top of income tax, depending on the federal state. Someone earning €70,000 per year pays more than €1,000.

People are registered as part of their religious community at birth or at local government offices. To stop paying the church tax, they must formally leave through a process known as Kirchenaustritt, or “church exit.”

The procedure varies across Germany’s federal states but typically requires appearing in person at a registry office or local court to submit a declaration. Most states also charge an administrative fee.

While those who deregister can still attend services as a visitor and access some church services, they are not allowed to have a church wedding, be a godparent or be guaranteed a church burial.

In 2025, some 310,000 left the Catholic Church, while around 350,000 left one of Germany’s regional Protestant churches.

Church exit

The reasons people give for formally leaving their religious communities range from feeling less connected to the church to simply wanting to save money.

“People are leaving the Church because they feel it no longer plays a role in their lives,” said Matthias Kopp, director of communications for the German Bishops’ Conference.

“Added to this are the scandals of recent years, which have called the Church’s credibility into question,” he added. “There are also people — though this is by no means the primary reason — who leave the Church because of the church tax.” 

“These are processes of alienation to which we must respond,” said Kopp.

For Jana Keil, a 33-year-old accountant from Berlin, the decision was both financial and moral. “I no longer wanted to support the system with church tax in light of the [child sex] abuse scandals,” she said.

Lukas Heinich, a 23-year-old working student, said he formally left after completing his apprenticeship because he “didn’t feel like paying the tax or supporting the church.”

That church tax revenues continue to rise despite the exodus is down to the types of taxpayers choosing to remain church members.

Those who are still paying church tax in Germany are “probably the higher earners,” said Zareh Asatryan, professor of empirical economics at the University of Münster. “Those that stay will naturally earn more income because of inflation plus real wage growth, and they will just generate more revenue.”

A miracle with an end date?

But the continued rise in church tax revenue masks significant long-term challenges — and raises questions about how long the trend can last. 

While those revenues are going up, they are “relatively sluggish” and “haven’t been increasing by a lot,” said Asatryan.

The increase in revenue from the church tax is considerably lower than the increase in revenue from income tax. State revenue from wage and income taxes rose by 6.65 percent in 2025, said Kopp, whereas church tax revenue increased by 1.93 percent.

“Long-term projections indicate that church tax revenue will decline significantly over the coming decades as church membership continues to decrease,” said the spokesperson for the Evangelical Church in Germany.

Protestant churches are already preparing for their income to decrease “through long-term planning processes,” said the spokesperson. “Without this system, the church’s religious, social and charitable work would not be possible on its current scale.”  

California's Prop 40 would impose a one-time 5% tax on the net worth of the state's billionaires.

MIRROR, ALBERTA — Nestled within a sleepy community campground and roadside cafe, hundreds of Canadians are gathered to imagine a new country of their own.

It’s July 1, and they’re hosting a family-friendly event that looks like a typical Canada Day celebration. Live music, a farmers’ market, hamburgers on the grill. Except there isn’t a Maple Leaf in sight.

Instead, people have wrapped themselves in Alberta’s flag, wave “we’re done” banners and wear “Trump 2024” and MAGA — Make Alberta Great Again — ball caps. This is an “Albertans’ Day” gathering at the Whistle Stop Cafe, which gained notoriety for bucking pandemic-era rules and which former Alberta premier Jason Kenney calls “ground zero” for the province’s fast-growing separatist movement.

Instead, people have wrapped themselves in Alberta’s flag, wave “we’re done” banners and wear “Trump 2024” and MAGA — Make Alberta Great Again — ball caps. This is an “Albertans’ Day” gathering at the Whistle Stop Cafe, which gained notoriety for bucking pandemic-era rules and which former Alberta premier Jason Kenney calls “ground zero” for the province’s fast-growing separatist movement.

And until Alberta separates, Moore places her faith not in Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney — whom she views as part of a Davos “cabal” — but in U.S. President Donald Trump.

“I kept thinking this: Trump is the only one that can save us.”

Moore’s affinity for conspiracy theories is shared by many, though certainly not all, of the separatists. Resentment toward the federal government in Ottawa is longstanding in Alberta. But a surprising new ingredient has turbocharged the separatist push: Trump and the increasingly toxic U.S.-Canada relationship. The separatists are furious about Carney’s friction with Trump and the fraying ties to their southern neighbor. Some even hope the Trump administration might help their cause.

Many separatists believe Trump’s presidency makes Alberta’s independence possible, with the United States a ready customer for its oil and gas should they split from Canada. One group, the Alberta Prosperity Project, is trying to seek a C$500-billion U.S. government loan to fund the province’s “seamless departure” from Canada.

“This isn’t your grandfather’s independence movement,” says Jeffrey Rath, a co-founder of the Alberta Prosperity Project and a longtime separatist activist who has sought to court the Trump administration.

Many separatists see a cultural kinship with the United States. They proudly share fake newspaper clippings that highlight the province’s history of early American settlers allegedly helping to shape a self-reliant, frontier culture that remains in Alberta today. They argue the Eastern provinces are more associated with European traditions than American ones.

While some object to Trump’s idea of making Canada the 51st American state, others embrace the idea.

“I like freedom and less taxes,” says Casey Phillips from Edmonton, Alberta.

Carney and his government are now working hard to convince skeptical Albertans their best prospects lie with a united Canada. He and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, who called the Oct. 19 vote, are touting a new pipeline agreement to send western oil abroad. The effort may work with some swing voters, but the hard-core separatists aren’t likely to buy it.

“It will never happen because Canada’s a communist country and there will be 24 years of paperwork,” Phillips says of the pipeline project. “It’s all lies.”

The separatists have good reason to think the Trump administration could be an ally. In January, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called Alberta a “natural partner for the U.S.” while referencing the province’s “great resources.”

“People are talking,” Bessent told conservative podcaster Jack Posobiec, nodding to the separatist movement. “People want sovereignty. They want what the U.S. has got.”

Rath says he has requested introductions to the U.S. Treasury Department and major financial institutions like JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs to build a day one feasibility plan for Albertan independence, though it’s unclear if he has had any such conversations.

The Alberta Prosperity Project, however, has taken three trips to Washington, D.C., and Rath insists the group has met with “very senior level” officials, who he says have taken their information directly to the White House.

A State Department spokesperson said the department “regularly meets with a wide range of representatives. We do not anticipate any future meetings, and all department engagements are at our sole discretion.”

“As Ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra has said, the vote is a decision for the people of Alberta,” the spokesperson added.

Bessent made his comments amid heightened U.S.-Canada tensions; days earlier Carney had argued at Davos that middle powers needed to form new coalitions after the Trump-fueled “rupture” in the global order.

That episode inflamed the pro-America separatists, as did Carney’s subsequent use of the phrase “new world order” during a January trip to China to sign new energy and trade agreements. That phrase is catnip to those who fear the creation of a global government, and more conspiracy theories quickly seeped into Alberta’s separatist movement through Facebook groups and YouTube videos claiming Carney is steering the country toward communism and against the U.S.

But it’s also true that Alberta’s grievances with Ottawa began long before Carney jostled with Trump. They have been passed down for generations, rooted in a belief that the federal government has ignored, exploited or misunderstood the province since its founding.

Today, that resentment has become deeply personal. Separatists point to what they see as federal overreach and clean energy policies that have made life more expensive and undermined their economy.

Federalists, meanwhile, are alarmed that neighbors, friends, family, and sometimes even spouses, are “willing to betray their country,” in Kenney’s words.

Former Conservative MP Damien Kurek cautions against dismissing separatists as traitors. Instead, he argues, politicians should ask why so many Albertans feel abandoned by the federation.

For Kurek, one of the defining moments of Albertan anger came in 2021, when U.S. President Joe Biden cancelled the Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office by revoking its cross-border permit.

The ripple effects spread throughout Kurek’s riding. He says mechanics had fewer oilfield trucks to repair and restaurants served fewer meals, while roadside motels sat empty and young families put off buying homes.

But what many Albertans remember most isn’t Biden’s decision. It’s the belief that Ottawa, under then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, failed to fight it.

“I was very frustrated with the Liberals, including many Liberals that told me that I just needed to accept it, that are still on the Liberal Cabinet benches today,” says Kurek, whose riding included Hardisty, Canada’s largest oil pipeline hub.

That moment reinforced a deeper belief among many of his constituents, he says: If our national leader won’t stand up for us when we need him most, the very “promise of Canada” was in question.

Many in rural Alberta feel like their communities live or die by decisions made thousands of miles away in Ottawa. But this was just another chapter in a much longer story.

Kenney, the former Alberta premier, traces Western alienation back to the province’s creation in 1905. He says Ottawa initially treated Alberta more like a colony than an equal partner, including delaying provincial control over its natural resources.

The modern separatist movement then took shape in the 1980s after former Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau introduced the National Energy Program, which raised taxes on oil companies and oil exports and shifted more of the industry’s profits from Alberta to Ottawa. The unpopular program was dismantled five years later, but Albertans didn’t forget.

When Trudeau’s son, Justin, became prime minister in 2015, his government introduced environmental policies that Alberta’s oil industry argued made it more difficult and expensive to build pipelines, expand production and attract investment.

Albertans’ sense of alienation also extends beyond energy policy. Many feel their votes carry less weight than those cast in vote-rich Ontario and Quebec, since that’s where federal elections are often decided. After repeatedly electing Conservative MPs only to see Liberal governments take power in Ottawa, some have concluded federal elections have little effect on Alberta’s fortunes.

That frustration is compounded by Canada’s equalization program, enshrined in the Constitution, which redistributes federal tax revenue to help less wealthy provinces fund public services. Because Alberta’s oil-rich economy is one of the country’s wealthiest, it has never qualified for those payments. At the same time, Ottawa collects more in federal taxes from Albertans than it spends in the province, which reinforces a decades-old belief that Alberta bankrolls the rest of the country while getting too little in return.

“It’s very scary to see what they’re trying to take from us, what they’re trying to control,” says Trina, a Red Deer resident who volunteers with a separatist group and who did not give her last name. “It leaves us with a lot of uncertainty. Nothing feels secure.”

Carney is aware of the challenge ahead. Even as he has warned Alberta against stumbling into its own Brexit disaster, he has sought to address the province’s most tangible concerns.

Last November, Carney signed an agreement with Alberta to work toward a new oil pipeline and soon after, delivered a sobering wake-up call to his Liberal caucus behind closed doors.

To the surprise of MPs in the room, Carney opened his remarks by addressing the specter of Alberta separatism, framing the pipeline deal not just as an economic win, but as a strategic necessity to keep the country together.

“He was emotional,” a Liberal MP, who was granted anonymity to discuss internal party matters, told POLITICO at the time. “You could hear a pin drop.”

It was a clear sign from the prime minister that the separatist movement was shaping his thinking — and federal policy.

“This was a no-BS kind of thing,” the Liberal lawmaker said. “This was coming from someone who grew up in that province, who understands that province, and who was very worried about the feelings of alienation.”

The speech also marked Carney’s first step in persuading Liberal supporters — many of whom had embraced Justin Trudeau’s aggressive climate agenda — that pipelines, increased oil production and energy exports were essential to Canada’s economic and geopolitical future.

Carney has made a similar pitch to the broader public.

“In Canada, we are strongest when we are united — when we look out for each other and ensure that no child, no family, no one is left behind,” Carney said in a speech to Canadians and his Cabinet in January. “This spirit of solidarity and generosity helps define us as a nation.”

Nine months later, Carney has backed up that message with action. Since taking office, he has rolled back several Trudeau-era environmental policies despite pushback from some Liberal MPs, including former environment minister Steven Guilbeault, who is leaving politics after accusing his party of “backsliding” on climate action. Last month, the West Coast oil pipeline got closer to fruition, after Carney’s government announced its partnership with Alberta would amount to a C$35 billion project in a bid to boost the province’s energy sector.

The policy shift is part of Ottawa’s effort to encourage federalists to send a strong message on Oct. 19, that they want to remain in Canada. In July, Carney made three trips to Alberta, two of which included photo-ops with Smith, Alberta’s premier. Both have been framing their pipeline pact as proof that Canada still works, for all its people, even as many separatists argue it comes a decade too late.

Federalists say the biggest risk in the vote isn’t necessarily that Alberta endorses moving toward separation; polls show about 30 percent of Albertans want independence. It’s that federalists don’t show up to vote since they assume victory. If turnout is low, a highly motivated separatist base could post an unexpectedly strong result, giving the movement new legitimacy and driving away private investment in the province.

“We can all think that the worst isn’t going to happen. We could put signs on our lawn and write poetry about Canadian unity. But honestly, unless people show up at the polls on Oct. 19, we could lose this referendum question,” says Eleanor Olszewski, a federal Liberal cabinet minister from Alberta.

Back outside the Whistle Stop Cafe, the conversations at Albertans’ Day drift from claims Carney wasn’t democratically elected, to beliefs the pandemic was orchestrated by global elites, to how a federal ban on assault-style firearms is meant to stop Canadians from rising up against the federal government.

One vendor sells knives, stun batons, tactical shovels, night-vision glasses and body shields, encouraging Albertans to protect themselves. Pickup trucks and SUVs are modified to look like sheriff’s vehicles with “Republic of Alberta” decals. Some separatists show off homemade T-shirts that read “skid mark Carney” or “pure-blood warriors” showcasing a white baby in the paws of a lion.

The antipathy toward Carney and enthusiasm for Trump even has some separatists ready to defend Trump’s wave of tariffs against Canadian goods.

Keith Walker, who is from a small farming community in southern Alberta, believes the only thing preventing Canada from becoming a communist country under Carney is Trump’s trade war.

Canada, in his view, is part of a group of governments that Trump is trying to dismantle alongside Venezuela, Cuba and Iran. “That’s why that’s happening,” Walker says of Trump’s tariffs; he and a friend are both wearing Trump 2024 hats.

The separatists’ longstanding grievances with Ottawa aren’t occurring in a vacuum. Populist forces have reshaped the globe over the last decade, amid Brexit and Trump and the pandemic, and they are now converging in Alberta.

Separatism has become a right-wing uni-cause.

“It is a perfect umbrella,” Kenney says, “for every obsession, paranoia and anxiety on the right.”

VILARDEVÓS, Spain — Nestled in the scrubby hills of northern Spain, this small village feels like a place that has fallen out of time. In reality, it offers a glimpse of the demographic future.

When Yaiza Ferreiro Collazos begins her English lesson on a June morning, eight children are sitting in front of her. The oldest are in sixth grade, the final year of primary school; the youngest are in fourth.

Teaching them together is not always easy, the 30-year-old says. But there are too few pupils to separate them.

The Rodolfo Núñez Rodríguez nursery and primary school opened in 1974 and was built for 700 children from Vilardevós and the surrounding villages. Today, it has 31 pupils, from preschool through sixth grade.

Apart from the school bell, the building is eerily quiet, even during breaks. The silence extends into the village. Most people encountered in its lanes are old. Many houses are abandoned, their façades marked with signs reading Se vende — for sale.

Vilardevós is an extreme case, but not an isolated one. Across Europe, birth rates are falling, populations are aging and fewer young people are entering the workforce.

Modern welfare states rest on an intergenerational bargain. Today’s workers finance pensions and health care for older people, trusting that others will eventually do the same for them.

Low fertility is straining that bargain. Fewer young people are entering the workforce just as large generations approach retirement. Pension reform has already become one of Europe’s most politically difficult issues, and the viability of the Social Security system is a perennial concern in the United States. Those political pressures will continue to intensify as the population ages.

That has forced governments to confront an increasingly urgent question: Can they persuade people to have more children — and, if not, can immigration prevent the demographic arithmetic from breaking down?

Why birth rates are falling

For a population to remain stable over time without immigration, women must have an average of about 2.1 children. According to the latest Eurostat data, the European Union’s fertility rate — the average number of children a woman is expected to have over her lifetime — fell to 1.34 in 2024. In Spain, the lowest among the continent’s large countries, it was 1.1 and still declining.

The United States is only slightly less exposed. Its fertility rate, long higher than Europe’s, has also dropped well below replacement level. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it fell to 1.6 in 2024.

For a long time, falling birth rates were not treated as an urgent problem. After all, their effects take decades to emerge: A decline in births does not become a shortage of workers until roughly a generation later. By the time schools empty and pension systems come under strain, the demographic trajectory is set.

Europe and the United States also appeared less exposed than parts of East Asia. Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore are already grappling with fertility rates below one child per woman.

Then there is the harder question: Why is this happening?

There are many competing explanations. Karen Benjamin Guzzo, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, has argued that part of the fall in the U.S. reflects a public-health success: Americans have become better able to avoid teenage pregnancies and unintended births. But beyond that, the story is similar on both sides of the Atlantic.

Housing is too expensive. Women are prioritizing their careers. Men are taking longer to mature. Religion has lost influence. Smartphones and social media are weakening real-world relationships. Fear of climate change makes having children feel useless and cruel.

Each hypothesis has its adherents, along with its own books, podcasts and preferred evidence. None, on its own, fully explains the decline.

Berkay Ozcan, professor of social and public policy at the London School of Economics, has little patience for attempts to identify a single culprit. The decline, says the 47-year-old father of two, is driven by a combination of causes. Insecure labor markets and high housing costs play a role, as do changing values, longer periods of education and rising expectations of parenthood.

But all these factors have a common effect: postponement. Surveys show that young people still want, on average, about two children. But many delay parenthood until they feel professionally, financially and emotionally ready, Ozcan says — and often wait longer than they intended.

Eva Beaujouan agrees, and she speaks from more than just professional experience. When the University of Vienna demographer was 34, she and her partner started trying to have a child. They finally managed five years later, after using IVF.

“I would never have imagined, starting at 34, that I would have issues,” says Beaujouan, who is now 48 and has focused her research on late parenthood.

Delayed parenthood extends well beyond affluent urban professionals. “Postponement is now observed in all social strata,” she says.

Assisted reproduction can create false reassurance. It may improve the chances of conception, but it cannot guarantee a child or fully overcome the effects of age. “It is invasive,” she says. “It is expensive. It creates inequalities. Not many people can afford it. And of course, it often fails.”

The cost of children

The fertility problem reflects a basic economic contradiction: Children are essential to the welfare state, but economically disadvantageous to the households that raise them.

In the past, children contributed labor and provided security in old age. In modern welfare states, that role has largely disappeared. “Although having children is necessary for the functioning of the welfare system, they do not have an economic function within the household,” says Beaujouan.

For all the meaning and fulfillment they may bring, raising children is expensive, can interrupt careers and may reduce lifetime earnings. Bringing up a child costs roughly $320,000 for a middle-class family in the United States, according to inflation-adjusted estimates based on U.S. Department of Agriculture data. In Britain, the Child Poverty Action Group, an anti-poverty charity, estimates the cost at about £250,000. For a household solely concerned with financial security in retirement, that money may offer a greater economic return if it is saved and invested instead.

What may be rational for individual households, however, can be damaging when repeated across an entire society.

Martin Bujard, research director at Germany’s Federal Institute for Population Research, explains the problem from an office in Wiesbaden crowded with stacks of paper. Before the conversation can begin, the 50-year-old sociologist and father of two has to clear a space for our two cups of coffee.

For an industrial country, Bujard says, quality of life does not depend primarily on the number of inhabitants. The crucial factor is how many people are entering the labor market relative to those retiring.

“If that is roughly in balance, the economy and welfare systems work,” Bujard says. “If only a few young people come up behind while very many retire, things become tricky.”

Searching for solutions

Back in Vilardevós, Yaiza Ferreiro Collazos remains in the classroom after the lesson and talks about her own plans. The 30-year-old is childless, like all her female friends.

“We work, and afterward we want fun or time for ourselves,” she says.

Collazos and her friends sometimes discuss having families, but she worries about what motherhood would require her to give up. “If I had a child, I could no longer continue my current life,” she says. She also worries about how pregnancy would change her body.

Governments across Europe have spent years trying to make such decisions easier. So far, none has found a reliable way to reverse falling fertility.

Two decades ago, Germany launched a major expansion of childcare for children under three. The reform was aimed primarily at closing the gap between the former West and East Germany. During the years that followed, fertility rose from around 1.4 to around 1.6 children per woman. But then the gains petered out — and the rate fell again. By 2025, it had reached a new historic low of 1.32.

Hungary relied more heavily on financial incentives. Former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government — proudly “illiberal” by its own description — offered parents bonuses and fiscal advantages, including an income-tax exemption for mothers with four or more children. Fertility rose from about 1.25 in the early 2010s to around 1.6 in 2021, before falling back to roughly 1.4.

Attempts at persuasion have fared no better. In 2016, Italy introduced a “Fertility Day” campaign. One advertisement showed a young woman holding an hourglass beside the slogan: “Beauty has no age. Fertility does.” The campaign provoked widespread outrage.

“It is very difficult to develop such campaigns,” says Beaujouan. “If you tell women at a later stage that if they do not start having children before such an age they will have trouble, then they start feeling guilty and anxious.”

Her assessment of the policy record is harsh. “I have not seen anything yet that would increase fertility rates,” she says. “Some policies can lay reasonable conditions for having children. And if they were not here, fertility may be even lower in some places. But they are rarely a motor of fertility rates.”

The immigration alternative

There is one response that has changed the demographic numbers where family policies and tax incentives have not: immigration. Spain offers perhaps the clearest example.

By the logic of its birth rate, the country should be shrinking. Instead, its population has grown from 46.5 million a decade ago to almost 50 million today. Foreign-born workers accounted for more than 70 percent of Spain’s employment growth between 2019 and 2024, according to an analysis by Esade, a prominent Spanish business school.

The country’s immigration policy is, however, hardly a template for the rest of Europe. Much of its recent immigration has come from Latin America, especially Colombia and Venezuela — countries where Spanish is the mother tongue and Christianity is the dominant religion. That does not make integration automatic. But it makes things easier.

In much of the rest of Europe, immigrants have been harder to absorb: Newcomers often arrive without the language, credentials or cultural familiarity that make it easier to find work and settle quickly. Migrants from Muslim-majority societies have also faced greater political and public pushback than Spain’s Latin America newcomers.

That may help explain why Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has been more willing than most European leaders to embrace large-scale immigration. Spain, he argues, needs younger workers to keep its economy growing and its welfare state afloat. His government recently launched one of Europe’s largest regularization programs for undocumented migrants. By early July, 1.2 million people had already applied.

But immigration solves one demographic problem by creating a different political challenge. Sánchez’s critics argue that the government counts the economic benefits while underestimating the pressure on housing, schools and public services, as well as the difficulties of integration and social cohesion.

Spain’s conservative opposition and the far-right Vox party accuse Sánchez of rewarding illegal immigration. Vox leader Santiago Abascal has claimed that the government is creating a “pull effect” and accelerating what he calls an “invasion.”

The recent crisis in Ceuta, a Spanish exclave on Morocco’s northern coast, demonstrated just how politically explosive immigration has become in Europe. In late July, tens of thousands of migrants, almost all of them young men, crossed into the territory, overwhelming local authorities. Some factors remain disputed, including the role of the Moroccan government, but the political backlash was immediate: Twenty-two of the EU’s 27 leaders signed a letter warning that Madrid’s generous policies risked creating a “pull factor” for irregular migration and placing pressure on other member states.

This criticism is backed by a public increasingly skeptical of large-scale immigration. Recent polling by YouGov, a London-based opinion research firm, found that majorities in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden and Denmark said immigration over the past decade had been too high. In the United States, about half the population supports deporting immigrants back to their countries of origin.

The controversy will not be resolved anytime soon. Just as the consequences of collapsing birth rates take decades to become fully visible, the long-term effects of large-scale immigration unfold slowly.

Renewal and resistance

Luton, 1,350 kilometers north of Vilardevós and half an hour by train from London, offers a contrasting picture of Europe’s demographic future. The English city has just under a quarter of a million inhabitants. In 2024, its fertility rate was 2.0, the highest in the country. The national figure was about 1.4.

Data provided by the city administration points to one important difference: Women in Luton tend to have children earlier. One in three births is to a woman aged 25 to 29, compared with one in four across England. Births to women aged 35 to 39, by contrast, account for a larger share nationally than they do in Luton.

Immigration is central to that pattern. Two-thirds of babies born in Luton in 2025 had a mother who was born abroad, according to figures provided to POLITICO by the local council. Across England, the share was about one-third.

Tahmina Saleem, the Labour politician who chairs the town council, describes Luton as “super-diverse and proud of it.” Born in Sheffield to parents from Punjab, she argues that the city attracts families because it still offers jobs, including through its international airport, while housing remains cheaper than in London. Behind her, on the wall, hangs a portrait of King Charles III in a scarlet parade uniform.

The diversity is most visible in the neighborhood of Bury Park, where many newer families have settled. Shops, travel agencies and religious institutions reflect the area’s large Muslim population and its links to South Asia and elsewhere. Women in headscarves and hijabs are a common sight. Travel agencies advertise the Hajj and Umrah, the major and minor pilgrimages to Mecca, and grocery stores sell halal products.

Luton is also illustrative of the political backlash that large-scale immigration can engender.

While Saleem sees immigration as having made the city younger and more open, others see Luton as a symbol of a country becoming demographically and culturally unrecognizable.

The far-right English Defence League emerged in the city in 2009, drawing heavily from the football-hooligan milieu and organizing against immigration and Islam. Its best-known leader, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, better known as Tommy Robinson, is also from Luton. Robinson has built his political identity on the same themes.

His influence now extends far beyond his hometown. In May 2026, Robinson drew roughly 60,000 supporters to a “unite the kingdom” rally in London, evidence that the grievances first mobilized in places such as Luton have become a national political force. The previous September, an even larger rally drew an estimated 110,000 people and featured a video link with Elon Musk, the tech billionaire who has repeatedly amplified Robinson’s agenda on his social media platform X.

“Tommy comes by now and then with cameras and foreign journalists to provoke us,” says Hamza Parker, a volunteer at Discover Islam Public Information Centre, a nonprofit organization in central Luton. “But he does not succeed.”

Limits of policy

Back in Vilardevós, Mayor Tamara Balboa García studies the population pyramid of her municipality. Of its 1,598 inhabitants, just 66 are 14 or younger. More than 960 are 60 or older. For every child or teenager, there are almost 15 senior citizens.

If the trend continues, García says, the village will eventually cease to have a future. But she insists that decline is not inevitable. The municipality helps returnees and newcomers find housing and work, particularly in agriculture, wine production and elder care. And even though the municipality is shrinking, it still has a supermarket, a pharmacy, a football pitch, an outdoor swimming pool, several bars, a bank branch and, of course, the school with its tiny classes.

A local nonprofit, Portas Abertas (“Open Doors”), plays a central role in the effort to keep the city alive. Andrea Rodríguez, the social educator who runs its local office, describes how the organization helped one immigrant family settle in the village: The mother, a trained nurse, found work quickly; the father was placed first as a truck driver and later as a baker; their child joined an after-school program.

Rodríguez’s own life is an example of what Portas Abertas wants to achieve. She left Vilardevós as a young woman for her training, but later returned. Four years ago, she bought a house for €92,000.

When the reporter looks at her incredulously, Rodríguez laughs. “It was even in good condition!”

Unlike the mayor, the schoolteacher and many other women in the village, Rodríguez has a child: a four-year-old daughter.

Before the reporter can ask whether she plans to have another child, Rodríguez answers.

“One child is enough.”

Hundreds of thousands of Europeans dream of landing one of the European Commission’s coveted civil service jobs, with around 170,000 people applying for just 1,500 entry-level positions at the EU institutions earlier this year.

Yet for many who make it inside the EU executive, the reality falls well short of the dream.

POLITICO spoke to a dozen officials from different commissioners’ cabinets and Directorates-General, varying in age, nationality and seniority, who described an institution where long hours, cumbersome bureaucracy and, in some cases, toxic management have left them exhausted, alienated and questioning whether the money and prestige are worth it.

Their experiences varied widely across the Commission’s 30,000-strong workforce — but the same complaints surfaced again and again. Some were granted anonymity to speak frankly about their workplace experiences.

“The conditions are more and more difficult,” said Nicolas Mavraganis, president of Union Syndicale Fédérale, an umbrella group linking roughly 20 staff unions across EU and international bodies. A Commission official since 1994, he has led the federation since 2019 and helps steer its representation of member unions in dealings with the institutions. “There is more and more workload, which means more and more pressure.”

As Brussels has taken on a more central geopolitical role — responding to Russia’s war against Ukraine, navigating tensions with China and managing an increasingly unpredictable United States — officials said there is a growing sense that every file matters.

Few of the complaints POLITICO heard — ranging from stressful projects and difficult bosses to endless bureaucracy and aging offices — are unique to the Commission, and similar stories can be found in ministries, law firms and consultancies across Europe. But officials said the combination of prestige, political pressure and the sheer scale of the institution makes the experience distinctive — and often difficult.

“It’s the EU’s executive so people have this weird God complex,” one official said.

A Commission spokesperson said the institution was “committed to being a modern, respectful and attractive place to work,” pointing to a review launched by President Ursula von der Leyen into the Commission’s operations. An internal survey found 74 percent of staff rated the Commission an attractive employer, up six percentage points from 2023.

Comparable public data is scarce. A 2025 staff survey at the European Central Bank found that 85 percent of employees were proud to work there, even as fewer than half considered their workload manageable. The figures point to a broader paradox: loyalty to an institution can remain strong even when day-to-day working conditions frustrate its staff. At the Commission, that gap helps explain why disillusionment does not necessarily lead people to leave.

Pressure cooker

Openings at the Commission, where employees shape policies affecting more than 450 million Europeans, remain some of the most sought-after public sector jobs. Brussels also remains relatively affordable compared to many Western European capitals, especially on a Commission salary.

The financial incentives are considerable too. Successful candidates for AD-5 jobs — the graduate-entry administrator role — earn roughly €6,000 to €7,000 a month before allowances, while Commission officials pay EU tax rather than national income tax, generally resulting in a lighter tax burden and more take-home pay. Family allowances, diplomatic discounts on cars and strong job security only add to the appeal. Some officials POLITICO spoke to even rent an apartment in Brussels while keeping their families in another country, flying home most weekends.

But several officials said the prestige of working at the Commission also creates its own pressures.

That atmosphere, officials said, filters down into daily life. Every briefing note, policy paper or press release attracts multiple layers of approval. Decisions move through sprawling email chains and successive rounds of revisions, while officials feel pressure to treat even routine work with the urgency of a geopolitical crisis.

One official in a commissioner’s cabinet said their days often begin at 7 a.m. or 8 a.m. and end around 7 p.m., with little time away from the office except to accompany their commissioner on missions. Another, working in communications, recalled crying late into the evening because of an overwhelming workload.

Several officials blamed the bureaucracy itself. Cabinet teams and the Commission’s policy departments, known as Directorates-General, often struggle to communicate effectively, leaving staff chasing approvals and information from one another.

“The DGs are waiting for scraps of information from the cabinets, who are so overworked that they don’t have the capacity to provide them that information,” another official working for a commissioner said. “It’s a structural problem. Everyone is trying to get information out of each other.”

Another official agreed. “I want to shoot myself sometimes.”

The institution’s sheer size can also leave people feeling anonymous. “There are thousands of people at the Commission, so even if you work there for 20 years, most people have never seen you,” a different official not working for a commissioner said. “You’re just this tiny little molecule in this huge organism.”

Mixed bag

Whether someone enjoys working at the Commission often comes down to luck.

First, there’s the boss.

Officials stressed that experiences can differ dramatically depending on which commissioner you work for. Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra’s cabinet is widely regarded internally as supportive, several officials said, while other commissioners have reputations internally for allowing toxic working cultures to develop, with infighting and power grabs.

One senior official in a commissioner’s cabinet has become notorious inside the Berlaymont for “screaming” at staff, according to two officials. An employee at DG ECHO, which coordinates the EU’s humanitarian program, said shouting was routine in their unit.

Another former official recalled watching a senior colleague berated over a leaked document in front of other managers. One official said their boss punched them during an argument after work in a bar near the Berlaymont.

Several said they felt they had little confidence complaints would be acted upon.

The Commission hired a chief confidential counsellor in 2024 to handle harassment complaints and has a team of 40 counsellors across the Commission and executive agencies as part of an “informal” approach to resolving workplace conflict, an official said.

Since September 2024, the chief counsellor, who reports to Budget Commissioner Piotr Serafin, has received 960 reports from “colleagues feeling harassed, alleged harassers, witnesses, managers and HR Correspondents,” according to a Commission spokesperson.

The Commission said 14,000 staff have attended presentations on anti-harassment policy while 2,400 managers have attended mandatory training sessions in the last two years. This increased awareness about how to seek support in dealing with harassment has “generated a relatively high number” of reports to the chief confidential counsellor, the spokesperson said.

The chief counsellor, however, “has no mandate to investigate and is not entitled legally to qualify the conduct as harassment as defined in the Staff Regulations,” the spokesperson explained. To make a formal complaint, staff have to go to the Investigation and Disciplinary Office (IDOC) or to the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF). The Commission receives around 20 to 25 of those per year, a spokesperson said.

Aging offices

Then there’s the building.

While the Berlaymont has benefited from extensive renovation, other Commission offices are showing their age. During June’s heatwave, staff at the DG AGRI building complained they were working without adequate air conditioning, according to internal communications seen by POLITICO.

At DG COMP’s headquarters in Madou Tower, meanwhile, officials were advised not to drink from certain water fountains because of possible contamination, while heating and sanitation systems were “not functioning to the level we should expect,” the acting director-general acknowledged in an email seen by POLITICO.

At the Berlaymont, staff on lower levels were left fuming after air conditioning was switched off in the middle of a heat wave but kept on for floors eight and above, which house commissioners and senior officials. An official told POLITICO at the time it was reminiscent of feudalism.

Experiences varied sharply across the institution, but many officials described the same tension: they remained drawn to the substance of their roles, even as their working conditions proved more frustrating and draining than expected.

Over cold pasta in a Commission cafeteria, one official was asked whether they were happy.

They shrugged. “It’s interesting work.”

For many inside the Commission, that is reason enough to stay.

If you have experienced harassment in the EU institutions, please WhatsApp us on +32 491 050629

LONDON — Andy Burnham entered Downing Street with a promise to give hard-pressed voters “breathing space” on the cost of living. Now he must show he can deliver. 

At the top of his list is finding a way to reduce stubbornly high energy bills — even as the Iran-U.S. war forces up prices and ministers are under pressure to cut their own departmental budgets. The new prime minister knows any intervention must make a real impact for voters if he is to turn Labour’s fortunes around. 

“You need to make an emotional connection with people,” said one senior government official, granted anonymity to talk candidly about Whitehall thinking. 

Britain’s new prime minister has already made one bid to show voters he is serious about tackling the problem: Removing VAT from household electricity bills, something he announced on his first day in No. 10. 

The move will knock less than £4 off the average monthly bill, ends after one year, and comes with a price tag of £850 million. Downing Street said it will be paid for through so-far unspecified Whitehall savings. 

But Burnham and his new Energy Secretary, Miatta Fahnbulleh, promised that the intervention is just a start. Cutting VAT is a “down payment” ahead of the winter, Fahnbulleh said. 

That means ministers have just weeks before Burnham’s first budget this fall to figure out what, if anything, can really ease the burden — and how to pay for it. 

Salami slicing 

“The fiscal space is going to be a challenge, and that is the case for any government,” said Sam Alvis, associate director for environment, energy security, and nature at the Labour-aligned Institute for Public Policy Research think tank. 

That’s because any intervention to bring down energy bills will have to be funded from already under-pressure Whitehall departments. 

“This government is going to have a look at the budget. Whether it chooses to do some priorities differently — that is an open question,” Alvis said. 

One option for Burnham is to slice more charges from electricity bills, as he did with VAT. But any savings could be quickly wiped out if, as expected, the Middle East crisis pushes up wholesale gas prices.

Forecasters at Cornwall Insight predict that average annual household bills will rise by two percent this fall, even after the VAT intervention. 

That leaves Burnham facing the same problems as the man he replaced, Keir Starmer. 

Starmer cut £150 off yearly bills last November by shifting some so-called green levies, used to fund a clean energy scheme, onto general taxation. By the summer, that cut had been swallowed up by higher prices driven by the Strait of Hormuz crisis. 

Nonetheless, Alvis said, this approach remains Burnham’s most realistic option. 

“We are now in a bit of a scenario of salami slicing, where you’re aggregating lots and lots of smaller bits,” he said. “There’s no one big thing that you can do that’s going to take over £100 off bills. So, it’s about accumulating all those things that you think you could possibly do in one go, so it becomes sizable and noticeable.” 

Decisions, decisions 

One of those options, proposed by the think tank Nesta and reportedly being considered by Burnham, involves shifting further green levies from electricity bills onto tax.  

It identified another £42 of savings from a yearly bill, costing the Treasury £1.7 billion per year for a decade. 

Every small cut helps consumers, insists Andrew Sissons, Nesta’s director of sustainable futures. The think tank has also proposed knocking £22 a year off bills by shifting the standing charge on gas — currently a fixed daily fee — onto the unit rate, which changes depending on how much energy a home uses. That would take a year to implement and would not cost the government a penny, Nesta says. 

But such moves must be accompanied by larger interventions if voters are to feel the benefit, he added. 

“The amount you’d need to cut people’s energy bills … for it to feel like a real difference is quite substantial,” he said. The government, he argued, should aim for a “big package.”  

If the government aims for larger changes, they would come with even greater costs.  

Nesta has suggested a one-off move to wipe out electricity debt, removing some bailout costs currently funded through bills, taking total annual bill savings to £130. But the Treasury would have to find £2.7 billion to fund that. 

“[We] shouldn’t ignore the fact that there are fiscal trade-offs. But if the government wants to prioritize energy bills, then this is the kind of step it needs to take,” Sissons added, pointing to their proposed levy change alongside the VAT cut.  

Things take time  

Net-zero policies will, ministers hope, bring down bills for good. But large-scale changes take years to implement. 

“Realistically, the only way to deeply, deeply help people is to get them solar panels, is to get them an EV [electric vehicle], potentially heat pumps in some houses as well,” said Alvis. 

This is another reason to opt for “salami slicing”, he said: To “alter the balance of electricity and gas prices, so that those clean technologies stack up and save people even more money.”  

Alex Bevan, a research fellow at the Future Governance Forum, agreed that big savings attached to the shift to green energy were still a way off.  

“There aren’t quick workarounds on whichever form of energy you choose to generate and deploy,” he said. But government must nonetheless “lock in the benefits [of clean energy],” he argued. 

The same official quoted above stressed that no decision had yet been made on how the government would intervene on bills. Asked whether the government favored a series of small policies or one big intervention, they said: “It doesn’t have to be binary. … It doesn’t have to be one or the other.”  

A Department for Energy Security and Net Zero spokesperson said: “The energy secretary’s focus is bringing bills down for good. We will tackle the cost of living to make life’s essentials affordable again and bring back hope.”

For now, Alvis insisted, Burnham has one thing going for him: He can operate in the knowledge voters accept international issues are pushing up costs. 

“The political point I would make is: By doing your best effort, you give yourself the space to have a conversation with the public,” he said. 

Brussels is bracing for an unusual fight between the EU’s smallest country and a British ex-footballing legend.

Peter Shilton, the England goalkeeper who conceded the “Hand of God” goal from Diego Armando Maradona in 1986, has started a new life as an anti-gambling advocate after overcoming a decades-long addiction.

Despite being a diehard Brexit supporter, he’s become the poster boy of the European Parliament’s push to tax online betting in a bid to raise some much-needed funds to finance the bloc’s next €2 trillion budget.

But the campaign has run into strong opposition from Malta. The tiny island in the Mediterranean Sea, with a population of just over half a million people, is home to a burgeoning betting sector. It says that higher taxes will cripple its gambling industry, boost illegal operators and drive firms outside the bloc.

“[Malta] will not accept the introduction of any EU-level taxes designed to sustain the bloc’s spending,” the country’s Prime Minister, Robert Abela, told the Maltese Parliament in June.

But Shilton, who lost more than £1 million in betting on horse racing over 45 years and now runs his own gambling addiction charity, dismisses the arguments by Malta and the gambling lobbies as “window dressing.” He’s in favor of higher taxes as he wants to shrink advertising revenue that is used to lure in new gamblers.

“Deep down they’re after everybody’s money. Simple as that,” he told POLITICO during a visit to Brussels in June.

The topic has split the EU’s 27 governments, pitting gambling-heavy Southern European countries against their more supportive Western European peers, led by France. Capitals are already fighting even though the Commission hasn’t yet issued a formal proposal for the possible tax, which would ultimately need to be unanimously approved by governments.

It’s one of numerous budget battle lines being drawn, with Ireland — which is steering the talks as chair of the rotating Council presidency — set to restart negotiations to facilitate an overall deal on the EU budget before the end of the year.

That’s no mean feat given Dublin’s task to mesh competing spending priorities into a single budget — financing everything from farmers’ subsidies to foreign aid — that is acceptable for each of the EU’s 27 governments.

National capitals will have to unanimously approve new EU-wide taxes — known as own resources — to pay for soaring defense spending and post-Covid debt repayments if they want to avoid drastically increasing national contributions to Brussels.

Supporters of the gambling levy point to the fact that it would rake in over €13 billion throughout the next budget cycle and — for some, more importantly — address a serious public health issue. An estimated 80 million adults globally have experienced a gambling addiction, according to experts.

“We look on it [gambling] as an illness. It’s something that’s inborn in you and that can be ignited,” Shilton said.

Malta’s game plan

Malta has invested heavily in the gambling industry — including lotteries, betting and casinos increasingly operating online — which now accounts for around 12 percent of its gross domestic product.

These firms have relocated to Malta because of its light-touch licensing regime, business-friendly tax regime and balmy weather.

The country is “as dependent on the online gambling industry as Germany is on cars,” said an EU diplomat, granted anonymity to speak freely.

While gambling firms need local authorization to operate in most other European countries, securing the Maltese license is crucial to access banking services and gain a foothold in the EU market.

Malta-based firms dominated the German and Austrian online gambling markets before national regulators cracked down. This has prompted the Maltese government to refuse to recognize some court rulings and sanctions issued by other EU countries against its gambling firms.

Given its influence, it is hardly surprising that the gambling industry has found a friendly ear among Malta’s politicians in Brussels.

The Maltese president of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, last year gave the opening speech at an international gambling conference in Rome that also featured Italian Foreign Affairs Minister Antonio Tajani.

“I’m more than a little proud that it started in my island home of Malta,” she said, referring to SiGMA, a Maltese events company that focuses on online gambling founded by Eman Pulis, a university friend of Metsola.

Betting lobbies say they oppose higher gambling rates on the grounds that they will fuel appetite for the illegal market, away from the grasp of EU rules.

“A higher tax would lead to worse odds for the customers … and it is relevant because access to the illegal markets in Europe is, obviously, one click away,” said secretary general of the European Gaming and Betting Association, Maarten Haijer.

Nicola Matteucci, an economist at the Università Politecnica delle Marche in Italy who has undertaken extensive research on the gambling sector, argued there is a “point where prices exceed a certain level and the demand [for gambling] diminishes. But it’s not as immediate as suggested by the industry.”

Matteucci said that most gamblers will be undeterred by slightly higher taxes and worse odds as they are not fully rational consumers.

Anti-gambling groups reason instead that higher taxes will reduce the sector’s spending on commercials, preventing would-be punters from getting sucked in to gambling in the first place.

“Higher taxes will therefore mean less gambling advertising overall and many people would regard that as a public benefit,” said Derek Webb, the founder of the Campaign for Fairer Gambling advocacy group.

Club Med joins Malta

Malta has joined forces with fellow Mediterranean countries — Italy, Portugal and Spain — to challenge the mooted tax which was first proposed by the Parliament’s socialist lawmaker Victor Negrescu, said four diplomats with knowledge of the discussions.

According to the European Commission’s estimates, seen by POLITICO, a 3 percent tax on the net turnover of the online gambling sector would generate an estimated €1.9 billion per year.

With its big online gambling market, Spain is expected to be among the biggest financial losers, should the tax go ahead. It is estimated to be on the hook for €414 million per year, almost a quarter of the total amount. That compares to a projected bill of €165 million per year for Malta— a disproportionality high amount for such a small country.

Portugal is also reluctant to back the levy. It fears that higher taxes would eat into revenue brought in by state-run betting and lotteries that is currently channeled to the charity Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Lisboa‘s healthcare and youth support programs, said a Portuguese official.

Meanwhile, given the relatively low uptake of online gambling, Italy’s misgivings have surprised anti-betting advocates. Rome is expected to pay a mere 7 percent of the proposed new levy — a significantly lower proportion than its regular EU budget contributions.

However, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party has previously been receptive to the gambling industry. Last year its MPs passed a resolution encouraging the reversal of a ban on professional football clubs advertising gambling firms.  

Palantir is shifting profits from its European operations to the United States, allowing the Florida-based data analytics giant to pay minimal taxes in Europe, a new report finds.

The report by the U.K.-based Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability and Research, a group partly funded by labor unions that researches corporate tax avoidance in an effort to win reform of global tax rules, found that Palantir’s European subsidiaries, which took in €440.5 million in annual revenue in 2024, report far smaller profit margins in Europe than in the U.S.

“Although a substantial part of Palantir’s revenue is realized in Europe, almost all of the pre-tax profits are funneled to the United States,” the report said.

Palantir pays no U.S. federal income tax because previous losses, tax credits, and R&D deductions offset its taxable income; and virtually no state income tax, with the exception of Maryland, which levies a digital services tax.

The profit gap between the U.S. and Europe is stark. In 2025, Palantir’s American business pocketed 47.7 cents in profit from every dollar of revenue — more than double the previous year’s 22.5 cents. Outside the U.S., the profit margin was just 6.3 percent. In some European subsidiaries, it fell to around 3 percent, according to the new report.

CICTAR argues that Palantir “intentionally and artificially” shrinks European profits — and therefore its European tax bills — to concentrate profits in the U.S. There is no claim in the report that such arrangements, often referred to as “profit shifting,” are illegal. Multinational companies often reduce reported profits by paying subsidiaries or other related entities for intellectual property, loans or expertise.

In Sweden, for example, Palantir reported €13.7 million in revenue in 2024, but only €1.1 million in profit. At Sweden’s 20 percent corporate tax rate, that left the company with a tax bill of just €424,000.

In its Q2 earnings report on Monday, Palantir made no explicit reference to earnings from its European subsidiaries. Instead, it highlighted its U.S. business, where revenue rose 115 percent year-on-year to $1.57 billion (€1.36 billion), and boasted of its 62 percent profit margin.

A U.K.-based Palantir spokesperson said that the majority of the company’s 2025 revenue and profitability was driven by its U.S. business. “Our tax position in each jurisdiction reflects the level of economic activity there, and we meet our tax obligations in every market in which we operate,” the spokesperson said.

Not alone

Palantir is not the first U.S. tech company to draw scrutiny over how it books profits in Europe.

In 2024, the European Court of Justice ordered Apple to pay Ireland €13 bn in back taxes, ending an 8-year-long fight over what Brussels said amounted to illegal state aid. Amazon also fought the European Commission over claims it had received an unlawful tax advantage worth around €250 million in Luxembourg — a case the company ultimately won. Microsoft, meanwhile, has faced scrutiny over its Irish subsidiary, Microsoft Round Island One, which avoided paying millions to the state after claiming tax residency in Bermuda. The U.S. software giant has denied that it is circumventing Ireland’s tax laws.

Jan Willem Goudriaan, General Secretary of the European Federation of Public Service Unions — a supporter of CICTAR— said that companies such as Palantir, Amazon and Microsoft focus on minimizing the taxes they pay, “thus robbing funding for public services.”

“Companies bidding for public contracts should have to demonstrate responsible tax conduct by disclosing where their revenues, workforce, profits and taxes are located,” he said.

Another reason for the low profits of Palantir’s European subsidiaries is their high personnel costs. In the U.K., where most of the company’s non-U.S. workforce is based, Palantir reported £173 million (€204.3 million) in employee costs for 749 staff in 2024 — an average of £230,974 (€272,803) per employee.

The report also points to Palantir’s use of stock-based compensation across its European subsidiaries, especially in the U.K., Spain and Norway. This means employees are paid partly in company shares or awards. Those awards are recorded as staff expenses, which can lower a subsidiary’s corporate tax bill.