EU Scream

Polish state media still is treated as a legitimate public service by European authorities. Yet many Poles refer to it as a factory of hate. They say Polish state TV and radio first and foremost serve to advance the agenda of the ruling Law and Justice party in Warsaw. And while Silvio Berlusconi of Italy was a pioneer in bullying media, and Viktor Orbán of Hungary took state control to new extremes, the Polish hard right has been quick to catch up. Since Law and Justice came to power eight years ago, Polish state media has become an outlet for demonising judges, LGBT people, and opposition politicians — and the deleterious effects are even felt beyond Poland. In the case of Dorota Bawołek, a respected Polish TV correspondent in Brussels, the abuse appears to follow a pattern. First her words and actions are misrepresented; next those misrepresentations are turned into lurid stories broadcast by Polish state media; and finally Dorota is confronted by an avalanche of online trolling. The attacks on Dorota are part of wider concerns about press freedom that have prompted EU plans for a Media Freedom Act. Among the Act's priorities is stopping governments turning public service media into their mouthpieces — although few observers expect any immediate impact. For its part, the European Broadcasting Union has warned about the undue influence of "political masters" and it says it wants independent oversight of public media. Yet Polish state radio and television remain full EBU members. The latest attack on Dorota came in October after she interviewed Polish politician and former president of the European Council Donald Tusk. Tusk's centre-right Civic Platform is the only real viable challenger to Law and Justice in Poland's upcoming elections. But there are worries the elections will prove neither free nor fair, especially in a media environment largely controlled by Law and Justice. "The game is not fair, for sure," says Dorota. The "media are the fourth power" but "we are being killed and the EU is watching." Listen (in Polish) to Dorota's podcast Stacja Bruksela.Support the show

Philippe Lamberts is advancing one of the most progressive agendas ever to reach the upper echelons of the EU power structure. This month the co-head of the Greens at the European Parliament will convene a conference that seeks to change, well, just about everything. The conference is called Beyond Growth — an umbrella term for thinking about how growth in a materially finite world is reaching its limits. All 1,500 seats have been snapped up and thousands of people are expected to watch via the Internet. But what's more remarkable is how Philippe got some of the EU's heaviest hitters to come along too. Among those expected to address the conference: Ursula von der Leyen, the conservative president of the European Commission. Her presence shows the growth debate is no longer "for loonies," says Philippe. But Philippe may also be cover for von der Leyen: she may want to be remembered as someone who at least tried to seek alternatives to growth models and metrics like GDP before the climate crisis worsens. For now, most policymakers are stuck on the idea that we'll be able to find a source of nearly unlimited high efficiency low carbon energy, and that we'll do so in time to avoid sharp declines in standards of living. The resulting inertia infuriates activists like those who disrupted the Brussels Economic Forum this month. They are demanding that the EU jettison an "ideology of infinite economic growth" without delay. But such demands sit awkwardly with winning steady and sustained buy-in from lobbies and voters. So how to face the future with the odds stacked so heavily against a satisfactory outcome? Philippe starts this episode with thoughts on how his Christianity informs his thinking on Beyond Growth — and on how his faith helps him deal with the existential questions we all must now live with.Support the show

Conveniently at the heart of the EU Qatargate corruption scandal is a rogue NGO. Conveniently, that is, for EU officials and lawmakers who dislike non-governmental organisations. NGOs frequently end up in an awkward relationship with states and international organisations, says Thomas Davies at City University, and that awkwardness increasingly seems to include the EU too. The trigger for the current tensions is an NGO ("Fight Impunity") that allegedly worked with Morocco and Qatar to channel cash to socialist members of the European Parliament. Conservatives, ultraliberals and the far right now are calling for NGOs to pass a kind of EU loyalty test and to classify some NGOs as foreign agents. Carlotta Besozzi, the head of Civil Society Europe, is among those who detect an increasingly hostile environment for NGOs. Among organisations under assault is Femyso, the Forum of European Muslim Youth and Student Organizations. EU support for Femyso irks MEPs who dislike its fight against Islamophobia and who suggest it has links to the Muslim Brotherhood. Femyso says such allegations are false and malicious and designed to undermine an organisation with no ties to political parties or political movements. Femyso's former president Youssef Himmat was smeared in similar ways by the United Arab Emirates — and his story now forms part of a must-read article in a recent edition of The New Yorker. With thanks to the Open Society Foundations for partnering with EU Scream on this episode.Support the show

Families can go wrong. And unless you've been under a rock these last weeks, you'll know that a number of members of the Socialist family at the European Parliament went very wrong. They allegedly took sack loads of Qatari cash on top of their already generous salaries and benefits in return, it seems, for trying to block their own Socialist colleagues from criticising Qatar's record on human rights. In this episode, Lara Wolters, a Socialist member, gives a first-hand account of being obstructed and misled by two of the prime suspects in the scandal. She also shares her feelings of vindication now that the truth is coming out. Yet Lara shows compassion for Eva Kaili, a young mother like herself, who has been implicated in the so-called Qatargate scandal and separated from her daughter. Also in this episode, a lawmaker from outside the Socialist family: co-president of the Left group Manon Aubry. Manon was convinced she saw the heavy hand of Qatar on lawmakers weeks before news about the scandal broke. So she blew the whistle on social media, where her video on the topic has racked up nearly 70,000 views. Manon, who has emerged as one of the firmest advocates for an EU ethics overhaul, reserves some of her most acid criticism for the conservative EPP group, which she says perpetuated a culture of opacity that has helped breed corruption.Support the show

Putin's barbarism is somehow felt by us all even though it can be hard to get to grips with the magnitude of what's at stake. One reason may be what writer and academic Tom Nichols calls normalcy bias, an inherent resistance to accepting that large changes can upend our lives. Another may be what Lithuanian arts curator Raimundas Malasauskas calls unlearned lessons from history about Russia's imperialist and colonialist drives. Political scientist David Rowe is a Fulbright NATO Security Studies scholar and a visiting fellow at the German Marshall Fund, and he has been looking into why so much of Europe wasn't ready for Putin. David, who's on sabbatical from Kenyon College in the US, gives his personal views about how the EU needs to rethink the role of war and peace in building and maintaining liberal democracy. Among points he addresses in this podcast are the consequences for the Western allies of not spilling their own blood in Ukraine, and the resentment Ukrainians will surely feel if the door to the EU club isn't really open after all. David starts with a description of the philosophical roots — laid some two centuries ago — of the EU's approach to international politics. It's an approach that's helped much of Europe keep the peace over recent decades. But it may also have left Europe flat-footed in the face of abhorrent aggression. "The problem," says David, "is that peace seems so evidently good, that it is very easy to overlook the deep structures that give rise to it."Poem 11/22 by Ariana Reines.Video from Mars Returns in Kaunas. Support the show

The European Parliament is reeling from corruption allegations involving the Gulf state of Qatar. Members' offices have been sealed. Raids have been carried out by Italian and Belgian authorities. And large sums of cash seized including sacks of banknotes from the father of one of the lawmakers at the centre of the scandal. That lawmaker, Eva Kaili, was with the Greek socialist Pasok party. She was a vice president of the European Parliament — and she'd been strongly promoting Qatar. Kaili has now been stripped of her title and is in custody. Of course it's far from the first corruption scandal in the EU. But in this case there's the promise of further lurid revelations of cash-fuelled influence peddling on a much bigger scale than previously thought. And now the race is on to apportion blame. Some lawmakers suggest malign foreign interference is mainly responsible. Others say non-governmental organisations and campaign groups should be in the crosshairs. Still others stress that there will always be bad apples and so there should be no need for collective guilt in a Parliament with 705 members. But such finger-pointing mostly amounts to denial and deflection. That's because the dumpster fire at the European Parliament may be largely of the EU's own making. Foreign governments still can meet lawmakers largely undetected, and there's still no central independent investigator and no system for anonymous whistle-blowers. It's what Transparency International calls a complete lack of independent ethics oversight. And while the EU has many gifted politicians and policymakers who are above reproach — still too many are low grade national party hacks and worse. One of the leading voices on making the E.U. more accountable and transparent is Alberto Alemanno. Alberto is Jean Monnet Professor in European Union Law at HEC Paris, and he sits on the board of several civil society organisations. He's also a good sport for taking a scooter through downtown Brussels, in the dark, on an icy evening, to come talk about, yes, "Qatargate".Support the show

The European Union wants India as a strategic ally. And India loves the positive attention it's getting from Europe. Both sides are trying to speed up a long stalled-trade agreement amid steadily tightening relations. But that only serves to magnify a glaring double standard in EU foreign policy. While the EU openly criticises China for abusing its the mostly Muslim Uyghur population, the EU turns a blind eye to the way India treats its own Muslim minority. The problems run deeper still. India's prime minister Narendra Modi has his roots in a fascist Hindu movement. And like Viktor Orbán of Hungary, Modi is associated with a rise in the kind of right-wing national populism that the EU supposedly deplores. So while the EU still describes India as the world's largest democracy, a looming question is how much longer that will continue to be the case. Journalist Rana Ayyub has emerged as one of the most prominent critics of Modi. She went undercover to investigate the extent of official complicity in mass killings of Muslims in Gujarat when Modi was the state's chief minister. Rana has been profiled in Time magazine and the New Yorker, and she's now a columnist for The Washington Post. She says any rapprochement with India mustn't come at the expense of the truth about Modi's authoritarian instincts and links to brutality against minorities. Also in this episode: Dutch member of the European Parliament Agnes Jongerius on her priorities for trade talks with India. Agnes represents the Socialists & Democrats group within the influential trade committee.Support the show

Decolonisation is a new way of confronting racism. It means rooting out colonial-era attitudes of white superiority that linger in our societies and institutions. The push for decolonisation in the US and parts of Europe took wings with the Black Lives Matter movement. But the EU still is nowhere near starting the process of decolonisation. Its reticence was underlined this month when top EU diplomat Josep Borrell branded most of the world a jungle and then got away with making only a grudging apology. In this episode: a look back at Borrell's offensive comments at the College of Europe; and a look ahead at how to decolonise EU foreign aid, with Shada Islam and Dylan Mathews of Peace Direct.  Support the show

Georgia Meloni was 19 and speaking to French TV when she praised Italian dictator and Hitler ally Mussolini. Back then the likely next prime minister of Italy was dressed all in black and flanked by burly men. Twenty-six years later things look very different. Meloni favours bright white pant suits and presses the flesh with European dignitaries. The normalisation of the neofascist far right in Italy seems complete. Part of the answer as to how this happened lies with an international political party, the European Conservatives and Reformists or ECR. Meloni is the president of the ECR party which has significant representation in the European Parliament — and branding that's disarmingly centrist. In fact the ECR is led by representatives of ultraconservative and radical right parties from Poland and Spain and by Meloni's own party: the Fratelli d'Italia or Brothers of Italy. Other key allies include Trumpist US Republicans. So should Meloni still be considered neofascist? She insists she's a patriotic conservative. And indeed, if she's prime minister, she's expected to respect Italy's democracy — if only to keep money flowing from the EU. She's also vowed to keep up support for Ukraine and NATO. Yet Meloni has shown scant if any remorse for her past. She congratulated Vladimir Putin for an "unequivocal" election victory in 2018. And only last year she was lauding Russia's defence of European values. And so, questions remain about how much Meloni has really moderated. Valerio Alfonso Bruno is a senior fellow at the UK-based Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right who is writing a book on the Brothers of Italy. Valerio says there could be troubling times ahead — and not just for Italy. Meloni and her international allies still want a Europe that deprives LGBT+ people of civil rights; that tells women what they can and can't do with their bodies; and that falls into line with racist conspiracy theories like the Great Replacement. With Meloni, it's not like we haven't been warned.Support the show

There are many things to love about France. But a stated policy of colour blindness is not one of them. Among those leading the charge against a French conception of universalism that makes discussing race so awkward is Grace Ly. Her Chinese Cambodian parents fled the Khmer Rouge during the late 1970s for France, where she has found success and celebrity with books like Jeune fille modèle and the podcast Kiffe Ta Race that she co-hosts with Rokhaya Diallo. The French still preach that everyone is equal in the eyes of the Republic, but Grace says the reality is very different. She cites a notorious incident where a former French interior minister, Brice Hortefeux, was caught saying in reference to immigrants of North African descent that, "when there is one it's OK,” but that, "when there are lots of them that there are problems." Grace is from an Asian European community that's often portrayed as a model minority. But she says that's a corrosive stereotype, and she too has to navigate double standards. "When I walk out in the streets, people see me, they actually see me very well because they still say ni hao to me, so they do see me. But it's what they want me to be. They want me to be invisible." Grace is in conversation with journalist and think tanker Shada Islam and commentator Helena Malikova. Support the show