A conversation with Anthony L. Gardner, the former US ambassador to the EU under President Obama. Gardner is a former director on the National Security Council who has spent much of his career in Europe. He left his ambassadorial post in Brussels when Donald Trump entered the White House, and he was succeeded by Gordon Sondland, a hotel magnate with scant government experience. Sondland has more or less hewed to a Trumpian script, occasionally pouring scorn on Brussels officials and raising questions about the relevance of the European project. Now Sondland has been swept up in the investigation that could result in Trump’s impeachment. Congressional panels are pouring over details about Sondland's possible role in pressuring Ukraine's leadership to investigate Joe Biden, Trump’s likeliest rival in next year’s US election, and Biden's son. It’s against this background that Gardner talks with EU Scream about what’s ailing American diplomacy in Europe, his forthcoming book on the importance of EU-US relations, and where the continent may be heading under its new leadership.A lexicon for this episode:A “stagiaire” is a trainee; "DG Comp” is the EU's antitrust department; the “Sablon” is an upscale part of Brussels teeming with antique and chocolate shops; “TTIP" is an acronym for Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, a failed US-EU effort to strike a trade deal; Wilbur Ross is U.S. commerce secretary; Herman Van Rompuy represented EU heads of state and government as the first president of the European Council; “ECSC” is the European Coal and Steel Community, the group of six countries that started an integration process eventually leading to creation of the EU; SWIFT is the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, a network through which interbank transfers are traditionally made; “PESCO” is Permanent Structured Cooperation, an EU policy goal for developing joint military capabilities. Visit our website for episode art and for more EU Scream. “Beethoven Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125” by Papalin is licensed under CC by 3.0. “Airside No. 9” is played by Lara Natale.Support the show

Should lobbyists engage with far-right and extremist lawmakers? After the EU elections in May, about 20 percent of members of the European Parliament have far-right agendas. That's a big gain — up from 10-to-15 percent five years ago. That’s also around 150 far-right lawmakers companies can lobby for favourable votes and amendments. Many people are uncomfortable with that prospect. Far-right parties are rife with misogyny, homophobia and islamophobia; many have members who openly admire Italian and German fascism and Putin's Russia. Lobbyists who work with these lawmakers risk normalising hate-mongering and anti-democratic values. Those concerns prompted EU Scream to take an ambitious step for such a young podcast: holding our first event. We had great support from Res Publica Europa, a new group mainly made up of European Union officials, and from Open Forum Europe, the think tank for the open source software community in Brussels. Our mission was to draw up some preliminary guidelines for lobbyists. We knew that was going to be ambitious. We nevertheless reached areas of consensus thanks to Alberto Alemanno, a law professor at French business school HEC Paris, and thanks to some dazzling panelists: Maris Hellrand, a journalist and activist from Estonia; Benedikt Herges, the head of the Brussels office for German technology and engineering company Siemens; Heather Grabbe, the director of EU affairs for Open Society Foundations, the philanthropic group founded by George Soros; and Michiel van Hulten, a former member of Parliament and the director of Transparency International EU. Visit our website for episode art and for more EU Scream. “Beethoven Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125” by Papalin is licensed under CC by 3.0. “Airside No. 9” is played by Lara Natale. Aquarium from “The Carnival of the Animals” by Camille Saint-Saëns is licensed under CC by 3.0. Support the show

Pastors and plutocrats are sponsoring an ultra-conservative agenda in Europe. Many of them have links to Donald Trump. It’s a world that's pretty opaque. But over the past year, investigative journalists have done painstaking work to pierce the veil. We talk to Blaž Zgaga, a multi-award winning investigative journalist from Slovenia. Zgaga writes for Croatia's Nacional and publications including EUobserver. He’s also a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and European Investigative Collaborations where he helps coordinate large cross-border investigations — including on the reach of the Christian lobby. He’s emerged with extraordinary detail about some of the biggest funders of faith-based causes in Europe and their links to Trumpworld. Another chronicler of the merging of fundamentalist Christianity with European public policy is Mary Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald was formerly with online activist network Avaaz and was a senior editor at Prospect magazine. She’s now editor-in-chief of openDemocracy, an online platform that's also done exhaustive work on what U.S. non-profit groups disclose about their foreign spending. Fitzgerald's platform also has reported on the arrival in Europe of US-style political campaign funding — funding of the kind that's hard to trace and potentially unlimited. Visit our website for episode art and for more EU Scream. “Beethoven Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125” by Papalin is licensed under CC by 3.0. “Airside No. 9” is played by Lara Natale.Support the show

Women in Romania have had the legal right to an abortion since 1990. But many women seeking care find themselves in a Kafkaesque trap. Bianca, a young Romanian, ended up obtaining abortion pills without a prescription, and she took them without medical supervision. Work done by investigative reporter Lina Vdovîi in Bucharest illustrates how politicians and priests — and even doctors — seek to shut down a woman's right to choose. The situation is not unique to Romania; women in Croatia and Italy face similar obstacles. The world increasingly looks to Europeans for leadership in civil rights and gender equality. So how can this still be happening? A key issue is that maternal healthcare and abortion are not explicitly referenced in European treaties, explains Irina Trichkovska of law firm White & Case. She says this “sadly causes significant disparities in the treatment of women across the EU." Visit our website for episode art and more EU Scream. “Beethoven Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125” by Papalin is licensed under CC by 3.0. “Airside No. 9” is played by Lara Natale.Support the show

Pressure on women to avoid terminating unwanted pregnancies has intensified in countries like Croatia, Poland and Romania. Michael Bird, an investigative journalist and writer in Bucharest, has been covering the situation for publications including EUobserver. He says constraints come from a variety of sources including churches, counsellors, public hospitals — even doctors. Elena Zacharenko at the International Planned Parenthood Federation European Network warns that arch-conservative forces seeking to narrow a woman’s right to choose got a boost in European elections in May. Ulrike Lunacek is a former vice president of the European Parliament who has first-hand experience of how anti-abortion activists stepped up their lobbying early this decade. She explains why pro-choice women and the LGBT community face a common enemy. “Beethoven Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125” by Papalin is licensed under CC by 3.0. “Airside No. 9” is played by Lara Natale.Support the show

Tony Blair shares his two-pronged formula for taking on nationalist populists — and winning. He says Britain is making a "profound historical mistake” by capitulating to the Brexiteers. But he has a stern message for Europe too: do more to stand up for values, not just narrow national interests. The European Union still needs a “strong sense of itself,” Blair suggests. We begin the show with another warning against complacency. Andrew Stroehlein is European media director for Human Rights Watch, a group investigating and reporting abuses in all corners of the world. In May's elections to the European Parliament, some far-right and extremist parties failed to do as well as expected. But Stroehlein says Europeans must remain alert to the ways these parties are seeking to erode rights and freedoms across the bloc. Support the show

We speak with two Muslim millennials raising their voices against discrimination and religious misconceptions. Nas is a celebrity video blogger with 13 million followers. He's also a Palestinian-Israeli educated at Harvard who defies the far-right’s stereotypes about young Arab men. He says governments should force integration — otherwise the kinds of Islamophobia and anti-Semitism that plague parts of Europe are inevitable. Mehreen Khan is a correspondent for the Financial Times in Brussels. Not only is she a rare Brexiteer among the EU press corps, she’s also a British Muslim of Pakistani descent who wears a headscarf. That makes her an unusual sight at European Union headquarters where the lack of diversity is at odds with the multicultural reality of many parts of the continent. We get her observations on the ways stereotypes about the East persist and about the ways Europe is failing to protect, and connect with, its 25 million Muslim inhabitants. I first asked why her avatar — that’s the picture she uses to identify herself on Twitter — looks a lot like a burka with a maniacal grin. Visit our website for episode art and transcripts, and for more on EU Scream. “Beethoven Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125” by Papalin is licensed under CC by 3.0. “Airside No. 9” is played by Lara Natale.Support the show

Estonia, a tiny Baltic state, was hit by a giant shockwave in March when a political party promoting white supremacist views won nearly 18 percent of the vote in a general election. A second shockwave hit when Jüri Ratas, the leader of the liberal-left Centre Party, invited the party, called EKRE, to form a coalition government. The powerful interior and finance ministries went to two EKRE leaders, Mart Helme and son Martin Helme; the family double act excels in racism, sexism and homophobia, and their followers spread the alt-right conspiracy theory that immigrant invaders are replacing so-called true Europeans. Last month, fascism defender Jaak Madison became the first EKRE representative to win a seat at the European Parliament. EKRE now has a strong role representing Estonia on the international stage where it threatens the country's carefully nurtured image as an advanced and open society that teems with startups and digital services. With a rather different Estonia emerging — an Estonia where the kind of accommodation that allowed EKRE into government has echoes with the rise of fascism in the 1930s — we travel to the capital Tallinn to hear from people who have taken a stand. Ahto Lobjakas is a former Brussels correspondent whose outspoken commentary at home frequently made him a government opponent. He is now more like an enemy of the state amid creeping censorship and threats to his personal safety. A former president of the country, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, is among those who have come to Lobjakas’ defence. We also talk to two leaders of anti-EKRE protest movements. Kristi Roost helped start the online campaign Kõigi Eesti this year with the goal of preserving Estonia as a respectful and inclusive country. A core group, including Silver Tambur, the co-founder of online magazine Estonian World, has grown to 27,000 members. Click here for Kõigi Eesti's video. Maris Hellrand, a civil society activist and journalist, takes a more direct approach by leading street protests outside Estonia’s seat of government, Stenbock House. She also has helped turn the tables on EKRE by promoting a lapel pin displaying “pink spittle,” which is one of EKRE’s epithets for their opponents. Neither movement was able to stop EKRE from joining the government or the European Parliament. But they are run by determined and imaginative campaigners. To start the show, we check in with Cas Mudde, a Dutch political scientist renowned for his work on populism and the radical right. Mudde offers some general thoughts on EKRE and on whether Moscow may have had a role in its rise, as was the case for some other far-right movements in Europe. Visit our website for episode art and more on EU Scream. “Beethoven Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125” by Papalin is licensed under CC by 3.0. “Airside No. 9” is played by Lara Natale.Support the show

You may have heard how large numbers of European Union citizens in Britain could not exercise their right to vote in the bloc’s elections. They were disenfranchised by British ineptitude and perhaps outright discrimination. But look beyond that group and there are 17.5 million more EU residents of voting age formally excluded because they lack a European passport. A significant number of them are in Berlin, where civil society groups are fed up that so many of the city’s residents are blocked from the ballot. This week we’re in the German capital to talk about these residents without voting rights with Séverine Lenglet of Citizens For Europe. We also cast a make-believe ballot in a symbolic EU election with James Rosalind of Demokratie in Der Mitte. We begin the show with Lucy Alice Thomas, the executive director of Give Something Back to Berlin, a group that brings together migrants, locals and refugees. Lucy spoke with us at Refugio, a venue where many old and new Berliners live and work together. Please visit our website for episode art and more EU Scream. “Beethoven Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125” by Papalin is licensed under CC by 3.0. “Airside No. 9” is played by Lara Natale.Support the show

Yanis Varoufakis is the leftist former Greek finance minister who tried and failed to end austerity. Like him or loathe him, Varoufakis is worth a look ahead of EU elections where centrists are struggling to compete with the far right’s clear and simple, if deceptive, messages. After a brief and tumultuous term in office, Varoufakis created the Democracy in Europe Movement, DiEM25. Varoufakis wants DiEM25 to win seats in the European Parliament to save the continent from what he sees as twin enemies: the Brussels establishment and far right ultra-nationalists. Critics point out that by creating his own movement, Varoufakis may further splinter the European left when it needs to be united against the far right, which appears in the ascendant. Varoufakis has found allies among a motley but enthusiastic crew: cerebral artists and musicians like Brian Eno; philosophers and intellectuals who name-drop Heidegger and Arendt at political rallies; and activists like Pamela Anderson, the ex-Playboy model and Baywatch star. We go on the trail of Varoufakis and his movement with Eleni Varvitsioti, the Greek journalist who has covered her country’s crises in masterful detail for Skai TV and the newspaper Kathimerini. Please visit our website for episode art and more EU Scream. “Beethoven Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125” by Papalin is licensed under CC by 3.0. “Airside No. 9” is played by Lara Natale.Support the show