The European Commission’s top jobs will all soon be up for grabs again after next month’s European election.
Which country will get the all-powerful trade commissioner job and oversee the EU’s impending trade war with China? Will the Poles secure a newly created defense portfolio to square up to their arch-rivals the Russians? And who will get to police U.S. tech giants like Apple and Google as Europe’s next competition chief?
Even before the June 6-9 election, maneuvering is underway
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TBILISI, Georgia — Almost every day, Giuli Alasania makes the drive down a dusty highway through the Georgian capital to visit her son, former President Mikheil Saakashvili, in hospital.
“It’s ironic,” she says, fussing over the plastic pots of stewed beans and salads she is bringing for his lunch, “when he was president, he built this clinic. Now he’s dying in it.”
Ailing and imprisoned, Saakashvili holds Georgia’s future
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Mujtaba Rahman is the head of Eurasia Group’s Europe practice and a columnist for POLITICO Europe. He tweets at @Mij_Europe.
The European Commission finally delivered its long-anticipated oral report on Ukraine’s progress last month, looking at the headway made toward the seven reforms the country will need to pass if European Union leaders are to green-light opening accession negotiations with Kyiv.
On reforms relating to the judiciary, Kyiv
Ben Cohen wasn’t talking about ice cream. He was talking about American militarism.
At 72, the co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream is bald and bespectacled. He looks fit, cherubic even, but when he got going on what it was like to grow up during the Cold War, his tone became less playful and more assertive — almost defiant.
“I had his image of these two countries facing each other, and each one had this huge pile of shiny,
This is the moment Ukrainians have been fighting — and dying — for. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is walking up a red carpet in Brussels’ Europa building toward his first meeting of the European Council, the forum where the European Union’s leaders hammer out the bloc’s most perplexing problems.
He has been here before, of course, wearing his olive green sweatshirt in solidarity with the Ukrainian soldiers fighting in the trenches — his eyes exhausted from leading his country through
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EU countries are all for Ukraine in its war against Russia, but they are all over the map when it comes to Ukraine’s demand to be recognized as a candidate for EU membership.
The European Commission on Friday is expected to recommend formal candidate status for Ukraine and for neighboring Moldova, but the final decision requires unanimity among the 27 EU heads of state and government who will gather for a European Council
Sixty years ago this spring, there was a huge — literally — shift in women’s bodies. For such a fundamental change, it happened almost by accident.
Timmie Jean Lindsey, a 29-year-old mother of six, went into hospital in Houston, Texas, for a routine operation to remove a tattoo from her breast.
Her two surgeons, Frank Gerow and Thomas Cronin, persuaded her to undergo a new procedure, which until then had only been tested on dogs: breast implants. She went from
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As EU leaders prepare to meet their Western Balkan counterparts on Wednesday, they might want to ask the European Commission’s point man for an impartial view of the region’s efforts to meet democratic standards and one day join the bloc.
Then again, they might not.
According to more than a dozen officials from multiple institutions and an analysis of internal documents, European Commissioner Olivér Várhelyi has overseen a push to play down concerns
