Both Matteo Salvini and Marine le Pen rushed on Sunday night to congratulate Santiago Abascal, leader of Spain’s radical right party, Vox, for his astounding result in the general election. No doubt the radical right has a right to celebrate Abascal’s result. In the election held in 2016, Vox obtained 46,638 votes (0.2 percent) and no seats. On Sunday, it…
This series considers how 1989 and it’s events will shape our world in the future. Was 1989 the greatest year in European history? How much of what is going on was a blip? Are we witnessing the decline of liberalism today? Ash provides insights into the course of our political history, but cautions on prescribing a course to our future.…
The recent signing of the Steinmeier Formula, which outlines the implementation of the Minsk Agreements of 2015, left neither signatories nor observers indifferent. In Ukraine, the move has provoked a wave of discontent. In pro-European circles, it spawned some cautious optimism. The Russian authorities, who had promoted this formula and achieved, so it would seem, success, have also not rushed to celebrate victory. On…
Emmanuel Macron is a man with a lot of big ideas about how Europeans should step up their game on foreign policy. Perhaps his biggest so far is for Europe to engage in negotiations with Russia on a new European security order, reflecting his belief, expressed last month, that “the European continent will never be stable, will never be secure,…
As Syria’s guns slowly fall silent and Bashar al-Assad re-establishes central control over much of the country, the wider confrontation that has sustained nearly a decade of civil war is shifting to a new battleground: the economy. Whether and how Assad can rebuild Syria has become the central issue around which the opposing sides in this painful conflict are now…
This summer the Finnish Embassy in Moscow and the Finnish Consulate General in St Petersburg conducted a survey on Russians’ perceptions of Finland. They found out that 71% of Russians have a positive towards Finland, and the proportion of those who have a positive attitude towards Finland has increased since the last survey. More about the results read in the…
Michael Emerson, Associate Senior Research Fellow in the Europe in the World research unit at CEPS, analyzed the strategy of the EU in the neighborhood. He advocates enhancing the economic and political integration of the entire wider European space with the EU This Policy Insights paper makes the case for enhancing the economic and political integration of the entire wider…
Richard Giragosian, the founding director of the Regional Studies Center, analyzed the geopolitical situation in Armenia for ECFR. Armenia’s 2018 Velvet Revolution had no broad effect on relations between Russia and the West. So the country now faces two main challenges: 1) to meet the ambitions that the European Union avows for countries in its neighbourhood; 2) to manage its…
The Russian International Affairs Council published an article of Andrey Kortunov, Director General of the RIAC. He explained why interest in the G8 format from the Russian leadership declined, how mutual grievances and frustrations had been accumulating for many years and that there will be no return The history of relations between Russia and the G7 can be compared to…
