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Netanyahu seeks to strip citizenship from Israelis as threats to NAZA film directors intensify

Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday that he would seek new laws allowing Israel to strip citizenship from people who “smear” Israeli soldiers, escalating the campaign against the Oscar-winning film-makers behind the Gaza documentary NAZA, who have faced threats from senior government and military officials and groups of far-right Israelis gathering outside their families’ homes. NAZA, which was produced by the Guardian, concerns the country’s mass killing of civilians in Gaza and is named for an acronym used euphemistically by Israel’s intelligence service to indicate how many civilians it expects to die in an airstrike. The film builds on revelations first published by the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine, the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call and the Guardian from 2023 to 2025. The 80-minute documentary won the special jury prize at this year’s Venice film festival on Saturday, after receiving a 25-minute standing ovation – a festival record. Soon afterwards, however, the film’s directors, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, came under attack from members of Israel’s government, with the culture minister, Miki Zohar, calling for their citizenship to be revoked, and accusing them of “treason against the state”. Zohar on Wednesday thanked the Israeli prime minister for his announcement to change the law in order to revoke their citizenship, saying it was “time to put an end to this disgrace”. “We will revoke citizenship for anyone who defames IDF soldiers around the world – he will be deeply hurt in his pocket,’’ said Netanyahu, who intends to promote two government bills concerning defamation of IDF soldiers and the state of Israel. According to media reports, the first bill, which will be submitted through the justice ministry, will double the amount of a defamation claim to 1 million shekels without proof of damage. The second bill, which will be submitted through the interior ministry, will stipulate the revocation of citizenship for anyone who defames IDF soldiers and the state of Israel around the world. On Wednesday evening, dozens of rightwing activists gathered outside the home of the parents of Rachel Szor, one of the directors of NAZA. Among the organisers were activists and campaign staff linked to the far-right Otzma Yehudit party of Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister. Messages circulated in activist groups earlier on Wednesday urged supporters to gather outside her house. Some of the messages included explicit calls for violence. Police and border police officers were deployed at the scene. One protester called for the “death penalty for traitors” and demanded that the homes of the film-makers’ families be demolished. The latest attacks followed a series of threats and incidents targeting the directors. Ben-Gvir had called the directors “a disgrace” while Netanyahu condemned the film as “intolerable”, saying it portrayed the Israel Defense Forces as war criminals. On Tuesday, the IDF’s chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, said the military would “not allow IDF soldiers to be made targets through lies and blood libels” and would use “every tool at our disposal” against the film. The Israeli television channel i24 later reported that the military had opened a leak investigation and was seeking assistance from Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security and counterintelligence agency. The agency would respond only after receiving a formal request from the military prosecutor, who would probably first consult the attorney general, the channel reported. Netanyahu posted a video which included an old clip of Abraham confronting a soldier in the occupied West Bank’s South Hebron Hills, an area where Israeli forces have repeatedly been accused of supporting settlers during attacks on Palestinians. In the video, the Israeli PM says: “The same director who produced that terrible film that slanders IDF soldiers.” On Wednesday, far-right Israeli journalists, influencers and activists escalated their threats against the two film-makers. Rightwing activists were organising protests outside addresses linked to the directors and their colleagues. This comes after the Channel 14 journalist Yehuda Schlesinger said the directors should be “pursued” or “hunted” wherever they went, and prevented from returning to Israel. He urged Jews in Israel and abroad to make clear that what he described as “25 minutes of antisemitic applause” in Venice would come at a “heavy price”. A rightwing activist with tens of thousands of followers separately called for protesters to target Abraham’s family and associates, saying: “We’ll show him ‘collateral damage’.” He shared a photograph of Abraham’s mother and sought information about the director’s return flight so supporters could “welcome” him at the airport. A mural appeared in Ashdod depicting Abraham and Szor with crosshairs, horns, swastikas and the word “traitors” emblazoned over the top. A video showing its creation was shared by the far-right rapper Yoav Eliasi, who has more than 750,000 followers on Facebook. In an interview with Israel’s Channel 13, Abraham commented on the campaign of vilification, saying: “Of course it’s hard … [Israel] is my home, it’s the only place I want to live, a place that is important to me. So of course I’m afraid I won’t be able to return.” As the threats against the directors intensified, film-makers and human rights groups voiced support for the pair. In a joint statement, 43 local human rights organisations urged Israeli authorities to stop what they described as incitement and threats against the film-makers, and not to prosecute either them or their sources. “The institutional response to the film and the threats against its creators are characteristic of dictatorial regimes,” said the statement, signed by groups including Peace Now, Adalah, B’Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights Israel and Breaking the Silence. More than 1,500 Israeli film-makers have also signed a petition defending “freedom of expression and creation” and expressing solidarity with Szor and Abraham. “In recent days, we have witnessed an unprecedented smear and incitement campaign against the film-makers, with the line between this rhetoric and physical violence or threats to their lives narrowing rapidly,” the petition said. The signatories said the role of art and journalism was to reflect society and encourage debate, “even when facing a harsh reality”, and called for the film to be released in Israel so audiences could judge it for themselves. Szor and Abraham won an Oscar for their previous documentary, 2024’s No Other Land (co-directed with Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal), which spotlighted Palestinian resistance in the occupied West Bank. The NGOs called for a “thorough” investigation into the high number of casualties in Gaza, particularly among civilians, and for journalists to be granted unimpeded access to the territory, from which Israel has largely barred foreign reporters since October 2023. Prominent figures in international cinema have also expressed solidarity with Abraham and Szor. Laura Poitras, who directed the 2015 Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour, about the whistleblower Edward Snowden, called the threats by Israeli government officials “a threat to journalists worldwide”. Diplomatic and foreign ministry sources told Haaretz that threats to punish the directors may have actually have boosted international media attention on the documentary. “It would have made headlines anyway, but they really helped amplify it,” a source at the Israeli foreign ministry told the newspaper. “The very fact that the government responded drew attention and headlines.” Late on Wednesday, +972 Magazine posted a video showing a man painting over the mural of the NAZA directors, replacing the word “traitors” with “heroes”. In a statement, the Guardian said said was “disturbed to see the authoritarian response to NAZA in Israel. “Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor are brave journalists and filmmakers. The attacks against them come from people who have not yet seen the film. “NAZA is based on more than three years of investigative journalism. The testimonies it contains are true and we believe they deserve to be heard. The interviews were given by confidential journalistic sources. “We will robustly defend NAZA – and the team behind it – from any attacks or attempts at censorship.”

‘Made in Europe’ law threatens UK plans for reset with EU

The UK government’s EU reset summit will be delayed again unless the bloc agrees to discuss legislation that could lock British business out of parts of EU industry, government sources have said. The “Made in Europe” legislation – formally known as the Industrial Accelerator Act – is designed to curb China’s increasing presence in European industry, but was not on the reset plan agreed by the former prime minister Keir Starmer and the European Commission chief, Ursula von der Leyen, in London in May 2025. A follow-up summit was due to be held in July this year, but was cancelled after Starmer’s resignation. The government is now looking to change the roadmap, with one source saying that “Made in Europe should be on the agenda”. It is understood that Hamish Falconer, the new cabinet minister with responsibility for the reset, told the EU’s trade commissioner, Maros Sefcovic, this was the UK’s new priority when the pair met last week. The trade minister, Anas Sarwar, told a gathering of UK business leaders on Tuesday they needed to let their EU partners know the risks posed by Made in Europe, which will prioritise EU suppliers in key industries including car manufacturing and defence. Ministers have privately expressed fears that the reset has lost significant momentum since Andy Burnham became prime minister, with his focus on the domestic agenda. Agreements have yet to be reached on several key issues, including what tuition fees will be paid by EU students coming to the UK on a mooted “youth experience” programme. UK sources say that while a food and drink deal and a youth mobility scheme are still on the agenda, the government will not agree to a new summit date until the bigger issues of the Industrial Accelerator Act are included in discussions. There was talk in London and Brussels that a meeting could be convened on 6 November, but it is understood this could now be pushed backuntil the end of November or beyond. One government source said: “We are willing to negotiate on the things that matter to them, but they have to be able to negotiate the thing that matters to us. Made in Europe should be on the table, definitely.” The UK fears the Made in Europe laws could jeopardise billions of pounds worth of trade if British goods are not categorised as European, locking it out of key contracts on the continent. France, which conceived the Made in Europe laws, is pushing to have the legislation passed by the end of the year, deepening fears that British manufacturing could be left behind. It is thought that France is sympathetic to the UK’s position, but believes increasing competition from China makes it more important to get the legislation on the books now, and make allowances for third countries later, a process that could take years. One EU diplomat said that there was substantial backing among key member states for the UK to be included in Made in Europe, though not all agreed. “The problem is the benefits are seen as asymmetrical,” the diplomat said. “The UK gets more out of it than the EU.” It is understood the Netherlands, Germany, Poland and Italy are all in favour of the UK’s inclusion, but France remains unconvinced. The government’s newly assertive approach could give the UK some leverage in negotiations over concessions on youth mobility, something that is a political priority for many EU capitals. Another UK source said a deal on Made in Europe would be “a good faith demonstration that we can find answers and almost everything else”. A government spokesperson said: “The UK is a close and trusted European partner, committed to our shared security and economic cooperation. “We will continue to engage with the EU on Made in Europe and work together, as like-minded partners, to boost growth and open up trade.” The UK’s desire for a deal on manufacturing rules comes at time when the EU is under pressure from industry across the bloc to loosen China’s growing presence in supply chains. Last week, manufacturing bosses warned of a potential loss of 300,000 jobs this year unless incentives were put in place to make European products more attractive than cheaper parts from China. The EU’s deficit with China is now running at €1bn a day, with fears that European companies are being cannibalised from within. In her state of the union address to the European parliament on Wednesday, von der Leyen said the EU needed to grow non-Chinese supplies of rare earths and critical minerals vital to manufacturing. Her surprise offer of an associate membership deal with Canada demonstrated how far Brussels can go to court third-country partners. Speaking in the presence of the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, the EU chief said: “We want to bring the relationship with Canada to the highest level possible. We must urgently reimagine our partnerships.” The EU and Canada are to hold a summit in late October to develop their future relationship. The 27-member EU has never had an associate membership category, though it has close ties with Norway, Iceland and Switzerland, enabling deep economic integration with these countries, which follow many EU rules including free movement – a red line for the UK. Carney, who is to address the European parliament on Thursday, has called for a “unique alliance” with the EU, as his country seeks to reduce its heavy dependence on US trade. Burnham met Carney at a football match in Liverpool on Wednesday night, where the two Everton fans watched their team in the EFL Cup. Burnham is also due to meet the US president, Donald Trump, for the first time at the UN general assembly in New York next week. The potential new alliance between the EU and Canada will worry UK ministers that the bloc’s priorities are shifting. Should Burnham fail to complete a food and drink deal that was already on Starmer’s reset agenda, it could have implications for October’s budget, as the economic effects of easing trade with the EU is priced in as part of growth calculations. The Conservatives criticised the UK-EU reset on Wednesday, saying a future Tory government would build a wholly independent regulatory system. Alex Burghart, the party’s deputy leader, and Victoria Atkins, the shadow environment secretary, warned the plans would make Britain less competitive. Speaking at the Policy Exchange thinktank, Burghart said: “Labour’s EU reset is the worst of both worlds and will leave Britain unable to take advantage of our country’s future growth potential. “The next Conservative government would not be bound by this arrangement and will begin work now on a genuinely independent regulatory system.”

Is EU’s offer to Canada a blueprint for Britain – or a reminder it is out in the cold?

Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, has been advocating closer alignment with “middle powers” since January in the face of recklessness in Washington. But what should worry another middle power, the UK, is that it was Brussels that came up with Wednesday’s big reveal in Strasbourg. To a standing ovation at her State of the Union address, Ursula von der Leyen said she wanted to open the door to Canada becoming the EU’s first “associate member” in a push to forge new ⁠links among allies in “an openly hostile world”. The European Commission president’s deal could be seen as an “earthquake” offer said Joël Reland, of UK in a Changing Europe, though it remains “deliciously vague”. But it also sets Canada apart from the UK, which could, once upon a time, have had some sort of associate membership with the EU were it not for the drive for a clean-break Brexit. The last time associate membership of the EU was mooted was in relation to Ukraine as an off-the-books novel way of bringing Kyiv closer to the bloc without become a fully fledged member state. New partnerships, von der Leyen said, were needed “in the cold fragility of today’s world” and in the face of an increasingly assertive China. Just moments earlier she spoke about the need for the EU to diversify urgently its supply of critical raw materials (CRM) and rare earths currently dominated by China, allowing it to follow Japan and stockpile said minerals needed for everything from the car to the defence industries. It is not a new subject – after all the EU has been grappling with China’s export surplus since 2023 and it introduced the Critical Raw Materials Act as far back as 2024. The prospect of an enhanced relationship with Ottawa is one that Keir Starmer might have dreamed of. Canada has something the EU desperately needs – rich supplies of CRM and rare earths – and the EU has something Canada urgently wants: new markets for products it can no longer sell into the EU in the face of a trade war with Donald Trump. Speaking before von der Leyen’s speech, Tobias Cremer, a German social democrat MEP, said a new deeper relationship between the EU and Canada could be a blueprint for other countries, including the UK. Bernd Lange, the influential chair of the European parliament’s international trade committee, said associate membership could “become a model for close transcontinental partnerships with democratic countries against the new model of the law of the strongest”. After Iceland’s rejection of membership of the EU, Fabian Zuleeg, the chief executive and chief economist of the European Policy Centre, suggested it was time that the EU developed new models, beyond the European Economic Area, that might offer “partial, gradual or associated membership options”. Reland said the vagueness of the offer extended to Canada could be promising for the UK’s hopes for a similar offer. “Any deep Canadian integration into the EU market would take some very heavy work to negotiate a defined set of treaty-bound rights and obligations, and so it seems more likely that – at least in the short term – cooperation will focus on more vaguely constructed alliances for ‘prosperity’ and ‘security’,” which aligns with the UK government’s desires, Reland wrote on Wednesday. In the current political climate in the UK, it is difficult to envisage a world in which Andy Burnham would encourage any associate membership of the EU. He has a steely focus on domestic issues and is keen to avoid going down any Brexit wormholes. The UK is seeking a reset with the EU, but the goals in the first year were modest and have yet to be achieved. The offer to Canada suggests the bigger ambitions for relations with the EU the better. Additional reporting: Jennifer Rankin

Nato leader warns of ‘most dangerous and complex security environment in a generation’

Nato needs “more UK and more Europe” to deal with the most dangerous security environment faced by the west in a generation, the secretary general of the 32-country military alliance said this afternoon on a visit to the UK. Mark Rutte praised Britain for promising to increase defence spending in line with US demands after a meeting prime minister Andy Burnham – but argued that the military and financial effort must continue into the future. “It is essential that your armed forces continue to provide the hard power Nato needs,” Rutte said in a speech to a specialist audience at Ditchley Park, a wartime retreat used by Winston Churchill in Oxfordshire. It was a plea for the UK to make progress towards an alliance-wide target demanded by Donald Trump of spending 3.5% of GDP by 2035, about £30bn in real terms, money that has to be found from extra taxation, borrowing or reducing other spending. Britain has so far only budgeted to increase defence spending to 2.7% of GDP by the end of the next decade. Short-term financial pressures have meant that the army has been told to stop non-essential training by the end of the year. Chancellor John Healey resigned as defence secretary from Keir Starmer’s government in June because the former prime minister would not commit to 3% by 2030, arguing that it would require too great a step up in the next decade. But Healey refused to recommit to the interim target when he was appointed to the Treasury by Burnham a month later, raising questions that the new government was backloading spending increases until after the next election. Rutte said that he had discussed Britain’s “Nato commitments” when he had met Burnham at a science business park in Oxford earlier on Wednesday, without offering any details, in the first one-on-one meeting between the two. Prior to that meeting, Burnham acknowledged that he had replaced Starmer, but insisted that there was “never any change in the UK’s unwavering commitment to Nato and our Nato obligations”. The Nato chief, a former Dutch prime minister, said many in Europe had made the “casual assumption” that the US would “always provide most of the muscle and pick up the bill, no matter what” until Trump returned to the White House. Instead, he noted that during a summit in The Hague in 2025, the UK and other alliance members had agreed to increase their own defence spending to match US levels, in response to Trump’s demand that Europe take the lead in defending the continent. “We need more UK and more Europe in the alliance,” Rutte said, because Nato “faces the most dangerous and complex security environment in a generation” with a return to wars in Europe and the Middle East, and wider geopolitical uncertainty. Citing “Russia and its war against Ukraine, terrorism, Iran and the tectonic shifts of global geopolitical competition”, Rutte argued that the UK and Europe needed to invest more, because otherwise “our collective defence will not be credible”. Britain, he said, had “a central role in building this stronger Europe in a stronger Nato” and noted that the UK was spending billions to upgrade the Trident nuclear deterrent, which is pledged to the defence of Nato members. The UK is also gradually upgrading its conventional forces, though the UK’s overall defence spending, long the second largest in the alliance, is now behind Germany. By 2029, Berlin’s military budgets are on track to be twice that of the UK. The UK was “leading the pushback” against a Russian campaign of provocation and sabotage across Europe, Rutte said, and that the UK had been “a good friend to Ukraine”. Britain spends £3bn a year supporting Ukraine with weapons. Meanwhile, Canada, seeking to diversify its defence ties ⁠away from ⁠the US, has formally applied to join the British-led Joint Expeditionary Force military ⁠coalition, prime minister Mark Carney’s office said on Wednesday. The a grouping ⁠of 10 North Atlantic Nato member states is a rapid response ‌military partnership. Canada, already a Nato member, ‌is seeking closer military cooperation with Europe. The JEF comprises Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the UK.

At least 21 killed after Israeli-hit building in Gaza City collapses

A building housing about 100 displaced Palestinian families has collapsed in Gaza City, killing at least 21 people in their sleep, including 11 children, forcing rescuers to dig through the rubble with their bare hands as they search for dozens of people believed to be trapped. A rescue team from Gaza’s civil defence said they had recovered the bodies of five children among the victims, while 25 injured people were taken to hospital. Medical sources said rescuers could hear the voices of people trapped beneath the rubble as they tried to reach them. The bombed-out multistorey building, which contained four apartments on each floor, had previously been hit by Israeli strikes during the war, leaving its structure badly weakened and at risk of collapse. When it gave way on Wednesday, it fell on to tents beside it housing displaced families, witnesses said. The collapse highlights the continuing danger facing tens of thousands of Palestinians living in an estimated 2,000 buildings damaged by Israeli airstrikes across Gaza. Mohammed Abu Dan, a superviser with the civil defence team recovering victims, said more than 10 families had been living in the building and displaced people had been forced to stay there because no other shelter was available. “Search and rescue operations are being carried out under extremely difficult conditions due to a lack of the necessary equipment and resources,” he said. Palestinian and UN officials have blamed Israeli restrictions on Gaza for the lack of heavy machinery in the territory. Israel says its restrictions are intended to prevent equipment from reaching militant groups. A video obtained by Reuters showed rescue workers trying to pull two people from beneath a collapsed wall. Another video circulating on social media showed Gaza’s civil defence spokesperson, Mahmoud Basal, carrying a young girl wrapped in a bloodstained scarf. Raed al-Dahshan, the director of Gaza City’s civil defence service, said: “We are still hearing voices from under the rubble, so there is still hope to find people.” Alessandro Mrakic, the head of the UN Development Programme’s Gaza office, said rescuers from UN agencies were taking part in the operation, which he described as extremely difficult because of the lack of appropriate machinery. Egypt’s relief agency was also involved. “There are actually people that are digging with their bare hands. We need to prepare [for more deaths],” Mrakic said. Tents belonging to displaced families had been erected along the road beside the building because there was nowhere else for them to shelter. Similar incidents have occurred repeatedly over the past two years, with dozens of homes and buildings damaged during the war later collapsing, trapping people and causing further deaths and injuries. With few other options, many Palestinians have returned to partly destroyed homes or moved into abandoned buildings, clearing small spaces among the rubble despite the danger. Soaring rents and the cost of vacant land have made finding safer accommodation increasingly difficult. Hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians also remain unable to return to neighbourhoods near the so-called yellow line, forcing families to find whatever space they can elsewhere. In May, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, ordered the military to seize 70% of Gaza. Damaged roofs, walls and supporting columns can collapse without warning, particularly during strong winds, heavy rain or further bombardment. Asked whether they feared for themselves and their children, people living there said: “Yes, we are afraid, but where can we go? This is better than staying out on the street.” Israeli strikes on Gaza have continued despite the ceasefire. According to Gaza’s health ministry, 1,369 Palestinians have been killed and 4,627 wounded since the fragile ceasefire took effect on 11 October 2025. This year, an independent UN inquiry found Israel had continued to commit genocide by deliberately targeting Palestinian children in Gaza. Separately, a video from the Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood of Gaza City showed the aftermath of an Israeli drone strike that killed Mohammed al-Zinati, 15, and wounded several other people. Al-Zinati had been trying to recover the body of a man killed in an earlier strike. Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, said on Wednesday that it was only a matter of time before Israel resumed full-scale war in Gaza and moved to force out its Palestinian population. Katz, responding to criticism from another rightwing politician before the 27 October elections, said 70% of Gaza had already been emptied of its population during Israel’s offensive launched after the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October 2023 that killed more than 1,200 people, the deadliest attack against Israel, according to official Israeli figures. He added that the Israel Defense Forces were prepared “to finish the job so that we can also implement the migration plan”. Since the war began, at least 73,783 Palestinians have been killed and 174,738 wounded, according to the health ministry.

Former French culture minister goes on trial over corruption charges

Rachida Dati, a former French culture minister, has gone on trial in Paris on corruption charges linked to dealings with the Renault-Nissan carmaking group. Dati, 60, is accused of illegal lobbying when she accepted €900,000 (£770,000) in lawyer’s fees from a Netherlands-based subsidiary of Renault-Nissan while she was a member of the European parliament. The court will have to decide what the money was for. Dati’s legal team denied all corruption allegations, saying she worked “exclusively” as a lawyer for the Renault-Nissan subsidiary. French prosecutors argue that she was instead paid to lobby for the carmaking group, an activity that is banned for members of the European parliament. Prosecutors said there was a lack of evidence to show Dati had carried out legal work. Dati was placed under investigation in 2019 on suspicion of illegally lobbying for Renault-Nissan between October 2009 and February 2013, when she was an MEP. Dati is on trial with Carlos Ghosn, the disgraced former Renault-Nissan chief, who will be tried in absentia. Ghosn, 72, was detained in Japan in November 2018 amid allegations of financial misconduct in a separate case involving a plot to falsify records about his personal pay in order to enrich himself. He dodged trial in Japan after escaping to Lebanon in an audio equipment case. He has denied all wrongdoing in the Japan case as well as in the Dati case. French prosecutors argue that a legal services contract signed in 2009 between Dati and Ghosn, in which Dati was paid an annual fee of €300,000, was used to disguise lobbying work. Investigators obtained the contract in 2019 during a search of Renault’s headquarters after Ghosn’s arrest in Japan. Dati, 60, who is the district mayor of the 7th arrondissement in Paris, is one of the most prominent figures on the French right. She was the first woman of north African and Muslim heritage to hold a major French government post when she was appointed justice minister by the rightwing president Nicolas Sarkozy. She returned to government under Emmanuel Macron, as culture minister. Dati redefined political celebrity in France, and has said growing up as the second of 11 children on a low-income housing estate on the outskirts of Chalon-sur-Saône in Burgundy gave her a greater understanding of the French electorate. She ran for mayor of Paris earlier this year, but lost to the Socialist Emmanuel Grégoire. If convicted, Dati faces up to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to €450,000. She could also face a five-year ban on holding public office. Dati’s lawyers said: “Unfounded allegations of influence peddling in the European parliament stem from an artificial intellectual construct devised by the prosecution.” In a separate investigation, Dati has been accused of accepting nearly €300,000 in undeclared payments from the energy group GDF Suez, also while an MEP. Prosecutors said last year they were looking into reports Dati failed to declare jewellery and watches worth €420,000 upon taking ministerial office. She has denied any wrongdoing in all cases.

Sweden voted against more power for the far right – but are centrists listening?

Europe’s focus turned nervously to Sweden on Sunday, after an explosive election in Germany just a week earlier placed a far-right party, officially classed as “extremist”, on the brink of power in a German state for the first time since the Nazi era. A party with neo-Nazi roots has been pulling the government’s strings in Sweden for the last four years. Would the country’s general election put the far right formally in government? Or would enough Swedes opt for a gear change, having seen the Sweden Democrats’ hardline (some would say poisonous) agenda in action? Votes were still being counted on Wednesday but it was immediately clear that the far-right Sweden Democrats had suffered a setback; their first loss of support among voters since entering parliament for the first time 16 years ago. The party slipped from being the country’s second biggest party to its third. The centre-left Social Democrats appear poised for a return to power, although it could take months for their leader, Magdalena Andersson, to form a coalition. Strong results for the left and green parties gave her left bloc a wafer-thin, three-seat majority. Is the far right’s regression, however modest, a turning point? Have Swedes reached the limits of a taboo-busting experiment with populist, nationalist rightwing prescriptions? And is there a message for mainstream leaders across Europe, many of whom seem fatalistic about a continent-wide far-right surge? France goes to the polls in April while governments in Italy, Spain and Poland, all face their electorates later next year. The Dutch political scientist Cas Mudde says elections in one country are a poor guide to what will happen in another. Specific local factors in Sweden, including a scandal, may have dented the far right’s support. For Mudde, the scale of the AfD’s win in Saxony Anhalt, however, was “a black day for Europe” – and with far-right ideas gaining ground, he warned mainstream politicians that “today’s key fight is for democracy, rather than for party or power”. This is where Sweden offers a cautionary tale. Its political establishment had “fully normalised” the far-right party, Mudde said. “Its nativism is now shared by all the major parties, albeit in lighter form, from the Moderates on the right to the Social Democrats on the left.” But the decline in the far right’s support, for now, he thinks, “at the very least creates space for mainstream parties to focus on issues other than immigration”. Ann-Cathrine Jungar, a professor of political science at Södertörn University in Stockholm, is very sure that the Sweden Democrats are not on the way out. Electoral rankings go up and down, she said, and the party’s influence will endure. More important now is how the mainstream parties respond. “We focus a lot on the extreme and radical right parties, but the key to their influence is what the other parties do. Why have Sweden’s mainstream parties adopted the far right’s policies? The Social Democrats have co-opted their ideas, even though they are counter to the country’s needs. In Sweden, we need competent, talented people who want to come and live here, we need labour for health and social care. Yet nationalism seems to be the prevailing ideology now.” In a widely read Guardian essay headlined How Sweden lost its soul – and stopped being Sweden, published before the vote, Martin Gelin documented his country’s transformation after 2022. Rightwing parties that year signed a Faustian pact with the Sweden Democrats, buying its support for a minority rightwing government. The deal? The far right party was given a direct hand in shaping policy. “A new Sweden has emerged, cruel and cold for migrants”, wrote Gelin, with xenophobic and ethno-nationalist ideas “now comfortably embedded in the political mainstream”. Most shockingly, Andersson’s Social Democrats, modelling themselves on their hardline Danish counterparts, had bought into the far right’s framings on crime and immigration. Will Sweden’s Social Democrats now learn from their worst performance in more than 100 years, and embrace an agenda that does not involve deporting toddlers to Iran, people with dementia to the UK, or locking up 14-year-olds? Jungar is sceptical. “When it comes to linking crime and immigration, this is the new normal,” she said. “The Social Democrats will not pursue policies that are more liberal.” Yet the political centre in Sweden could articulate a clear alternative to the far right, Mudde says. The Left and the Greens did significantly better among young voters in this week’s election. “This reflects a development we see across Europe, namely that young people prefer outspokenly leftwing parties over centre-left parties.” *** Ghosts of grievance Like Giorgia Meloni’s party, Brothers of Italy, and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France, the Sweden Democrats have “deradicalised” in selective ways, to broaden their appeal, Jungar told me. By contrast, what was striking in Germany, was how the AfD doubled its score to 44% of the vote, on what Constanze Stelzenmuller in the FT called “a programme of stunning malevolence”. Two further regional elections this Sunday in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania will be closely watched, including by the AfD’s American boosters such as Elon Musk. Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania has economic and demographic conditions comparable to Saxony Anhalt. For those struggling to understand the appeal of the AfD in eastern Germany, Carolin Würfel’s essay offered an original insight. Born in the former East Germany, Würfel believes that many voters there don’t actually know or care about the AfD’s detailed policies. But the party had tapped into a legacy of grievance about the economic impact of reunification in the 1990s. “Villages and small towns that had been hollowed out, some of them ghostly and depopulated, were suddenly told again: you matter. Everyone else may have left you behind, but I, we, the AfD, care.” The AfD won’t improve life in east Germany, Würfel wrote, “but that was never the point”. As in Sweden, the political centre in Germany is now being warned that time is running out to offer a credible democratic alternative to the far right. As Florian Ranft of the Das Progressive Zentrum thinktank wrote: “Waiting for the AfD to fail is not a strategy.” To receive the complete version of This Is Europe in your inbox every Wednesday, please subscribe here.

Former Kosovo president Thaçi sentenced to 25 years in prison by international court in The Hague – as it happened

And, on that note, we will be closing the blog for today. Former Kosovo Liberation Army commander and later Kosovo president Hashim Thaçi has been sentenced to 25 years in prison as he is held criminally responsible for war crimes during the violent break from Serbia in the 1990s by an international court in The Hague (11:33, 16:01). It found that Thaçi “was a key member” in the Kosovo Liberation Army and even “personally participated in crimes,” despite his denials (11:56). The decision of the tribunal was deeply unpopular in Kosovo, where people booed the verdict and chanted in support of their former leader (12:40), while some of his supporters even briefly clashed with police in The Hague (13:11, 14:45). Elsewhere, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has warned the EU is “the strongest” but “most precarious” it has ever been as it faces “an openly hostile world”, as she floated the idea of Canada getting an “associate membership” of the bloc (10:42, 11:04). There is no existing legal structure that would allow for that move, leaving lots of questions over what that would actually entail (16:40). Carney is set to address the European parliament on Thursday (11:13), after visiting the UK this evening to watch his beloved Everton play in the third round of the Carabao Cup (13:28). In a wide-ranging speech, von der Leyen also announced proposals to ban social media for children under 13 as she warned their omnipresence were “depriving children of their childhood.” If you have any tips, comments or suggestions, email me at jakub.krupa@theguardian.com. I am also on Bluesky at @jakubkrupa.bsky.social and on X at @jakubkrupa.