European Union

Spokespersons for Parliament and for the political groups will hold a briefing on the 15 - 18 December plenary session, on Friday at 11.00 in Parliament’s Anna Politkovskaya press room.

Source : © European Union, 2025 - EP

Spokespersons for Parliament and for the political groups will hold a briefing on the 15 - 18 December plenary session, on Friday at 11.00 in Parliament’s Anna Politkovskaya press room.

Source : © European Union, 2025 - EP

Tens of thousands of people took to the streets across Bulgaria on Wednesday to protest against the government and corruption in the latest rally since the end of last month.

The SAFE initiative was initially pitched to replenish national defence stockpiles through joint purchases

The arrests are tied to suspected contracts manipulation within the broader kickback-for-contracts scheme engulfing Prime minister Pedro Sánchez's Socialist Party

Courts have ruled domestic energy firms can't sue EU governments – Budapest thinks otherwise

German-Israeli relations became strained after Berlin imposed a partial embargo on arms deliveries to Israel

Both volumes and prices have fallen, "dragging export revenues to their lowest since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022," the International Energy Agency said.

• The European Parliament that emerged after the June 2024 elections is characterized by a high level of diversity and fragmentation.
• More than 200 national and transnational parties are represented, with more than one third of the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) belonging to very small political parties, with one to three representatives, or have no party affiliation. Ten national parties gather 204 MEPs, dominating political interactions in the EP environment.
• The observed fragmentation enhances diversity and pluralism but also undermines the formation of stable political and ideological networks and coalitions.
• The EPP, the S&D, and Renew, together with the Greens at some (small) distance, form the cluster of the ‘governing majority’. ESN and PfE are located far away from this first cluster. The European Left and the ECR have an intermediate position, showing thematic flexibility and an occasional, selective ad hoc convergence with either cluster in different votes.
• S&D is the most cohesive political group in the EP, followed by the EPP and the RENEW group that also show a high level of cohesion. Large deviations in the voting patterns of their constituent members exist in the ECR and PfE groups.
• Combining our findings with the ones of the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) on the ideological positions of the EP political groups, we find that the groups’ positions on European integration explain voting alignment better than ideology does. This reinforces a key literature insight that European integration has become perhaps the most influential cleavage in the EP politics — one that increasingly structures legislative behaviour beyond the traditional Left–Right divide.

Read here in pdf the Working paper by Antonis Papakostas, former EU official; Research Associate, ELIAMEP; Spyros Blavoukos, Professor, Athens University of Economics and Business; Senior Research Fellow and Head of the ‘Ariane Condellis’ European Program, ELIAMEP and Georgios Matsoukas, Research Assistant, ELIAMEP.

 

Brussels has made a series of last-minute moves in recent weeks to calm farm-sector anger over the controversial trade deal

'It is incredible that this study did not assess the impact on essential and critical medicines,' says generics lobby chief Adrian van den Hoven

The law prevents girls younger than 14 from wearing headscarves that "cover the head in accordance with Islamic traditions" in all schools.

State aid will go to GlobalFoundries and X-Fab which the Commission said have "committed" to becoming Open EU Foundries

Portugal is facing a critical moment for the future of its motorway network.

"We shouldn't take sovereignty to the extent of blocking anyone unless [they're] European," deputy minister for digital policy, Nicodemos Damianou, told Euractiv

Despite starting the week furious over an EPP power grab, the socialists, Renew and the Greens ended it saying the final carve-up felt fair enough

Donald Trump has reiterated the criticism of Europe recently expressed in the US National Security Strategy. In an interview with Politico, he said that Europe's top politicians were too "weak" and too "politically correct", and that their efforts to control migration and end the war in Ukraine had failed. European commentators make suggestions as to how the bloc should position itself.