European Union

Sweden's Left Party has assumed a key role in the struggle to form a new government: it says it will prevent the leader of the Social Democrats Stefan Löfven from becoming prime minister if his party and the Greens stick to the plans for market liberalisation set out in their agreement with the Centre Party and the Liberals. The four parties had struck the deal in order to achieve a majority without the right-wing populist Sweden Democrats. Can the strategy work?

Britain’s latest clean air strategy sets significantly tighter air pollution limits than the EU’s, but could lack the regulatory teeth to enforce them after Brexit. EURACTIV's media partner Climate Home News reports.

The Russian foreign ministry published on Tuesday (14 January) a statement voicing concern about “instability” in Greece following the ratification of the recent change of the constitution in Macedonia. Greece retorted with a warning to Russia not to interfere in its internal affairs.

Parts of a German risk assessment of the weedkiller glyphosate was copy-pasted from contributions from industry, according to a report presented in the European Parliament Tuesday. The authors said 50.1% of the chapters assessing studies on health risks related to glyphosate were identified as plagiarism. This report was financed by three centre-left and left-wing political groups, and comes ahead of a vote on the conclusions of parliament's pesticides committee.

Germany has reacted with disdain after America's "unusual" ambassador to Berlin threatened sanctions against its new Russian gas pipeline.

The Faroe Islands and the UK will sign a free-trade agreement later this month to keep trade going after Brexit. "Trade with the UK is secure and can continue unhindered when the country leaves the EU," minister of foreign affairs and trade, Poul Michelsen, told Greenland newspaper Sermitsiaq. The new free-trade agreement is based on the current EU agreement regulating trade with the Faroe Islands.

British MPs on Tuesday night are expected to reject Theresa May's deal on leaving the European Union amid calls that the 29 March Brexit deadline could be pushed back.

German chancellor Angela Merkel has proposed a EU-China summit during Germany's 2020 EU presidency, likely to coincide with China's displacement of the US as the EU's largest trade partner. Merkel communicated the idea to EU colleagues in December, according to Reuters. The summit would include national leaders of EU countries as well as officials from Brussels and Beijing.

Flemish government head, nationalist party N-VA member Geert Bourgeois, announced on Monday that he will lead the party's list in the European election in Flanders. "We want to express our Flemish voice very explicitly at European level," he tweeted. Belgian federal election will be held the same day as the European parliament elections, after the federal government collapsed in December over N-VA's refusal to sign the non-binding UN migration pact.

MEPs in the European Parliament's Committee on Industry, Research and Energy backed plans on Monday evening (14 January) for a comprehensive policy framework on artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, weeks after ethical concerns in the field were highlighted in a EU report.

The EU commission is set to propose on Tuesday that EU governments gradually abandon their national vetoes, starting this year with policies that do not have an impact on national taxation rights. Member states should agree to take decisions by supermajority in more sensitive areas by the end of 2020, according to the draft obtained by Bloomberg. EU decisions on taxation require unanimity among governments, according to the EU treaties.

Talks between Brussels and Berne have been running since 2014 in a bid to formalise the 120 separate accords that have been negotiated between the EU and Switzerland since a 1992 referendum in the Alpine state rejected joining the European Economic Area. But the draft agreement, which was made public in early December, now seems unlikely to become reality.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is meeting Tuesday (15 January) the premiers of Germany’s four lignite mining states as well as the heads of the country’s so-called coal exit commission. The move, however, cannot hide the fact that Berlin strongly lacked the political willingness to bring the energy transition forward over the past years, Hans Josef Fell, the initiator of the world-renowned German renewable energy feed-in legislation 2000, told EURACTIV in an interview.

Thousands of people gathered across Poland on Monday after the fatal stabbing of Gdansk mayor Pawel Adamowicz on stage at a charity concert on Sunday evening. Adamowicz was for 20 years a popular, liberal mayor. EU Council president Donald Tusk, a Gdansk native, joined the crowds and called Adamowicz a "man of Solidarity and freedom" and "a European". No evidence has emerged that the attack was politically motivated.

Now a governing party in Italy, the Five Star Movement gets back to their anti-system roots complaining the "waste of money” of having another Parliament’ seat in Strasbourg, asking for getting rid of it.

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and US counterpart Donald Trump mooted Monday  (14 January) the creation of a "security zone" in northern Syria as tensions rose over the fate of Kurdish fighters in the war-torn country.