Alberto Alemanno
Presented as a transparency exercise, a draft European Parliament report would curb the Court of Justice’s power to defend judicial independence across the Union and with it the legal infrastructure on which the EU’s citizens, companies and rights depend, warns Alberto Alemanno.
What the Socialists, Liberals and Greens can no longer do is denounce the hard-right while sustaining the parliamentary machinery that gives it influence. Yet that is precisely what they have been doing since 2024, and the renewal of the European Parliament presidency is about to expose the contradiction.
Unanimity has paralysed EU action too many times. This time it’s possible to avoid it, writes Albert Alemanno. The proposal to ban goods from Israeli settlements is qualitatively different. It does not seek to punish a state or alter a geopolitical relationship. Its sole aim is to ensure that EU commerce does not infringe international law.
In the US, the backlash against AI data centres is bipartisan, organised and growing. But not in Europe, where government are bending over backwards to attract them, writes Albert Alemanno.
Whatever happens on 12 April, the EU will emerge after the Hungarian elections without a suitable plan for the country and its future relations with the Union. Its entire Hungary strategy amounts to a single wager: that Orbán loses, writes Alberto Alemanno.
At their ‘leaders’ retreat’, we are seeing the curtailing of EU democracy in the name of saving Europe’s economy. They should be unleashing citizens’ demand for a stronger, independent Europe.
What distinguishes the current review is its conceptual ambition — floating the idea of ending lifelong civil-service status for new hires, a move that, if extended to the whole institution, would signal a shift from a permanent, independent bureaucracy to a flexible, temporary workforce aligned with shifting political priorities, warns Alberto Alemanno.
The playbook is brutally efficient: fabricate a scandal, delegitimise and defund organisations into dependency on philanthropic support, then criminalise their new funding as foreign influence — all while continuing to demand NGOs monitor consumer protections that governments refuse to fund themselves, warns new EUobserver columnist Alberto Alemanno.
The Várhelyi spying allegations pose a question the European Union has never had to answer so starkly: what happens when a member state treats the institutions it helped create not as a common project, but as hostile territory to be infiltrated and undermined? asks Alberto Alemanno.
The European Court of Justice is currently facing a major question: can religious freedom coexist with animal welfare? The decision of whether religious slaughter can continue is expected in a matter of weeks.
With the declared aim to protect the integrity of the European elections, Facebook new political ads rules are preventing these elections from being truly European.
British plans to – maybe – take part in EU elections risk legal chaos in the next European Parliament, which could be resolved only by treaty change – an unlikely prospect.
The proposal by the European Commission for a directive protecting whistleblowers could be a true turning point in how corruption and abuse of law is fought in the EU.
A last-minute five-year renewal for glyphosate, the chemical in Monsanto’s weedkiller Roundup, seemed like a victory for the herbicide industry – but is it?
At a time when citizens expect an unprecedented level of accountability from their elected representatives, senior MEPs use their ‘free mandate’ to justify opposing new lobbying transparency rules.
Barrosogate is putting to the test an already weak oversight system of former EU commissioners and highlighting the limits of the lobbying regulatory regime.