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Europeans view immigration with increasing suspicion. Seven out of 10 Europeans believe that their country takes in too many migrants, according to a survey carried out by BVA Xsight for ARTE Europe Weekly, a project led by the French-German TV channel ARTE GEIE and which EL PAS has participated in, as part of the countdown to the European elections in June.

The survey shows that 85% of respondents feel the European Union needs to take more action to combat irregular migration. And only 39% believe that Europe needs immigration today.

The countries where most people consider immigration a problem are Bulgaria (74% of respondents), the Czech Republic (73%), Hungary and Cyprus (68% in both cases). Paradoxically, in Italy, the European country where the largest number of immigrants entered irregularly last year (157,652), only 44% of respondents viewed it as a problem and only 14% saw it as the main problem. In Greece and Spain, the second and third countries with the most irregular arrivals in 2023, respectively, only 11% of respondents considered it the issue of most concern to them, below the European average of 17%. However, Greece is the country where the most people (90%) believe their country takes in too many migrants.

These are some of the conclusions from a survey carried out online between March 27 and April 9 in the 27 member states, where 22,726 people over 15 years of age were interviewed, with a representative sample from each country. In addition to El PAS, the media organizations Gazeta Wyborcza, Internazionale, Ir, Kathimerini, Le Soir and Telex collaborated in the survey.

Beyond the data on migration, health is the biggest concern for Europeans (41%), followed by the war in Ukraine (38%). The environment and inflation are tied in third place at 24%. Each country also presents some unique features when it comes to the order of priorities. In France, purchasing power is a top concern; in Poland people are particularly focused on security; the Irish are notably preoccupied with housing and Spaniards are very worried about unemployment.

This picture of Europeans concerns emerges one month before more than 400 million people from to the 27 countries of the European Union are called to vote in the elections to the European Parliament, which will be held between June 6 and 9. Voters will elect 705 MEPs in a chamber whose composition will be key to deciding issues such as pushing or stopping a policy of self-defense, and the promotion of measures for the green transition under threat by the far right, which is forecast to perform well at the polls.

On the economic front, 73% of those surveyed feel optimistic about their personal future, although 57% believe that the economic situation in the EU has worsened and 63% feel the same way about their own country.

Only a third of respondents believe that EU decisions have a positive impact on their lives. And there is only one country, Portugal, where the majority (51%) highlighted the positive influence of the EU on their lives. Portugal is followed by Spain, Luxembourg, Malta and Romania, all of them with 43% positive responses. At the opposite pole, France and the Czech Republic (21% in both cases) are where the smallest number of people believe that the EU affects their lives favorably, followed by Hungary (24%) and the Netherlands (26%).

In the population as a whole, only 9% admit to feeling more European than their own nationality. In several of the member states that joined the EU most recently, citizens recognize that, when they vote, they prioritize their national needs over European ones: Romania (82%), Bulgaria (81%), Greece and Latvia (79% in both cases). However, the majority of countries would like to see the common European policy strengthened, especially in defense (72%) and immigration (70%).

Pollsters believe the survey paints a portrait of a Europe divided between those who worry more about the end of the world security and the war between Russia and Ukraine and those who focus more on end of the month issues. The first group includes Estonia, Finland and Poland, who are closer to the Russian borders. The second group, more concerned about the loss of purchasing power, encompasses France, Belgium, Spain and Portugal.

The war that began with Russias full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 might have served to reinforce the feeling of belonging to the EU. But it did not turn out that way. Only 14% of citizens say they feel more European now than before the invasion of Ukraine. And 15% of those surveyed consider themselves less European since the beginning of the conflict.

The survey shows that 62% of Europeans fear an imminent war with Russia, a fear that is felt most strongly in the countries geographically closest to the invading country, such as Poland, the Baltic States, Finland and Romania. Only 30% think that Europe has enough military resources to respond to a possible attack. Although 61% believe that the EU should strengthen its support for Ukraine, a similar majority (63%) believe that a ceasefire should be negotiated.

Fully 63% of Europeans are in favor of Ukraines accession to the EU. However, the countries most favorable to negotiations with Vladimir Putin (Hungary, Czech Republic, Austria, Bulgaria) are also the most reluctant to the admission of Ukrainians into the European club.

The environment occupies, along with the loss of purchasing power, the third place among the top concerns of Europeans. Last year was the warmest on Earth since records began in the 19th century. For 82% of respondents, this is an important problem. And for 43%, the fight against global warming is a priority, especially in southern Europe Malta, Italy, Portugal, Cyprus and Spain where droughts and heat waves are felt most keenly.

The measures that generate the most support to combat climate change are those decided by governments and the European Parliament, such as the reduction of pesticides (60%) or massive investment in public transportation (57%). However, decisions that involve changes in individual behavior, such as increasing taxes to reduce personal vehicle use, are well received in only 21% of cases.

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Seven out of 10 Europeans believe their country takes in too many immigrants - EL PAS USA

George Robertson was at Natos Brussels headquarters when the second plane hit. By 9.30pm on 11 September 2001 he would become the first, and only, Nato secretary general to trigger Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which states an attack on one is an attack on all. But his first thought after watching 9/11 unfold was that the Nato headquarters lay beneath the flight path to Brussels Airport. All non-essential staff were sent home.

Then, his mind turned to the perpetrators. He first suspected US domestic terrorists; the Oklahoma bombing had happened six years before. You began to realise that if it was an external source, then this was huge, he said when we spoke in his Westminster office. America had been attacked for the first time since Pearl Harbor. Here, in many ways, the world had changed.

His staff drafted a statement while he phoned the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, and the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, to discuss triggering Article 5. Robertson said they were initially sceptical about whether it would work. It was high-risk because if you do it and it fails it has the opposite effect.

At 3.30pm he put the plan to the Nato council. If somebody had said, No, we dont like the wording or we dont want to do it today, put it off till tomorrow, then it would have been pretty disastrous. But eventually, I persuaded everybody. We got it [finalised] by half past nine. Everybody in the morning thought it was their idea but that was fine.

Robertson entered parliament as a Labour MP at the 1978 Hamilton by-election. He became a stalwart of the partys right: Pro-American, pro-Europe, pro-mixed economy and willing to fight for it. Robertson remembers Tony Blair later saying he was New Labour before we even thought about it. He was appointed shadow Scottish secretary in 1993. His remark that Scottish devolution would kill the SNP stone dead has been ridiculed since: the party has been in government since 2007.

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Im yet to be proved wrong, Robertson told me. The SNP is in dire trouble at the moment, largely because of their inability to use the instruments of devolution. And in many ways, I thought that is exactly what would happen I may well be proved right. He held the Scottish brief until the 1997 election, when he took charge of the Ministry of Defence. I had a staff of three and a half people; 24 hours later, I had 383,000 people, and a navy and an air force, he chuckled.

Robertson then joined Nato in 1999 as secretary general, leaving in 2003. He is still active in the party he joined the Labour Middle East Council in March and now champions causes such as Ukraine and Kosovo in the Lords, which explains his office decor. A painting on the walls shows long, slender poppies growing out of the soil, beneath which lies a bed of skulls. He was presented with it at a school in Kosovo, where he said Serbian paramilitaries had taken 16 children and burned them alive in a house during the 1998-99 Kosovo War. In 1999 Blair, alongside an initially reluctant Bill Clinton, led the Nato bombardment of Serbian forces to prevent such atrocities. Are Kosovar children named after Robertson, as they are after Blair? No, but I was still treated as a hero, he said.

He gestured to a photo on a nearby shelf. That was my second meeting with Putin, he said. The two men are sitting on ornate, pink and red armchairs. The Russian presidents chin is turned down, his eyes raised in a mischievous glance. Robertson stares straight at the camera with a grave expression. What was Putin like? Serious, but he had a sense of humour then. He doesnt seem to have it any more. Im one of a few people still alive who can tell funny stories about what Putin said. There was one occasion when I gave him an English-language book [as a gift]. It was an antiquarian book, Gossip in the Tsars Court. Putin told him: Thanks for the book. I practise my English by reading out loud so my dog is now a perfect English speaker.

Robertson was hopeful in the early 2000s that Putin might lead Russia away from Boris Yeltsins drunkard anarchy and towards a reliable friendship with the West. [Putin] said at one of the meetings: I want Russia to be a part of western Europe when are you going to invite Russia to join Nato? And why didnt Nato? We dont ask countries to join; they apply.

There was a bit of a window [for Russia to join the West], he admitted. But he wanted not equality around the Nato-Russia council table; he wanted it with the United States He started thinking that Russia needed to be admired and respected. And feared. So the opportunity was gone, but largely due to him.

When pressed about whether Nato and the West could have done more to welcome Russia into the international community, he said: Its difficult to do the counterfactual, and I dont know that [the then US vice-president Dick] Cheney and [US defence secretary Donald] Rumsfeld were terribly interested in getting closer to Russia. [George W] Bush was but I think by that time Putin was beginning to get a grandiose notion about [how] he wanted Russia to be seen.

Robertsons eyes turned towards a picture of him and Bush on his shelf. He remembers Bush as interesting he listened to you. Not every head of state, or head of government, listens his favourite question was: What do you mean by that?

Whereas Putin, he went on, was thin-skinned, so when Obama said that Russia was just another regional power [in 2014], that would cut through. But Robertson views the UK and USs failure to punish the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons in 2014 as the moment Putin realised he could act with impunity. [It was] the most extraordinary thing to take place: a prime minister recalls the House of Commons in order to get backing for a military action and gets defeated. And not only that, [he] then stays on, he said. In the Kremlin, that must have been a bright green light.

One theory, propounded by realists such as the academic John Mearsheimer, is that Nato expansion in eastern Europe was the reason that Putin invaded Ukraine. Robertson dismissed the idea. I met Putin nine times during my time at Nato. He never mentioned Nato enlargement once. What Robertson said next was interesting: Hes not bothered about Nato, or Nato enlargement. Hes bothered by the European Union. The whole Ukraine crisis started with the offer of an [EU] accession agreement to Ukraine [in 2014].

Putin fears countries on Russias border being fundamentally and permanently changed by EU accession. Every aspect [of society is affected] they woke up very late to it I dont think they ever fully understood the EU, Robertson said, adding the caveat that the EU was not at fault because accession was what Ukraine, as a sovereign nation, wanted.

Whatever the wars cause, isnt the challenge facing Ukraine insurmountable? 15 February 1989: 100,000 Soviet troops left Afghanistan, Robertson replied. No face-saving. No off-ramp. Still, that withdrawal came ten years after the Soviet Union invaded, in 1979.

Despite Robertsons knowledge of the Ukraine conflict, he does not believe we are on the brink of total war. People who go around saying the world is more dangerous than ever thats absurd. There are a lot of dangers in the future if Putin wins in Ukraine, but at the moment there is no actual danger to us.

In terms of a physical attack, Im probably the only person who ever will [trigger Article 5] because nobodys going to cross that line, he said. Nato is stronger than it ever was before. A billion people and a trillion dollars. Almost a billion people sleep easily in their beds at night because of Nato and Article 5.

[See also: John Healey: Britain has a lot to learn from Ukraines resilience]

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George Robertson: Why Russia fears the European Union - The New Statesman

Meta, the American tech giant, is being investigated by European Union regulators for the spread of disinformation on its platforms Facebook and Instagram, poor oversight of deceptive advertisements and potential failure to protect the integrity of elections.

On Tuesday, European Union officials said Meta did not appear to have sufficient safeguards in place to combat misleading advertisements, deepfakes and other deceptive information that is being maliciously spread online to amplify political divisions and influence elections.

The announcement appears intended to pressure Meta to do more ahead of elections across all 27 E.U. countries this summer to elect new members of the European Parliament. The vote, from June 6-9, is being closely watched for signs of foreign interference, particularly from Russia, which has sought to weaken European support for the war in Ukraine.

The Meta investigation shows how European regulators are taking a more aggressive approach to regulate online content than authorities in the United States, where free speech and other legal protections limit the role the government can play in policing online discourse. An E.U. law that took effect last year, the Digital Services Act, gives regulators broad authority to rein in Meta and other large online platforms over the content shared through their services.

Big digital platforms must live up to their obligations to put enough resources into this, and todays decision shows that we are serious about compliance, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, the European Unions executive branch, said in a statement.

European officials said Meta must address weaknesses in its content moderation system to better identify malicious actors and take down concerning content. They noted a recent report by AI Forensics, a civil society group in Europe, that identified a Russian information network that was purchasing misleading ads through fake accounts and other methods.

European officials said Meta appeared to be diminishing the visibility of political content with potential harmful effects on the electoral process. Authorities said the company must provide more transparency about how such content spread.

Meta defended its policies and said it acted aggressively to identify and block disinformation from spreading.

We have a well-established process for identifying and mitigating risks on our platforms, the company said in a statement. We look forward to continuing our cooperation with the European Commission and providing them with further details of this work.

The Meta inquiry is the latest announced by E.U. regulators under the Digital Services Act. The content moderation practices of TikTok and X, formerly known as Twitter, are also being investigated.

The European Commission can fine companies up to 6 percent of global revenue under the digital law. Regulators can also raid a companys offices, interview company officials and gather other evidence. The commission did not say when the investigation will end.

Social media platforms are under immense pressure this year as billions of people around the world vote in elections. The techniques used to spread false information and conspiracies have grown more sophisticated including new artificial intelligence tools to produce text, videos and audio but many companies have scaled back their election and content moderation teams.

European officials noted that Meta had reduced access to its CrowdTangle service, which governments, civil society groups and journalists use to monitor disinformation on its platforms.

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Meta Faces EU Investigation Over Election Disinformation - The New York Times

In ancient Greece poetry was regulated so as to prevent excessive passions from corrupting the social order. Rhyming couplets have long since lost their ability to sway politics. And yet. On April 29th a small crowd in Aachen, a German town near the Belgian border, turned out for ein Poetry Slam in which amateur bards were asked to riff on, of all things, the European Union. A few dozen mostly grey-haired types, including Charlemagne (your columnist, not the medieval emperor who once ruled from the city), listened tactfully as a trio of youngsters rhymed one elongated compound word with another. Some light rapping was attempted. A local TikTok political influencernot a profession Plato would have recognisedserved as host and ensured the social order was indeed not corrupted (the risk seemed slim in retrospect). The lyrical battle having been settled amicably, the audience was treated to another Greek civic art. Streamed from down the road in Maastricht, eight politicians from Denmark, Luxembourg and beyond engaged in an old-fashioned contest of rhetoric ahead of the upcoming European elections on June 6th-9th.

To latter-day Aristotles, this half-filled theatre on a Monday night was a sign of another phenomenon with Greek roots: the emergence of a European demos, or common political culture. For centuries in Germany and beyond, civic life has been the stuff of municipalities, provinces or nation-states. Yet in Europe power is increasingly wielded by EU institutions in Brussels. Whether this centralising arrangement can be anything more than a souped-up intergovernmental body, a sort of regional UN on steroids, depends in part on whether citizens of countries across the EU viscerally feel they belong to the same polity. From such a unified demos might emerge a unified European democracy.

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Europeans lack visceral attachment to the EU. Does it matter? - The Economist

EU enlargement is vital for Europes long-term security, but the project also requires EU member states to give up perhaps the biggest guarantor of their sovereignty. Thats the latest claim from German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, in a recent opinion piece published on Tuesday, April 30th, celebrating the anniversary of the 2004 EU enlargement.

In order for our Union of Freedom to accomplish this task for our generation, we must reform it. To my mind, this includes reducing the scope for vetoes in the Council, Baerbock wrote. We must remain capable of action also in a future Union potentially numbering over 35 members.

Such a move would serve to isolate the more sovereigntist governments of the Union, while further centralizing power in Brussels.

To be honest, Baerbock is not the first to have this revolutionary idea. Replacing unanimity with qualified majority voting in the EU Council effectively scrapping veto powershas been a central theme of most EU reform proposals circulating in Brussels in recent months.

The logic is always the same: look at conservative troublemakers like Hungary and (formerly) PiS-led Poland, daring to use their vetoes to stop EU legislation that they deem counterproductive to their national interests. Imagine the mood in Brussels: Now we are letting in the eight candidate countries currently in the waiting room, we run the risk of eight more leaders saying no to our liberal agenda, and we cant have that, can we?

Therefore, to keep the EU operational, its leaders would take away the one thing designed to protect member states sovereignty and the democratic choices of their people: the veto. Dont worry, says Baerbock, its fair because the change would affect each country equally.

This includes reaching decisions more often with a large majority as opposed to achieving unanimity. Even if this means that Germanylike any other member statecan also be outvoted, the minister wrote.

Well, the fact is that Germany is not like any other member state. It is by far the largest EU member and therefore, its voice carries a much larger weight already,not to mention in a future Council deprived of the unanimity principle.

In a system based on qualified majority (QMV) voting, one needs only half of member states who represent roughly two-thirds, or 65%, of the EUs total population to pass any law. This means that while the current system gives one votea more or less equal voiceto each EU member in the European Council, under QMV, the larger a state, the more powerful it is relative to others.

Germany alone represents nearly 19% of the total EU populationmore than the smallest 17 member states combined. In fact, the five biggest member states alone (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Poland) together already account for 66% of the total population, meaning that they are far less likely to find themselves on the wrong end of any vote in a QMV system.

In other words, what Baerbock is advocating in the name of freedom and democracy would be the single biggest shift away from true democratic principles in the history of EU reforms.

The problem is that shes not alone. The left-leaning majority of the European Parliament already endorsed several treaty change proposals that include scrapping veto rightsaiming to strengthen Brussels and weaken member states to eliminate any meaningful political oppositionwhile justifying it with the mostly undebated need for enlargement.

As Polish MEP Jacek Saryusz-Wolski explained, the people of Europe are being deliberately kept in the dark about what it truly entails:

The public is not supposed to notice that a putsch is about to take place, that the European Union as a community of sovereign states is being abolished and a superstate is being created without any consent of the people, and that the member states are being reduced to the role of German states.

This is a kind of group of political ideologues, some of whom I would even call fanatics, who want to build a superstate on the ruins of nation-states, where a political oligarchy will rule unaccountably and escape the democratic control of citizens.

Recently, even former Commission chief Jos Manuel Barroso spoke out against the idea of a systematic treaty change, warning that it would be a huge mistake if now Europeans would start a fundamental revision of the [EU] institutions because of enlargement, lest we run the risk of neither becoming a reality.

Instead, the bloc should avoid too ambitious reforms and only make those strictly necessary for enlargement, the ex-Commission president said.

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German Foreign Minister Aims To Abolish Veto in EU Council Ahead of Enlargement - The European Conservative