The Irish government has set the path for a showdown between MEPs and governments over the next seven year EU budget after proposing an 8 percent cut worth €141bn to the European Commission’s spending plan. 

Savings from the commission proposal have been found across all headings in the so-called ‘negotiating box’ for the 2028–2034 Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF). But farmers’ subsidies under the common agricultural policy and the bloc’s cohesion policy, which provides funding to the EU’s poorest regions, have been exempted from any cuts. 

That is a nod to a sustained lobbying effort by a group of seventeen EU countries, known as ‘Friends of Cohesion’. 

As expected, meanwhile, cuts totalling €38bn have been made from the ‘Global Europe’ heading, which covers foreign aid, while €75bn has been taken from the competitiveness fund and €10bn from the EU’s administrative costs. 

In a statement on Saturday (10 October), Ireland’s minister for Europe, Thomas Byrne, said that the €1.62 trillion spending plan was “intended to bridge the many differences between Member States. It brings us closer to resolving the critical questions our Union faces on how to balance both new priorities and core policies, whilst also reflecting the fiscal realities that all Member States face.” 

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EU leaders will mouth hollow criticism of West Bank settlers at next week’s summit, while staying mute on Israel’s genocide in Gaza – in sharp contrast to the 2026 Nobel peace prize.

The EU “strongly condemns the continued and growing settler violence against Palestinian civilians and calls for accountability”, they aim to say in a declaration in Brussels on Thursday (15 October), according to a draft seen by EUobserver on Friday.

And they are to warn of “legal, economic, and reputational consequences for [Israeli] businesses participating” in building a settlement in the E1 area of the West Bank, which would destroy the two-state solution by chopping the region in half.

It remains to be seen if Slovenia’s pro-Israeli prime minister, Janez Janša, will sign up, after he ranted on X in August that he would veto this type of thing.

But even if Janša agreed, it would still amount to EU impunity for settlers, as there was no mention of banning settler imports or even blacklisting more settler extremists.

“The EU keeps condemning illegal settlements that it trades with, financing the very occupation and abuses it claims to oppose. How does that make any sense?,” said Claudio Francavilla from Human Rights Watch.

The summit draft also voiced “grave concern over developments in Gaza”, where “protection of civilians must be ensured”, and urged Israel to let in more aid.

Israel has killed some 1,450 people in Gaza since an October 2025 ceasefire.

It has killed over 74,000 Palestinians and displaced 1.8 million people in Gaza since 2023, but the EU leaders’ passive-tense language did not blame Israel for civilian deaths or mention Gaza “accountability”.

And that will put our 27 prime ministers and presidents at odds this Thursday with Europe’s moral compass, international law, and public opinion.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee gave the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday to Navi Pillay, a South African judge, who had chaired a UN commission that found Israel guilty of “genocide” in Gaza and worked for the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, which has indicted Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes.

She was “a bigot … propagating blood libels,” he said on X.

Israeli foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar said: “[Nazi propaganda chief] Joseph Goebbels is probably applauding in hell.”

And US president Donald Trump joined their Nobel-bashing by imposing sanctions on the ICC.

But three other Nobel laureates, from Colombia, DR Congo, and Liberia were among global VIPs who also wrote to the European Commission on Friday urging trade sanctions on Israel, in a sign of wider revulsion.

And “if the EU was serious about fulfilling its obligations under international law, or indeed in terms of its own stated values and policies, it would go much, much further [in terms of sanctions],” said H. A. Hellyer, from the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think-tank in London.

Palestine solidarity marches in Berlin, London, Rome, and Warsaw on Saturday showed that ordinary Europeans wanted their elected politicians to take action.

Some 83 percent of Germans and 88 percent of Italians now disapproved of Netanyahu, said the Pew Research Centre in June.

Blood and rubble

The latest EU summit draft pledged support for Palestinian elections.

“The European Union stands ready to support the electoral process, including by the deployment of an EU Election Observation Mission,” it said.

But EU words were being buried in blood and rubble faster than the summit statements could be updated.

The Palestinian vote would have to be postponed until at least late 2027 due to the “security and economic conditions” created by Israel in the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority warned France, also on Friday.

Meanwhile, the EU summit will fall two weeks before Israeli elections on 27 October and the leaders’ empty words might be tactical – so as not to throw meat to far-right Israeli zealots in a rabid atmosphere.

But Europe’s quietism is also due to Germany and Italy’s internal politics and its psychopathological mix of World War 2-guilt, raging far-right populism, and transatlantic realpolitik.

“I don’t think this [the draft EU summit text on the Middle East] is a strategy, so much as a statement of the lowest common denominator in EU foreign policy,” RUSI’s Hellyer said.

And going back to the Nazi slurs against the 2026 Nobel, Israeli author Gideon Levy said in the Haaretz daily on Saturday: “No, Sa’ar … If Goebbels has a reason to applaud, it is upon seeing what has happened to the country that arose from the ashes of the Holocaust.”

“Goebbels is applauding perpetrators of genocide around the world, particularly the one in Gaza,” said Levy.

So long as Berlin and Rome don’t realign their compasses, Europe’s silent blessing for Palestinian erasure will feed Israeli hardliners’ schizoid and delusional sense of self-righteousness.

“As long as Israel is not willing to … admit, at least partially, to its crimes, it will never change,” Levy said.

In December 2023, a Belarusian KGB representative entered an online seminar organised by the Belarusian Free University and told participants that everything was under the service’s control.  

The following month, the online university, run from exile, was designated an “extremist entity”.

It was a warning that being in exile in a safe country does not necessarily put independent voices beyond the reach of authoritarian states. 

For people forced into exile, reaching the EU should mean being able to continue their work without fear. Yet repression follows them into the digital spaces where they organise, report, and communicate. “We can never be sure who is behind a switched-off camera in our online meetings,” one interviewee told us.  

ARTICLE 19 Europe’s new report, 404: Safety not found?, draws on interviews with exiled targeted journalists, human rights defenders working in Belarusian and Russian language environments, as well as digital security experts who try to protect them. Respondents identified Belarusian and Russian state-linked actors as major sources of threats, while stressing how difficult it is to attribute individual incidents. 

The research documents phishing attacks that expose private communications and trusted contacts, including people inside repressive states. It also shows how platform moderation is manipulated through coordinated malicious complaints.

“Extremist” and “foreign agent” designations deter audiences from sharing or subscribing to independent media. A publication may lose sensitive records built up over years, or remain online yet lose contact with the people it exists to inform. 

The harm extends beyond the person whose accounts are compromised. Stolen information may be used to pressure colleagues and relatives, while fear and mistrust drive self-censorship and withdrawal from public work.

For dispersed organisations with few offline ways to reach audiences, losing access to a platform can threaten their ability to function. 

To an external observer, those attacks might seem like a scattering of isolated incidents. They are not. Digital transnational repression is a coordinated, evolving strategy – and treating it as anything less than a systemic risk will leave the response permanently one step behind the threat.

It’s a reality that the international community, including the European Union, must confront. 

Turning commitments into protection

EU governments should recognise transnational repression for what it is: an attack on the conditions that allow independent journalism and civil society to function.

Offering physical refuge is not enough if people in exile cannot safely investigate abuses, organise or reach their audiences.  

On 23 September, more than 130 UN human rights experts called for action against transnational repression. Mariana Katzarova, the UN special rapporteur on Russia, has called for a binding UN convention. 

But the EU does not need to wait.  

The Digital Services Act already gives the European Commission a basis for action. It requires designated very large online platforms to assess systemic risks to fundamental rights arising from their services in the EU and to take effective, proportionate measures in response.

The practical test is straightforward: does a platform’s design or operation enable transnational repression? Does that amount to a systemic risk under Article 34? Has the platform adequately mitigated it under Article 35? 

Repeated abuse of reporting systems should trigger scrutiny of how those systems operate.

Platforms should provide meaningful human review, clear and accessible appeals and timely support for users facing coordinated attacks, and scrutinise government requests based on politically motivated designations.

Where the commission finds breaches, it should enforce compliance. Any measures against repression must protect freedom of expression, privacy and secure communication, including encryption. 

While attribution remains difficult, victims should not have to establish the entire chain of state responsibility before receiving support.

Investigators must pursue perpetrators and enablers, while regulators assess whether platforms have addressed recurring risks.

These are distinct responsibilities; difficulty in fulfilling one cannot justify neglecting the other. 

The EU should also establish a permanent European coordination mechanism linking national authorities, cybersecurity responders, and civil society.

It should set out clear arrangements for cross-border referrals, early warnings and support.

People reporting attacks need practical assistance, legal advice, and psychological support. Authorities must work with affected communities and build trust without treating language or nationality as grounds for suspicion. 

The test for the EU is simple: can people who have reached European soil feel safe to continue documenting abuses, speaking publicly and seeking justice without having to constantly fear the governments they fled?

If the EU’s commitment to freedom of expression is real, it must be measured by the protection it delivers.