Former French MEP Rachida Dati is facing intense scrutiny following allegations she took lobbying money from French energy giant GDF Suez/Engie during her time at the European Parliament, on top of a separate investigation into her ties with French car maker Nissan-Renault.

The 60-year-old, who was born to Arab parents and started out as a maid, is also a former French culture and justice minister, and now mayor of the affluent 7th arrondissement in Paris.

But she also risks wearing a police ankle-bracelet and faces four years in prison in ongoing trials into her ties with the French companies, which first hit the headlines in 2025.

And back in 2014, when she sat in the European Parliament on the benches of the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) group, she threatened to sue EUobserver because we asked her about GDF Suez, which later changed its name to Engie, while deriding the corruption allegations against her as racist slurs.

EUobserver has published below some of the related email correspondence for the sake of transparency:

“Rachida Dati will not hesitate to sue any media which will report such a defamatory statement,” her office also said in an email in 2015, after a German Green MEP, who was spearheading an ethics committee, said she was likely pocketing GDF Suez money.

The allegedly “defamatory statement” had been made by Gerald Häfner, a former German MEP, who had chaired the parliament’s advisory committee on its Code of Conduct.

Häfner’s supposedly offensive words were:

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The European Parliament’s culture committee on Tuesday (29 September) agreed to boost the flagship Erasmus+ student exchange programme by €7bn in 2028-2034 linked to rule-of-law conditions, even as so-called frugal countries seek to cut overall funding. 

MEPs backed in April to increase the European Commission’s original proposal from €40bn to €47bn as part of a interim report on the EU’s long-term budget (MFF).

On Tuesday, they also said funds should be linked to respect for the rule of law and transparency standards – a clear reference to the situation facing Hungarian universities in the past, which were unable to participate in Erasmus+ during the illiberal rule of former prime minister Viktor Orbán. 

Candidate countries, such as Ukraine and Moldova, may be able to participate in the next Erasmus+ in the coming cycle, provided they met “certain conditions,” Polish centre-right and lead MEP on the file, Bogdan Zdrojewski, said during a press conference in Brussels.

The UK and Switzerland are also set to rejoin the programme already in 2027.

And Canada might be able to participate too, Zdrojewski said, should it gain an associate EU membership – an unclear status presented by EU commission president Ursula von der Leyen during her State of the Union speech on 11 September and welcomed by Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney.

Around 17m participants have taken part in Erasmus+ since it was launched 39 years ago, in what is widely considered one of the most popular EU integration projects.

An estimated one million babies have also been born from couples who have met during their exchange. 

The committee boost comes amid long-term EU budget talks for the next seven years, in which frugal states such as Germany and the Netherlands want to pay in less than in the past, but Zdrojewski was “feeling optimistic” about getting through the proposed Erasmus budget increase. 

He said he counted on EU capitals to defend the programme in future negotiations.

MEPs want to make Erasmus+ more inclusive, highlighting special programmes for adult learners and students in informal education programmes.

They also aimed to set a 20 percent quota for participants with underpriviliged access to career and educational opportunities.

To make Erasmus+ easier to manage, they proposed dividing the funding between different areas: education and training (74 percent), youth and volunteering (15 percent), and sport (four percent).

The committee report will now be voted on by the EU Parliament plenary, although it is still unclear when, when it becomes part of MEPs’ formal basis for negotiations with EU capitals.

This article was updated on 30 September 2026 to make clear that the €47.39bn figure was first set out in Parliament’s interim report on the MFF, adopted in April. Tuesday’s committee vote incorporates that figure into the Erasmus+ regulation, alongside new rule-of-law and transparency conditions.

The European Commission says it will not compromise on protecting the EU’s external borders, but will also respect human rights, while declining to specify if a new emergency rule could suspend people’s basic right to asylum.

The vague statements by Magnus Brunner, the EU home affairs commissioner, in Brussels on Tuesday (29 September), followed an equally vague proposal announced by commission president Ursula von der Leyen in her State of the Union speech on 11 September, who pledged to create a “European emergency response framework”.

When asked if her new framework would include the possibility to suspend asylum at the EU’s external border in cases that mirrored this summer’s Ceuta crisis, when tens of thousands of people entered the Spanish enclave in north Africa, Brunner said: “I can’t go into details, because it’s a discussion which is going on at the moment”.

His non-committal take on the hot button issue also came after a resolution adopted by the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) in Brussels on Tuesday, which is demanding that member countries, in some cases, be given the option to temporarily suspend asylum applications.

Specifically, it calls on the EU “to adopt legislative measures authorising refusal of entry or returns without individual asylum procedures for illegal migrants used in a hybrid attack”.

Meanwhile, Brunner and von der Leyen come from the same conservative party in the EPP, posing questions to what extent political pressure has influenced the latest commission initiative.

Greece’s prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis (also EPP) in early August had already gone public with demands for new EU rules allowing for asylum to be suspended for newly arrived people.

The Polish government (EPP) also weighed in, claiming credit for getting von der Leyen to cite the idea in her big speech.

Warsaw had earlier this month extended its asylum ban on people entering from Belarus, in what rights groups say involves pushbacks that cause loss of life.

But for Brunner, the issue had already been broached in a commission asylum strategy report that was published back in January.

That report references “weaponisation of migration” by hostile countries, such as Belarus and Russia, and links it back to another commission document from December 2024 that argues there are certain exceptional situations in which the ban on pushbacks cannot apply.

For Michael O’Flaherty, who is the human rights commissioner at the Council of Europe, a rights watchdog based in Strasbourg, any effort to extend the existing EU ban criteria risked unraveling decades of human rights law.

The issue will be discussed by EU interior ministers on Thursday and Friday in Luxembourg, where migration weighs heavily on the agenda.

And those talks, in turn, will lean into and continue among heads of state and government at an EU summit on 15 October.

As the EU seeks budget cuts to break a stalemate in member states’ talks, women’s rights groups are on the chopping bloc, prompting advocates’ concern that the cause is fading from the common agenda.

Research published on Monday (28 September) by rights initiative MOTERIS showed a consistent loss of funding for feminist organisations across EU countries.

Some groups are also facing political conditions on the money they receive, for instance in Poland and Croatia, alongside groups reporting increasing dependance on unpaid work.

And the trajectory points toward decreased funding in the 2028-2034 EU multi-annual framework (MFF), which is currently being haggled in Brussels, making matters worse.

Feminist groups pointed toward AgoraEU as evidence of the trend – the proposed new single-funding stream is to merge grants for culture, media, equality and civil society under in the same MFF bracket, in what would make equally worthy causes and their defenders compete against one another for diluted resources.

And the ongoing cuts at national level meant that “EU funds are a crucial lifeline for many women’s rights groups where state funding is insufficient,” MOTERIS said.

Small, grassroots rights groups, many of whom MOTERIS represents, find it even harder to access grants due to heavy administrative requirements.

Meanwhile, the Czech Republic and Lithuania served as examples of EU countries whose philanthropy was dependent on external top-ups, making them “more vulnerable to geopolitical shifts, such as the withdrawal of US funding.”

MOTERIS staged a protest to push for MFF support for women’s rights groups outside the European Parliament in Brussels on Tuesday (29 September), ahead of an MEPs’ debate on the topic. 

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