The sharp drop in irregular migrant arrivals is evidence that the EU’s policy reforms are working, EU migration commissioner, Magnus Brunner, said on Thursday (1 October).
But Syria is also no longer the single biggest source of asylum claims after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime 22 months ago, a factor that appears to have been conveniently ignored.
On Thursday, he told reporters after a meeting of EU interior ministers in Luxembourg that irregular arrivals have dropped 55 percent in the past two years.
“So that’s a record low in the asylum applications,” said the former Austrian finance minister, adding that Austria and Sweden have recorded equally low asylum numbers and that Germany is deporting more people than are asking for protection.
“The basis for all of that, and the foundation for all of that, is the pact, the pact on migration and asylum,” he said, in comments that were echoed by Ireland’s migration minister, Jim O’Callaghan.
The pact, spanning a mix of complex regulations, was launched in June. Despite having two years to prepare for the launch, its implementation remains patchy.
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Greece will extend the presence of its air defense battery of Patriot missiles in Saudi Arabia for at least another month, top defense and foreign policy officials agreed on Thursday. In a session chaired by Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the Government Council on National Security and Foreign Affairs (KYSEA) took into consideration the increased tension […]
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US Secretary of State Marco Rubio will visit Athens next week as head of an American delegation to the 6th US-Greece Strategic Dialogue. According to a statement by the State Department, his visit is part of a series of stops at Rekjavik, Athens, and Lisbon from October 5 to 8, 2026. “In Greece, Secretary Rubio […]
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In Germany’s recent state elections, voters as young as 16 could cast ballots. The results confirmed a global trend of political division between young women and men.
“On 1 January, we both deleted Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat. And whichever of us would be the first to start watching Reels again or download Instagram would have to eat a slice of rotten cheese,” Greta and Lena told Germany’s Deutschlandfunk radio station.
The 16-year-old girls live in a village in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and chose to delete social media because they had been spending far too much time on it. They often scrolled on TikTok or Instagram late into the night, affecting their performance at school. This summer, however, both reinstalled TikTok for a month. This time without the punishment of a slice of rotten cheese.
They did so for an experiment with journalists from Deutschlandfunk. The journalists wanted to find out what political content the girls would consume through TikTok, the popular Chinese social network, during the peak of the election campaign. Mecklenburg-Vorpommern went to the polls on the third weekend of September. And, as is well known, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) swept the state, just as it had two weeks prior in Saxony-Anhalt.
Greta and Lena, however, were in a markedly different position from their peers in Saxony-Anhalt. For the first time, the north-eastern federal state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern had allowed 16- and 17-year-olds to vote in state elections. Since young people consume much of their news on social media, Greta and Lena immersed themselves in TikTok, one of the networks now most popular among young Europeans.
For the first few minutes, the girls watched a range of non-political videos — recipes, tomato growing and “silly” AI videos. Then, at around the third minute of scrolling, the first political content appeared. First came a video about Erich Honecker, the former East German communist politician. “Why am I seeing so much stuff about the GDR here?” Greta wondered. As she continued scrolling, she came across AfD co-leader Alice Weidel herself.
It was the first moment when the girls began to notice how quickly their initially apolitical feed was changing. “I feel as if it is constantly just AfD,” Greta said later. She added that she had not searched for any such content in advance. Over the following month, the girls kept a diary of their feed and observed how, after political videos, more and more similar content began appearing — not only from the parties themselves, but also from a range of accounts that picked up and further spread their messages.
The experiment confirmed what has been known for some time: TikTok and other networks alongside it can quickly form the political world a young person sees and the views they come to adopt. At the same time, algorithms are accelerating a trend of a political divide between young women and men, which was also reflected in the results of the state elections mentioned above in Germany.
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