Preparations for war with Russia and complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza have set off a struggle over jobs, wages and military production
War preparation is now a reality across Europe. Within a single September week, Poland issued fresh warnings, Germany ran drills and national alerts, military exercises were held across the Baltic, and Lithuania published plans to evacuate residents of Vilnius in the event of an attack.
The Finnish government is in full cry over the prospect of war, reminding its citizens yet again that they should be ready, in mind and in practice, for the disruption it would bring.
On 18 September, French President Emmanuel Macron gathered party leaders and presidential hopefuls at the Elysee Palace to hear the heads of France’s intelligence services describe what his office called the rapid deterioration of the international situation.
Nato, meanwhile, talks ever more openly about Russian sabotage, cyber attacks, arson and drone attacks.
Many workers and citizens across the continent, though, are not convinced by the war fever.
Thousands of Airbus workers in Spain began strike action on 1 July after rejecting the company’s pay and conditions offer.
Representatives of the UGT and CGT unions said the stoppage had slowed military and commercial production and would make it harder for the company to meet its delivery target. Airbus’s eight sites in Spain produce military transport planes and parts for commercial aircraft and satellites.
As the Defence Matters website reported: “The industrial pressure is not confined to commercial aviation. Spain is central to Airbus Defence and Space, including military transport and satellite activity. European governments are asking manufacturers to increase output at the same time as companies compete for engineers, technicians and production workers.”
Supply lines are so tight that Airbus has had to hire giant Antonov An-124 heavy-lift aircraft to ferry parts from one plant to another just to keep production running.
Air Data News reported that the strike “threatens key military aircraft programmes”, noting that the Eurofighter plant near Madrid and the military transport aircraft site near Seville were both affected.
Spanish unions said about 90 percent of eligible workers took part in the stoppage on 25 August, part of an indefinite strike. The strikes were called after workers voted at plant-level assemblies to reject the company’s offer.
French unions briefed on the dispute said the three striking Spanish unions represent about 40 percent of Airbus Spain’s roughly 14,000 employees. Workers were seeking inflation-linked pay rises, the restoration of previous remote-working arrangements and sick-leave benefits.
After the intervention of Industry Minister Jordi Hereu and concessions from Airbus, the strikers paused the stoppage on 10 September, but not the movement. Two days later, around 8,000 workers from Airbus sites across Spain marched through Madrid to keep the pressure on.
On 1 October, 77 percent of those voting backed an improved offer providing for the restoration of lost purchasing power, inflation-linked pay rises and the protection of remote-working rights, a settlement that months of industrial action had forced out of the company.
The Airbus dispute shows the leverage workers hold in the very industries on which Europe’s rearmament depends.
Trains and the TUC
In Scotland, meanwhile, the rail union RMT, the drivers’ union Aslef and the white-collar TSSA have demanded that the Scottish government remove CAF, the Spanish manufacturer Construcciones y Auxiliar de Ferrocarriles, from its shortlist of contractors to build ScotRail’s new fleet of suburban trains.
The company is included in the UN human rights database of businesses involved in Israeli settlements for its role in running the Jerusalem light rail and helping to extend it into territory illegally seized by Israel.
Aslef made clear that its members would refuse to drive CAF trains, a position echoed by TSSA general secretary Maryam Eslamdoust when she urged the Scottish government to “think again”.
Scottish Greens co-leader Gillian Mackay put the first minister on the spot, asking him directly: “So will the first minister agree that CAF should be blocked from this contract, and will he stand with the rail workers who have refused to drive trains produced by a company that they say profits from apartheid?”
In his response, the first minister confirmed that ScotRail was seeking advice on the contract.
For the second year running, delegates at the Trades Union Congress (TUC) backed a motion opposing increases in arms spending.
This year’s motion passed with even more support than last year’s, which reversed the TUC’s previous backing, advocated by the GMB and Unite unions, for higher defence spending.
Speaking in favour of the motion, Alex Gordon, a former RMT president and national officer of the Stop the War Coalition, said: “This movement is about fighting for jobs, for public services, for investment in the industries of the future that our young people, that our young workers need.
“Those industries are not military industries. The skills of the workers in the military sector are vital skills, vital skills that need to be used in civilian production.”
Ports and classrooms
Dockworkers’ unions in at least six countries are planning an international day of action and strikes on 30 October to protest against the war on Gaza and demand an immediate end to the genocide of the Palestinian people.
This coordinated mobilisation follows a strike on 6 February this year that shut down cargo operations at more than 20 Mediterranean and European ports to halt arms shipments bound for Israel.
“No to the war economy, government rearmament plans, and the project of militarisation of ports and strategic infrastructure from [the] EU,” the unions said in their statement. “Public resources must be used to meet people’s social needs, not to finance war.”
The signatories include CGT FNPD in France, Enedep in Greece, LAB in the Basque Country, Liman-Is in Turkey, ODT in Morocco, and Orsa Porti and USB in Italy.
The next generation, at least in Germany, seems even less enthusiastic about the prospect of a new European war. More than 45,000 school students across the country walked out of class in late September to protest against plans for compulsory military service, after hundreds of young men were summoned for medical examinations.
The School Strike Against Conscription initiative said demonstrations took place in more than 100 cities after the German defence ministry began calling in 18-year-old men for medical screening. Service itself remains voluntary for now, but the screening is compulsory.
Students took to the streets demanding a halt to the forced checks, the repeal of the new military service law and an end to what they call a step-by-step return to the draft.
This is now the ground on which European politics is being fought. It is a contest between a political establishment obsessed with war and preparations for war, and millions of workers across the continent unwilling to pay for rearmament with their wages, jobs and living standards.
Wife of former British deputy PM Nick Clegg promises liberal alternative to the PP and Socialists before snap election
The Spanish lawyer Miriam González Durántez has launched a new liberal, centrist party, vowing to clean up politics and give voters an alternative to the dominant socialist and conservative parties as the country gears up for next month’s snap general election.
González Durántez, an ex-EU adviser who is married to the former British deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, says her new party, Democracia21, will offer a modern, transparent kind of politics that “doesn’t feed on fear, insults or nostalgia”.
Ukraine’s president says his country has halted strikes on Russian oil refineries for two days after Trump’s energy ceasefire announcement
On frozen Russian assets, Poland’s Sikorski says the use of frozen Russian assets is “a complicated issue,” but takes a very clear stance in response to any suggestion of releasing them back to Russia.
“We are working on it, but there is also some rumours that some people are expecting these assets to be released back to Russia.
I don’t think I’m speaking just for myself in saying: over our dead bodies.”
“Russia right now is not ready for ceasefire, but still, this only can encourage us to stay with Ukraine and to, strengthen, the pressure on Russia and always be ready for conversations, but and also especially for, for ceasefire negotiations.
But, until this doesn’t happen, we are with Ukraine. We are with the president the German government is is backing the Ukrainian government and the president, completely. He is the person to lead Ukraine, and we are with him.”
If far right nationalists gain power in four big countries simultaneously, we are in for a dramatic Trumpian tilt
When it comes to Europe’s economy or its peace and security, it is obvious that decision-making has to be done largely at the European level to be meaningful. Yet electoral politics is still conducted mostly at the national level. The silver lining of this mismatch is that from country to country in Europe we have governments with different political priorities and leanings. Unlike in the US, where one presidential election can radically change the entire country’s course, as we have seen so vividly under Donald Trump’s leadership, the same drama has not so far unfolded in Europe. This may be about to change.
Pedro Sánchez rolled the dice in Spain last week, calling a snap election for next month after an unholy alliance of the conservative People’s party (PP), the far-right Vox and Catalan pro-independence party Junts blocked his big housing reform package in parliament. If the socialist prime minister, hailed by progressives globally but demonised by Europe’s right and Trump’s US, loses his election gamble, Spain could fall into the hands of a conservative/far-right coalition, which is currently ahead in the polls.
“The issue is, do we have another leader to replace Pedro Sánchez?”.
Former Spanish congresswoman Hana Jalloul Muro is among her prime minister’s closest allies in the European Parliament.
“It has not been an easy mandate. Every day is a survival day, all the challenges that prime minister Pedro Sánchez has faced have been unprecedented,” the Socialists and Democrats (S&D) MEP told EUobserver.
They had faced the Covid pandemic, a volcanic eruption in the Canary Islands in 2021, and the migrant crisis in the Ceuta enclave in north Africa in the summer of 2026, she said – not to mention the corruption allegations levelled at his close relatives.
Sánchez’ PSOE party is trailing behind the centre right people’s party (PP) in the polls, which is also growing closer allied to the increasingly successful far-right Vox party.
“These elections will pit two models against each other,” Jalloul said.
“On the one hand, a progressive government that defends public services, improves wages and pensions, expands rights and protects the social majority. And on the other, a model represented by the PP and Vox, which, wherever they govern, have opted for privatisations and policies that risk widening inequalities,” she said.
Ceuta-linked election
Jalloul, who spoke to EUobserver at the European Parliament (EP) in Brussels, used to lecture on international terrorism at the University of Madrid, before she became vice-chair of the EP’s foreign affairs committee.
And she recalled the heated debate on the Ceuta incident on 31 July, including accusations that Morocco had engineered it to gain leverage over Spain.
“This is a crisis that we could not expect,” she said.
But had there not been a “good relationship with Morocco, [we] would never be able to return 90 percent of the 70,000 people that came in less than 72 hours,” she added.
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On October 9, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced blocking sanctions against the International Criminal Court as an institution: a ban on all transactions, the freezing of assets under US jurisdiction, and the cutoff of cloud services, software, and payment processing. “Either the ICC will end its threats, or we will end the ICC,” he said. The sanctions include a six-month transition period and take full effect by April 2027. That date, not the announcement itself, is Europe’s real deadline.
Rubio has repeatedly tied Israeli interests to US actions against the court. The ICC previously issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on charges of war crimes in Gaza. While the October 9 announcement focused heavily on protecting American personnel, the administration had previously denounced the tribunal’s investigations against “the United States and our close ally Israel” as “illegitimate and baseless,” indicating that Washington’s campaign is aimed at shielding both US and Israeli officials.
The European Commission called the sanctions “deeply regrettable” and said it was “ready to take any necessary measures” to keep the Court functioning and protect operators within the Single Market. But the same formula contains a brake: the six-month delay “leaves room for dialogue.”
Kaja Kallas, speaking for the EU, called threats against the Court “unacceptable,” reaffirming commitment to the rules-based order but stopping short of announcing any protective mechanism. António Costa promised support through political, diplomatic, financial, and practical means, without naming a single concrete instrument.
Belgian Foreign Minister Maxime Prévot is one of those publicly demanding activation of the EU Blocking Statute. “The Court’s independence cannot depend on whom it investigates. Europe must act,” he said, after securing a place for the issue on the agenda of the October 12 meeting of EU foreign ministers.
The Netherlands, where the Court sits, asked the European Commission to prepare the statute but called it a “nuclear option,” emphasizing that six months provide space for dialogue. Germany and France joined a joint statement by eight countries expressing “strong disagreement,” without mentioning countermeasures.
Why the Blocking Statute Is No Panacea
The Blocking Statute (Council Regulation No. 2271/96 of 1996) was created to counter US extraterritorial sanctions related to Cuba, Iran, and Libya. Its mechanism includes a prohibition on EU companies and citizens complying with the designated third-country sanctions, a refusal to recognize foreign court judgments based on those sanctions, and the right to recover damages in court. In 2018, after the US withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal, the regulation was expanded.
Adding the US sanctions against the ICC to the regulation’s annex would mean a legal prohibition on European banks, insurers, and cloud providers complying with the US restrictions. But its purpose is not to save the ICC itself. It protects European operators and jurisdiction: the regulation binds European operators and cannot compel American banks, Microsoft, Amazon, or payment systems to keep servicing the Court.
Activating the statute in this case would be unprecedented: in its thirty years of existence, it has never been applied against US sanctions affecting an international judicial institution. Its earlier use concerned US measures against those same countries, which were bilateral trade restrictions rather than an assault on a body of international justice. If the EU goes ahead, it would be the first time the Blocking Statute is transformed from a trade-defense instrument into an instrument for defending what Brussels calls the “international legal order.”
That is why it is called “nuclear”: it means legal confrontation, but it does not solve the problem of technological dependence. The ICC relies on American banking services, payment systems, cloud servers, and software. The Blocking Statute can prohibit European companies from complying with the sanctions, but it does not create an alternative to dollar clearing, global payment networks, or the servers where the Court’s data is stored.
For Washington, it is enough that American companies themselves refuse to work with the ICC because of the risk of secondary sanctions; the Blocking Statute cannot prevent that.
What Is Already Happening and What Might Happen
The practical effects of the sanctions are already beginning to show. In response to earlier US measures, the ICC has shifted its office and collaboration software from Microsoft to openDesk, a German open-source platform, and developed workarounds for banking, insurance, and payroll. It has also paid staff months in advance to limit potential payroll disruption. But these safeguards do not eliminate the Court’s broader reliance on American financial and technological infrastructure, and full sanctions could still disrupt its operations.
The alternatives Europe can offer are limited: activating the Blocking Statute, developing payment and clearing alternatives to dollar-based infrastructure, and providing European cloud services. None can be implemented quickly enough to replace American financial and technological infrastructure by April 2027.
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The Asymmetry That Explains Everything
The ICC began work in 2002, and its early practice focused predominantly on African conflicts: the DRC, Uganda, Sudan, Kenya, and Libya. This imbalance fueled accusations of selectivity and neocolonialism; in 2025, three Sahel states announced their withdrawal, calling the Court an “instrument of neocolonial suppression.”
The United States signed the Rome Statute under Clinton but never ratified it; in 2002, Congress passed the American Service Members’ Protection Act, authorizing the president to use “all necessary means” to free any American detained by the ICC. Washington did not object to the Court’s early focus on African situations, even as it rejected jurisdiction over itself. Its opposition hardened once the ICC moved toward cases involving the US and its allies.
In 2020, after the Appeals Chamber authorized an investigation into crimes by US military personnel and the CIA in Afghanistan, Washington sanctioned Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and a senior Court official. The following year, Prosecutor Karim Khan “deprioritized” the American component of the case. No US citizen has ever been indicted by the ICC.
Rubio calls the ICC a “body of globalists” threatening US sovereignty and has urged US allies to rein it in. The criticism has a real basis: the Court can hear cases involving crimes committed on the territory of a state party even if the accused’s country has not joined the Rome Statute. But the ICC remains a treaty court, dependent on state cooperation, Western donors, and political decisions of the UN Security Council.
Washington’s contradiction is built into the design itself: the US is attacking an institution that grew out of the liberal order it helped create. Europe’s is different: a declaratory commitment to international law coexists with the practical costs of reducing reliance on American infrastructure.
What October 12 Will Reveal
October 12 will show whether the EU moves from declarations to legal obligations. If the final document includes a European Commission decision to add the US sanctions against the ICC to the annex of Regulation 2271/96, that would mean a legal prohibition on European companies complying with the US measures — an unprecedented use of the Blocking Statute.
If the outcome is a general declaration, a call on Washington to rescind the sanctions, and a mandate for the Commission to “prepare options,” that would confirm a scenario in which Europe defends the principle of ICC independence but is not prepared to pay for that defense through a direct collision with US extraterritorial jurisdiction.
The probability of full and immediate activation of the statute on October 12 is low. A more realistic scenario is a political declaration of support, a Commission mandate to prepare a legal mechanism, and the preservation of the six-month pause for negotiations.
The Dilemma Beyond The Hague
The question is not whether the ICC survives past April 2027. The question is whether Europe can defend what Brussels calls the “international legal order” when the costs of that defense fall on its own companies, banks, and technological supply chains.
The Blocking Statute is a test of the EU’s ability to act not as a regulator but as a geopolitical player willing to bear the costs of conflict. If Europe limits itself to declarations and negotiations, it will confirm the formula Washington has already internalized: European sovereignty ends where American extraterritorial jurisdiction begins.
If it activates the statute, it will launch an open legal conflict with an ally on which its security depends. For now, every signal points to a third option: prepare the instrument, defer the decision, and bet that Washington will back down on its own.
Around 400 BC, Europe was changing, though not in a single direction. Athens had just lost the Peloponnesian War (404 BC), and Roman tradition says the Gauls would sack Rome around 390 BC. Farther north, Iron Age communities reacted in almost opposite ways. In the south of the Netherlands and the southeast of Gaul, people […]
The European Union is witnessing a full-blown social revolt. Governing political parties and their economic policies are held in open contempt as public protests and strikes escalate across multiple countries.
Protests, mass marches, and industrial strikes are spreading across the EU in France, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Germany, Ireland, Portugal, and other countries. The grievances are various, from students and teachers over woeful education services, to healthcare professionals and transportation workers denouncing crumby wages and pension cuts.
But at the core is a warmongering, dehumanizing system of capitalist inequality.
Unbearable living costs for basic needs, from food to housing, are driving millions onto the streets in desperation and anger at the lack of adequate political response to their concerns. As one French student said: “Too young to be listened to, old enough to be tear-gassed.”
The entire political system is being brought into disrepute for its dysfunction and indifference towards meeting rudimentary human needs. Then, infuriating all the more, are lies from the elite rulers and their propaganda media about “national defense and threat of war from Russia.”
In Spain this week, an 87-year-old frail woman known as Maricarmen died in hospital after she was evicted from her Madrid home because she could not pay the extortionate rent increase. Her plight has come to galvanize a nationwide protest against Spain’s housing crisis, a crisis that is repeated across every European country. Protesters shouted furiously that the pitiful old woman was “murdered by the state and corporations.”
In France, the brutality of police against student protests has shocked the nation and the world. Nearly 7,000 young people have been arrested, as riot police tear gas and shoot at largely peaceful rallies. Students gathering at the Place de la Bastille in Paris and other cities vow that they will not back down. One student had his hand blown off by a police stun grenade while another teenager lost an eye from a rubber bullet fired at close range.
The Place de la Bastille is where the French Revolution manifested in 1798 against a hated aristocracy amid abject misery. Today, the tensions are boiling towards another momentous rebellion, this time inspiring again similar movements across Europe.
These protests and the inhumane suffering that underlie them are channeling uprisings all over the EU.
There is a palpable sense that populations en masse have had enough of decades of inequality and chronic deprivation inflicted by capitalist policies that enrich a few and are enforced by governments slavishly serving the interests of capital over the needs of the citizen majority.
Western media reports talk about “cash-strapped” governments under pressure from bond markets to reduce record debt levels while workers, students and pensioners demand more public investment and relief from economic hardship.
That is a misleading partial portrayal of the problem. Omitted is the crucial backdrop that European governments are directing vast economic resources towards militarism and the proxy war in Ukraine against Russia. That is what is causing the “cash-strapped governments.” In other words, their declared fiscal straits are a policy choice, not some mysterious dilemma.
The social crisis sweeping across Europe is also seen in the United States and other Western-aligned nations. The background is a failed economic system that no longer provides a modicum of acceptable living conditions. The problem has been decades in the making from growing inequality and diminishing political representation. Today it is even questionable if Western states are democracies, controlled as they are by corporate oligarchies.
Nevertheless, the social crisis that is unfolding across Europe has been intensified and amplified by European political rulers operating in a relentless war mode against Russia.
The European Union has pumped hundreds of billions of euros into Ukraine over the past four years to prop up a NeoNazi regime run by a corrupt dictatorship – all for the objective of defeating Russia. The EU leaders – many of them unelected, like Ursula von der Leyen, Kaja Kallas and António Costa – are driven by an obsessive Russophobia. But that is only part of the explanation.
Other elected leaders and parties like France’s Macron and Germany’s Merz are also despised for their elitism and delusions of grandeur. Merz declares that he wants to make Germany the strongest military in Europe, in total tin-ear deafness to his nation’s economic and social problems and the sinister historical connotations of resurrecting Nazi Germany. Meanwhile, as his government suffers electoral defeat after defeat, European elites deprecate German voters as being blind because they dare to choose parties that are opposed to war with Russia.
There are many grounds for the Europe-wide contempt of ruling parties. Inequality, poverty, unemployment, soaring living costs, declining wages, deteriorating public services. Uncontrolled immigration amid the pressure on inadequate public resources is another cause for grievance. Europe’s complicity in the Israeli genocidal war on Palestinians, and Europe’s complicity in Trump’s aggression towards Iran, Yemen, Cuba, and so on, are other factors.
However, the bogus narrative that governments are “cash-strapped” is a cause for immense public disgust. There are plenty of economic resources to meet public needs. It’s a question of those resources not being permitted to create just and humane societies under the prevailing capitalist system with its priority of enriching a tiny elite class.
The conditions of “tight budgets” and “austerity for the masses” are created by deliberate policies of militarism and fuelling a proxy war in Ukraine.
European “leaders” and their NATO lobbyists like Mark Rutte demand hundreds of billions of euros to boost military industries while at the same time calling for draconian cuts in public spending and social welfare in order to pay for this reckless militarism. The EU is “lending” an additional €90 billion over the next two years alone just to prop up the corrupt regime in Kiev so that it can keep fighting a futile war with Russia. The perverse priority is driven by the military-industrial complex and its corporate investors. It is also driven by an ideological, propagandized mindset that demonizes Russia as an enemy. President Putin and other Russian voices have repeatedly stated that they do not want war with Europe. They say the conflict in Ukraine has root causes that can be resolved through diplomatic engagement. Why are European politicians implacably opposed to peace?
A major factor is covering for internal political and economic failure of the European system. The EU’s economies, as with those in the U.S. and other Western states, are bankrupt dystopias in terms of delivering on social and democratic needs. The failure has been compounded by the costs of war in Ukraine.
That failure is criminal and fatal for the politicians and governments who have overseen the policies. Thus, the political class, including the propaganda news media, cannot admit their criminal policies.
In the face of their own internal contradictions, the European political elites are seeking a solution by externalizing Russia as an enemy. This is the same modus operandi that European rulers have used for the past century and more, unleashing two world wars as a result.
These criminal politicians and their dysfunctional economic system are again pushing war as their escape plan for survival at the expense of millions of lives and at the risk of starting a third world war, one that this time around could involve catastrophic nuclear nemesis.
It is damning of virtually every European government, including primarily the British, that there are no calls for diplomacy and political settlement with Russia. They are committed to waging war on Russia to absolve themselves from the social devastation they are responsible for.
One positive thing, though, is that increasing numbers of people can see through the chicanery and lies. A German student placard summed it up: “We won’t fight your wars… Education not bombs!”
A day of reckoning is imminent. Criminal political leaders and their warmongering system are exposed like never before and in a way that demands total revolt as a proper solution. The consequences are not to be externalized this time. Chickens are coming home to roost, as Malcom X once said.
EUobserver is proud to have an editorial partnership with Europod to co-publish the podcast series “Briefed” hosted by Léa Marchal. The podcast is available on all major platforms.
Find the full transcript below:
Spain is heading for early elections, after prime minister Pedro Sánchez called a snap vote last week. According to current polls, the conservative People’s Party, or PP, is ahead of Sánchez’s Socialists, while Vox is also making significant gains.
So, what would happen if the PP and Vox decided to govern together? And what would that mean for Europe?
Let’s start with the numbers. According to Politico’s poll of polls, the PP, the conservative right-wing party, is currently polling first, at around 34 percent. The Socialists of the PSOE are at around 26 percent, and the far-right party Vox at around 18 percent.
The Socialists already came second in the last general election, in 2023. The PP won the most seats, but it couldn’t form a government. Pedro Sánchez eventually secured enough support from other parties, including the left-wing Sumar, to remain prime minister.
This time, the balance could be different. If the current polling were reflected in the election result, the PP and Vox could have enough seats to form a government together. PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo has said he could negotiate with Vox.
And this would not be completely new in Spain. The PP and Vox are already governing together in four Spanish regions: Extremadura, Aragon, Castilla y León and Andalusia.
Now, would that mean Spain would have a government with Vox ministers? One possibility would be a government led by the PP, with Vox supporting it from outside, without taking ministerial positions. That’s what we’ve seen in Sweden, for example.
But what seems more and more likely is that Vox would become part of the government itself. The Vox MEP José Buxadé told Politico a few weeks ago that if his party negotiates a coalition with the PP, it would seek ministerial positions proportional to the number of votes it receives.
According to Politico, based on current polling, that could mean a third of ministers coming from Vox. So, what would this mean for Europe and for Spain? A lot.
Spain is currently one of the EU countries where the government has taken relatively progressive positions on issues such as migration, climate policy and social policy.
A change of government would therefore give more weight to the right in the European Council. That could be particularly important on migration, but also on economic files.
And then there is climate policy. Vox has called for the abolition of the European Green Deal, arguing that environmental policies have harmed employment and Spain’s energy policy.
Something that is very much contradicted by the fact that Spain is one of the European countries that has been particularly resilient during the energy crisis, thanks to its renewable energy.
So a change in climate policy could have consequences not only for Spain, but also for the EU’s wider energy transition.
And there could be another major change: foreign policy. Pedro Sánchez has been one of the more outspoken European leaders on the war in Gaza. Spain has taken a particularly critical position towards Israel and has recognised a Palestinian state.
Vox takes a very different position. The party strongly supports Israel and has called for European funding to the Palestinian Authority to be suspended.
The Spanish election is still several weeks away, so we don’t yet know whether the PP and Vox will actually be able to form a government, or what form such an agreement would take.
But if they do, Spain’s position in Europe could change quite significantly.
Spanish trade unions representing millions of workers have announced a general strike for November 11. The announcement comes amid nationwide mobilizations for the right to housing and only days after Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called early elections for November 29.
The strike was announced by the two largest union organizations, the General Union of Workers (UGT) and the Workers’ Commissions (Comisiones Obreras, CCOO), alongside the General Confederation of Labor (CGT), Basque unions ELA and LAB, and the Galician confederation CIG.
It will be the country’s first general strike in 14 years, excluding the feminist strike of March 8, 2018.
Housing and wages are the same struggle
“A key demand of this strike is to vindicate decent salaries to afford housing,” the Madrid Tenants Union wrote.
In their strike call, unions emphasized several demands that have been on their agenda for months. These include reductions in working hours, wage increases, health and safety measures in the workplace, eradicating precarious employment and progress in collective bargaining – a process that has been obstructed by employers for almost a year.
Yet, echoing the sentiment voiced on the streets, where hundreds of thousands have protested and erected encampments against a predatory housing system, the trade union call links all these demands to the right to housing.
“This is a strike with very clear foundations and labor demands,” CCOO’s Carlos Gutiérrez said. “Is it being called because working families cannot access affordable housing? Yes. But we cannot separate the inability to access affordable housing from the wage situation in our country and what is happening in the workplace.”
Maricarmen Abascal during a protest in June 2026. Source Sindicato de Inquilinas e Inquilinos de Madrid/Facebook
The general strike builds on a protest wave triggered by the eviction of 87-year-old Maricarmen Abascal in late September. After years of battle to keep the home she had been living in for 70 years, Abascal was carried out of the apartment on a stretcher. She remained hospitalized until Wednesday, October 7, when the Madrid Tenants Union announced her death.
“Although a historic agreement was reached that would have allowed her to return to her home, this solution came too late,” the organization wrote. “An absolutely avoidable situation, following an agonizing process.”
A strike against all who “do nothing to solve the housing crisis”
Many of those participating in the protests recognized that Sánchez’s administration failed to implement policies that would truly address the housing crisis. Yet union and civil society statements emphasize the problem goes much further than the behavior of a specific political option.
“It’s important to make clear that this is not a strike against any particular government, but against those who do nothing to solve the housing crisis, and also against the employers, who have kept the Agreement for Employment and Collective Bargaining (AENC) blocked for nearly a year,” Patricia Ruiz from UGT was quoted as saying in Público.
Political parties from the center-left to the left have largely expressed support for the strike. Even PSOE figures who share the responsibility for not addressing the housing crisis signaled support for concerns outlined by trade unions.
While a general strike held only a couple of weeks ahead of an election would usually spell trouble for the incumbent administration, local political analysts say this is a peculiar situation that could swing both ways.
Right-wing options are polling high, but ongoing housing mobilizations could steer the electoral campaign away from scapegoating migrants toward issues of social justice – topics they are generally keen to avoid.
When people talk about Neanderthal technology, they almost always mean stone: points, scrapers, flakes chipped from flint. There is a good reason for that. Stone can last hundreds of thousands of years, while a wooden stick buried in the ground rots away quickly. For decades, a large part of Neanderthal equipment has simply been missing […]
Regulation could be the fastest response for tenants facing their next rent payment, Italian MEP Irene Tinagli said. Measures to moderate rent increases and restrict short-term rentals in neighbourhoods under the greatest pressure could help in the short to medium term.
“In the long term we need structural measures that provide a greater supply of affordable homes,” she told the European Newsroom (enr) on Wednesday. That would however require substantial investment and long-term planning, she added.
Tinagli, who chairs the European Parliament’s Special Committee on the Housing Crisis (HOUS), said residential property “has become an asset” and was increasingly attracting investors and real estate funds. These investors were buying entire buildings and evicting tenants or sharply raising rents, she said, describing a pattern seen in cities across the EU.
One such case was Maricarmen Abascal, whose eviction from her longtime Madrid home made her a symbol of Spain’s housing protests. She died in hospital at the age of 87 on October 7, two weeks after her eviction. She never returned home, despite an agreement with the apartment’s owner, Urbagestión, that would have allowed her to return at roughly her previous rent rate.
In the interview, conducted before news of Abascal’s death emerged, Tinagli described Abascal’s eviction as “a case that we are seeing in many other cities and countries across the European Union” and added: “It tells me that we need to do something.”
European tools, local action
While housing remains primarily a national and local responsibility, the EU could provide authorities with tools to act, alongside guidelines and parliamentary resolutions, Tinagli said.
She pointed to greater use of cohesion funds, “reprogramming them to address housing investments”, and more flexible state-aid rules to support social and affordable housing projects.
Work on an Affordable Housing Act, which the European Commission proposed last month, was intended to give authorities clearer criteria for restricting short-term rentals “where they are becoming increasingly invasive of the dynamics of the city,” the Italian politician said.
Such restrictions could range from limits on licences to outright bans, depending on local housing pressures. Reducing potential returns from holiday lets could curb investors’ interest in driving up property prices, she added.
Maricarmen Abascal, the 87-year-old Madrid pensioner whose eviction from the home where she had lived for more than 70 years triggered demonstrations across Spain, has died in hospital. Her case has pushed the country’s housing crisis to the centre of a general election campaign that will culminate in a vote on 29 November.
María del Carmen Abascal, widely known as Maricarmen, died on Wednesday at Madrid’s Gregorio Marañón hospital, where she had been receiving treatment since being evicted from her flat in the Retiro district on 23 September. The Madrid Tenants’ Union, which had supported her during the long-running dispute with the property owner, announced her death. The cause has not been disclosed.
Abascal had lived in the property since 1956, when her father first rented it. The tenancy later passed to her mother and subsequently to Abascal under Spain’s old protected-rent system. A legal dispute began after the property changed hands and Urbagestión Desarrollo e Inversión challenged her right to remain under the inherited tenancy. The courts eventually sided with the owner after a dispute over the rules governing successive transfers of old rental contracts.
She had been paying about €500 a month. Urbagestión sought a new rent of €2,650 before subsequently proposing €1,650, still above Abascal’s pension of about €1,350 a month. Three earlier attempts to remove her from the property had failed before the eviction was finally carried out on 23 September. Abascal left the building on a stretcher and was taken to hospital.
Her removal quickly became a focus for wider anger over housing costs. Thousands demonstrated in Madrid and other Spanish cities, while protesters established an encampment in Puerta del Sol under slogans including “Ni una Maricarmen más” — “Not one more Maricarmen”. Speaking from hospital after the eviction, Abascal urged demonstrators to continue campaigning and “defend what is yours”.
After negotiations involving Abascal’s representatives, Urbagestión and Madrid’s municipal housing company, an agreement was eventually reached that would have allowed her to return to the flat under a new eight-year tenancy at an affordable rent. She remained in hospital, however, and was never able to return home.
The tenants’ union said the agreement had arrived too late and described the events surrounding the eviction as a turning point in Spain’s housing debate. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez offered condolences to Abascal’s family and those affected by her death. The government had previously described her eviction as the type of case that new housing legislation was intended to prevent.
The political consequences have extended well beyond Madrid. On 29 September, Sánchez’s government approved two emergency housing decrees covering eviction protection, rental contracts and speculative property purchases. One measure would have extended protections for vulnerable households facing eviction until 2030, while the package also proposed restrictions on certain property acquisitions and additional safeguards for tenants.
Congress rejected both decrees on 2 October, with the PP, Vox and Junts voting against the measures. Opponents argued that tighter intervention in the rental market would discourage landlords from offering properties for rent and further restrict supply. Supporters of the measures said stronger tenant protection was necessary amid rapidly rising housing costs.
Three days later Sánchez announced a general election for 29 November, saying he needed a broader parliamentary majority to pursue further reforms. As EU Today reported following the announcement, the election brings an early end to a parliament in which the minority coalition had become increasingly dependent on shifting alliances to pass legislation.
The dispute comes against a substantial housing shortage. The Bank of Spain estimates that the gap between new homes and household formation accumulated to around 750,000 properties between 2021 and 2025. Official data cited in the government’s housing legislation also show that 26.8 per cent of Spanish households renting at market prices spent more than 40 per cent of their income on rent in 2025, compared with an EU average of 18.6 per cent.
Pressure is likely to continue during the campaign. Spain’s main trade union confederations, CCOO and UGT, have backed a nationwide general strike for 11 November over the housing crisis, less than three weeks before polling day. It will be the first general strike jointly backed by the two organisations in 14 years.
Abascal’s death therefore comes as a personal case that began with a dispute over one Madrid flat has become inseparable from a much larger argument over rents, property rights, housing supply and the degree to which the Spanish state should intervene in the market. Those questions are now set to form one of the principal dividing lines of Spain’s November election.
The Alfa Watan, a ship sailing under the flag of Togo, and the Able, a vessel flying the flag of Palau, were targeted by naval and aerial drones on Tuesday (6 October) morning in the Black Sea near the Bulgarian coast.
The Alfa Watan sank, and rescuers at the scene found only an overturned boat, life jackets, and fragments of the ship’s equipment, according to Bulgarian prime minister Rumen Radev.
The 18-member crew of the Able caught fire, but was successfully evacuated to the port of Varna.
“This is an unacceptable attack in Bulgaria’s exclusive economic zone,” Radev said after an emergency government meeting on Tuesday.
Bulgaria had discussed the drone attack inside the EU and Nato, he added.
It came after a drone also sank a Turkish-owned grain ship, the Royad Mammadov, killing two sailors, on Monday.
But even though Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky was quick to blame Russia, the perpetrators have not been formally identified yet, in a grey-zone conflict in which deniability is a tactic.
Russia and Ukraine have been escalating attacks on ships for several months in an effort to disrupt each other’s export economies.
And Moscow’s attacks have largely halted Ukraine’s maritime exports of agricultural products, while Kyiv’s attacks have forced Russia to seek alternative routes for exports.
“The situation in the Black Sea is increasingly concerning,” said EU Commission’s president Ursula von der Leyen on X on Tuesday.
Ukraine has “proposed concrete steps to de-escalate the situation”, also said Zelensky.
But for all his good will, the attacks were just part of a broader deterioration in Europe’s security environment, covering also Nato’s eastern and southern borders.
‘Shadow war’
For Czech president Peter Pavel, speaking to Czech daily Deník N on 22 September, the most imminent danger came from a false-flag attack in Estonia or Latvia, to test Nato’s resolve.
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Pedro Sánchez has turned a parliamentary defeat over housing into a general election on 29th November.
The calculation is clear: force Spain’s political argument onto territory more favourable to the left before migration, corruption allegations and parliamentary paralysis return to the foreground. But the polls suggest that the gamble could still deliver power to the centre-right People’s Party and Vox.
Pedro Sánchez’s decision to dissolve Spain’s parliament nine months ahead of schedule is more than an admission that his minority government had reached the limits of what it could achieve in the Congress of Deputies. It is an attempt to choose the terms on which his government will be judged.
The immediate trigger was the defeat of two emergency housing decrees after the conservative People’s Party (PP), Vox and Catalan separatist Junts voted against them. Housing had already moved rapidly to the centre of Spanish politics following the eviction of 87-year-old Maricarmen Abascal from the Madrid flat where she had lived for 71 years, followed by large demonstrations across the country. EU Today has previously reported on both the housing protests across Spain and Sánchez’s subsequent decision to call the election.
The prime minister is now attempting to convert legislative weakness into electoral advantage.
In his announcement on 5 October, Sánchez presented the election as a choice between a broader progressive majority capable of advancing social legislation and an opposition that had obstructed measures on housing and other domestic priorities. The government reinforced that strategy a day later by approving revised versions of the two housing decrees, containing 21 measures including tax incentives, assistance for first-time buyers and measures intended to increase supply. They will require validation by the Diputación Permanente, the standing parliamentary body that remains after dissolution.
The political calculation is straightforward. Housing offers Sánchez an issue on which anger is directed not only at government but at landlords, property investors, regional authorities and political parties opposing stronger regulation. The eviction of Abascal gave that argument a human symbol and transformed a long-running affordability problem into an immediate political confrontation.
That does not mean the strategy will work.
Most polling continues to place the PSOE behind the PP. Surveys put the Socialists at roughly 28 per cent, while Vox has risen to around 18 per cent. A PP-Vox combination is currently the only bloc consistently projected to command an outright parliamentary majority. One Sigma Dos survey published after the election announcement projected the two parties winning 203 of the Congress’s 350 seats.
Sánchez therefore appears to be playing less for immediate dominance than for mobilisation.
His problem before the housing protests was not simply the strength of the right. The broader left had become fragmented, while the government was being damaged by disputes over migration, particularly following the crisis in Ceuta, as well as corruption investigations involving figures associated with the PSOE. At the same time, Junts had become an increasingly unreliable parliamentary partner, leaving the government unable to guarantee major legislation or a new budget.
Housing changes the subject.
It allows Sánchez to argue that the central question is not whether his coalition has governed smoothly, but whether voters want a parliament prepared to intervene more aggressively in the housing market. The PP, however, is contesting precisely that framing. Alberto Núñez Feijóo argues that the housing shortage is itself a product of Sánchez’s eight years in government and has promised to raise annual construction towards 200,000 homes while reducing taxes.
The election may therefore develop into a dispute over responsibility rather than diagnosis. Both sides accept that housing has become a major national problem; they differ sharply over whether regulation or additional supply should dominate the response.
There is also a wider European dimension. Housing affordability is increasingly politically disruptive across the EU, including in major cities where construction has failed to keep pace with household formation, migration and demand for short-term accommodation. EU Today has examined similar pressures in Berlin’s housing market. Spain could now provide a test of whether housing can become powerful enough as an electoral issue to reverse the wider European movement towards the right.
For Ukraine, however, the consequences are likely to be less dramatic than Spain’s domestic political contest might suggest.
Sánchez committed €1 billion in bilateral military support to Ukraine for 2026, with Spain putting its cumulative bilateral military assistance since Russia’s full-scale invasion at almost €4 billion. Madrid has also trained more than 9,000 Ukrainian military personnel.
Spain is also home to a considerably larger Ukrainian community than the roughly 300,000 figure frequently cited. Government data showed 353,009 Ukrainian nationals holding valid residence documentation at the end of June, including 262,782 under temporary protection.
A PP-led government would alter Madrid’s domestic priorities and potentially its approach to defence spending and migration, particularly if Vox were required to sustain a parliamentary majority. Yet there is little basis at present for assuming that a change of government would produce a reversal of Spain’s fundamental position on Russia’s invasion or membership of the European and Atlantic security structures supporting Ukraine.
The more immediate question is whether Sánchez can make housing important enough to overcome the electoral arithmetic confronting him.
Calling the election has allowed him to escape a parliament in which his legislative coalition was steadily disintegrating and to enter a campaign around an issue capable of mobilising his electorate. It has not changed the fact that the PP and Vox begin that campaign with the stronger numbers.
Sánchez has chosen the battlefield. On 29th November, Spain will decide whether that was enough.
A Spanish court has sentenced a 61-year-old Sudanese man to 14 years in prison for raping a woman with whom he shared a home, after he threatened her with a machete and struck her with an electrical cable.
The third section of the Provincial Court of Valencia ruled that the May 29, 2024, attack was a sexual assault involving penetration, aggravated by the degrading and humiliating nature of the violence used. The court also ordered fines totaling €1,200 for two minor offenses of injury and threats, and it applied a simple mitigating factor of alcohol intoxication because the man’s volitional capacity was slightly impaired.
The assault occurred about 5 p.m. in a Valencia residence while the other two occupants were out, according to the ruling as reported by Las Provincias. The man ordered the woman into his room and forced her to drink several beers while brandishing a machete with a 57-centimeter blade.
“Come drink with me; if you don’t come, look what’s waiting for you,” he told her, the newspaper reported, citing the established facts.
When she tried to leave, he seized her by the hair and placed the blade against her neck, saying, “Now, the jokes are over.”
He tore off her shirt, lowered her pants, failed in an attempt at anal penetration, then raped her vaginally and ejaculated. He then whipped her back and legs with an electrical cable, covered her mouth and nose so her cries would not be heard, and told her he would keep going until he was “in prison or in the grave.”
She fled when he stood to retrieve tobacco, ran down the hallway and called for help. Neighbors who could not understand her language but recognized she was in distress then dialed for police. When National Police officers arrived, they found her half-naked and frantic. She immediately sought their protection.
In the man’s bedroom they recovered the machete, the cable and the woman’s passport, which he had burned.
The court rejected his trial claim that his own calls had brought police to the scene.
The judges found the woman’s account coherent from her first statement and supported by neighbors, officers and medical reports that documented injuries and an acute stress disorder. A forensic doctor testified that the absence of genital wounds did not exclude the reported assault.
Analysis of vaginal samples detected the defendant’s semen, and experts dismissed as implausible his assertion of consensual sex 16 days earlier. The panel also noted irregularities in the collection of the defendant’s DNA after he refused to provide samples following his arrest.
“The complainant’s statement meets the criteria to be considered sufficient incriminating evidence to overcome the presumption of innocence of the accused,” the court said. The judges added that “no relevant contradictions or inconsistencies were noted in her statement that could affect its reliability.”
The woman had been in Spain only a short time, did not speak the language, had little money, and had no family or support network. The court rejected the defense argument that she had reported the crime to obtain a residence permit, citing the objective evidence.
Around 3,700 years ago, anyone crossing the great hall at La Almoloya, a hilltop settlement in the Sierra Espuña mountains of southeastern Spain, had to walk over a man. He lay at the exact point where the two halves of the room meet, his lower body under the hearth and his face about a centimeter […]
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced a snap election for late November after two housing bills were defeated in a parliamentary vote on Friday, October 2. The bills came amid widespread mass mobilizations demanding urgent action on the country’s housing crisis, following the eviction of an 87-year-old woman in Madrid.
Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of approximately 50 cities over the weekend in support of these demands.
“It is true that there are still many injustices to correct, many social goals to achieve, and many problems to solve – above all in the areas of inequality, public services, and access to housing,” Sánchez said in his speech on Monday, as he appealed to voters to give progressive forces more decisive electoral support to allow them to implement reforms more easily.
Real estate speculation drives housing crisis
While Sánchez’s administration has profiled itself as one of the more progressive governments in Europe in terms of international policy, national movements remain frustrated by the lack of decisiveness it has approached making changes at home – including in housing policy.
For years, tenants unions have been warning against the different ways house-owners, particularly real estate speculation funds, have exacerbated housing insecurity for the general population.
Existing anger spilled over as Maricarmen Abascal, an elderly tenant in Madrid, faced eviction from the home she had lived in for 70 years. After the development company Urbagestión Desarrollo e Inversión SL acquired the house Abascal lived in, they imposed a 275% rent increase that she was not able to meet, leading, after a lengthy legal process, to her eviction at the end of last month.
The mobilizations that followed addressed a wider set of problems. “Maricarmen’s situation reflects a housing model that prioritizes real estate profits while abandoning the very people who built our neighborhoods over the decades,” Madrid Tenants’ Union (Sindicato de Inquilinas e Inquilinos de Madrid) warned.
“Most serious of all is that this situation cannot be understood without considering the weight of laws inherited from the Franco regime that denied women basic rights,” the union emphasized in May. “The original contract was signed solely by Maricarmen’s father because the legal system of the time rendered women invisible within the family. Had that same contract been signed today, both parents would have been named as holders, and Maricarmen would remain fully protected.”
“Yet an extremely restrictive interpretation of the regulations has ultimately weighed more heavily than social reality, than the desire to protect those who rent, and more than seventy years of roots in a neighborhood,” they added. “For the Madrid Tenants’ Union, the position is clear: no formalistic interpretation of the law can justify evicting an 87-year-old woman from the home where she has lived her entire life simply to boost the profitability of a real estate investment.”
Unions promise building general strike for housing
The protests formulated several demands to the government, including a ban on eviction of vulnerable tenants where alternative housing is not available; a limit to short-term and room rentals; a rent freeze; and an extension for contracts ending in 2026 and 2027.
Such demands were generally by the public, as well as by trade unions. “Housing and work are not separate struggles,” unions wrote, pledging to work towards a general strike for housing. “The rise in rents is a direct transfer of wealth from the working class to rentierism. Our wages end up, month after month, in the pockets of the rentiers who control our homes.”
The uproar pushed Sánchez’s government to reflect these demands in two bills it presented to parliament. Most considered this a significant breakthrough for the housing movement despite the official texts not fully corresponding to the protesters’ vocabulary and the vote taking place on two separate proposals.
Watered down or not, right-wing and far-right parties voted against both bills.
“We have a democracy held hostage by rentiers and speculators,” the progressive party Podemos wrote as protests rolled out over the weekend. “The housing mobilization must keep growing and move toward a general strike until the speculators and those who defend them in the institutions have nowhere left to hide.”
“Between now and November 29, the voices of all of us who want peace must be heard,” Irene Montero from Podemos added after the snap election announcement. “Those of us who want our sons and daughters to avoid war and to have healthcare and education, instead of money being spent on weapons; who want homes to live in; who want jobs and time to spend with our loved ones; and who want the cost of living to go down.”
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