Europe Archive

MADRID—Last month’s election in Catalonia underlined the deep and longstanding divisions in the region over whether to seek independence from the rest of Spain. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s Socialist Party may have won the most votes, but separatist parties together won the most seats in the regional Parliament and are poised to form a government. However, the record-low voter turnout of just over 53 percent raises questions about how much of a mandate the new Catalan government will have. The rift between separatists and unionists has dominated both Catalan and Spanish politics for a decade, and the regional polls […]

Last month, after months of jockeying for influence, member states of the International Criminal Court held a secret ballot to determine the court’s next chief prosecutor. The winner was Karim Khan, a British lawyer with extensive experience on both the prosecutorial and defense side of international criminal cases. Khan will be only the third person to hold the job. He will take over from the current chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, at a time when the ICC faces some difficult questions about what kind of institution it will be. This week on Trend Lines, WPR’s Elliot Waldman is joined by Kyle […]

Italy fell into a political crisis in late-January, when, following disagreements in the coalition then headed by Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, a small but crucial part of the government withdrew its support. Without the backing of former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s Italia Viva party, Conte no longer had the required majority in Parliament. Given the dire straits of Italy’s health system and economy due to the coronavirus pandemic, the unexpected move raised concerns over the country’s ability to effectively continue its vaccination campaign and lay the foundations for economic recovery. Those fears were alleviated on Feb. 18, when Mario Draghi, […]

On a snowy afternoon in January, 24-year-old Thanujan Sellathurai delivered a speech in front of a small crowd of protesters from the Tamil community in Geneva. He called for the United Nations, which has several of its agencies headquartered there, to condemn the “brutal atrocity” that had just taken place in Sri Lanka. Authorities at the University of Jaffna, on the northern tip of Sri Lanka, had ordered the bulldozing of a memorial paying tribute to the victims of the Mullivaikkal massacre, a mass killing of Tamil civilians that took place in May 2009, during the last few days of […]