Western Europe Archive

After a first six months spent focused on matters domestic and European, French President Emmanuel Macron has begun to travel farther afield. He is in West Africa this week, having arrived yesterday in Burkina Faso and continuing on to Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana. Earlier this month he traveled to the Persian Gulf for a planned visit to the United Arab Emirates, making an unplanned stopover in Saudi Arabia on his way back to Paris. In West Africa, Macron will try, as all new French presidents must, to reset a relationship burdened by the historical legacy of colonial exploitation and postcolonial […]

BELFAST, Northern Ireland—The deadlocked political situation in Northern Ireland shows no sign of ending, at least this side of Christmas. The region’s two main parties—the conservative Democratic Unionist Party, or DUP, and left-wing, nationalist Sinn Fein—still cannot reach an agreement to restore a devolved power-sharing government, which was brought down by a domestic scandal in January. The crisis has been deepened considerably by the prospects of a British exit from the European Union that calls into question the spirit of the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 that ended three decades of violence between nationalists and unionists. That deal, which has […]

Negotiations to form a coalition government in Germany broke down this week, leaving Chancellor Angela Merkel, and the country, in a state of suspended animation two months after an inconclusive general election. The possible ways forward include Merkel continuing as chancellor at the head of a minority government, or new elections. Opinion polls, however, suggest that a fresh round of voting would do nothing to significantly alter the electoral outcome or resolve the current impasse, opening what could be an extended period of political uncertainty in a country long known for its stability. Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union suffered a drop […]

On Nov. 2, Iceland’s president, Gudni Johannesson, asked the leader of the Left-Green Movement, Katrin Jakobsdottir, to form a government, even though the party came in second to the incumbent Independence Party in parliamentary elections late last month. After a first attempt at forming a coalition government failed, Jakobsdottir has now entered into talks with the centrist Progressive Party and the conservative Independence Party, which led the previous coalition government. In an email interview, Olafur Th. Hardarson, a professor of political science specializing in Icelandic elections at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik, discusses the election results, the coalition talks […]

While talks between the United Kingdom and the European Union over the terms of Brexit are ongoing, the question of how to sever Northern Ireland from the EU has emerged as a major point of contention. If talks fail, the U.K. will likely exit the EU without a smooth transitional framework in place. That would raise several border issues in Ireland and Northern Ireland and could even threaten the Good Friday peace agreement that ended 30 years of violence in Northern Ireland in the late 1990s. In an email interview, Frank Barry, a professor of international business and economic development […]

Editor’s note: This article is the first in an ongoing WPR series about workers’ rights in various countries around the world. On Oct. 23, leaders of European Union member states agreed to revise the legal statute regulating the bloc’s system of “posted workers,” which are employees sent by their companies on temporary assignment from one member state to another. As populist sentiment within the EU has risen, reforming the posted workers system has increasingly become a hot-button issue, as countries seek to protect their workers from what many consider to be unfair competition. In an email interview, Matthias Busse, an […]