Euobserver.com

Polish government authorities snubbed a European Parliament probe into spyware Pegasus by refusing to show up to an inquiry on Thursday.

Russian president Vladimir Putin thanked Chinese president Xi Jinping for his "balanced position" on the Ukraine "crisis" in Uzbekistan Thursday in what was their first meeting since the war. Putin also backed China's claim to Taiwan and condemned US "provocations" in support of its independence. The meeting is being closely watched by Western diplomats after Russia and China announced a new special relationship at the Chinese Winter Olympics in February.

Ursula von der Leyen barely noticed that European democracy is under attack not only from external threats, but from within. Two of the world's leading autocratic countries are EU member states.

The overwhelming majority of European parliament lawmakers have supported a resolution saying Hungary is no longer a full democracy. 433 MEPs on Thursday voted in favour, 123 against and 28 abstentions. The resolution notes that lack of decisive EU action has contributed to the emergence of a "hybrid regime of electoral autocracy". It condemns the "deliberate and systematic efforts of the Hungarian government" to undermine EU values.

Swedish centre-left prime minister Magdalena Andersson has pledged to resign Thursday, after vote counting from last Sunday's election saw a right-wing bloc including a party with Nazi roots narrowly win. The right-wingers got 176 seats out of 349 with 99 percent of the votes counted. The bloc's Sweden Democrats party has Nazi roots and used to be a pariah, but now won some 20 percent of the Swedish ballots.

Tiny Kox, the Dutch head of a venerable watchdog on European democracy, has denied being a Kremlin fixer after one Russian spy described him as a top contact in leaked files.

The European Parliament agreed on higher renewable and energy-saving targets for energy consumption in the EU — amid an energy crisis which has prompted the EU to put forward unprecedented measures to curb high energy prices.

To deal with the energy and climate crisis, EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen announced new spending rules which are going to be "more flexible."

French finance minister Bruno Le Maire said on Wednesday that the economy was not facing recession, after the government lowered its economic outlook for 2023 to one percent from 1.4 percent previously, Reuters reported. "France is not going into a recession. France is having a good 2022. We have revised up our growth estimate to 2.7 percent from 2.5 percent," Le Maire said.

Google lost a challenge on Wednesday, when a top EU court upheld a ruling that the US tech giant broke competition rules and fined it a record €4.1bn, Reuters reported. The EU's General Court trimmed the fine modestly, to €4.125bn from €4.34bn. The EU said Google imposed unlawful restrictions on manufacturers of Android mobile devices and mobile network operators in order to consolidate the dominant position of its search engine.

It is difficult to see how Vladimir Putin can survive more major setbacks or outright defeat. Should this happen, Russia will find itself in a major political crisis. But offering him negotiations now would help him, by easing domestic pressure.

The European Parliament is the first EU institution expected to say that one of the 27 EU members is not a fully-fledged democracy. But that has little consequence for Hungary — more to the EU.

Crisis measures include imposing cuts in power-consumption across the bloc, a cap on the excess revenues made by renewable and nuclear energy, and a "solidarity mechanism" to channel the massive and unexpected profits of fossil fuel firms to citizens.

Instead of suppressing the entire economy to tackle inflation, the economist Isabella Weber says a less damaging way to address it is by directly controlling the price of essential resources — like gas and energy.

Danish private consumers and SME's will be able to wait for up to five years to pay the actual increase of energy prices, social democrat PM Mette Frederiksen proposed on Wednesday. "We can't just look at the fact that there will be Danes this winter who can't pay for their electricity and heat," she said. Public money will be made available for energy companies to back the loans.

Five civil society groups (BEUC, Birdlife, ECOS, T&E and WWF) announced on Wednesday that they have abandoned the EU's Platform on Sustainable Finance, responsible for developing technical recommendations on the EU taxonomy. They argued that the inclusion of gas and nuclear is the result of political interference and accused the European Commission of ignoring science and the expert's recommendations — particularly regarding forestry, biomass, gas-fired power plants and nuclear energy.

The EU wants to finalise the overhaul of the migration and asylum laws before the end of the current mandate in 2024. But big issues on solidarity remain unsolved, including in the European Parliament.

Negotiations to resolve a strike between European Parliament staff interpreters and its administration have collapsed amid renewed efforts to elevate the dispute to the political level.

At least 49 Armenian soldiers have reportedly been killed by Azerbaijan in a conflict highlighting the fragility of the former Soviet region beyond Ukraine.

Spain must renew the country's top judicial body, European Commission vice-president Věra Jourová has warned — after the president of the National Council for the Judiciary threatened to resign.