Euobserver.com

Hans-Georg Maassen, the head of Germany's domestic intelligence service, the BfV, has contradicted chancellor Angela Merkel on reports that fascist groups attacked migrants in the German town of Chemnitz during riots last week. The BfV had "no reliable information about such hunts taking place", he said. Merkel had earlier said video images "very clearly" showed evidence of the xenophobic assaults, but Maassen said the video clips could have been faked.

Sweden heads for a hung parliament after Sunday's election, which saw support for the nationalist Sweden Democrats surge. With just 30,000 votes between the two blocs, votes cast abroad to be counted on Wednesday could still make the difference.

The European Parliament will kick off the EU political season, ahead of the European elections next May, with EU Commission president outlining new migration initiatives. MEPs will also vote on the state of Hungary's democracy.

The Sweden Democrats emerged as second largest party (19.2%) in Sunday's general elections, an exit poll published by the Swedish public broadcaster SVT minutes after the vote closed showed. Center-left parties received 39.4 percent and the centre-right bloc got 39.6 percent of votes, according to the poll, which also put the Green party (4.2%) at risk of missing the 4 percent parliamentary threshold. First results are expected by 11PM.

Thirty four percent of Swedes had already voted by Saturday, signalling a likely high turnout in Sunday's election finale. The ruling centre-left Social Democrats have polled to remain the biggest party, but if neither the centre-right nor the centre-left bloc win a majority, the anti-migrant Sweden Democrats could be in a key-position when forming a new government. Polling stations close at 8PM local time, with first results expected by 11PM.

Former Eurogroup chief Jeroen Dijsselbloem said on Friday that he had been a member of French president Emmanuel Macron's En Marche movement since 2016. Clarifying remarks he made on a Dutch political podcast, the former Dutch finance minister said he would "never" leave his centre-left social democrat party. Dijsselbloem, who wrote a book about his experiences, recently also revealed he turned down a bank lobbying job.

Eight EU member states in the UN Security Council have called on Russia and Iran to maintain a previously agreed ceasefire and avoid military escalation in the northwestern Syrian province of Idlib to avoid "catastrophic humanitarian consequences for civilians". The statement was signed by the UK, France, Sweden, Poland, the Netherlands, together with Germany, Belgium and Italy, who recently sat in the Council or will soon be sitting.

Ireland is discussing a special Brexit deal to keep using the UK as a "land bridge" for goods in transit to Dublin without border checks. Carol-Ann O'Keeffe, a senior Irish tax official, explained at a British and Irish Chambers of Commerce conference in Dublin on Thursday that goods from the continent could undergo checks in France, containers could then be sealed and given free passage to Dublin, the Guardian reported.

Swedish voters are consuming much more "junk news" than other Europeans ahead of their elections, a new study says.

Following a town hall debate in Luxembourg on Thursday, French president Emmanuel Macron told reporters that the centre-right EPP bloc, which includes German chancellor Angela Merkel, should "clarify its positions" on nationalist policies. "We have been too slow, too ready to compromise," he said. The European Parliament's EPP party, which includes Hungary's ruling Fidesz, risks an open split in a vote next week on introducing penalties against Hungary.

An EU law that promised greater security, passed in the aftermath of terror attacks in France and Belgium, appears to have been a dud.

Window of opportunity for Kosovo-Serbia deal is wide open, but not for long, the Kosovar president's chief of staff writes for EUobserver as talks resume on Friday.

MEPs will vote next week on whether to urge member states to investigate Hungary on EU values. Budapest calls it "liberal fundamentalism", with the EPP in a difficult position.

Time for Christian Democratic leaders in the EP to show where they stand on democracy in Hungary, but also the founding principles of the Europe Union, say Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International in a joint text.

Germany and France, along with the US and Canada, issued a joint statement Thursday with the UK, a day after London identified two men over the Salisbury nerve gas attack against Sergei and Yulia Skripal. They said they have "full confidence in the British assessment that the two suspects were officers from the Russian military intelligence service" and that the operation was "almost certainly approved at a senior government level."

German chancellor Angela Merkel contradicted Thursday her interior minister Horst Seehofer, who said on Wednesday that migration was "the mother of all problems". "I say it differently," she replied in an interview on RTL television. "Migration presents us with challenges and here we have problems, here we also have successes," she said.

The European Commission gave its green light Thursday for the acquisition of Shazam, a UK music recognition application, by US giant Apple. It said that the move would "not materially increase Apple's ability to target music enthusiasts" and would not restrict access to the Shazam app for streaming services. "Shazam's data is not unique and Apple's competitors would still have the opportunity to access and use similar databases," it said.

Sara Mardini and her sister, who competed in the 2016 Summer Olympics, in 2015 saved 18 refugees by swimming their raft to a Greek island. Mardini, who has a hero status in Germany for her efforts, has since returned to Greece to help others. Police now accuse the 23-year old of people smuggling and is in jail. "She is in a state of disbelief," her lawyers told the Guardian.

Horst Seehofer's CSU party took a tough line on migration at its congress and distanced itself from Merkel on foreign policy.

Cyprus interior minister, Constantinos Petrides, on Wednesday said the country will put forward measures to ease the spike of asylum seekers in the hope of offloading them on other EU states. "If these numbers continue to increase, I admit that we will no longer be able to cope with it," he said. The island-nation of 1.1 million received some 4,000 asylum applications in the first eight months of 2018.