Europe is getting older – but ageing alone is not the biggest threat to its long-term care systems. Bruegel’s study finds that the real danger is whether Europeans spend those extra years healthy or living with disabilities that require sustained care.

Germany can launch satellites into orbit, attract billions into start-ups and build cutting-edge industries – yet millions of voters still feel the country’s future has nothing to offer them. The National Interest argues that the AfD’s historic victory in Saxony-Anhalt exposes this dangerous split between a Germany reinventing itself and regions still scarred by decades of economic decline.

Germany’s political establishment is facing the result it spent years trying to prevent. The AfD’s 43.8 per cent victory in Saxony-Anhalt is not just another eastern protest – GMF sees it as a direct threat to Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Germany’s post-war political order.

Jordan Bardella and Nigel Farage are trying to look less like protest leaders and more like prime ministers-in-waiting. Institut Montaigne sees their Birmingham summit as a calculated credibility operation, with migration and sovereignty used to advertise a new nationalist cooperation across the Channel.

Germany has crossed a political threshold that its mainstream parties can no longer dismiss as an eastern protest. The AfD stormed to 43.8 per cent in Saxony-Anhalt, more than doubling its 2021 result and leaving it just three seats short of an outright majority.

Europe is spending more on defence, but RAND warns that money alone will not make the continent ready for the threats already hitting it. Russian sabotage, hybrid pressure and attacks on critical infrastructure are exposing weak spots far beyond the battlefield.

Europe has spent 15 years pretending it has a common defence procurement market. In reality, most governments ignored the rules, protected national champions and kept buying heavily from outside the EU, especially the United States.