This article is presented by EFPIA with the support of AbbVie I made a trip back to Europe recently, where I spent the vast majority of my pharmaceutical career, to share my perspectives on competitiveness at the European Health Summit. Now that I work in a role responsible for supporting patient access to medicine globally, I view Europe, and how it compares internationally, through a new lens, and I have been reflecting further on why the choices made today will have such a critical impact on where medicines are developed tomorrow. Today, many patients around the world benefit from medicines built on European science and breakthroughs of the last 20 years. Europeans, like me, can be proud of this contribution. As I look forward, my concern is that we may not be able to make the same claim in the next 20 years. It’s clear that Europe has a choice. Investing in sustainable medicines growth and other enabling policies will, I believe, bring significant benefits. Not doing so risks diminishing global influence. > Today, many patients around the world benefit from medicines built on European > science and breakthroughs of the last 20 years I reflect on three important points: 1) investment in healthcare benefits individuals, healthcare and society, but the scale of this benefit remains underappreciated; 2) connected to this, the underpinning science for future innovation is increasingly happening elsewhere; and 3) this means the choices we make today must address both of these trends. First, let’s use the example of migraine. As I have heard a patient say, “Migraine will not kill you but neither [will they] let you live.”[1] Individuals can face being under a migraine attack for more than half of every month, unable to leave home, maintain a job and engage in society.[2] It is the second biggest cause of disability globally and the first among young women.[3] It affects the quality of life of millions of Europeans.[4] From 2011-21 the economic burden of migraine in Europe due to the loss of working days ranged from €35-557 billion, depending on the country, representing 1-2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).[5]   Overall socioeconomic burden of migraine as percentage of the country’s GDP in 2021 Source: WifOR, The socioeconomic burden of migraine. The case of 6 European Countries.5 Access to effective therapies could radically improve individuals’ lives and their ability to return to work.[6] Yet, despite the staggering economic and personal impacts, in some member states the latest medicines are either not reimbursed or only available after several treatment failures.[7] Imagine if Europe shifted its perspective on these conditions, investing to improve not only health but unlocking the potential for workforce and economic productivity? Moving to my second point, against this backdrop of underinvestment, where are scientific advances now happening in our sector? In recent years it is impressive to see China has become the second-largest drug developer in the world,[8] and within five years it may lead the innovative antibodies therapeutics sector,[9] which is particularly promising for complex areas like oncology. Cancer is projected to become the leading cause of death in Europe by 2035,[10] yet the continent’s share of the number of oncology trials dropped from 41 percent in 2013 to 21 percent in 2023.10 Today, antibody-drug conjugates are bringing new hope in hard-to-treat tumor types,[11] like ovarian,[12] lung[13] and colorectal[14] cancer, and we hope to see more of these advances in the future. Unfortunately, Europe is no longer at the forefront of the development of these innovations. This geographical shift could impact high-quality jobs, the vitality of Europe’s biotech sector and, most importantly, patients’ outcomes. [15] > This is why I encourage choices to be made that clearly signal the value > Europe attaches to medicines This is why I encourage choices to be made that clearly signal the value Europe attaches to medicines. This can be done by removing national cost-containment measures, like clawbacks, that are increasingly eroding the ability of companies to invest in European R&D. To provide a sense of their impact, between 2012 and 2023, clawbacks and price controls reduced manufacturer revenues by over €1.2 billion across five major EU markets, corresponding to a loss of 4.7 percent in countries like Spain.[16] Moreover, we should address health technology assessment approaches in Europe, or mandatory discount policies, which are simply not adequately accounting for the wider societal value of medicines, such as in the migraine example, and promoting a short-term approach to investment. By broadening horizons and choosing a long-term investment strategy for medicines and the life science sector, Europe will not only enable this strategic industry to drive global competitiveness but, more importantly, bring hope to Europeans suffering from health conditions. AbbVie SA/NV – BE-ABBV-250177 (V1.0) – December 2025 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] The Parliament Magazine, https://www.theparliamentmagazine.eu/partner/article/unmet-medical-needs-and-migraine-assessing-the-added-value-for-patients-and-society, Last accessed December 2025. [2] The Migraine Trust; https://migrainetrust.org/understand-migraine/types-of-migraine/chronic-migraine/, Last accessed December 2025. [3] Steiner TJ, et al; Lifting The Burden: the Global Campaign against Headache. Migraine remains second among the world’s causes of disability, and first among young women: findings from GBD2019. J Headache Pain. 2020 Dec 2;21(1):137 [4] Coppola G, Brown JD, Mercadante AR, Drakeley S, Sternbach N, Jenkins A, Blakeman KH, Gendolla A. The epidemiology and unmet need of migraine in five european countries: results from the national health and wellness survey. BMC Public Health. 2025 Jan 21;25(1):254. doi: 10.1186/s12889-024-21244-8. [5] WifOR. Calculating the Socioeconomic Burden of Migraine: The Case of 6 European Countries. Available at: [https://www.wifor.com/en/download/the-socioeconomic-burden-of-migraine-the-case-of-6-eu­ropean-countries/?wpdmdl=358249&refresh=687823f915e751752703993]. Accessed June 2025. [6] Seddik AH, Schiener C, Ostwald DA, Schramm S, Huels J, Katsarava Z. Social Impact of Prophylactic Migraine Treatments in Germany: A State-Transition and Open Cohort Approach. Value Health. 2021 Oct;24(10):1446-1453. doi: 10.1016/j.jval.2021.04.1281 [7] Moisset X, Demarquay G, et al., Migraine treatment: Position paper of the French Headache Society. Rev Neurol (Paris). 2024 Dec;180(10):1087-1099. doi: 10.1016/j.neurol.2024.09.008. [8] The Economist, https://www.economist.com/china/2025/11/23/chinese-pharma-is-on-the-cusp-of-going-global, Last accessed December 2025. [9] Crescioli S, Reichert JM. Innovative antibody therapeutic development in China compared with the USA and Europe. Nat Rev Drug Discov. Published online November 7, 2025. [10] Manzano A., Svedman C., Hofmarcher T., Wilking N.. Comparator Report on Cancer in Europe 2025 – Disease Burden, Costs and Access to Medicines and Molecular Diagnostics. EFPIA, 2025. [IHE REPORT 2025:2, page 20] [11] Armstrong GB, Graham H, Cheung A, Montaseri H, Burley GA, Karagiannis SN, Rattray Z. Antibody-drug conjugates as multimodal therapies against hard-to-treat cancers. Adv Drug Deliv Rev. 2025 Sep;224:115648. doi: 10.1016/j.addr.2025.115648. Epub 2025 Jul 11. PMID: 40653109.. [12] Narayana, R.V.L., Gupta, R. Exploring the therapeutic use and outcome of antibody-drug conjugates in ovarian cancer treatment. Oncogene 44, 2343–2356 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41388-025-03448-3 [13] Coleman, N., Yap, T.A., Heymach, J.V. et al. Antibody-drug conjugates in lung cancer: dawn of a new era?. npj Precis. Onc. 7, 5 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41698-022-00338-9 [14] Wang Y, Lu K, Xu Y, Xu S, Chu H, Fang X. Antibody-drug conjugates as immuno-oncology agents in colorectal cancer: targets, payloads, and therapeutic synergies. Front Immunol. 2025 Nov 3;16:1678907. doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2025.1678907. PMID: 41256852; PMCID: PMC12620403. [15] EFPIA, Improving EU Clinical Trials: Proposals to Overcome Current Challenges and Strengthen the Ecosystem, efpias-list-of-proposals-clinical-trials-15-apr-2025.pdf, Last accessed December 2025. [16] The EU General Pharmaceutical Legislation & Clawbacks, © Vital Transformation BVBA, 2024.

BERLIN — The leaders of German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservative-led coalition on Friday announced accords on key issues that had divided his government in recent weeks. The internal disagreements — over pension reforms and a phaseout of the combustion engine — had turned into a test of the viability of Merz’s relatively weak and ideologically divergent coalition government. The new agreements, reached after a night of long negotiations, may have staved off a larger crisis of confidence in Merz’s government. Members of Merz’s coalition sought to portray the agreements as evidence that the government is functioning smoothly. “Sometimes the image that people paint — saying that everything is stuck and so on — doesn’t match what I experienced yesterday,” said Lars Klingbeil, the leader of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), which governs in coalition with Merz’s conservative alliance. “We really did push forward far-reaching changes for this country in constructive debates.” The agreements announced Friday revolve around a pension package lawmakers are set to vote on in December that a faction of Merz’s own conservatives had railed against, as well as a deal on Germany’s position on the EU’s push to phase out the combustion engine. In the case of the pension reform, Merz sought to placate conservative rebels by vowing to take on a second, more far-reaching set of pension system reforms that would involve implementing the recommendations of an expert commission as early as next year. Previously, the coalition had agreed on a lengthier timeframe. “There is now a firm agreement,” Merz said in view of the immediate pension reform package set to go for a vote. “We will come to a decision next week, and it is not just a gut feeling, but a well-founded hope, based on the discussions we had this morning, that our colleagues now see that we are really serious about these reforms and that we are now going down this path together.” With regard to EU plans to ban carbon-emitting engines from 2035, Merz said he would write a letter to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Friday to urge Brussels to apply extensive exemptions — including on dual-motor vehicles, plug-in hybrids, electric vehicles with range extenders and “highly efficient” combustion engines. That announcement signaled that the SPD has effectively backed off its previous support for EU green regulations for cars. “We ask the Commission, in a comprehensive sense, to adapt and correct the regulations for mobility,” said Merz. “This concerns in particular the compatibility of competitiveness — the industrial competitiveness of the European automotive industry — with the demands we place on climate protection.” Merz’s coalition has a majority of just 12 votes in the Bundestag, making his government vulnerable to even modest defections in the ranks. Conservative Bavarian premier Markus Söder on Friday signaled satisfaction with the agreements. “Everything we did yesterday is good for Germany, good for the economy, and bad for radicals,” he said in view of the surging far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. “They are waiting outside the door for us to fail together. That is their great hope, that we will fail.”

By ALEX PERRY in Paris Illustrations by Julius Maxim for POLITICO This article is also available in French When Patrick Pouyanné decided to spend billions on a giant natural gas field in a faraway warzone, he made the call alone, over a single dinner, with the head of a rival energy company. Pouyanné, the chairman and CEO of what was then called Total, was dining with Vicki Hollub, CEO of Houston-based Occidental Petroleum. It was late April 2019, and Hollub was in a David and Goliath battle with the American energy behemoth Chevron to buy Anadarko, like Occidental a mid-sized Texan oil and gas explorer. The American investor Warren Buffett was set to back Hollub with $10 billion, but it wasn’t enough. So Hollub flew to Paris to meet Pouyanné. Hollub’s proposal: Pouyanné would pitch in $8.8 billion in exchange for Anadarko’s four African gas fields, including a vast deep-sea reserve off northern Mozambique, an area in the grip of an Islamist insurgency. The Frenchman, who had previously approached Anadarko about the same assets, said yes in a matter of minutes. Advertisement “What are the strengths of Total?” Pouyanné explained to an Atlantic Council event in Washington a few weeks later. “LNG,” he went on, and the “Middle East and Africa,” regions where the company has operated since its origin in the colonial era. “So it’s just fitting exactly and perfectly.” Total, “a large corporation,” could be “so agile,” he said, because of the efficacy of his decision-making, and the clarity of his vision to shift from oil to lower-emission gas, extracted from lightly regulated foreign lands. In the end, “it [was] just a matter of sending an email to my colleague [Hollub],” he added. “This is the way to make good deals.” Six years later, it’s fair to ask if Pouyanné was a little hasty. On Nov. 17, a European human rights NGO filed a criminal complaint with the national counterterrorism prosecutor’s office in Paris accusing TotalEnergies of complicity in war crimes, torture and enforced disappearances, all in northern Mozambique. The allegations turn on a massacre, first reported by POLITICO last year, in which Mozambican soldiers crammed about 200 men into shipping containers at the gatehouse of a massive gas liquefaction plant TotalEnergies is building in the country, then killed most of them over the next three months. The complaint, submitted by the nonprofit European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), alleges that TotalEnergies became an accomplice in the “so-called ‘container massacre’” because it “directly financed and materially supported” the Mozambican soldiers who carried out the executions, which took place between June and September 2021. “TotalEnergies knew that the Mozambican armed forces had been accused of systematic human rights violations, yet continued to support them with the only objective to secure its facility,” said Clara Gonzales, co-director of the business and human rights program at ECCHR, a Berlin-based group specializing in international law that has spent the past year corroborating the atrocity. In response to the complaint, a company spokesperson in Paris said in a written statement: “TotalEnergies takes these allegations very seriously” and would “comply with the lawful investigation prerogatives of the French authorities.” Last year, in response to questions by POLITICO, the company — through its subsidiary Mozambique LNG — said it had no knowledge of the container killings, adding that its “extensive research” had “not identified any information nor evidence that would corroborate the allegations of severe abuses and torture.” This week, the spokesperson repeated that position. Advertisement Asked in May in the French National Assembly about the killings, Pouyanné dismissed “these false allegations” and demanded the company’s accusers “put their evidence on the table.” Questioned about the complaint on French television this week, he again rejected the allegations and described them as a “smear campaign” motivated by the fact that TotalEnergies produces fossil fuels. The war crimes complaint is based on POLITICO’s reporting and other open-source evidence. In the last year, the container killings have been confirmed by the French newspaper Le Monde and the British journalism nonprofit Source Material. The British Mozambique expert Professor Joseph Hanlon also said the atrocity was “well known locally,” and an investigation carried out by UK Export Finance (UKEF) — the British state lender, which is currently weighing delivery of a $1.15 billion loan to Total’s project — has heard evidence from its survivors.  The massacre was an apparent reprisal for a devastating attack three months earlier by ISIS-affiliated rebels on the nearby town of Palma, just south of the border with Tanzania, which killed 1,354 civilians, including 55 of Total’s workforce, according to a house-to-house survey carried out by POLITICO. Of those ISIS murdered, it beheaded 330. TotalEnergies has previously noted that Mozambique has yet to issue an official toll for the Palma massacre. In March, a French magistrate began investigating TotalEnergies for involuntary manslaughter over allegations that it abandoned its contractors to the onslaught.  After the jihadis left the area in late June, Mozambican commandos based at Total’s gas concession rounded up 500 villagers and accused them of backing the rebels. They separated men from women and children, raped several of the women, then forced the 180-250 men into two metal windowless shipping containers that formed a rudimentary fortified entrance to Total’s plant. There, the soldiers kept their prisoners in 30-degree-Celsius heat for three months. According to eleven survivors and two witnesses, some men suffocated. Fed handfuls of rice and bottle caps of water, others starved or died of thirst. The soldiers beat and tortured many of the rest. Finally, they began taking them away in groups and executing them. Only 26 men survived, saved when a Rwandan intervention force, deployed to fight ISIS, discovered the operation. A second house-to-house survey conducted by POLITICO later identified by name 97 of those killed or disappeared. Along with the new ECCHR complaint and the British inquiry, the killings are the subject of three other separate investigations: by the Mozambican Attorney General, the Mozambican National Human Rights Commission, and the Dutch government, which is probing $1.2 billion in Dutch state financing for TotalEnergies’ project. This week’s complaint was lodged with the offices of the French National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor, whose remit includes war crimes. The prosecutor will decide whether to open a formal inquiry and appoint an investigating magistrate.  Should the case move ahead, TotalEnergies will face the prospect of a war crimes trial.  Such an eventuality would represent a spectacular fall from grace for a business that once held a central place in French national identity and a CEO whose hard-nosed resolve made him an icon of global business. Should a French court eventually find the company or its executives liable in the container killings, the penalties could include fines and, possibly, jail terms for anybody indicted. How did TotalEnergies get here? How did Patrick Pouyanné? ‘POUYANNÉ PETROLEUM’ Born in Normandy in 1963, the son of a provincial customs official and a post office worker, Pouyanné elevated himself to the French elite by winning selection to the École Polytechnique, the country’s foremost engineering university, and then the École des Mines, where France’s future captains of industry are made. Following a few years in politics as a minister’s aide, he joined the French state petroleum company Elf as an exploration manager in Angola in 1996. After moving to Qatar in 1999 as Elf merged with Total, Pouyanné ascended to the top job at Total in 2014 after his predecessor, Christophe de Margerie, was killed in a plane crash in Moscow. Pouyanné led by reason, and force of will. “To be number one in a group like Total … is to find yourself alone,” he said in 2020. “When I say ‘I don’t agree,’ sometimes the walls shake. I realize this.” A decade at the top has seen Pouyanné, 62, transform a company of 100,000 employees in 130 countries into a one-man show — “Pouyanné Petroleum,” as the industry quip goes. His frequent public appearances, and his unapologetically firm hand, have made him a celebrated figure in international business. “Patrick Pouyanné has done an extraordinary job leading TotalEnergies in a complex environment, delivering outstanding financial results and engaging the company in the energy transition quicker and stronger than its peers,” Jacques Aschenbroich, the company’s lead independent director, said in 2023. Advertisement Marc-Antoine Eyl-Mazzega, director of energy and climate at the French Institute of International Relations, agreed. “His involvement is his strength,” he said. “He’s able to take a decision quickly, in a much more agile and rapid way.” Still, Eyl-Mazzega said, “I’m not sure everyone is happy to work with him. You have to keep up the pace. There are often departures. He’s quite direct and frank.”  Among employees, Pouyanné’s lumbering frame and overbearing manner has earned him a nickname: The Bulldozer. The moniker isn’t always affectionate. A former Total executive who dealt regularly with him recalled him as unpleasantly aggressive, “banging fists on the table.” The effect, the executive said, has been to disempower the staff: “The structure of Total is trying to guess what Pouyanné wants to do. You can’t make any decisions unless it goes to the CEO.” In a statement to POLITICO, TotalEnergies called such depictions “misplaced and baseless.” ‘DON’T ASK US TO TAKE THE MORAL HIGH GROUND’ What’s not in dispute is how Pouyanné has used his authority to shape Total’s answer to the big 21st-century oil and gas puzzle: how to square demand for fossil fuels with simultaneous demands from politicians and climate campaigners to eliminate them. His response has been diversification, moving the company away from high-emission fuels towards becoming a broad-based, ethical energy supplier, centered on low-carbon gas, solar and wind, and pledging to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. The change was symbolized by Pouyanné’s renaming of the company TotalEnergies in 2021. A second, more unsung element of Pouyanné’s strategy has been moving much of his remaining fossil fuel operation beyond Western regulation.  Speaking to an audience at Chatham House in London in 2017, he said the catalyst for his move to favor reserves in poorer, less tightly policed parts of the planet was the penalties imposed on the British energy giant BP in the United States following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout, in which 11 men died and an oil slick devastated the Gulf of Mexico coast. Pouyanné declared that the fines — between $62 billion and $142 billion, depending on the calculation used — represented an excessive “legal risk” to oil and gas development in the West. While other, more troubled territories came with their share of dangers, Pouyanné put the cost of failure of any project outside the West at a more manageable $2 to $3 billion, according to his Chatham House remarks. As a way of assessing risk, it was efficient. “Other players would spend a lot of money on consultancies and write 70 reports to conclude that a project is risky,” Eyl-Mazzega said. “Pouyanné, on the other hand, is prepared to take risks.” Asked by the French Senate in 2024 how he chose where to invest, however, Pouyanné admitted that his math was strictly about the bottom line. “Don’t ask us to take the moral high ground,” he said. ‘A COLLAPSE WILL NOT PUT TOTAL IN DANGER’ The first oil and gas prospectors arrived in northern Mozambique in 2006 as part of a Western effort to broaden supply beyond the Middle East. When Anadarko found gas 25 miles out to sea in 2010, the talk was of Mozambique as the new Qatar. At 2.6 million acres, or about a third of the size of Belgium, Rovuma Basin Area 1 was a monster, thought to hold 75 trillion cubic feet of gas, or 1 percent of all global reserves. An adjacent field, Area 4, quickly snapped up by ExxonMobil, was thought to hold even more. To cope with the volume of production, Anadarko’s Area 1 consortium drew up a plan for a $20 billion onshore liquefaction plant. Together with ExxonMobil’s field, the cost of developing Mozambique’s gas was estimated at $50 billion, which would make it the biggest private investment ever made in Africa. But in 2017, an ISIS insurgency emerged to threaten those ambitions.  By the time Pouyanné was preparing to buy Anadarko’s 26.5 percent share in Area 1 two years later, what had begun as a ragtag revolt against government corruption in the northern province of Cabo Delgado had become a full-scale Islamist rebellion.  Insurgents were taking ever more territory, displacing hundreds of thousands of people and regularly staging mass beheadings. Even under construction, the gas plant was a regular target. It was run by Europeans and Americans, intending to make money for companies thousands of miles away while displacing 2,733 villagers to build their concession and banning fishermen from waters around their drill sites. After several attacks on plant traffic to and from the facility, in February 2019, the militants killed two project workers in a village attack and dismembered a contract driver in the road.  A further risk had its origins in a ban on foreigners carrying guns. That made the plant reliant for security on the Mozambican army and police, both of which had a well-documented record of criminality and repression. Initially, Pouyanné seemed unconcerned. The gas field was outside international law, as Mozambique had not ratified the Rome Statute setting up the International Criminal Court. And Pouyanné appeared to see the pursuit of high-risk, high-reward projects almost as an obligation for a deep-pocketed corporation, telling the Atlantic Council in May 2019, soon after he agreed the Mozambique deal, that Total was so big, it didn’t need to care — at least, not in the way of other, lesser companies or countries. “We love risk, so we have decided to embark on the Mozambique story,” he said. “Even if there is a collapse, [it] will [not] put Total in danger.” Advertisement In September 2019, when Total’s purchase was formally completed, the company declared in a press release: “The Mozambique LNG project is largely derisked.” In one of several statements to POLITICO, TotalEnergies explained the term echoed the boss’s focus on “the project’s commercial and financial fundamentals. To infer this was a dismissal of security concerns amounts to a fundamental misunderstanding of the way the sector operates.” Still, for workers at the project, it was an arresting statement, given that a Mozambique LNG worker had recently been chopped to pieces. Around the same time, the project managers at Anadarko, many of whom were now working for Total, tried to warn their new CEO of the danger posed by the insurgency. It was when they met Pouyanné, however, that “things then all started to unwind,” said one. Pouyanné regaled the team who had worked on the Mozambique project for years with a speech “on how brilliant Total was, and how brilliantly Total was going to run this project,” a second executive added. Pouyanné added he had “a French hero” running the company’s security: Denis Favier who, as a police commander, led a team of police commandos as they stormed a hijacked plane on the tarmac at Marseille in 1994, and in 2015, as France’s most senior policeman, commanded the operation to hunt and kill the Islamist brothers who shot dead 12 staff at the Charlie Hebdo newspaper in Paris. “This is easy for him,” Pouyanné said. Asked about the transition from Anadarko to Total, the company maintained it was responsive to all concerns expressed by former Anadarko workers. “We are not aware of any such dismissal of security concerns by TotalEnergies or its senior management,” the company said. “It is incorrect to state that advice from the ground was not listened to.” Still, after meeting Pouyanné, the old Anadarko team called their Mozambique staff together to brief them on their new boss. “Well, holy shit,” one manager began, according to a person present. “We’ve got a problem.” ‘VERY VULNERABLE’ A third former Anadarko staffer who stayed on to work for Total said that on taking over, the company also put on hold a decision to move most contractors and staff from hotels and compounds in Palma to inside its fortified camp — a costly move that Anadarko was planning in response to deteriorating security. “This was a danger I had worked so hard to eliminate,” the staffer said. “Palma was very vulnerable. Almost nobody was supposed to be [there]. But Total wouldn’t listen to me.” Other measures, such as grouping traffic to and from the plant in convoys and flanking them with drones, also ended. One project contractor who regularly made the run through rebel territory described the difference between Anadarko and Total as “night and day.” Then in June 2020, the rebels captured Mocimboa da Praia, the regional hub, and killed at least eight subcontractors. In late December that year, they staged another advance that brought them to Total’s gates. At that, Pouyanné reversed course and assumed personal oversight of the security operation, the first Anadarko manager said. Despite no expertise in security, “[he] had to get into every little last possible detail.” The second executive concurred. “It went from, ‘I don’t care, we’ve got the best security people in the business to run this’ to ‘Oh my God, this is a disaster, let me micromanage it and control it,’” he said. The company was “not aware of any … criticism that Mr. Pouyanné lacks the necessary expertise,” TotalEnergies said, adding the CEO had “first-hand experience of emergency evacuation … [from] when Total had to evacuate its staff from Yemen in 2015.” The insurgents’ advance prompted Pouyanné to order the evacuation of all TotalEnergies staff. By contrast, many contractors and subcontractors, some of them behind schedule because of Covid, were told to keep working, according to email exchanges among contractors seen by POLITICO. “Mozambique LNG did not differentiate between its own employees, its contractors or subcontractors when giving these instructions,” the company said, but added that it was not responsible for the decisions of its contractors. Advertisement Then, in February 2021, Pouyanné flew to Maputo, the Mozambican capital, to negotiate a new security deal with then Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi. Afterward, the two men announced the creation of the Joint Task Force, a 1,000-man unit of soldiers and armed police to be stationed inside the compound.  The deal envisaged that the new force would protect a 25-kilometer radius around the gas plant, including Palma and several villages. In practice, by concentrating so many soldiers and police inside the wire, it left Palma comparatively exposed. “It is incorrect to allege that Palma was left poorly defended,” the company said. “However, it is a fact that these security forces were overwhelmed by the magnitude and violence of the terrorist attacks in March 2021.” TotalEnergies added it is not correct to say that “Mr. Pouyanné personally managed the security deal setting up the Joint Task Force.” ‘TRAIN WRECK’ By this time, the company’s own human rights advisers were warning that by helping to create the Joint Task Force — to which the company agreed to pay what it described as “hardship payments” via a third party, as well as to equip it and accommodate it on its compound — Pouyanné was effectively making TotalEnergies a party to the conflict, and implicating it in any human rights abuses the soldiers carried out. Just as worrying was TotalEnergies’ insistence — according to a plant security manager, and confirmed by minutes of a Total presentation on security released under a Dutch freedom of information request — that all major security decisions be handled by a 20-man security team 5,000 miles away in Paris. That centralization seemed to help explain how, when the Islamists finally descended on Palma on March 24, 2021, Total was among the last to know. One Western security contractor told POLITICO he had pulled his people out 10 days before the assault, based on intelligence he had on guns and young men being pre-positioned in town. In the days immediately preceding the attack, villagers around Palma warned friends and relatives in town that they had seen the Islamists advancing. WhatsApp messages seen by POLITICO indicate contractors reported the same advance to plant security on March 22 and March 23. Advertisement Nonetheless, at 9 a.m. on March 24, TotalEnergies in Paris announced that it was safe for its staff to return. Hours later, the Islamists attacked. “Neither Mozambique LNG nor TotalEnergies received any specific ‘advance warnings’ of an impending attack prior to March 24,” the company said. Faced with a three-pronged advance by several hundred militants, the plant security manager said TotalEnergies’ hierarchical management pyramid was unable to cope. Ground staff could not respond to evolving events, paralyzed by the need to seek approval for decisions from Paris. Total’s country office in Maputo was also in limbo, according to the security manager, neither able to follow what was happening in real-time, nor authorized to respond.  ‘WHO CAN HELP US?!’ Two decisions, taken as the attack unfolded, compounded the havoc wreaked by the Islamists. The first was Total’s refusal to supply aviation fuel to the Dyck Advisory Group (DAG), a small, South African private military contractor working with the Mozambican police. With the police and army overrun, DAG’s small helicopters represented the only functional military force in Palma and the only unit undertaking humanitarian rescues. But DAG’s choppers were limited by low supplies of jet fuel, forcing them to fly an hour away to refuel, and to ground their fleet intermittently. Total, as one of the world’s biggest makers of aviation fuel, with ample stocks at the gas plant, was in a position to help. But when DAG asked Total in Paris for assistance, it refused. “Word came down from the mountain,” DAG executive Max Dyck said, “and that was the way it was going to be.” Total has conceded that it refused fuel to DAG — out of concern for the rescuers’ human rights record, the company said — but made fuel available to the Mozambican security services. DAG later hired an independent lawyer to investigate its record, who exonerated the company. Advertisement A second problematic order was an edict, handed down by Pouyanné’s executives in Paris in the months before the massacre, according to the plant security manager, that should the rebels attack, gate security guards at the gas plant were to let no one in. It was an instruction that could only have been drawn up by someone ignorant of the area’s geography, the man said.  If the Islamists blocked the three roads in and out of Palma, as conventional tactics would prescribe, the only remaining ways out for the population of 60,000 would be by sea or air — both routes that went through TotalEnergies’s facility, with its port and airport. By barring the civilians’ way, the company would be exposing them. So it proved. TotalEnergies soon had 25,000 fleeing civilians at its gates, according to an internal company report obtained under a freedom of information request by an Italian NGO, Recommon. Among the crowd were hundreds of project subcontractors and workers. Witnesses described to POLITICO how families begged TotalEnergies’ guards to let them in. Mothers were passing their babies forward to be laid in front of the gates. But TotalEnergies in Paris refused to allow its guards on the ground to open up. On March 28, the fifth day of the attack, Paris authorized a ferry to evacuate 1,250 staff and workers from the gas plant, and make a single return trip to pick up 1,250 civilians, who had sneaked inside the perimeter. That still left tens of thousands stranded at its gates. On March 29, a TotalEnergies community relations manager in Paris made a panicked call to Caroline Brodeur, a contact at Oxfam America. “He’s like, ‘There’s this huge security situation in Mozambique!’” Brodeur said. “An escalation of violence! We will need to evacuate people! Who can help us? Which NGO can support us with logistics?’” Thirty minutes later, the man called back. “Wait,” he told Brodeur. “Don’t do anything.” TotalEnergies’ senior managers had overruled him, the man said. No outsiders were to be involved. “I think he was trying to do the right thing,” Brodeur said in an interview with POLITICO. “But after that, Total went silent.” Over the next two months, the jihadis killed hundreds of civilians in and around Palma and the gas plant before the Rwandan intervention force pushed them out. The second former Anadarko and Total executive said the rebels might have attacked Palma, whoever was in charge at the gas project. But Total’s distant, centralized management made a “train wreck … inevitable.” Advertisement TotalEnergies said its response to the attack “mitigated as much as was reasonably possible the consequences.” Confirming the phone call to Oxfam, it added: “There was no effort by whoever within TotalEnergies to shut any possibility for external assistance down.” The company was especially adamant that Pouyanné was not at fault.  “The allegation that Mr. Pouyanné’s management of TotalEnergies exacerbated the devastation caused by the attacks in Mozambique is entirely unsubstantiated,” it said. “Mr. Pouyanné takes the safety and security of the staff extremely seriously.” In his television appearance this week, Pouyanné defended the company’s performance. “We completely evacuated the site,” he said. “We were not present at that time.” He said he considered that TotalEnergies, whose security teams had helped “more than 2,000 civilians evacuate the area,” “had carried out heroic actions.” ‘AN ALMOST PERFECT DINNER PARTY’  TotalEnergies’ troubles in Mozambique have come amid a wider slump in the country’s fortunes and reputation. Years of climate protests outside the company’s annual general meetings in central Paris peaked in 2023 when police dispersed activists with batons and tear gas. For the last two years, TotalEnergies has retreated behind a line of security checks and riot police at its offices in Défense, in the western part of Paris. Though the company intended 2024, its centenary year, as a celebration, the company succeeded mostly in looking past its prime. When Pouyanné took over in 2014, Total was France’s biggest company, and 37th in the world. Today, it is France’s seventh largest and not even in the global top 100.  Several French media houses chose the occasion of TotalEnergies’ 100th birthday to declare open season on the company, portraying it as a serial offender on pollution, corruption, worker safety, and climate change. Pouyanné has also presided over a rift with the French establishment. Last year, when he suggested listing in New York to boost the stock, French President Emmanuel Macron berated him in public. Advertisement The division grew wider a few weeks later when the French Senate concluded a six-month inquiry into the company with a recommendation that the formerly state-owned enterprise be partly taken back into public ownership.  The company has faced five separate lawsuits, civil and criminal, claiming it is breaking French law on climate protection and corporate conduct.  In a sixth case, brought by environmentalists in Paris last month, a judge ordered TotalEnergies to remove advertising from its website claiming it was part of the solution to climate change. Given the company’s ongoing investments in fossil fuels, that was misleading, the judge said, decreeing that TotalEnergies take down its messaging and upload the court’s ruling instead. The Swedish activist Greta Thunberg has also led protests against TotalEnergies’ East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline. That project, intended to pump oil 1,000 miles from Uganda across Tanzania to the Indian Ocean, is similarly embroiled in accusations of human rights abuses, drawing criticism from the European Parliament plus 28 banks and 29 insurance companies who have refused to finance it. Pouyanné has also taken hits to his personal brand. A low point came in 2022 when he chose the moment his countrymen were recovering from Covid and struggling with soaring fuel prices to defend his salary of €5,944,129 a year. He was “tired” of the accusation that he had received a 52 percent rise, he wrote on Twitter. His pay, he added, had merely been restored to pre-pandemic levels.  Overnight, the CEO became the unacceptable face of French capitalism. “Pouyanné lives in another galaxy, far, far away,” said one TV host. Under a picture of the CEO, an MP from the leftist France Unbowed movement wrote: “A name, a face. The obstacle in the way of a nation.” So heated and widely held is the contempt that in 2023 the company produced a guide for its French employees on how to handle it. Titled “An Almost Perfect Dinner Party,” the booklet lays out arguments and data that staff might use to defend themselves at social occasions. “Have you ever been questioned, during a dinner with family or friends, about a controversy concerning the Company?” it asked. “Did you have the factual elements to answer your guests?” ‘FALSE ALLEGATIONS’ The war crimes case lodged this week against TotalEnergies was filed in France, despite the alleged crimes occurring in Mozambique, because, it argues, TotalEnergies’ nationality establishes jurisdiction.  The case represents a dramatic example of the extension of international justice — the prosecution in one country of crimes committed in another. A movement forged in Nuremberg and Tokyo in the wake of World War II, the principles of international justice have been used more recently by national and international courts to bring warlords and dictators to trial — and by national courts to prosecute citizens or companies implicated in abuses abroad where local justice systems are weak. U.S. courts have ordered ExxonMobil and banana giant Chiquita to stand trial for complicity in atrocities committed in the late 1990s and early 2000s by soldiers or militias paid to protect their premises in Indonesia and Colombia, respectively. Exxon settled a week before the case opened in 2023. A Florida court ordered Chiquita to pay $38 million to the families of eight murdered Colombian men in June 2024; Chiquita’s appeal was denied that October.  In Sweden, two executives from Lundin Oil are currently on trial for complicity in war crimes after Sudanese troops and government militias killed an estimated 12,000 people between 1999 and 2003 as they cleared the area around a company drill site. The executives deny the accusations against them. Advertisement ECCHR has initiated several international justice cases. Most notably, in 2016, it and another legal non-profit, Sherpa, filed a criminal complaint in Paris against the French cement maker Lafarge, accusing its Syrian plant of paying millions of dollars in protection money to ISIS. Earlier this month, Lafarge and eight executives went on trial in Paris, accused of funding terrorism and breaking international sanctions — charges they deny. The war crimes complaint against TotalEnergies cites internal documents, obtained under freedom of information requests in Italy and the Netherlands, that show staff at the site knew the soldiers routinely committed human rights abuses against civilians while working for the company.  There were “regular community allegations of JTF [Joint Task Force] human rights violations,” read one, including “physical violence, and arrests/disappearances.” The report also referred to “troops who were allegedly involved in a [human rights] case in August [2021].” These were deemed so serious that TotalEnergies suspended pay to all 1,000 Joint Task Force soldiers and the army expelled 200 from the region, according to the internal document. The ECCHR complaint accuses TotalEnergies and “X”, a designation leaving open the possibility for the names of unspecified company executives to be added. Among those named in the document’s 56 pages are Pouyanné and five other TotalEnergies executives and employees. Favier, the company’s security chief, is not among them. TotalEnergies declined to make any of its executives or security managers available for interviews. In April 2024, when Pouyanné was questioned about his company’s Mozambique operation by the French Senate, he stated that while the government was responsible for the security of Cabo Delgado, “I can ensure the security of whichever industrial premises on which I might operate.” Asked about the container executions before the National Assembly this May, Pouyanné reaffirmed his faith in the Mozambican state, saying: “I think we help these countries progress if we trust their institutions and don’t spend our time lecturing them.” Apparently forgetting how he helped negotiate a security deal to place Mozambican soldiers on Total’s premises, however, he then qualified this statement, saying: “I can confirm that TotalEnergies has nothing to do with the Mozambican army.” A company spokesperson clarified this week: “TotalEnergies is not involved in the operations, command or conduct of the Mozambican armed forces.” In addition to the war crimes complaint, TotalEnergies’ Mozambique operation is already the subject of a criminal investigation opened in March by French state prosecutors. The allegation against the company is that it committed involuntary manslaughter by failing to protect or rescue workers left in Palma when ISIS carried out its massacre. Though POLITICO’s previous reporting found that 55 project workers were killed, TotalEnergies — through its subsidiary, Mozambique LNG — initially claimed it lost no one. “All the employees of Mozambique LNG, its contractors and subcontractors were safely evacuated from the Mozambique LNG Project site,” Maxime Rabilloud, Mozambique LNG’s managing director, told POLITICO last year. Advertisement That assertion notwithstanding, the death of at least one British subcontractor, Philip Mawer, is the subject of a formal inquest in the U.K.  In December 2024, the company’s Paris press office adjusted its position on the Palma attack. “TotalEnergies has never denied the tragedy that occurred in Palma and has always acknowledged the tragic loss of civilian lives,” it told POLITICO. For the first time, it also admitted “a small number” of project workers had been stationed outside its secure compound during the attack and exposed to the bloodbath.  A resolution to the French manslaughter investigation will take years. A decision on whether to open a formal investigation into the new claims against TotalEnergies for complicity in war crimes, let alone to bring the case to trial, is not expected until 2026, at the earliest. Should anyone eventually be tried for involuntary manslaughter, a conviction would carry a penalty of three years in prison and a €45,000 fine in France, escalating to five years and €75,000 for “a manifestly deliberate violation of a particular obligation of prudence or safety.” For complicity in war crimes, the sentence is five years to life. ‘CAN YOU ACTUALLY LOOK AT YOURSELF IN THE MIRROR?’ The war crimes accusation adds new uncertainty to the 20-year effort to develop Mozambique’s gas fields. In the aftermath of the 2021 Palma massacre, TotalEnergies declared a state of “force majeure,” a legal measure suspending all contracted work due to exceptional events. The following four and a half years of shutdown have cost TotalEnergies $4.5 billion, in addition to the $3.9 billion that Pouyanné originally paid Anadarko for the Mozambique operation. Billions more in costs can be expected before the plant finally pumps gas, which Total now predicts will happen in 2029. The manslaughter case and the war crimes complaint have the potential to cause further holdups by triggering due diligence obligations from TotalEnergies’ lenders, preventing them from delivering loans of $14.9 billion — without which Pouyanné has said his star project will collapse. Total also faces a Friends of the Earth legal challenge to a $4.7 billion U.S. government loan to the project. A TotalEnergies spokesperson said this week that the project was able to “meet due diligence requirements by lenders.” Advertisement All this comes as the situation on the ground remains unstable. After a successful Rwandan counter-attack from 2021 to 2023, the insurgency has returned, with the Islamists staging raids across Cabo Delgado, including Palma and the regional hub of Mocimboa da Praia. The International Organization for Migration says 112,185 people fled the violence between September 22 and October 13. Among those killed in the last few months were two gas project workers — a caterer, murdered in Palma, and a security guard, beheaded in a village south of town. TotalEnergies has consistently said that neither recent legal developments nor the upsurge in ISIS attacks will affect its plans to formally reopen its Mozambique operation by the end of the year. “This new complaint has no connection with the advancement of the Mozambique LNG project,” a spokesperson said this week. Pouyanné himself has spent much of this year insisting the project is “back on track” and its financing in place. In October, in a move to restart the project, the company lifted the force majeure.  Still, in a letter seen by POLITICO, Pouyanné also wrote to Mozambican President Daniel Chapo asking for 10 more years on its drilling license and $4.5 billion from the country to cover its cost overruns.  Mozambique, whose 2024 GDP was $22.42 billion — around a tenth of TotalEnergies’ revenues for the year of $195.61 billion — has yet to respond. A final issue for TotalEnergies’ CEO is whether a formal accusation of war crimes will fuel opposition to his leadership among shareholders. At 2024’s annual general meeting, a fifth of stockholders rejected the company’s climate transition strategy as too slow, and a quarter declined to support Pouyanné for a fourth three-year term. In 2025, several institutional investors expressed their opposition to Pouyanné by voting against his remuneration. In the statement, the TotalEnergies spokesperson pointed to the 2023 comments by Aschenbroich, the independent board member: “The Board unanimously looks forward to his continued leadership and his strategic vision to continue TotalEnergies’ transition.” Yet, there seems little prospect that his popularity will improve, inside or outside the company. “Patrick Pouyanné is everyone’s best enemy,” says Olivier Gantois, president of the French oil and gas lobby group UFIP-EM, “the scapegoat we love to beat up on.” Recently, the 62-year-old Pouyanné has begun to sound uncharacteristically plaintive. At TotalEnergies’ 2022 shareholder meeting, he grumbled that the dissidents might not like CO2 emissions, “but they sure like dividends.” At last year’s, he complained that TotalEnergies was in an impossible position. “We are trying to find a balance between today’s life and tomorrow’s,” he said. “It’s not because TotalEnergies stops producing hydrocarbons that demand for them will disappear.” Advertisement TotalEnergies’ articles of association require Pouyanné to retire before he reaches 67, in 2030, around the time that TotalEnergies currently forecasts gas production to begin in Mozambique. Henri Thulliez, the lawyer who filed both criminal complaints against TotalEnergies in Paris, predicts Pouyanné’s successors will be less attached to the project — for the simple reason that Mozambique turned out to be bad business. “You invest billions in the project, and the project has been completely suspended for four years now,” Thulliez says. “All your funders are hesitating. You’re facing two potential litigations in France, maybe at some point elsewhere, too. You have to ask: what’s the point of all of this?” As for Pouyanné, two questions will haunt his final years at TotalEnergies, he suggests. First, “Can shareholders afford to keep you in your job?” Second, “Can you actually look at yourself in the mirror?” Aude Le Gentil and Alexandre Léchenet contributed to this report.

BERLIN — German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is facing rising opposition — but this time it’s from within his own conservative ranks. A group of 18 young lawmakers in Merz’s conservative bloc are threatening to stop a pension reform bill put forth by the chancellor’s coalition government, arguing the benefits pledged in the agreement aren’t sustainable and “cannot be justified to the younger generation.” The revolt has turned into a test of Merz’s authority and the durability of his relatively weak government — a coalition between his conservative bloc and the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD). Merz’s coalition only has a 12-seat majority in parliament — one of the narrowest in postwar German history — making his government vulnerable to even modest defections within the ranks. During a conference over the weekend, Merz pushed back against criticism from young conservatives that planned pension benefits are too generous. “Does anyone seriously believe that we can win a race to the bottom on who can offer the lowest pension levels?” Merz said. “You can’t be serious!” Merz faced a series of harsh questions from attendees, many of whom felt the chancellor was not taking their arguments sufficiently seriously. “Let me be perfectly clear: There will be no further changes to this law,” SPD Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil said. “We will pass it in the Bundestag.” | Bernd von Jutrczenka/picture alliance via Getty Images “Can you personally reconcile this with your credibility?” asked Laurenz Kiefer, a member of the young conservatives from Munich. Coalition lawmakers had initially expected to pass the pension reform package in early December as part of a series of bills Merz has attempted to push through to show his government can undertake the key structural reforms Germany needs to boost economic competitiveness. But the timing of that vote has now been cast into doubt amid the internal fighting. “I hope that we will have concluded this discussion by the end of the year so that we can enter 2026 with a genuine willingness to reform,” Merz said during an event in Berlin on Monday. Merz is effectively stuck between the demands of young conservatives to reconsider the pension package and the obduracy of his SPD coalition partners, who say they’re not willing to renegotiate it. “Let me be perfectly clear: There will be no further changes to this law,” SPD Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil said. “We will pass it in the Bundestag.” The pension issue has become particularly thorny as Germany’s baby-boomer generation enters retirement, with millions of people leaving the workforce and far fewer entering it. Pensions are the largest single item of public expenditure in the country. At the heart of the internal rebellion is a proposal to stabilize pension benefits after 2031. Young conservatives argue that this plan goes further than what was originally agreed by the coalition, and would mean over €115 billion in additional costs by 2040. The internecine dispute has led some in Merz’s coalition — including his own family minister, Karin Prien — to propose postponing the pension reform vote to avoid the kind of embarrassment and open discord that could potentially lead to the coalition’s unravelling. “It is important that fair solutions for the broad majority are found in parliament,” Prien told German newspaper Handelsblatt.

Senators have reached a deal to end the government shutdown. The broad framework for agreement, which was negotiated in part by Sens. Angus King, Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan as well as GOP senators, has “more than enough” members of the Senate Democratic Caucus to advance, according to two people granted anonymity to disclose the terms. he deal, said one of the people, was brokered between the Democratic negotiators, Senate Majority Leader John Thune and the White House. Members of the Appropriations Committee were also closely involved and helped negotiate the terms. As part of the deal, Democratic negotiators agreed to ensure at least eight members from their caucus would vote “yes” on procedural motions to advance the government funding package. That would provide certainty that the 60-vote procedural threshold is consistently met up until final passage, where only a simple majority is required. The Senate is poised to vote later Sunday night to advance the House-passed stopgap, which will later become the vehicle for the larger funding deal. It still needs to pass the House before the government can be reopened. The breakthrough follows weeks of closed-door negotiations not only among a bipartisan group of rank-and-file senators but also Thune and, according to one of the people granted anonymity to share private conversations, President Donald Trump. The Sunday vote would pave the way for consideration later this week of a legislative package that would fund the Department of Agriculture and the FDA, the Department of Veterans Affairs and military construction projects, and the operations of Congress, for the full fiscal year — the product of months of bipartisan, bicameral negotiations between top appropriators. “I also think it’s highly significant that we’ll have three year-long appropriations bills attached,” Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) said Monday night. All other agencies would be funded through Jan. 30, according to the text of a continuing resolution released Sunday. As part of Democrats’ agreement to end the shutdown, Thune is promising Senate Democrats a vote in mid-December to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies that are due to expire at the end of the year without Congressional action. Democrats will also get to determine what extension bill receives that vote. The government-opening agreement guarantees that federal employees laid off during the shutdown are re-hired and gives federal employees backpay. It also would require agencies to give written notice to Congress about the withdrawal of the so-called reduction-in-force notices issued during the funding lapse, plus provide the amount of back pay owed. It would, as well, prevent some future firings with a blanket prohibition on reductions-in-force in any department or agency until at least the end date of the continuing resolution: Jan. 30, 2026. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), who was involved in negotiations over the RIF language, said in a statement shortly after the deal was announced that he would support it. “I have long said that to earn my vote, we need to be on a path toward fixing Republicans’ health care mess and to protect the federal workforce,” Kaine said. Many progressives in the Senate — along with a large number of House Democrats, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries — think anything short of a deal to enact an extension of the ACA tax credits is insufficient. “We will not support spending legislation advanced by Senate Republicans that fails to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits. We will fight the GOP bill in the House of Representatives, where [Speaker] Mike Johnson will be compelled to end the seven week Republican taxpayer-funded vacation,” Jeffries said in a statement. House Democratic leadership has insisted the health subsidies be addressed in legislation rather than a handshake compromise, especially as Johnson has refused to offer Democrats the same promise of a vote on an extension in his chamber. But while attending a Sunday night football game, President Donald Trump appeared optimistic the end of the longest government shutdown in history might be finally within reach. “It looks like we’re getting very close to the shutdown ending,” he told reporters. A handful of centrist House Democrats are expected to support the deal, according to one House Democrat granted anonymity to speak candidly. News of the agreement came as the Senate Democratic Caucus was huddling behind closed-doors to talk about the path forward. Likely opponents, like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), spoke during the meeting, which is still ongoing. Negotiators involved in the talks are also giving pitches. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who took heat from the progressive base for leading his party in shoring up the votes to prevent a government shutdown back in March, told reporters he would oppose the deal Sunday night. Other Senate Democrats also came out of the meeting vowing to oppose the agreement. “No deal without health care,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) told reporters leaving the meeting. Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) wrote in a social media post, “I’m voting NO.” Mia McCarthy, Katherine Tully-McManus, Calen Razor and Meredith Lee Hill contributed to this report.

The mastermind of President Donald Trump’s effort to downsize the federal workforce, Russ Vought, promised to use the government shutdown to advance his goal of “shuttering the bureaucracy.” Presented with a layoff plan that would have moved in that direction, officials at the Department of Health and Human Services scaled it way back, POLITICO has learned. It was another example, like several during the layoffs led by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency this spring, in which Trump’s agency heads have pushed back successfully against top-down cuts they viewed as reckless. POLITICO obtained an HHS document from late September, the shutdown’s eve, that said the department wanted to cut nearly 8,000 jobs, based on guidance from Vought’s budget office. On Oct. 10, HHS only went ahead with 1,760. In the two weeks since, the number has dwindled to 954, as the department has rescinded nearly half of the total, blaming a coding error. The disorganized handling of the layoffs is reminiscent of Musk’s DOGE effort, in which employees were rehired after being fired, sometimes on court orders, sometimes because agency officials objected. In each case, the layoffs rattled agency managers and traumatized employees, as Vought wanted, but haven’t gone nearly as far in downsizing the government as forecast. While the nearly 8,000-person layoff plan this month was largely scuttled by top agency officials who intervened before the cuts could be made, the whiplash manner in which it was proposed and then scaled back shows that the administration is still following the DOGE playbook. “These appear to be leftovers from DOGE. I don’t know anyone — including in the White House — who supports such cuts,” a senior administration official told POLITICO in explaining the pullback from the promised mass layoffs. The official, granted anonymity to discuss confidential matters, pointed to the involvement of a staffer who was part of the DOGE effort in producing the administration document. That document came to its initial tally of 7,885 layoffs at HHS by adding employees who would be furloughed during the shutdown, as well as workers in divisions that would be shuttered if Congress passed Trump’s fiscal 2026 budget proposal. Trump’s May budget plan called for a 25 percent cut to HHS, but lawmakers have rejected it in the appropriations bills now in process. HHS spokesperson Emily Hilliard told POLITICO in a statement that HHS made its layoff list “based upon positions designated as non-essential prior to the Democrat-led government shutdown.” She added: “Due to a recent court order, HHS is not currently taking actions to implement or administer the reduction-in-force notices.” According to the document reviewed by POLITICO, the National Institutes of Health was to take the hardest hit among HHS agencies, 4,545 layoffs, or roughly a quarter of its workforce. It ended up firing no one. A federal judge in San Francisco blocked the firing of 362 of the 954 HHS employees who did receive the October layoff notices. More will be shielded after additional federal employee unions joined the lawsuit on Wednesday. In congressional testimony earlier this year, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he had downsized his department’s staff to 62,000 from 82,000 when he took office. He’s nowhere close. An HHS contingency plan produced in advance of the shutdown said the department still employed 79,717. Employees who took a Sept. 30 buyout offer from Musk would bring that lower, though the number who did is unknown because the White House has not released agency-by-agency totals and has stopped publishing agency employment updates. It’s unclear who within the Trump administration came up with the initial plan for the shutdown layoffs. Hilliard did not respond to POLITICO’s question about who within HHS was responsible. Thomas Nagy, the HHS deputy assistant secretary for human resources, has been the one updating the judge, Susan Illston of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, about the layoffs. The experience of the fired 954, whose last work day is scheduled for early December, mirrors the chaos of DOGE’s spring layoffs, in which employees were left wondering whether they still had jobs amidst lawsuits and officials were forced to backtrack and rehire fired workers. In one such instance, Kennedy told a House panel in June that he had appealed directly to Vought to make sure Head Start funding was protected after the early education and health care program was left out of the president’s budget proposal. In another case, HHS fired and then rehired an award-winning Parkinson’s researcher. Kennedy also told senators that he brought back hundreds of staffers at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. That came after West Virginia Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito and others protested. Now many HHS employees are having déjà vu. The situation is reminiscent of the experience some former employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development had during the Trump administration dismantling of the foreign aid agency early this year. Some furloughed employees at HHS, for example, didn’t have access to their work emails to receive notices informing them they were laid off this month. “There were individuals who didn’t even know if they were in RIF status until they got the hard copy packet in the mail two days ago,” a laid-off employee at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said, using the acronym for “reduction-in-force.” A similar situation played out at HHS’ Office of Population Affairs, where nearly all of the roughly 50 employees were laid off two weeks ago, according to one person with knowledge of the situation speaking anonymously for fear of retribution. The office, which is congressionally mandated, manages hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for family planning and teen pregnancy prevention programs. Three fired employees from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration — granted anonymity to provide details about the firings without fear of retribution — said that many of the roughly 170 employees cut from the agency earlier this month are getting physical copies of their termination notices mailed to them because they’re shut out of their email accounts. “DOGE never really left, it just looks different now,” one of the SAMHSA employees said. Amanda Friedman and Sophie Gardner contributed reporting. Tim Röhn is a global reporter at Axel Springer and head of investigations for WELT, POLITICO Germany and Business Insider Germany.

Friedrich Merz’s stimulus can’t arrive quickly enough. The number of people out of work in Germany rose by more than expected again in September, as years of economic weakness took their toll on the labor market. Data released by the Federal Labor Office showed unemployment, adjusted for seasonal effects, rose by a worse-than-expected 14,000 to a new 14-year high of 2.98 million. “The labor market continues to lack the necessary impetus for a stronger recovery,” said labor office head Andrea Nahles. Indeed, the local headlines are being conspicuously dominated by national champions shedding staff. Earlier this week, Lufthansa said it will cut 4,000 administrative jobs by 2030. The news came only days after engineering giant Robert Bosch said it would cut an additional 13,000 positions by 2030, after announcing 5,550 layoffs in November last year. Automaker Volkswagen and Germany’s second-largest lender, Commerzbank, announced significant job cuts earlier this year. Such trends are having knock-on effects further down the supply chain: Insolvencies nationwide were up over 12 percent from a year earlier in the first half of 2025. Last week it was the turn of Kiekert, an auto supplier that pioneered central locking sytems, to declare itself bankrupt, putting another 700 German jobs at risk. Europe’s largest economy has been in recession for two consecutive years and will eke out minimal growth this year, according to a report from think tanks that advise the government. Many fear the country risks missing out on the turnaround that Chancellor Friedrich Merz promised to deliver when he took office earlier this year. Companies have become increasingly skeptical that the government will deliver necessary reforms. Only last month, the unadjusted number of unemployed in Germany passed 3 million for the first time in a decade. It dipped back below that level in September, as is usual at this time of year. The seasonally adjusted jobless rate remained stable at 6.3 percent of the workforce. While analysts say that unemployment may continue to tick up, they argue that changing demographics and ongoing skills shortages should prevent any massive surge similar to the one in the early 2000s that triggered radical labor market reforms under then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. The jobs numbers wasn’t the only worrying data out of Germany on Tuesday. Retail sales volumes in August fell 0.5 percent, suggesting that consumers are getting increasingly cautious about spending. On the brighter side, recent declines in world energy prices are leaving more in consumers’ pockets, and Pantheon Macroeconomics’ Claus Vistesen pointed out that planned cuts to energy-related taxes will give them a further boost from January.

RINGASKIDDY, Ireland — When Pfizer started manufacturing its anti-impotence drug Viagra in southwestern Ireland, locals experienced a spike in sexual arousal, five-legged rabbits proliferated, and visitors took U-turns back to their spouses after fumes from its local plant drifted in through their car windows.   That’s according to local legend, at least.  These stories “transited through the local pub,” said Pat Hennessy, a long-term resident of Shanbally, just up the road from the coastal village of Ringaskiddy. “There was a girl there and she said: ‘One whiff and they’re stiff.’”   The impact of Big Pharma on the area, however, goes far beyond amusing anecdotes: Its arrival in the 1970s turned a sleepy fishing village into an industrial powerhouse and turbocharged economic growth in County Cork. But today, the industry — and the region that depends on it — are in the eye of U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff storm.  As he drives to slash the massive U.S. trade deficit, Trump says he is determined to reshore the production of weight-loss drugs, cancer treatments and other pharmaceuticals. He has threatened to eventually slam tariffs as high as 250 percent on the sector.  Ireland, Trump says, “took our pharmaceutical companies away” with its tax policies: Of the $213 billion of medicines the U.S. imports, the largest share comes from Ireland, a global leader in the production of expensive brand-name medicines. Dublin’s liberal tax regime has exerted an irresistible pull on U.S. Big Pharma for decades.  Locals find only limited solace in a deal struck in July between the European Union and the White House which — at least on paper — caps U.S. tariffs on pharmaceutical imports from the EU at 15 percent and exempts generic medicines. Ireland, as one of the EU’s most open economies, is particularly vulnerable to the tariffs, and uncertainty persists over Trump’s next moves and the damage they could inflict.  “It’s still like an axe hanging over us,” said David Collins, the fifth-generation owner of a family-run store in Carrigaline, a commuter town 20 minutes by bike from Ringaskiddy. “It’s a constant threat.”  The area is home to seven of the 10 largest pharma companies worldwide. More than 11,000 people in County Cork work in the industry — with tens of thousands more in ancillary jobs. Ringaskiddy alone hosts Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson, Sterling Pharma Solutions producing for Novartis, as well as smaller firms such as Recordati, BioMarin and Hovione. In addition to Viagra’s active ingredient, critical components of cardiology, immunology and oncology medications are made here.   PITCH AND PUTT  When Pfizer arrived in 1969, its workers spent their lunch breaks building a course to play pitch and putt — a scaled-down version of golf — for the local community, recalled Michael Goably, a pensioner, while enjoying his morning coffee at the clubhouse of Raffeen Creek Golf Club, nestled on the lush shores of Cork harbour.  As the name suggests, a nine-hole golf course, also built on land owned by Pfizer, now complements the pitch and putt. It’s just one example of how the area has benefited from big pharma: Ask the locals, and they’ll tell you the industry’s contribution far outweighs the side effects, such as commuter traffic and environmental pollution.  “I couldn’t say a bad word,” said Ray Keohane, another golfer taking a break on a bench between rounds.  The town of Carrigaline, once an agricultural village, now counts 20,000 residents, as well as a hotel, several supermarkets and a lively shopping street.  “When I was a child growing up in Carrigaline, there was one main industry, and it was called Carrigaline Pottery … there wasn’t a family in the area of Carrigaline that didn’t at least have one person working in the pottery,” said Collins, the supermarket owner.  “Roll on 50 years later, that’s been replaced by the pharmaceutical industries.”  CELTIC TIGER  The arrival of multinational corporations softened the impact of the closure of manufacturing sites by carmaker Ford and Dunlop, a tyre company, in the 1980s. “Ireland as a country wasn’t doing well, but Cork was a particularly black spot then,” said John O’Brien, a lecturer in finance at University College Cork. “The combination of pharmaceuticals and IT … together really have brought up the city,” he added, referring to Ireland’s second-largest city Cork, which hosts the EU headquarters of tech giant Apple.   Nationally, the success in the pharma sector helped drive economic growth in Ireland’s “Celtic Tiger” era from the 1990s to the late 2000s. That’s thanks to large-scale foreign investment — especially from the U.S. — low corporate taxes, a skilled English-speaking workforce and EU membership.  According to Louis Brennan, an emeritus professor at Trinity College Dublin, pharma’s contribution was threefold: It created high-value and high-paying jobs, led to the development of an ecosystem of suppliers and subcontractors, and generated government revenues.   Cork has also established itself as a hub for higher education in pharma-related fields.   TARIFF GAMES  Since Trump’s return to the White House, that engine of the Irish economy finds itself under (verbal) attack, exposing just how much Irish success hinges on the country’s capacity to remain the go-to location for U.S. firms, which beyond welcoming tax benefits have also long shifted their profits and patents there.  “We want pharmaceuticals made in our country,” Trump told CNBC in August.  As part of his vow to slash drug prices and bring manufacturing back to the U.S., Trump in April opened a so-called Section 232 investigation into the pharmaceutical sector to probe the impact of imports on national security and impose tariffs if needed.   Analysts estimate that Trump is unlikely to impose a tariff as high as the threatened 200 or 250 percent. However, a first “lower tariff” — no higher than 15 percent, provided Trump does indeed stick to the terms of the EU-U.S. agreement — could yet be followed by a heavily disruptive tariff of around 50 percent after a year or two. The message isn’t lost on big pharma: Giants such as Eli Lilly and Johnson & Johnson have this year announced new investments in the U.S. Yet experts warn Trump’s tariff policy risks driving up drug prices and leading to shortages, rather than spurring large-scale relocation.  While the 15 percent tariff cap foreseen by the EU-U.S. deal offers the industry a reprieve, companies need to make tricky calculations, warned Dan O’Brien, chief economist at the Institute of International and European Affairs, an Irish think tank.  “For those products that are uniquely made in Ireland there is at least some element of a buffer: It’ll take a few years for production to move out of Ireland, in a worst-case scenario,” he said. For products also made elsewhere, it will be easier to shift production and “could happen more quickly,” he added.  RISKY BUSINESS   For now, those scenarios remain hypothetical — but the unpredictability is already leaving its mark.   As companies rushed to export their goods, Irish pharma exports to the U.S. surged by nearly 50 percent in the first five months of this year. “Geopolitical concerns” now rank among the top three threats to business in the Cork Chamber of Commerce’s last survey of its members.  Companies are mostly keeping quiet. Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson declined to comment for this story, whereas Sterling Pharma Solutions, BioMarin, Recordati and Hovione did not respond to requests for comment. Novartis, which is supplied by Sterling Pharma Solutions, warned that “the introduction of tariffs risks creating additional barriers that could further delay access to life-saving treatments.”  Giants such as Eli Lilly and Johnson & Johnson have this year announced new investments in the U.S. | Cristina Arias/Getty Images Reacting to the deal between the EU-U.S. deal, the Irish Pharmaceutical Healthcare Association warned that “tariffs on medicines would be a substantial new cost where there was none before and a drag on investment, jobs and innovation.”  A worker at a pharma plant in the area, granted anonymity to protect their job security, told POLITICO output had slowed in the last couple of months as the company waited to regain planning certainty. Similarly, Dan Boyle, a Green Party councillor for Cork and the city’s former mayor, said companies told him that “our hope was that we would have announced future investment for 2030, and that’s being sat on, until we know what the situation is going to be.”  UNDER PRESSURE  Local, national and European politicians are acutely aware of just how much is at stake.  Séamus McGrath, a Dáil deputy for the Cork South-Central constituency, called for a “continuous process of renegotiation and engagement” with Washington.   “We need to renew our pitch and renew our attraction as a country for foreign direct investment,” said McGrath, sitting in the lobby of the Carrigaline Court Hotel, the town’s only hotel. “You cannot sit back.”   The politician with the co-governing centrist Fianna Fáil party entertains strong ties with Brussels, not least thanks to his brother, EU Justice Commissioner Michael McGrath.  In the EU capital, lawmakers from the region are urging the EU to boost the bloc’s competitiveness. Cynthia Ní Mhurchú, of the liberal Renew Europe group, called for cutting “excessive red tape” for businesses. And Seán Kelly, an MEP with the centre-right European People’s Party, welcomed the European Commission’s plans to secure access to new markets through trade deals.  After all, for locals back on the Irish coast, power politics determine no less than their personal future.  “They say they [the big companies] will go away,” said Amy Lyons, a bartender at Ringaskiddy’s only pub, The Ferry Boat Inn.    “I’m doing a biopharma course in college. So, imagine I get my degree, and they are gone,” she added as she drew pints for the regulars, who were discussing a new road being built to ease road congestion — caused by commuter traffic to the pharma plants.  Graphics by Hanne Cokelaere.

In an AI-first era, where AI is becoming an integral part of everything we do, its applications spanning across different sectors and facilitating various parts of our daily routines, healthcare should be no exception. In an ideal world, this is what healthcare should look like: a patient goes to an app to book an appointment, AI directs them to the doctor with the best expertise, knows which equipment is available, and which location makes most sense, and puts the appointment in their respective diaries. The complexity with healthcare is that this isn’t just a system, but three interconnected worlds that must work together seamlessly. Patients rightly want care when and where they need it. Clinicians want to ensure their expert resource is directed as impactfully and efficiently as possible. And medical assets, from MRI scanners to life-saving medications, must be available when and where required. This is where investing in technology becomes key. The good news is that the AI revolution in healthcare is already beginning, and the early results are encouraging. Some GP practices have cut waiting times by 73 percent using smart triaging systems, reducing waits from 11 to three days. AI can help tackle the dreaded ‘8am rush’ when phone lines jam with appointment requests. In the same study, GP practices using these systems reduced phone-based contacts from 88 percent to 18 percent and saw a 30 percent drop in missed appointments — potentially saving £350 million annually from reduced non-attendance. Through ServiceNow’s work with NHS Trusts, we’ve identified five areas where change can make an immediate difference, as outlined in ServiceNow’s NHS Digital Transformation white paper: * improving the staff experience; * joining up corporate services; * protecting against cyber threats; * streamlining patient journeys; and * harnessing AI. The reward for getting this right? We could see £35 billion in productivity savings by 2030. That’s money that could be reinvested directly into patient care. Better staff systems could save £750 million annually — not through cuts, but by giving critical NHS workers back the 29 million hours currently lost to bureaucracy. Right now, it takes up to 120 days to get a new NHS employee properly started. In some trusts we have cut that to 25-40 days. Imagine the impact if this was rolled out across the whole NHS. When you’re trying to grow the workforce from 1.5 to 2.4 million people by 2036, every day matters. Joining up corporate services could save another £1.6 billion each year. This is especially urgent given that Integrated Care Systems are facing combined deficits and have been told to slash running costs by 50 percent. The NHS 10 Year Health Plan for England talks about rebuilding the NHS in working-class communities; areas that currently get 10 percent less funding per person. Digital transformation isn’t just about efficiency; it’s about equity. When systems work properly, everyone benefits, but the biggest gains go to those who currently struggle most to access care. The problem is these parts barely speak to each other. The white paper reveals just how costly this disconnection has become: 13.5 million hours wasted annually due to inadequate IT, a 7.5 million case waiting list, and nearly £3 billion spent each year compensating for care failures. Behind every statistic is a person. Someone facing a delayed diagnosis, a cancelled operation or simply not receiving the care they deserve. This fragmentation isn’t just inefficient, it has a direct effect on patients and clinicians too. We’re spending £15.5 billion annually, 6.5 percent of the entire NHS budget, on corporate services that don’t talk to each other. Nurses are spending over a quarter of their time on paperwork instead of caring for patients. GP practices are drowning in 240 million calls annually from frustrated patients who can’t get through. We have a patchwork of systems where crucial information gets lost in translation.  When it takes 20 separate manual processes just to say goodbye to a leaving employee, you know there’s room for improvement. In addition to internal challenges, there’s the cyber threat affecting the NHS. Healthcare cyberattacks doubled between 2022 and 2023. A single ransomware attack forced over 10,000 patients to have their appointments cancelled at just two trusts. Without proper digital defenses and monitoring, we’re one attack away from regional healthcare paralysis. But here’s the thing, AI is only as good as the systems it connects to. That’s where we need to be honest about the infrastructure challenge. You can’t build tomorrow’s healthcare on yesterday’s technology. We need systems that talk to each other, share information securely and put the right information in the right hands at the right moment. The truth is, the NHS can’t do this transformation alone. The scale is too big, the timeline too tight and the technical challenges too complex. It’s about partnership — because the best outcomes happen when public sector insight combines with private sector innovation and speed. We need genuine partnerships focused on outcomes, not just products. At ServiceNow, we’ve seen what’s possible when this approach works: connected systems, freed-up time and better patient experiences. We’re at a crossroads, and the path we choose in the next two to three years will determine the NHS our children inherit. We can keep tinkering around the edges, managing decline through small improvements or we can be bold and build the digital foundation that healthcare needs. This isn’t a distant dream; it’s an immediate opportunity. Patients have waited long enough. NHS staff have endured enough frustration with systems that make their jobs harder, not easier. The cost of inaction isn’t just measured in pounds, it’s measured in lives. The technology exists, the knowledge is there and the legal framework is in place. What we need now is to act on what we already know works for this transformation to happen.