The European Commission has warned that Donald Trump’s latest restrictions on foreign aid are dangerous and threaten global health — while saying the EU can’t fill the funding gap alone. The Trump administration revealed further conditions on foreign aid last week, which seek to restrict NGOs, governments and agencies in receipt of U.S. funding from promoting not only abortion but also “gender ideology” and “discriminatory equity ideology.” The measures come as lower-income countries face catastrophic health impacts after many donors, led by the U.S., dramatically cut funding last year, leaving them with little choice but to accept conditional funds. The policies have appalled health experts who say they are an unprecedented attack on sovereignty and confirm the weaponization of aid under Trump, whose administration is seeking more direct influence over global health programs. Europe has also criticized the expanded policy, stepping up its response compared with more restrained positions to the Trump administration’s other diverging health policies. “Limiting international assistance through restrictive funding conditions undermines joint efforts for human rights, global health, peace and stability. It makes funding more unpredictable and increases the vulnerability of those already most at risk,” European Commission spokesperson Anitta Hipper told POLITICO. “Ultimately, this risks our goal of saving lives,” Hipper said. The EU would assess the implications for the programs it funds and will remain a “credible, reliable, principled and predictable partner,” but Europe “cannot fill the gap left by others,” Hipper added. The new policy is the widest expansion of the Mexico City Policy — which international groups have called the ‘global gag rule’ because of the restrictions it imposes — that the U.S. has ever imposed. U.S. Vice President JD Vance said last week the Trump administration was “expanding this policy to protect life, to combat [diversity, equity and inclusion] and the radical gender ideologies that prey on our children.” He said it would increase the reach of the Mexico City Policy, which has traditionally only applied to abortion advocacy, threefold. It’s the latest policy that underlines the Trump administration’s explicitly strings-attached foreign aid agenda. The U.S. has rolled out a series of bilateral deals with 14 African countries, requiring them to guarantee the U.S. access to pathogen samples and data in exchange for health funding — much of which the U.S. had withdrawn last year through USAID cuts. It has also offered to restore funding to global vaccine program GAVI, but only if the organization stops using a common mercury-based preservative that Trump’s top health officials have linked to autism, without evidence. The latest policy is part of a “much larger project by the Trump administration to advance this radical anti-rights agenda,” Beirne Roose-Snyder, a senior policy fellow at the Council for Global Equality, told reporters this week. Desirée Cormier Smith, a former U.S. diplomat, said she hoped governments in the EU and elsewhere would “push back” and deliver a bracing message to the Trump administration: “We refuse to leave all of our people behind. You’re not going to export your domestic culture wars and the division that plagues the U.S. to our own countries.” The new rules, which come into effect Feb. 26, will also increase pressure on European governments over their own levels of global health funding. Major donors such as France, Germany and the Netherlands have trimmed their own contributions, as part of the global crunch in aid spending. Lisa Goerlitz, head of the Brussels office at global health NGO DSW, said Europe must keep foreign aid spending at levels needed “to allow a credible transition towards domestic resources and new financing mechanisms”. The New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights, meanwhile, said the EU faced a “clear test of its leadership and credibility on equality and human rights.” Claudia Chiappa contributed reporting.

Vice President JD Vance on Friday said the United States will stop funding any organization working on diversity and transgender issues abroad. Vance called the policy, which has been widely expected, “a historic expansion of the Mexico City Policy,” which prevents foreign groups receiving U.S. global health funding from providing or promoting abortion, even if those programs are paid for with other sources of financing. President Donald Trump reinstated the Mexico City Policy last year, following a tradition for Republican presidents that Ronald Reagan started in 1984. Democratic presidents have repeatedly rescinded the policy. “Now we’re expanding this policy to protect life, to combat [diversity, equity and inclusion] and the radical gender ideologies that prey on our children,” Vance told people attending the March for Life in Washington, an annual gathering of anti-abortion activists on the National Mall. The rule covers non-military U.S. foreign assistance, making the Mexico City Policy “about three times as big as it was before, and we’re proud of it because we believe in fighting for life,” Vance said. That means that any organizations receiving U.S. non-military funding will not be able to work on abortion, DEI and issues related to transgender people, even if that work is done with other funding sources. POLITICO reported in October that the Trump administration was developing the policy. The State Department made the rule change Friday afternoon. Vance accused the Biden administration of “exporting abortion and radical gender ideology all around the world.” The Trump administration has used that argument to massively reduce foreign aid since it took office a year ago. Vance said the Trump administration believes that every country in the world has the duty to protect life. “It’s our job to promote families and human flourishing,” he said, adding that the administration “turned off the tap for NGOs whose sole purpose is to dissuade people from having kids.” Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Africa Subcommittee, called the new aid restrictions “the best and most comprehensive iteration” of the Mexico City Policy since Reagan. Smith, who opposes abortion, was also speaking at the March for Life. But domestic and international groups deplored the expanded policy, noting that it would make women and girls in some parts of the world more vulnerable. “History shows that the Mexico City policy not only diminishes access to essential services for women and girls, but also breaks down networks of organizations working on women’s rights, and silences civil society,” the International Crisis Group, which works to prevent conflicts, said in a statement. “This expansion will amplify those effects and is set to compound the global regression on gender equality that we have seen accelerate in the last year,” the group added. The expanded Mexico City Policy, which international groups have called the ‘global gag rule’ because of the restrictions it imposes, will limit how humanitarian groups and other organizations “can engage in advocacy, information dissemination and education related to reducing maternal mortality, sexual and reproductive health, and reducing stigma and inequalities anywhere in the world, with any funding they receive,” said Defend Public Health, a network of volunteers fighting against the Trump administration’s health policies. “This would effectively coerce them into denying that transgender, nonbinary, and intersex people exist,” the group said. Alice Miranda Ollstein contributed to this report.

STRASBOURG — The European Parliament has voted today to set up an EU fund to expand access to abortion for women across the bloc, in a historic vote that divided lawmakers. The plan would establish a voluntary, opt-in financial mechanism to help countries provide abortion care to women who can’t access it in their own country and who choose to travel to one with more liberal laws. European citizens presented the plan in a petition — through the campaign group “My Voice, My Choice.” Lawmakers in Strasbourg voted 358 in favor and 202 against the proposal, and 79 MEPs abstained. The topic sparked animated discussions in the European Parliament plenary on Tuesday evening. MEPs with center-right and far-right groups tabled competing texts to the resolution put forward by Renew’s Abir Al-Sahlani on behalf of the women’s rights and gender equality committee. Supporters of the scheme argued it would help reduce unsafe abortions and ensure women across the bloc have equal rights; those who oppose it, mostly from conservative groups, dismissed it as an ideological push and EU overreach into national policy. Abortion laws vary greatly across the EU, from near-total bans in Poland and Malta to liberal rules in the Netherlands and the U.K. The fund could be a game changer for the thousands of European women who travel every year to another EU country to access abortion care. The European Commission now has until March 2026 to give a response. This story is being updated.

Liz Truss looks out of place. In her neat pink jacket and white blouse, the former U.K. prime minister, who served a brief but eventful 49 days in the role back in 2022, strikes a contrast to the hoopla around her in the packed ballroom. Truss has come to Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia this October evening for the yearly “CEO summit,” drawing corporate figures, conservative influencers and donors for a night of fiery speeches about the triumphs of the MAGA movement — seasoned with the university’s Christian conservative tradition of mixing politics with prayer. Truss rises somberly as the crowd is enjoined to repent, soul-search and double down on tithe payments to the Baptist mega-church originally founded by the late televangelist Jerry Falwell. From the stage at the front of the room, she nods along to the heady mixture of God and politics, waiting to start a talk about the so-called “deep state” — which, she claims, includes the Bank of England and the U.K. Treasury. She announces that she is “on a mission” to transform the U.K., and when someone cries a noisy “amen,” that throws her for a moment before she resumes. If the juxtaposition between the ex-prime minister and fire-and-brimstone MAGA evangelicals seems unlikely — Truss later tells me she is still a stalwart of the Church of England, which is much more establishment than evangelical, even if she thinks it has gone a bit “woke” on social issues like trans rights — her presence here nonetheless represents an increasingly popular trend. A transatlantic “Magafication” movement is luring traditional conservatives from the U.K. to identify with the provocative style of U.S. President Donald Trump — and to try their hands at imitating him on his home turf, participating in rousing conservative speaking events across the U.S. For some, like Truss, these events are a lucrative, mood-enhancing chance to establish a new identity after the stinging defeat of the Tory party at the last general election in July 2024. For her more charismatic predecessor Boris Johnson, they are a chance to hear the roar of the crowd that more sedate speaking gigs with hedge funds and law firms can’t deliver. For Nigel Farage, from the ultraconservative Reform UK party, they are a chance to re-forge British politics in the image of Trump — a benediction and a bro-mance all in one. Whether it’s connecting with voters on either side of the Atlantic, however, is a less certain proposition. Most of the students going about their early evening outside the hall don’t seem to know who Truss is. “They kind of told us she was the leader in the U.K.,” muses one business studies major, “but I never heard of her.” Just a few weeks earlier, it was Johnson — the premier who rose on the wings of Brexit and preceded Truss in a carousel of Tory leaders after the Leave vote — who spoke on campus at the new-term convocation, following a sequence of Christian rock numbers.  “We’re in a congregation, folks, convocation — I mean, we’ve been convoked,” Johnson riffed. The ruffle-haired charm and Old Etonian levity were a preamble to a speech about the Christian university as a “bastion of freedom” and a paean to the memory of Charlie Kirk, the murdered conservative activist, whom Johnson hailed as “a martyr to our inalienable right as human beings to say what is in our hearts.” Later, he zoned in on the need to keep supporting Ukraine and lambasted the authoritarianism of Russian President Vladimir Putin — to a muted response from the audience. It’s not exactly a popular take here; there are no follow-up questions on the topic. And at the CEO event, none of the speakers mention Ukraine or the U.S. role in its future at all. Much like the isolationism Johnson encountered, the British MAGA trail is a sign of the times. Trump’s twofold electoral success is attractive to some U.K. conservatives who feel there must be something in the president’s iconoclasm they can bottle and take home. And unlike tight-lipped debate forums in the U.K., such events give them a chance to be noisy and outspoken, to paint arguments in bold and provocative colors. In other words, to be Brits on tour — but also more like Trump. And, for added appeal, these tours are a lucrative field for former inhabitants of 10 Downing Street. One person who has previously worked at the Washington Speakers Bureau, one of the main hubs for booking A-list speakers, said that the fee for a former premier is around $200,000 for a substantial speech, plus private plane travel and commercial flights for a support team. That is a level of luxury unparalleled at home. Well known figures like Johnson and David (Lord) Cameron, the British premier from 2010 to 2016, can aim even higher if travel is complicated. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Having “former prime minister” in front of your name in writing may open a lot of doors, but these politicians nonetheless have to tailor their resumes to appeal to American audiences.” Political CVs are duly bowdlerized to appeal to the target market of U.S. institutions and interests. Johnson’s profile at the Harry Walker agency in Washington, for instance, stresses his interest in deregulation and claims that he “successfully delivered Brexit — taking back control of U.K. law, marking the biggest constitutional change for half a century and enabling the United Kingdom to generate the fastest vaccine approval in the world.” This sequence of events and superlatives is debatable at best. Failures are routinely airbrushed out — Johnson’s premiership crashed in a mess of mismanagement during the pandemic and party divisions unleashed by the Brexit vote and his controversial handling of the aftermath, including the temporary dissolution of parliament to push through his legislation. But for characters whose legacy at home is either polarizing (like Johnson) or more likely to elicit a sly British eye roll outside a small fan base (Truss), there is also a degree of absolution on the American performance circuit that feels refreshing, in the same way that U.K. Indie bands stubbornly try to conquer America. Neither of the former Conservative leaders however, have as much to gain or lose by speaking at Trump-adjacent events as Farage, the leader of Britain’s Reform party — an “anti-woke,” Euro-skeptic, immigration-hostile party that is leading in the polls and attempting to expand its handful of lawmakers in the House of Commons into a party in contention for the next government. Farage has the closest access to Trump — a status previously enjoyed by Johnson, who last met Trump at the Republican National Convention in 2024 to discuss Ukraine. Proximity to Trump is the ultimate blessing, but it’s far harder to secure out of office than in it. Johnson endorsed Trump’s comeback at CPAC in February 2024 and wrote a column in support of Trump’s attack on the BBC for splicing footage of the January 6 uprising, which was deemed to be misleading and led to the abrupt departure of the broadcaster’s director general. Johnson was at Trump’s inauguration along with Truss (no other former U.K. politician was asked), but the invitations appear to have dropped off since chummy relations in Trump world can be ephemeral. Farage, by contrast, is a frequent visitor at both Mar-a-Lago and the White House. On November 7, he joined Trump at a fundraising auction for military veterans and has arranged to donate the prize of a walk with a centenarian veteran on Omaha beach, commemorating the D-Day landing site for U.S. forces. “I see him often,” he told me of his visits to Trump. Farage’s relationship with Trump could prove advantageous to him if he and his party claim greater power at home. He’d have the ear of the president, perhaps even the ability to sway Trump into a more sympathetic stance toward the U.K., even as the Americans embrace a more isolationist foreign policy. For now, Farage is certainly the most in-demand Brit on the MAGA circuit. He was the main speaker at the $500-a-head Republican party dinner in Tallahassee, Florida in March. Guests paid around $25,000 for a VIP ticket, which included having a photograph taken with the Reform UK leader. For the leader of a party that has a skimpy presence in parliament and faces the challenge of keeping its surge momentum and newsworthiness intact on a long road to the next election, being in the Trump limelight is a vote of confidence and a sign that he is taken seriously across the pond. The quid pro quo is performative loyalty — Farage, by turns genial and threatening in his manner, has echoed the president’s rancorous tone toward public broadcasters and media critics of MAGA. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- All of this transatlantic networking has threatened to ensnare the British visiting troupe in ethical quagmires about how their lucrative American freelancing relates to duties and strictures at home. Farage has attracted envious attention among his peers in parliament for earning around $1.5 million a year in addition to his MP salary, but he was forced to apologize recently for failing to declare the March dinner appearance and any fees associated with it in the official registry. So far, he’s revealed only that the trip was “remunerated in three separate installments over the course of two months,” without naming the funder.  Even Farage’s friendship with Trump — the envy of his compatriots on the MAGA trail — could present vulnerabilities among the U.K. electorate. Farage’s base of Reform voters largely supports Trumpian stances on immigration and diversity, and they love Trump’s personality. But beyond core Reform voters, the president does not enjoy broad support in the U.K. Recent polling shows only 16 percent of British people like the president. That’s a challenge for the Reform UK leader, whose party polls at just under 30 percent support in the U.K.; he needs to reach Trump-skeptical voters beyond his base in order to claim power. On top of those liabilities, avid Christian nationalism of the kind Truss encountered at the Liberty event presents a cultural problem for British politicians. Mixing ideology with religious fervor is awkward back home where church-going is largely regarded as a private matter, even if there are signs of more evangelical commitment among influential Christian Conservatives like Paul Marshall, a hedge-funder who recently acquired The Spectator, the house publication of well-heeled Tories, expanding its digital reach into America. Hardline evangelical stances could undermine support for campaigners like Farage, says Tim Bale, an expert on elections and political trends at Queen Mary College, University of London. Farage “probably needs to be careful of getting into things like anti-abortion arguments or even term limits on abortion. That does not play in the U.K.,” he told me. Duly, on their U.S. pilgrimages, both Truss and Johnson side-step direct engagement with the religiosity of their hosts. Johnson, who once joked that his own Anglican faith “comes and goes like Classic FM in the Chiltern hills,” basks in his reputation as a cheerful libertine with an array of past wives and mistresses. He fathered one child by an affair, and a scandal arising from allegations that he paid for an abortion during another affair got him sacked from his party’s front bench in 2004. (Johnson married his current wife, with whom he has four children, in 2021.) Religion isn’t the only subject that makes British MAGA-philes modulate their tone toward Trump. Johnson spoke of Trump’s “boisterous and irreverent” treatment of journalists, but dismissed it as minor compared to the attacks on the fourth estate in Moscow. Despite her previous support for Ukraine as Johnson’s foreign secretary, Truss awkwardly ducked questions on the Westminster Insider interview podcast when I pressed her about whether the administration should send Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine, which Trump opposes. “I’d have to know about the facts on the ground,” she said. But Farage, Johnson and Truss are betting that the benefits of being a transatlantic Trump acolyte well outweigh the risks. And there might be more to it than personal vanity tours and cushy earnings. The sense of grievances unheard or unaddressed that first elevated Trump to power have echoes across the Atlantic: worries about national decline, a feeling that traditional parties have lost touch with voters and a capacity for making Barnum-style entertainment out of the business of politics. It is a long way from being interrupted by the Speaker of the House of Commons shouting, “Order, order!”- Whether it is a flattering transatlantic afterlife for fallen leaders or a precursor to pitch for power at Westminster for Farage (who tells me that, like Trump, he is “building an unstoppable movement”) the MAGA circuit is the place to be — even if it’s not where everybody knows your name. It is also about embodying something these political pilgrims reckon their rivals fail to grasp: namely, the way one man’s MAGA movement has redefined Conservatism and opened up space for imitators in Europe to identify with more than their own election flops — and for newcomers to seek to remake their own political landscape. After all, if it happened to America, it might turn out to be a bankable export.

ROME — The conservative think tank behind Donald Trump’s Project 2025 roadmap is looking for new friends across the Atlantic.  The Heritage Foundation, the intellectual engine behind the 922-page blueprint that has become the key policy manual for Trump’s second term, is partnering with a constellation of European nationalist far-right movements to export its playbook for countering progressive policies.  That included a conference in late October at the frescoed former home of late premier Silvio Berlusconi in Rome focused on Europe’s demographic crisis and the idea that falling birthrates pose a threat to Western civilization. Speakers included Roger Severino, Heritage’s vice president of domestic policy and the architect of the group’s campaign to roll back abortion access in the U.S., as well as Italy’s pro-life family minister Eugenia Roccella, the deputy speaker of the Senate, and members of Italian right-wing think tanks.  Severino and the Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, have also been speaking guests at summits and assemblies of far-right groups such as Patriots for Europe, which includes Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National and Italy’s League, under a Make Europe Great Again banner.  Meanwhile Heritage representatives have held private meetings in Washington and Brussels with lawmakers from far-right parties in Hungary, Czechia, Spain, France and Germany. Just in the past 12 months, the group held seven meetings with members of the European Parliament, compared to just one in the five years prior, according to Parliament records. And they’ve had additional meetings with MEPs that weren’t formally reported, including with three members from Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party. Severino told POLITICO that meetings with the European right serve to exchange ideas. But the meetings signal more than pleasantries. For European politicians, they’re a way to get access to people in Trump’s orbit. For Heritage, they’re a way to extend influence beyond Washington and achieve its ideological goals, which under Roberts have grown increasingly aligned with Trump’s MAGA approach.  Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at Heritage, said he meets with conservative parties to share experience in dealing with common challenges — “comparing notes, that kind of thing.” He said his interlocutors are “very interested” in policies on abortion, gender theory, defense and China, adding that parts of Project 2025 such as a section he wrote on defunding public broadcasters, are “very transferable” to Europe.  The foundation has been active in Europe for years, he points out, but demand has increased since Trump’s return to office. European right-wing leaders, Gonzalez said, “see Trump and what he is doing and say, ‘I want to get me some of that.’”  BETTER THE SECOND TIME It’s not the first time MAGA has attempted to galvanize the European right. Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon unsuccessfully tried to unite populist nationalist parties under the Movement think tank in 2019, hamstrung by a lack of buy-in from the parties themselves.  Some observers are doubtful this renewed push will go differently. “I’m skeptical that it will amount to much,” said EJ Fagan, an associate politics professor at the University of Illinois and author of The Thinkers, a book on partisan think tanks. “The European right have their own resources that produce policies, so there’s not a lot Heritage can provide to European parties.”  That is especially an issue, Fagan noted, when it comes to finessing legislation, since Heritage doesn’t have a deep bench of “people who have a fine understanding of laws and treaties” in Europe.  But the Heritage Foundation’s European mission comes as far-right groups gain ground across Europe by tapping public frustration over issues such as immigration, climate policy and sovereignty and pushing policies that are similar to those laid out in the group’s Project 2025 agenda.  Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, have also been speaking guests at summits and assemblies of far-right groups such as Patriots for Europe. | Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA In Italy, two MPs have proposed legislation granting fetal personhood, which would make abortion impossible. The regional government in Lazio is preparing to approve a law that would guarantee protection of the fetus “from conception,” echoing a similar push in the US. And Rocella, Meloni’s family minister who appeared last month with Heritage’s Severino, is attempting to block a regional law banning conscientious objectors from roles in clinics providing abortions.  It’s not just reproductive rights. Meloni’s government has pulled out of a memorandum of understanding on the Belt and Road Initiative, the Chinese government’s ambitious program that aims to finance over $1 trillion in infrastructure investments. It effectively blocked Chinese telecoms giant Huawei from being a part in telecommunications development.  Lucio Malan, an MP in Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party and a panelist at two conferences organized with the Heritage Foundation, attempted to reverse a ban on homophobic and sexist advertisements — though he told POLITICO he took part in the events on the invitation of the center-right FareFuturo think tank, which co-organized the events with Heritage.   Heritage and its allies in the Trump administration have everything to gain from stronger nationalist parties in Europe, which are also pushing for delays in climate and agriculture regulations and sided with the US and Big Tech on digital regulation. Earlier this year, Heritage hosted the presentation of proposals by two far-right European think tanks, Hungary’s Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) and Poland’s Ordo Iuris Institute for Legal Culture, to overhaul and hollow out the EU, undermining the commission and the European Court of Justice. And Heritage’s activity in Europe comes as the organization faces a swirl of controversy back home after Roberts sided with right-wing political commentator Tucker Carlson over criticism for interviewing a white nationalist. The incident triggered an open revolt against Roberts, who subsequently apologized. The unexpectedly swift and wide-ranging implementation of Project 2025 in the U.S. has boosted Heritage’s credentials in Europe, said Kenneth Haar of Corporate Europe Observatory, a non-profit that monitors lobbying in the EU. “Trump’s wholesale adoption of their agenda has given them unparalleled status,” he said. Now, Haar added, Heritage “is not just a think tank from the U.S., it is a representative of the MAGA coalition. It is not an exaggeration to say they are carrying out foreign policy on behalf of the president.” But the Heritage Foundation’s European mission comes as far-right groups gain ground across Europe by tapping public frustration over issues such as immigration, climate policy and sovereignty and pushing policies that are similar to those laid out in the group’s Project 2025 agenda. | Shawn Thew/EPA For Heritage, there’s good reason to focus on Europe in particular: It has become a focal point for the group’s donors and activists in the U.S., who fret about perceived Islamicization and leftist politics on the continent.  “We have an existential interest in having Europe be sovereign and free and strong,” Gonzalez told POLITICO. A RALLYING POINT Historically, Europe’s right has struggled to cooperate, with different factions representing conflicting national interests. But the machinery underpinning Trump’s reelection, and his ability to move national policy in European capitals, has shifted those dynamics, making Heritage “a factor in uniting the European right,” Haar said.  “MAGA has become a rallying point, the European right is meeting more frequently,” he added. Trump’s support for their policies also gives them more “clout” in Europe, he said, as Europe’s leaders seek favor from Trump and his allies across a range of issues, including tariffs.  Transparency activists said that they’re seeing a notable uptick in activity that suggests Heritage is gaining traction beyond symposiums and events.  Raphaël Kergueno, Senior Policy Officer at Transparency International, a NGO advocating against undue political influence, said the group’s activities — including those undeclared meetings with MEPs, which may put those members in breach of the European Parliament’s code of conduct — underscores the weakness of European rules on lobbying and advocacy.  Kenneth Haar added, Heritage “is not just a think tank from the U.S., it is a representative of the MAGA coalition. It is not an exaggeration to say they are carrying out foreign policy on behalf of the president.” | Shawn Thew/EPA “The Heritage Foundation has pushed blatantly anti-democratic projects, and is now free to court MEPs without disclosing its goals or funding,” he said. “If the EU does not clean up its act, it will allow hostile actors to import authoritarianism through the backdoor.” But Nicola Procaccini, an MEP in Meloni’s party who has held several meetings with Heritage, dismissed the idea that Heritage presents a danger to the rule of law or to European politics. He said he has not read Project 2025, and pointed to the group’s long history as an economic policy powerhouse — though that has changed in the Trump era, as the group’s new head Roberts has pivoted closer to Trump.  Nevertheless, he said, “You can share or not share their views … but Heritage is certainly an authoritative voice.”  

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said he wants to enshrine the right to abortion in the Constitution, following the example of France, which last year became the first country in the world to take the historic step.  In a post on social media, Sánchez said he is planning to bring a proposal to Parliament to constitutionalize the right to voluntary termination of pregnancy. “With this government, there will be no step backward in social rights,” he said.  The post follows approval by Madrid’s city council of a measure which will make health centers inform women considering abortion about so-called “post-abortion trauma.” The measure was supported by the center-right Popular Party (PP) and the far-right Vox party.  “The PP has decided to merge with the far right. That’s their choice,” Sánchez wrote. “They can do that. But not at the expense of women’s freedoms and rights.” The prime minister said he plans to amend Spain’s abortion laws to prevent “misleading or scientifically inaccurate information about abortion from being provided.”  

BERLIN — German lawmakers voted to appoint three judges to the country’s highest court on Thursday in a series of high-stakes ballots that tested the cohesion of Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s coalition government. “Today has been a very, very important day for democracy in this country, and also for the constitution,” said Matthias Miersch, the general secretary of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD). Thursday’s votes came months after conservative and left-leaning members of Merz’s government clashed over the appointment of a judge to Germany’s top court, raising questions about the viability of the ideologically divergent coalition. At the time, members of Merz’s conservative bloc refused to support Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf, a legal expert nominated by their coalition partners in the SPD, resulting in a postponement of the vote. The fight over Brosius-Gersdorf came after questionable allegations of plagiarism surfaced against her and amid what many viewed as a smear campaign aimed at discrediting the legal expert over her views on abortion. Brosius-Gersdorf withdrew her candidacy last month, writing in an open letter that she wanted to prevent “the coalition dispute over the selection of judges from escalating and setting in motion a development whose effects on democracy are unforeseeable.” The conflict over Brosius-Gersdorf underscored not only emerging divides inside the coalition, but its relative fragility given the government’s weak parliamentary majority and the rise of radical parties. The popularity of far-right Alternative for Germany, now the second-biggest party in Germany’s Bundestag, means Merz’s centrist coalition controls only 52 percent of parliamentary seats, making it particularly vulnerable to even small disputes and defections within the rank and file. Members of Merz’s government now hope that, with the votes to appoint three top court judges behind them, the coalition will be able to set aside the highly emotional dispute and begin to address a series of pressing economic and pension reforms. “Today’s vote brings an end to a period of uncertainty,” said Jens Spahn, leader of the conservative faction in the Bundestag. “We as a coalition, the conservatives and the SPD, have come through the summer recess in good shape. We have found our footing.” Rasmus Buchsteiner and Hans von der Burchard contributed to this report.

On Wednesday evening, Emily Cleary, a 47-year-old journalist and public relations consultant from Buckinghamshire in the U.K., was sitting watching TV with her 12-year-old son when she got a BBC alert that Charlie Kirk had been shot. She’d never heard of him, but she soon gathered from the coverage that he was associated with President Donald Trump. “You might have seen him, Mummy,” her son insisted. “He’s the man on TikTok with the round face who shouts all the time.” He began filling her in on a long, detailed list of Kirk’s views. “He thinks that if a 10-year-old gets pregnant she should be forced to keep it,” he explained. In the U.S., Kirk was a well-known figure on both sides of the political spectrum thanks to his proximity to the Trump family and profiles in outlets such as POLITICO Magazine and The New York Times Magazine. On the other side of the Atlantic, a schism appeared this week between those perplexed at why Prime Minister Keir Starmer was making statements about a seemingly obscure American podcaster, and those who already viewed him as a celebrity. Debates about the activist’s legacy sprung up in online spaces not usually known for politics, such as Facebook groups intended for sharing Love Island memes or soccer fan communities on X, with some people saying they will “miss his straight talking.” Parents of teens were surprised to find themselves being educated by their children on an issue of apparent international political importance. To some, this was all the more bewildering given the U.K. offshoot of Kirk’s Turning Point was widely mocked as a huge failure when it tried launching at British universities. But Emily’s son learned about Kirk somewhere else: TikTok’s “for you” page. “He hadn’t just seen a few videos, he was very knowledgeable about everything he believed,” she said, adding that her son “didn’t agree with Kirk but thought he seemed like a nice guy.” “It really unnerved me that he knew more about this person’s ideas than I did.” Kirk first rose to prominence in the U.S. when he cofounded Turning Point USA in 2012. It aimed to challenge what it saw as the dominance of liberal culture on American campuses, establishing a network of conservative activists at schools across the country. Kirk built Turning Point into a massive grassroots operation that has chapters on more than 800 campuses, and some journalists have attributed Trump’s 2024 reelection in part to the group’s voter outreach in Arizona and Wisconsin. But across the pond, Turning Point UK stumbled. Formed in 2019, it initially drew praise from figures on the right of the U.K.’s then-ruling Conservative party, such as former member of parliament Jacob Rees-Mogg and current shadow foreign secretary Priti Patel. However, the official launch on Feb. 1 of that year quickly descended into farce: Its X account was unverified, leading student activists from around the country to set up hundreds of satirical accounts. Media post-mortems concluded the organization failed to capture the mood of U.K. politics. The British hard right tends to fall into two categories: the aristocratic eccentricity of Rees-Mogg, or rough-and-ready street-based movements led by figures such as former soccer hooligan (and Elon Musk favorite) Tommy Robinson. Turning Point USA — known for its highly-produced events full of strobe lights, pyrotechnics and thundering music — was too earnest, too flashy, too American. And although U.K. universities tend to be left-leaning, Kirk’s claim that colleges are “islands of totalitarianism” that curtail free speech didn’t seem to resonate with U.K. students like it did with some in the U.S. “For those interested in opposing group think or campus censorship, organisations and publications already exist [such as] the magazine Spiked Online,” journalist Benedict Spence wrote at the time, adding that “if conservatives are to win round young voters of the future, they will have to do so by policy.” Turning Point UK distanced itself from its previous leadership and mostly moved away from campuses, attempting to reinvent itself as a street-based group. However, five years later in early 2024, Kirk launched his TikTok account and quickly achieved a new level of viral fame on both sides of the Atlantic. Clips of his “Debate Me” events, in which he took on primarily liberal students’ arguments on college campuses, exploded on the platform. This also coincided with a shift in the landscape of the British right toward Kirk’s provocative and extremely online style of politics. Discontent had been swelling around the country as the economic damage of Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic began to bite, and far-right movements distrustful of politicians and legacy media gained traction online. While some of Kirk’s favorite topics — such as his staunch opposition to abortion and support of gun rights — have never resonated with Brits, others have converged. Transgender rights moved from a fringe issue to a mainstream talking point, while debates over immigration became so tense they erupted in a series of far-right race riots in August 2024, largely organized and driven by social media. In this political and digital environment, inflammatory culture-war rhetoric found new purchase — and Kirk was a bona fide culture warrior. He called for “a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor,” posted on X last week that “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America” and regularly promoted the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which asserts that elites are engaged in a plot to diminish the voting and cultural power of white Americans via immigration policy. “The American Democrat Party hates this country. They want to see it collapse. They love it when America becomes less white,” he said on his podcast in 2024. Harry Phillips, a 26-year-old truck driver from Kent, just south of London, began turning to influencers for his news during the pandemic, saying he didn’t trust mainstream outlets to truthfully report information such as the Covid-19 death toll. He first came across Kirk’s TikTok videos in the run-up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election. “I really liked that he was willing to have his beliefs challenged, and that he didn’t do it in an aggressive manner,” he said. “I don’t agree with everything, such as his views on abortion. But I do agree with his stance that there are only two genders, and that gender ideology is being pushed on kids at school.” Through Kirk, Phillips said he discovered other U.S. figures such as far-right influencer Candace Owens and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, whom he now follows on X, as well as more liberal debaters such as TikToker Dean Withers. “America’s such a powerful country, I think we should all keep an eye on what happens there because it can have a knock-on effect here,” he said. University students in the U.K. may not have been concerned about free speech in 2019, but Phillips definitely is. “I believe we’re being very censored by our government in the U.K.,” he said, citing concerns over the numbers of people reportedly arrested for social media posts. He also said Kirk was not just popular with other people his age, but older members of his family too — all of whom are distraught over his death. In May 2025, six years after the original Turning Point U.K. failed to take off, Kirk found his way back to U.K. campuses via the debate societies of elite universities like Oxford and Cambridge. He wasn’t the first far-right provocateur to visit these clubs, which have existed since the 19th century — conservative media mogul Ben Shapiro took part in a Cambridge debate in November 2023. Oxford Union’s most recent president, Anita Okunde, told British GQ these events were an attempt to make the societies, which were widely considered stuffy and stuck-up, “culturally relevant to young people.” Kirk’s hour-long video, “Charlie Kirk vs 400 Cambridge Students and a Professor,” has 2.1 million views on YouTube and has spawned multiple shorter clips, disseminated by his media machine across multiple platforms. Clips from the same debates also exist within a parallel left-wing ecosystem, re-branded with titles such as “Feminist Cambridge Student OBLITERATES Charlie Kirk.” Although Kirk has been lauded in some sections of the media for being open to debate, these videos don’t appear designed to change anyone’s opinion. Both sides have their views reinforced, taking whatever message they prefer to hear. Karen, a British mother in her late 50s who lives on a farm outside the city of Nottingham, said clips of Kirk getting “owned” by progressives are extremely popular with her 17-year-old daughter and her friends. “I had no idea who he was until she reminded me she had shown me some videos before,” said Karen, whose surname POLITICO Magazine is withholding to protect her daughter’s identity from online harassment. “I think he’s a bit too American for them,” she said. “He’s too in-your-face, and they think some of his opinions are just rage-baiting.” The U.K. political landscape is currently in turmoil, with Farage’s Reform U.K. leading the polls at 31 percent while Starmer’s center-left Labour lags behind at 21 percent. Given the unrest at home, it may seem unusual that so many people are heavily engaged with events thousands of miles away in Washington. Social media algorithms play a role pushing content, as do Farage and Robinson’s close relationships with figures such as Trump, Musk and Vice President JD Vance. In any case, young people in the U.K. are as clued into American politics as ever. Cleary’s 12-year-old son’s description of Kirk wasn’t the first time he surprised her with his knowledge of U.S. politics, either: He recently filled her in on Florida’s decision to end vaccine mandates for schoolchildren. “I’m happy that he is inquisitive and he definitely questions things,” she said. However, she wonders if this consumption of politics via social media will shape the way he and his peers view the world for the rest of their lives. “He even says to me, ‘No one my age will ever vote Labour because they’re no good at TikTok,’” she said. “And he says he doesn’t like Reform, but that they made really good social media videos.”

LONDON — Nigel Farage is gambling that a hardline stance on migration is a surefire vote-winner. But it’s a risky bet. Amid a spate of protests outside hotels housing some of Britain’s asylum seekers, Farage’s insurgent Reform UK party faces a dilemma. Should it condemn the demos and disappoint voters on the right? Or lean in — and risk alienating the more moderate voters who are now powering its rise? Reform UK’s base is increasingly mirroring the average Briton, according to fresh polling from the think tank More in Common. Just 40 percent of its current supporters backed the party in 2024, and just 16 percent of its current backers once voted for Farage’s old outfit, UKIP. Its gender gap has narrowed, its age profile has evened out, and many of its newest recruits are less glued to online culture wars. That makes Reform’s growth, in the pollsters’ words, both “a blessing and a curse.” The broader the party gets, the greater the risk of being defined by its more radical supporters — and losing the very voters Farage has worked to bring in. Members of the far-right have egged on protests outside the Bell Hotel in Epping. What began as a local protest quickly drew in the Homeland party — a breakaway from Britain’s biggest far-right group, Patriotic Alternative — alongside Britain First, and hard-right agitator Tommy Robinson. So far, Reform has backed the right to protest — Farage described people protesting as “genuinely concerned families,” and insisted that violence was caused by “some bad eggs.” “We don’t pick and choose the protest,” his Deputy Leader Richard Tice told POLITICO in an interview. “We don’t choose to support some and not others. We just say lawful, peaceful protest is an important part of a functioning democracy.”  DISTANCE But it’s a careful line for a party that has spent the past year trying to sharpen its operation — tightening vetting rules for candidates and putting distance between itself and overt racism. “They’ve drawn a clear line when it comes to distancing themselves from Tommy Robinson,” said Marley Morris, associate director for migration, trade and communities at the Institute for Public Policy Research. So far, Reform has backed the right to protest — Nigel Farage described people protesting as “genuinely concerned families,” and insisted that violence was caused by “some bad eggs.” | Neil Hall/EPA “That’s actually come at quite significant costs for Nigel Farage, because of its consequences for his relationship with Elon Musk.” The Tesla owner has been a staunch online backer of Robinson, who was jailed in the UK for contempt of court after he repeated false claims about a Syrian schoolboy. Farage — whose party descends on Birmingham for its annual conference this weekend in a jubilant mood — is riding high in the polls, and will be buoyed by polling that consistently puts migration at or near the top of Brits’ list of concerns. But the summer of tense protests risks complicating matters, according to some British commentators. Farage “feels under pressure from the online right,” argued Sunder Katwala, director of the British Future think tank. Over the past month, Reform has doubled down on its anti-immigration pitch — in language critics say edges closer to the far-right. In August, Tice told Times Radio that there should be more groups of men on a “neighborhood watch-style basis within the bounds of the law” to protect women from the “sneering, jeering, and sexual assaults and rapes that are taking place, coincidentally, near a number of these asylum-seeker hotels.”  Pressed by POLITICO, Tice doubled down on this position. “There is already vigilantism going on. No one wants to report it, but that’s the reality of life … It is much better to shine the spotlight on an issue, talk about it … and then government can make better policy.”  Tice likens asylum arrivals in the UK to “an invasion double the size of the British Army.” But the summer of tense protests risks complicating matters, according to some British commentators. | Tolga Aken/EPA “That’s how people talk about it in the pubs and clubs and bus stops and sports fields up and down the country. I know that makes people in Westminster uncomfortable — tough,” Tice told POLITICO. THE CONNOLLY FACTOR The party has also wrapped its arms around Lucy Connolly, a 42-year-old woman who was jailed after pleading guilty to stirring up racial hatred against asylum seekers with a post calling for migrant hotels to be set on fire. Reform has painted Connolly as a political prisoner of Keir Starmer’s government, with Farage even flying to Washington this week to slam Britain’s online safety rules and likening the UK to North Korea on free speech.  Cabinet ministers blasted Farage’s U.S. trip as a “Talk Britain Down” tour. Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds called it “as anti-British as you can get. More in Common polling shows that while voters are split on whether Connolly’s sentence was too harsh or too lenient, 51 percent want politicians to distance themselves from her, including more than a quarter of Reform voters. “The transnational neoconservative right is a massive danger to the British right, not an opportunity,” argued IPPR’s Morris. More in Common polling shows that many of Reform’s newer supporters view U.S.-style populist figures, such as Donald Trump, negatively. Social attitudes are also shifting, with six in ten voters supporting same-sex marriages, and 46 percent thinking the legal abortion limit should stay at 24 weeks. POLICY PITFALLS While Reform is confidently ahead in national voting intention polls, there is evidence of some unease about its specific policy pledges. A proposal to work with the Taliban to return Afghan asylum seekers got a mixed reception. Some 45 percent of Britons said that giving money to the regime to take returns would be “completely unacceptable,” according to a YouGov poll. The party has also struggled to clarify its stance on deporting children. Chairman Zia Yusuf suggested unaccompanied minors could eventually be removed under the party’s mass deportation plans — only for Farage to row back, insisting it wouldn’t happen in Reform’s first term. “When it came to deporting children, they realized that what they proposed isn’t really sustainable — it seems, frankly, inhumane,” said Morris. “If [Reform] wants to appeal to the wider public, and not just to its base, it can’t just appeal to this kind of narrow group of people.” Tice has since sought to narrow the focus. “We’ve said that we will start focusing on detaining and deporting males first,” he said. “If a husband is detained and deported, if he’s got a wife and children, they’ve got a choice to make. “The children of parents who are here illegally, those children are not British citizens by law,” he continued. “There are bound to be specific cases and things, but as a principle, we’re not going to go through a whole long list of exemptions. If you do that, you actually create a criminal gang focus on the exemptions, and then people try to game that system. So we’re not playing that game.”

LONDON — JD Vance is on a summer break in Britain. He’s not always been such a fan. Donald Trump’s second-in-command hasn’t exactly been shy in expressing what he really thinks about the U.K. over the years, branding it an “Islamist” hellhole bent on ending free speech. But apart from that! As he holidays in the idyllic Cotswolds (dubbed the “Hamptons of England“) — including a stay at U.K. Foreign Secretary David Lammy’s taxpayer-funded country pile — Vance will see if his pontificating from afar matches reality. POLITICO runs through five occasions where Vance did not hold back in his assault on old Blighty. 1) BRITAIN IS AN “ISLAMIST COUNTRY” Vance made this outburst before Trump selected him as his VP pick. Last July, the then-Ohio senator called the U.K. an “Islamist country” after Labour ousted the Conservatives from Downing Street.  Speaking at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C., Vance recounted a conversation with a friend about the dangers of nuclear proliferation. And then he pushed the red button. “I was talking about what is the first truly Islamist country that will get a nuclear weapon,” Vance recalled. “Maybe it’s Iran, maybe Pakistan already kind of counts, and then we sort of finally decided maybe it’s actually the U.K., since Labour just took over.” Labour, then briefly basking in their election glory, shrugged off Vance’s comments.  “I don’t recognize that characterization,” said no-nonsense Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner. “I’m very proud of the election success that Labour had recently. I think he said quite a lot of fruity things in the past as well.” That’s one way of putting it.  2) BRITAIN KILLED FREEDOM OF SPEECH  One of Vance’s first overseas visits in the new gig was to the Munich Security Conference — dubbed “Davos with guns” — in February. Vance’s trip includes a stay at U.K. Foreign Secretary David Lammy’s taxpayer-funded country pile. | Johnny Green/PA Images via Getty Images Vance used the forum to launch an attack on Western societies for curbing free speech and allowing mass migration. The U.K. came in for particular criticism, with Vance claiming the “backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britons in particular in the crosshairs.” Vance attacked buffer zones outside U.K. abortion clinics, which prohibit protest within a certain distance. And he claimed that the Scottish government had urged citizens to “report any fellow citizens suspected guilty of thought crime.” 3) GUNNING FOR KEIR STARMER When a guest comes to visit, it’s generally nice to make them feel welcome. Not for Vance, who  was happy to make British Prime Minister Keir Starmer sit just a little uneasily in the Oval Office back in February.   While Starmer and Trump appeared to get on like a house on fire, Vance, sat to one side on a couch, carped about how Britain was attacking free speech.  “We also know that there have been infringements on free speech that actually affect not just the British — of course what the British do in their own country is up to them — but also affect American technology companies and, by extension, American citizens,” Vance said. In fairness, the U.K. government did demand Apple grant it a backdoor to access user data, teeing up an almighty fight with the U.S. And its online safety laws have tried to rein in tech giants with new rules forcing them to police “harmful” content – much to the annoyance of some U.S. lawmakers. Still, Starmer managed to hold his own in the face of the impromptu attack. “We’ve had free speech for a very, very long time in the United Kingdom and it will last for a very, very long time,” the PM shot back as Trump looked on. 4) YOU AND WHOSE ARMY?  As Britain and France strained to show Trump that Europe was willing to commit peacekeepers to bolster any Ukrainian ceasefire deal, Vance stepped on a rake. He claimed that the big minerals deal struck between Kyiv and Washington would actually be a better guarantee of Ukraine’s security than “some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years.” A soldier of “some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years” fires on the Taliban in Afghanistan, 2007. John Moore/Getty Images The U.K. and France had both fought wars more recently than that — and, while he didn’t name names, Vance was accused by British politicians of disrespecting the memory of the hundreds of soldiers killed while fighting alongside the U.S. in Afghanistan and Iraq. Vance called the criticism of him “absurdly dishonest” and insisted he wasn’t referring to the U.K. and France but unspecified countries who didn’t have the “battlefield experience nor the military equipment.” That’s that cleared up, then. 5) LABORING THE POINT  Vance’s most recent criticism is a familiar right-wing talking point, with the vice-president claiming that immigration has tanked Britain’s productivity. “If you look in nearly every country, from Canada to the U.K., that imported large amounts of cheap labor, you’ve seen productivity stagnate,” he told Washington, D.C. tech bros. “That’s not a total happenstance. I think that the connection is very direct.” In an act of unparalleled generosity, he pointed out that the U.S. has also pursued “40 years of failed economic policy” too. There’s that missing sense of transatlantic solidarity! … AND THE ONE TIME HE WAS NICE Perhaps aware he may have crossed the line one time too many, Vance told UnHerd in April that there is a deep “cultural affinity” between the two nations. He highlighted Trump’s admiration for King Charles and the late Queen Elizabeth. That’s code for: I want to tag along on your fancy state visit, Donald.