Dr. Daniel Steiners This is not an obituary for Germany’s economic standing. It is an invitation to shift perspective: away from the language of crisis and toward a clearer view of our opportunities — and toward the confidence that we have more capacity to shape our future than the mood indicators might suggest. For years, Germany seemed to be traveling along a self-evident path of success: growth, prosperity, the title of export champion. But that framework is beginning to fray. Other countries are catching up. Parts of our industrial base appear vulnerable to the pressures of transformation. And global dependencies are turning into strategic vulnerabilities. In short, the German model of success is under strain. Yet a glance at Europe’s economic history suggests that moments like these can also contain enormous potential — if strategic thinking and decisive action come together. One example, which I find particularly striking, takes us back to 1900. At the time, André and Édouard Michelin were producing tires in a relatively small market, when the automobile itself was still a niche product. They could have focused simply on improving their product. Instead, they thought bigger; not in silos, but in systems. With the Michelin Guide, they created incentives and orientation for greater mobility: workshop directories, road maps, and recommendations for hotels and restaurants made travel more predictable and attractive. What began as a service booklet for motorists gradually evolved into an entire ecosystem — and eventually into a globally recognized benchmark for quality. > In times of change, those who recognize connections and are willing to shape > them strategically can transform uncertainty into lasting strength. What makes this example remarkable is that the real innovation did not lie in the tire itself or merely even a clever marketing idea to boost sales. It lay in something more fundamental: connected thinking and ecosystem thinking. The decision to see mobility as a broad space for value creation. It was the courage to break out of silos, to recognize strategic connections, to deepen value chains — and to help define the standards of an emerging market. That is precisely the lesson that remains relevant today, including for policymakers. In times of change, those who recognize connections and are willing to shape them strategically can transform uncertainty into lasting strength. Germany’s industrial health economy is still too often viewed in public debate in narrowly sectoral terms — primarily through the lens of health care provision and costs. Strategically, however, it has long been an industrial ecosystem that spans research, development, manufacturing, digital innovation, exports and highly skilled employment. Just as Michelin helped shape the ecosystem of mobility, Germany can think of health as a comprehensive domain of value creation. The industrial health economy: cost driver or engine of growth? Yes, medicines cost money. In 2024, Germany’s statutory health insurance system spent around €55 billion on pharmaceuticals. But much of that increase reflects medical progress and the need for appropriate care in an aging society with changing disease patterns. Innovative therapies benefit both patients and the health system. They can improve quality and length of life while shifting treatment from hospitals into outpatient care or even into patients’ homes. They raise efficiency in the system, reduce downstream costs and support workforce participation. > In short, the industrial health economy is not merely part of our health care > system. It is a key industry, underpinning economic strength, prosperity and > the financing of our social security systems. Despite public perception, pharmaceutical spending has remained remarkably stable for years, accounting for roughly 12 percent of total expenditures in the statutory health insurance system. That figure also includes generics — medicines that enter the ‘world heritage of pharmacy’ after patent protection expires and remain available at low cost. Truly innovative, patent-protected medicines account for only about seven percent of total spending. Against these costs stands an economic sector in which Germany continues to hold a leading international position. With around 1.1 million employees and value creation exceeding €190 billion, the industrial health economy is among the largest sectors of the German economy. Its high-tech products, bearing the Made in Germany label, are in demand worldwide and contribute significantly to Germany’s export surplus. In short, the industrial health economy is not merely part of our health care system. It is a key industry, underpinning economic strength, prosperity and the financing of our social security systems. Its overall balance is positive. The central question, therefore, is this: how can we unlock its untapped potential? And what would it mean for Germany if we fail to recognize these opportunities while economic and innovative capacity increasingly shifts elsewhere? Global dynamics leave little room for hesitation Governments around the world have long recognized the strategic importance of the industrial health economy — for health care, for economic growth and for national security. China is demonstrating remarkable speed in scaling and implementing biotechnology. The United States, meanwhile, illustrates how determined industrial policy can look in practice. Regulatory authorities are being modernized, approval procedures accelerated and bureaucratic barriers systematically reduced. At the same time, domestic production is being strategically strengthened. Speed and market size act as magnets for capital — especially in a sector where research is extraordinarily capital-intensive and requires long-term planning security. When innovation-friendly conditions and economic recognition of innovation meet a large, well-funded market, global shifts follow. Today roughly 50 percent of the global pharmaceutical market is located in the United States, about 23 percent in Europe — and only 4 to 5 percent in Germany. This distribution is no coincidence; it reflects differences in economic and regulatory environments. At the same time, political pressure is growing on countries that benefit from the American innovation engine without offering an equally attractive home market or recognizing the value of innovation in comparable ways. Discussions around a Most Favored Nation approach or other trade policy instruments are moving in precisely that direction — and they affect Europe and Germany directly. For Germany, the implications are clear. Those who want to attract investment must strengthen their competitiveness. Those who want to ensure reliable health care must appropriately reward new therapies. Otherwise, these global dynamics will inevitably affect both the economy and health care at home. Already today, roughly one in four medicines introduced in the United States between 2014 and 2023 is not available in Europe. The gap is even larger for gene and cell therapies. The primacy of industrial policy: from consensus to action — now Germany does not lack potential or substance. We still have a strong industrial base, a tradition of invention, outstanding universities and research institutions, and a private sector willing to invest. Political initiatives such as the coalition agreement, the High-Tech Agenda and plans for a future strategy in pharmaceuticals and medical technology provide important impulses, which I strongly welcome. > A fair market environment without artificial price caps or rigid guardrails is > the strongest magnet for private capital, long-term investment and a resilient > health system. But programs must now translate into a coherent action plan for growth. We need innovation-friendly and stable framework conditions that consider health care, economic strength and national security together — as a strategic ecosystem, not as separate silos. The value of medical innovation must also be recognized in Germany. A fair market environment without artificial price caps or rigid guardrails is the strongest magnet for private capital, long-term investment and a resilient health system. Faster approval procedures, consistent digitalization and a determined reduction of bureaucracy are essential if speed is once again to become a competitive advantage and a driver of innovation. Germany can reinvent itself, of that I am convinced. With courage, strategic determination and an ambitious push for innovation. The choice now lies with us: to set the right course and unlock the potential that is already there.

BRUSSELS — In the corridors of Brussels, policymakers endlessly debate the intricacies of the Vision for Agriculture and Food, the urgency of the European Child Guarantee and the future of the Common Agricultural Policy. Yet the place where these high-level strategies actually collide, and succeed or fail, is likely the noisiest room in any building: the school canteen. This week, as we mark International School Meals Day, we need to stop treating school food as a mere logistical cost or a side dish to education. Instead, we must recognize it for what it is: the single most powerful but under-utilized lever for systemic change. Beyond the plate: a systemic warning The statistics are sobering. Today, one in four European adolescents is overweight or obese, according to the World Health Organization. This is not merely a matter of individual choice or poverty. This trend is driven by a food landscape where ultra-processed, low-nutrient options have become the most accessible and affordable default for almost every family, regardless of socio-economic background. For many children, school meals are the only reliable window of high-quality nutrition in a day otherwise dominated by a broken food system. On the production side, our farmers are protesting for fair incomes, while the climate crisis demands a shift to sustainable food systems. It sounds like an impossible knot to untie. But for the past three years, a growing revolution has been taking place in close to 4,000 schools across 22 European countries, reaching over one million children. > For many children, school meals are the only reliable window of high-quality > nutrition in a day otherwise dominated by a broken food system. Through the EU-funded initiative SchoolFood4Change (SF4C), cities and schools have gone far beyond updating their menus; they have dismantled the old model entirely. While thousands have begun transforming how food is sourced, prepared and valued, more than 850 schools have taken the leap even further by fully implementing the Whole School Food Approach (WSFA). The results, published by Rikolto in a new report this week, offer a blueprint for an EU-wide roll-out of the model. “Evidence proves the framework works, yet we are currently hitting a bureaucratic ceiling,” explains Amalia Ochoa, head of sustainable food systems at ICLEI Europe and coordinator of SF4C. “Healthy school meals combined with food education represent the most accessible pathway to food system transformation, directly benefiting the 93 million children and young people across Europe. By aligning existing initiatives under a coherent framework, the EU can deliver on its promises to public health and both economic and environmental sustainability in one integrated approach.” Breaking the silos The WSFA works because it shifts the focus from the individual plate to the entire ecosystem. It recognizes that school meals are not an isolated education cost, but a powerful crossroads where public health, regional economics and environmental policy meet. Credit: LAYLA AERTS The approach integrates four pillars: meaningful policy leadership; sustainable procurement (favoring local and organic); hands-on education (gardening and cooking); and community partnership. When procurement is aligned with regional sustainability goals, magic happens. Children understand the value of food, waste less and local farmers gain a stable, predictable market, shielding them from global market volatility, while simultaneously lowering the long-term healthcare costs associated with diet-related diseases. The missing ingredient: it’s not just the food, it’s the people However, the report reveals a critical bottleneck. The biggest barrier to scaling this success isn’t necessarily the cost of the ingredients; it is the lack of dedicated coordination. > School meals are not an isolated education cost, but a powerful crossroads > where public health, regional economics and environmental policy meet. Transformation requires human power. It needs local coordinators who can navigate the labyrinth between a city’s health department, the procurement office and the school board. Too often, we fund the infrastructure but forget the implementation. For the WSFA to become an EU-wide standard, national and regional authorities need to move beyond project-based thinking. It’s not just another subsidy; it’s a strategic investment in Europe’s social and ecological resilience. As Thibault Geerardyn, director at Rikolto Europe, notes in the report:“The true obstacle to scaling up is institutional, not ideological. Changes in policy must be embedded in the current system, not merely added to it as a ‘nice to have’ project.” The mandate for change: a strategic imperative As the EU begins implementing its new mandate, school food offers a rare ‘triple dividend’ that hits every major political target on the Brussels agenda. It serves as a public health shield, a guaranteed market for local farmers and a tangible safety net for the European Child Guarantee. > Systemic change cannot be led by temporary staff or volunteers. The EU can > make the difference. However, this potential remains locked as long as school food is treated as a secondary concern. Systemic change cannot be led by temporary staff or volunteers. The EU can make the difference. We call on the European Parliament and Commission to: 1. Standardize quality: establish an EU-wide minimum standard of healthy school food and education to drive quality upwards across all member states. 2. Fund the coordinators: move away from short-term grants toward long-term strategic investment in the permanent operational implementation and coordination needed to guide schools through this transition. You cannot build a resilient system on temporary project cycles. 3. Connect the dots: create an interdepartmental taskforce. School food is currently a political orphan, sitting awkwardly between agricultural, health, youth and social policies. It needs a permanent home in the EU institutions and a unified strategy. The revolution is on the menu. We have the recipe. We have the evidence from more than 850 schools. Now, what’s needed is the political courage to serve it. Read the full evidence-based report here: “From Pilots to Policy: Evidence from Three Years of Implementing the Whole School Food Approach in Europe.” This article has been published with funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 101036763. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Disclaimer POLITICAL ADVERTISEMENT * The sponsor is Rikolto België vzw * The ultimate controlling entity is Rikolto België vzw * The political advertisement is linked to encouraging change to European policy on food systems with calls to action for EU Institutions. Reference to the Green Deal, the European Child Guarantee, and agricultural reform. More information here.

NEW DELHI — Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday blasted social media platforms and the tech executives who run them in a fiery dismissal of their claims to be defending free speech. The French president used a discussion on university partnerships between India and France to flay nontransparent platforms and artificial intelligence systems. “Some of them claim to be in favor of free speech. We are in favor of free algorithms, totally transparent,” Macron said during his remarks in India. “Free speech is pure bullshit if nobody knows how you are guided through this.” “All the algorithms have biases, we know that. There is no doubt,” he said. “And they are so impactful, when you speak about social media, that having no clue about how the algorithm is made, how it is tested and where it will guide you — the democratic biases of this could be huge.” Since returning to office in 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has cast Europe’s tech rules as a threat to America’s free speech tradition. While Brussels has spent the past decade designing legislation to rein in Big Tech through landmark laws like the GDPR, Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act, Washington frames many of those efforts as incompatible with U.S. principles on free expression. That dispute has triggered a broader political clash, with U.S. officials and tech companies warning that Europe’s content moderation rules amount to censorship, while EU leaders insist the measures are necessary to curb illegal content and platform abuses. Macron has repeatedly called for restrictions on access to social media access for younger users, as a groundswell of European political sentiment builds in support of his position.

STRASBOURG —  The European Commission should reverse its decision to release €10 billion to Hungary in 2023, according to a senior legal adviser to Europe’s top court. The Court of Justice of the EU is examining a claim by the European Parliament that the Commission breached its own rules when it unfroze funding for Hungary in December 2023 — money that had been withheld over rule-of-law concerns. MEPs accuse the Commission of political expediency because the decision came on the eve of a crucial summit of EU leaders at which the bloc was desperate for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to cooperate on sending aid to Ukraine. The legal opinion by Advocate-General Tamara Ćapeta — to annul the Commission’s decision to unfreeze the funds — will guide the judges on their final ruling, which will be delivered in a few months. Advocates-general are not judges but legal advisers who help the court in complicated or unprecedented cases. René Repasi, a German MEP and EU law professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam and the University of Geneva, said an annulment would mean the Commission should “request the money back.” “If Hungary does not pay back, the Commission can lower other disbursements, which Hungary is entitled to receive, by the amount Hungary is obliged to pay back,” Repasi said. When it comes, the court’s ruling will establish a precedent regarding the extent of the Commission’s discretion when assessing rule-of-law violations by EU countries, especially in the context of the Common Provisions Regulation (CPR), which sets strict conditions relating to fundamental rights and judicial independence for the disbursement of EU funds. The Commission defended itself during a hearing in October 2025, saying that specific pre-established technical “milestones” on addressing judicial independence concerns had been formally met by Budapest, and therefore the Commission had to release the funds. The Parliament’s lawyers say the Commission should have taken a broader view of systemic rule-of-law deficiencies in Hungary. Green MEP Daniel Freund said the advocate-general’s opinion “was a stinging rebuke to the Commission. Should the court follow this reasoning in its final ruling, it would mark a victory for the rule of law in Europe.” He added that the opinion “confirms what the European Parliament has long denounced: The release of €10 billion to the Hungarian government was illegal and politically motivated. By acting as it did, the Commission has gambled away its own credibility.” “EU funds must only be disbursed when the recipient upholds the law, European values, and the rule of law. We expect the European Commission to adhere to these principles in the future. It must stop allowing itself to be manipulated by autocrats like Viktor Orbán.” This article is being updated

5 TIMES THE WINTER OLYMPICS GOT SUPER POLITICAL Invasions, nuclear crises and Nazi propaganda: The Games have seen it all. By SEBASTIAN STARCEVIC Illustration by Natália Delgado /POLITICO The Winter Olympics return to Europe this week, with Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo set to host the world’s greatest athletes against the snowy backdrop of the Italian Alps. But beyond the ice rinks and ski runs, the Games have long doubled as a stage for global alliances, heated political rivalries and diplomatic crises.  “An event like the Olympics is inherently political because it is effectively a competition between nations,” said Madrid’s IE Assistant Professor Andrew Bertoli, who studies the intersection of sport and politics. “So the Games can effectively become an arena where nations compete for prestige, respect and soft power.” If history is any guide, this time won’t be any different. From invasions to the Nazis to nuclear crises, here are five times politics and the Winter Olympics collided. 1980: AMERICA’S “MIRACLE ON ICE” One of the most iconic moments in Olympic history came about amid a resurgence in Cold War tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The USSR had invaded Afghanistan only months earlier, and Washington’s rhetoric toward Moscow had hardened, with Ronald Reagan storming to the presidency a month prior on an aggressive anti-Soviet platform. At the 1980 Winter Games in Lake Placid, New York, that superpower rivalry was on full display on the ice. The U.S. men’s ice hockey team — made up largely of college players and amateurs — faced off against the Soviet squad, a battle-hardened, gold medal-winning machine. The Americans weren’t supposed to stand a chance. Then the impossible happened. In a stunning upset, the U.S. team skated to a 4-3 victory, a win that helped them clinch the gold medal. As the final seconds ticked away, ABC broadcaster Al Michaels famously cried, “Do you believe in miracles? Yes!” The impact echoed far beyond the rink. For many Americans, the victory was a morale boost in a period marked by geopolitical anxiety and division. Reagan later said it was proof “nice guys in a tough world can finish first.” The miracle’s legacy has endured well into the 21st century, with U.S. President Donald Trump awarding members of the hockey team the Congressional Gold Medal in December last year. 2014: RUSSIA INVADES CRIMEA AFTER SOCHI Four days. That’s how long Moscow waited after hosting the Winter Olympics in the Russian resort city of Sochi before sending troops into Crimea, occupying and annexing the Ukrainian peninsula. Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych had fled to Moscow days earlier, ousted by protesters demanding democracy and closer integration with the EU. As demonstrators filled Kyiv’s Independence Square, their clashes with government forces played on television screens around the world alongside highlights from the Games, in which Russia dominated the medal tally. Vladimir Putin poses with Russian athletes while visiting the Coastal Cluster Olympic Village ahead of the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics. | Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images No sooner was the Olympic flame extinguished in Sochi on Feb. 23 than on Feb. 27 trucks and tanks rolled into Crimea. Soldiers in unmarked uniforms set up roadblocks, stormed Crimean government buildings and raised the Russian flag high above them. Later that year, Moscow would face allegations of a state-sponsored doping program and many of its athletes were ultimately stripped of their gold medals. 2022: RUSSIA INVADES UKRAINE … AGAIN There’s a theme here. Russian President Vladimir Putin made an appearance at the opening ceremony of Beijing’s Winter Games in 2022, meeting on the sidelines with Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping and declaring a “no limits” partnership. Four days after the end of the Games, on Feb. 24, Putin announced a “special military operation,” declaring war on Ukraine. Within minutes, Russian troops flooded into Ukraine, and missiles rained down on Kyiv, Kharkiv and other cities across the country. According to U.S. intelligence, The New York Times reported, Chinese officials asked the Kremlin to delay launching its attack until after the Games had wrapped up. Beijing denied it had advance knowledge of the invasion. 2018: KOREAN UNITY ON DISPLAY As South Korea prepared to host the Winter Games in its mountainous Pyeongchang region, just a few hundred kilometers over the border, the North Koreans were conducting nuclear missile tests, sparking global alarm and leading U.S. President Donald Trump to threaten to strike the country. The IOC said it was “closely monitoring” the situation amid concerns about whether the Games could be held safely on the peninsula. South Korean Vice Unification Minister Chun Hae-Sung, shakes hands with the head of North Korean delegation Jon Jong-Su after their meeting on January 17, 2018 in Panmunjom, South Korea. | South Korean Unification Ministry via Getty Images But then in his New Year’s address, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un signaled openness to participating in the Winter Olympics. In the end, North Korean athletes not only participated in the Games, but at the opening ceremony they marched with their South Korean counterparts under a single flag, that of a unified Korea. Pyongyang and Seoul also joined forces in women’s ice hockey, sending a single team to compete — another rare show of unity that helped restart diplomatic talks between the capitals, though tensions ultimately resumed after the Games and continue to this day. 1936: HITLER INVADES THE RHINELAND Much has been said about the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, in which the Nazi regime barred Jewish athletes from participating and used the Games to spread propaganda. But a few months earlier Germany also hosted the Winter Olympics in the town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, allowing the Nazis to project an image of a peaceful, prosperous Germany and restore its global standing nearly two decades after World War I. A famous photograph from the event even shows Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels signing autographs for the Canadian figure skating team. Weeks after the Games ended, Hitler sent troops into the Rhineland, a major violation of the Treaty of Versailles that was met with little pushback from France and Britain, and which some historians argue emboldened the Nazis to eventually invade Poland, triggering World War II.

LONDON — U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer is braced for a meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping — and there’ll be more than a few elephants in the room. Though Britain has improved its relationship with China following the more combative approach of previous Conservative administrations, a litany of concerns over national security and human rights continues to dog Labour’s attempted refresh. Starmer, who will meet the Chinese president in Beijing Thursday morning, told reporters engaging with China means he can discuss “issues where we disagree.”   “You know that in the past, on all the trips I’ve done, I’ve always raised issues that need to be raised,” he said during a huddle with journalists on the British Airways flight to China on Tuesday evening. In a sign of how hard it can be to engage on more tricky subjects, Chinese officials bundled the British press out of the room when Starmer tried to bring up undesirable topics the last time the pair met. From hacking and spying to China’s foreign policy aims, POLITICO has a handy guide to all the ways Starmer could rile up the Chinese president. 1) STATE-SPONSORED HACKING China is one of the biggest offenders in cyberspace and is regarded by the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) — part of Britain’s GCHQ intelligence agency — as a “highly sophisticated threat actor.” The Electoral Commission said it has taken three years to recover from a Chinese hack of its systems. The Chinese state, and private companies linked directly or obliquely to its cyber and espionage agencies, have been directly accused by the British government, its intelligence agencies and allies. As recently as last month, the U.K. government sanctioned two Chinese companies — both named by the U.S. as linked to Chinese intelligence — for hacking Britain and its allies. 2) ACTIONS AGAINST BRITISH PARLIAMENTARIANS Politicians in Britain who have spoken out against Chinese human rights abuses and hostile activity have been censured by Beijing in recent years. This includes the sanctioning of 5 British MPs in 2021, including the former security minister Tom Tugendhat, who has been banned from entering the country. Last year, Liberal Democrat MP Wera Hobhouse was refused entry to Hong Kong while attempting to visit her grandson, and was turned back by officials. The government said that the case was raised with Chinese authorities during a visit to China by Douglas Alexander, who was trade minister at the time. 3) JIMMY LAI In 2020, the British-Hong Kong businessman and democracy campaigner Jimmy Lai was arrested under national security laws imposed by Beijing and accused of colluding with a foreign state. Lai — who is in his late 70s — has remained in prison ever since. Last month, a Hong Kong court convicted Lai of three offenses following what his supporters decried as a 156-day show trial. He is currently awaiting the final decisions relating to sentencing — with bodies including the EU parliament warning that a life imprisonment could have severe consequences for Europe’s relationship with China if he is not released. Lai’s son last year called for the U.K. government to make his father’s release a precondition of closer relations with Beijing.  4) REPRESSION OF DISSIDENTS China, like Iran, is involved in the active monitoring and intimidation of those it considers dissidents on foreign soil — known as trans-national repression. China and Hong Kong law enforcement agencies have repeatedly issued arrest warrants for nationals living in Britain and other Western countries.  British police in 2022 were forced to investigate an assault on a protester outside the Chinese consulate in Manchester. The man was beaten by several men after being dragged inside the grounds of the diplomatic building during a demonstration against Xi Jinping. China removed six officials from Britain before they could be questioned. 5) CHINESE SPY SCANDALS Westminster was last year rocked by a major Chinese spying scandal involving two British men accused of monitoring British parliamentarians and passing information back to Beijing. Though the case against the two men collapsed, the MI5 intelligence agency still issued an alert to MPs, peers and their staff, warning Chinese intelligence officers were “attempting to recruit people with access to sensitive information about the British state.” It is not the only China spy allegation to embroil the upper echelons of British society. Yang Tengbo, who in 2024 outed himself as an alleged spy banned from entering the U.K., was a business associate of Andrew Windsor , the` disgraced brother of King Charles. Christine Lee, a lawyer who donated hundreds of thousands of pounds to a Labour MP, was the subject of a security alert from British intelligence. In October, Ken McCallum, the head of MI5, said that his officers had “intervened operationally” against China that month. 6) EMBASSY DING DONG This month — after a protracted political and planning battle — the government approved the construction of a Chinese “super-embassy” in London. This came after a litany of security concerns were raised by MPs and in the media, including the building’s proximity to sensitive cables, which it is alleged could be used to aid Chinese spying. Britain has its own embassy headache in China. Attempts to upgrade the U.K. mission in Beijing were reportedly blocked while China’s own London embassy plan was in limbo. 7) SANCTIONS EVASION China has long been accused of helping facilitate sanctions evasion for countries such as Russia and Iran. Opaque customs and trade arrangements have allegedly allowed prohibited shipments of oil and dual-use technology to flow into countries that are sanctioned by Britain and its allies. Britain has already sanctioned some Chinese companies accused of aiding Russia’s war in Ukraine. China has called for Britain to stop making “groundless accusations” about its involvement in Russia’s war efforts. 8) HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES AND GREEN ENERGY U.K. ministers are under pressure from MPs and human rights organizations to get tougher on China over reported human rights abuses in the country’s Xinjiang region — where many of the world’s solar components are sourced. In a meeting with China’s Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang last March, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband raised the issue of forced labor in supply chains, according to a government readout of the meeting. But he also stressed the need for deeper collaboration with China as the U.K.’s lofty clean power goal looms. British academic Laura Murphy — who was researching the risk of forced labor in supply chains — had her work halted by Sheffield Hallam University amid claims of pressure from China. “I know that there are other researchers who don’t feel safe speaking out in public, who are experiencing similar things, although often more subtly,” Murphy said last year. 9) THE FUTURE OF TAIWAN China continues to assert that “Taiwan is a province of China” amid reports it is stepping up preparations for military intervention in the region. In October, the Telegraph newspaper published an op-ed from the Chinese ambassador to Britain, which said: “Taiwan has never been a country. There is but one China, and both sides of the Taiwan Strait belong to one and the same China.” In a sign of just how sensitive the matter is, Beijing officials reportedly threatened to cancel high-level trade talks between China and the U.K. after Alexander, then a trade minister, travelled to Taipei last June. 10) CHINA POOTLING AROUND THE ARCTIC Britain is pushing for greater European and NATO involvement in the Arctic amid concern that both China and Russia are becoming more active in the strategically important area. There is even more pressure to act, with U.S. President Donald Trump making clear his Greenland aspirations. In October, a Chinese container ship completed a pioneering journey through the Arctic to a U.K. port — halving the usual time it takes to transport electric cars and solar panels destined for Europe.

DOHA, Qatar — Inside the U.S., President Donald Trump is dogged by rising consumer prices, the Epstein files debacle, and Republicans’ newfound willingness to defy him. But go 100 miles, 1,000 miles, or, as I recently did, 7,000 miles past U.S. borders, and Trump’s domestic challenges — and the sinking poll numbers that accompany them — matter little. The U.S. president remains a behemoth in the eyes of the rest of the world. A person who could wreck another country. Or perhaps the only one who can fix another country’s problems. That’s the sense I got this weekend from talking to foreign officials and global elites at this year’s Doha Forum, a major international gathering focused on diplomacy and geopolitics. Over sweets, caffeine and the buzz of nearby conversations, some members of the jet set wondered if Trump’s domestic struggles will lead him to take more risks abroad — and some hope he does. This comes as Trump faces criticism from key MAGA players who say he’s already too focused on foreign policy. “He doesn’t need Capitol Hill to get work done from a foreign policy standpoint,” an Arab official said of Trump, who, let’s face it, has made it abundantly clear he cares little about Congress. Vuk Jeremic, a former Serbian foreign minister, told me that whether people like Trump or not, “I don’t think that there is any doubt that he is a very, very consequential global actor.” He wasn’t the only one who used the term “consequential.” The word doesn’t carry a moral judgment. A person can be consequential whether they save the world or destroy it. What the word does indicate in this context is the power of the U.S. presidency. The weakest U.S. president is still stronger than the strongest leader of most other countries. America’s wealth, weapons and global reach ensure that. U.S. presidents have long had more latitude and ability to take direct action on foreign policy than domestic policy. They also often turn to the global stage when their national influence fades in their final years in office, when they don’t have to worry about reelection. There’s a reason Barack Obama waited until his final two years in office to restore diplomatic ties with Cuba. In the first year of his second term, Trump has stunned the world repeatedly, on everything from gutting U.S. foreign aid to bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities. He remains as capricious as ever, shifting sides on everything from Russia’s war on Ukraine to whether he wants to expel Palestinians from Gaza. He seeks a Nobel Peace Prize but is threatening a potential war with Venezuela. Trump managed to jolt the gathering at the glitzy Sheraton resort in Doha by unveiling his National Security Strategy — which astonished foreign onlookers on many levels — in the run-up to the event. The part that left jaws on the floor was its attack on America’s allies in Europe, which it claimed faces “civilizational erasure.” The strategy’s release led one panel moderator to ask the European Union’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, whether Trump sees Europe as “the enemy.” Yet, some foreign officials praised Trump’s disruptive moves and said they hope he will keep shaking up a calcified international order that has left many countries behind. Several African leaders in particular said they wanted Trump to get more involved in ending conflicts on their continent, especially Sudan. They don’t care about the many nasty things Trump has said about Africa, waving that off as irrelevant political rhetoric. Trump claims to have already ended seven or eight wars. It’s a wild assertion, not least because some of the conflicts he’s referring to weren’t wars and some of the truces he’s brokered are shaky. When I pointed this out, foreign officials told me to lower my bar. Peace is a process, they stressed. If Trump can get that process going or rolling faster, it’s a win. Maybe there are still clashes between Rwanda and Congo. But at least Trump is forcing the two sides to talk and agree to framework deals, they suggested. “You should be proud of your president,” one African official said. (I granted him and several others anonymity to candidly discuss sensitive diplomatic issues involving the U.S.) Likewise, there’s an appreciation in many diplomatic corners about the economic lens Trump imposes on the world. Wealthy Arab states, such as Qatar, already are benefiting from such commercial diplomacy. Others want in, too. “He’s been very clear that his Africa policy should focus on doing business with Africa, and to me, that’s very progressive,” said Mthuli Ncube, Zimbabwe’s finance minister. He added that one question in the global diplomatic community is whether the next U.S. president — Democrat or Republican — will adopt Trump’s “creativity.” The diplomats and others gathered in Doha were well-aware that Trump appreciates praise but also sometimes respects those who stand up to him. So one has to tread carefully. Kallas, for instance, downplayed the Trump team’s broadsides against Europe in the National Security Strategy. Intentionally or not, her choice reflected the power differential between the U.S. and the EU. “The U.S. is still our biggest ally,” Kallas insisted. Privately, another European official I spoke to was fuming. The strategy’s accusations were “very disturbing,” they said. The official agreed, nonetheless, that Trump is too powerful for European countries to do much beyond stage some symbolic diplomatic protests. Few Trump administration officials attended the Doha Forum. The top names were Matt Whitaker, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, and Tom Barrack, the U.S. ambassador to Turkey. Donald Trump Jr. — not a U.S. official, but certainly influential — also made an appearance. Several foreign diplomats expressed optimism that Trump’s quest for a Nobel Peace Prize will guide him to take actions on the global stage that will ultimately bring more stability in the world — even if it is a rocky ride. A British diplomat said they were struck by Trump’s musings about gaining entry to heaven. Maybe a nervousness about the afterlife could induce Trump to, say, avoid a conflagration with Venezuela? “He’s thinking about his legacy,” the diplomat said. Even Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of State whom Trump defeated in the 2016 presidential race, was measured in her critiques. Clinton said “there’s something to be said for the dramatic and bold action” Trump takes. But she warned that the Trump team doesn’t do enough to ensure his efforts, including peace deals, have lasting effect. “There has to be so much follow-up,” she said during one forum event. “And there is an aversion within the administration to the kind of work that is done by Foreign Service officers, diplomats, others who are on the front lines trying to fulfill these national security objectives.” Up until the final minute of his presidency, Trump will have extraordinary power that reaches far past America’s shores. That’s likely to be the case even if the entire Republican Party has turned on him. At the moment, he has more than three years to go. Perhaps he will end immigration to the U.S., abandon Ukraine to Russia’s aggression or strike a nuclear deal with Iran. After all, Trump is, as Zimbabwe’s Ncube put it, not lacking in “creativity.”

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.

LUXEMBOURG ― Internal EU spats don’t get much bigger than the European Commission facing off in court against the European Parliament. Played out during a three-hour hearing before 14 red-gowned judges in Luxembourg on Tuesday, the Court of Justice of the EU examined the Parliament’s allegations that the Commission broke its own rules when it unfroze funding to Hungary in December 2023. MEPs accuse officials of political expediency because the decision came on the eve of a crucial summit of EU leaders where the bloc was desperate for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to play ball on aid to Ukraine. “The Commission rushed” the unblocking of EU funds, which it based on a “premature and incomplete” assessment of Hungary’s adherence to rule-of-law and judicial independence standards, the Parliament’s lead lawyer Richard Crowe told the court. At the heart of the conflict ― and the key case law the court will produce when it issues a judgement ― is how much discretion the Commission has in assessing rule-of-law violations. Four lawyers from the Commission, backed in court by a lawyer from Hungary’s government, strongly defended its approach, arguing that its decision was based on detailed and objective legal analysis. In the days after the decision, MEPs derided the move. It came just hours before a summit in Brussels at which Orbán dropped his objections to Ukraine’s EU membership talks and a €50 billion aid package for Kyiv. At the time, Katalin Cseh, a Hungarian MEP who opposes Orbán, told the Parliament the Commission was “selling out” EU values.  “The timing of the decision was not due to political consideration, but simply to the fact that the Commission, after a lengthy investigation procedure, which had already lasted several months, had no further grounds to prolong the procedure,” the Commission’s lead lawyer Bernd Martenczuk said. Tamara Ćapeta, the advocate general assigned to the case, pressed both sides during the hearing and expressed skepticism about the Commission’s decision-making. “I am still puzzled by the outcome,” Ćapeta said, questioning why the Commission had deemed judicial independence sufficiently restored to release one tranche of funds while keeping another €6.8 billion frozen under a separate conditionality mechanism that also deals with judicial independence and rule of law. Ćapeta, who will issue a non-binding legal opinion on Feb. 12, also probed the Parliament’s accusation that the Commission had failed to publish a detailed assessment justifying its decision. Her opinion will help guide the Court’s final ruling, expected several months later. MILESTONES At the heart of the legal dispute is the interpretation of the Common Provisions Regulation (CPR) and its “Charter Conditionality,” which sets strict conditions — most notably, judicial independence — for the release of cohesion funds. The Parliament’s lawyers argued that the Commission should have taken a broader view of systemic rule-of-law deficiencies in Hungary, not just whether pre-established technical “milestones” had been formally met. Katalin Cseh, a Hungarian MEP who opposes Orbán, told the Parliament the Commission was “selling out” EU values. | Thierry Monasse/Getty Images They argued the Commission had “turned a blind eye” toward Budapest’s controversial sovereignty protection bill, which was being discussed when the Commission unfroze the funds. Crowe also argued the Commission had ignored a bill passed in 2023 that intimidated judges to stop them from requesting assistance from the European court on how to apply EU law in Hungary. Martenczuk dismissed the Parliament’s concerns over the sovereignty protection bill, saying that at the time of the decision there was no evidence the bill would undermine judicial independence. He characterized other objections raised by the Parliament as either speculative or irrelevant. Hungarian government lawyer Miklós Zoltán Fehér emphasized the broader stakes: “This case raises general questions that will certainly have an impact on the future functioning of the EU budget and EU funds.”

[1] https://digitalreport.protectedplanet.net/ [2] Satellite sea surface temperature measurements began in 1982; ocean heat content estimates are derived from in situ observations that started in 1960. [3] https://marine.copernicus.eu/osr9-summary/flipbook/ [4] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/28/world/europe/spain-beach-blue-dragon-sea-slugs.html#:~:text=The%20arrival%20of%20the%20tiny,what%20they’re%20dealing%20with. [5] https://marine.copernicus.eu/osr9-summary/flipbook/ [6] https://marine.copernicus.eu/osr9-summary/flipbook/