Deceptichum

Not all threats come from outside Europe’s borders.

One of the most insidious is the fragmentation of the political landscape. Traditional parties are losing ground. Political reference points are shifting — often to the benefit of extreme positions. Disruptive forces are rushing in to fill the vacuum.

Today’s politics is, above all, anti. Anti-European. Anti-immigration. Anti-elite. Anti-woke. Anti-system.

Democratic debate is increasingly drowned out by so-called “culture wars”.

There are always easy targets. In the UK, Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch has highlighted the weaponisation of the European Convention on Human Rights, accusing it of weakening national identity and border security.

In the US, Vice-President JD Vance, doubling down on his Munich speech, has framed limits on free speech as a direct threat to Western civilisation.

The risk is using the tools of democracy itself — its laws, institutions, and freedoms — to restrict rights, suppress dissent, and create the illusion that security must come first.

In total, just five of the 96 promised upgrades had been completed and 11 were in construction, almost three years after their announcement. The rest remained in the design or planning stage, the Victorian School Building Authority (VSBA) website showed.

As a crowd waved Lithuanian, German and Ukrainian flags, Friedrich Merz and his defence minister, Boris Pistorius, attended a ceremony launching the official formation of an armoured brigade aimed at protecting Nato’s eastern flank.

“A sane country does not wage war against civilians, does not kill babies as a pastime, and does not engage in mass population displacement,” Yair Golan, a left-wing opposition voice and the former deputy chief of staff of the Israeli army, said in a charged interview with local radio station Reshet Bet.

Comparing Israel's actions to those of South Africa during the decades of apartheid, Golan, the leader of the small Democrats party and a longtime critic of Netanyahu, added, “The Jewish people, who have endured persecution, pogroms, and genocides throughout our history ... are the ones now taking actions that are utterly unconscionable.”