When CDU/CSU broke Germany's cross-party “firewall” against the far right by passing a Bundestag motion on asylum with AfD votes in January 2025, it was Heidi Reichinnek — Die Linke (The Left) parliamentary group chair — whose two-minute response speech went viral and brought hundreds of thousands onto the streets. Joanna Strzałko interviews her on the substance: a progressive wealth tax to fund housing, healthcare and public transport; renationalising the railways; a government that finds (…)

This article was written in the seventh year of Russia's war against Ukraine and before the February 2022 full-scale invasion would expand the scale of the war beyond recognition. The empirical figures Hrytsenko cites — some 55,000 women in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, mostly in non-combat positions — have since risen sharply. Over 70,000 women serve, around 5,500 of them on the front line; women now comprise about 8% of the armed forces overall. They serve as drone operators, tank (…)

On 26 June 2026, an Ashura procession in Copenhagen's Nørrebro district drew eighteen thousand participants — and a public controversy over the organisers' imposition of gender segregation. Rezgar Akrawi uses the episode as a starting point for a wide-ranging analysis of Islamic religious institutions in Europe. He identifies three interlocking problems: the structural dependence of a significant number of mosques on funding from authoritarian states (Iran, Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia); the (…)