Italiens Ministerpräsidentin will unbedingt ein neues Wahlgesetz durchs Parlament bringen – dabei hat sie dort schon eine böse Überraschung erlebt. Jetzt stellt sie die Vertrauensfrage.

Critics say decree also banning burqa in schools shows Italian PM worried about losing far-right voters in next year’s elections

The Italian government has been accused of ramping up divisive rhetoric to try to court far-right voters ahead of next year’s general election after it passed a decree aimed at capping the number of newly arrived migrants in classrooms and banning the burqa and niqab in schools.

The prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, who leads the far-right Brothers of Italy party, said her government had approved what she called “commonsense measures that do not divide but genuinely help to integrate”.

Instead, constrain it legally and fight it politically. The world is watching

Far-right nationalist populist parties are making the running everywhere from Washington to Warsaw. So why be so alarmed about a little regional electoral victory for one such party, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), in one federal state, Saxony-Anhalt? “Because it’s Germany!” is the almost instinctive answer in many heads around the world.

But that “because it’s Germany” needs to be taken apart, like the segments of an orange. Yes, because of Adolf Hitler, two dictatorships (Nazi Germany until 1945, communist-ruled East Germany until 1989) and two world wars. And yes, some of the language used by the AfD will give anyone familiar with Nazi rhetoric a cold shudder down the spine.

Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist. His new book, Europe in 7 1/2 Chapters, is published in October

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Security experts fear Putin may be winning hybrid war with the west amid rise of pro-Kremlin, far-right parties

Defence planners working with Nato fear that if war broke out with Russia, Europe could not currently sustain a prolonged war of attrition owing to a public lack of war readiness, a conference on the future of European military coordination heard this week.

The pessimism reflects concern that Russia may be winning a so-called hybrid war with Europe, weakening the options available to Nato war planners in the event of military conflict.

Futuro Nazionale party’s speedy poll rise poses questions whether PM will return to her roots before election

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Giorgia Meloni’s government has become the longest-running in Italy since the second world war – a milestone the prime minister is determined not to let pass unnoticed.

In the port area of Bari, the capital of the southern Italian region of Puglia, where Meloni hosted the G7 in 2024 and where she spends her summer holiday, preparations are well under way for a festival-style showcase of her rightwing administration.

Tories accuse Reform of ‘peddling conspiracy theories’ as row erupts in wake of Conservative leader’s trip to Rome

Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch have spent years trading barbs and fighting for the rightwing vote. But now the party leaders find themselves in a much more bizarre struggle – for the affections of the rightwing Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni.

The row began on Monday when the Times published an article claiming that during a meeting in Rome, Meloni had advised the Conservative leader against doing a deal with Farage to unite the right. After complaints from Reform – and, reportedly, Meloni’s team – the article was amended to remove that claim.

Reform MP seeks to heap pressure on Tory leader amid confusion around details of meeting with Giorgia Meloni

Robert Jenrick has accused Kemi Badenoch of telling “a pack of lies” about her meeting with the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, as he launched a deeply personal attack on his former boss.

The Reform UK MP sought to heap pressure on the Conservative leader amid confusion about whether Meloni urged Badenoch at a meeting in Rome to “be her own woman” and resist doing a deal with his party.

Case of Abderrahim Fakir is first in which legal shield giving police greater protection from prosecution has been invoked

If, before 19 July, few people in Italy beyond his family and friends knew who Abderrahim Fakir was, by the late afternoon of that day the final moments of his life were being watched across the country.

Video footage widely shared online showed him being handcuffed and forcibly restrained by police on a street in Pilastro, a neighbourhood in the north-east of Bologna.

Bei einem Massaker tötete die SS im toskanischen Sant’Anna di Stazzema 1944 Hunderte Menschen. Erstmals räumt ein Minister der Meloni-Regierung eine Mitschuld ein – aus Kalkül?

Die Bundesregierung pocht auf die EU-Asylreform, die Dublin-Überstellungen wieder vorsieht. Doch Rom weigert sich. Was bedeutet das für die guten Beziehungen zwischen Meloni und Merz?

Seit der Krise von Ceuta vergiftet das Thema Migration wieder das politische Klima in Europa, das zeigt sich insbesondere an der Fehde zwischen den Regierungschefs von Spanien und Italien. Gibt es einen Ausweg?

Travellers caught up in migration row as Madrid introduces checks on visitors from Italy in retaliation for Rome’s move

Italy’s foreign minister has called Spain’s decision to impose retaliatory checks on travellers from Italy “incomprehensible and completely unacceptable” as people making their way between the two EU countries were left grappling with the effects of the escalating feud.

Spain started carrying out spot checks on visitors from Italy at midnight on Saturday. The tit-for-tat move came after Rome infuriated Madrid by launching checks on 1 August for travellers from Spain in response to the recent influx of about 72,000 people into Ceuta, a Spanish territory in north Africa.

Der große Migrationsdruck in die spanische Nordafrika-Exklave sorgt weiter für Zwist zwischen Madrid und Rom. Weil Italien sich weigert, seine Grenzkontrollen einzustellen, kontrolliert Spanien jetzt ebenfalls.

The early success of Roberto Vannacci’s National Future sends an ominous signal as extreme politics become normalised

When a serving Italian general published a far-right tract in 2023 entitled The World Turned Upside Down, a disciplinary inquiry swiftly followed. Roberto Vannacci’s text was a sustained exercise in bile and bigotry, attacking among other things the “normalisation” of homosexuality, and questioning whether a high-profile black volleyball star could really be considered Italian. The controversy sent the book into the bestseller charts, and its author was suspended for bringing the army into disrepute.

A year out from Italy’s next general election, Mr Vannacci is a problem not for the military but for the country’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni. Now a member of the European parliament, in February he exploited his notoriety to found National Future, a political party which argues that Ms Meloni’s coalition government has sold out its far-right supporters through not being extreme enough. The “true right”, according to the former paratrooper – who once served as a military attache in Moscow – should be pro-Putin and anti-Ukraine, anti-EU, and committed to restoring the “cultural homogeneity” of Italy through the expulsion of immigrants and their descendants.

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Spin Time provides homes, food banks and after-school clubs but the authorities have locked out residents

Hundreds of people have spent a week sleeping in tents in the Rome heat amid a standoff between Giorgia Meloni’s far-right government and local politicians over the future of Italy’s most high-profile centre for housing and social assistance.

A minor fire last week forced the evacuation of the building, occupied by grassroots groups since 2013, and it has remained closed as the Meloni government attempts to crack down on such squatted properties.

Die Innenminister beraten über Lehren aus der Migrationskrise in der spanischen Exklave und von der Leyen lobt den spanischen Premier. Bis alle Verwerfungen überwunden sind, dürfte es aber noch dauern.

Instead of finger-pointing at Spain, mainstream EU leaders should be showing solidarity with its prime minister, Pedro Sánchez

At least 72 people are believed to have died late last week, most of them drowned or crushed as they joined tens of thousands of others in attempting to swim from Moroccan waters to the Spanish exclave of Ceuta. Yet the scale of that human tragedy has barely registered, as Donald Trump has decried an “invasion” while European politicians exploit the crisis to serve their own agendas. If further evidence were needed of the way that the radical right increasingly distorts the terms of the migration debate in the EU, the last few days have furnished it.

More needs to be understood about the drivers behind a shocking episode. Misinformation on social media – orchestrated or otherwise – appears to have played a big part, following a Spanish supreme court ruling that migrants arriving by sea could not be summarily turned back. Moroccan authorities seemingly did little to prevent the chaotic exodus, which echoed previous smaller incidents and focused international attention on a territory whose sovereignty Rabat contests. If there were online indications that such an incursion was a possibility, no alarm was sounded.

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At a time when the quickening pace of global heating has never been clearer, climate policies are being deprioritised

A new and ominous word has entered the vocabulary of firefighters struggling to cope with the vast wildfire sweeping through south-west France. A pyrocumulonimbus is a fire-generated thunderstorm that can whip up winds in unpredictable ways, making the containment of a blaze and assessment of its likely course far more difficult. A known phenomenon in North America and Australia, firefighters believe France is suffering its first in the Bordeaux region, as the country endures the consequences of the third major heatwave of the summer and prepares for a fourth.

The dire statistics of the ongoing fires in France and Spain tell a story of deepening devastation and human misery. A far greater expanse of French land has already been burnt this year, compared with the 30,000 hectares during the whole of 2025, while 220,000 people have been evacuated from their homes in the Gironde. In Spain, the environment ministry has calculated that over 170,000 hectares have been affected, compared with 29,000 last year. Over 100,000 people have been forced to flee.

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In Bologna stirbt ein 43-jähriger Marokkaner bei einem Polizeieinsatz. Danach geraten Protestierende und Polizisten gewaltsam aneinander. Warum der Fall in ganz Italien Aufregung auslöst.