Talking Europe

Talking Europe interviews Jutta Urpilainen, the EU Commissioner for International Partnerships, who is in charge of overseeing official development assistance. She announces exclusively on FRANCE 24 a fresh €66 million package for Niger, to be spent on education. Urpilainen stresses that development aid is part of geopolitical competition, and that it would be a "huge mistake" for Europe and the West to turn their back on the Global South. We also discuss climate financing, corruption in recipient countries, conditionality of aid and the post-Cotonou agreement with African, Caribbean and Pacific states.

Talking Europe devotes a special programme to levelling up – efforts to reduce inequalities and disparities in the European Union. Featuring extracts from our own reporting from around the continent, we take a comprehensive view of the EU's cohesion policy with Elisa Ferreira, the Commissioner for Cohesion and Reforms. She insists that levelling up "has really worked", but says that "this does not mean that everything is perfect". She also urges member states to reflect on the political cost of the continuing imbalances between European regions.

Talking Europe devotes a special programme to levelling up – efforts to reduce inequalities and disparities in the European Union. Featuring extracts from our own reporting from around the continent, we take a comprehensive view of the EU's cohesion policy with Elisa Ferreira, the Commissioner for Cohesion and Reforms. Join us for this second part of the programme.

Talking Europe interviews the head of the Council of Europe, the continent's human rights watchdog. A former Croatian minister of foreign and European affairs, Marija Pejcinovic Buric was elected to lead the Council of Europe in 2019. The organisation started out with just 10 nations in 1949, and now numbers 46, including the European Union member states and other countries that are outside the EU.

Since the start of the Syrian crisis in 2011, the European Union has been the largest donor of humanitarian, stabilisation and resilience assistance to Syrians, with another conference known as Brussels VII – aimed at supporting Syria and the region – held on June 14 and 15 in the Belgian capital. But the recent rehabilitation of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad by regional players has arguably complicated the EU's task.

Talking Europe catches up with Spain’s foreign minister, José Manuel Albares, as Madrid prepares to take over the rotating presidency of the European Union on July 1, 2023. We discuss the poor showing by the ruling Socialist party in May’s regional and municipal elections, in which both the right and the far right made gains. And we get into Spain’s priorities for its EU presidency, including making the EU’s Stability and Growth Pact more flexible, reforming the EU’s electricity market and sending a strong political signal to Latin American countries. On the question of Gibraltar – a British overseas territory that sits on the southern tip of the Iberian peninsula –Albares says that Spain is ready for a post-Brexit deal with the UK.

Talking Europe hosts Bujar Osmani, the foreign minister of North Macedonia, which launched EU accession talks nearly a year ago – although it has been in the EU’s waiting room for far longer than that. Currently a screening process of North Macedonia’s legislation is under way, and Osmani urges the opening of talks with the EU on key topics. He warns that North Macedonian society has become wary of “making concessions while there are no deliverables”.

Talking Europe interviews the boss of the largest and oldest group in the European Parliament, the centre-right European People's Party. Manfred Weber is a veteran of the EU assembly, having first been elected nearly twenty years ago, and he is an important player in German politics, in the conservative Christian Social Union. He missed out on the job of EU Commission president in 2019, but does not seem to have given up on that ambition. We start the discussion with the European elections scheduled for June 2024, which could shake up the bloc's political scene.

Talking Europe hosts two MEPs who are diametrically opposed on the question of EU military assistance to Ukraine. "The European Union is not a military union. It is a peace union. It should be an honest broker, a mediator between Russia and Ukraine," argues Slovak MEP Katarina Roth Nevedalova. "I'm not against individual member states supplying weapons to Ukraine, but this should not be a common EU position," she adds. Belgian MEP Assita Kanko counters: "If I was Bambi, unarmed, why would I negotiate peace with a lion? I would see peace, but the lion would only see a meal." Kanko continues: "Neutrality is not very far from complicity."

The European Union sees Romania as one of its frontline states when it comes to the war in Ukraine. The country of 19 million people, a member of both the EU and NATO, has a land and sea border with Ukraine of more than 600 kilometres. It has been a transit hub for weapons supplies to Kyiv. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have passed through Romania, and more than 130,000 have been granted temporary protection in the country, according to the UN. Talking Europe interviews Viktor Negrescu, a Romanian politician from the Social Democratic Party. He is a Member of the European Parliament and he was Minister Delegate for European Affairs in the government of Romania between 2017 and 2018.