Talking Europe

They’re calling it the "weaponisation of human beings". Thousands of people – mainly from the Middle East – have been sold travel packages to Belarus, a non-EU state, and told that from there, they will be able to get into the European Union.

Estonia's recently-elected president is urging caution over the situation at Belarus's borders with the European Union. Thousands of migrants hoping to enter the EU and claim asylum there, mainly from the Middle East, are camped at the borders. Asked by FRANCE 24 how dangerous he judges the tensions to be, Alar Karis said: "I think it's a threat. It's a border of the EU and of a NATO state. We should be very careful and cautious about what's going on […] Of course the sad thing is that there are innocent people in between that they are using as a shield."

Cancer is an illness which in various forms claimed the lives of more than a million people across the EU in 2020. The European Commission projects that cancer cases will increase by more than 20 percent by the year 2035, unless quick and decisive action is taken. The Commission has launched a wide-ranging "Beating Cancer" strategy, which we discuss in this programme with two Members of the European Parliament who are also medical doctors.

Lithuania's foreign minister has defended his country's newly-imposed state of emergency on and around its border with Belarus, amid an increasing number of irregular migrants trying to cross – and has accused the Belarusian president of orchestrating "instrumentalised migration" and participating in "trafficking". Gabrielius Landsbergis told FRANCE 24's Catherine Nicholson that Lithuanian border officials need "more legal instruments to really secure the border", which runs for approximately 700 kilometres.

Since August, a new British ambassador to France has been in post. Menna Rawlings has taken up the job at a time when the two countries have butted heads over various issues, from migration to Northern Ireland to fishing, while still bound together on other international issues – including the COP26 climate summit and as permanent members of the UN Security Council. Speaking to FRANCE 24 in a week when around 1,000 undocumented migrants crossed from France to England in small boats in a single day, she defended British border policy and spoke out about the ongoing disputes over the Northern Ireland Protocol.

France and Germany's relationship "will be stronger" under the new coalition government in Berlin than it was under Angela Merkel, and the next German government will be "deeply European". That's the view of former German Social Democratic Party (SPD) leader Martin Schulz.

Here in northern Europe we've had some very odd weather events in the last few months, including torrential rainfall and deadly floods – which scientists say are a direct consequence of climate change. It's something to focus the mind as leaders and negotiators meet in Glasgow at the United Nations climate summit known as COP26.

It's a government that has repeatedly found itself at odds with the European Parliament, Commission and other member states. Now Hungary is facing a delay in receiving approximately €7 billion from the EU's Covid-19 recovery fund. Hungary's Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó sits down with FRANCE 24's Catherine Nicholson to discuss those clashes and some of the issues behind them.

With more than 75 percent of EU adults vaccinated against Covid-19, the conversation is increasingly turning to the low rate of vaccination in low-income countries. After the US recently called on World Trade Organization members to temporarily lift intellectual property rights on Covid-19 vaccines, the European Commissioner for Health Stella Kyriakides told FRANCE 24: "All options are on the table – but the European Union has never put an export ban on the vaccines, and we encourage all the partners that are producing vaccines to continue as we have from day one, and to share vaccines with the rest of the world."

Stefano Sannino, the Secretary General of the EU's European External Action Service (EEAS), has rebuffed a claim from Russia's representative to the EU that the bloc is treating Russia as an "adversary". That comment by Vladimir Chizhov came amid claims from European lawmakers that Russia bore some responsibility for soaring gas prices across the continent. Russia's state-controlled company Gazprom supplies around one third of the EU's gas. Sannino told FRANCE 24's Talking Europe programme that the EU is "continuing engaging with Russia" – but that "the choice of confrontation is one that has been decided by Russia, not by the European Union".