EU Scream

This week we’re in conversation with Carl Dolan, the outgoing director at the EU office for anti-corruption organisation Transparency International. He explores links between populism and corruption at the European Parliament and in Hungary.

We also meet civil society activist Julia Krzyszkowska. She and data geek Xavier Dutoit struggled — and succeeded — in creating an online tool called MEP Watch...

Is the contest to become the next president of the European Commission just make-believe democracy? We look for answers in the Dutch city of Maastricht, where candidates held their first official debate on April 29th.

Christine Neuhold, the professor of EU Democratic Governance at Maastricht University, which helped organise the event, talks about what was real, and surreal, about the debate...

Yanis Varoufakis is the leftist former Greek finance minister who tried and failed to end austerity. Like him or loathe him, Varoufakis is worth a look ahead of EU elections where centrists are struggling to compete with the far right’s clear and simple, if deceptive, messages. After a brief and tumultuous term in office, Varoufakis created the Democracy in Europe Movement, DiEM25...

You may have heard how large numbers of European Union citizens in Britain could not exercise their right to vote in the bloc’s elections. They were disenfranchised by British ineptitude and perhaps outright discrimination. But look beyond that group and there are 17.5 million more EU residents of voting age formally excluded because they lack a European passport...

Estonia, a tiny Baltic state, was hit by a giant shockwave in March when a political party promoting white supremacist views won nearly 18 percent of the vote in a general election. A second shockwave hit when Jüri Ratas, the leader of the liberal-left Centre Party, invited the party, called EKRE, to form a coalition government...

We speak with two Muslim millennials raising their voices against discrimination and religious misconceptions. Nas is a celebrity video blogger with 13 million followers. He's also a Palestinian-Israeli educated at Harvard who defies the far-right’s stereotypes about young Arab men. He says governments should force integration — otherwise the kinds of Islamophobia and anti-Semitism that plague parts of Europe are inevitable...

Tony Blair shares his two-pronged formula for taking on nationalist populists — and winning. He says Britain is making a "profound historical mistake” by capitulating to the Brexiteers. But he has a stern message for Europe too: do more to stand up for values, not just narrow national interests. The European Union still needs a “strong sense of itself,” Blair suggests. We begin the show with another warning against complacency...

Pressure on women to avoid terminating unwanted pregnancies has intensified in countries like Croatia, Poland and Romania. Michael Bird, an investigative journalist and writer in Bucharest, has been covering the situation for publications including EUobserver. He says constraints come from a variety of sources including churches, counsellors, public hospitals — even doctors...

Women in Romania have had the legal right to an abortion since 1990. But many women seeking care find themselves in a Kafkaesque trap. Bianca, a young Romanian, ended up obtaining abortion pills without a prescription, and she took them without medical supervision. Work done by investigative reporter Lina Vdovîi in Bucharest illustrates how politicians and priests — and even doctors — seek to shut down a woman's right to choose...

Pastors and plutocrats are sponsoring an ultra-conservative agenda in Europe. Many of them have links to Donald Trump. It’s a world that's pretty opaque. But over the past year, investigative journalists have done painstaking work to pierce the veil. We talk to Blaž Zgaga, a multi-award winning investigative journalist from Slovenia. Zgaga writes for Croatia's Nacional and publications including EUobserver...