Despite the adoring support from Elon Musk and Donald Trump, Javier Milei’s radical-right free-market nightmare is unravelling, and the people are beginning to score major victories against the government in the streets and in elections, reports BEN HAYES

CHANCELLOR Olaf Scholz’s three-party class cuddle coalition has collapsed. The unholy assembly of Scholz’s Social Democrat Party (SPD), the petit bourgeois Greens and the neoliberal Free Democrats has disintegrated under the burden of Germany’s growing economic crisis and the problems facing the German model of managed capitalism.
One expression of the break with the recent past is the rise, within the opposition Christian Democrat Party (CDU), of its latest leader Friedrich Merz, whose long contest with former party leader and chancellor Angela Merkel ended with her retirement. Since then the political landscape in Germany has changed and while the full disposition of political forces will not be visible until the election is over, the outline is taking shape.
The latest opinion polls have the SPD on 16.5 per cent, the conservative CDU/CSU alliance on 24.2 per cent, the Greens on 12 per cent, the neoliberal FDP on 3.5 per cent ,the far-right Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) on 20.5 per cent, Die Linke on 4 per cent and Bundnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) on 7 per cent.

NICK WRIGHT reports from Italy, where 80 cities saw Gaza strikes as unions paralysed transport and massive crowds clashed with police in Milan — but France is also kicking off, and Westminster, in a very different way, is facing a crisis of legitimacy too

When the latest round of hysteria reached our town, we successfully organised and stopped it reaching the asylum centre gates as the far right had planned — but we need to have answers for the local residents who joined their demonstration, writes NICK WRIGHT

US tariffs have had Von der Leyen bowing in submission, while comments from the former European Central Bank leader call for more European political integration and less individual state sovereignty. All this adds up to more pain and austerity ahead, argues NICK WRIGHT

Starmer sabotaged Labour with his second referendum campaign, mobilising a liberal backlash that sincerely felt progressive ideals were at stake — but the EU was then and is now an entity Britain should have nothing to do with, explains NICK WRIGHT