Défense

Following plenary votes, Parliament’s rapporteurs will brief journalists on the new list of safe countries of origin and on the application of the safe third countries regulation.
Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs

Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

Deux mois après la signature de l'accord de paix entre le Rwanda et la RD Congo, Félix Tshisekedi est de retour à Washington. Le président congolais y a notamment rencontré Marco Rubio, pour faire le point sur l'application des textes. Au Nigeria, Bola Tinubu déploie l'armée dans l'ouest du pays après une attaque qui a fait plus de 160 morts. 

While the radical left busied itself karening through public life—thugging around with cliquish silent stares to shame non-socialist conformity, in ways uncomfortably reminiscent of Khamenei-style intimidation—the streets of Iran have been on fire since December 28, 2025. What erupted across all 31 provinces marked the largest wave of democratic movement since the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman who died in custody after being arrested by Iran’s hijab police for allegedly violating compulsory hijab laws.

Unlike earlier protests that flared unevenly and then dissipated in fragments, this movement distinguished itself through scale, coordination, and synchronized leadership. Bazaar merchants shuttered their shops in lockstep with nationwide strikes by students and industrial workers. Ethnic minorities mobilized along the periphery, while the global Iranian diaspora amplified the uprising abroad in real time, transforming local dissent into a transnational political moment.

This mobilization was not spontaneous rage but the product of a deep structural rupture. Decades of economic stagnation and systemic corruption had pushed Iranian society beyond the threshold of endurance, leaving virtually no space for reform within the existing order. By December 2025, inflation had surged past 52.6 percent, while the rial had collapsed by more than 80 percent year over year—material conditions that rendered political quietude untenable.

The Islamic Republic, in the end, responded to this democratic challenge as it always has: by killing its own people. Iran International estimates that by mid-January 2026, between 12,000 and 20,000 protesters had been killed in a brutal nationwide crackdown—a textbook campaign of mass repression—alongside roughly 330,000 injuries and more than 18,000 arrests.

When the Radical Left’s Romanticism Turns into a Political Theatre

Despite their cadre-bred reflex to wrap grand social causes in revolutionary garb—and their near-compulsive urge to politicize them across Facebook timelines—the radical left in the West has remained conspicuously silent on the bloodshed in Iran. This silence, bitterly felt across the Iranian diaspora over the past one month, has been so complete as to verge on erasure, especially when contrasted with the movement’s vocal and relentless solidarity campaigns for Gaza.

Angered by this identity-denying deafened hush, Iranian-American human-rights activist Masih Alinejad, for instance, has directly criticized the radical left’s posture as “beyond hypocrisy”: not an accidental omission, but an ideological silence that, in her words, exposes how readily parts of the radical left “sympathize with… Islamic terrorists” so long as their violence is rhetorically framed as resistance to the West. Her charge is blunt: solidarity collapses the moment the victims refuse to conform to the approved script.

Even outlets hardly hostile to the left have noted the same void with a similar diagnosis. The Atlantic, in its essay The Silence of the Left on Iran, observes that Iranian exiles are “dismayed by the lack of sympathy from the American left,” largely because they are “viewed through the thick lens of (radical left anti-imperialist) ideology”—not as victims of repression, but as imagined agents of hostile power.

Right-wing publications have, unsurprisingly, been the most vocal in amplifying criticism of the radical left’s silence. In a January 13 article titled Why are the world’s loudest ‘human rights’ voices silent on Iran?, The Telegraph traces this silence to a deeper anti-Western intellectual lineage shaped by figures such as Michel Foucault and Edward Said. According to the piece, this tradition furnished the ideological scaffolding that enabled a revolution-romanticizing Western radical left to form what it calls a “strange union” with the ayatollah—reframing the Iranian Revolution not as the consolidation of theocracy, but as an anti-imperialist struggle for liberation.

The outcome of that union, however, was not the emancipation the radical left had imagined, but betrayal. As the article recounts, it produced systematic purges, mass executions, and the criminalization of secular allies throughout the 1980s. Yet despite this historical reckoning, the same moral relativism that excused the ayatollah’s betrayal in that decade has remained deeply embedded in the “anti-Western brain rot that intellectually cripples our students today.” The radical left’s inherited truth, thus, is simple: “the (radical) left loves nothing more than a revolution—but only when it harms the West.”

This entrenched reflex, the article suggests, has not disappeared; it has merely reemerged as silence, shaping attitudes even within international institutions. The Telegraph points, for example, to UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher, noting that he posted not a single image of the ongoing massacre in Iran, while readily uploading self-congratulatory video selfies of himself “bravely helping the Palestinians.”(To be clear, as of January 23, 2026, this silence among the radical left has persisted even while the UN Human Rights Council convened its 39th special session of the Human Rights Council on the deteriorating human rights situation in the Islamic Republic of Iran—documenting mass protests, thousands killed in crackdowns, mass detentions, internet blackouts, and executions—and passed a resolution extending the Fact‑Finding Mission for two years. In this context, unless the UN explicitly bans radical-left activists—and anyone who supports or excuses criminal radical-left activities—from holding UN positions, and enforces strict political neutrality across the organization, it will continue to undermine its own moral authority.)

In a similar vein, The Spectator expresses its abhorrence of the radical left’s moral relativism on Iran. According to the magazine, the “ugly truth of the left’s creepy silence” lies in the fact that the “privileged keffiyeh classes of the West” have “fallen down the well of moral relativism,” becoming so intoxicated by the delusion that Islamic terrorists function as a bulwark, propping up the very bourgeois ideological white elephant they pretend not to see.

Spokespersons for Parliament and for the political groups will hold a briefing on the 9 - 12 February plenary session, on Friday at 11.00 in Parliament’s Anna Politkovskaya press room.

Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

Newsletter - 9-12 February 2026 - Strasbourg plenary session

Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

En lice pour le remplacement des T-45C Goshawk de l’US Navy et déjà choisi par sept pays [Italie, Israël, Pologne, Émirats arabes unis, Nigéria, Singapour et Australie], le M346 « Master » de Leonardo est bien placé pour devenir le prochain avion d’entraînement de la force aérienne indonésienne [Tentara Nasional Indonesia – Angkatan Udara / TNI-AU]. En...

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« La France a enfin un budget », s’est félicité le Premier ministre, Sébastien Lecornu, après le rejet d’une ultime motion de censure déposée en réponse à son recours à l’article 49-3 de la Constitution pour faire passer le projet de loi de finances 2026. C’est « un budget qui assume des choix clairs et des priorités essentielles »,...

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New policy approaches being conducted by the US Administration mirrors past policy in putting the interests of the United States ahead of those of its adversaries and allies, with possible outcomes remaining to be seen. While likely a result of local midterms being a possible barrier to future policy, the rapid exposure of US policy in the Americas and abroad will probably change the path of mostly failed long term policies to date.

The removal of the leader of Venezuela and head of much of the narco-terror in the region has forced the remaining Chavistas in Venezuela to play ball with the US Administration. While suffering under sanctions, Venezuela’s oil industry was unable to properly modernise their oil and gas production, many facilities once belonging to US energy companies. The US, instead of taking over as they did in Iraq, has chosen a path of self determination with outside pressure to keep the controlling systems in Venezuela in place, while edging them towards a more Western oriented position. The hope is that Venezuelans will move the country towards a healthy state, starting with free elections where Venezuela can change towards its natural path of a traditional democracy.

With Venezuelans being one of the largest refugee populations worldwide due to the Chavez/Maduro regime, many would return to rebuild and redevelop the country if given the opportunity. With an organised and well planned out opposition in Venezuela, the country has been ready for a generation to return to its natural state. Unlike many other states, the traditional structure of Venezuela existed with checks and balances and an independent judiciary, a structure that had always been in place in modern Venezuela until it was corrupted by the rise of Chavismo in the late 1990s. Step by step, we will see if Venezuela can move past the current regime, but still it is not safe to openly challenge the regime on the streets, an issue that should be addressed promptly by the United States.

Iran’s mass protests is the sixth of these kinds of movements to take to the streets in Iran since 2009. In this instance however, the US Administration has voiced its support for a Free Iran, openly supports the opposition movement, and has made it clear by past military actions and recent statements that the tolerance for regime terror is greatly reduced. The lack of support for all minority groups in the Middle East in the last two decades has lead to extreme movements and violence in the region where some of the oldest communities in the region have been targeted for extermination. During this time, with an exception in some extreme cases, Western leaders and media have worked to erase the mention of the existence of these indigenous groups to Western audiences, a move that left the 2009 protesters to be brutalised by Iran’s regime at the time.

While there has been a slight pause in recent actions, it is likely the case that actors in the region on the side of Free Iranians are unsure of the outcome as there is not a recognizable organised opposition on he ground that can take power from the regime as exists in Venezuela. Iran’s true allies will give all support, but it is important that a change in the Government comes from Iranians and goes directly to Iranians so it is a legitimate power structure that operates in the best interests of the country, and not for nations or interests abroad. It is likely the case that allies of a Free Iran are waiting on a leadership plan inside of the country, despite having a strong voice for a Free Iran externally coming from the family of the former Shah of Iran. The most important measure the West can take is to show its full support for the movement in Iran, as in every other of the five past protest movements the Iranian people, especially their women and girls, were intentionally forgotten by Western powers. It seems that the real victims of divisive policies are always the women, and always the girls, and no society can claim any legitimacy if it cannot protect their wives, daughters and children. All such regimes need to fall.

Bernd Lange, chair of Parliament’s International Trade Committee and standing rapporteur for the US, has issued the following statement regarding the EU-US trade deal.
Committee on International Trade

Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

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- Le fil de l'Info / Bosnie-Herzégovine, Courrier des Balkans, Relations internationales

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L'hypothèse d'une adhésion de l'Ukraine à l'Union européenne dès janvier 2027 s'invite dans les négociations de paix — au risque de bouleverser en profondeur les règles de l'élargissement européen, notamment pour les Balkans.

- Articles / Courrier des Balkans, Albanie, Questions européennes, Elargissement UE, Blocage UE, Bosnie-Herzégovine, Macédoine du Nord, Serbie, Monténégro

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