Free Republic

When Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002, it generated considerable debate between those who saw its success as a potentially liberalizing force and critics who feared it would ultimately bring the end of Turkish democracy. Depending on who you spoke to, the AKP was poised to turn Turkey into either Sweden or Iran; to finally realize Ataturk’s vision of making the country modern and Western or permanently destroy it.Today, a decade and a half later, the future of Turkish democracy certainly looks grim. With President Recep Tayyip Erdogan now leading a heavy-handed campaign to further...

Either people are the fully-actualized individuals that democracy supporters claim, and are capable of considering all information and then determining a path for the state, or they are stupid morons who can’t tell the difference between fact and fiction, and thus should have no say in the way the government is run. Pick one.

Irregular immigration to the EU from Western Africa rose more than ten times on the year in January, according to the bloc's Frontex border agency, which expects overall arrivals to grow in 2024 and says halting the movement of people completely is impossible. Frontex head Hans Leijtens spoke in his Warsaw office ahead of a trip by the EU chief executive and Spanish prime minister on Thursday to Mauritania, which has recently become a major point of departure for Europe. Asked about a June EU-wide parliamentary election, in which migration is a top issue, the former Dutch border guard told...

Under intense pressure from farmers, the European Commission has dropped key passages in a proposal for a new 2040 goal for cutting greenhouse gas pollution. “All sectors” would need to contribute to the effort, the EU executive's plan says. But a mention of a possible 30 percent cut to agricultural pollution between 2015 and 2040, which was in previous drafts seen by POLITICO, had been removed. Also excised were recommendations for citizens to make changes to their behavior, like eating less meat, and a push to end fossil fuel subsidies. Farmers' protests have broken out in many countries across Europe...

Hungary has vowed to block censorious attempts from globalist Eurocrats such as Guy Verhofstadt to impose sanctions on Tucker Carlson for interviewing Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Amid the left-wing establishment furore over Carlson’s decision to interview the Russian head of state, former Belgian prime minister and current member of the European Parliament, Guy Verhofstadt called for an EU travel ban to be imposed on the American journalist and for the bloc to begin the process to levy sanctions External Action Service, the EU’s diplomatic controlled by Spanish socialist Josep Borrell. However, the body does not have unilateral authority to sanction individuals...

Tucker Carlson's interview with Vladimir Putin hasn't even been released yet and already Western leaders are talking about censuring him for speaking to the Russian president. Newsweek is reporting that politicians inside and outside the EU Parliament are arguing that Carlson is aiding and abetting Putin by giving him a platform, and hence Carlson should face sanctions in the same way that other Russian allies of the Kremlin leader do. Exclusive: Tucker Carlson could face sanctions over Putin interview.https://t.co/J3l0SIzoMX pic.twitter.com/TuBNXH1D4e— Newsweek (@Newsweek) February 7, 2024The irony is strong in this one. One of Putin's great sins is suppressing all political...

Farmers have taken to the streets en masse in several places in Europe. To ensure MPs hadn’t lost touch with the people and public sentiment, Caroline van der Plas told the Dutch House of Representatives why the massive protests were happening. Caroline van der Plas is the founder and party leader of the Farmer Citizen Movement (Boer Burger Beweging or “BBB”) and a Member of the Dutch Parliament (“MP”). Yesterday, she posted a video of a speech she made during an agriculture budget debate. “At its core, this is why farmers are protesting – they are being destroyed,” she tweeted....

Pressure is mounting on Hungary to ratify Sweden's bid to join NATO after Budapest finally joined other European Union states in agreeing on new aid to Ukraine. Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on Friday he "went to the wall" for his country before agreeing to the EU deal worth 50 billion euros ($54 billion) at a summit in Brussels on Thursday after weeks of resistance.

To get Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban to end his block on a 50 billion euro ($54.3 billion) aid package for Ukraine, other European Union leaders teamed up ahead of a crunch summit to deliver a stark message: You're on your own this time. The veteran Hungarian leader, who maintains close ties to Moscow despite its invasion of Ukraine, has been adept in the past at finding enough support among his peers to drive a hard bargain in EU negotiations. But in the days and hours before Thursday's special summit in Brussels, leaders - individually and in groups - told...

European Union leaders unanimously agreed on Thursday to extend 50 billion euros ($54 billion) in new aid to Ukraine, the chairman of the summit said, overcoming weeks of resistance from Hungary and winning praise from Kyiv. Before the summit started, EU leaders piled pressure on Hungary to lift its block, telling Prime Minister Viktor Orban to pick sides in what several saw as an existential challenge posed by Russia's war in Ukraine, the biggest conflict in Europe since World War Two. "We have a deal. Unity," said European Council President Charles Michel in a post on X. "All 27 leaders...

PVV has not made any further progress since the previous poll. Geert Wilders' party - which recorded a large increase in December 2023 - will be two seats slightly lower in the new year with 45 seats (47 in December).

ITALY -- Italian regulators said they told OpenAI that its ChatGPT artificial intelligence chatbot has violated European Union’s stringent data privacy rules. The country’s data protection authority, known as Garante, said on Monday that it notified San Francisco-based OpenAI of breaches of the EU rules, known as General Data Protection Regulation. The watchdog started investigating ChatGPT last year, when it temporarily banned within Italy the chatbot that can produce text, images and sound in response to users’ questions. Based on the results of its “fact-finding activity,” the watchdog said it “concluded that the available evidence pointed to the existence of...

The European Union has just run crosswise with Captain James T. Kirk, and by any measure the Captain is right to blast Europe’s left-wing, nanny state, cancel culture, loons for their latest “diversity” move. This week, news broke that the EU — which apparently stands for Entirely Useless — is looking to make the world safe from evil “gendered” words, like man, male, guys, and anything testosterone related, The Telegraph reported. This impinges directly on one of Captain Kirk’s most famous lines, the one that serves as the opening monologue to the famed 1966 series, “Star Trek.” TV viewers and...

In a somber admission, the head of European diplomacy, Josep Borrell, conveys a gloomy outlook on the Ukrainian conflict, stating, “We do not see the light at the end of the Ukrainian tunnel.” Despite European sanctions, Borrell acknowledges that they have only weakened, not destroyed, the Russian military machine. This confession comes as Ukraine’s hopes of defeating Russia appear to be fading, with President Zelensky pleading for more support amid international fatigue and political gridlock. The Washington Post reports a sense of desperation within Ukraine’s corridors of power, highlighting the country’s plea for arms, aid, and political commitments. Two years...

The upcoming European Parliament elections will see a “sharp turn to the right” as populist parties are projected to be victorious in at least nine EU member states and come in second or third in a further nine countries. According to an analysis of opinion polls in each EU member state in combination with statistical modelling based on the previous performance of national parties, the globalist European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) think tank has predicted that right-wing populist parties will come out on top in Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Slovakia in...

At an undetermined date, in an undisclosed location, the Biden administration began operating a secretive new court to protect Europeans’ privacy rights under U.S. law. Officially known as the Data Protection Review Court, it was authorized in an October 2022 executive order to fix a collision of European and American law that had been blocking the lucrative flow of consumer data between American and European companies for three years. The court’s eight judges were named last November, including former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. Its existence has allowed companies to resume the lucrative transatlantic data trade with the blessing of...

At the opening of the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called for increased cooperation between governments and private businesses to enact tech censorship in the face of “industrial scale disinformation”.Following in the example of WEF Chairman Klaus Schwab’s ‘Global Risk Report’, EU chief Ursula von der Leyen used her address in Davos on Tuesday to highlight the supposed risks of allowing the free flow of information in light of the alleged threat of “disinformation and disinformation”. (snip) Going into the election year, Brussels will have also have more censorship powers...

'Our freedom comes with risks,' European Union (EU) President Ursula von der Leyen told the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos. 'The top concern is ... disinformation and misinformation [as] the boundary between online and offline is getting thinner and thinner.' The European Commission’s pursuit of digital ID on a global scale became none more apparent than during President Ursula von der Leyen’s remarks to the globalist elite at the World Economic Forum (WEF). "The top concern for the next two years is not conflict, or climate, it is disinformation and misinformation," she said in Davos, Switzerland on January 16....

While EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen praised Ukrainian “democratic institutions” and promised more billions for the NATO proxy war in her speech before the EU Parliament, AfD MEP Bernhard Zimniok blasted von der Leyen and the EU for stonewalling the death of US journalist Gonzalo Lira and called for an independent investigation. Official Ukrainian spokesperson Michael “Sarah” Cirillo continued to mock the dead US journalist on Twitter/X. “The case of US journalist Gonzalo Lira, who died in a Ukrainian prison last week, shows that Ukraine has nothing in common with our values,“ MEP Bernhard Zimniok said in the...

Former Polish Interior Minister Mariusz Kaminski and his deputy Maciej Wasik were detained by police and taken to prison on Tuesday after being convicted of abuse of power. [...] ANTI-CORRUPTION AGENCY Kaminski was first elected a member of parliament in 1997 and was re-elected in 2001 and 2005. He resigned in 2006 to become the head of the Central Anti-Corruption Bureau. Political opponents said he and his associates pursued corruption with excessive zeal, using methods they said sometimes circumvented laws and hounding innocent people. PARDON In 2015, Kaminski and Wasik were found guilty and sentenced to three years in prison....