Members of justice committee say €150m in EU funding went straight to country’s president, Kais Saied

The European Commission has been accused of “bankrolling dictators” by senior MEPs, who have claimed that the €150m it gave to Tunisia last year in a migration and development deal has ended up directly in the president’s hands.

A group of MEPs on the human rights, justice and foreign affairs committees at the European parliament launched a scathing attack on the executive in Brussels, expressing fears that the commission’s president, Ursula von der Leyen, was about to seal a similar deal with Egypt .

European Commission chief makes rallying speech after being nominated by her EU grouping for new term as head of executive

Populists, nationalists and demagogues of the far right and left are challenging a peaceful and united Europe like never before, Ursula von der Leyen has declared, as she was endorsed as the sole candidate of the EU’s leading political group, the centre-right European People’s party, to head the the European Commission for another five years.

“They want to trample on our values, and they want to destroy our Europe. And we, the EPP, will never let that happen,” she said at the EPP conference in the Romanian capital, Bucharest.

Centre-right European People’s party says it wants to create deportation deals with non-EU countries to head off rise of far right

A group of political parties backing Ursula von der Leyen for a second term in one of the most powerful jobs in Brussels at the head of the European Commission is planning to call for further migration reforms, similar to the UK’s Rwanda policy, to head off the rise of the far right.

The European People’s party (EPP), an umbrella group of centre-right and conservative parties, has said in the final draft of its manifesto ahead of elections to the European parliament in May that it wants a series of deal with non-EU countries with a view to deporting irregular migrants for asylum processing in “safe” third countries.

As campaigning begins for the most important pan-European vote for decades, progressive parties need to respond to the radical right threat

Across Europe, the sound of starting guns can be heard, as campaigning for the most consequential elections to the European parliament since 1979 gets under way. In Marseille at the weekend, Marine Le Pen and her Rassemblement party’s president, Jordan Bardella, pledged to roll back the European Union’s green deal and take back multiple powers from Brussels – including the right to impose draconian anti-migrant laws. Current polls suggest that this agenda will hoover up a record 30% of votes for Rassemblement, and inflict a humiliating defeat on President Emmanuel Macron.

Elsewhere, the overall numbers look equally grim from a progressive perspective. According to one analysis , the Eurosceptic, nationalist right is likely to top polls in nine EU states – including founding members Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands, as well as France – and come second or third in nine more, including Germany. In Rome, where Europe’s centre-left gathered to launch its own campaign on Saturday, the Spanish president, Pedro Sánchez, warned that “the very soul of Europe is at risk”.

Ukraine’s president met the prime ministers of Italy, Canada and Belgium in a show of unity after recent battlefield defeats

Volodymyr Zelenskiy welcomed western leaders to Kyiv on Saturday yesterday on the second anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, declaring that Vladimir Putin “must lose absolutely everything”.

Ukraine’s president met the prime ministers of Italy, Canada and Belgium – Giorgia Meloni, Justin Trudeau and Alexander De Croo – as well as the European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen.

European Commission president seeks a second term and says there’s no place for ‘Putin’s friends’ in bloc

The chief of the European Commission has vowed to never work with extremist parties such as the far-right Alternative für Deutschland, no matter how big a vote they get in the European elections in June.

Ursula von der Leyen, officially launching her campaign for a second term in Brussels’s top job against a backdrop of rising concern over security and Russia, said on Wednesday she would only work with “pro-European, pro-Nato, pro-Ukrainian, clear supporters of our democratic values”.

Mass demonstrations across the EU against environmental directives have become a politically charged issue

On the outskirts of the northern Spanish city of Pamplona, a green, red and blue stream of New Holland, John Deere, Massey Ferguson, Fendt and Deutz-Fahr tractors trundled forwards, horns honking and orange lights flashing.

Under drizzly grey skies and escorted by navy blue Policía Nacional vans, few were in the mood to explain the motives for their demonstration, but a young farmer from the nearby town of Estella threw open his cab door to share his grievances. “They’re drowning us with all these regulations,” he said. “They need to ease up on all the directives and bureaucracy. We can’t compete with other countries when things are like this. We’re … drowning.”

Refining the metal – which is essential for electric car batteries – in Europe would ease the EU’s precarious reliance on China

It has been called the new gold rush – a rush to catch up with China in producing and refining the materials needed in everything from computers to cars: but has it come too late to save Europe’s car industry?

Deep inside a former East German town lies the first fruits of the EU’s grand plan to “de-risk” and wean itself off dependency on imports for the green revolution. In Bitterfeld-Wolfen, 140km south-west of Berlin, an Amsterdam-listed company is scrambling to complete construction of a vast factory that will be the first in Europe to deliver battery-grade lithium.