Press

Foreign policy expert Ian Bond, from the Centre for European Reform think-tank, says the West needs to stop being - and sounding - afraid.This is what he told the Doomsday Watch podcast:"Nothing is as provocative to Putin as weakness, so the more the West says 'we are afraid that Russia might use nuclear weapons', the more likely it Putin is to continue making the threat of using nuclear weapons - and perhaps even use one or two to demonstrate he really means it."

The British prime minister can now claim to have secured an influential role, removing the risk of Brits being treated as “second-class citizens” opposed to the EU bloc, said Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform think-tank.

“The parties in the current government are looking well placed,” said Ian Bond, a former UK ambassador to Riga and director of foreign policy at the Centre for European Reform. “They aren’t being punished for the economic problems because Russia has been blamed for it.”

A more likely point of contention, according to Luigi Scazzieri of the Centre for European Reform, is if the EU tightly links recovery funds to Italy’s completion of judicial and civil service reforms started by Draghi. If a conflict develops over the EU’s interpretation of the rule of law there are genuine prospects of a Poland-Hungary-Italy triangular alliance, Scazzieri argues.

The three parties also want to revise Italy’s €200 billion EU Covid recovery plan - in agreement with the EU - to put more resources into energy diversification and help consumers with higher energy prices. "This programme would be expensive to implement, and a loose fiscal policy would lead to higher borrowing costs for Italy and perhaps a financial crisis," says Luigi Scazzieri, who is a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform (CER)."Meloni is aware of the risks of appearing spendthrift, and is trying to stress that she is fiscally responsible."

For Ian Bond, director of foreign policy at the Centre for European Reform, Vučić is an opportunist above all else.“There is a cynical calculation going on about how he can extract the maximum benefit from both sides. He is a Serb nationalist and it plays well with his voters if he can also be shown to be standing up for ethnic Serbs in Bosnia. Does he want to annex the Republika Srpska? I suspect not because that would actually bring down the wrath of the EU on his head in a way that would not suit his interests. But he’ll be quite happy to cause a certain amount of trouble.”