securing a big cut to France’s contribution to the joint budget, which would lead to a full-on collision with Germany. France could join the resisters blocking the union’s projects. Mr Bardella describes his relationship with Ms Le Pen as “very close”. He still, deferentially, uses the formal vous form to address her, while she uses the informal tu with him. But, he declares: “It’s not a relationship of tutelage.” He has begun to sound a divergent note. Ms Le Pen wants to lower the pension age; he is less sure. She espouses left-leaning statism that goes down well in the north-eastern rustbelt; he wants to win over bourgeois right-wing voters too, and has reached out to business chiefs with a pro- enterprise message. What, if anything, does this self-professed “pragmatist” really believe? He is well-rehearsed on matters from fiscal to energy policy. He sounds more animated when denouncing what he sees as France’s unfair deal in a German-dominated Europe. What really fires him up is immigration. “Our continent will no longer be the continent of Europeans if we do not put an end to the flood of migration,” he told nationalist friends in Poland recently. Mr Bardella wants to end birthright citizenship and cut benefits for immigrants. In June he drew condemnation for linking street violence
among fans after PSG, the capital’s dominant football club, won the European Champions League to France’s “inability to control immigration”. Behind this nativism seems to be an intolerance for those who fail to behave like his parents. Mr Bardella’s mother, Luisa, was born in Turin; his father’s Italian father—who married a French-Algerian—also migrated in the 1960s. This was a generation that “did everything to become French, to learn the language, respect the country that welcomed them”, an effort that, he deplores, is “no longer required” today. Mr Bardella describes Saint-Denis, where his mother still lives, as a place of “drug-trafficking, crime, squalor and the loss of our values and identity”. His compelling personal story glosses over inconvenient details. His father, who divorced his mother when Mr Bardella was tiny, ran a small drinks-distribution business, and bought his teenage son a car; the kid from the estate was taken out of the public system early and sent to a Catholic school in Saint-Denis. But it makes for good populist politics. He wants to ensure, he says, that “the country doesn’t resemble the neighbourhood I grew up in”. These days Mr Bardella spends more time in Paris boardrooms and embassies—or at the Monaco Grand Prix, where he was spotted in the VIP stand with his new companion—than on the streets of Saint-Denis. His courtship of the elite carries a risk: that he loses credibility with the anti- establishment base. Kévin Pfeffer, an RN deputy and friend, argues that his fairy-tale romance “makes everyone dream”. Indeed he would not be the first populist to live an elite lifestyle. But the revolutionary French may be less forgiving than most. And Mr Bardella, who controls his image meticulously—he folds his crisp identikit white shirts round paper interlays inside his suitcase—should know this. When the verdict comes, there will be tensions. If the court shortens Ms Le Pen’s sentence and enables her to stand next year, it will put him back in her shadow. If the ban is upheld, she will hand over the family business (eight presidential campaigns between père and fille) to an outsider, albeit one she hand-picked. Does the prospect keep Mr Bardella up at night? “If I brushed away your question, you would conclude that I was lying; if I told you I was worried, that would risk worrying you. The truth is doubtless in between.”■
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America’s Balkan policy is all about gas It is using its terminal in Krk to shoulder the green EU aside July 2nd 2026 THE CROATIAN island of Krk is bereft of vowels but rich in gorgeous beaches. Flying into the island’s airport, holidaymakers might notice what looks like a ship at anchor. In fact, it is a floating liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal. Since its completion in 2021 it has become a crucial European node for importing LNG, mostly but not entirely from America. It is also part of the reason why American and European aims in the region, which for decades were aligned, are increasingly at odds. In the six western Balkan countries that are not members of the European Union, America First policies are starting to bulldoze the EU out of the way. The disagreement was evident at a meeting in April in Dubrovnik, another Croatian beach resort, of EU members from the Adriatic, Baltic and Black
Sea regions. America was represented at the Three Seas Initiative summit by Chris Wright, its energy secretary. Mr Wright touted a “Trump Peace Pipelines Framework”, which he said would allow central and eastern Europe to replace its remaining dependence on Russia’s gas with America’s. Croatia signed an agreement at the summit to connect Krk to Bosnia, which now gets all of its gas from Russia. Also in April, an American company signed a $6bn deal to supply LNG to Albania. All of this is evidence that America aims to do more than end Russian energy imports to Europe. It is seeking, as the National Security Strategy of November 2025 said, to restore “energy dominance”, to “project power” and roll back what it sees as harmful European climate policies that “threaten the United States”. Western Balkan countries currently use little gas, and the EU wants eventually to phase out its use of the fuel. Europeans fear that replacing Russian with American gas will undermine the countries’ transition to renewables and make it hard for them to align their energy legislation with that of the EU, which they seek to join. The American push is likely to benefit political and business associates of Donald Trump, who will probably win infrastructure and service contracts, says Ivan Brodic, editor of Energypress, a Croatian energy news site. The gas interconnector linking Bosnia and Croatia, for example, had been
discussed for years. But the country’s politicians, divided on ethnic lines between Bosniaks (Muslims), Croats and Serbs, had never been able to agree on it. In April, however, the Bosnians suddenly amended a law and named an American-owned company with no previous experience in gas or pipelines as the main investor in the project. The company’s directors include a former lawyer of Mr Trump and the brother of Michael Flynn, his former national security adviser. Mr Flynn is a lobbyist for Milorad Dodik, the pro-Russian de facto leader of the Serbian half of Bosnia. Mr Dodik is already benefiting from the Trump administration’s interventions. In May Christian Schmidt, the High Representative in Bosnia (an international overseer created under the 1995 peace settlement which ended the country’s civil war), said he was resigning, under American pressure. He had objected to the no-tender award of the gas contract, which contravenes EU rules. Mr Schmidt had long clashed with Mr Dodik. American policy in Bosnia, says Adi Cerimagic, an analyst, is now “driven by these investors and by these investments”. The importance of energy investments to American policy extends throughout the region. Gazprom, Russia’s state-owned gas firm, has long held a controlling interest in NIS, Serbia’s biggest oil-and-gas company. But American sanctions on Russia are forcing it to sell its stake to MOL, a Hungarian state-owned energy firm. Mr Brodic expects America will strong- arm Serbia into buying American LNG. And America’s interest goes beyond gas. This month Serbia’s government issued a call for proposals for a new hydroelectric power plant; only American companies, it specified, need apply. North Macedonia, too, was previously dependent on Russian gas. In February it signed an agreement committing to buy American LNG. Tiny Kosovo is also in America’s sights. It has no pipeline connecting it to the region’s gas networks. In 2021 Albin Kurti, its prime minister, suspended a project to link the country to North Macedonia. Still, just before Kosovo’s election on June 7th, the American chargé d’affaires in the country urged it to revive that project, warning it otherwise risked being the only western Balkan country “without access to American LNG”. This was widely seen as an appeal to vote against Mr Kurti. He won,
but may yet go ahead with the pipeline. The message from America is clear: if you want to keep our support, ignore the Europeans, and buy our gas. Where American LNG helps Balkan countries stop buying Russian gas, the EU welcomes it. The problem for Europeans is the use of coercion and the promise of benefits to cronies on both the American and Balkan sides to push the deals through. They also deplore the possibility that southern European countries with plenty of solar, wind and hydropower potential might instead be pushed to use American gas. Europeans, with their good- government regulations and green objectives, have trouble competing with firms that offer personal benefits to Balkan bigwigs who sign up for gas deals. But in a world where rules are giving way to power, they may have to work out how to match America’s bid. ■ To stay on top of the biggest European stories, sign up to Café Europa, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//europe/2026/06/29/americas-balkan-policy-is-all-about- gas
Volodymyr Zelensky’s surge is a bid to force peace talks Ukrainian claims to be winning the drone war are partly propaganda and partly real July 2nd 2026 TO A SLAVIC ear, 40 days is no accidental deadline. In Russia as in Ukraine, the 40th day after death is when the soul departs. So when Volodymyr Zelensky took to social media on June 25th to announce a new drone surge to “compel” Russia to negotiate for peace, he seemed to be telling Vladimir Putin he was already finished. With blunt messages like these, the Ukrainian president has lately been beating Mr Putin in the war of words. The military balance is less clear-cut than the rhetoric. But Mr Zelensky’s threats are not idle. Ukraine is bombing refineries in Russia, forcing petrol