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The UK media’s treatment of UKIP in the recent local and European elections gave the party ample space to air its anti-immigrant rhetoric and flawed solutions to the political malaise of many citizens, with the Greens’ victory marginalised and treated in terms of the larger parties’ decline rather than the rise of a genuine alternative in British politics.

In the face of rising populism, Europe must adopt an audacious approach that addresses the anxieties of citizens and proposes a vision of the welfare state beyond the nation state.

The polarised results of the European elections seem to indicate that new kinds of parties are replacing the traditional parties. This phenomenon was visible in Sweden, but also in many other countries across Europe.

In the European elections, European citizens were for the first time given the opportunity to vote for a common European candidate to take the Presidency of the Commission. Yet now it seems uncertain whether this promise will materialise. The outcome will either reinforce or lessen the deficit of legitimacy in the EU.

With elections behind us, what kind of European Parliament is now being formed? The results paint a fragmented picture, with significant losses weakening the centre in favour of an increased presence of the radical right and left.

Using the symbolic politics of ‘government of the people for the people’, Orban secured a comfortable re-election. He skillfully captured shifting political moods, and helped fracture the left. However his future plans remain unclear, and Hungary may now witness a battle between right and far-right.

Stories about the Great War are usually confined to a national perspective. The war of 1914-918, which decimated a whole generation of Europe’s population and marked those who survived for life, is hardly ever commemorated jointly. This ought to change.

How can we explain the shift in the prevailing attitude among the leadership of Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) and Free Trade Unions at the beginning of World War I? In the space of a few days, a position of fervent opposition was replaced by patriotic support for the government’s military ambitions, and the reasons behind this change remain the subject of debate.

The time has come to review the democratic workings of the European Union. Ideally, this should be the subject of a new Convention, but it is also possible to strengthen, here and now, European democracy.

Beginning in the fall of 2013, three manifestos published by German and French intellectuals revived the idea of establishing a “Political Community for the Euro” to give the single currency a true system of democratic governance.