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The threads we keep following, each one gathering every story and every debate we have published on it.
Only one of the three crises that reached Türkiye this year gave it something other governments need, and that is the route out of Iraq. The second thing Ankara has to offer is a defence pact it cannot yet deliver: the Mecca agreement needs ratification by its own parliament and then a separate mandate before a single soldier moves. What Ankara wants in return, the F-35, Cyprus and the customs union, is decided by others.
Europe pays for Ukraine with the interest on Russian reserves it has chosen not to confiscate. At sea it has a flag check under Article 110, which lets a warship stop a tanker but not keep it. Washington's contribution was tariffs of up to 100 percent on the five largest buyers of Russian oil and gas, signed into law on 18 September and waived by the president on 16 October, while drones hit shipping off Romania and Bulgaria.
Sweden elected 349 members of the Riksdag on 13 September. The Social Democrats, the Left Party, the Centre Party and the Greens took 176 seats to 173, and Ulf Kristersson resigned as prime minister on 17 September. A month later there was still no government: on 15 October the Riksdag rejected Magdalena Andersson as prime minister by 248 votes to 99.
The war began on 28 February 2026 with American and Israeli strikes that killed Iran's supreme leader. The ceasefires since have broken down, and the June memorandum settled neither of the two questions the war is about: the nuclear programme and the Strait of Hormuz. In late September 2026 Iran put a sequence for settling them on the table, and Washington rejected the sequence.
The strait carries oil equal to about a fifth of world petroleum liquids consumption and about a fifth of traded liquefied natural gas, and on EIA's June 2025 estimate the pipelines around it hold only some 2.6 million barrels a day of spare capacity, which makes control of passage a lever long before the strait is fully closed. By October 2026 the lever had reached past the strait itself, and the two sides did not agree on whether it was open.
Germany blames Russia for an explosive drone found at an airport that supplies Ukraine, and a month on, the EU is still looking for an answer that stops short of military means. On 16 September 2026 that answer got a name, the Emergency Security Protocol, which convenes member states rather than committing them.
A secondary school movement that began in Créteil on 17 September merged in October with a march against the cost of living, which drew 550,000 people by the interior ministry's count. Underneath both sits a 2027 budget with about 43 billion euros of fresh savings. Sébastien Lecornu has promised not to force it through with article 49.3, in a chamber where he has no majority.
Official inflation fell below 30 percent in September, the slowest reading in almost five years, and that was the fourth monthly fall in the annual rate in a row. On 22 October the central bank cut the policy rate to 36 percent, its first move since January, while keeping the threat of tightening again. The net minimum wage has been frozen since January, TÜRK-İŞ puts a family's monthly food bill at 37,800.92 lira, and beside the programme 131 investment funds are being wound up.
When a Turkish mayor is jailed for corruption, the interior minister suspends them and their own council elects a stand-in. Appointing a trustee is the terrorism route, not the corruption one. The suspension runs to final judgment, and in the Istanbul case the court has given itself up to twelve and a half years. More than 20 CHP mayors are now jailed pending trial, and the European courts have begun answering back.
A court ousted the CHP's elected leader, 91 of its 135 lawmakers walked out to found the New Party, and the Treasury money stayed with the CHP because state funding follows votes already cast. Since then the CHP has expelled 48 of Özgür Özel's allies, lost İzmir to Erdoğan's party, and sent its reinstated leader to meet the government's ally Devlet Bahçeli.
Viktor Orbán governed Hungary for sixteen years. Since Péter Magyar's Tisza party won a two-thirds majority in April 2026, parliament has elected a president Orbán's government had removed from the Supreme Court, the government has accepted the Commission's conditions for unfreezing €16.4 billion, and Hungary has expelled ten Russian diplomats. In September parliament opened the first corruption investigations into ministers of the Orbán years.
The Aegean argument is now fought with marine parks, energy plans and exercise zones, because the one move that would widen Greek waters, from six nautical miles to twelve, is the move Türkiye's parliament called a cause for war in 1995. In October 2026 it moved to third countries: Libya approved its maritime deal with Türkiye, six parties declared that deal void, and Ankara told Egypt it could gain more sea from Türkiye than from Greece.
Sweden treats its military and civil defence as a single whole, totalförsvar. It has signed a 4.3 billion euro contract for four French frigates, the first due in 2030, and its government has presented the country's first national strategy for psychological defence. According to the armed forces, the targets for the new Himars rocket artillery lie hundreds of kilometres behind the front lines of a potential war.
Europe has given itself until 2030 to be able to defend itself. The EU's credit line is open and paying out, and the military associations say their armies cannot recruit or keep enough people.
Yemen's war resumed in July 2026, and on 10 and 11 September the Houthis took the port of Mocha and Perim Island, giving one side of the war control of Bab el-Mandeb, the strait that carries Red Sea traffic toward the Suez Canal.
Europe's firm capacity turns out to be weather-dependent: river-cooled nuclear and hydropower fail in the same weeks a heatwave pushes demand to its peak. Hungary and Romania held their grids together with imports and with large users asked to switch off. The offshore wind Denmark is buying instead is not due to be fully running until 2032, and only if the contracts are signed. From September 2026 the same thin margin was tested from the other direction, by diesel rather than by weather.
Spain has checked identity and documents on the sea and air links out of Ceuta ever since it joined Schengen, and the Commission says nobody who got in reached mainland Spain or another member state. Italy answered the crossings with checks on non-EU travellers arriving from Spain, Spain answered back, and both renewed into October. On 22 October the two governments agreed to lift the checks permanently.
Israeli settlers and soldiers have killed at least 1,100 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank since 7 October 2023, and on B'Tselem's count one Israeli has been charged over such a killing in that time.
The ceasefire rests on a twenty-point plan that ties Israeli withdrawal to a disarmament the plan leaves to monitors it never names. A separate agreement in July 2026 was meant to settle the order of steps, and Israel says it never agreed to that one. A monitor was proposed in August 2026, an American military general, and Netanyahu's office did not confirm it.
The UN arms embargo on Sudan covers only Darfur, while a UN fact-finding mission says the weapons, drones and foreign fighters that keep the Rapid Support Forces going arrive through Chad, Libya and Somalia.
Eight years of residence instead of five, knowledge of Swedish and of Swedish society, and an income of about 20,000 kronor a month. The Riksdag voted transitional provisions down by 147 to 146 on 29 April 2026, so the requirements catch the roughly 100,000 people already in the queue. The Social Democrats promise a law giving them the old rules back.
Turkey's framework law, in force since 18 August 2026, suspends the sentences of PKK members rather than erasing them. Its deferrals begin only when the National Security Council confirms in the Official Gazette that the group has dissolved and handed over its weapons, and it says nothing about Öcalan's own status.
The Security Council has told its peacekeeping force in Lebanon to stop operating on 31 December 2026. By mid-July 2026, on Security Council Report's account, it had still not discussed the three options its own Secretary-General put before it, beyond informal contacts among some members. What replaces UNIFIL turns on two questions nobody has settled: whether Israeli troops leave the ground they hold, and whether Hizbullah gives up its weapons.
The far-right AfD came first in two German state elections in September 2026 and took 43.8 percent in Saxony-Anhalt on the final count. It holds 39 of the 83 seats there, and no party has agreed to enter a coalition with it. On 6 October the Saxony-Anhalt parliament elected an AfD politician to chair the chamber, with votes from outside his own party.
Europe fights its fires with borrowed aircraft: a country that cannot cope asks the emergency response coordination centre in Brussels for help, other countries offer what they can spare, and the EU pays up to three quarters of the cost. The Union's own planes do not arrive until 2028, and the same heat is emptying the rivers the continent ships on.