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”Romania can become an exporter of energy solutions to Moldova and regionally on a larger scale. If Romania manages to take all the steps and comply with authorisation, safety and environmental impact procedures, it will be advantageous [to the region].

Romania and the state company Nuclearelectrica did the right thing regarding [a new] project with the United States [in 2021] which aims to implement Small Modular Reactor (SMR) technology [in Romania].”

Eugenia Gusilov, director of the Romanian Energy Centre, ROEC

Romania has ambitious plans to ensure its energy self-sufficiency and open further routes to export, with the help of nuclear power.
The two reactors of the country’s only nuclear power plant in Cernavoda produce almost 20 percent of the country’s electricity, using Canadian technology. Romania plans to become a regional pioneer by implementing new nuclear technologies patented in partnership with the U.S., such as SMR reactors which can be moved and scaled up and down.

The main target for electricity exports is the Republic of Moldova, which needs cheap and reliable electricity, so it can help escape from Russia’s strategy of energy blackmail.

The Hungarian government is committed to nuclear energy, and so is the population: according to a survey conducted early this year, 70 percent of Hungarians support nuclear power plants.

Hungary has one nuclear power plant, Paks. Built with Russian technology, it has been in operation since the 1980s. The four units are set to be decommissioned in the 2030s, but the government is seeking a lifetime-expansion that could mean a further 10 to 20 years of operation.

The country is also building two more units at the same site by the river Danube. The new units were meant to replace the old ones, but expansion means they might be operational side-by-side for decades.

According to government officials, electricity is crucial due to increasing household demand, and because various Asian battery factories are set to be built in the country, which require a steady flow of power.

The constructor of the new units is Russian state-owned company Rosatom, which supplies the reactor assembly with French, German and American companies supplying other main systems. Hungary awarded the contract to Rosatom, skipping an open international tender in 2014, with Moscow providing a loan of 10 billion euros.

However, Péter Szijjártó, Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs, has recently disclosed that all contracts are being renegotiated because time has passed since the signing of the original documents. Sanctions against Russia are also playing a key part.

Some analysts believe Rosatom will be unable to deliver the project under such circumstances. Others argue that it is in Hungary’s national interest to find another contractor, as Russia is now a hostile power.

Similar to the way in which the previous contracts were kept secret until 2019, the modifications are still unclear. It is not certain whether the details will allow Rosatom to conclude the project. Also, the construction of the new units is already years behind schedule, mostly because of Rosatom’s failure to present design plans that comply with EU and Hungarian standards.

Construction on the third reactor at the Flamanville nuclear power plant in northern France was approved in 2007 and should have been operational five years later, in 2012.

But the project is dragging on and is expected to take at least 17 years to complete, at an estimated cost of 19.1 billion euros – nearly six times the original estimate. In December, the owner-operator EDF announced its postponement to the first quarter of 2024 because of work to repair welds with questionable quality.

It seems the construction of a further European pressurised water reactor, designed to revive nuclear energy after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, is a real challenge.

My uncle has an apartment in Hamburg, overlooking wind turbines. Although there are strong currents in the city, the blades have often stood still in recent months. Why? Because there was too much electricity in the German grid and energy plants that could be shut down had to stand idle.

Actually, the last German nuclear power plants were supposed to be shut down at the beginning of this year. But supporters of nuclear power seized the opportunity and the fear of power shortages due to the energy crisis to lobby for a period of grace, and their operating time was “stretched” by a further three-and-a-half months.

Last Saturday, they were finally put to rest. These plants were not critical to the energy mix, as they covered only six percent of Germany’s electricity consumption.

Would we have had power outages in winter without them? Probably not. Many days, Germany even exported electricity. It’s quite possible that those were exactly the periods of time when the wind turbines near my uncle’s apartment were standing still.
I think it’s naive to play off the danger of the climate crisis against the danger of nuclear power plants. We saw in Chernobyl and Fukushima how devastating the consequences of accidents can be.

It is possible to make power plants safe against accidents, natural disasters and sabotage, as has been the case in Germany (probably thanks to continuous criticism from the opponents of nuclear power), but the risk cannot be eliminated.

Also, the waste from the plants will remain dangerous for tens of thousands of years. Safe storage alone makes this form of energy production much more expensive than solar and wind.

The energy that some have invested in recent months to polemicise for extended operating times would be better spent on expanding renewables, so that the turbines can use the wind that’s blowing freely….

András Léderer, head of advocacy at the Hungarian Helsinki Committee on a recent attack against the LGBTQ community in Hungary.

“Here’s some good news. Uganda’s parliament has passed an anti-LGBTQ law so that pansies who marry will be executed” – a prominent Hungarian pro-government journalist András Bencsik recently made this comment on one of the most watched Hungarian pro-government TV channels.

In Hungary, homophobic propaganda has a long history, how did we get here?


Bencsik’s remarks are the latest in a series of choreographed narrative and legislative attacks against the LGBT community. This began with a threatening statement by the Prime Minister Viktor Orban on the international day against homophobia in 2015, where he spoke about “us, Hungarians” and “them, having a different lifestyle”.

The next seven years saw a war on gender studies, constitutional amendments that bring exclusionist positions into key laws, banning legal gender recognition in practice and same-sex couples’ right to adopt children, mixing paedophilia with belonging to the LGBT community, banning the discussion and portrayal of LGBT content for under 18s, and organising a national referendum on questions such as whether voters support the promotion of gender-reassignment for minors.

What could be the purpose of Bencsik’s statement?

Bencsik is testing how far the rest of the state’s propaganda machine is willing to go in attacking LGBT rights.

What are the consequences of such a statement?

Whether he manages to expand the limits of what is acceptable to say as propaganda partially rests on the public response to such statements. The normalisation of hate can only happen when the rest of society is silent.

Secondly, there are people who are beginning to understand their identity, and where they orientate their affections. It matters greatly if they hear that people like them are worth executing, and that is all they hear.

After attacking media freedom, Giorgia Meloni’s government has taken on rainbow families and disowned same-sex parenthood. The Italian Ministry of the Interior has forced Milan’s progressive mayor Beppe Sala to backtrack in recognising rainbow families, by instructing him to stop registering the children of same-sex parents.

Sala denounced this problem at a press conference in Strasbourg, while dozens of progressive mayors protested against the government’s decision. This is a further step in the erosion of the rule of law in Italy, the European Parliament stated last week.

In December 2021, the EU Court of Justice ruled that “a child who has same-sex parents according to a birth certificate drawn up by the host Member State must be issued an identity card or a passport by the Member State of her nationality and must be able to exercise her freedom of movement in the EU with each of her parents”. The “Stolichna obshtina, rayon Pancharevo” case inspired the EU Commission’s proposal for a regulation. It expects that “parenthood established in a Member State of the EU should be recognised in all the other Member States”.

But for this proposal to be approved, unanimity is needed, and Meloni seems to prefer an “Orbanisation” of Italy.

It’s not that hard to spot a trend: one year ago, after his re-election as prime minister, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán declared that “gender is the main problem in Europe”. His anti-LGBT laws have become notorious. But he was inspired by the Polish Law and Justice party: in 2020, Andrzej Duda’s presidential campaign was also marked by anti-LGBT rhetoric.

Now that Meloni is in power, she is using the same tactics, to cover her failures under the veil of propaganda.

Petro Zherukha is reserved and soft-spoken, and not the usual kind of man you would expect to see in military uniform. Until last year, he spent his time debating at a book club, playing chess, and, above all, playing music, as he was studying at the music academy in Lviv. Now he is a volunteer in the Ukrainian army.

Petro has made a similar life-change to hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, but another detail made his journey specific: he is homosexual, and in war, this brings complications. The issues are not social: in many interviews, Ukrainian gay and lesbian soldiers have said how they do not experience discrimination either from their comrades, or from their superiors. On the contrary, when you see people from different walks of life defending the same values as you, taking the same risks as you, and suffering as you do, this builds loyalty. The problems start when homosexuals move from the field of battle to the field of law.

In Ukraine, only relatives can visit a person in intensive care, identify the remains in a morgue, or be the legal representative of the deceased. A gay couple may live together for 30 years ― but legally they are strangers. Petro wants to change this. He is pushing for a new law on civil partnerships for same-sex couples ― a more inclusive alternative to what his country has traditionally considered a family.

“Now I’m sitting on a bag of sugar in a house under shelling,” Petro wrote in a post asking for support for the petition to pass the law, “My private life is on pause, but I still think this law is timely. I am fighting for an Ukraine where there is no discrimination, and where everyone can defend their relationships.”

Within five days, the petition gathered 14,000 signatures. Parliament is expected to discuss the draft in the spring. The legal space in Ukraine is still lagging behind people’s attitudes and experiences, but society is bringing change.

Since this March, it only takes four months to legally change your gender in Spain. Parliament has passed a LGTBQ protection law that keeps Spain on track to be one of the most progressive countries in LGTBQ issues, at least on paper.

In the past, a trans person needed a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria and two years of hormone therapy. Now, all you have to do is inform the civil registry that you want to change your gender, come back three months later and wait another month. This avoids the “pathologisation” of trans people.

“Gender ideology and the LGBT movement threaten the identity, the nation, its continuance and the Polish state” – Jaroslaw Kaczynski, chairman of Poland’s ruling right-wing and populist Law and Justice (PiS) party, said in 2019.

In June 2020, during the campaign for the presidential election, President Andrzej Duda, who hails from PiS and was standing for re-election, also spoke on this issue: “They try to tell us that [LGBT] are people, but it is an ideology.”

These are examples of homophobic hate speech used by major Polish politicians in the parliamentary (2019) and presidential (2020) campaigns. Both were won by PiS and Duda.

But this triggered a counter-effect. What followed were mass coming-outs by the young all over the country, not just in big liberal cities. Many PiS voters have realised that this was not due to “LGBT ideology”, it was their gay, lesbian, transgender children or grandchildren realising their identities.

Paradoxically, those homophobic campaigns, cynically unleashed for political gains, were a wake-up call for many Poles. In 2022 Poland saw record support for at least civil unions of same-sex couples – 64 percent are in favour of them.

It seems Poles have found a social consensus, but society lacks the political will to change. The ruling PiS party will refuse to pass a law supporting LGBT people. But even those politicians are aware of this social shift. The topic of “LGBT ideology” has already disappeared from their political agenda.

Poland’s parliamentary election will be held in autumn. The two main opposition parties – Civic Platform and Poland 2050 – have announced the introduction of civil unions. The third one – New Left – supports marriage equality. It depends on this election whether the Polish authorities will finally begin to respect human rights, or whether Poland, however, will continue to resemble Putin’s Russia.

“Grandparents helping their children become independent or paying for their grandkids’ school is proof the system doesn’t work. This year, my pension will grow by 8.5%, but you will probably not get a pay rise, and if you do, it will be 3% at most.

It is unfair that we still get better and better pensions: just for starters, I have bought my house, while my son loses 40% of his salary on rent.”

Mariano Guindal, 72, is a pensioner from Barcelona who feels privileged. He receives the maximum pension (which is more than 3,000 euros per month), and it keeps increasing.

But he feels this is unfair: in his opinion, the pensioners are a ‘protected’ social group, spoilt by successive Governments for electoral purposes. In Spain, there are ten million seniors, which means ten million voters out of a total of 36 million.