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A few days ago, my son, who recently began university in the Netherlands, sent me a few pictures he took in a local supermarket. Truth be told, I put him up to it because I was curious after coming across data on unbalanced food price inflation in Europe.

In the small town where he lives, near Amsterdam, a croissant costs 0.35 euros or, if they’re on offer, three for a euro. 

During my next trip to the shops, I checked the biggest local grocery chain here in Czechia. One croissant cost 12.9 CZK, or 0.53 euros. That’s 50% more expensive than in the Netherlands.

I know it’s just one item, but it looks out of place given the average annual salary in the Netherlands is almost double that in Czechia. What we’re experiencing here is a fundamental change: although wages are going up in Eastern Europe, prices are rising way faster, ending a decades-long trend when lower wages meant lower prices in the region.

In August, on average, bread in the European Union was 18% more expensive than a year ago. But the price rise in every Western European country was below that average. People in the Netherlands pay less than 10% more, while here, in Prague, prices have gone up almost 30% and in my homeland Hungary 66%.

I wonder how fair it is that millions of Central and Eastern Europeans work in the food industry in Western Europe and send much of their hard-earned money home, only to see it worth so much less in the grocery store.

I’m happy for my son, but I worry about the financial security of my friends and family here. Who will pay the price? Not just of bread, but of rising inequality.

It would cost PLN 6.6 billion (1.35 billion euro) a year to give all three million schoolchildren in Poland one hot meal a day, according to a motion filed in parliament last month by left-wing parties calling for the change.

“Today, around 900,000 children in Poland live in poverty. These children often attend lessons on an empty stomach,” say advocates of the motion.  

Amid heated debate coloured by comparisons with the communist era, some commentators have criticised the idea of providing free meals for all children regardless of financial background, while others reply that the idea is to avoid stigmatising poorer pupils. 

And the cost? 0.2 percent of GDP. “Not much,” they say.

“This crisis is bubbling like a pot,” Mauro Uliassi says. When it comes to pots, he definitely knows what he’s talking about. He is the chef of a 3-Michelin-stars restaurant in Senigallia, the world’s 12th best place to eat.

“As a result of skyrocketing energy prices, the costs of raw materials increased by 20 to 40%. The electricity bill in the first half of the year grew from 13,000 to 39,000 euros”. 

The restaurant overlooks the sea and the squid skewer of the Rimini Fest, or the Smoked Spaghetti with clams and grilled cherry tomatoes, are known as delicious. You’re bitten by the crisis when you digest the bill: “The classic menu now costs 240 euros, instead of 200,” says Uliassi. 

The chef knows he’s better placed than most to withstand the worst of the crisis. His restaurant has a thirty-year history, financial stability and loyal customers willing to spend. “But I think about those who have just started,” he says. ”They had to face the pandemic, and now there’s a new crisis. This is a heavy blow, and it isn’t over.”

Marco Pedroni, president of retailer Coop Italia, warns that “this high cost of living has not been seen since the 80s. There is a need to support domestic demand for consumption.”

You don’t have to go to Senigallia to taste high prices: in Rome, I pay 10% more for a cappuccino and croissant than I did last summer. I asked the waiter if his wage had gone up too. As I feared, it hadn’t. 

A giant watermelon at the edge of Ukraine’s Kherson region, this statue became a familiar sight to millions of Ukrainians who would pass it en route to the coast. The statue is symbolic of Kherson’s agricultural riches, among them watermelons known for their size, taste and low price.

Watermelons from Kherson once cost about 5 UAH (0.17 euros) per kilo. In early October, the picture went viral after the statue was liberated by the Ukrainian army. 

This summer, watermelons in Ukraine cost about one euro per kilo. Russian occupation of the Kherson region saw its produce disappear from shelves in other parts of Ukraine. A pair of watermelons carried out by fleeing residents were symbolically sold at auction for several thousand UAH. All proceeds went to the army.

Partial liberation of the region brings hope that local produce will finally re-enter the market. And not only Ukraine’s: dozens of local farmers are certified to export their crops to the EU. So prices may be ‘repaired’, just like the monument.

In early October, Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko declared that “all price increases will be banned”. As usual, the dictator’s statements were widely mocked outside Belarus. Yet Hungary has already shown it can be done.

Since February, supermarkets have been forced to freeze the prices of six essential food products – granulated sugar, flour, milk, pork legs, chicken breast and cooking oil – at the levels they were at on October 15, 2021.

The government decree also required retail chains and small shops to ensure at least the same stock in the shop as before. They receive no subsidies or other support.

Initially, prices were frozen until May 31, with the government citing a need to protect families but saying nothing about the more important goal of winning April’s general election. As inflation skyrocketed, the freeze was extended until the end of the year.

The move may indeed bring relief to Hungary’s poorest. But supermarkets are becoming increasingly inventive in trying to extricate themselves. The grocery chains make up the shortfall by hiking the price of other products. Losses on chicken breast, for example, are made up for on legs, which cost 61% more than a year ago. 

Some retailers are restricting the quantities their customers can buy, forcing makers of homemade plum jam to go from shop to shop buying a kilo of sugar in each. Many shops refuse to sell sugar at all or offer unregulated substitutes at much higher prices. Some hide the cheaper items at the back of the shelves or label them misleadingly.

International food chains can make up the losses more easily but have nevertheless lodged a constitutional complaint that the government is curtailing their right to free pricing. The judges were all appointed by Viktor Orbán’s ruling Fidesz so are unlikely to rule in their favour.

What type of heater should I choose ― electric or gas? How much does a balcony solar panel cost? Will three power banks be enough and should I get thermal clothes or just add another regular layer? Just like millions of other Ukrainians, these are the questions currently running through my head.

We worry whether our army will make progress in the winter and whether the supply of modern weapons will continue. But one thing is certain: either through continued missile strikes or by hacking our systems, the Kremlin will do its utmost to make this a very dark, very cold winter for Ukraine.

I know how it feels. Ever since 2014, Russian hacker strikes have caused blackouts in various parts of my country. So now I search the Internet for what’s still possible to buy to get me through this period.

I understand Russia’s rationale: a harsh winter and high gas bills may push Europe to agree to Moscow’s terms to end this war. Blackouts and bitter cold will further exhaust Ukrainians and nurture a wish to end this nightmare.

But everyone I know has no thought of surrender.

That’s why, in Ukraine now, candles are not about coziness or romance. They are a means of survival, stacked as a source of light just like 200 years ago.

I don’t care about gas prices, but about the ability to use gas at all. I bought matches, a portable gas stove, and several gas cartridges, following the advice of a popular brochure on crisis preparation. It feels like a camping trip, but instead of a forest I’ll have to camp in my home this year. But the destination is clear ― our freedom.

Up until a few weeks ago, few French people had heard of the government-funded Ecowatt website. But with winter arriving, this “electricity weather forecast” promises to become a helpful and popular tool. So, like many, I logged on. Via its site or text message, Ecowatt warns consumers about potential power cuts, giving them time to switch off household appliances to reduce consumption and protect them from disruption. For reasons we’re all well aware of, the risk of power cuts is on the rise. For the moment, thanks to the mild weather, I haven’t been pinged. Will it stay that way come winter?

Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania need at least another 1,000 days to become independent of Russian electricity under a €1.6bn plan to decouple the Baltic states from the Russian grid by 2025.

It may be possible to connect to the “Continental Europe grid” even earlier, but the risk of outages and higher power bills will remain given the current infrastructure is not yet ready for an orderly transition. 
The stakes are high: the Baltic states are determined to stop Russia weaponising energy; last week, Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas warned of black-outs if Putin decides to cut the countries off.

While Western Europe talks renewable energy, Poland is scrambling for coal.

Coal is Poland’s primary energy resource, used not only to produce electricity but burned by thousands of households to keep the cold at bay. Supply had never been a problem. Until now.  

The Law and Justice (PiS) government treated coal almost as a fetish, with coal miners enjoying some of the most generous state support in the country. To please the mining lobby, the government crippled the development of wind farms, while calls from environmentalists for Poland to heed the warning signs of climate change were dismissed by PiS politicians as leftist propaganda. Studies showing that air pollution is behind the deaths of thousands of Poles every year were ignored. 

Poland has enough coal for 200 years, according to President Andrzej Duda. But in fact, while kowtowing to the mining lobby, the government quietly closed many mines, as imports from Russia and Russian-occupied Donbass – in defiance of an EU embargo – were more profitable.

On April 14, some six weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, Poland imposed an embargo on Russian coal imports. Then the trouble started.

Once-full coal depots emptied. Prices shot up. In June, the government assured the public there was no need to panic-buy; the price would come down.

The exact opposite has happened. PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński is now telling Poles to buy less and to wait patiently for fresh supplies. The government has ordered fuel from South America, but it’s unclear if it will arrive in time. There are also question marks over the quality of imported coal.

Europe is in for a harsh winter. Poland, in particular. In November 2021, the US warned Warsaw that a Russian invasion was imminent. The government had more than four months to prepare and to confront the prospect of coal  shortages. What did it do?

The energy crisis is a European one, but this time, unlike during the 2008 financial crisis, Europe is upside down: Germany, in particular, was once the “schoolmaster” lecturing Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain about fiscal irresponsibility, but Berlin now finds itself much harder hit than its southern neighbours when it comes to energy. 

Germany powered its industrial and economic growth with cheap Russian gas, giving little thought to the security risks, not just to itself. Who’s “irresponsible” now? One might ask.

Spain, on the other hand, proved its farsightedness by investing in a more diversified energy mix, despite the greater economic cost.

While just a few months ago the Spanish proposal (backed by Portugal and Italy) to radically overhaul the European energy market was being dismissed by some – with their hierarchical reflexes – as ‘quixotic’, it seems there are finally some southern winds of change: an adapted Spanish “gas cap” is now becoming a reality for the rest of the bloc. 

Of course, reform like that is a long-term project. This winter, the door must still be opened to more pragmatic and short-term options for gas or coal from the United States, Norway and Azerbaijan. 

But, just as the Covid-19 pandemic allowed for the rupture of certain ‘mantras’ that seemed impossible to break, the belated understanding that energy is a matter of European security also represents a historic opportunity to push for more sustainable means to ensure it. 

Looking to the future, this hopefully means moving towards a better developed energy mix with more renewables all over Europe – together.

Italy woke this week to the rise of the most far-right leader since Mussolini. In every European capital, the extreme right rejoiced. If public debate was more mature, we’d have foreseen not only Giorgia Meloni’s win, but also her tactics.

If we’d looked more closely at Budapest, for example, we would have seen that its strongholds of “illiberal democracy” serve as connection points for the European extreme right. I was there in April to report on elections; but what I found concerned Rome and Paris as well.

At the pro-Orbán Danube Institute, Erik Tegnér, lieutenant to French far-right presidential candidate Éric Zemmour, was a visiting fellow. There too was Hungarian President Katalin Novak, who previously teamed up with Lorenzo Fontana of Italy’s right-wing Lega to invoke the ‘traditional family’. Francesco Giubilei, a young ideologue of Meloni’s “conservative turn”, has also built ties with pro-Orban think-tanks.

Back in Rome, Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia used the campaign to attack Peppa pig’s first same-sex couple. No coincidence. In Hungary, cartoons are reported to the media authority under anti-LGBT legislation. Orbán began his new mandate by declaring gender “the great problem of Europe”. Meanwhile, it’s business-as-usual between Hungary and Russia.

The more that Europeans understand how the extreme right handles identity politics elsewhere in Europe, the better they can debunk such tactics.

Days before Italy voted, Ursula von der Leyen said “we have tools” for countries that take illiberal turns. But the precondition for a strong European democracy is real democratic debate – and it starts from below. This doesn’t mean on social media alone: Mark Zuckerberg is already represented, with Meta’s 2022 budget to lobby Brussels at €6 million, up from €450,000 in 2015.

One crucial pressure group is still underrepresented: European public opinion. To build it up, let’s start with all of us.

In France, only 3.6% of television news was devoted to EU-specific topics between 2015 and 2020, according to a recent study by the French think-tank Jean Jaurès. By comparison, the EU average in 2018 was 13%.

The French figure drops further, to 2.5%, if we remove from the panel the public Franco-German channel “Arte”, which was founded in 1991 “to address cosmopolitan and curious citizens in Europe, especially in France and Germany”.

More than three decades later, European news and public discourse still seem to be ‘niche’ in French television programming.

It’s in The New York Times, it’s in The Wall Street Journal, it’s in Western European media. And it’s not going away. I’m talking about an outdated but persistent shorthand by which each of the Baltic countries is referred to as a “former Soviet republic” regardless of whether the article is about economics, digital leaps, tourism or Russia’s ongoing war of aggression.

Hence why this tweet by the Estonian politician Eerik-Niiles Kross – a sarcastic tutorial on how to describe other countries around the world – went viral earlier this month.

Here in Estonia we try to take it in good humour, but it actually demonstrates the shallowness of many large media and their editors. To be clear: the “former Soviet republics” never agreed to be part of the Soviet Union. They were violently forced into it. What we are or do now has little or nothing to do with our Soviet legacy.

An hour after Vladimir Putin ordered the mobilisation of 300,000 reservists, Viktor Orbán took to Facebook, not to express concern at a potentially more dangerous phase of the war in Ukraine, but to prod his finger at the West.  “Energy prices are rising because of the misguided sanctions imposed by Brussels,” he wrote

Orbán’s siding with Russia and his undermining of a strong European response is not merely a domestic matter. The key question facing Europe is whether Russian imperialism can be stopped. False narratives are what help Putin win. Orbán is looking for a scapegoat for his own mistakes: economic hardship, the weakening forint, rising debt, above-average inflation… That’s why he condemns European sanctions and remains silent on the Russian threat. His most important tool is the Hungarian language, with which he builds a private reality for his compatriots. Key to this is control of the press.

What Orbán says resounds a thousand times louder than anyone else’s words in Hungarian. And few people in his country are able to hear or read dissenting opinions in English, German, French, or even Ukrainian. Orbán has a monopoly on storytelling about the dangers posed by the outside world that – so the story goes – only he can save Hungarians from. There is still a free part of the Hungarian press that sticks to its calling and tries to present all sides of what’s going on. But its power and possibilities are limited by the system. With unfair taxes, legislation and the power of oligarchs, the still-free media is squeezed into such a narrow space it cannot reach the furthest corners of the country.

The fate of Europe also depends on how much of the world Hungarians are able to see. And on what conclusions Europe’s citizens draw from Hungarian autocracy.

Johannes Hillje is a political consultant with a focus on pan-European communication and author of the book “Plattform Europa”, in which he elaborates his vision for a vital European public discourse.

You are critical of the way public spheres in Europe are still generally organised on a national basis. Why?

Although there is a lot of reporting on European issues in different national media, it is nearly always filtered by national interests. In most cases, the preferred perspective is: What is ‘our’ national benefit from a decision? But not: How does it serve our common European interest?

What are the risks?

Overall, this causes a democratic problem because we are living in a common political system. The nation states have handed over a considerable amount of decision-making power to the EU. Our common political institutions make decisions influencing the lives of all of us on a daily basis. But we don’t have a common and public democratic debate in which we could discuss these decisions together.

In addition, national governments will continue using this absence again and again for a blame game: Responsibility for unpopular decisions is often blamed on Brussels, while popular decisions are claimed to be taken by the national capital. There is hardly anyone correcting the stereotypical depiction of the EU or the other member states. So you can easily nourish anti-European sentiment.

What do you suggest?

In general, we need more shared communication spaces and truly European mass media. I also envision a real big shot: A common, publicly-owned digital European communication platform providing the infrastructure for a pan European discourse. It should provide not only news on European matters, but also entertainment and cultural content advancing a European identity. We should have political talk shows with European politicians and series, which tell stories of Europeans living together, for instance in border regions, during Erasmus or Interrail. And it could enable a truly pan European exchange including artificial intelligence-supported translations or virtual reality meetings.