Leonid Bershidsky

The bankruptcy of Thomas Cook Group Plc, the company whose founder is credited with inventing the modern tourist industry, is being blamed on Brexit, a series of bad management decisions and an unsustainable debt level. Perhaps, however, it’s worth looking at Thomas Cook’s failure as the beginning…

Ursula von der Leyen, the new European Commission president, wants to make Europe the first carbon-neutral continent by 2050. She’s promised to deliver a “European Green Deal” in the first 100 days of her tenure, which starts Nov. 1. The neutrality target, however, is unrealistic: It’s undermined…

Political parties of the far-right make unreliable, even disastrous, coalition partners. The history of governments that involve them, the latest of which has just collapsed in Italy, should be a warning to their mainstream rivals. The center-right Christian Democrats in the German state of…

Germany is on the brink of a recession. This isn’t happening because of any structural problems: US President Donald Trump’s trade wars are the main culprit. Still, Germany’s powerful industrial lobby now is openly questioning the government’s adherence to the famous schwarze Null, or zero budget…

Once the casualties from the El Paso mass shooting are added in, statistics show that since 9/11, more people have been killed in the US by far right terrorists (107) than by militants (104). The urge to try to fix this with regulatory measures is understandable, but it’s also worth looking at the…

Sandro Gozi, the former Italian minister now working for the French government, could be a man of the future – a politician for whom borders between European Union countries don’t exist. The populist leader of one of Italy’s governing parties has accused Gozi of betraying his homeland. That…