1. 🚗 EUROPE’S AUTOMAKERS ARE BEGGING BRUSSELS TO STOP

Europe’s auto industry is in crisis. German automakers, including Volkswagen, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz, headed to Brussels to renew lobbying against the EU’s suffocating CO2 emissions rules that would crush their industry.

The numbers tell the story: Automakers warned that Germany’s auto sector alone could lose 225,000 total jobs by 2035 if more bureaucratic red tape is added and competitiveness does not improve. Under current proposals, fleet emissions from new cars in 2035 must be 90 percent lower than 2021 levels. At the same time, renewable fuels remain costly, unreliable, and scarce.

While Brussels forces European automakers into an EV-only future, Chinese competitors like BYD are flooding the market, car sales haven’t recovered to pre-pandemic levels, and European factories sit underused. As one supplier association leader put it: “We need to create the flexibility in the policy environment to react to what the market actually is able to accept.”

This is an industry being crushed by ideological mandates it cannot meet, and it is now shouting that from the rooftops in Brussels. The EU’s environmental extremism doesn’t just cost jobs; it hands market share to China on a silver platter.

2. 🇫🇷 FRENCH FARMERS ARE BACK

Farmers in France are taking their tractors to the streets again, and this time, they’re targeting the rising costs of fuel. Dozens of farmers descended on Lyon on Monday, blockading a key TotalEnergies refinery loading point and marching on the Rhône prefecture, demanding relief from soaring energy costs. The price of agricultural non-road diesel has skyrocketed from €0.90 to €1.70 per litre: a 70 percent increase in just four months.

Rhône’s Rural Coordination leader Bertrand Molinier said: “We are here to raise the voice of farmers who can no longer do so economically. We have had an increase in costs, but sales prices are not keeping up.”

France’s leadership has failed its farmers, refusing to deliver the structural changes the agricultural community is demanding. As the head of the region’s union said, farmers have reached their “limit” and want “structural changes, not small measures.” The people who feed France deserve better than a government that ignores them.

🇬🇧 BRITAIN BACK TO BRUSSELS?

In another display of political surrender, the British government introduced legislation to formally strengthen ties between the United Kingdom and the European Union. The so-called “European Partnership Bill” is designed to implement EU agreements with Britain “now and in the future.”

Prime Minister Keir Starmer is under fire after Labour suffered heavy losses in Scottish, Welsh, and local English elections last week and is responding to political failure not by listening to voters, but by rushing back into Brussels’ arms. His own government has already admitted that Britain must “align with EU regulations by default” in key industries.

His own government has already admitted that Britain must “align with EU regulations by default” in key industries.

Britain voted for Brexit to take back control. Now, Starmer is engineering regulatory alignment with the EU, locking British businesses and consumers into Brussels’ rule book, without membership, without a vote, and without a voice. Britain will be subject to EU laws without having any say in how they are made.

This is the EU’s reach made manifest. You don’t even have to be a member anymore. Brussels’ regulatory tentacles extend far beyond its borders, and the people of Britain will pay the price.