Stockholm’s Trojan horse

Swedish politics has become a peculiar chessboard where nobody seems to know who is playing the game and who is simply moving the furniture. Magdalena Andersson has once again been asked by Speaker Andreas Norlén to explore the possibility of forming a government. Her second attempt begins on October 5, and she has until October 12 to report back. The arithmetic is brutally simple: the centre-left bloc holds 176 seats, while the right-wing bloc holds 173. Yet three seats can sometimes be more useless than three hundred when the key players refuse to sit at the same table.

To an outsider, this looks like democratic chess. To anyone watching Swedish politics closely, it looks more like a high-wire balancing act in which the right and far-right have discovered an exceptionally convenient piece: the Centre Party.

The Centre Party is not the Sweden Democrats. It does not speak the same political language, and it has explicitly rejected Ulf Kristersson as its preferred candidate for prime minister while identifying Andersson as its most likely partner. But this is precisely what makes its position so compelling. The Centre Party can help place Andersson in the driver's seat while simultaneously demanding that the Social Democrats accept strict limits on how far she can turn the wheel.

 

And that is where the real battle lies. Nobody seriously doubts that a Social Democratic government would want to spend more on schools, healthcare, culture, and other public services. These are the comfortable parts of the argument. Everyone can stand outside a hospital, school, or library and promise increased funding. Politicians love initiatives that make for a good photo opportunity.

The tougher question is what happens to the political architecture built over recent years. Sweden has spent years overhauling its migration policy, criminal justice system, policing, surveillance, citizenship rules, and the broader relationship between the state and those who arrived from abroad. Some of these reforms were presented as necessary responses to genuine challenges. Others were deliberately designed to harden the political atmosphere. Together, they have shifted the boundaries of what was once considered mainstream Swedish politics.

Calling every one of these measures “anti-Swedish” would be as intellectually lazy as pretending that none of them altered the country. The point is precisely that they did. And that is where the Centre Party functions as a Trojan horse, not because it secretly belongs to the right, but because its leverage can preserve much of the ideological ground conquered by the right, even while a different administration occupies the offices.

That is the sleight of hand. A Social Democratic prime minister can walk into Rosenbad. Ministers can announce fresh investments. The government can speak of solidarity, schools, hospitals, and culture. But if the price of parliamentary survival is accepting the fundamental direction set by the previous government on migration, law and order, and state authority, then what exactly has changed?

The colour of the administration? The furniture? The tone of the press conference?

This is the uncomfortable truth facing Andersson. Securing the largest bloc is not the same as winning the political argument. Sweden's election yielded a narrow parliamentary majority for the four-party centre-left grouping, but the internal contradictions are stark. The Centre Party refuses to govern alongside the Left Party, while the Left Party insists it will not simply offer external support without securing tangible policy concessions.

Thus, Sweden may well end up with a government that wears the badge of the left while operating under compromises largely drafted by the right. That is not necessarily illegitimate, it is the nature of parliamentary democracy. But it is precisely why voters ought to look past the colour of the flags and start reading the small print.

Ultimately, politics is not about who is handed the keys to the building. It is about what they are permitted to rebuild once inside. Right now, the right and far-right have every reason to smile, their greatest triumph may not be keeping Andersson out but letting her in while keeping …their furniture firmly in place.

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The Aegean mirage

For decades, centuries and definitely going back to WWI, the West has been selling the same comfortable fantasy about the Eastern Mediterranean, Greece and Turkey are difficult neighbours, NATO keeps them talking, diplomats keep the temperature down and therefore everything is under control. It is a beautiful fantasy. It is also becoming dangerously detached from reality.

Whenever Ankara raises the temperature, Athens is advised to remain calm. Whenever Turkish ambitions collide with Greek sovereignty, Greece is encouraged to show restraint. Whenever the Aegean becomes another theatre of strategic pressure, European diplomacy discovers its favourite word: dialogue.

 

Dialogue is wonderful. Unfortunately, it does not define maritime boundaries, defend sovereignty or limit strategic ambition. While everyone has been congratulating themselves on the Mediterranean’s supposedly calm waters, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been building something considerably more ambitious, a strategic network extending far beyond traditional Western alliances, deep into the Gulf and South Asia.

The emerging defence relationship involving Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan is not simply another diplomatic handshake. It is part of a broader Turkish effort to multiply its strategic options, cultivate regional partnerships and reduce dependence on any single geopolitical bloc.

This does not mean Turkey has abandoned NATO; that interpretation would be simplistic. The far more intriguing development is precisely the opposite: Ankara appears increasingly comfortable moving through several strategic worlds simultaneously.

NATO when NATO is useful. Regional partnerships when they are useful. Transactional diplomacy when that is useful. Strategic autonomy when nothing else will do.

And why shouldn't Turkey act this way? The West has spent years teaching its allies that permanent guarantees are rarely as permanent as they sound. Ankara has simply learned the lesson on its own terms.

Greece, however, is travelling in another direction. Athens has invested heavily in Europe, international law, multilateral institutions, and the rules-based international order. Its assumption of the rotating presidency of the UN Security Council temporarily places Greece at the centre of global diplomacy, reinforcing the image of a nation seeking security through institutions rather than geopolitical improvisation.

And here lies the uncomfortable contradiction; Greece is asked, occasionally pressured, to believe in international rules while Turkey demonstrates just how much room there is for a powerful regional state to operate outside them.

The Aegean, therefore, cannot be reduced to another quarrel over islands, territorial waters, continental shelves, or energy resources. Those disputes are real but beneath them lies a much larger confrontation between two fundamentally different visions for the Eastern Mediterranean.

Athens wants a region governed by European principles and international law. Ankara wants the freedom to define its strategic environment through power, bilateral arrangements, military capability, and regional influence.

These visions can coexist for a time, but they cannot be assumed to be compatible forever. This is where the Western approach becomes increasingly absurd: Turkey is "too important" to confront. Turkey controls geography. Turkey matters to NATO. Turkey matters for migration. Turkey matters in the Black Sea. Turkey matters to the Middle East.

Fine. Turkey matters.

But Greece matters too. Europe cannot endlessly demand that Greece be the adult in the room while treating Turkish strategic experimentation as merely sophisticated diplomacy. Athens should show restraint. Athens should avoid provocation. Athens should compromise. Athens should understand Ankara's security concerns. But where is the equivalent expectation of Ankara?

A security system cannot survive when restraint is demanded from one side while strategic flexibility is celebrated on the other.

Greece has every right to insist that international law actually means something. Defending sovereignty does not become nationalism simply because somebody across the water dislikes the argument.

This distinction is vital, as NATO’s southern flank is beginning to look less like a single strategic structure and more like two different geopolitical philosophies temporarily occupying the same map.

There may still be one alliance, and there may still be one NATO headquarters. Yet underneath the institutional rhetoric, Athens and Ankara are preparing for vastly different futures. Greece is tying its security to Europe, international law, and multilateral diplomacy. Turkey is constructing a wider, more transactional regional network where alliances overlap, interests shift, and strategic autonomy is treated as an objective in itself.

The West can continue pretending that these trajectories are perfectly compatible; Greece should not. The Aegean is not an empty blue space between two NATO flags. It is Europe's south-eastern frontier, a strategic corridor connecting the continent with the Black Sea and the Middle East, where sovereignty, energy, migration, and military power collide.

The dangerous European habit of treating Greek sovereignty as an inconvenient detail whenever Turkey becomes strategically useful must end.

The Aegean does not need another sentimental speech about friendship between neighbours. It needs Europe to understand that peace is not maintained by endlessly asking one side to swallow every strategic challenge in the name of stability. Peace requires boundaries. Peace requires rules. Peace requires consequences when those rules are broken.

Above all, peace requires recognising that Greece is not NATO's inconvenient southern relative waiting for permission to defend its interests. Greece is Europe. The Aegean is Europe.

The real Mediterranean illusion is not that Greece and Turkey disagree, everybody knows they do. The illusion is that disagreement automatically guarantees stability. It does not. The waters may still look calm from Brussels, but beneath them, the tectonic plates are shifting. Sooner or later, Europe will have to decide whether it wants to keep admiring the surface or finally look underneath.

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The algorithmic empire

 

The United Nations has discovered artificial intelligence. The machines, unfortunately, discovered the United Nations some time ago. That is the uncomfortable joke behind the grand discussions now surrounding AI governance. World leaders gather in New York, pronounce the words security, responsibility, humanity, and international cooperation, and then return to governments that still struggle to regulate yesterday’s technology. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is moving at a speed that makes diplomatic procedure look almost geological.

The problem is not that the UN is discussing AI, it absolutely must. The problem is that much of the conversation risks being conducted through the mental architecture of the twentieth century: identify the dangerous technology, establish rules, create monitoring mechanisms, and hope sovereign states behave themselves. It worked, imperfectly, for nuclear weapons. AI is something else entirely.

A nuclear weapon requires extraordinary physical infrastructure. AI requires computing power, energy, data, talent, chips, and access to networks. These resources are not distributed remotely equally.

The UN itself has acknowledged this enormous capacity gap. Its current discussions include proposals for stronger access to infrastructure, skills, data, and technology, whilst a recent UN report highlighted fragmented financing for AI capacity-building in developing countries. The first Global Dialogue on AI Governance was deliberately designed to bring the Global South into the conversation.

That is welcome. But participation is not the same thing as power. A country can have a seat at the diplomatic table and still have no semiconductor industry, no hyperscale data centres, inadequate electricity grids, limited research capacity, and little influence over the companies developing the most powerful models.

This is where the AI debate becomes uncomfortable. The great technological powers are not merely developing products; they are building the infrastructure upon which everyone else may eventually depend. The danger is therefore not only that AI might become autonomous, malicious, or uncontrollable. The quieter danger is dependency.

The Global South could become the customer, the data source, the testing ground, and eventually the labour market of an AI economy designed somewhere else. That would be an old colonial pattern wearing a new digital suit.

This is why the UN cannot allow AI governance to become another exclusive conversation among governments, technology corporations, and the countries that possess the money to build the machines. António Guterres has warned that power is increasingly shifting towards a handful of private corporations and individuals, whilst global institutions still reflect an older distribution of power. That observation goes directly to the heart of the AI problem.

There is also a delicious contradiction here. Some governments argue that global regulation would interfere with innovation. Others demand stronger international rules. Technology companies themselves increasingly acknowledge that no single country or company can manage the technology alone. At the same time, the companies possessing the greatest technical capacity remain overwhelmingly concentrated in a small number of states.

So who exactly is writing the rules? And for whom?

AI governance cannot simply become nuclear non-proliferation with better software. The objective should not merely be preventing catastrophic misuse by powerful states; it must also prevent the creation of a permanent technological hierarchy in which a handful of countries own the intelligence and everybody else rents it.

The UN therefore needs to talk about infrastructure with the same seriousness with which it talks about ethics. Electricity, broadband, data centres, computing capacity, education, open research, local-language systems, and technical skills are not peripheral development issues, they are the foundations of technological sovereignty.

Otherwise, we may succeed spectacularly in regulating the future whilst leaving most of humanity without any meaningful ownership of it. That would not be global governance. It would simply be global dependency with a United Nations logo on the paperwork. The machines will not care who writes the rules. People should.

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Mitsotakis diplomacy of damage control

Damage control is not diplomacy. It is what governments do after diplomacy has already failed. That distinction matters in the increasingly complicated relationship between Greece and Turkey, where every carefully staged handshake risks becoming another exercise in managing yesterday’s problem rather than preventing tomorrow’s crisis. And this is precisely why Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ non-schedule meeting with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in New York deserves more scrutiny than the choreography of another stand-in photo.

The disturbing part is not that the Greek PM is meeting Erdoğan. Of course he should. Neighbours with a history of disputes, competing interests and overlapping ambitions have to talk. The disturbing part is the apparent absence of a sufficiently defined agenda. Diplomacy without an agenda can easily become diplomacy by improvisation and improvisation is rarely a sensible strategy when dealing with a leader who understands leverage considerably better than he understands restraint.

Erdoğan has spent years constructing Turkey as a regional power whose influence stretches far beyond its borders. He has combined military power, economic relationships, migration, energy, diplomacy and geography into a foreign-policy toolbox that gives Ankara options. Turkey does not need every option to be used. The mere existence of those options creates leverage.

Greece, by contrast, too often appears trapped in a reactive diplomatic rhythm; tension rises, European partners become nervous, Washington encourages dialogue, Athens seeks de-escalation, Ankara signals flexibility, a meeting is arranged and everybody congratulates themselves on having prevented a crisis. Then the cycle begins again.

That is not a strategy. It is a fire brigade. The problem with permanent damage control is that it gradually changes the balance between the parties. The side that creates uncertainty acquires bargaining power; the side constantly trying to restore stability becomes responsible for maintaining it. Eventually, stability itself becomes the concession.

This is where Mitsotakis needs to be particularly careful and sadly he literally …fails. There is nothing inherently wrong with dialogue. Indeed, refusing dialogue between Greece and Turkey would be reckless. But dialogue has value only when it serves a clearly defined diplomatic purpose. A meeting should establish what can be discussed, what cannot be traded away, what constitutes progress and what happens when commitments are ignored. Otherwise the meeting risks becoming another ritual in which the existence of dialogue is mistaken for the achievement of diplomacy.

Erdoğan understands political theatre. He understands the symbolism of presidential meetings, the language of strategic patience and the usefulness of appearing reasonable while keeping multiple avenues of pressure open. Calling him a regional superpower may be premature; calling Turkey an increasingly consequential regional power is simply recognising reality. Ankara wants influence and it has repeatedly demonstrated that it is prepared to pursue it.

That does not make Turkey an enemy. Nor does it make Erdoğan an inscrutable mastermind with a secret plan behind every curtain. But it does mean that Greek diplomacy should stop behaving as though good intentions automatically produce balanced negotiations.

Athens needs its own leverage. That means European solidarity cannot remain a ceremonial phrase. It means alliances must be converted into practical diplomatic capital. It means Greece needs clearly articulated red lines, but also clearly articulated areas where cooperation with Turkey is possible. And above all, it means Greece should enter negotiations knowing precisely what it wants, not merely hoping to prevent what it fears.

There is a dangerous psychological trap in diplomacy: believing that because nothing exploded today, something was achieved. Nothing exploding is not necessarily progress.

A successful Greek-Turkish relationship cannot be built on endless emergency management, carefully worded communiqués and photographs from meetings whose substance disappears before the aircraft lands.

Mitsotakis can meet Erdoğan in New York. He should talk to him. But Athens should not confuse access with influence, conversation with negotiation, or calm with resolution.

Diplomacy is not the art of making every crisis disappear from tomorrow’s newspapers. It is the art of ensuring that the next crisis begins with fewer advantages for the other side. That requires an agenda. And, more importantly, it requires a strategy.

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