As Euro 2024 begins, a cloud of political turmoil hangs over the continent

This week, millions of football/soccer (delete depending on where you are reading this) fans turned their attention to Munich for the beginning of Euro 2024.

It’s a huge moment for our sports team who, following an epic preview of every team, and all 622 players in the tournament, are gearing up for match reports and analysis, live minute-by-minute coverage of every match, incisive columns, a daily podcast and newsletter and lots more. You can find it all on our dedicated Euro 2024 site. According to our experts, France and Germany are favourites.

It’s an exciting moment but it comes at a fascinating and, for many, deeply worrying time for Germany as a whole. At the beginning of the week, our reporters and columnists across Europe were busy covering the results in this year’s elections to the EU’s European parliament, with the radical far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) coming second in the polls. The party’s success was mirrored elsewhere across Europe, with far-right parties topping the polls in Italy and Austria – and threatening to pull the entire bloc rightwards.

Our sportswriter Jonathan Liew wrote sharply about the rise of the far right presenting a cloud above what should be a glorious sporting occasion. “In a way,” Jonathan wrote, “Germany’s current existential angst resembles a kind of Brexit without Brexit, a wholesale reimagination of what it is to be German, a vacuum of confidence and self into which all kinds of malign actors have poured.”

The 2006 World Cup, the last major men’s tournament in Germany, is now known as the Sommermärchen – the summer fairytale. It was a time when Germans were able to shake off the shackles of 20th-century history and embrace flying the flag, as our European culture editor, Philip Oltermann, explained in his state of the nation piece. But it wasn’t like that for everyone – Guardian Europe columnist Fatma Aydemir wrote a fascinating piece on Thursday about her own polar opposite experience.

In France, the scale of the victory by Marine Le Pen’s National Rally led a humbled Emmanuel Macron to gamble on a snap parliamentary election. In Paris, too, what was to have been a celebratory summer of sport crowned by an Olympics that Macron hoped would celebrate modern France will now be underscored by political and societal turmoil. At the Guardian, we have never seen sport as separate from society or politics, but part of it. Yet that won’t stop us also covering the action on the pitch or the track with passion and precision. Just as sport often reflects the messy realities of life, it can also be a soaring escape from it.

After the headlines, my pick of the best stories of the week.

The Guardian’s UK political editor, Pippa Crerar, revealed that Rishi Sunak’s closest parliamentary aide placed a £100 bet on a July election three days before the prime minister named the date. Craig Williams, who is standing again to be an MP in Montgomeryshire, reluctantly admitted placing a “flutter” on Wednesday evening – then on Thursday apologised for a “huge error of judgment”.

Meanwhile, economics editor Larry Elliott analysed the sums in both the Conservatives’ and Labour’s manifestos, to see if they all added up. Ian Martin, a writer on the classic BBC political sitcom The Thick of It, authored a very funny piece on Rishi Sunak’s comedic moments, and found him to be “the great improv comic of our age”. Former prime minister Gordon Brown wrote about the shocking normalisation of food banks in the first in our series on emblems of 14 years of Tory Britain, and Rupert Neate’s First Edition newsletter with the pollster John Curtice was essential reading on the breakdown of trust in our politicians. (Sign up here to get First Edition every weekday).

The European elections were always going to be an important moment in the EU’s political life, but no one expected their aftermath to be quite so explosive. Our team of European correspondents charted every moment of a gripping night in which the centre held in Brussels but the far right made gains in several countries and the Greens lost about a quarter of their seats. .

Last Friday’s episode of Today in Focus, with Emma Graham-Harrison and host Michael Safi, was truly unmissable. With Gaza on the brink of famine, Emma spoke to protesters who were trying to stop aid getting into the strip, and to those who had risked their lives to ensure aid would get through. Emma worked incredibly hard to gain the trust of local people on both sides to understand their perspectives.

The US politics team launched American psyche, a new series exploring the complex psycho-social dynamics shaping the terrain on which the presidential election is being fought.

Guardian Australia’s political editor, Karen Middleton, spoke with the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, on the Full Story podcast about pro-Palestine protests outside electorate offices around Australia; the Indigenous voice referendum, eight months on; and the opposition party’s decision to ditch the 2030 emissions target.

We published a major investigation showing how drug cartels are forcing migrant children to work as foot soldiers in Europe’s booming cocaine trade. The Guardian’s Mark Townsend, Ana Lucía González Paz, Lucy Swan and Harvey Symons reported and visualised a trail linking hundreds of vulnerable African minors with ruthless gangs.

And finally, I loved reading Steve Rose on the “sad, stupid” rise of the sigma male, a new form of toxic masculinity; Alexis Petridis’s joyous five-star review of Taylor Swift’s UK leg of her Eras tour; and the story of Naomi and Deej, who, after first meeting online via a Guardian Blind date during the pandemic, are the latest Blind date couple to get married.

One more thing … England fans who are optimistic about the Euros, the strong possibility of a Labour government … maybe it’s inevitable that the best new music of the year in the UK has a strong 90s flavour, too. Mentored by Goldie and claiming Britpop as an inspiration, the brilliant Bradford-born Nia Archives recently told Saturday magazine of her part in the resurgent popularity of jungle and drum and bass – and her hopes it will act as a unifying force in a filter bubble era. And, given all the news above, we could all do with some of that. Our music critic Alexis Petridis called her debut album Silence Is Loud “impressive and bold”, and she will surely be a breakout star of the summer festival season across Europe – including a peaktime slot at Glastonbury later this month.

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