Europe’s Next Winter: Expensive, Dry, and Self‑Inflicted

European traders are already pricing in another brutal season. Winter power contracts for late 2026–early 2027 are trading more than 20 percent above next year’s benchmark, the highest winter premium since the 2022 energy crisis.

The signal is clear: markets expect tight supply and painful prices for households and industry.

The reasons are layered and ugly. Gas storage is lower than at this point before last winter, when Europe was still scrambling for alternatives to Russian pipeline gas.
At the same time, hydropower reservoirs are depleted after dry seasons in key regions like the Nordics, cutting into what used to be the continent’s “cheap battery.”

In countries like Germany and Italy, winter quarter contracts are rising faster than full‑year prices, a classic sign of fear about cold‑weather shortages.

Officially, Brussels calls this a “transition.” In practice, the EU has voted to phase out Russian LNG by the end of 2026 and pipeline gas by 2027, banned new Russian gas contracts and ordered existing ones wound down, while betting on global LNG, renewables and demand reduction to fill the gap.

When everything works — mild weather, full storage, no shocks in the Strait of Hormuz — the system just about holds. When water is low, gas is tight and new crises erupt, the price of virtue shows up directly in utility bills and factory closures.

The result is a slow‑burn de‑industrialization risk that even Brussels now admits in footnotes.

High and volatile energy prices, layered with green regulation and tighter emissions rules, are making whole sectors — chemicals, metals, paper, fertilizer — borderline unviable in Europe while the U.S., the Gulf and parts of Asia woo them with cheaper energy and subsidies.

Politicians sell this as climate leadership; for many European workers it feels more like being told to sacrifice their jobs so that their leaders can brag at conferences.

None of this changes the physics: the continent needs huge amounts of stable electricity and heat, and right now it’s entering winter with less cheap hydro, more expensive gas, and no real replacement for the Russian flows it chose to cut off.

The crisis wasn’t a one‑off spike in 2022 — it’s a new normal. Europe insisted it could fight Russia, decarbonize fast and keep energy affordable all at once. The coming winter looks like another reminder that, in the real world, you don’t get all three.

#europe #energyCrisis #gas #electricity #winter #warEconomy #fakeDemocracy

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🗳 The Right Counts Seats and Assigns Blame

Gilad Erdan says there will be “a major merger on the center-right before the election.” His intended partners are responding with the enthusiasm of people reading their names in a hostile takeover notice.

The Zionist Home–Reservists Party, led by Chili Tropper and Yoaz Hendel, called it strange that a party named “Unity” had focused on division since its creation. It said that if the job is branding every rival a leftist, Erdan has Netanyahu covered.

The numbers explain the panic.

A Kan News poll by Dudi Hasid gives Ofer Winter’s proposed list five seats if it includes journalist Netaly Shem Tov, activist Yoseph Haddad, and bereaved mother Lali Deri. But the new party would draw enough voters from Religious Zionism to push Bezalel Smotrich below the electoral threshold. The pro-Netanyahu bloc would fall from 51 seats to 50. Winter’s five seats would not expand the right; they would rearrange its losses.

Netanyahu’s answer appears to be political triage: attack Winter, ignore Erdan, and persuade Avi Maoz and Moshe Feiglin not to run. This is not a strategy for building a majority. It is an attempt to stop longtime allies from becoming statistical debris.

Erdan, meanwhile, is talking to Benny Gantz about a possible joint run. Kan reported that the two held preliminary talks, while Erdan has also met with Winter. For now, the parties are negotiating the same question in different rooms: who can merge without disappearing?

On the other side, Roy Folkman is reportedly weighing a return to politics after leaving Erdan’s camp and being approached by Gadi Eisenkot. Eisenkot’s new party has a different problem: it lacks parliamentary experience. Folkman chaired Moshe Kahlon’s Kulanu faction and knows how the Knesset works. A party built around a former army chief may now need a veteran legislator to explain the machinery.

Then there is the old score.
Eli Feldstein says Netanyahu excluded Itamar Ben-Gvir from the war cabinet at the start of the war after security officials warned him about the national security minister’s conduct. Ben-Gvir says he was excluded because Eisenkot and Gantz boycotted him. Two explanations for the same absence. Neither cancels the other.

And from Ra’am, a party routinely discussed as a potential coalition partner, MK Walid Taha says Israel is developing “an apartheid regime in the occupied Palestinian territories.”

The election has not started. The blocs are already negotiating their autopsies.

#Israel #Elections #Netanyahu #Erdan #Winter #Smotrich #Eisenkot #Knesset

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