Can the EU make Poland recognise gay marriage?
If the winter blues have got you down, these two things might lift your spirit: (1) the Christmas section at your local Lidl, and (2) the news that a same-sex marriage in one EU country must be recognised in another. But how this ruling is going to be implemented across the bloc—especially in the countries where there are no civil partnership rights—remains to be seen. This week, we unpack the manifold questions raised by this big-step-in-the-right-direction decision. We also examine the Louvre’s controversial new ticketing policy. Is giving cheaper tickets to Europeans a form of discrimination?
Our guest this week is Angéla Kóczé, chair of the Romani Studies programme at Central European University. Angéla recently wrote a compelling article for Verfassungsblog in response to a troubling new Hungarian law. We caught up with her to discuss Europe’s long history of anti-Roma discrimination, including decades of forcible sterilisation of Roma women.
ICYMI: We’ve launched a newsletter! Get a fuller picture of who’s had a good week and who’s had a bad week in Europe each Friday in GOOD WEEK BAD WEEK. You can sign up at europeanspodcast.substack.com.
Also, if you’ve been looking for an extra incentive to support The Europeans: on December 15 at 2030 CET, we'll be recording the final episode of the year on Zoom at a very fun live show just for our supporters. We'd love to have you with us!
Inspiration Station recommendations:
The 2022 film Woman on the Roof
The very cool website Mapping Diversity, which reveals just how many streets in your European city were named after women (spoiler: probably very few)
Other resources for this episode:
“How significant was an EU ruling on same-sex marriage?” – RTÉ, 30 November 2025
“Poland will implement EU court order to recognise same-sex marriages, says justice minister” – Notes from Poland, 26 November, 2025
“L’établissement public du musée du Louvre et son fonds de dotation” - French auditors’ report on the Louvre’s finances, 6 November, 2025
“Contrat à 15 000 euros, commanditaires « à l’accent slave », van blanc… Les secrets du casse du siècle au Louvre” - the juiciest French reporting on the investigation into the Louvre heist. Le Parisien, 25 November, 2025
“Multilingualism protects against accelerated aging in cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses of 27 European countries” – Nature Aging, 10 November 2025
Producer
Katz Laszlo and Morgan Childs
Mixing and mastering
Wojciech Oleksiak
EDITORIAL SUPPORT
Wojciech Oleksiak
Music
Jim Barne and Mariska Martina
Thanks for listening! If you enjoy our podcast, we'd love it if you'd consider chipping in a few bucks a month (many currencies are available).
You can also help new listeners find the show by leaving us a review on Apple or giving us five stars on Spotify
This podcast was brought to you in cooperation with Euranet Plus, the leading radio network for EU news.