This World

After Brexit: The Battle for Europe (2017x2)

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The European Union faces the biggest challenge in its 60-year history with the rise of populist eurosceptic movements across the continent. As Britain prepares to begin the process of withdrawing from the EU, the BBC's Europe Editor Katya Adler asks whether the Union itself can survive. For BBC Two's award-winning This World strand, Katya Adler travels across the continent, from France, Italy, Hungary to Germany, meeting leading populist politicians who now pose a major threat to the EU establishment. She also meets ordinary voters who feel angry and left behind after years of Eurozone turmoil and the international migrant crisis. The film begins in Sicily, where Katya has full backstage access to the annual political rally of Italy's populist Five Star Movement. Travelling on to Rome she talks with the pro-European reformist Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, in a candid interview. Over the course of the film Katya charts the collision course between these two forces, resulting in Renzi's resignation and a major victory for Five Star. Across the continent - from Italy to France, where the Front National's Marine Le Pen is now in contention for presidency, to Hungary, where the football-loving Prime Minister Viktor Orban is launching his own counter-revolution against Brussels - the film looks at how populist forces are challenging the European Union like never before. Back in Brussels, Katya meets some of the EU's top eurocrats and politicians, including Martin Schulz, the outgoing President of the European Parliament and Guy Verhofstadt, a former Prime Minister of Belgium and the man charged with negotiating Brexit on behalf of the European Parliament. Can this 60 year-old project survive, or will it be swept away by a populist revolution?