Young people today face rents that keep climbing, a pension system they'll pay into for decades with little certainty it will be there for them, and traditional parties that leave little room for new voices. So naturally, they want to find a way to actually make a difference and change their own conditions, as the traditional leadership structures let them down. Lukas Sieper, a German MEP, did just that.

Twenty active party members, 600 Instagram followers, three election posters and a €2,500 campaign budget for all of Germany. By every measure, he should not have won a seat in the European Parliament. But he did, by building his own party, the Party of Progress, after years of hitting a wall inside the CDU.

His story comes at a tense moment. In Saxony-Anhalt, the far-right AfD just won the largest share of the vote, while Germany's traditional parties keep losing ground.

Lukas and Samuel discuss how to navigate this landscape as a young person trying to make a difference, and debate the big questions: if the old parties won't make room for new voices, and the main alternative rising in their place is extremist, where do young people who believe in democracy go? Is starting your own party the only way in? And can the political centre change fast enough to stop protest votes from turning into real power?

Lukas argues that Germany's big traditional parties are "fundamentally fucked," and that democracy is still alive precisely because people like him can still win. They also get into dealing with the far right inside the Parliament, being courted by every political group on arrival, and who the GOAT (greatest of all time) rapper is.

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(Since we recorded, the AfD has won its first-ever state parliament presidency in Saxony-Anhalt, with votes from outside its own ranks, and its candidate Ulrich Siegmund plans to run for state premier in December.)

One in five European children report mental health problems, and those on social media three hours a day show roughly double the rates of anxiety and depression. Social media is clearly not good for our children.

At the State of the Union this week, von der Leyen finally announced the EU Kids Act: no social media under 13, and parent-chaperoned "mini accounts" to 15.

For older teens, it also promises "safe design." And that raises a bigger question: shouldn't those default protections shield the rest of us too? Because we're dealing with the consequences of these platforms as well – we lose sleep, lose more than 30 days a year on average to scrolling, and carry higher rates of anxiety and depression due to these platforms.

So how does the EU's new approach line up with that reality? Is it helping the kids, all of us, or neither?

To find out, Samuel sits down with Jean Cattan, former Secretary-General of France's Conseil national du numérique, who was advising the French government at the exact moment its own bid to bar under-15s collapsed. He has since become one of the sharpest voices in Europe arguing that the whole age-limit debate misses the bigger picture.

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For two years European streets filled in outrage and public opinion shifted, and yet Europe is no more serious on Israel today than it was when the protests began. At least, that is how it seems from the outside.

So where does Europe’s paralysis on Israel come from? Has the EU budged at all on Israel? And if so, why is there not greater action? Is it historical guilt, its trade dependency, the unanimity trap, the gravitational pull of Berlin? And who are Europe's elected officials actually trying to represent?

To find out, Samuel sits down with MEP Catarina Vieira, who sits on the Trade Committee, the Human Rights Committee, and the Delegation for relations with Israel. She holds a vantage point onto the conversations the rest of us don't see.

They get into why the EU can fund Palestinian life one day and watch it bombed the next, how the shock of October 7th shaped the Parliament's first year of debate, what ELNET – the self-styled "AIPAC of Europe" – actually buys with its trips and galas, why the EU’s association agreement's human-rights clause has gone two years unenforced, and how Germany and the centre right became the elephant in the room.

Comments, concerns or suggestions: samuel.dempsey@europeancorrespondent.com

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Recorded early September 8th, before the news broke that the UK, France, and Canada – backed by nine other European governments – announced coordinated bans on trade with illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank.