At the 11th hour of the European elections, the Romanian Social Democrats have just put out an “anti-fraud guide”, reports a Cotidianul headline. The paper warns, however, that “this guide can also be a very good source of inspiration for would-be fraudsters”. Designed to put party members on their guard, the manual describes no fewer than 18 different types of electoral fraud. That includes the “Crunch”, a commotion staged to block access to a polling station where another party is ahead in the polls; the “Morning” involves stuffing ballot boxes at dawn with 50-odd pre-stamped ballots; “Baksheesh” entails precisely that, bribing voters to pick the “right” party; and, last but not least, “Stalin”, in which certain ballots are nonchalantly shifted from one pile to another when nobody is looking.
The leader of Greece’s leftist alliance SYRIZA is the new bright hope of Greek politics. Steering a course between pragmatism and the rhetoric of class warfare, he has unsettled Berlin, and not just those who back Angela Merkel's austerity policies. 
Europe’s economic woes have forced us to try to understand the secret Olympian world of global finance. But now that we pay more attention to bond yields and stability mechanisms, isn’t it clear that the experts up on their lofty peaks don’t know what’s going on either? 
This year’s Eurovision Song Contest is hosted by Azerbaijan, a country that is far from being a model democracy. An Estonian journalist takes a critical look at the deferential treatment enjoyed by the regime in Baku.