Europe

Hungary’s new government, led by Péter Magyar, has put forward a constitutional amendment that would limit prime ministers to a maximum of eight years in office, in effect barring Viktor Orbán from returning to the role.

The draft amendment was submitted on Wednesday, just over a week after the new government took office. It marked Magyar and his Tisza party’s first step in dismantling a constitution that was unilaterally rewritten and amended more than a dozen times as Orbán and his Fidesz party worked to turn Hungary into what they called a “petri dish for illiberalism”.

Accoladed director Andrey Zvyagintsev has sent a direct message to Vladimir Putin urging him to start listening to the Russian people and end the “senseless” war in Ukraine, continuing a war of words between Russia’s most revered living film-maker and the Kremlin that started at the Cannes film festival awards ceremony over the weekend.

Accepting the Grand Prix for his new film Minotaur on the French Riviera on Saturday night, Zvyagintsev had appealed to Putin to “stop this butchery […] the whole world is waiting for this.”

Protests in Albania over a proposed luxury resort backed by Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, are set to intensify after opponents rejected an offer from the country’s prime minister “to discuss solutions”.

Thousands took to the streets of Tirana for a third straight day on Wednesday, some of them brandishing inflatable flamingos in a nod to feared environmental damage, amid mounting calls for the project to be blocked.

Protests are also planned for the south of the country, where groundwork on the $1.6bn (£1.19bn) complex recently began in an area long seen as one of the Mediterranean’s most environmentally sensitive.

“From start to finish there has been a total lack of transparency,” said Aleksandr Trajce, executive director of the country’s leading conservation group, the Protection and Preservation of the Natural Environment in Albania (PPNEA). “We have seen no public consultation or public documentation regarding permits, and so now what we are saying is, if they remove the bulldozers, remove the fence and restore the habitats to what they were, then we can start talking.”

Canada and France are to open diplomatic consulates in the capital of Greenland on Friday, showing support for their Nato ally Denmark and the Arctic island after US efforts to secure control of the semi-autonomous Danish territory.

Tens of thousands of pupils across Germany are expected to boycott the classroom and take to the streets in a nationwide protest organisers say is to stop the government’s rearmament policy turning young people into “cannon fodder”.

Despite threats from teachers’ associations and education ministries, which have said anyone who demonstrates during school hours could risk penalties and even expulsion, organisers say they expect the number of participants at Friday’s school strike to be at least as high as the estimated 50,000 who attended each of the first two.