PM Mitsotakis: Greater flexibility needed to provide targeted support measures for vulnerable households and businesses
Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, according to reports, told the European Council that the conclusions did not reflect the urgency of the situation created by rising energy prices. He said greater flexibility was needed within the existing fiscal framework to provide targeted, tailored and temporary support measures for vulnerable households and businesses. He added that these measures should be financed from the portion of increased public revenues generated by higher inflation, while ensuring fiscal sustainability. “We must bridge the gap between the need to act and our ability to do so,” he stressed. He also underlined the urgent need to review key aspects of the Emissions Trading System (ETS). While it should remain a cornerstone of the EU’s decarbonisation strategy, it could not continue to operate as if circumstances had remained unchanged since the system was adopted, he noted.
PASOK’s Androulakis: Europe needs to advance its strategic autonomy in defence, foreign policy, production and energy
Main opposition PASOK leader Nikos Androulakis took part in the pre-summit meeting of the Party of European Socialists in Brussels on Thursday morning. In statements following the meeting, he said that the latest Trump-Putin agreement was not a peace initiative, but rather “an example of transactional diplomacy at the expense of the peoples of Europe”. He added that Europe needed to advance its strategic autonomy in defence, foreign policy, production and energy. Referring to the issues to be discussed at the European Council meeting on Thursday afternoon and Friday, Androulakis said that it also needed to address the energy crisis, which was having a serious impact on both the cost of living and production costs. He called for joint decisions and initiatives to tackle the effects that were making everyday life more difficult for millions of European citizens, as well as for coordinated action to reduce production costs, warning that thousands of businesses were becoming unviable.
Heating oil subsidy of €0.40/lt
Heating oil is as of Thursday available at a rate of around €1.55 per liter, following a 40-cent subsidy by the government and refineries, which absorbs part of the energy price increases. The price is significantly more expensive than last year, when it was €1.12 nationwide, but it is also significantly lower than the €1.73 in April, which was the government’s target. Additional assistance is planned for the lowest income groups through an increase in the heating subsidy, which could further lower the price for beneficiaries to up to €1.35/lt.
https://www.ekathimerini.com/economy/1318243/heating-oil-subsidy-of-e0-40-lt
Greece submits Draft Budgetary Plan for 2027 to European Commission
Greece’s Draft Budgetary Plan (DBP) for 2027 was submitted to the European Commission by the General Accounting Office of the State within the prescribed deadlines on Thursday. According to the Ministry of National Economy & Finance, the DBP confirms the fiscal figures for 2026 and 2027, as set out in the draft 2027 budget submitted to Parliament’s Standing Committee on Economic Affairs on October 5. Growth is projected at 2% in 2026 and 2.3% in 2027, while public debt is expected to drop from 146.1% of GDP in 2025 to 136.7% in 2026 and 128.8% in 2027. This also reinforces, before the international community, Greece’s steady fiscal course in the midst of global geopolitical uncertainty. It also confirms the Greek economy’s continuing growth momentum, which significantly outpaces the European Union’s average growth rate.
ATHEX: Sellers have a field day on bourse
The Euronext Athens (ATHEX) general index closed Thursday at 2,582.10 points, shedding 0.83% from Wednesday’s 2,603.70 points. The large-cap FTSE-25 index contracted 0.97% to end at 6,602.94 points, though mid-caps expanded 0.51%.
https://www.ekathimerini.com/economy/1318356/athex-sellers-have-a-field-day-on-bourse
KATHIMERINI: Controls on AirBnB safety controls will take pace remotely
TA NEA: Drill between Greece, Cyprus, France and Italy within the area where the energy cable will be placed sends a clear message
EFIMERIDA TON SYNTAKTON: EU Summit: No action regarding energy
RIZOSPASTIS: Second explosion at Motor Oil. The new crime is shouting out: it’s either their profits or our lives
KONTRA NEWS: 23,8%: Free fall for New Democracy as voters turn away
DIMOKRATIA: Energy Minister Papastavrou is being exposed after the ousting of Guilfoyle
NAFTEMPORIKI: Greece will no longer be one of the 3 the most indebted EU countries
DRIVING THE DAY
COMPETING FOR THE SPOTLIGHT: Volodymyr Zelenskyy faces an uphill battle to keep Ukraine at the front of EU leaders’ minds at today’s summit in Brussels.
The EU has been Kyiv’s staunchest backer throughout its full-scale war with Russia. But mounting concerns about energy prices at home and an impasse over the bloc’s budget risk drowning out everything else, including Ukraine’s fight for survival.
Zelenskyy will remind leaders what’s at stake for his country when he addresses them this morning, but it’ll be a tall order to shift their attention from other priorities, a European leader who was granted anonymity due to the sensitivity of the discussions told Playbook.
Is that a snub? It’s a sign of how crowded the EU’s list of priorities has become that, for the first time since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine was not the top item on the summit agenda. That honor went to the EU’s budget.
Underscoring Kyiv’s desperation, the Ukrainian president arrived in Brussels a day earlier than scheduled to meet with leaders bilaterally, including French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday night. He will also hold his first meeting with Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar on Friday morning.
There’s also unease among some EU leaders over how Zelenskyy has handled his fraught relationship with U.S. President Donald Trump, an EU diplomat said, adding that they felt Zelenskyy had been “not helpful” by hitting out at Trump in public statements.
In a briefing just before 1 a.m., Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever predicted Zelenskyy would “probably look everybody straight in the eye and say thank you for the €90 billion but that money is going to run out because war is a very costly thing.” The Ukrainian president would want to know if the “European family” would come through or not, he added.
Rally round the flag: A second EU diplomat said it was not up to leaders to criticize a president who is fighting an existential war, adding it was unlikely they would actually reprimand him. And a third said Trump’s deal with Moscow to import Russian diesel “probably may help” Zelenskyy by encouraging European solidarity.
One thing rising up the agenda: The fraught question of what to do with Russia’s frozen financial assets. Sweden, Finland and Germany want to revisit the issue, although EU countries have balked at a U.S. proposal to unfreeze some of the assets and transfer them to a vehicle controlled by Washington to use as leverage in peace talks.
The stakes don’t get much higher … Kyiv is heading into its fifth wartime winter, with its energy infrastructure under constant Russian bombardment and a $35 billion budget shortfall next year, according to IMF projections. Gabrielius Landsbergis, Lithuania’s former foreign minister, diagnosed the situation as “extremely grim,” telling Playbook that “everything falls on European shoulders now.”
“The Europeans have been kicking the can down the road,” Landsbergis said, referring to their efforts to sustain Ukraine. “And the proverbial can is hurling back at us.”
Follow all the action from Day 2 of the summit in our live blog.
BIG AND BREAKING
MEANWHILE, ON THE FRONT LINES: Ukraine is running critically low on U.S.-made interceptor missiles, leaving it more vulnerable to Russian ballistic missile attacks, per CNN and the Washington Post.
FROM THE TOP: The order to limit Ukraine’s use of the vital Starshield satellite service came from the White House, Reuters reported overnight, citing American and Western officials.
PLAN C: The U.S. is considering easing restrictions on Russian and Iranian “shadow fleet” tankers in its latest bid to relieve pressure on diesel prices, the FT reports.
OUTDATED: Big tech bosses are questioning whether the EU’s two-year-old AI law is still fit for purpose amid growing concerns about the technology’s risks to humanity, Pieter Haeck and Mathieu Pollet report.
DAY 1 RECAP
ROUGH DAY FOR COSTA: If you went to bed before Day 1 of the summit wrapped up late last night, we’ve got you covered on the two biggest fights: a drawn-out brawl over the bloc’s carbon pricing scheme, and a less explosive exchange over the EU’s stalled €2 trillion budget.
Budget battle rolls on: What was expected to be the most contentious topic of the day, the EU’s seven-year budget, saw no big breakthroughs or fireworks. The odds of leaders in the two deeply entrenched rival camps reaching a deal by the end of the year look vanishingly slim, an EU diplomat said, even though Emmanuel Macron gave Costa a boost by urging fellow leaders not to delay. Spain’s election in November throws a further spanner in the works.
That doesn’t bode well: In a sign of how dire the state of negotiations is, Cyprus’ President Nikos Christodoulides told Playbook in an interview during a break in the talks that leaders should consider an unprecedented three- or four-year budget.
“We’re discussing the budget in 2034 and now we’re in 2026,” Christodoulides said, arguing that a shorter budget might be easier for some member countries to swallow. “Why not open the political discussion?” he argued.
ETS WTF: While the budget may have been a bit of a nothingburger, the bloc’s energy policy — specifically its Emissions Trading System (ETS) — ended up almost derailing the whole evening, with Italy and Central European countries clashing with the Nordics and others over the wording of the summit’s conclusions.
Ouch: An EU diplomat couldn’t contain their frustration, telling me that European Council President António Costa had allowed the talks to go “off the rails” … was behaving “worse than Charles Michel,” his predecessor as Council president … and hadn’t “read the room.”
A second EU diplomat agreed there was “huge frustration” with Costa, saying the Council president forced leaders to spend “half the day in a drafting exercise” and hadn’t managed the discussion properly.
The ETS talks went on so long that a planned press conference with Costa and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was canceled — an embarrassing flub for Costa, who has mostly sailed through his presidency as a well-liked consensus-builder until now. Read our full story on that here.
20-SECOND PLAYBOOK PRIMER
The College of Europe’s office in Tirana was set on fire during protests in Albania, but what is the college and where is it based? It’s a training ground for EU civil servants and the world’s oldest postgraduate institute of European studies, offering one-year master’s programs. Its main base is in Bruges, where it has been since 1950. It opened another campus in Natolin, a neighborhood of Warsaw, in 1992 and one in Tirana in 2024.
TALK TO PLAYBOOK: WhatsApp us on +32 491 050629 and listen from 7 a.m. to hear if we give you a shout-out.
I DECLARE A …
BRIEFING WAR: The European People’s Party’s battle over its vice chairs is getting ugly. As 12 candidates jostle for the 10 spots, rival camps are furiously briefing the media against each other to sway the vote, which is set for Oct. 20, Max Griera reports.
Boiling over: Despite center-right EPP chief Manfred Weber’s attempts to keep the fighting in-house, five people with knowledge of the race said it is getting feisty. On Thursday evening, POLITICO received an anonymous email purportedly sent by vice chair candidate Andrzej Halicki, apparently urging colleagues to reject Portugal’s Sebastião Bugalho’s bid.
But POLITICO hasn’t been able to verify the identity of the sender, Halicki’s office denied he ever sent such an email, and six of the supposed recipients POLITICO spoke to said they had not seen it. Bugalho’s office said he “will obviously not comment on forged emails.”
The whole affair reveals how heated the race for the powerful posts has become after Weber failed to persuade any candidates to withdraw. The EPP chief tried to roll over the incumbents, but Portugal’s switch from Lídia Pereira to Bugalho threw off the mandatory gender balance, while surprise bids from Eszter Lakos and Danuše Nerudová added fuel to the fire.
3 MORE THINGS GETTING US TALKING
BETTER TOGETHER: The U.K. is ready to work with the EU to counter China’s carmaking dominance, a trade minister told my colleagues — signaling London could back Brussels’ tariffs on EV imports to get access to Made in Europe.
TRUMP’S WANING SHOCK VALUE: EU leaders are increasingly immune to the American president’s antics, Jamie Dettner explains.
LOOK AWAY NOW: Paul Dallison’s latest Declassified column considers what Brussels might look like if Marine Le Pen gets her way.
DASHBOARD
Day 2 of the EU leaders’ meeting in Brussels will include talks on migration, during which return hubs, a crisis framework to respond to sudden mass movements and a bolstered role for border agency Frontex are bound to come up. They’re tense topics — even as irregular border crossings are down and returns are up.
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