PM Mitsotakis: Justice reforms strengthen rule of law and modernize infrastructure
Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis attended an event on Wednesday organized by the Ministry of Justice focusing on reforms in the Greek judicial system.
No fireworks in Syriza leadership candidates’ debate
The four candidates for the leadership of left-wing Syriza took part Wednesday in a debate largely devoid of drama on state TV ERT.
https://www.ekathimerini.com/news/1254011/no-fireworks-in-syriza-leadership-candidates-debate
SYRIZA might soon lose 3 more MPs
SYRIZA could soon lose its position as the main opposition party, as reports suggest that three more MPs are considering leaving. If this happens, PASOK could become the main opposition party in the Greek parliament.
https://www.ekathimerini.com/politics/1254001/syriza-might-soon-lose-3-more-mps
Arms bust linked to past guerrilla groups
Greek police have uncovered a significant arms cache hidden in a storage unit in the Pangrati district of Athens, raising concerns about the potential resurgence of urban guerrilla activity.
https://www.ekathimerini.com/news/1254022/arms-bust-linked-to-past-guerrilla-groups
Criminal charges filed against Olympiakos executives in soccer crime case
Judicial authorities have reportedly filed criminal charges against the president and four senior officials of Olympiakos soccer club in connection with a major case involving 167 defendants accused of being part of a criminal organization in Greek soccer. The activities of this organization have also been linked to the death of a police officer late last year.
ATHEX: Rebound for bourse after Tuesday drop
The Greek bourse’s benchmark came off Tuesday’s three-and-a-half-month lows on Wednesday to show a significant rebound, even if that was on the lowest turnover of the last nine sessions. The day’s gains snapped a five-day losing streak, led by non-banking stocks. Thursday will see third-quarter results publications by a number of blue chips, while Friday is the day of the Fitch Ratings report on the Greek credit rating.
https://www.ekathimerini.com/economy/1254003/athex-rebound-for-bourse-after-tuesday-drop
KATHIMERINI: Old guerrilla group behind the arms cache revealed
TA NEA: Turks return to the Aegean
EFIMERIDA TON SYNTAKTON: Railway: 70 km without safety certification
RIZOSPASTIS: Yesterday’s large strike marks the escalation of workers’ fight
KONTRA NEWS: PM Mitsotakis is in agony due to a possible new blow by former PM Karamanlis
DIMOKRATIA: Church of Crete expresses rage regarding Germany’s debts
NAFTEMPORIKI: Competition Commission is scanning 5 markets
DRIVING THE DAY: EU ECONOMIC WOES
SLOW AGONY OF EU TRADE TALKS, AS TRUMP TOOLS UP: Trade ministers from EU countries are meeting in Brussels this morning for sensitive talks about how to leverage the bloc’s economic influence amid Trump’s return to the White House and an escalating trade war with China.
But they’re lethargic and divided: As POLITICO trade reporter Camille Gijs reports, some countries are frustrated about Brussels’ glacial pace of inking fresh trade deals. The ministers’ first discussion today will bring even more internal tensions to the surface when the conversation turns to a major impending EU trade agreement with a group of South American countries known as Mercosur.
Macron-Scholz relationship low: Germany, with its export-oriented economy, is pushing to strike the deal after 25 years of seemingly never-ending negotiations. Protectionist France, fretting about the political fallout from angry farmers, is waging an 11th-hour campaign to block it.
Steak out: Even French supermarket chain Carrefour joined the Mercosur-bashing, announcing it won’t sell meat from those countries in solidarity with the agri industry.
Hungary floats mini deals: While the EU’s trade talks with countries like India, Mexico and the Philippines hit a wall, Hungary has been pitching an idea: strike little deals instead of full-blown agreements, and be prepared to leave the table, Camille and Barbara Moens report.
Another sign of the division: Hungary’s provocative Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó is chairing today’s talks. His country has controversial trade and business ties with China and Russia.
Trump’s shadow looms large: The other prickly question ministers will pore over will be what to do about those 10-to-20 percent tariffs Trump has threatened to slap on EU goods entering the U.S.
Charm offensive or preemptive strike? There are two possible strategies. The EU has already tried to butter up Trump’s incoming administration by offering to buy more U.S. liquified natural gas. But it is also tooling up with a bristling armory of trade weapons it can deploy if and when Trump launches the first assault on EU trade flows. Koen Verhelst has a fun guide to trade wonk weaponry here.
Lutnick, meet Šefčovič: Trump’s new top trade dude is billionaire Wall Street financier Howard Lutnick, whose role as commerce secretary gives him sway over U.S. trade policy. He’s defended Trump’s plans for tariffs — although some experts argue he won’t be overly excitable and will use them more as a bargaining chip. Lutnick’s EU counterpart will be incoming Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič.
What about Bob? Trump’s decision to appoint Lutnick raises questions about what role (if any) Robert Lighthizer, the president-elect’s first-term trade representative, might play in the incoming administration. POLITICO’s Gavin Bade has more on that.
NEW COMMISSION
DELIVERING ON EXPECTATIONS: TheEuropean Parliament reached a deal last night that saved the skins of the seven commissioners who had been waiting for over a week to know their fates. In the end, bar a little wobble, it went as we predicted it would at the start of the month. For the first time this century, not a single commissioner candidate was deemed inadequate for the job. Here is the write-up by Max Griera.
Bottom line: It’s now all but guaranteed that the European Commission will kick off on Dec. 1, and the EU can get a head start of almost two months on the new Trump administration — although the February German election could gum things up.
How the deal happened: Wednesday was a flurry of activity in Parliament. There were hushed meetings between the European People’s Party (EPP), Renew Europe and Socialists and Democrats (S&D). Von der Leyen showed up. Parliament President Roberta Metsola made a risky call to pressure negotiators by scheduling final meetings before a deal was done. At one particularly tense moment, Playbook spotted S&D leader Iratxe García having a cigarette break.
One final jump-scare: Even when it was over, it wasn’t fully over, Max writes. Hours of haggling ensued over the wording of the official nomination letters MEPs have to write. The EPP pushed to include a sentence in Teresa Ribera’s demanding she commit to resign if she gets into legal problems over her ministry’s management of Valencia’s flood disaster. The Socialists and Renew tacked on some final words to Raffaele Fitto’s letter saying they don’t endorse von der Leyen’s choice to make him a vice president. But it was all just words.
Here’s Playbook’s analysis of the winners and losers from the confirmation process …
WINNERS
1) All 26 commissioners — Especially Viktor Orbán’s pick, Olivér Várhelyi, who just months ago no one in Brussels assumed would be safe; and Sweden’s Jessika Roswall (from the EPP) who passed first time despite tanking her hearing. The commissioners stayed blandly on message and rarely, if ever, committed to more than their official lines allowed.
2) Ursula von der Leyen — The commissioners she fought for in the summer are all through, her power structure is untouched and her second era as Commission prez can start in fewer than 10 days (though it should have started already).
3) Manfred Weber — The EPP chief out-negotiated his opponents in Parliament by throwing his political weight around, got more than a dozen EPP commissioners home and dry, protected Italy’s Fitto, made few concessions and helped the big Spanish delegation breathing down his neck score some points back home.
4) Giorgia Meloni — The Italian prime minister celebrated getting a job upgrade for Italy’s Executive Vice President Fitto, and can persuasively argue that her hard-right European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) is now firmly in the EU policy-making mainstream and can be a trusted voting partner.
5) Valérie Hayer — OK, this one is a bit of a stretch, but ultimately Renew is such a diminished force (as the fifth-largest group in Parliament), the fact Hayer’s team was even at the table and secured two executive vice presidents is a win for them. Then again, they also swallowed the appointment of Fitto as an EVP.
LOSERS
1) The European Parliament — The power-hungry institution took a rare step back by failing to flex its muscle. The hearings were poorly structured (partly due to tinkering by the EPP) and sometimes descended into domestic point-scoring. It bodes ill for parliamentary scrutiny over the new commissioners, and in five years the hearings will be taken less seriously.
2) Iratxe García — The Socialists’ leader went public with red lines including no “structured cooperation” with the ECR, no senior position for Fitto and a commissioner role for Nicolas Schmit. In the end, García buckled on all those demands — and worse, Spanish PM Pedro Sánchez failed to stand up for his group leader. It wasn’t all bad. By going toe-to-toe with the EPP, García secured the second highest-ranking position in the Commission for Teresa Ribera, another top role (and a new title) for Roxana Mînzatu, and thinned out the Hungarian commissioner’s duties. But some members of the Socialists group are rebelling.
3) Bas Eickhout and Terry Reintke — The Greens’ leaders took the credit for von der Leyen’s reelection in July. Months later, though, they’re back out in the cold, having been excluded from the talks by the EPP, S&D and Renew — and they’re fuming about it. With no Green commissioner, they had little purchase in the negotiations. It’s hard to escape the notion they got played by the EPP.
BRAND NEW EU FACE-SAVING MECHANISM: Reading the official communications from Renew and the Socialists, you’d be forgiven for thinking they won a far-reaching concession in exchange for OKing the EPP’s demands. A two-page statement agreed by the EPP, S&D and Renew “accomplished what seemed impossible days ago,” García wrote.
Sleight of hand: What the Socialists called a “platform cooperation statement” and Renew boldly described as a “coalition agreement,” is really just a useful off-ramp to bring eight days of gridlock to an end.
Viva Venezuela: S&D and Renew demanded that the EPP commit to sticking with the centrist mainstream, rather than turning to the right-wing parties in Parliament, Max writes in this definitive piece. But the agreement falls short of that, leaving the EPP free to swing to both the left and right to find majorities. “If they think that with this document we will never look to the right in plenary anymore, they are wrong,” one EPP lawmaker told Playbook last night.
Dead on arrival: “This coalition agreement is a joke. If the S&D gave up everything for this it’s the worst deal ever,” said Daniel Freund, a German Green MEP. Added one EU diplomat last night, referring to the wintery weather blowing through Brussels: “It may have less staying power than this snow.”
Last word: “When an ECR commissioner gets approved by the EPP and the S&D it gives some hope to those who are more devoted to policy than to political scarecrows,” said Sebastião Bugalho, a Portuguese EPP member. “It’s a positive sign for the next five years — I hope.”
HUNGARY
EU FUNDS FREEZE BITES HUNGARIAN UNIVERSITIES: Many Hungarian universities are suffering from being excluded from the EU-funded Erasmus and Horizon programs, academic officials told a conference organized by the Liszt Institute and EuroAtlantic Consulting in Brussels Wednesday.
Think of the students! In early 2023, the Commission blocked 21 Hungarian universities (representing two-thirds of all students) from signing new EU grants because they were in the hands of public foundations filled with people from Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party, Csongor Körömi reports. Although Budapest has proposed a law banning ministers, MPs and mayors from top positions in these trusts, the Commission said the new rules are not convincing enough.
Orbán’s view: Rodrigo Ballester, Hungary’s ministerial commissioner, said the case has hurt the EU’s reputation more than his country’s universities, because “whether you like it or not, there’s a world beyond Erasmus.”
Not fun-ding: But uni officials say they’re facing a backlash from European colleagues, and their reputation has been “seriously damaged” even at universities that are still eligible for EU funding. “This is a long-term damage, the effects of which we are still feeling,” said János Levendovszky, vice rector of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics.
GREEN MEP SLAMS “INACTION” ON HUNGARY: Meanwhile, at a different event held in the European Parliament on Wednesday, Tineke Strik, the MEP in charge of a slow-burning procedure to strip Hungary of certain EU membership rights, slammed “the inaction of the EU, [doing] too little, too late, and allowing Orbán during 14 years to end up at this level.”
Strik-ly speaking: “The member states still adopt a kind of non-interference attitude toward each other, and for that reason we don’t have any action on the Article 7 procedure for these six years that we have it pending,” said Strik, a Dutch Green MEP. “I find it a real disgrace and especially at this moment where Orbán is isolated by everyone, where everyone is seeing how much he is aligning with … external actors [who are] threatening us.”
Bóka’s 180-degree turn: Former Hungarian liberal MEP István Szent-Iványi, who was presenting a new book on “the dismantling of the rule of law in Hungary” at the event, recalled having János Bóka as his parliamentary assistant between 2004 to 2009. Bóka would go on to become Hungary’s EU affairs minister, and play a leading role in the ongoing Hungarian presidency of the Council of the EU.
Bóka juniors: “At that time he was a committed liberal,” Szent-Iványi said. He was not surprised about Bóka’s career trajectory though, he said, saying it was logical after he joined the ministry of justice. “I knew about that, that he has changed his mind. We have still [got] a good personal relationship .. but … [on politics] we have very different views on many issues.”
RUSSIAN WAR
THE KREMLIN’S PEACE TERMS: Russian President Vladimir Putin is “open to discussing a Ukraine cease-fire deal with Donald Trump” but would insist that Moscow gets to keep the territory it has captured and that Ukraine does not join NATO, Reuters reported, citing five sources with knowledge of the Kremlin’s thinking. Read the full story here.
What does Zelenskyy think? Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told Fox News in an interview that his country “cannot legally acknowledge any occupied territory of Ukraine as Russian,” in response to whether he was willing to cede land.
On Crimea: But Zelenskyy acknowledged that returning Crimea to Kyiv’s control would have to be done through diplomacy, because Ukraine could not accept the deaths of tens of thousands of its troops “for the sake of Crimea coming back.”
BIDEN’S UKRAINE LEGACY: The Biden administration plans to cancel $4.65 billion in debt owed by Ukraine, Bloomberg reports, as the outgoing president seeks to bolster support for Kyiv ahead of the transition of power to Trump.
HOW’S THAT GAS DECOUPLING GOING? The West is looking to Azerbaijan to help end reliance on Russian fossil fuels, striking a string of natural gas agreements even during this year’s COP29 climate change talks. But as my colleague Gabriel Gavin reports, the deals could ultimately benefit Russia.
IN OTHER NEWS
POLISH PRESIDENCY TO FOCUS ON SECURITY: Security will be the central policy theme when Poland takes the helm of the EU presidency starting Jan. 1 next year, a government spokesperson confirmed to Playbook. Magdalena Sobkowiak-Czarnecka, Poland’s undersecretary of state for European Union affairs, briefed members of the European Economic and Social Committee in Warsaw this week that the six-month presidency will focus on seven types of security: external and military, energy, economic, food and climate, health and information.
YIKES: A weak growth outlook and looming U.S. tariffs on European imports threaten to reignite concerns over debt sustainability in the eurozone, the European Central Bank warned on Wednesday.
COULD THE DEBT BRAKE GO THE WAY OF SCHOLZ? Johanna Treeck reports that Germany’s impending election is raising big questions about the future of the country’s most talismanic symbol of its tight public finances: the “debt brake.”
TWO TOP STORIES …
1) Ketrin Jochecová and Sarah Wheaton have spoken with Roma women who were sterilized without their consent in what is now the Czech Republic between 1966 and 2012. Read the important story here.
2) Britain’s Oxford University is on the hunt for a new figurehead. And it has a China dilemma. Bonus track: Listen to our Power Play podcast on the topic here.