Commission warns against further delays in GSI project
Tensions are rising over the Greece-Cyprus electricity interconnector, the Great Sea Interconnector (GSI), after Cyprus distanced itself from the project and the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO) launched an investigation.
European prosecutor has not contacted Greece regarding GSI, says government spox
Government spokesperson Pavlos Marinakis said that the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO) has not contacted Greece regarding its probe into the Great Sea Interconnector (GSI), a planned subsea power cable linking Greece and Cyprus.
PM to unveil tax breaks as popularity dips
Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis will announce more than €1.5 billion in tax breaks and other handouts this weekend, officials said, as he seeks to halt a slide in popularity caused by a protracted cost of living crisis and corruption claims.
https://www.ekathimerini.com/politics/1279909/pm-to-unveil-tax-breaks-as-popularity-dips
Archbishop Damianos announces succession at Saint Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai
The decision to initiate the succession at the Holy Monastery of Saint Catherine on Mount Sinai was announced by Archbishop Damianos in a letter released on Thursday. As stated in the letter, he has informed the Greek government, and he has already discussed the issue with the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Church of Greece.
ATHEX: High turnover, but stocks end mixed
The Greek stock market remains in search of direction, as, after the significant gains on Wednesday on low turnover, trading volume increased considerably on Thursday but the picture on the board was mixed: The majority of stocks closed with losses, while the benchmark and the blue chip index ended up with negligible growth. Late on Friday Morningstar DBRS will issue its new report on Greece and its credit rating.
https://www.ekathimerini.com/economy/1279960/athex-high-turnover-but-stocks-end-mixed
KATHIMERINI: System upgrade: More air-traffic security and less delays
TA NEA: Big game regarding the power cable interconnecting Greece and Cyprus
EFIMERIDA TON SYNTAKTON: Tempest linked to the power cable interconnecting Greece and Cyprus
RIZOSPASTIS: Cretan Mafia: Rotten system, rotten state, rotten profits, rotten institutions
KONTRA NEWS: Greece ended up Europe’s Colombia
DIMOKRATIA: Judges “owned” by the mafia intervened to save a “family child”
NAFTEMPORIKI: “War” in international stock markets
DRIVING THE DAY: MANIFESTING PEACE
UKRAINE’S INEVITABILITY STRATEGY: There’s no sign that a ceasefire in Ukraine is coming anytime soon; no path to make it happen. But Kyiv and its allies are planning as though it’s an inevitability.
On the other side of the truce: Western powers are hammering out security guarantees, while Ukraine is barreling forward with its EU accession ambitions. At best, it’s prudent planning and manifesting, self-help style, for a desired future — at worst, it’s wishful thinking.
Kyiv’s 2030 vision: Ukraine will be ready to join the EU in 2030 — that was the message from Deputy Prime Minister for European Integration and chief trade negotiator Taras Kachka, speaking with my colleague Bartosz Brzeziński at a conference in Kyiv on Thursday, organized by farm lobby UCAB.
Target locked: Kachka, who replaced Kyiv’s former point person on EU accession Olha Stefanishyna in July, said even the EU’s biggest skeptics should no longer treat membership as hypothetical. “In the bigger picture, it’s simple: 2030 is the target. Whether we like it or not,” he said.
Lessons from 2004: He pointed to the 2004 enlargement, when Poland, Slovakia and Hungary adopted EU rules in just four years, noting the rest of the drawn-out process was “geopolitics.” Ukraine, he argued, has already cleared that hurdle with the EU’s decision to launch the accession talks. (Playbook thought bubble: Those countries probably aren’t the best examples to make your point …)
No exemptions: The task now is meeting Brussels’ rulebook, from strict farm standards to wider single-market requirements. “These are compulsory. It’s not about whether we accept them or not … We won’t ask for exemptions.” Today’s trade fights over grain or chicken quotas, he added, are just “a second or third Harry Potter volume” in a much longer saga of integration. That’s a touch less wizardry than his predecessor Stefanishyna, who promised Kyiv would have its EU homework finished by 2027.
Hungary holdout: Ukraine, Kachka argued, is “more advanced now than Poland or Slovakia were in the 1990s,” with 26 EU capitals already firmly behind enlargement. Only Budapest, he added with a wink, remains unconvinced. “But by 2030 we’ll also convince Hungary, and all will support our accession.”
Read more: Kachka tells Bartosz why the Mercosur accord is bad news for Ukraine, for Morning Agri subscribers.
WILLING TO SHELL OUT — “WHEN THE TIME COMES”: Twenty-six of Ukraine’s allies in the “coalition of the willing” are pledging operational and financial contributions to security guarantees for Kyiv if there’s a peace deal to end the war after a meeting in Paris Thursday, my colleagues Marion Solletty, Laura Kayali and Nette Nöstlinger report.
Macron’s half-full glass: “The U.S. were very clear,” French President Emmanuel Macron said after a call with U.S. President Donald Trump, “on their support and their willingness to be a part of security guarantees. There is no doubt about that.”
What there is doubt about: How far coalition countries will be willing to go. Poland and Romania, for example, are ruling out sending their own troops into Ukraine, but are willing to help with transport and logistics. And Finnish President Alexander Stubb, who was at the Paris meeting, told Finnish media: “We are not sending Finns to the war front in Ukraine. Finland will participate in one way or another when the time comes.”
ESTONIAN PRESIDENT’S HALF-EMPTY GLASS: As Trump contemplates drawing down forces from countries bordering Russia, countries like Estonia “have to be prepared for any scenario,” President Alar Karis told Playbook’s Nick Vinocur. That means “build[ing] up our own capacity,” he said — but eastern states aren’t the only ones who should worry. “Modern missiles can start from Moscow and end up in The Hague and Brussels in just a few minutes,” he said. Read the full interview.
Context: The Pentagon is currently reviewing its global force posture and is expected to unveil the results at the end of this month. Some 2,000 soldiers are stationed in the Baltics.
Fueling the pessimism: The FT reports that Pentagon officials told European diplomats last week that funding for programs that train and equip forces on the frontline of any conflict with Russia will be zeroed out.
SOTEU PREP AND SANCTIONS
CHEWING OVER THE YEAR AHEAD WITH VDL: European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is receiving the EU’s top envoys for a rentrée working lunch today at the Berlaymont, Camille Gijs writes in to report.
General rehearsal: The lunch, which happens every year, will shed light on the Commission’s priorities over the next few months and help von der Leyen brainstorm for her State of the European Union speech in Strasbourg on Sept. 10. That’s still being drafted and probably will be right up until Tuesday evening.
Likely agenda items: Ukraine and the EU’s readiness is top of the list. Diplomats also predicted that the EU’s trade deals with the U.S. and Mercosur, as well as competitiveness, simplification and the next seven-year budget, presented in July, would be discussed.
TALKING SANCTIONS WITH VP VANCE: On Thursday evening, the Commission president had a phone call with U.S. Vice President JD Vance to talk about “preserving a unified front on sanctions,” chief spokesperson Paula Pinho said on social platform X.
Working weekend: Preparations are still underway for the 19th sanctions package against Russia, with two diplomats telling POLITICO that “confessionals” — where groups of ambassadors share their views on what should be included — are expected to take place this weekend (though not fully confirmed yet). Von der Leyen had announced the EU executive would put the package forward in early September.
METSOLA MEETS KEY TRUMP ALLY: European Parliament President Roberta Metsola spoke with Mike Johnson, the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, at a conference in Ottawa on Thursday. In addition to European security, they discussed trade as a way to “increase prosperity and job creation on both sides of the Atlantic,” her office told Playbook. “In this context, the importance of reliable energy supply was specifically underlined.”
LISTEN UP — HAS EUROPE MISSED ITS MOMENT? Prepare for the political drama ahead in both Brussels and Paris in this week’s edition of the EU Confidential podcast. Clea Caulcutt has a chronicle of a death foretold ahead of a no-confidence vote for French Prime Minister François Bayrou’s government, while Nick Vinocur and Paul Dallison have their predictions — both substantive and silly — for von der Leyen’s challenging SOTEU address. Listen and subscribe to EU Confidential here.
GPS-GATE
FLIGHTS OF FANCY: The Kremlin infowars playbook: Flood the zone with so much contradictory information that no one knows what to believe anymore. Sit back and watch society molder in distrust.
Doing Putin’s job for him: The constant flip-flopping and dissembling about whether Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s plane was hit with Russian GPS jamming — and whether she was specifically targeted (arguably an act of war) or whether she just happened to get caught up in general interference — is creating exactly the confusion the Kremlin wants.
Long story short, the Commission — generally citing the Bulgarian government — has been sounding the alarm about “blatant interference” that forced von der Leyen’s plane to circle over Plovdiv, Bulgaria for an extra hour on Sunday before landing using, as the FT put it with a dramatic visual, “paper maps.” Intentionally or not, the narrative casts von der Leyen as a daring counterpoint to Putin, risking her life to visit the “frontline” countries on the border with Russia, acting as bait to the provocative Russian president.
Flip-flop … But as the drip drip drip of skepticism from experts emerged — including in this comprehensive piece by my colleagues Antoaneta Roussi, Tommaso Lecca and Mathieu Pollet — the Bulgarian government, especially, started to change its tune. On Thursday morning, Bulgarian Prime Minister Rosen Zhelyazkov told parliament that von der Leyen’s plane had not been disrupted but had only experienced a partial signal interruption, the kind typically seen in densely populated areas.
Don’t put words in my mouth: Commission spokesperson Arianna Podestà told reporters it was our fault if we got overexcited: “We have never been speaking of the targeting ourselves and I was very clear in saying that we had no information in this sense,” she said on Thursday at noon.
Flop-flip … By mid-afternoon, Sofia was back to the original talking point that possible GPS interference needed to be investigated. Antoaneta Roussi steadies us through the diziness caused by all these rhetorical somersaults.
What we know: Von der Leyen’s plane did report some sort of GPS disturbance over Plovdiv, and pilots did end up using an alternate electronic system to land — sans paper maps. And we also know that the war in Ukraine has wreaked general havoc on GPS systems in the region. We also know, as our airlines guru Tommaso Lecca reports for Mobility Pros this morning, public data show von der Leyen’s plane GPS was jammed while flying over the Baltics in a different part of the “frontlines” tour — but there hasn’t been a hubbub about that one.
What we have to imagine: Putin is chuckling as he watches both Brussels and a “frontline” EU capital undermine their own credibility — crying GPS-jamming wolf in a way that will make us a lot more skeptical should he decide to actually target an EU official with this sort of hybrid attack.
A NEW EU FOR ME AND FOR YOU
AI HITS EU PARLIAMENT’S TRANSLATION DEPT: The Parliament’s translation department, with a budget of around €15 million in 2024, is set for an overhaul that would reshuffle its structure, cut jobs, and facilitate the integration of new AI tools, according to an internal note seen by Max Griera. Parliament spokesperson Delphine Colard said that, while the institution currently does not use “AI-enhanced technologies” to translate texts, the aim of the reform is to get the service up to speed with new tech.
Big picture: The revamp will allow civil servant positions to be moved from the translation department to newly created ones as part of a bigger reshuffle imposed on the communications department in June, meant to reallocate resources to legislative work.
No bots in the booths — yet: Though helpful, tech tools “cannot replace human translators, who bring nuanced understanding of context and cultural intricacies,” Colard said.
SIMPLIFICATION PUSH COMES TO THE COMMISSION: The European Commission will be restructured to speed up decision making and cut out inefficiencies, with plans set to be developed within the next few months, according to an internal document seen by Gabriel Gavin. The “large-scale review” of the 32,000-employee executive is entering its final stages, while a more focused deep dive will be begun in earnest before the start of 2026.
Who’s in charge: Budget Commissioner Piotr Serafin has been tasked with overhauling the institution to help deal with “volatility as the new normal” and reduce both complexity “and, where possible, costs.” The reorganization plans were first reported by La Lettre.
A high-level external group will be set up this autumn to feed into that process and offer “benchmarking” with the outside world. Catherine Day, a former secretary-general of the Commission, has been tapped to chair this group, with the (not exactly streamlined) title of special adviser to the cabinet of budget, anti-fraud and public administration.
Taking on the bureaucracy: Some current directorate generals could end up being merged in the name of eliminating “unnecessary processes,” per two Commission officials. That’ll be more clear when recommendations are due at the end of next year. Read the details here.
IRAN
EX-US VEEP TO JOIN RALLY AGAINST IRANIAN REGIME: Former U.S. Vice President Mike Pence is expected to join crowds of protesters in Brussels on Saturday calling for the overthrow of Iran’s theocratic leadership and a re-imposition of harsh sanctions over Tehran’s nuclear program.
Formers out in force: Pence is expected to join former Belgian Prime Minister and MEP Guy Verhofstadt, former speaker of the U.K. House of Commons John Bercow and ex-U.S. member of Congress Patrick Kennedy at the demonstration, according to the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), the advocacy group organizing the protest.
Snapback rally: Organizers said they expect “tens of thousands” of people to join the rally, which will call for an end to a wave of executions, recognizing “the Iranian people’s right to overthrow” the regime, and the re-imposition of harsh sanctions against Iran.
Ramping up pressure: The rally comes a few weeks before the expiration of a deadline set by the so-called E3 countries — France, Germany, the United Kingdom — after which they will seek to re-impose harsh global sanctions against Iran. While all three countries have stated their intention to re-impose the sanctions, France’s foreign minister said last week that the “door of diplomacy” remained open to Iran to avoid such a move.
IN OTHER NEWS
ISRAEL SLAMS RIBERA: Israel’s foreign ministry accused Commission Executive Vice President Teresa Ribera of being a “mouthpiece for Hamas propaganda” after she described the country’s actions in Gaza as genocide Thursday. In a post on X last night, the ministry said Ribera’s claim was “baseless” and “reckless” and that she should instead criticize Hamas for refusing to disarm and release the remaining Israeli hostages.
THE COST OF EUROPE’S NEW INDUSTRIAL ARMS RACE: Campaigners in Georgia say their local environment is being devastated by the mining of minerals that are crucial to Europe’s green energy transition. POLITICO has this must-read deep dive.
WONDER WHAT THE NOBEL COMMITTEE WILL THINK OF THIS: White House to rebrand Pentagon the Department of War.