Emergency services on high alert after 6.1 magnitude quake off Crete
Emergency services were on high alert in Crete on Thursday after a 6.1 magnitude quake hit off the Greek island, causing tremors felt across Turkey and Israel. The Fire Service said it has not received any calls for assistance so far nor reports of any serious property damage.
FM calls for unhindered aid for Gaza in call with Palestinian PM
Unhindered and large-scale assistance remains essential in order to address the humanitarian crisis and alleviate the suffering of civilians in Gaza, Foreign George Gerapetritis has told Palestinian Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Mohammad Mustafa.
Androulakis: The government’s attitude towards the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is offensive
The dramatic events in Gaza, the responsibilities of the international community and the attitude of the government, which he accused of not adopting a position, dominated an interview given by main opposition PASOK-Movement for Change leader Nikos Androulakis to SKAI radio on Wednesday.
Mitsotakis visits Health Ministry to discuss ESY modernization
Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis visited the Ministry of Health on Wednesday to discuss the modernization plan for the National Health System (ESY) with Health Minister Adonis Georgiadis. The plan focuses on strengthening medical staff, upgrading infrastructure and implementing a digital transformation, all aimed at enhancing the quality and efficiency of healthcare services.
ATHEX: Autonomous course for local bourse
Despite the decline on Wall Street and concerns about further violence in the Middle East, the Greek stock market remained on its growth course for another session on Wednesday, taking its benchmark to another 15-year high. A host of blue chips insisted on adding to their recent gains and rallied in the latter half of the session, peaking in the closing auctions, unlike PPC, whose first-quarter financial results announcement led to a drop.
https://www.ekathimerini.com/economy/1270415/athex-autonomous-course-for-local-bourse
KATHIMERINI: Block for water-consuming farming
TA NEA: Games with land assets
EFIMERIDA TON SYNTAKTON: The government has blood on its hands regarding the genocide in Gaza
RIZOSPASTIS: Stop now the massacre in Gaza! Rally today outside the Israeli embassy
KONTRA NEWS: European district attorney sweeps the Ministry of Agriculture
DIMOKRATIA: Turkey entered the EU armament program
NAFTEMPORIKI: Overhaul regarding wealth origin declarations in the tax office
GRIM NEWS TO WAKE UP TO: Two Israeli Embassy staffers in Washington were shot dead in the early hours of this morning, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said in a social media post. A spokesperson for the Israeli Embassy said the people were shot “at close range while attending a Jewish event” at the Capital Jewish Museum, CNN reports.
MEANWHILE, IN THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT: Accusations of physical and verbal aggression flew between Swedish EPP lawmaker Alice Teodorescu and an unnamed staffer from Swedish left-wing party Vänsterpartiet. The altercation appears to have been related to a debate about Gaza held Wednesday.
Fingers pointed: Teodorescu’s party says the staffer was at fault; Vänsterpartiet claims it was the MEP who was the aggressor. Both parties have said they’ve filed complaints to the Parliament, and the police have also reportedly been notified.
G’DAY. I’m Karl Mathiesen and it’s Thursday morning. Sarah Wheaton will see out the week.
DRIVING THE DAY: SOCIALISTS IN THE WILDERNESS
LOOKING FOR ANSWERS: The center left were largely bystanders on Sunday’s super day of European democracy. Or worse. In Portugal, the recently mighty Socialist Party (PS) now has the same number of seats as far-right Chega. In Brussels and beyond, an uncomfortable post-mortem is raising more questions than answers.
Left out: In presidential elections in Romania and Poland, the candidates belonging to the Party of European Socialists (PES) family (supposedly Europe’s second-mightiest political force) didn’t make the top two runoff. In Portugal, voters hammered the hapless PS, which lost votes in almost every region in the country for the second election in a row.
Soul searching: “The recent results are not encouraging,” said Victor Negrescu, a vice president of the Socialists and Democrats (S&D) grouping that the PS is a member of in the European Parliament. Negrescu is an MEP from Romania, where his party leader resigned this month after its presidential candidate crashed out in third. “It is clear that we have to reconnect with people’s daily struggles and expectations: rising inequality, the cost of living, insecurity,” Negrescu said.
Costa living crisis: Things haven’t exactly gone well for the PS since former leader António Costa swapped Lisbon for the airy trappings of the European Council. But his failure to groom a successor and tackle real economic pain, while also stoking uncontrolled tourism amid a spiraling housing crisis, laid the rails for this week’s defeat, my colleague Aitor Hernández-Morales said in a voice note from the Portuguese capital.
Then … As Chega rose in the polls since 2019, Costa’s government “lacked clear policy direction and largely operated in a caretaker mode,” and “his resignation was never clearly explained to the electorate,” said Nuno Garoupa, a professor at George Mason University and a renowned Portugal watcher.
Blame game 1: “The PS finds itself confronted with Costa’s legacy,” the opinion pages of Expresso howled.
NOT PANICKING … is PES Secretary-General Giacomo Filibeck. The crisis of social democrats is a perennial cycle “that we see always,” and then overcome. “We have a challenging situation to face,” he admits, “but we are conscious about it and ready to take measures for it.”
TBD: But what exactly the center left will do to “reconnect” is a matter for its congress in the fall.
Woke and chew gum: Filibeck pushed back against criticisms that Europe’s center left had become too embroiled in culture war issues and lost sight of voters’ economic concerns. “One thing doesn’t exclude the other. To recognize, acknowledge and respect civil rights everywhere in Europe does not imply that our social rights are becoming of less importance … I believe we will continue to fight for both.”
And don’t forget: “It’s not precisely fully correct or true that we lose everything, everywhere,” he said. “We won in Lithuania a couple of months ago.” (It was October, to be precise.)
Blame game 2: Filibeck reckons it’s the EPP that bears the responsibility for the blooming far-right vote in many European elections because in places like Sweden, Spain, Italy, Finland and the Netherlands “traditional center-right parties have decided to open up their doors to creating coalition with radical nationalist right-wing parties, breaking the firewall.”
We are the only ones who can beat the far right 1: “We really fear that the whole European project may be at stake here. And we feel that if it’s not us defending it, it’s gonna be hard for the project itself to survive,” said Filibeck.
IT’S ON EVERYONE’S MIND: POLITICO today carries a major interview with the EPP’s president, Manfred Weber, warning against this exact thing. European conservatives are buoyed by their recent electoral successes. But Weber says they should avoid the trap of their predecessors in the Weimar Republic, who rolled over for the Nazis.
Hitler’s handmaidens: “Having also my German history in mind with Weimar and the Nazi regime, then the real historic mistake was to give right-extreme politicians executive power, and that is for us the red line,” Weber tells Max Griera.
That’s a jab at … several national branches of the EPP which, as Filibeck points out, are already playing with fire.
We are the only ones who can beat the far right 2: Weber’s solution, unsurprisingly, is for everyone else in the center to do more or less what the EPP says. After the European election in 2024 delivered a rightward shift, other parties should support more conservative policies, he says: “There is no left-liberal majority anymore in this house and that must also be translated in politics.”
Just don’t mention … that the EPP itself gained exactly one seat in last year’s election.
FRANCE GOES HEAVY METAL
DON’T STOP NOW: Just days after Emmanuel Macron teamed up with Germany to light the cremation fires under Europe’s corporate due diligence law, the French president’s lieutenant in Brussels has issued a call for an even greater conflagration.
Slash and burn: In an exclusive chat with Playbook’s Nicholas Vinocur, France’s European Affairs Minister Benjamin Haddad said red-tape cutting should be extended to defense and the EU should stop working on the bloc’s 2040 climate target. “This is not the time to add complexity, but to see how we can make sure our companies are competitive on the international stage,” he said. “We have a window to act and we need to take it.”
Transport pun enthusiast klaxon: “The omnibus needs to become a TGV,” Haddad quipped.
Someone missed the memo: When we asked the environment ministry about this recently, a spokesperson told us: “France supports an ambitious 2040 target, and this is what we expect from the European Commission.”
ONE MORE REASON THE FRENCH ARE REVOLTING … against green regulation is the extraordinary advance of the yellow hats farmers movement — which is increasingly turning the French countryside on to the far right, and the protectionist trade politics of American President Donald Trump.
Read it now: Marion Solletty goes on maneuvers with “the army of the serfs.”
VDL’S GAZA PROBLEM
THE INFERNO WIDENS: AfterEU member countries set in motion a formal review of EU-Israel trade relations over the spiraling horror in Gaza, the pressure is increasing for the Commission — and its leader — to make some room for criticism alongside their staunch support of the Israeli government.
No let up: Last night in a rare press conference, Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to continue the war until the entire Gaza Strip was under military control, the BBC said.
No relief: Netanyahu said a new aid delivery system for Gaza, involving a “sterile zone” cleared of Hamas fighters, would be working within days, AP reported. The U.N. said none of the aid that has entered Gaza in recent days had actually reached Palestinians.
S&D gets personal: European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, one of Israel’s most unwavering supporters in Europe since the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack, came under direct fire from S&D leader Iratxe García during a debate on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza in Parliament on Wednesday. “How can the president of the European Commission remain silent in the face of a project of extermination and ethnic cleansing that is broadcast live, every day, from Gaza?” said García.
We’ve been here before: “Our response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine was forceful, swift and exemplary. And now, what is the value of international legality if it is only applied when it is convenient? Do we want the European Union to go down in history for repeating the mistakes of the international community in Rwanda and Srebrenica?” asked the S&D president.
This sounds like just the job for … the European commissioner for intergenerational fairness, youth, culture and sport: Eyebrows were raised in the Parliament by the choice to send Maltese Commissioner Glenn Micallef to the debate. An S&D official said they were “concerned and sadly surprised” that neither von der Leyen nor EU foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas were present. The Left called the decision to send the Commission’s “most junior” member a “clear insult to the European Parliament and to the gravity of the situation.”
Other stuff on: A spokesperson for the Commission said Kallas was unable to attend as she was at a summit with the African Union.
Diplomacy, Israel-style: Also on Wednesday, Kallas condemned the Israeli military for firing shots to warn a diplomatic delegation that included European representatives they were traveling in a restricted area. The Israeli military said it “regrets the inconvenience caused.”
RIGHT-WINGERS IN THE WILD
WHAT’S THE WAY TO A WOMAN’S HEART? Above, we took you inside the left-wing soul-searching going on in Brussels and beyond. For some insight into what the right-wingers are worried about, Playbook reporter Šejla Ahmatović dropped in on an event on women and conservatism on Wednesday evening, hosted by Hungarian state-funded right-wing think tank MCC Brussels.
Inside the Hotel Martin’s Brussels, just a stone’s throw from the European Commission’s Berlaymont building, four female speakers — including Patriots for Europe MEP Barbara Bonte — offered their take on why women are increasingly voting for leftist parties (and how to reverse the trend). Another agenda item: how to encourage conservative women to pursue careers.
This oughta do it: Bonte argued that child-rearing should be recognized as a “civic contribution” and subsidized by the state. She also called for womanhood and motherhood to be taught in schools, though by whom, the Belgian politician didn’t say. French far-right activist Alice Cordier said “conservative parties are not addressing women’s concerns,” and called for what she described as right-wing feminism.
That Insta life: Polish journalist Aleksandra Rybińska claimed that for today’s women, “life is a collection of experiences, an Instagram life.” As young women moved to cities to build careers, she said, “young men are frustrated because they can’t find a wife.” The men sitting next to your reporter and several others in the audience nodded in agreement.
Eggs and opposition: The room was full, the microphones worked, but the speeches had competition from outside. Around 80 anti-fascist demonstrators gathered at the hotel entrance, their chants clearly audible throughout the event. The protest was eventually dispersed — but not before the demonstrators hurled dozens of eggs at the building and the police guarding it.
IN OTHER NEWS
SANCTIONS FOREVER: Ukraine plans to pitch the EU next week on a new sanctions round that would include seizing Russian assets and bringing in sanctions for some buyers of Russian oil, Reuters reports.
From Trump’s lips to Europe’s ear: U.S. President Donald Trump told European leaders during their phone call on Monday that Vladimir Putin isn’t ready to end Russia’s war on Ukraine because he thinks he’s winning, the Wall Street Journal reports, citing three people familiar with the conversation.
LOOK WHO POPPED UP IN ROMANIA: European Parliament President Roberta Metsola continued her habit of being first in, best dressed, meeting Romania’s President-elect/EU Great Hope Nicușor Dan last night. She wrote on social media: “Together in Bucharest. Together for Europe. Together for Romania.” Ahead of the trip, Metsola said in a statement that she looked forward to traveling to Romania “at such an important moment for the country.”
The official reason for the visit is for Metsola to collect the Timișoara Award for European Values, a €30,000 prize doled out to international figures who promote Europe’s core values. (Though Metsola won’t be pocketing the cash, having asked for it to be added to next year’s award.)
IN TRUMP’S CLEAN ENERGY WAR, EUROPE AND CHINA COULD WIN: The U.S. president simply does not care that walking away from clean energy could present America’s competitors with a multibillion-dollar opportunity. That’s opening up a fundamental divide within Trump’s Republican Party over how to confront China. Read more here.
NO DEAL ON BIG DATA: Negotiators last night failed to reach a deal on new rules to speed up investigations of breaches of the EU’s GDP`R laws by tech companies. Ellen O’Regan reports EU countries and lawmakers couldn’t agree on the thorny topics of deadlines and judicial remedies.
NOR ON BIG PHARMA: Senior diplomats from EU countries also failed to reach an agreement on the capitals’ position on an overhaul of Europe’s pharmaceutical legislation.
8 EYES: Belgium, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Sweden and the Netherlands have joined forces to share intelligence, strengthen security and resilience as the bloc faces a growing number of military, hybrid, terrorist and criminal threats as well as foreign interference and manipulation, according a statement seen by our defense team and reporter Max Griera.
LATEST TRUMP APPEAL: The FT reports this morning that Brussels is considering extending tariff-free access for U.S. lobsters in its bid to see off Trump’s tariffs.
ICYMI — HUAWEI NAMES: Belgian authorities asked the European Parliament to lift the immunity of center-right Italian MEPs Fulvio Martusciello and Giusi Princi in relation to an investigation into a cash-for influence scandal connected to Chinese firm Huawei, Max Griera reports. That follows requests for Maltese Socialist Daniel Attard, Bulgarian liberal Nikola Minchev, and the EPP’s Salvatore De Meo, all of whom went public earlier this week to defend their innocence and vowed to collaborate with the Belgian authorities.