PM Mitsotakis at the 3rd Ukraine-Southeast Europe Summit: Geopolitical and security situation in Europe makes enlargement imperative
Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis speaking on Wednesday at the plenary session of the 3rd Ukraine-Southeast Europe Summit, highlighted the importance of Greece’s initiative in hosting the first such summit on August 21, 2023.
Kasselakis remains in SYRIZA leadership race after committee vote
The SYRIZA disciplinary committee voted 8 to 6 not to exclude former president Stefanos Kasselakis from the leadership race. The majority decided to archive the case without further examination.
Androulakis-Doukas debate for PASOK leadership is cancelled
A plan for a televised debate between the two contenders for the leadership of PASOK-Movement for Change (KINAL) ahead of a second round of elections on Sunday (Oct. 13) fell through, according to an informal briefing by the party on Wednesday.
https://www.amna.gr/en/article/853965/Androulakis-Doukas-debate-for-PASOK-leadership-is-cancelled
Hatzidakis: The upgrade of the Athens Stock Exchange is excellent news for Greece
The upgrading of the Athens Stock Exchange by FTSE Russell with the aim of returning it to the category of developed markets is excellent news for Greece, the Minister of National Economy and Finance Kostis Hatzidakis pointed out in a statement, emphasising that “it is a result of the positive developments in the economy, the positive prospects that are opening up but also the specific successful moves of the government in the field of privatisations.”
Hellenic Parliament ratifies VAT code
The Hellenic Parliament’s Plenary voted in favor of the Ministry of National Economy and Finance’s bill to ratify the “Value Added Tax Code” (VAT). New Democracy supported the bill, while SYRIZA and PASOK declared “present.” The remaining opposition parties, including the Communist Party (KKE), Elliniki Lysi, Nea Aristera, NIKI, Plefsi Eleftherias, and Spartiates, voted against it.
https://www.amna.gr/en/article/854007/Hellenic-Parliament-ratifies-VAT-code
ATHEX: Banks drag stocks index further down
Wednesday was another day of decline for the Greek bourse, led primarily by banks but spread across the board. However, a few blue chips bucked the trend and minimized the losses of the large-cap index. Liquidity in the market is clearly abundant, and turnover on the day topped 200 million euros, since traders felt they could ease off until bank stock prices return to lower levels.
https://www.ekathimerini.com/economy/1250556/athex-banks-drag-stocks-index-further-down
KATHIMERINI: No more night billing for electricity – New price bulletins with two changes
TA NEA: Pensions: Blocking decreases due to pensioners’ solidarity levy
EFIMERIDA TON SYNTAKTON: National Transparency Authority: Intercity bus service under scrutiny for mismanagement
RIZOSPASTIS: Companies’ profits are dipped in the blood of workers
KONTRA NEWS: The government is calling on 200,000 farmers to return subsidies
DIMOKRATIA: “Green” electricity billings are going to be abolished
NAFTEMPORIKI: Tax office targets cryptos
WHAT QATARGATE COSTS YOU: The EU taxpayer has already forked out up to €100,000 in legal fees because of the European Parliament corruption scandal, in which ex-MEPs stand accused of taking bribes from foreign powers. A public filing shows Belgian law firm Liedekerke won the contract to rep the Parliament last year, as the criminal case drags on and on. The Parliament says this is the maximum amount the lawyers can draw on, regardless of how long the case lasts.
MEPs STRANDED ON STRASBOURG SHORES: MEPs hoping to catch a boat from the Strasbourg city center to the chamber were left high and dry this week due to the high level of the River Ill. The Parliament pays a company €89,000 a year to run the service. Word is it’s back on this morning.
TEACH A BUREAUCRAT TO PHISH … “Your voice matters!” reads an internal email sent to EU officials after Ursula von der Leyen presented her new Commission. The “Portfolio Advisory Group” sent staff a survey on the new structure and priorities of the executive. But all was not as it seemed. Those who clicked on the link were taken to a page saying: “You have been phished!” — in an in-house initiative to warn of the dangers of suspicious emails. Turns out EU staffers’ voices don’t matter — but cybersecurity does.
MOIEN. This is Eddy Wax practicing my Luxembourgish in honor of today’s Home Affairs Council meeting.
DRIVING THE DAY: MIGRATION
EU WANTS MIGRANTS OUT OF SIGHT AND MIND: Interior ministers from 27 EU countries meet today in Luxembourg, where they are likely to signal the latest hardening of the bloc’s migration policy. As irregular migration continues to dominate national politics, the latest EU thinking is all about how to deal with migrants well away from Europe itself — reminiscent of the U.K.’s failed Rwanda scheme.
Why now? EU migration policy is shifting — and fast. This is what happens when you have a more right-wing European Parliament, a right-wing French government, far-right regional wins in Germany, an incoming EU migration commissioner from Austria (where the far right also just won an election) … oh, and a Hungarian EU presidency that’s been opening the EU’s borders to Russians while threatening to send bus-loads of migrants to Brussels.
Fortress within a fortress: MeanwhileSchengen, the Luxembourgish village that gave its name to the bloc’s border-free travel zone almost 40 years ago, is becoming harder to get to. Eight countries including Germany have reintroduced border controls inside the Schengen zone. This week Denmark increased checks on its Swedish and German borders, citing terror threats and gang violence.
Send ‘em back: The EU’s outer border is also the focus of attention today. Doing the rounds among diplomats is an old idea for “return hubs” or “hotspots.”
Deportation camps: They sound like the place you dump an unwanted Amazon Prime package but this actually refers to an ill-defined policy of either processing people’s asylum claims outside the bloc (like Italy is planning to do in Albania), or forcibly deporting those deemed to have illegally entered the EU to foreign shores, in order to send them back to their home countries from there. This could work hand-in-hand with the controversial cash-for-policing deals that Brussels has been steadily striking with Turkey and North African countries.
“Libya is an informal migrant hub, Turkey is the same,” said an EU diplomat. “So that’s what the talk is about, we should be more involved, and if we are there we can help them and help to avoid them coming into Europe,” they said.
Lunchbourg: Chaired by Hungary behind closed doors, today’s ministerial talk paves the way for a European Council meeting next week where country leaders will hammer out common language on migration. As Nick and Barbara reported Monday, EU leaders want the European Commission to revamp an old law on “returns” — or in human language, deportations.
Where things stand: “Many” member countries “are of the opinion that more can be done to increase the effectiveness of returns,” said an EU diplomat. The idea is “to send a clear signal to the new European Commission to actually work on this.” Diplomats are already briefing journalists that any so-called hubs must meet international law standards.
Spain’s own lane: Spanish PM Pedro Sánchez, one of the EU’s few remaining left-wing leaders, is on a different page to many other countries on migration, judging by a speech he made Wednesday. He plans to champion migration, focusing on making things easier for those wanting to come, and integrating them into an aging society whose cities have emptied out for decades, the Guardian reports.
NOTHING DOING
THE EU’S WRITE-OFF YEAR: Between the endless resets in Brussels after this year’s EU election and the German vote everyone is waiting for next year, Europe can pretty much write off 2024, report POLITICO’s Barbara Moens and Jacopo Barigazzi.
Which is a problem. The months of process-filled thumb-twiddling are endangering the EU’s support for Ukraine, and officials fear that crucial budget negotiations will be stalled until after the German general election. The must-read piece is here.
Talking of the EU budget …
BAD SPENDING SOARS: The EU’s spending watchdog estimated in its annual review, released overnight, that 5.6 percent of the EU budget in 2023 was spent in a way that broke the rules — euphemistically referred to as “irregular” spending. This marks an increase from 4.2 percent in the previous year.
Destructive accounting: EU audit master Tony Murphy warned about skyrocketing EU debt and told reporters he’s not a fan of tentative Commission plans — scooped by our reporter Gregorio Sorgi — to shape the next seven-year EU budget in the image of the post-pandemic recovery pot. That model makes it “extremely difficult” to check money is being well spent, the president of the European Court of Auditors said. Will Murphy’s warning be heeded?
NEW COMMISSIONERS
DECISION TIME ON HEARINGS SCHEDULE: The leaders of Parliament’s political groups meet this morning in Strasbourg to hammer out the final schedule for the live grillings of European commissioners. The key question, as we flagged in Wednesday’s Playbook: Do the executive vice presidents go first, or last?
PRESSURE MOUNTS ON ASPIRING COMMISSIONERS … as MEPs meet again this morning in Strasbourg to decide if they’re too dodgy for the job, my colleagues Elisa Braun and Max Griera write in to report. MEPs are looking for conflicts of interest between the nominees’ personal finances or CVs and the jobs Ursula von der Leyen has asked them to do in Brussels. But the legal affairs committee has limited investigative powers and — as ever with Parliament — it remains to be seen if it’ll really flex its muscles.
Second time lucky? Behind closed doors, the legal affairs committee MEPs have been screening new documents from the commissioner wannabes, after 23 of them failed to provide adequate info to the Parliament last week. (Elisa and Max scooped the first round of documents here.) Only three nominees — Dutchman Wopke Hoekstra, Pole Piotr Serafin and Hungarian Olivér Várhelyi — provided sufficient info.
More form filling, yay! Today lawmakers will analyze new details they asked the commissioners who returned mostly empty forms to provide.
Does it matter? For once, yes. The committee can kill (or severely hurt) commissioners’ job hopes by rejecting them or pushing for them to be given a weaker job description, if they find evidence of conflicts of interest. The whole process is a bit tame since MEPs don’t have proper investigative powers — but commissioners’ declarations will officially become public at some point.
UKRAINE
EU GOVERNMENTS PUSH FORWARD €35B LOAN: EU envoys approved the Commission’s proposed loan of up to €35 billion for Ukraine to be paid for using money generated by frozen Russian assets, a diplomat told my colleague Gregorio Sorgi.
Next step: The Parliament is expected to approve the proposal on Oct. 22. Now the only open question is whether Hungary will agree to change the EU’s sanctions rollover period from six months to three years, which could help convince the United States to play a role in the loan.
WITH RAMSTEIN POSTPONED, ZELENSKYY TAKES OFF: Starmer, Meloni, Macron and Scholz. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will meet four European leaders in rapid succession to present his plan for ending the war against Russia. “Within 24 hours, I will start negotiations with key partners on whom the military component of our strengthening depends,” Zelenskyy announced Wednesday during the South East Europe summit in Dubrovnik, Playbook reporter Šejla Ahmatović writes.
Zelenskyy’s whirlwind trip around Europe comes after a summit of allied countries aimed at coordinating more military support for Ukraine, set for Saturday Oct. 12, was postponed following the cancellation of U.S. President Joe Biden’s visit to Germany.
Starting with Starmer: Zelenskyy will today hold talks with U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who is expected to confirm his ironclad support for Ukraine. Later in the day, Zelenskyy will travel to Paris — after France’s President Emmanuel Macron visited Ukrainian troops at a military camp in eastern France on Wednesday. In the evening, Zelenskyy will be in Rome to meet PM Giorgia Meloni at Villa Doria Pamphili. On Friday, he’ll meet German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Berlin.
What he’s up against: Russia has made slow but steady battlefield gains in recent weeks, U.S. officials told our Stateside colleagues Wednesday. But those advances have come at a steep cost — it has been the bloodiest month in the nearly three-year war. Casualties from the offensives in the Donbas have brought Russia’s total number of dead and wounded to over 600,000, according to officials — more than 40 times the country’s losses during its decade-long invasion of Afghanistan in the 1990s.
INTERESTING READ: The FT has a feature on how Russia’s shadow fleet gets its ships.
MIDDLE EAST
LATEST: Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant warned Israel’s retaliation for a recent Iranian missile attack will be “lethal” and “surprising,” while the country’s military pushed ahead with its large-scale operation in northern Gaza and a ground offensive in Lebanon against Hezbollah militants. More from AP.
BIBI’S (SORT OF) LISTENING: The former White House Special Envoy for Middle East humanitarian issues, Ambassador David Satterfield, tells POLITICO’s Power Play podcast that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is listening to Washington before launching retaliatory strikes on Iran. “On the character of the targets in Iran, I do believe he is listening. I don’t believe a decision has been taken on this yet.”
JOURNALISTS DETAINED IN LEBANON: Germany’sBild reports several of its journalists, including Paul Ronzheimer, who reports for POLITICO parent company Axel Springer, were arrested in Beirut a day after Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s assassination. The journalists were taken from their hotel, handcuffed, blindfolded and brought to an unknown location by men who were reportedly members of Lebanon’s military intelligence.
The arrests came after Ronzheimer gave an exceedingly rare live TV interview from Lebanon to Israel’s public broadcaster Kan. Following intervention by Germany’s embassy, Ronzheimer was released the same day but was later forced to leave Lebanon.
US
MILTON HITS: Hurricane Milton made landfall along Florida’s Gulf Coast as a Category 3 storm overnight, after the state saw 19 confirmed tornadoes that destroyed 120 homes earlier in the day. But the winds brought by the storm appeared to be weaker than officials and National Hurricane Centers had initially feared, our Stateside colleagues report.
ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL — TRUMP’S RUST-BELT MOMENTUM: New polls show Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump is gaining support in the Rust Belt states that are crucial to Kamala Harris’ campaign. He has taken a slight lead in Michigan and the pair are neck and neck in Wisconsin.
Trump’s tactics: POLITICO’s Alex Isenstadt takes readers inside Trump’s push to win over the “bro” vote.
Courting expats: Trump vowed to end “double taxation” for millions of Americans living overseas if he wins the election, the Wall Street Journal reports. Backstory here.
IN OTHER NEWS
MENTAL HEALTH PLEA: MEPs in Strasbourg will call on the Commission to radically beef up its year-old €1.2 billion mental health strategy, according to POLITICO health reporter Giedre Peseckyte. “We need more ambitious objectives … much stronger funding than it is provided now,” EPP lawmaker Tomislav Sokol told Giedre. “We need something similar to Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan,” he added.
BARNIER TO UNVEIL BUDGET: French Prime Minister Michel Barnier is set to unveil his 2025 budget today, in a critical test of both his leadership and whether the parliament can function when no party holds a majority. Victor Goury-Laffont and Clea Caulcutt have the curtain-raiser. Meanwhile, Mujtaba Rahman writes that the budget will be key to Barnier’s survival.
SHRINKING POWERHOUSE: German Economy Minister Robert Habeck confirmed on Wednesday that his country’s gross domestic product is set to shrink for the second year in a row.
AUSTRIAN “STALEMATE”: President Alexander Van der Bellen said on Wednesday that he couldn’t ask the far-right Freedom Party (FPO) to form a government after it came first in last month’s election, because no one wants to govern with it. Van der Bellen said the parties that came in second and third place — Chancellor Karl Nehammer’s conservative People’s Party (OVP) and the Social Democrats (SPO) — should try to break the “stalemate” themselves. Reuters has a write-up.