The EU budget battle just got nastier

0:00This episode is brought to you by PayPal. Holiday Rush? Skip the mall traffic and shop online with PayPal. Shop your favorite online stores like eBay, Fanatics, Walmart, Sephora, Target and TikTok shop. And choose to pay now or pay later at checkout. Plus pay in four with no interest and no late fees. Shop now with PayPal. Pay in four subject to approval. Learn more at PayPal.com slash pay in four. PayPal Incorporated NMLS 910457. Good morning. It's Monday, October 12th. And this is the Brussels Playbook podcast. The vibe in Brussels today is bruised as Ireland's attempts to broker a compromise on the blocs next seven year budget has managed to upset just about everyone. Also on the pod. Migration Commissioner Magnus Brunner tells us about Europe's efforts to curb irregular arrivals.

1:01And EU leaders are heading to Brussels for a summit later this week. But the influencers who were meant to be joining them won't be making an appearance after all. I'm Zoe Shafdolovic and with me today is our chief for an affairs correspondent Nick Vinnicka. Morning Nick. Hey. How was the protest yesterday in Brussels for you? Some crazy scenes. I mean, I stayed as far as possible, but it has been a lot of disruption on the way over here for sure. Yeah, there were thousands of people in the streets of Brussels yesterday protesting against climate change in action. All right, Nick. Well, let's get started first up. So over the weekend, you and I have been making a lot of phone calls and receiving a lot of text messages because the Irish presidency of the council unveiled their proposal for the EU's next seven year budget and people are pretty furious. Yeah, basically we had reactions mostly from the so called frugal camp. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, saying he's not happy. We're still a long way from an agreement is what he said. It said the cuts must be much bigger.

2:05And then of course you have Sweden calling the proposal a wildly unaffordable increase. Austria says it's miles away. So effectively you've got the frugal country saying this is not good enough. If this is the proposal, there will be no deal by the end of this year. And we should tell people what this proposal is actually folks will remember the EU budget proposal that came out from the European Commission was for a two trillion budget from 2028 to 2034. Since then, we've had a few attempts to trim that back because the countries that contribute the most of the EU budget thought that was too high. And now the Irish presidency proposed cutting around about 159 billion from the original proposal, which amounts to about 8% of that proposal. And the biggest cuts were 75 billion from competitiveness funding, 38 billion from foreign aid and 10 billion from administration costs. I'm not sure who's happy with this deal. I'm not sure anyone's happy, but in any case the so-called Friends of Cohesion, these are largely the advocates of a larger budget.

3:09They also happen to be Europe's less wealthy countries, southern and eastern countries largely got what they wanted. Italy welcomed protections for farmers, Poland welcomed keeping its position as the biggest recipient of EU funds. We've been talking about this for a while. There's this camp, the Friends of Cohesion camp, which tend to be the folks who get more money out of the budget than they put in. And then the frugal camp led by Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, they put more money into the budget than they take out. And in fact, Germany provides around about a quarter of the EU budget's funding. So it is a big deal if Friedrich Merz says this is not a go-option for us. And of course, we've seen plenty of reactions in the European Parliament. You've got the lead budget negotiator, Sig Fried Merzahn from the EPP and Carla Tavarez from S&D have rejected the Nigo box. And of course, Parliament's position, let's remind it, is distinct from national positions and is backing a vision for a larger budget. And the Parliament is important because they can vote down this budget proposal and that would be a big problem for a Sullivan-Deline, the Commission President, because that could really tank things.

4:15Now all this is building to the European Council summit on Thursday. What everyone's been saying for months is that the negotiations on the lower level among ambassadors, among ministers have not really led anywhere. And you're going to need the leaders to provide an impulse here. So I had a conversation yesterday with one of the diplomats who was in the room, just kind of came out to talk about it and asked him, what would it take for progress to be made at this European Council summit? And after some Heming and Haing, he said, what we need is a really, really powerful display of leadership. And people talk a lot about how the Franco-German engine is no longer what it was, but these are still the two biggest, most popular countries in the EU. And this person said, if Friedrich-Mertz and Emmanuel Macron can come with a really strong message saying, we need to accept that things are changing for the EU, the MFF needs to reflect that, it could get things moving in the room. Yeah, but Mertz is in a really tight spot because he's got this far right kind of nipping at his heels. So he's in a tough spot. He has really said that hundreds of billions, not 159 billion, but hundreds of billions need to be cut from the budget.

5:26So he doesn't have a lot of room, particularly because of where these cuts are coming from. So the competitiveness cuts in particular would be a very hard pill for him to swallow. And just in the lead up to this nego box being released, I was speaking with a bunch of diplomats. And one thing that was very interesting was, one of the frugal said to me, if everyone is equally unhappy with what the Irish propose, maybe we can live with that. But if we are more unhappy than the cohesion countries, then that's something we will not be able to live with. So I think that's what I've been watching out for. And certainly it seems to me that the friends of competitiveness, the frugal, etc, are much less happy with this proposal than the cohesion countries are. So I suspect we're in for a bruising battle over this one on Thursday and Friday at this European Council summit. Nick, let's talk about migration. It's of course one of the hottest topics in Europe right now. And in fact, this is another topic of conversation at this week's European Council summit. And ahead of that conversation, I've sat down with the EU's migration commissioner Magnus Brunner. And he had some very interesting things to say.

6:39Commissioner Brunner, you are the commissioner for some pretty hefty things that the EU is making a priority right now, the chief among them being migration. And as this podcast goes out, you're actually going to be on a plane to Bangladesh to discuss this very topic. Can you talk a little bit about what you hope to achieve there? Yes, and also the reason why we go to Bangladesh and why Bangladesh is so important because we see that the most dangerous route on illegal migration we have at the moment towards Europe is coming from Bangladesh and Pakistan via the Gulf countries through Egypt to Libya. And from Libya, either to Greece or to Italy. Our approach is that we have to talk to the countries at the origin, actually, and not just the people who come to Europe. So what we talk with the Bangladesh and the Pakistani is that we want to help them to protect their borders also. And also maybe find some possibilities for legal pathways also towards Europe. And yeah, to be maybe a bit smarter when it comes to the fight against illegal migration, the fight against smugglers and human traffickers.

7:44I wanted to ask you commissioner about the latest on the Sota crisis. So obviously this summer there was a large influx of migrants breaching the border between Morocco and Sota. The images that came out of that were shocking for Europeans. It led to quite a lot of alarm. There are still several thousand migrants who were there on the ground. Can you give us the latest on that? Well, first of all, because you mentioned rightly so the images Sota created. And that has always, I think, to be put into perspective. Because what we see is that our migration reforms actually work. The numbers are decreasing. We have a decrease 55% of illegal migration seen in the last two years. Some member states have the lowest numbers ever like Sweden, for instance. Austria has more returns than asylum applications. So it's going in the right direction. The reforms pay off. But then Sota came and the images of Sota overshadowed all the progress we made with the reforms on illegal migration. So yes, we saw the pictures. What we did from the very first day, we offered support to Spain financially, but also operationally with frontx with our asylum agency.

8:52With Europe financially with 115 million euros to support returns on the one hand, but also of course the whole procedure in Sota. What is the situation at the moment? Most of the migrants were returned to Morocco in the first 48 hours, but yes, there are some people still in Sota. What we're doing now is supporting the Spanish authorities to return everyone and the Morocco promise to take everyone back. The good thing is nobody has entered the shangan area. No one has entered the European continent. Some countries so Greece in particular, but others as well are pushing for the ability to suspend asylum applications when there is a large influx in an emergency procedure. And I know that Asalvand Alliance said that this was something that the commission would work on would consider. Where are we ash on that proposal? Is there broad support? And are you going ahead with it? We're definitely going ahead. The president of Asalvand Alliance asked me to do that. We started discussions in the council.

9:53The next round is with the leaders at the European council. We are talking about concrete steps on this European emergency response framework. I think it is important to be more flexible if events like Svissot and Sota occur where mass movements are actually engineered and weaponized also against the European Union. It would be more flexible, more agile. That's what the member states ask for and that's what we're working on. I wanted to ask you about the entry exit requirements. Over the summer, there were lots of reports about people's holidays being ruined because of hours long queues at the airport. But there were even reports earlier this month that there were five hours six hours long queues at Brussels airport. What is going on with this system? We have to make clear this is the most modern border management system in the world. And we have the comparison to the US, to Canada, to others. And they're all jealous a little bit. And it's a security issue. It has to work. The member states had enough time to prepare themselves for the system. They agreed on the systems. And just to give you some numbers there, we have almost 230 million registrations of entries and exit on these 1500 entry points to the European Union.

11:09And by the way, out of these 230 million, we also had about 80,000 refuses for documents, false documents. And out of these 80,000 we had 2,000 refuses because of people posing a security threat to the European Union. Links to terrorism, to organized crime, for instance. So you see it actually works and it pays off about the queues. Yes, we do have challenges. And I really urge the member states to do their job. Because some member states are a bit behind. They agreed on the new system. Now it's up to the member states to do their job. Thank you very much Commissioner. I appreciate your time. Nick, you know, I also asked Bruno about plans to restrict the number of Russian tourists who enter the EU. And he did say that there are going to be tougher rules coming in early next year, which will restrict the number of folks coming in. But this is a key topic of conversation today at the Foreign Affairs Council. This is the meeting of the EU's Foreign Affairs Ministers in Luxembourg.

12:12Right. And so the big headline we will see today is Foreign Ministers agreeing to adopt this huge package of new sanctions listings targeting individuals and entities like companies. I'm about more than 1600 new sanctions listings, the biggest package since the start of Russia's full scale invasion. And of course this comes in the wake of this life-sake attack. So Germany formally attributing this thwarted drone attack in in life-sake airport. And all the conversations, all the briefing suggested this is a demonstration of strength toward Russia. You mentioned tourist visas and visas for ex-combatants. Another topic that's under discussion is limiting the movements of Russian diplomats in the EU. The idea that they'd have to seek authorization moving from one country to the next. Many of these diplomats are suspected to be actually intelligence agents. And that idea has also got some new wind in its sales. And it's something they're going to be looking at today. But there's going to be this very strong message of strength.

13:15And of course the context here, the wider context, is that Donald Trump is, of course, moving the other direction with regard to Russia. And over the weekend I was reading when this move came in, basically Trump announcing that he had been speaking with Putin and that he was going to be buying mass amounts of Russian diesel, basically to bring down prices at the gas pump in the US because he's looking ahead at those midterm elections that are coming up in the US very soon. Gas prices are extremely high and he wants to bring those prices down. And so that's what he has done. And Ukrainian president Valeriy Zalinski actually said this agreement was a gift to Putin and said it was going to help Russia finance the war. So there's also been a big shift from Trump in terms of how he talks about Zalinski as well this weekend. Right. Trump said that Ukraine needs a new leader effectively lobbying for elections for Zalinski to be replaced. That's also not going down well among the EU allies. And we see this split between US and EU positions toward Russia, toward Ukraine really widening. But Europe is going to try to show we're still very much on key side.

14:19Nick, are you on TikTok? I've heard of that. That's the social media. It is. Do you do the dancers? There's TikTok dancers in my mind. Yeah. Well, anyway, the reason we're talking about this is because again, at this week's European Council summit, we were supposed to see a bunch of influences from around the EU come and sort of take videos and do TikTok dancers and the EU. And the European Council building and beam that out to the followers back car. And that was the plan anyway, but it turns out our colleague Mary Eko's reports, no influences will be coming. What's going on? Well, Mari spoke to a number of different six to be precise. And none of their countries actually propose influencers once said that there were logistical problems, budget constraints and others said they hadn't even raised this idea in their capital. And the argument that she was hearing is that if a leader wants an influencer at the summit, they can bring one themselves. I think ultimately, I wonder if maybe they just didn't know of any influences EU politics influence.

15:27Yeah. And if you're an influencer, you're really working for that. Yeah, this is the criticism of various journalists associations. It was that when you or I go to a European Council summit, everyone knows who pays our wages. But if you get a random influencer from some country and the EU coming in filming videos in the council. And they're actually getting some potentially dodgy money or getting money that they're not declaring the sources of that might be a bit problematic. So maybe it is all as well that ends well on this one. As far as work and certainly that's fine. Nick, I wonder if folks out there would actually watch content that an influencer did from an EU leader summit. Let us know in the show notes. There's a WhatsApp link. Let us know. Would you watch it? All right. Before we go, Nick, did you know that our colleagues down under have some huge news? There is a new podcast launching today. It's the Canberra Playbook podcast. And it's very exciting. It's hosted by Amanda Cobb. It will bring you the latest on Australian politics. And the first episode looks at new legislations that will make online platforms more responsible for harmful content.

16:35Yeah, they've interviewed the minister in charge of this. So it's going to be a good one for folks here who are following the social media ban moves in Brussels, the kids act. And in case you need another reason to listen to it, there's a very familiar name to longtime Brussels playbook readers Ryan Heath, the original author of Brussels playbook is on the first episode and teasing Amanda about an unusual injury. I don't know if we could have teased or set this up anymore. Yeah. Oh, Dionis is playing it for us. Oh, I'm so excited. First up, I need to inform you all that Amanda has turned up in the office. Absolutely legless. Legless? Legless is Australian for drunk because you're so drunk you can't stand up. So you're legless. That's right. She's strapped into a massive leg brace. Amanda, what the hell happened? Look, it's honestly an embarrassing story, Ryan. That's what we want to hear. We should be clear Amanda was not actually drunk. This was a joke. A Ryan joke.

17:37Let's not slander Amanda. So there's three episodes of that a week, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. So Nick, get subscribed. Like and subscribe. But first like and subscribe us. Then like and subscribe them. One, two, two clicks. Alrighty folks, thank you so much for joining us. See you tomorrow. Brussels clean up nicely at sweet green. Maple glazed, roasted and edges perfectly caramelized. Sweet greens fall harvest is back on the menu and the season's most overlooked little green vegetable is dressed to be devoured. You know what to do. Order on the sweet green app.