Peacocking for von der Leyen

HOWDY. Welcome to Wednesday’s edition of Brussels Playbook. Eddy Wax will guide you through the rest of the week.
LET THE PORTFOLIO PEACOCKING BEGIN: And just like that, Ursula von der Leyen goes from being a candidate to being the only vote that matters. Now that she’s cemented her second term as Commission president, it’s up to her to dole out leadership assignments within the EU executive to nominees from the capitals. Her letters formally asking countries to nominate a man and a woman will be in the mail any moment now. 
Pursuing prestige: What counts as a good assignment varies by country. Economic portfolios are the hottest commodities, while some geopolitical posts are also desirable — think enlargement and the new Mediterranean commissioner. It’s all basically up to von der Leyen and her team, so capitals have limited leverage.
In their tiny toolboxes: Relationships and human resources. Let’s look at how leaders are trying to steer her choices. 
**A message from DIGITALEUROPE: Shockingly, only 8% of EU SMEs trade across borders. Companies need scale to succeed in the digital era, but they’re hiring lawyers not coders. Let’s reignite the single market love story and make Europe the best place to do business.**
EXHIBIT A — MITSOTAKIS REMINDS VDL WHAT HE DID FOR HER: Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis is adamant that his country should get a very important job when von der Leyen puts together her top team. “I would certainly like a portfolio that highlights on the one hand the progress that Greece has made economically, but also Greece’s sort of strategic position at the southeastern flank of Europe and of NATO,” he told Barbara Moens in an interview in the Maximos Mansion, the official office of the Greek leader in Athens.
Name game: Mitsotakis hasn’t yet announced Greece’s choice for the next Commission, and wouldn’t be drawn on who his pick will be. The current Greek commissioner, Margaritis Schinas, told Brussels Playbook this month he would like to stay on and doing so would be a “great honor.” But there are others in the frame, including Governor of Central Macedonia Apostolos Tzitzikostas and Labor Minister Niki Kerameus.  
Power/guilt trip: Together with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, Mitsotakis was one of the European People’s Party (EPP) negotiators who clinched a second term for von der Leyen in the European Council. With French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in weakened positions, and bridge-builders such as former Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte and Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo leaving the Council, Mitsotakis can style himself as a leader of leaders — for example on how to finance defense investments. Read more of Barbara’s interview here.
EXHIBIT B — SCHOOF SENDS A FAMILIAR FACE: As expected, Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof officially backed Wopke Hoekstra, currently the EU’s climate chief, to stay as the Netherlands’ commissioner. “This gives the Netherlands a strong candidate for a substantial portfolio,” Schoof tweeted. “Substantial” likely means a financial or economic portfolio.
All in the family: Hoekstra’s Dutch party, the Christian Democratic Appeal, isn’t part of Schoof’s unwieldy coalition. But it is part of von der Leyen’s political family, the EPP. (As Barbara notes in her must-read primer on the commissioner nomination process, capitals don’t have to send in two names if they’re renominating an incumbent.)
EXHIBIT C — LITHUANIA’S DOMESTIC FEUD HITS FOREIGN AMBITIONS: Sure, EPP chief Manfred Weber may have publicly endorsed Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis to serve in the Commission. But it’s not up to Weber, a German MEP. It’s (ultimately) up to Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda, and he’s in a long-running feud with Vilnius’ top envoy.
Changing the subject: Nausėda is now publicly saying that Lithuania should focus on an economic portfolio in the next Commission, Barbara reports, instead of a foreign policy one — suggesting that Landsbergis is not the right man for the job. Nausėda is hinting at other names, including the Lithuanian Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė and finance minister. 
More drama: It’s up to Šimonytė to nominate a candidate — who then needs sign-off from both the president and the Lithuanian parliament.
SIDEBAR — D-DAY FOR MALTESE HEALTH ASPIRANT: The Covid-19 pandemic was a reminder that even unsexy, seemingly powerless posts like health commissioner can sometimes become very important. So the fact that Malta’s Chris Fearne, formerly the EU’s longest-serving health minister, wants the job would seem a win-win. In May, however, Fearne resigned from his post as deputy PM because of fraud charges related to hospital contracts — while protesting his innocence.
Second chance: A judge in Malta is due to rule today whether there is enough evidence for a criminal case to go ahead. Prime Minister Robert Abela has signaled he would still nominate Fearne as the country’s next EU commissioner if his name is cleared. More in Morning Health Care for Pro subscribers.
No obvious alternative: Current Health Commissioner Stella Kyriakides of Cyprus ruled herself out, and Belgian Health Minister Frank Vandenbroucke remains unlikely to go for the post. (No Flemish party seems interested in offering up a commissioner, Belgian daily De Standaard reports — a situation that improves the chances of Justice Commissioner Didier Reynders of the Francophone liberals keeping a Berlaymont job.)
LET’S TALK FRONTEX: In his interview with Barbara, Greek Prime Minister Mitsotakis said he wants Brussels to be more concrete about the role of Frontex in migration policy. 
Role of the border agency: “It’s not always clear to me whether we have given Frontex the appropriate mandate to actually do its job,” he said. “It’s a question of making sure we all agree on what we do and what we don’t do when it comes to border protection.” 
Mitsotakis stressed this is not just a question for countries such as Greece, which cope with illegal migration from the south. Poland and Finland are dealing with “the instrumentalization of migration,” he continued. “Frontex should not be a welcoming committee facilitating anyone who wants to enter the European Union. That’s simply not acceptable. And I don’t think that’s their job.” 
Pushing back on pushback complaints: The Greek prime minister, whose country has been accused of pushbacks and causing deaths of migrants by the U.N. Refugee Agency and several NGOs, said: “We feel that it is within the scope of European regulation to prevent boats from entering into our territorial waters. I’m very clear on that. However, if there are people whose lives are at risk, we will always save them. So there’s a way of balancing these two.”
RULES REPORT CARD: Attacks on journalists in Italy and shutdowns of public media in Slovakia … persistent political blockage of judicial independence in Spain … probes of civil society groups in Hungary (to name just the latest issue). It can feel like democratic safeguards are backsliding around Europe. Yet the Commission’s latest rule of law report — due to be made public today after approval by the College of Commissioners — offers a more optimistic view.
‘Playbook’ for democratic checks and balances: “We started to build this preventive mechanism in 2020,” said Commission VP for Transparency Věra Jourová in a statement to Playbook. Her office’s annual deep dive with tailored recommendations has itself become a “Playbook,” she said, for governments to work on their “judiciary, anti-corruption framework, media freedom and other checks and balances of our democratic societies.”
Responding to feedback: National governments followed up on some 68 percent of the recommendations the Commission made in 2023, according to a draft of the report’s main findings, viewed by POLITICO. 
New this year: The Commission assessed rule-of-law practices in the accession-track countries of Albania, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia — though the EU executive doesn’t issue recommendations.
POLITICAL CONTEXT: Then again, the report itself has been subject to concerns about accountability failures. As POLITICO’s Clothilde Goujard reported last month, it was due to be released on July 3. However, officials said von der Leyen sought to slow-walk the report to avoid criticizing Italy on media freedom issues while she sought Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s support for a second term. A Commission spokesperson said at the time that the report was still being prepared.
THAWING RESISTANCE ON RUSSIAN ASSETS: As G7 finance ministers meet today in Rio de Janeiro, the EU is trying to soothe U.S. concerns about lending $50 billion from frozen Russian assets to Kyiv, Gregorio Sorgi writes in to report.
Why the US is worried: Washington fears the loan is risky, since a single EU country can block the renewal of sanctions every six months and unfreeze the assets that are mainly held in Europe. This would force G7 countries to pay back their share of the loan using their own money. 
Perpetually frozen? The EU executive proposed an “open-ended immobilization” of the assets to be reviewed at “regular intervals” in a bid to offer certainty to the U.S., according to a document seen by POLITICO. Under this scheme, the Commission could recommend unfreezing the assets if Russia agrees to pay post-war compensation to Ukraine. The idea will be discussed by the EU’s 27 ambassadors today. (Bloomberg and the FT also have details.) 
Softer option: The second proposal involves extending the renewal period of sanctions from the current six months to 18, 24 or 36 months. But EU officials are worried that Hungary’s Russia-friendly government won’t agree to either option, as they both require unanimity.
Nearing a deal: EU and U.S. officials informally agreed to equally share their contributions to the loan, giving $20 billion each, according to two officials with knowledge of the proceedings. But the U.S. is looking for concessions to give its political blessing to the agreement.
Who won’t be there to help smooth things over: European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde is set to miss the G7 and G20 finance ministers’ meetings this week and will instead be soaking up the Olympic buzz in Paris, attending a sustainable development conference and Friday’s opening ceremony, Johanna Treeck reports.
WHERE THE FIREWALL ENDS: Tuesday’s votes for committee leadership posts in the European Parliament show exactly who’s allowed to help govern — and who’s kept out in the right-wing cold.
Meloni in, Orbán out: The Parliament’s third-largest group, the Patriots for Europe, should have been allocated two committee chairs based on their sheer numbers. But the new formation, which includes lawmakers from Hungary’s Fidesz and France’s National Rally, was completely blocked, Max Griera, Paula Andrés, Louise Guillot and Giovanna Faggionato report. Italian PM Meloni’s European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), meanwhile, will lead panels in charge of budgets, agriculture and petitions. It also nabbed 10 vice presidencies across other committees.
KEEPING SCORE 1: ECR group Co-Chair Nicola Procaccini posted on X Tuesday that he was going to get a tattoo of the number 13, in honor of the group’s total leadership posts. Playbook is sincerely unsure whether he is being sincere. 
KEEPING SCORE 2: After doing some math following the von der Leyen vote, the head of Italy’s EPP delegation, Fulvio Martusciello, said he wasn’t going to vote for any leadership nominees from the Greens. “Our candidate started with 401 votes and 401 votes she got. The Greens are 53. If there had been a block vote of the group she would have had many more votes,” he wrote to colleagues over the weekend, in an email seen by Playbook’s Eddy Wax. 
Only the Greens? We’re not clear on how Martusciello’s math accounts for likely defections from von der Leyen’s core coalition of EPP, the Socialists and Democrats and Renew Europe in the secret ballot. But the bottom line, he told us Tuesday evening, was that all of the Greens hadn’t voted for von der Leyen, as promised, in exchange for committee leadership posts — so he considered the deal null and void. 
KEEPING SCORE 3: One Renew MEP who said she voted against von der Leyen, Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, was nonetheless able to win the chair’s seat on the Parliament’s defense subcommittee. More here for Defense Pros from Jacopo Barigazzi. 
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ECR COZIES UP TO TRUMP: The European Conservatives and Reformists are starting to make moves towards Donald Trump. According to Italian newspaper La Repubblica, Meloni’s hard-right party is eying a joint confab with the Republicans before the U.S. presidential vote on Nov. 5. One of the ideas would be for Trump allies to attend the ECR European Congress of Families scheduled for September in Croatia.
Setting misgivings aside: While Viktor Orbán’s Patriots for Europe has made no secret of its Trump fandom, the ECR has been more reticent. The transatlantic relationship is a big part of the historic ECR brand, and Trump’s stances on NATO and Ukraine have been hard for some members to swallow. ECR Secretary-General Antonio Giordano attended the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee last week, where he met with members of the presidential campaign. “Everyone was asking me about Giorgia Meloni,” Giordano told Secolo d’Italia, a conservative Italian daily.
VDL TO MEET STARMER: Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and the U.K.’s new Prime Minister Keir Starmer will organize a meeting “within weeks” to reset Britain’s relationship with the EU, the FT reports. Von der Leyen missed Starmer’s big European political summit last week, but her team is now aiming for a meeting next month or early September, officials told the paper.
SETBACK FOR TUSK: Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has hit a brick wall on one of his main campaign promises, to increase access to abortions, after narrowly losing a parliamentary vote earlier this month. On Tuesday, about 1,000 demonstrators gathered in front of parliament in Warsaw demanding that Tusk’s government uphold its election promises. “What the f**k did they think was going to happen: that we’re going to give up?” said one of the organizers. Wojciech Kość has more.
MACRON SLAPS DOWN LEFT’S BID TO GOVERN FRANCE: President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday pushed back on plans by the left-wing alliance (which won the most seats in this summer’s snap parliamentary election) to install a little-known Paris city official, Lucie Castets, as prime minister. In a TV interview, Macron said his outgoing government will remain in place until mid-August while Paris hosts the Olympic Games. Write-ups from POLITICO and Reuters.
Now read … why Parisians are pissed at Olympic disruptions: French authorities have gone to great lengths to protect the millions of tourists and athletes descending on the capital for the Summer Games, but some locals are angry that their daily commutes have been upended. Giorgio Leali has the story.
— EU ambassadors meet in Coreper II at 9:30 a.m. … deputy ambassadors meet in Coreper I at 9:30 a.m.
— European Commission College meeting at 9 a.m. Agenda.
— European Commission Vice President Margaritis Schinas is in Athens, Greece; participates in a ceremony commemorating the restoration of the Hellenic Republic.
— Economy Commissioner Paolo Gentiloni is in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; participates in the G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors meeting.
— Energy Commissioner Kadri Simson is in Bucharest, Romania, where she meets Jennifer Granholm, U.S. secretary of energy; Ukraine’s Energy Minister German Galushchenko; and his Romanian counterpart Sebastian Burduja.
— Financial Services Commissioner Mairead McGuinness receives a delegation of the Irish Seanad select committee on scrutiny of draft EU-related statutory instruments.
WEATHER: High of 23C, sunny with cloudy intervals.
TRADING SPACES: Electoral losses mean less desirable real estate in the European Parliament. So in Brussels, German Green lawmakers led by MEP Hannah Neumann have moved into the former offices of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). She discovered a chaotic mess, including empty Jupiler cans, left behind by the previous tenant, Maximilian Krah. “If cleanliness is a German virtue, then Mr. Krah is not particularly German,” Neumann told the German daily SPIEGEL.
Another Green, Sergey Lagodinsky, found a mug in his new office that says, “The future is old, white and male.”
Mysterious box: Apart from personal belongings, Krah, who was kicked out of the AfD after multiple scandals and is now non-affiliated, also left a cardboard box. The name on the box is that of Krah’s former employee, who has since been arrested over accusations he spied for China. We wonder what might be inside. Any guesses?
Prost! An aide to Krah, Jörg Sobolewski, told Playbook’s Šejla Ahmatović that the beer had been left for the movers, adding that they “obviously should have left a few beers for our next tenant, too.” 
SPOTTED … AT THE LITHUANIAN AMBASSADOR’S GOODBYE RECEPTION: Lithuanian Ambassador Arnoldas Pranckevičius; Spanish Ambassador Marcos Alonso Alonso; Portuguese Ambassador Pedro Lourti; Croatian Ambassador Irena Andrassy; Dutch Ambassador Pieter Jan Kleiweg; Maltese Ambassador Marlene Bonnici; Greek Ambassador Ioannis Vrailas; former Commissioner and MEP Virginijus Sinkevičius; Moldovan Ambassador Daniela Morari; the FT’s Andy Bounds; Bloomberg’s Jorge Valero; Reuters’ Andrew Gray; Le Monde’s Philippe Jacqués and POLITICO’s Barbara Moens.
A bientôt? Pranckevičius, who will be posted in Paris, hinted that this might not be his final goodbye to Brussels. In his farewell speech, he said that when he left the European Parliament many years ago, he looked back at the building and said the famous words of another Arnold: “I’ll be back.”
NEW JOB: NATO has appointed Javier Colomina as special representative for the southern neighborhood. He was previously deputy assistant secretary-general for political affairs and security policy.
CRIME AT MIDI: Nearly a year after Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo announced a police station at Brussels Midi to combat crime and sketchiness, progress is finally being made. A suitable location has been found — with plans to open the station by the end of summer, The Brussels Times reported.
BE SAFE OUT THERE: Speeding violations accounted for over 80 percent of traffic offenses in Belgium last year, according to a report issued by the federal police. Interestingly enough, the Bruxellois tend to speed in summer and fall, with most fines being issued in August and October.
BIRTHDAYS: European Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič; former European Commissioners Marianne Thyssen and Jonathan Hill; Estonian foreign ministry’s Kaja Tael; former MEPs Viktor Uspaskich, Burkhard Balz, Teresa Jiménez-Becerril, Margot Parker and Flavio Zanonato; Dalia Lahdo from the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs; EUIPO’s Jakub Cebula; NATO’s Georgiana Dragomir; DPA’s Juergen Baetz; Uzbekistan President Shavkat Mirziyoyev; Joan Enric Vives Sicília, co-prince of Andorra; European Disability Forum’s Daniel Casas Ballester.
THANKS TO: Barbara Moens, Elena Giordano, Gregorio Sorgi, Eddy Wax and Helen Collis; Playbook editor Alex Spence, reporter Šejla Ahmatović and producer Catherine Bouris.
**A message from DIGITALEUROPE: The EU has put in place almost 70 new rules on digital in the last five years, meaning companies here face hurdles their competitors do not. The result: Europe is lagging behind on 7 of 8 critical technologies that will define our future, mainly due to a lack of competitiveness. The next Commission should use this golden opportunity to simplify, merge and consolidate laws. Companies in the digital era need speed and scale; let’s be bold and set a strict three-month deadline for compliance decisions. Read more in our manifesto.**
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