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Brussels Playbook Podcast
Brussels gives cows a promotion
00:15:32
Europe’s cows now have a new job title: critical infrastructure.
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- [00:00]
A
I'm Arch Manning.
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B
I'm Madison Skinner. I'm Eva Jovic.
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A
I'm Decoria Moore. Wanna train like a Red Bull athlete?
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B
Tell us your fitness goals this summer to enter the Red Bull Athlete Challenge. You'll get to try each of our workouts for a chance to win an ultimate Red Bull experience. Think you have what it takes?
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A
Good morning. It's Thursday, July 9th, and this is the Brussels Playbook. PO. The vibe in Brussels today is stunned and maybe a little confused as Europe grapples with the shock court ruling that allows Marine Le Pen to run for French president in 2027. Also on the pod, Europe's cows now have a new job title, critical infrastructure. And Estonia is calling for the EU to cut funding to the International Olympic Committee after it opened the door to Russian athletes competing at the Olympics again. I'm Zoya Shetalovic, and with me today is one of our policy editors, Sarah Wheaton. Hey, Sarah.
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B
Hey, Zoya.
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A
What have you got planned for your weekend?
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B
I might be driving to Luxembourg to buy cheaper liquor than what is available in Belgium.
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A
That is an excellent answer.
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B
Also, I will be filing my taxes. These two things are directly related.
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A
Excellent. Alrighty, Sarah. Now that the dust has settled on this Marine Le Pen verdict in France, let us unpack what we can expect from the next kind of almost year ahead of this April 2027 French presidential election. So just as a little reminder to folks, on Tuesday, the court upheld her conviction in the European Parliament embezzlement case, and she was sentenced to one year of house arrest with an E tag, like a little monitor on her ankle to sort of make sure that she stays home. But crucially, the ban on running for office was reduced. And so technically, she's free to run, albeit potentially from home.
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B
Yeah, I mean, you know, the other thing that really gets complicated now is that we had been kind of thinking, okay, maybe it's gonna be Jordan Bardella, her kind of deputy. And so she's kind of now trying to say, like, look, it's gonna be this dual. Dual candidacy. But ultimately, this really wasn't the clean comeback that she had wanted.
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A
No, not at all. And particularly, look, she has appealed. And as a result of that, this sentence with the ankle bracelet has been suspended, so she can actually leave the house. So people might still see her out and about on the campaign trail, but still, it's all messy. It's very, very messy. As you say, Jordan Bardella had been the presumptive candidate if the court upheld the verdict. He's been kind of sitting There as a plan B. And he has been pretty active, too. He's been campaigning, he's been setting out his store. He had that big Politico interview that people would have heard on this podcast about where he pledged various things. So he talked about the fact that he wouldn't be sending money to Bruss and laid out his store, talked about how he was going to be his own man. But it looks like now he's going to have to be number two, a second fiddle to Marine Le Pen. So that is going to have a pretty significant impact both on Brussels, but also on Paris.
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B
Yeah, I mean, we should say Bardella has been very loyal, you know, and so Le Pen's loyalists control key parts of the campaign. So he's basically fallen back into line. But we've already heard her come out and basically go full populist. Her line is, the judges and the system tried to stop me and now the French people get to decide. It felt like really this people versus elites campaign.
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A
Yeah. And she's trying to capitalize on some of the appeal of Jordan Bardella. Because when we've spoken about this election in the past, when we've spoken about the preferred candidates, generally speaking, the centrists are more concerned about Bardella. He's young, he doesn't have that Le Pen name, dragging him down potentially with kind of the stain that that has when your name is Le Pen. He's kind of a clean slate candidate. And so he was seen as a better option for the far right. Marine Le Pen comes with a hell of a lot of baggage, and so she is seen as less electable in some parts. And when you look at polling, he does better in polling. So I think this is being seen as something of a win for the centrist candidates, for Edouard Philippe, who is the presumed kind of front runner when it comes to the centrist camp. And so I think this is kind of a best case scenario for them because not only does Marine Le Pen not have the kind of. The big kind of martyrdom that she could have had, but also there isn't clarity around Bardella either. So I think it muddies the waters enough where things might look tricky if you're in business, if you're kind of someone who was wavering and you see that the candidate of this party is wearing an ankle bracelet or has a criminal conviction and all of this kind of cloud over her, you may not be as inclined to vote that way.
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B
Yeah, I mean, we'll have to see. But I think in Brussels, the mainstream is feeling More unease. You know, they were starting to see Bardella as somebody that maybe they could work with, along the lines of Giorgia Meloni. Our colleague Max Guerrero spoke to MEPs about how they see the choice, and the mood was not so much that Bardella would be fine, but that he at least would be less disruptive than Le Pen. So it is a bit one of those things where you're like, okay, if you're in the mainstream, you're like, well, the less electable candidate is running, so maybe that's better. But if that less electable candidate nonetheless gets elected, it makes things much more complicated.
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A
Yeah. And I think for Le Pen, it's clear that she sees that Bardella has appeal, and she's trying to get some of that appeal to rub off on her own candidacy. So she said in this interview that she did right after this verdict. She gave an interview on Tuesday night, and she talked about the fact that she was going to be running with Bardella, and it was something like a joint ticket, sort of like in the US a president and a vice president run on a joint ticket. But she was like, oh, he's going to be my prime minister. Of course, that's not how things work in Paris. You don't. In France, you don't run as a prime minister. That's a parliamentary vote. So, you know, it's kind of a bit of an interesting tactic that she's deploying there. Yeah, look, we've got a long way to go. We've got another court ruling pending, so there's plenty more where that came from. But I'm interested to hear what our listeners have to say about this. If you're a French voter, has this Le Pen verdict affected your voting intention? You know, are you more likely, less likely to vote for Le Pen? Let us know. Sarah, story two, and this one's close to your heart. It's cow farts and cow burps.
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B
Zoya, don't forget about the cow burps.
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A
I could never forget about the cow burps. Basically, cows in Europe have had a bit of a promotion, haven't they?
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B
Yeah. I mean, they're suddenly seen as, you know, part of our strategic autonomy here. Look, you know, for a long, livestock was seen as, you know, maybe something of an inconvenience. Cows with their burps and their other gas emissions.
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A
You're so American right now, you can say fart. You can say fart on a podcast.
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B
I'm just old. I'm just kind of a boomer who doesn't like to use dirty words on a podcast. But anyway, these gaseous emissions, emissions were contributor or a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, particularly methane. And so it was like, well, actually, you know, it's shrinking Europe's livestock herds could help Europe meet its climate goals. But now that whole vibe is changing.
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A
Yeah. Well, this is so interesting to me because it feels like we've gone full 180. We've got an interesting story out today by our colleague Bartosz Brzezinski, and he's basically looking at the fact that Agriculture Commissioner Christoph Hansen said the farming sector supports 7 million jobs. It generates around 400 billion euro a year. He said the EU exports loads more in livestock products than it imports. And the message is this is not a dirty problem and a dirty market that we need to eliminate. It's actually a strategic asset that we need to defend as part of Europe's resilience.
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B
Right, yeah, exactly. So Bartos was jumping off the commission, putting out this new livestock strategy. And it basically looks at how to prop up this sector of Europe that actually has been shrinking. And instead of, hey, maybe here's how we get farmers to transition away from livestock instead, they were saying, look, we want to preserve this, and we should see livestock, as you said, a strategic asset. And it's not just because of the economic factors. That is also this idea that if there's empty farmland, especially on the border areas of the eu, that could be a security risk.
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A
But unfortunately, there's still the methane problem. Right. That is where things get a bit controversial, because livestock do produce a huge amount of methane. And the fact is that that's going to be problematic.
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B
Well, so the commission is proposing to say, look, instead of having less cows, let's just count the methane emissions differently. And. And that could. That could potentially help Europe still, Sarah,
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A
So what we're doing is not less methane, but less counting of methane. Is that what I'm hearing?
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B
We're going to use alternative counting, alternative facts?
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A
Some might say yeah, but no.
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B
Okay, in all seriousness, this is a real debate. Look, some farm advocates say, look, methane goes up into the atmosphere. Yes, it's a warming gas, but it only lasts 10 years. Maybe we need to just therefore count it differently. There's also an argument that, look, we need to really go farm by farm to understand how this works. And the other thing they're saying is, look, unlike, you know, kind of gasoline or chemical pollution, methane is from cows, is biogenic in nature. That means that it's a natural part of the way the Earth Cycle works. And so we need to just be a little more accepting of it.
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A
Well, green groups, suffice to say, aren't really buying it. They're saying it's a bit of a scandal. Greenpeace and others, they've said that Hanson shouldn't be downplaying the climate impact of livestock. And they want Brussels to cut animal numbers, they want the EU to encourage people to change their diets, and they want to cut subsidies from the most polluting production. So that's kind of those two quite intractable positions.
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B
Yeah. And I mean, it's just that type of thing is just going to be a non starter in Brussels, especially, as we discussed in this podcast before, if you cut this stuff too much, farmers are just going to protest. And even more than climate change, even more than Putin invading our borderlands, politicians around here have shown that they're afraid of farmers bringing manure and potatoes on tractors to capitals.
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A
All right, Sarah, for our third story today, it is Russian athletes being allowed back into the Olympics.
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B
What? What? I mean, well, we're just seeing so much politics, you know, interference sports that I have to admit, I'm not really that surprised. But basically, yeah, the International Olympic Committee has provisionally lifted its suspension on Russia.
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A
Yeah. And just to remind people, Russian athletes were banned from participating in official Olympic team competitions back in February 2022, which was in the wake of the full scale invasion of Ukraine. And the Russian Olympic Committee was suspended from the IOC the following October. And now basically the IOC has lifted that suspension of the Russian Olympic Committee and that has people pretty furious. So Estonia, for instance, yesterday said that it will ask for the European Commission to exclude the IOC from EU funding. So basically pulling all EU money from the ioc. And there's actually a statement that's being prepared by the sports Commissioner for Europe, Glenn McAuliffe, at the moment. And we think this is going to come up at next week's Foreign Affairs Council as well. And I mean, the, the reactions to this latest move, people are saying it's sports washing. You know, the Australians, the Baltics, they've been tweeting, they've been talking, you know, to folks in Brussels and saying, look, this is a classic case of just yet more sports washing of Russia. They've been slowly allowed back into the cultural and sporting field despite the fact that Russia is still waging a full scale invasion on Ukraine, and despite the fact that, and this is the point that is made by a lot of these critics, often these athletes are being used in propaganda. Some of these athletes are serving in the military themselves or are portraying themselves on social media in sort of military garb. So, you know, the argument is this isn't just people who are innocent bystanders. Oftentimes they're actually also involved and are being used in propaganda on behalf of the Russian Federation. So that's kind of one of the points that's being made.
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B
Yeah. So sort of to mitigate that, what you're describing, you know, there are still some rules in place, like Russia's flag and colors. National anthem won't be returning anytime soon.
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A
Well, that's just as things stand now. So we don't actually know because the next Olympics in LA will be in 2028, and we'll see what happens. All right, Sarah, what is on the Weekender tomorrow?
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B
Yeah, we have two really great discussions. The first one is a talk with author John Kempfer. He's written a book called Braver New World, where he basically traveled around to 10 different countries where governments are actually performing. And he profiled them, talked about how it's transferable and how it might not be. So we'll talk to him about the three European destinations he went to. Finland, Estonia and Austria. That's a very optimistic conversation. We'll have a somewhat more cynicism inducing one with Asla Aydin Tasbosh. She's a former Turkish journalist now working at the Brookings Institution, still watches very closely, and she'll help us understand President Erdogan's relationship with Europe, which is complicated. And his bromance still complicated with Donald Trump.
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A
Oh, I'm looking forward to it. Sarah, before we go, we have had a fun message from one of our listeners in Serbia. Their name is Voha and they write in. I am currently vacationing in Cyprus and had some delicious halloumi for lunch. There you go. Ian, take that in your pipe and smoke it. They continue. I may even dare try Chef Dalia, smiley face. You should try it and tell me what it's like. They also have Kebab Politico. Look it up. My God, this is like the triumvirate of the Brussels Playbook podcast. Halloumi Shaftalia and Kebab Politico.
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B
I think we need to start serving Kebab Politico at the office.
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A
I did actually look it up and Politico Kebab appears to be a traditional Greek dish that combines minced meat, cumin, allspice, sumac and chili. And when I say I looked it up, I mean our producer Saga and our producer Dionis looked it up and told me what it was. And then I absorbed that information and have produced it as my own, as I do every day on this podcast. That's about it from us today, folks. Leave us a review. Bang us a rating, five stars. Sarah will appreciate it. See you, folks.