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Brussels Playbook Podcast
Testing Trump’s Board of Peace
00:15:36
The EU is taking a careful seat at Donald Trump’s first meeting of the Board of Peace — sending Mediterranean Commissioner Dubravka Šuica, but not signing up to the initiative.
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- [00:00]
Podcast Sponsor/Announcer
Today's episode is Presented by Amazon. 60% of sales on Amazon come from independent sellers across Europe. Over 280,000 small and medium enterprises partner with Amazon to grow their business. Learn more at aboutamazon.eu Good morning.
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Zoya Shevdolovic
It's Thursday, February 19th, and this is the Brussels Playbook podcast. The vibe in Brussels today is morbidly curious as a European commissioner is set to attend US President Donald Trump's first formal meeting of the so called Board of Peace to discuss Gaza. And also on the podcast, we've got nine EU countries who are urging the European Commission to act to help more women access abortion across the eu. And Europe wants to get trade deals done faster. And its solution is found in translation. Sorry about the joke, listeners. I'm Zoya Shevdolovic, POLITICO's chief EU correspondent, and with me today is our policy editor, Sarah Wheaton. Hey, Sarah.
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Sarah Wheaton
Hey, Zoya. Congratulations on the end of your second week anchoring a near daily podcast. How are you holding up?
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Zoya Shevdolovic
I am eating twice as much sugar and sleeping half as much, Sarah. So what about you?
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Sarah Wheaton
That sounds very playbooky. Well done.
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Zoya Shevdolovic
All right, Sarah, let's move to our first story today. We've got the Commissioner for the Mediterranean, Dubravka Schwitzer. She's in Washington today for the first formal meeting of this Board of Peace that Donald Trump has dreamt up. He came up with this proposal in Davos in January and we had sort of a flurry of countries saying, yes, they'll go, no, they won't go. And where we've landed is the eu. It's not going as a member of the Board of Peace, but we've got Dubravka Schwitzer coming in to sort of observe what's happening.
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Sarah Wheaton
Yeah, I mean, the idea is to keep it a little ambiguous. The EU wants to see what's going on, but doesn't want to formally endorse the thing. I mean, after all, this board doesn't have a clear mandate. It's just supposed to help broader global peace efforts. Starting out with Gaza. It does have some kind of credible players. I mean, well, I should say naturally, it's chaired by Donald Trump himself.
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Zoya Shevdolovic
Of course, who else would chair it, Sarah?
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Sarah Wheaton
And then there are other people who are, who have credibility because they are close to him, including envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. And the guy in charge, maybe not a household name, but somebody with deep experience in the Middle east and actually a former member of the European Parliament. He's a Bulgarian diplomat named Nikolai Mladinov, and he is the Board of Peace's high representative for Gaza. And the thing about Mladinov is he used to have roles in the Middle east for the United Nations. So this is a credible person. And yet, despite these bold faced names, fairly serious people, the EU is keeping its distance.
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Zoya Shevdolovic
Yeah, it is. And it's because it's kind of a funny setup, this Board of Peace. Firstly, the remit is not just for Gaza. Donald Trump himself said, look, we're going to start with Gaza and then I'm going to be solving all of these other problems in the world. Secondly, there is no term limit or set time when Trump's term expires. So he's kind of got this indefinite position. He hasn't said whether he'd step down when his presidency ends. He hasn't said, you know, how long he plans to stick around. So I think that is worrying people. But I think the main issue that people have with it, particularly in the eu, is there is this real fear that, that this group will supplant the United nations, which exists. It's got a charter, it's got rules, it's got procedures. Obviously people know that it has its flaws, but equally it has huge benefits that we've seen over the past 80 years. So I think there is a real fear that by creating this alternate UN that Donald Trump will essentially destroy the real deal in New York. And so I think that's part of the hesitation.
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Sarah Wheaton
And another big issue is Vladimir Putin is one of the main members of this board.
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Zoya Shevdolovic
Absolutely. And that's the reason why we see Ursula von der Leyen in particular, but also other EU leaders, even some big Trump fans, like Giorgio Maloney, the Italian Prime Minister, being quite hesitant to actually accept their invitation to be on the Board of Peace because essentially it might mean sitting next to Vladimir Putin while he's waging full scale war on Ukraine.
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Sarah Wheaton
And that said, and maybe it's not surprising given what we've just said, but Hungary has joined as a full member. Viktor Orban is expected to actually attend in person. Bulgaria has also joined, but several other top players in the EU have declined to join, notably France, which Trump responded to Macron's rejection by saying that he was gonna put 200% tariffs on French champagne. And so we have some other countries just kind of sitting on the fence. And von der Leyen was invited, but she's trying to split the difference by sending sweets of Zoe. What are you hearing from diplomats about how she's handling this?
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Zoya Shevdolovic
So I think it's super interesting. The message that sending debrafka Schwitzer, the Commissioner for the Mediterranean sends. She is not an executive vice president or even a vice president of the European Commission. She's just the bog standard commissioner. She's got a pretty narrow remit when it comes to these talks. This is very much within the Gaza part of her portfolio. So the idea, I think having spoken with some officials and gotten some insight as to how this choice was made, the idea is Ursula von der Leyen was not interested in going herself or sending one of her real top players, or for instance, Kayakallis, that you use top diplomat, because that would have really legitimized this board of peace proposal. The idea was they didn't want to snub the the US Fully, and they also didn't want to be cut out of the room fully because if Debra Schwitzer is not there and no European commissioner is there, we don't know what might have been decided. And there's this sense of like, the European Union wants to be represented in the room.
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Sarah Wheaton
Well, and after all, I mean, they're. The EU is the largest humanitarian donor to Palestinians. They give 1.65 billion euros just since October 7, 2023 alone. So, yeah, legit that they, they at least want to have a sense of what's going on.
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Zoya Shevdolovic
Yeah, they want to be in the room. They want to know what is said and what is done. So I think it's actually strategically quite well thought out move this selection of Dubravka Schwitzer.
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Sarah Wheaton
Yeah, I mean, curious to see how long Europe can maintain this balance of staying in the room in Trump's kind of side thing, while also not completely undermining the UN Yeah, it's going to be tricky.
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Zoya Shevdolovic
All right, Sarah, let's move to our second story today. Politico has seen a letter that's been signed by nine EU countries. And what they would like is for the commission to explore setting up a voluntary EU fund that would help more women access abortion care across EU borders. And this is linked to a citizens initiative that's one of these kind of petitions that are signed by a certain number of people. So there's a threshold of a million citizens. If you get that threshold, then you have the right to have your initiative looked at by the eu. And the group that was behind this one was called My Voice, My Choice. So that's kind of the background here, Sarah. Yeah.
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Sarah Wheaton
And the citizens initiative, they're asking the EU to give financial support to women who need to travel from one EU country to another in order to get an abortion. And the kind of reality behind that is that abortion access is very uneven across the eu.
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Zoya Shevdolovic
Yeah. This is really quite surprising to me because I just assumed that it would be relatively simple to get an abortion in most places in Europe. I know, of course, there are some outliers. We've got Malta and we've got Poland, where some of the most restrictive rules exist and where it's virtually impossible to get an abortion. But my assumption was that in a place like France, where there's separation of church and state, in places like Belgium, where there's very good social health care, that it would be easy. But it turns out it's not.
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Sarah Wheaton
No. And it's a bit of a different story in each country. But, you know, France and Italy, for example, are countries where abortion is legal, but doctors have the right to say, I personally am against abortion, and so I choose not to provide it. And so therefore, women might just not be able to get them. In Belgium, it's only legal up to 12 weeks, whereas in the Netherlands, there's kind of a longer window. Our colleagues on Politico's healthcare team actually wrote an article last year noting that one woman a week actually travels for from Belgium to the Netherlands just to get an abortion because they need this kind of extra window. So when you look at just that, okay, there's a supply and demand issue. It doesn't seem so political for the EU to just kind of give an assist here. But I can actually tell you as a former health reporter, this is absolutely explosive because the EU is a not responsible for health policy. But also, I mean, this is the ultimate culture war issue. On the one hand, if you think life begins at conception, you see abortionists killing babies. Other people who support abortion rights see it as an issue of bodily autonomy for women. This would be the EU absolutely putting their hand on the scale and saying, we are going to give women access to this, even if countries like Poland and Malta did not intend for women to have those rights.
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Zoya Shevdolovic
Yeah. And it's interesting because. So this isn't harmonizing abortion laws or anything. This is just essentially the idea behind it is, yes, there is one Belgian woman who travels to the Netherlands to get an abortion every week. Week. But what about the women who cannot afford that trip to the Netherlands? And that's really what this is looking at. It's helping those women for whom it can be such a barrier that they're unable to get the care that they feel they need. So I think that is really the Interesting element here, and what's also interesting, Sarah, is we know that Poland has among the strictest rules in in the eu, but the Polish minister actually signed this letter from the nine countries. The others are Austria, Estonia, Finland, France, Luxembourg, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden. The natural question here is if you want to support people to leave Poland and go elsewhere for their abortion, why not just make it easier to get an abortion in Poland?
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Sarah Wheaton
Super fascinating. This captures how divided Polish society is. So Prime Minister Donald Tusk for government won the elections in 2023 by promising to liberalize the country's abortion laws. But the President of Poland was and remains linked to the Law and Justice Party, very conservative, very Catholic, and the president just keeps blocking that effort. And so this apparently is the government saying, okay, look, we get that we're not going to be able to keep this campaign promise. And so we will invite the EU to help our citizens to travel to another country to access abortion.
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Zoya Shevdolovic
It's so eye opening, Sarah. So in terms of next step. So this letter has come through from these ministers. They've written to Equality Commissioner Hajar Labib. So now the commission has until March to respond. So we'll see what the commissioner says. And now for some headlines. If you're interested in what's happening and the race for the ECB top job. Now that there's speculation that Christine Lagarde may not finish her eight year term, we've got an essential and I might say completely speculative guide as to who might replace her. That's up on our homepage. And we've also interviewed Petra Podashenko, the former Ukrainian president, who has some interesting advice for anyone who's negotiating with Vladimir Putin. Chief among it is that you've got to remember that Putin was a KGB officer. So that one's up on the homepage too.
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Sarah Wheaton
Zoya. Our third story is about another issue that is explosive, always in the Brussels bubble. Translation.
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Zoya Shevdolovic
Sarah, this is a topic so close to my heart because in my family, somehow, magically, every conversation around the dinner table always comes back to translation and origins of words. So anytime I can talk about translation, interpretation, languages, etcetera, is a good day for me. And this one's a doozy because what's happening is the Commission is looking at ways that they can speed up the making of trade deals. And Trade Commissioner Maris Shevchevic is going to present an idea to the bloc's trade ministers when they meet in Cyprus this Friday to basically go English first in trade deals.
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Sarah Wheaton
It turns out that you can cut down the timeline from 23 months to 13 months if you just don't bother to Translate into all 24 European languages before finalizing a trade deal.
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Zoya Shevdolovic
Yeah, this is called this accelerated procedure. And basically the thinking is we're in a pretty tough geopolitical environment right now. We've got Donald Trump making and breaking trade deals left, right and center, and the EU is taking so long to even just get things translated. And to be fair, there's a reason for that, because there are 24 languages, and some of those languages, French, Spanish, German, there's plenty of people who could translate those. But when you look at some of the more rare languages, like Maltese, like Irish, Gaelic, those are very limited in terms of who you can actually draw on to do the work. So I think that's part of the reason for the delay. And of course, in general, you know, there's just. It's legalese, it's complicated. Every comma, every dot has to be in the right place. So this is the stuff of nightmares if you're a budding interpreter making a mistake and something like that. So they really take their time. So this is the idea that, look, we will eventually translate all of these deals into all of the 24 languages, but in the meantime, we're going to do that in parallel. We're not going to wait for the last language to be finished before the deal is done.
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Sarah Wheaton
Yeah, I mean, this deal with India, that was just wrapped and Indonesia, those are going to be the test cases. So let's see how it goes.
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Zoya Shevdolovic
Can't wait. Sarah. Well, that's it for the Brussels Playbook podcast for the week. Sarah, what have you got on? Tomorrow on the EU Confidential podcast, we
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Sarah Wheaton
have something that turned into somewhat a dramatic interview with the EU's ambassador to Ukraine, Katerina Matarnova. She was speaking to us from her office in Kyiv when air raid sirens basically went off. So we'll really get a searing understanding of what it's like to be on the ground there.
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Zoya Shevdolovic
Oof. That sounds like a bit of a heavy one, but a really important one because of course, we're nearing the four year anniversary of the war on Ukraine, so really, really important to hear from her. All righty. Well, we've got a birthday shout out this morning, and by the way, if you'd like your birthday shouted out, please do Send us a WhatsApp voice note or text message. The number is in the show notes. Sarah, this is one of your friends.
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Sarah Wheaton
Yeah, I mean, as the Food and Agriculture editor, I want to wish a heartfelt happy birthday to Esther Delonga a former MEP who is now the Chief of staff to Agriculture Commissioner Christoph Hansen.
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Zoya Shevdolovic
Did you get an invitation to her birthday?
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Sarah Wheaton
No, but the agri team is ready to bring you a birthday cake to your office. Just let us know.
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Zoya Shevdolovic
Let us know, Esther. We're right here for you folks, if you haven't already, make sure you're subscribed. And I know I say this every time, and I'm sorry to be boring, but please rate us. It helps other people find us. Thanks so much.
- [15:10]
Podcast Sponsor/Announcer
A Message from Amazon 60% of sales on Amazon come from independent sellers across Europe. Over 280,000 small and medium enterprises partner with Amazon to grow their business. Sellers like Nivoma and Toulouse use Amazon to grow their food supplement brand into a global business. Learn more at aboutAmazon€.