Transcript
A (0:00)
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B (0:23)
Good morning. It's Thursday, February 12th, and this is the Brussels Playbook podcast, the Vibe. Today it's strategic autonomy meets strategic dysfunction. EU leaders are gathering in a castle in Limburg for an informal retreat and they're going to discuss how to revive Europe's economy. Also on the table, the parliament has sued the commission over Hungary. And we'll get a hint on who's going to win that case today. And a little taste of castle diplomacy. I'm Zoya Sheftolovic, POLITICO's chief EU correspondent, and with me today is our policy editor, Sarah Wheaton.
C (0:59)
Hey, Zoya, I'm glad to be with you, but like, aren't you supposed to, like, be at that castle to cover this summit?
B (1:06)
Listen, the things I do for this podcast, that's where I'm going next, Sarah.
C (1:10)
All right, well just be careful, don't fall.
B (1:12)
While I won't be running this time, it'll be a bus that ferries me to Limburg. All right, let's get started. This is an informal retreat that Antonio Kosta has organized. This is something that he's been doing lately. It's kind of an innovation of his. The idea is actually to get leaders together informally and to get them to chat, really buy into how they're going to make changes to the EU at that top, top level and then go back to their ministries and give instructions. So can you tell us a little bit about this particular one? What's he doing? What's he up to?
C (1:45)
Well, I always like to imagine these leaders are doing like trust falls and like team building exercises, but probably they'll just be sitting around a table at Alden Bees and Castle focused on fixing Europe's economy. You know, things we've heard before, rebuilding competitiveness. They are going to be coming rate from Antwerp where they just indeed had, as you discussed yesterday, they had this competitiveness discussion with industry, but ultimately they're going to be chit chatting. They're probably not going to make a lot of firm decisions here.
B (2:17)
That's true. But on the other hand, I do think that there is a sense at this meeting specifically that something's got to change. And that's what I've been hearing from sources around town for several weeks now, actually, Sarah, because they are coming to grips with the fact that the European economy really needs really electric shock therapy. And a lot of the easy fixes have been done. You know, they've done the low hanging fruit, as some around town might say. They've plucked it, picked it, eaten it, delicious. But now they've got to do some of the really tough stuff, stuff like completing the capital markets union, the banking union. Energy prices are a big priority for them as well at this one because prices are so high in certain countries, and I hasten to add, not in all countries. You've got high prices in the southern Europe, you've got reasonable prices in other parts of Europe. You know, you've got taxes on energy in some countries, you don't have in other countries. So this is part of what the commission wants to do. It wants to get all of these leaders together and it wants them to really buy into the idea that affordable energy prices are a priority for everyone. Because European competitiveness is a team sport, so to speak. So yeah, I think that's part of what they'll be talking about. There'll be other things as well. They're very keen to unlock people's savings. I keep hearing from various folks around town, one of the problems is that Europeans are risk averse. They put their money in the stock market. They certainly don't put their money in European stock markets. And by the way, there are so many of them. The idea is like we've got to get those savings invested. We've got to figure out how we do that. But again, that requires countries to accept that, you know, maybe my little tiny stock market doesn't exist anymore because we need one giant European one or maybe two or three. So that's the sort of stuff that they're talking about.