Welcome to Better Europe’s weekly update on EU Affairs.
EU LEADERS REBUFF TRUMP’S UKRAINE PEACE PLAN
EU leaders issued a stark warning against premature peace talks between Ukraine and Russia at their Summit in Brussels this week. Rebuffing US President-elect Donald Trump’s hints at brokering a ceasefire, leaders from Belgium, Lithuania, Sweden and elsewhere insisted that Ukraine, not Moscow – or Washington – must dictate the terms of future negotiations. “The priority now is to strengthen Ukraine,” said Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, suggesting that peacekeepers could be an option. The summit also saw cautious support for a European peacekeeping force, with Sweden and Belgium open to contributing troops after the war. For now, Belgium’s Alexander de Croo warned: “First the Ukrainians have to win the war.” As Ukrainian President Zelensky pushed for air defense systems and €6.6 billion in military aid, blocked by Hungary, Putin’s boasts of military progress and ‘hypersonic missiles’ dominated Russian media. And as the EU seeks to assert its strategic autonomy, leaders stressed the need for greater defense independence, underlining Europe’s role in shaping its own future security. With Trump’s peace ambitions and Europe’s autonomy in question, EU leaders doubled down on unity. As winter looms, the EU’s message is clear: Kyiv and not the Kremlin must control the endgame.
REVIEW OF SUS FIN DISCLOSURE REGULATION COMING TOGETHER
More Christmas gifts this week as the Platform on Sustainable Finance published its long-awaited recommendations on the review of the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation. The SFDR, as the acronym goes, was one of the first pieces of the ‘susfin’ puzzle laid back in 2019, when lawmakers agreed that financial investment products need to demonstrate how sustainable they are to prevent greenwashing, a regime that over time became a label for ‘light green’ and ‘dark green’ investment products. It also prescribes a limited form of due diligence for Europe’s largest FMPs — bubble jargon for Financial Market Participants, anyone who creates financial investment products basically. Although many products would use marketing language such as “recognized as Article 9 dark green investments according to EU legislation”, the rules were never intended to classify or label products. The Platform now joins many others in accepting the inevitable future of the regime as a classification scheme, proposing concrete indicators of “what is green and what is not” as Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis would put it. The file will certainly remain top of mind of incoming Commissioner Alburquerque, who will have to justify that any legislative intervention in compatible with the Commission’s anti-admin burden drive and the forthcoming ‘Omnibus’ proposal. It therefore remains to be seen whether the transformation from a disclosure to a classification or even labelling regime, planned for the second quarter of next year, is actually going to fly.
PARLIAMENT ENDORSES NEW INTERGROUPS ON THE POLICE, PALESTINE AND WINE
In other news, MEPs this week silently adopted their list of 28 ‘intergroups’ for the next five years — groups of Parliamentarians with a shared interest that typically does not really fit within the boundaries of EU competences but reflect personal pastimes such as model trains. While this might be clear for groups that promote the “Ways of Saint James” or “Wine, Quality Foodstuffs and Spirits”, the reality is that most of the intergroups this mandate are essentially lobby shops for those who sponsor them by providing staff time to the MEPs chairing and participating in the intergroups. As before, stakeholders can also instead push for the creation of “informal intergroups”, bypassing the beauty competition that took place over the past months with MEPs and political groups indicating their support for one of the 28 groups that made the cut. While helpful as a regular contact opportunity with MEPs, many outside stakeholders seem to accept that Intergroups have simply become yet another tool in the advocacy tool box — nice to have, but, if need be, a screw can be forced in with a hammer. The current list of intergroups does give a good impression of the Zeitgeist; unsurprisingly, the new group on “The Police” probably won’t be reflecting on how every little thing that Ursula does is magic, but rather on the current migration and security-obsessed cohort of MEPs.