After
toasting €90B loan, EU leaders face up to the morning after
At the
summit in Cypriot party town Ayia Napa, the comedown came quickly.
By
Sebastian Starcevic, Nektaria Stamouli and Jacopo Barigazzi
AYIA
NAPA, Cyprus ― The afternoon began with the EU finally sealing its €90 billion
loan to Ukraine. The evening ended with leaders confronting the sheer scale of
everything else they have to do.
Among
other things: Get Kyiv into the EU, beef up the bloc’s mutual defense clause,
shield themselves from the economic fallout of the war in Iran and sort out
their collective €1.8 trillion budget for another seven years.
Sounds
easy, right?
As
European heads of state and government dined together on Thursday in the
Cypriot resort of Ayia Napa, on the first day of a two-day gathering largely
focused on global politics, any sense of triumph ebbed as they confronted the
many challenges and crises on their plates. While they had the luxury of not
needing to put their names to a joint statement that evening, their
conversation ― over lamb and ravioli ― once again exposed how hard they find it
to agree on the way forward.
The good
news had come earlier when, after months of delay ― mainly down to Hungarian
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s intransigence ― his country and Slovakia dropped
their vetoes on the funds for Ukraine first agreed in December. The EU also
approved its 20th round of sanctions on Russia.
Volodymyr
Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president who joined the EU talks, seemed jollier than
he had been in months, one diplomat present for some of the discussion in
Cyprus said.
Not
‘realistic’
But the
celebration will be short-lived. The next item on the EU’s agenda is whether,
how and when to get his war-torn nation into its club. It is a likely component
of any peace deal with Russia and, while the path to EU membership looks a
little more feasible now Orbán is on his way out after a brutal election
defeat, it is nothing like straightforward.
The
turquoise waters that provided the stunning backdrop to the summit could not
disguise the EU’s fractures. While Estonian Prime Minister Kristen Michal told
reporters he favored “accelerating” Ukraine’s membership, Croatian Prime
Minister Andrej Plenković all but scoffed at the idea of Kyiv joining anytime
soon.
“I don’t
think it’s realistic that it’ll happen on the first of January ’27,” he said.
Croatia, which became the latest member of the bloc in 2013, “was relatively
fast” to do so and it still took “six years to negotiate.”
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That
sounded different again from the approach French President Emmanuel Macron set
out. It was “important to give a precise timeline to Ukraine and Moldova,” he
said.
For
years, if there has been any EU unity at all, it has been in fighting Orbán.
With him gone ― and after he skipped what would have been his final summit ―
even the illusion of that common front has vanished.
“Leaders
against Ukraine’s EU accession can no longer hide behind Orbán’s stance,” said
one EU official closely involved in the talks. Like others in this article, the
were granted anonymity to discuss Thursday’s confidential discussions.
Operational
plan
On
defense, too, leaders are butting heads, but tried not to let it show.
With the
war in the Middle East still unresolved, Nikos Christodoulides, the president
of Cyprus, which is not a NATO member and was struck by Shahed drones in the
early days of the Iran conflict, sought to steer the conversation toward the
bloc’s security.
For
European countries outside the transatlantic alliance, or those unnerved by
Donald Trump’s questioning of it, the EU’s barely used Article 42.7 is
attractive. In case of armed aggression against an EU country, it requires
other governments to come to its aid.
“We need
to have an operational plan,” said Christodoulides. The EU needs to work out
“what is going to happen in case a member state decides to trigger the specific
article.”
Christodoulides
wanted to use the meeting to present the other EU leaders with a roadmap for
how 42.7 could become operational, a senior Cypriot official told POLITICO
ahead of the talks.
“It could
be something like the activation of the EU civil protection mechanism, which
allows any country hit by a disaster to request emergency assistance,” the
official said.
“It’s not
going to be up and running after this summit,” the official added, “but the
preparation should start.”
But the
discussion among leaders was mainly about geopolitics and energy prices in the
end, three diplomats said. The article 42.7 discussion barely got off the
ground and “was mentioned as part of the wider discussion” by Christodoulides,
a fourth diplomat said.
Not
Europe’s war
In a sign
of just how high the stakes are for the EU, Christodoulides argued there cannot
be peace in the Middle East without Europe.
“We
cannot reach de-escalation in Iran without the active participation of the
European Union,” he said.
Yet many
European leaders are still loath to get meaningfully involved in the conflict,
with the prevailing feeling in Brussels and other capitals that it is simply
not Europe’s war, and discussion centering on little more than moving around
warships already stationed in the region.
Earlier
on Thursday, Trump said he had ordered the U.S. Navy to “shoot and kill” with
“no hesitation” boats laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz. European leaders
skirted the subject.
For them,
Thursday’s dinner was more about setting the course for the next few months.
Belgian
Prime Minister Bart De Wever said that while things may become somewhat
smoother without the pugnacious Orbán, “there are other countries in Europe
with leaders who do not always go along with” the European consensus.
De Wever
— who burnished his own credentials as an obstructionist when he refused to
allow the EU to funnel frozen Russian assets from a Brussels-based financial
depository to Ukraine last year over fears Moscow would retaliate against
Belgium — said it was “slightly overestimated” how much smoother European
summits will be without Orbán at the table.
At its
halfway stage, and — for now — free from the burden of having to put their
names to any firm commitments, leaders could avoid really putting that to the
test. But they’ll soon have to.
Gabriel
Gavin and Giorgio Leali also contributed to this article.
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