POLITICO’s must-read briefing on what's driving the day in Brussels, by Gerardo Fortuna, Nicholas Vinocur and Gabriel Gavin.
This site is protected by Turnstile and the Cloudflare Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
AI generated Text-to-speech
POLITICO’s must-read briefing on what’s driving the day in Brussels, by Gerardo Fortuna, Nicholas Vinocur and Gabriel Gavin.
By GABRIEL GAVIN
Send tips here | Follow us @gerardofortuna @NicholasVinocur @GabrielGavin | Listen to Playbook and view in your browser
GOOD MORNING — I’m Gabriel Gavin, with you on International Left Handers Day. And that got me wondering: Who’s Europe’s most powerful southpaw since the U.K.’s David Cameron left office? Send your suggestions to: [email protected]
In today’s Playbook:
— Foreign ministers are set to talk Israel — it won’t be an easy conversation.
— Brussels’ e-scooters are on the way out. But shared electric bikes may survive.
— Faces in the crowd: Hildegard Bentele, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Elke Van den Brandt, Elon Musk, Kaja Kallas, Dubravka Šuica, Gabriel Attal, Radosław Sikorski, Benjamin Netanyahu and more.
SANCTIONS SHOWDOWN: EU countries are heading for another clash over long-planned sanctions against Israel next month but they’re still unlikely to reach an agreement, three European diplomats involved in the negotiations told Playbook. Capitals remain stuck even though Israel’s rejection of a Gaza plan proposed by Donald Trump’s Board of Peace undercut one of the arguments against taking action.
Off to Ireland: Foreign ministers will return to the subject of whether to impose trade restrictions and blacklist individual Israeli politicians when they meet in the Irish town of Wicklow for a so-called Gymnich on Sept. 1-2, they said. That’s less than two months before Israel’s Oct. 27 election. The EU’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas, who’s convening the meeting, will write to governments with the agenda in coming days.
Split opinion: Kallas has tried over the past year to broker the majority needed among capitals for the suspension of trade with what the EU says are illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and the unanimous support needed to sanction far-right ministers over human rights concerns.
Peace plan impediment: But some national governments have resisted the push, with countries including Czechia and Germany cautious about moving ahead while peace talks were ongoing. Those concerns have now been swept aside by Israel’s rejection of the Board of Peace deal.
No to the Board: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected the 15-point document on Sunday, saying the Israeli military withdrawal from the war-torn territory that was part of the plan was unacceptable before the total disarmament of Hamas.
It’s politics: “I expected a rejection [of the plan] because of the current political circumstances in Israel,” said Hildegard Bentele, a German MEP and chair of the Parliament’s delegation to Israel. Anything other than an insistence on Hamas’ disarmament is “very hard to explain to an Israeli public, whose main concerns are still security concerns.”
Political sensitivities: While the scuttling of the Gaza plan has allayed concerns over interfering with peace talks, fears that EU sanctions could play into Israel’s election campaign remain. Despite the support of countries like Sweden and the Netherlands, there will be no real consensus to take action until after the election, said the diplomats from three separate EU countries, granted anonymity to speak frankly.
Backfire alert: Sanctions proposed on National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, for example, could backfire and bolster his far-right Otzma Yehudit party in the polls, one diplomat said.
Talk about it: Dublin, a long-time advocate for tougher action against Israel, believed it was important to put sanctions on the agenda, even though the impasse remains unresolved, one of the diplomats said. Kallas had also pledged to come back to the discussion after it was shut down during a tense meeting in July.
Waiting is a strategy shared by Washington: “We recognize the complexities that come from the Israeli elections, and we’re obviously going to give [Netanyahu] a space to try and navigate that,” a Trump administration official told my U.S. colleagues.
Give diplomacy a chance: Israel is keen to avert sanctions before or after the election, insisting it’s prepared to deal with the EU to assuage concerns. “Anyone that is concerned about the Palestinians, the answer is to work with Israel, not against us,” Israel’s ambassador to the bloc, Avi Nir-Feldklein, told Playbook. He praised a recent diplomatic push from Mediterranean Commissioner Dubravka Šuica for having advanced humanitarian projects in Gaza.
UKRAINE’S GRAIN DRAIN: Kyiv’s vast agricultural exports face being cut off from the market by Russia’s Black Sea attacks — and hesitancy from the country’s EU allies, Bartosz Brzeziński reports.
HOMEGROWN MISSILES: Ukrainian defense tech company Fire Point’s first ballistic missile will be ready this fall, as Kyiv prepares to counter the growing ferocity of Russian missile attacks, Veronika Melkozerova reports.
OUR MAN IN BERLIN: Germany is planning to give its intelligence agencies new powers to carry out more assertive operations, including sabotage and cyber activities, in response to growing threats from Russia, Nette Nöstlinger reports.
AFTER THE TERROR: The mother of Abdul Ballout, detained for the Berlin Pride attack that killed one woman and injured another 29 people, is struggling to come to terms with her son’s radicalization. Julia Zabert sat down with her in the German capital.
TRUMP’S PLANE SWITCH: A credible threat that Trump’s plane could be targeted by a shoulder-fired missile was behind the decision to move the president onto a smaller government jet during last month’s trip to Turkey, Reuters reports. And CNN says several close personal aides joined Trump on his secret flight.
NO REST ATTAL: There’s another Gabriel spending the summer working while his colleagues are on the beach: Gabriel Attal is playing catch-up in the race to be France’s next president, Victor Goury-Laffont reports from Paris.
I’M A CLACTON LAD, ME: Britain’s go-to populist politician Nigel Farage has a plan to beat his bin-headed competitor by bashing “the establishment” and painting himself as a local champion, John Johnston writes.
BIG SIGNAL: Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski has said Poland will stop paying $50 million-a-year to Starlink if Elon Musk’s company doesn’t stop “discriminating” against users of the mobile internet service in his country.
ETNA CHAOS: An estimated 100,000 travelers have been affected by the closure of Sicily’s Catania Airport due to smoke from the eruption of Mount Etna, La Stampa reports. The closure is slated to last until Friday night.
WEATHER: Sunny. High of 35C.
BATTLE OF THE BIKES: E-bike and e-scooter rental companies Voi, Dott and Bolt will meet with the Brussels-Capital Region government next week, in an eleventh-hour bid to avoid being barred from the city’s streets. The government told the companies to get ready to remove their vehicles ahead of a Sept. 1 deadline, after a top court ruled their licenses were invalid.
Bye bye, scooters: Authorities are optimistic about the prospects of doing a deal to keep the e-bikes, while ditching the e-scooters, a spokesperson for Brussels’ mobility minister Elke Van den Brandt told Playbook. “We are trying to find a way where every company can to some extent have a few [bikes] — we don’t know how many or for how long but if they don’t find a solution by Sept. 1 then they are out.”
Ready to compromise: “I’m pretty hopeful that we’ll find a find a solution,” said Yessin Aattache, Voi’s Benelux country manager, adding that companies know they’ll have to compromise on the numbers of bikes on the road if they want to keep operating at all. “People use it every day, it’s their main form of transport … so I do also trust in [companies’] good faith to make sure that we can keep at least one form of shared mobility active.”
Berlin: Friedrich Merz needs a plan for what he’ll say after the Sept. 6 Saxony-Anhalt election, with polls suggesting the far-right AfD’s prospects are improving.
London: The polls have just opened in the seat of Clacton as the weirdest U.K. by-election in a generation heads for the finish line.
Washington PM: A crucial share of Trump’s supporters say the biggest failure of the president’s second term is the cost of living, according to The POLITICO Poll.
**Playbook came to Brussels in 2015 and changed how this town starts its day. On 17 August it lands in Canberra: a capital with just as many officials and, until now, no daily briefing of its own. Canberra Playbook: free, daily, radically impartial. Subscribe free.**
MEP Dirk Gotink; former MEPs Andrey Slabakov, Gérard Deprez and José Manuel García-Margallo; former French PM Manuel Valls; IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva; Euractiv’s Aurélie Burnier; The Think Room’s Liora Kern.
Playbook is brought to you by POLITICO’s EU Politics team: Gerardo Fortuna, Nicholas Vinocur, Gabriel Gavin, Zoya Sheftalovich, Max Griera, Mari Eccles, Hanne Cokelaere and Sebastian Starcevic. And: reporters Ferdinand Knapp and Milena Wälde, editors Alex Spence and James Panichi, and producer Dean Southwell.
SUBSCRIBE to the POLITICO newsletter family: Brussels Playbook | London Playbook | London Playbook PM | Playbook Paris | Berlin Playbook | Sunday Crunch | EU Influence | London Influence | D.C. Playbook | D.C. Influence | Canada Playbook | POLITICO Forecast | All our POLITICO Pro policy morning newsletters
About the Author
