If Ursula von der Leyen has her way, the Tunisia deal will become the “blueprint” for combating illegal migration to the EU. This is what the Commission President writes in a letter to the heads of state and government, which Table.Media has obtained. The letter is in preparation for the EU summit, which will take place from Thursday and at which the Commission and the Swedish Presidency of the Council want to give an account of migration policy.
Tunisia deal? This is the partnership agreement that the President of the Commission and the Prime Ministers of Italy and the Netherlands, Giorgia Meloni and Marc Rutte, brokered during their joint visit to Tunis on June 11.
The deal is not yet perfect, but the Commission is working on it at full speed. The agreement is reminiscent of the 2016 agreement with Turkey that stopped illegal migration across the Aegean Sea: A partnership to combat human trafficking is to be forged in a concerted effort involving money, trade expansion and economic cooperation in areas such as renewables. Including robust border protection, programs for repatriation from Tunisia to the home countries of the refugees, but also from the EU to Tunisia.
“Blueprint” sounds like the Commission President has countries in mind for further agreements. Perhaps we will know more after the summit.
If you enjoy reading Europe.Table, please feel free to forward our briefing. If this mail was sent to you: Here you can test our briefings for free.
Following the uprising of the private militia Wagner against the army leadership in Russia, the Russian government on Monday mainly tried to simulate normality. While President Vladimir Putin publicly took arms, his cabinet, led by Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, reported that there were no major social consequences of the weekend’s events. The remarkable thing – as Russian Kremlin experts Farida Rustamova and Maxim Towkajl explained it – was that the Cabinet meeting was shown publicly. Usually, there are no pictures of such meetings.
The Russian government still does not seem to have found a way to deal with the mercenaries’ uprising. Three questions now arise:
Numerous experts on Russian domestic politics yesterday pointed on the one hand to Putin’s weakened position, but at the same time to the fact that the fate of Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin has not yet been decided. “He is now a political actor, the regime must find a way to deal with him”, Ekaterina Schulmann, who lives in exile in Berlin, told the Financial Times. Speaking to Table.Media, she said, “Putin’s system is crumbling. Slowly or quickly – it’s unclear, only the direction is clear: It’s going downhill.”
Prigozhin himself reappeared via his Telegram channel late in the afternoon on Monday – with a surprisingly banal message: His “March of Justice” was a response to the defense minister’s attempt to gain control over Wagner. No more loud demands, no more insults, no more accusations. That’s how someone who justifies himself speaks. According to Russian media, moreover, the criminal case against Prigozhin has not yet been officially closed.
It is not yet clear whether the uprising, which resulted in several dozen deaths on the side of the Russian military and Wagner, will be entirely without consequences. In any case, the first names for a renewal at the top of the Russian Defense Ministry emerged yesterday: The current deputy minister and governor of the Tula region, Alexei Djumin, could succeed Sergei Shoigu. General Sergei Surovikin could replace the current Chief of the General Staff, Valery Gerasimov. Should Shoigu and Gerasimov leave, Prigozhin would have achieved an important goal after all.
It is also questionable whether Ukraine can take advantage of the briefly chaotic situation. “The longer the coup would have lasted, the better it would have been”, said Russian-speaking Israeli military analyst Ygal Levin, who lives in Kyiv and analyzes the situation on the front lines for Ukrainian media. In any case, he said, it helped that the Russian army had lost more helicopters in its suppression of the uprising.
If the short-term uprising was just a tempest in a teapot, it will have no immediate impact on the war in Ukraine, at least for now. For the time being, there is also little to gain from the situation for the governments in the EU and Washington. Rather, the West needs to promote a democratic elite in Russia in the long term, political analyst Kirill Shamiev said when asked. “The West needs to signal that it wants to support those who want democratization in Russian political life.” Shamiev is alluding to criticism widely voiced over the weekend among Russian exiles that no pro-democracy forces in the country had responded to the uprising.
It is still unclear how weakened Putin actually is. Alexey Yusupov, head of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation’s Russia program, now expects political purges: “So what will follow if Putin succeeds in putting down this uprising is a wave of purges,” he said in an interview with Table.Media (only available in German) immediately after the uprising began. “The hardliners will try to eliminate the supposedly unreliable in the political elite, in the military, in the public sphere, remove them from their functions or arrest them, or get rid of them altogether”, Yusupov said. He suspects that “a tightening of the police-state character of the system” will follow.
At least, there was one piece of good news on Monday. Serbia released three allegedly kidnapped Kosovo police officers, thus making a contribution to de-escalation with Pristina. But Josep Borrell couldn’t quite claim even that success when he briefed foreign ministers Monday on the stalled dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina. On the short messaging service Twitter, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán claimed to have secured the release from Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vučić.
Borrell and his Special Representative Miroslav Lajčák do not appear to have a happy hand at present. Member states are ready to take punitive measures if necessary to advance the dialogue on normalization between Belgrade and Pristina, Borrell said after the debate. As next steps, the EU foreign affairs envoy expects the election of mayors in four municipalities in northern Kosovo to be repeated and members of the Serb minority to participate this time.
It has been a long time since the Belgrade-Pristina dialogue made it so prominently onto the foreign ministers’ agenda. Instead of rapprochement and normalization, there has recently even been the threat of a renewal of armed confrontation. At the most recent crisis meeting in Brussels last week, Kurti and Vučić did not even want to sit down at the same table.
The responsibility for the confrontation of the past weeks is clearly seen in the environment of chief diplomat Borrell as lying with Albin Kurti. Kosovo’s head of government triggered the escalation with his stubborn attitude toward Belgrade, according to ambassadors from the region in the capitals.
But is the narrative true? Among the member states, there is support for Borrell and his special representative Lajčák. But the EU Parliament is critical of the mediators’ performance. The course taken by Lajčák and Borrell has proven to be wrong, says Austrian MEP Lukas Mandl, a member of the delegation that is also responsible for relations with Kosovo. The mess has been made, he says, and Ursula von der Leyen must make the dossier a top priority as soon as possible and put an end to the EU’s lurching course.
Of course, Albin Kurti also made mistakes. But Kosovo is basically on the right, pro-European path – unlike Serbia. Lukas Mandl accuses the mediators of “appeasement toward the Serbian leadership”, also because the goal of the dialogue was never clearly addressed: “We demand a clear course in parliament for the recognition of Kosovo.”
Instead, the mediator duo is relying on concessions to Belgrade and delaying tactics. Serbia has not accepted the Russian sanctions, has recently encouraged the circumvention of the punitive measures, has allowed demonstrations by warmongers and has created the impression that Putin is on the side of the Serbs, Lukas Mandl states. All this has had no consequences for the accession negotiations. In its progress reports, the EU Commission loses itself in technical details and ignores the big picture. The leadership in Belgrade is lying to its own people that Kosovo is part of Serbia and is using this fantasy to prevent the country from developing its potential as an economic engine of the region, says Mandl.
Reinhard Bütikofer of the Green Party takes a similar view. Borrell and Lajčák had a credibility problem from the very beginning, he said, because the Spaniard and the Slovak come from the small minority of EU states that have not yet recognized Kosovo. But that could not excuse the fact that the chief diplomat and his special envoy were acting with “unparalleled one-sidedness” in favor of Belgrade.
Albin Kurti had certainly made a mistake when he tried to bring elected mayors in northern Kosovo into office with police protection and with a low turnout. But the turnout was so low because the Serbs boycotted the election under pressure and death threats from Belgrade. And this after the Europeans had urged Pristina to postpone the election once again.
For Bütikofer, it is therefore clear that the escalation is the result of obstructionism from Belgrade. The EU is now threatening Albin Kurti with punitive measures after letting Aleksandar Vučić get away with everything for ten years: “The provocations from Belgrade are unacceptable.” In a kind of panic, the EU and the USA believed that Alexander Vučić would switch completely to the Putin camp without appeasement.
Serbia’s president is giving the West the middle finger and using the leeway to organize Putin’s influence in the Western Balkans. Curiously, the MEP finds complaints that Kurti is not as corruptible as his predecessors and therefore less easy to put under pressure. The EU Parliament, says Reinhard Bütikofer, must stop the EU mediators.
Rasmus Andresen has lived Europe without borders from an early age. Growing up with a binational background on the German-Danish border, he quickly became aware of the advantage his socialization can have. “I went to school in Denmark, played in a Danish handball club. I’ve always seen that thinking across borders and also having different cultural influences is not a weakness, but a strength”, he says.
The 37-year-old is now a member of the European Parliament, where he has been spokesman for the German group in the Green parliamentary group since the end of 2021. He replaced, surprisingly for some, the long-time leader of the German Greens, Sven Giegold, when the latter became a civil servant state secretary in the Ministry for Economic Affairs after the change of government in Berlin. The German Greens make up about one-third of the Green group in the European Parliament and are therefore a power factor.
One might think that as head of the German group, Andresen would have to represent German interests first and foremost. But he cares about the success of the entire European Union, he says. “I think it’s very important that we have a strong European perspective in the federal policy debate, because I’m one of those who definitely believe that we can only tackle and solve major challenges in a European context”, Andresen says. Decisions must “not only work in Berlin-Mitte, but also for other countries”, for example for people in Greece or Finland.
Especially since the Federal Republic cannot dictate every decision in the EU anyway. “The war in Ukraine has given the Eastern European countries a completely different weight. In the European debate, Poland in particular, but also the Baltic countries, are getting more of a hearing.” In the Green Group in the European Parliament, they are making sure that a few member countries do not develop too strong a dominance.
But how exactly is Andresen’s role as spokesman for the German group within the Group to be understood? “There’s a saying in Brussels that everyone is president of something”, he jokes. The group has a classic Green leadership – co-chair of the group is Terry Reintke from NRW. Together with Belgian Philippe Lamberts, she represents the group externally. “To this end, the parliamentary group chair and the spokesperson convey the Green positions internally – that is, to Berlin, to the federal party, to the parliamentary group in the Bundestag. We are also the ones who, in addition to the specialist politicians, represent our positions, our stance externally in the press, to associations.”
In this role, the administrative science graduate is someone who often gets involved in federal political debates. Beyond that, he is characterized by tenacity. The NDR magazine Panorama accompanied Andresen for a year in his efforts to commit shipping in the EU to climate neutrality from 2040. To this end, he also sought talks with companies in northern Germany that are not enthusiastic about the Green’s plans. He was not able to push through his goal. Andresen did not support the compromise of an 80 percent reduction in emissions by 2050.
In the European Parliament, Andresen is already pursuing his second career as an MEP. From 2009 to 2019, he was a member of the Schleswig-Holstein state parliament, most recently even one of several vice-presidents. In the European Parliament, he is responsible for the EU budget. He also coordinates the issue for his parliamentary group. It is eagerly awaited on which list position he will run for the next European Parliament. The decision will be made at the party conference in November. Andresen is considered a contender for the top spot among the male candidates, as are his group colleagues Michael Bloss, Daniel Freund and Sergey Lagodinsky.
He was once politicized by the debate surrounding Agenda 2010, which “funnily enough brought him to the Greens”. In the years that followed, he worked to help the party sharpen its profile in the social and economic spheres. His participation in the protests in the Wendland region against the Castor transports also had a formative influence on him. Added to this is his bi-national socialization.
All of this makes Andresen a European-minded politician who will not be so easily ground down by the mills of Brussels. Despite setbacks such as the climate-neutral shipping issue, he continues to campaign for green positions with the necessary endurance. Constantin Eckner
If Ursula von der Leyen has her way, the Tunisia deal will become the “blueprint” for combating illegal migration to the EU. This is what the Commission President writes in a letter to the heads of state and government, which Table.Media has obtained. The letter is in preparation for the EU summit, which will take place from Thursday and at which the Commission and the Swedish Presidency of the Council want to give an account of migration policy.
Tunisia deal? This is the partnership agreement that the President of the Commission and the Prime Ministers of Italy and the Netherlands, Giorgia Meloni and Marc Rutte, brokered during their joint visit to Tunis on June 11.
The deal is not yet perfect, but the Commission is working on it at full speed. The agreement is reminiscent of the 2016 agreement with Turkey that stopped illegal migration across the Aegean Sea: A partnership to combat human trafficking is to be forged in a concerted effort involving money, trade expansion and economic cooperation in areas such as renewables. Including robust border protection, programs for repatriation from Tunisia to the home countries of the refugees, but also from the EU to Tunisia.
“Blueprint” sounds like the Commission President has countries in mind for further agreements. Perhaps we will know more after the summit.
If you enjoy reading Europe.Table, please feel free to forward our briefing. If this mail was sent to you: Here you can test our briefings for free.
Following the uprising of the private militia Wagner against the army leadership in Russia, the Russian government on Monday mainly tried to simulate normality. While President Vladimir Putin publicly took arms, his cabinet, led by Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, reported that there were no major social consequences of the weekend’s events. The remarkable thing – as Russian Kremlin experts Farida Rustamova and Maxim Towkajl explained it – was that the Cabinet meeting was shown publicly. Usually, there are no pictures of such meetings.
The Russian government still does not seem to have found a way to deal with the mercenaries’ uprising. Three questions now arise:
Numerous experts on Russian domestic politics yesterday pointed on the one hand to Putin’s weakened position, but at the same time to the fact that the fate of Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin has not yet been decided. “He is now a political actor, the regime must find a way to deal with him”, Ekaterina Schulmann, who lives in exile in Berlin, told the Financial Times. Speaking to Table.Media, she said, “Putin’s system is crumbling. Slowly or quickly – it’s unclear, only the direction is clear: It’s going downhill.”
Prigozhin himself reappeared via his Telegram channel late in the afternoon on Monday – with a surprisingly banal message: His “March of Justice” was a response to the defense minister’s attempt to gain control over Wagner. No more loud demands, no more insults, no more accusations. That’s how someone who justifies himself speaks. According to Russian media, moreover, the criminal case against Prigozhin has not yet been officially closed.
It is not yet clear whether the uprising, which resulted in several dozen deaths on the side of the Russian military and Wagner, will be entirely without consequences. In any case, the first names for a renewal at the top of the Russian Defense Ministry emerged yesterday: The current deputy minister and governor of the Tula region, Alexei Djumin, could succeed Sergei Shoigu. General Sergei Surovikin could replace the current Chief of the General Staff, Valery Gerasimov. Should Shoigu and Gerasimov leave, Prigozhin would have achieved an important goal after all.
It is also questionable whether Ukraine can take advantage of the briefly chaotic situation. “The longer the coup would have lasted, the better it would have been”, said Russian-speaking Israeli military analyst Ygal Levin, who lives in Kyiv and analyzes the situation on the front lines for Ukrainian media. In any case, he said, it helped that the Russian army had lost more helicopters in its suppression of the uprising.
If the short-term uprising was just a tempest in a teapot, it will have no immediate impact on the war in Ukraine, at least for now. For the time being, there is also little to gain from the situation for the governments in the EU and Washington. Rather, the West needs to promote a democratic elite in Russia in the long term, political analyst Kirill Shamiev said when asked. “The West needs to signal that it wants to support those who want democratization in Russian political life.” Shamiev is alluding to criticism widely voiced over the weekend among Russian exiles that no pro-democracy forces in the country had responded to the uprising.
It is still unclear how weakened Putin actually is. Alexey Yusupov, head of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation’s Russia program, now expects political purges: “So what will follow if Putin succeeds in putting down this uprising is a wave of purges,” he said in an interview with Table.Media (only available in German) immediately after the uprising began. “The hardliners will try to eliminate the supposedly unreliable in the political elite, in the military, in the public sphere, remove them from their functions or arrest them, or get rid of them altogether”, Yusupov said. He suspects that “a tightening of the police-state character of the system” will follow.
At least, there was one piece of good news on Monday. Serbia released three allegedly kidnapped Kosovo police officers, thus making a contribution to de-escalation with Pristina. But Josep Borrell couldn’t quite claim even that success when he briefed foreign ministers Monday on the stalled dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina. On the short messaging service Twitter, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán claimed to have secured the release from Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vučić.
Borrell and his Special Representative Miroslav Lajčák do not appear to have a happy hand at present. Member states are ready to take punitive measures if necessary to advance the dialogue on normalization between Belgrade and Pristina, Borrell said after the debate. As next steps, the EU foreign affairs envoy expects the election of mayors in four municipalities in northern Kosovo to be repeated and members of the Serb minority to participate this time.
It has been a long time since the Belgrade-Pristina dialogue made it so prominently onto the foreign ministers’ agenda. Instead of rapprochement and normalization, there has recently even been the threat of a renewal of armed confrontation. At the most recent crisis meeting in Brussels last week, Kurti and Vučić did not even want to sit down at the same table.
The responsibility for the confrontation of the past weeks is clearly seen in the environment of chief diplomat Borrell as lying with Albin Kurti. Kosovo’s head of government triggered the escalation with his stubborn attitude toward Belgrade, according to ambassadors from the region in the capitals.
But is the narrative true? Among the member states, there is support for Borrell and his special representative Lajčák. But the EU Parliament is critical of the mediators’ performance. The course taken by Lajčák and Borrell has proven to be wrong, says Austrian MEP Lukas Mandl, a member of the delegation that is also responsible for relations with Kosovo. The mess has been made, he says, and Ursula von der Leyen must make the dossier a top priority as soon as possible and put an end to the EU’s lurching course.
Of course, Albin Kurti also made mistakes. But Kosovo is basically on the right, pro-European path – unlike Serbia. Lukas Mandl accuses the mediators of “appeasement toward the Serbian leadership”, also because the goal of the dialogue was never clearly addressed: “We demand a clear course in parliament for the recognition of Kosovo.”
Instead, the mediator duo is relying on concessions to Belgrade and delaying tactics. Serbia has not accepted the Russian sanctions, has recently encouraged the circumvention of the punitive measures, has allowed demonstrations by warmongers and has created the impression that Putin is on the side of the Serbs, Lukas Mandl states. All this has had no consequences for the accession negotiations. In its progress reports, the EU Commission loses itself in technical details and ignores the big picture. The leadership in Belgrade is lying to its own people that Kosovo is part of Serbia and is using this fantasy to prevent the country from developing its potential as an economic engine of the region, says Mandl.
Reinhard Bütikofer of the Green Party takes a similar view. Borrell and Lajčák had a credibility problem from the very beginning, he said, because the Spaniard and the Slovak come from the small minority of EU states that have not yet recognized Kosovo. But that could not excuse the fact that the chief diplomat and his special envoy were acting with “unparalleled one-sidedness” in favor of Belgrade.
Albin Kurti had certainly made a mistake when he tried to bring elected mayors in northern Kosovo into office with police protection and with a low turnout. But the turnout was so low because the Serbs boycotted the election under pressure and death threats from Belgrade. And this after the Europeans had urged Pristina to postpone the election once again.
For Bütikofer, it is therefore clear that the escalation is the result of obstructionism from Belgrade. The EU is now threatening Albin Kurti with punitive measures after letting Aleksandar Vučić get away with everything for ten years: “The provocations from Belgrade are unacceptable.” In a kind of panic, the EU and the USA believed that Alexander Vučić would switch completely to the Putin camp without appeasement.
Serbia’s president is giving the West the middle finger and using the leeway to organize Putin’s influence in the Western Balkans. Curiously, the MEP finds complaints that Kurti is not as corruptible as his predecessors and therefore less easy to put under pressure. The EU Parliament, says Reinhard Bütikofer, must stop the EU mediators.
Rasmus Andresen has lived Europe without borders from an early age. Growing up with a binational background on the German-Danish border, he quickly became aware of the advantage his socialization can have. “I went to school in Denmark, played in a Danish handball club. I’ve always seen that thinking across borders and also having different cultural influences is not a weakness, but a strength”, he says.
The 37-year-old is now a member of the European Parliament, where he has been spokesman for the German group in the Green parliamentary group since the end of 2021. He replaced, surprisingly for some, the long-time leader of the German Greens, Sven Giegold, when the latter became a civil servant state secretary in the Ministry for Economic Affairs after the change of government in Berlin. The German Greens make up about one-third of the Green group in the European Parliament and are therefore a power factor.
One might think that as head of the German group, Andresen would have to represent German interests first and foremost. But he cares about the success of the entire European Union, he says. “I think it’s very important that we have a strong European perspective in the federal policy debate, because I’m one of those who definitely believe that we can only tackle and solve major challenges in a European context”, Andresen says. Decisions must “not only work in Berlin-Mitte, but also for other countries”, for example for people in Greece or Finland.
Especially since the Federal Republic cannot dictate every decision in the EU anyway. “The war in Ukraine has given the Eastern European countries a completely different weight. In the European debate, Poland in particular, but also the Baltic countries, are getting more of a hearing.” In the Green Group in the European Parliament, they are making sure that a few member countries do not develop too strong a dominance.
But how exactly is Andresen’s role as spokesman for the German group within the Group to be understood? “There’s a saying in Brussels that everyone is president of something”, he jokes. The group has a classic Green leadership – co-chair of the group is Terry Reintke from NRW. Together with Belgian Philippe Lamberts, she represents the group externally. “To this end, the parliamentary group chair and the spokesperson convey the Green positions internally – that is, to Berlin, to the federal party, to the parliamentary group in the Bundestag. We are also the ones who, in addition to the specialist politicians, represent our positions, our stance externally in the press, to associations.”
In this role, the administrative science graduate is someone who often gets involved in federal political debates. Beyond that, he is characterized by tenacity. The NDR magazine Panorama accompanied Andresen for a year in his efforts to commit shipping in the EU to climate neutrality from 2040. To this end, he also sought talks with companies in northern Germany that are not enthusiastic about the Green’s plans. He was not able to push through his goal. Andresen did not support the compromise of an 80 percent reduction in emissions by 2050.
In the European Parliament, Andresen is already pursuing his second career as an MEP. From 2009 to 2019, he was a member of the Schleswig-Holstein state parliament, most recently even one of several vice-presidents. In the European Parliament, he is responsible for the EU budget. He also coordinates the issue for his parliamentary group. It is eagerly awaited on which list position he will run for the next European Parliament. The decision will be made at the party conference in November. Andresen is considered a contender for the top spot among the male candidates, as are his group colleagues Michael Bloss, Daniel Freund and Sergey Lagodinsky.
He was once politicized by the debate surrounding Agenda 2010, which “funnily enough brought him to the Greens”. In the years that followed, he worked to help the party sharpen its profile in the social and economic spheres. His participation in the protests in the Wendland region against the Castor transports also had a formative influence on him. Added to this is his bi-national socialization.
All of this makes Andresen a European-minded politician who will not be so easily ground down by the mills of Brussels. Despite setbacks such as the climate-neutral shipping issue, he continues to campaign for green positions with the necessary endurance. Constantin Eckner
