Vladimir Putin’s possible return to a G20 summit in Florida in December risks normalizing Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine, the EU’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said on Saturday.

“Normalizing Russia coming back to these international fora is just normalizing war crimes being committed every day now” in Ukraine, Kallas said in an interview with Bloomberg TV.

She added that Russia’s war in Ukraine conflicts “with U.N charter principles that all these countries around the table have signed up to.”

Putin hasn’t yet confirmed whether he would attend the December summit hosted in the U.S. His last in-person attendance at a G20 meeting was in 2019 — three years before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Kallas’ remarks come amid growing frustration among EU countries over Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov’s attendance at a G20 ministerial gathering in Atlanta.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was hosting the meeting, called off the traditional family photo after European officials refused to stand beside Lavrov.

Kallas said in the interview that “we don’t want to stand next to him [Lavrov] in this fora,” because he’s been placed under international sanctions.

However, she added that Lavrov’s presence meant “we can also immediately fight back on these lies” from Russia.

Kallas hailed the U.S. decision on Friday to sell 500 Patriot missile interceptors to Ukraine as a “very positive development” and called on allies to toughen sanctions against Russia.

A former Prime Minister of Estonia, Kallas has emerged as one of the EU’s most vocal critics of Russia.

In the interview, she rebuffed reported calls from the Pentagon for NATO countries, including the Baltic states that border Russia, to tone down their criticism of the Kremlin.

“The question is if you don’t talk about the threat, is it going away? I think it’s not going away.”

MONTREAL — Canada embraced the European Union’s offer of “associate membership” after a two-day summit at which Brussels and Ottawa gave themselves until next June to work out what their new relationship will look like.

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s endorsement of the proposal by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen followed weeks of hesitation, a hostile response from U.S. President Donald Trump and pushback from EU heavyweight Germany.

“In the coming months, we will determine the full substance, scale, and scope of this new form of membership,” Carney told a press conference on Friday at the end of the two-day summit at the Port of Montreal. 

“Today, we move towards associate membership for Canada,” Carney said, describing it as “the deepest possible partnership short of accession.”

The two sides have set a June 2027 deadline to determine the terms and boundaries of their intensifying relationship — an alliance that comes with a payment schedule. Carney danced around a question pressing him on how much associate membership will cost the Canadian public.

“We don’t view this as paying, personally,” Carney said, stressing the alliance as a “positive” project.

Von der Leyen and European Council President António Costa, standing either side of Carney, presented the experiment as a necessary survival strategy to thrive in an increasingly dangerous world.

“The concept of an associate member is uncharted territory but we have the ambition, trust and creativity to shape it together,” Von der Leyen told reporters. “To be crystal clear, this is not a partnership against anybody, but for our common strength.”

Canadian government officials who spoke to reporters after the press conference confirmed legislation won’t be necessary to legitimize Canada’s EU associate membership status.

“Our relationship is so special that we want to create something new — to go beyond a simple association, everything short of a full EU membership,” said Costa, pitching a new model for non-European countries to integrate more closely with the bloc. “Our association will be the closest, deepest and most unique of its kind.”

Irritants persist

Despite the upbeat rhetoric, some longstanding trade disputes remained unresolved after the summit.

Carney told reporters the two sides had reached an agreement on carveouts from a landmark EU anti-deforestation law, but Canadian government officials subsequently walked back his assertion.

The issue remains part of ongoing trade discussions, one official said, noting progress in addressing what Canada views as flaws in the legislation. The officials were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic and trade negotiations.

Another irritant has been whether Canada would qualify for “Made in Europe” status under the EU’s Industrial Accelerator Act, a landmark measure that would seek to channel public procurement spending in sectors ranging from green energy to automotive toward locally produced goods. 

Von der Leyen said the regulation proposed earlier this year by the Commission foresaw including Canada as a free-trade partner, but added that it was now subject to review by EU lawmakers and governments.

“The Industrial Accelerator Act has been proposed by the Commission to include all countries with whom we have free-trade agreements. So automatically Canada would be in,” she said in response to a question. 

“Of course now the proposal has to go through the co-legislative process. But our proposal is very clear in including Canada.”

Despite months of preparations, the summit itself was chaotic, with agenda details confirmed at short notice and bilateral meetings split between two locations. The informal arrangements were intended to encourage more face time between EU commissioners and Canadian ministers, who are set to see much more of each other.

Canadian ministers have been invited to attend more meetings with their EU counterparts as part of a plan to deepen political alignment. Recent participation by Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand and International Trade Minister Maninder Sidhu in informal EU meetings has served as a trial run.

Carney himself is expected in Dublin in two weeks, having accepted Costa’s invitation to join an informal European Council meeting.

Night falls in the European capital. Everything’s quiet, but the nightmares are about to begin.

Viktor Orbán’s ghost haunts the Schuman roundabout; ash from the bonfire of red tape covers the Justus Lipsius building; Ursula von der Leyen’s chief of staff, Björn Seibert, chases after staffers demanding to know what “associate membership” for Canada actually means; and MEPs tremble at the prospect of construction workers uncovering the skeletons of political intrigues past during renovations.

Scared? You should be.

Here’s our guide to who is terrified of whom in the Brussels bubble. 

Everyone is scared of Marine Le Pen

The person haunting EU diplomats, officials and lawmakers is French presidential front-runner Marine Le Pen. Will she really halve Paris’ contribution to the EU budget, as promised? Will she pull Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni away from the Brussels mainstream? And will she demand von der Leyen’s head?

The bubble had warmed (slightly) to the idea of Jordan Bardella in the Élysée Palace, after his years leading the National Rally’s European operation revealed a certain pragmatism toward Brussels — only for those hopes to be shattered when a Paris appeals court cleared Le Pen to be a candidate for the presidency.

The next ECB chief is scared of Jean-Luc Mélenchon

The European Central Bank president is the euro’s last line of defense against unorthodox national economic decisions — but that could be tested by French presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who is on course to reach the runoff after vowing to set billions of euros of French debt “on fire.” His incendiary plan calls on the Frankfurt-based ECB to waive interest payments on a vast tranche of French bonds — an unorthodox, perhaps impossible, maneuver that critics warn could even see France kicked out of the euro.

Now that we know Christine Lagarde will step down as ECB president in February, what France’s presidential candidates want to do about its monumental debt pile will haunt the race for her successor, with Dutchman Klaas Knot and Spaniard Pablo Hernández de Cos as the two frontrunners.

Lobbyists are scared of ChatGPT

The number of amendments lawmakers have filed has exploded since generative AI arrived, with key EU laws now facing thousands of proposed text changes. Parliament officials don’t think it’s a coincidence, with some pointing to amendments written in suspiciously bot-like language, and others saying sometimes amendments cite legislation that does not even exist.

The growing pile of amendments is haunting lobbyists, parliamentary assistants and officials forced to track and sort through it all — along with the fear that AI could eventually replace them. Spare a thought, too, for the MEPs who may have to vote through the amendments one by one, with hands raised in plenary. 

Commission officials are scared of Austria’s Europe minister

Well-heeled Commission officials (and their families) are spooked by Austria’s Europe Minister Claudia Bauer, who has been leading a push to slash the Commission’s administration expenditure — which pays eurocrats’ salaries and offices — in the next seven-year budget. The campaign, backed by most EU capitals, resulted in an 8% cut to the admin budget in the latest budget proposal.

Bauer is so feared that EU officials joke they reduce their delegations’ size whenever they travel to Austria.

Jessika Roswall is scared of Stéphane Séjourné and Valdis Dombrovskis

Environment Commissioner Jessika Roswall and her department have reason to fear industry boss Stéphane Séjourné, who is taking the lead on the upcoming Circular Economy Act, despite Roswall’s official title of Commissioner “for a Competitive Circular Economy.” Making matters spookier, Roswall’s environment department now shares the Breydel building with Séjourné’s internal market and industry department, setting the stage for some chilling corridor encounters as Roswall pushes for greater environmental protection while Séjourné prioritizes industrial growth.

Roswall is also under pressure from EU simplification chief Valdis Dombrovskis to cut red tape on several environmental laws. The Latvian commissioner, who oversees the omnibus packages, wants a deal before year-end. Meanwhile, the center-right European People’s Party continues to press the Commission to reopen laws on birds, habitats, and water — the EU’s oldest nature protection laws — so they can be simplified too.

Alexander Stubb is afraid of Kaja Kallas and António Costa

Kaja Kallas has not publicly addressed the call that Finnish President Alexander Stubb made to Russia’s Vladimir Putin, but the EU’s top diplomat has made clear she dislikes such outreach. Still, if Putin offered serious talks and concessions, Kallas would be the obvious person to answer: as coordinating EU foreign and security policy is her job. “Of course I will talk if such an opportunity presents itself,” she told Estonian media in September when asked about speaking with Putin or his Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

Also reaching for the phone: António Costa. EU diplomats note that the European Council president represents the bloc at the leaders’ level abroad. That institutional turf war may explain why Stubb stressed that he and Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Støre spoke only for their own countries — not for Europe.

Manfred Weber is scared of his own group …

What keeps the leader of the European People’s Party — Europe’s largest political family — up at night? Divisions within his own ranks. So far, Weber has kept a tight ship and wants to reunite his troops ahead of the 2029 EU election, which he is casting as a battle against the far right. But that may prove tricky as the EPP’s national delegations increasingly clash over whether to work with the far right or isolate them.

… and the group is scared of Ouarda Bensouag

Central to Weber’s strategy is Ouarda Bensouag, the group’s secretary-general and his chief of staff. One of his most trusted lieutenants, she has a reputation as a smart but ruthless operator who EPP staffers fear when crossing paths in the Parliament’s labyrinthine hallways.

No one is scared of the Parliament … but they should be

Parliament’s attempts to spook capitals over the next long-term budget have been borderline tragic so far: It keeps threatening to kill the budget, but nobody seems to care or believe it will.

They should care. When it comes time to pass the budget, 361 of 720 votes will be needed, and the margin could be razor-thin in a fragmented chamber that’s hostile to plans to pool farm and regional funds. The louder MEPs protest — and the longer the Council ignores them — the more determined they become to prove the threat is real.

By Max Griera, Gregorio Sorgi, Kathryn Carlson, Nick Vinocur, Jakob Weizman, Fiona McNally and Eliza Gkritsi

BRUSSELS — European coffin manufacturers are joining forces to ask Brussels to investigate Chinese imports, warning that low prices and potential customs loopholes are threatening an industry built around one of the continent’s most predictable markets: death.

A group of manufacturers — which until now had no dedicated lobby representation — has formed a coalition and met with European Commission officials, including from its trade department, the initiative’s organizers told POLITICO. The group is preparing an anti-dumping complaint — a request for the EU to investigate whether Chinese coffin makers are selling their products in Europe at unfairly low prices.

The industry says the damage is already being felt. Over the past five years roughly a quarter of European coffin manufacturers have shut down, their numbers falling from about 120 to 90, according to Folco Ciulli, a consultant helping coordinate the complaint.

“Smaller companies were unable to withstand competition from non-European importers,” Ciulli said, adding those that survived have absorbed only half the production previously handled by the businesses that closed.

The push follows an appeal by a group of EU lawmakers to Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič last year. The MEPs raised concerns about Chinese competition, and were told the industry could submit a formal trade complaint.

“The EU takes robust action to protect its industries from unfairly traded imports and at present has over 200 measures in place,” a Commission spokesperson said. They declined to confirm meetings with the manufacturers, saying contacts with industry over potential trade defense complaints are confidential.

The price of death

At the heart of the industry’s case is a stark price difference.

According to manufacturers’ estimates, producing a coffin in China costs roughly one-third as much as an equivalent product in Italy, even when the same type of wood is used.

The coalition — which has yet to agree on a name for itself — flags several factors it believes give Chinese producers an advantage, including state subsidies, export-related tax benefits, lower labor costs and cheaper timber. It also argues that Chinese manufacturers benefit from preferential raw-material supply chains, and that higher U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods have helped redirect production toward Europe.

But cheap prices alone don’t constitute dumping under EU trade rules.

To secure anti-dumping duties, European manufacturers must provide evidence that Chinese producers are selling coffins in the EU below their established normal value, that the EU industry is suffering material injury, and that dumped imports are responsible for that injury.

The coalition is therefore collecting detailed information on production costs, raw materials, labor and factory-gate prices to compare equivalent coffins manufactured in China and Europe.

Not adding up?

European coffin manufacturers are also examining a hypothesis that some coffins entering the EU from China are not being categorized as such by customs authorities.

Emiliano Inguscio, a mathematician hired by the industry to analyze trade and production data, said his calculations had identified an unexplained discrepancy equivalent to around 30,000 coffins a year in Italy.

“In theory, the number of coffins available for consumption should broadly correspond to domestic production plus imports, minus exports and adjusted for changes in inventories,” Inguscio explained.

Because demand for coffins is relatively predictable and closely linked to mortality, he argues, significant discrepancies could indicate that some imports are not being properly recorded.

The coalition is concerned that such shipments could escape accurate recording in import statistics, obscuring the true extent of Chinese competition.

This has led to a hypothesis that manufacturers have dubbed the “IKEA loophole,” by which some Chinese coffins arrive in Europe flat-packed, with their components declared to customs as wooden parts rather than finished funeral products. Once inside the EU, the pieces are assembled and sold as coffins, the theory goes.

The Commission confirmed that unassembled goods can still be classified as finished products under international customs rules, provided they retain the essential characteristics of the completed item. That means a flat-packed coffin cannot necessarily be treated simply as wooden components for customs purposes.

The industry has also raised a second hypothetical loophole: coffins being imported as packaging for other merchandise, rather than declared as commercial products in their own right.

A widening trade battle

The coffin-makers’ campaign reflects a broader shift in Europe’s trade disputes with China, as complaints about low-cost competition spread beyond strategic sectors such as electric vehicles, steel and chemicals to more traditional manufactured goods.

According to the Commission’s latest annual trade defense report, published in September, the EU launched 32 new trade defense investigations in 2025, nearly matching the previous year’s record.

Coffin-makers would not be the first relatively small, traditional European industry to win protection.

In January, the Commission imposed anti-dumping duties of between 56% and 60% on Chinese candles following an investigation into damage to an EU industry employing around 9,000 people across 80 companies.

MONTREAL, Canada — European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Thursday she aims to bring EU-Canada relations to the “highest level possible,” touting potential associate member status in the bloc for Ottawa despite capitals having rejected the term a day earlier.

Von der Leyen’s overture comes on the eve of a landmark EU-Canada summit in Montreal where she and Prime Minister Mark Carney are due to announce plans for deeper cooperation against a backdrop of rising autocracy globally and unpredictable relations with U.S. President Donald Trump.

“Canada cannot become a full-fledged member of the EU because of geography, but we both want to bring our relationship to the highest level possible,” von der Leyen said in a speech hosted by the C.D. Howe Institute. “This is why we are discussing the idea of Canada becoming the first associate member of the European Union.”

No sooner had von der Leyen finished speaking than German Chancellor Friedrich Merz issued a statement saying that the EU and Canada were establishing an “Alliance for the Future” — without mentioning the associate member status. Germany has led the opposition to using the term, according to EU diplomats.

“We are fighting each other about a few words which von der Leyen pulled out of thin air,” one of those EU diplomats told POLITICO on Wednesday. “It’s a bit silly while we should have ambition and focus on other things. This is not our proudest moment.”

In a speech hours later on the sidelines of the summit, European Council President António Costa sought to bridge the divide by playing down the importance of the term.

“Tomorrow, the European Union and Canada will launch an Alliance for the Future of Europe,” he said in a nod to Merz’s statement and using the term preferred by Carney to describe the relationship.

“President von der Leyen has even put forward the bold idea of making Canada an ‘associate member’ of the European Union,” he said, noting “I share her ambition.”

“Whether that ends up being the term or not, one thing is clear: our partnership will be the closest, deepest and most unique of its kind,” he added.

The Commission president said in her speech that talks about associate membership would focus on deeper cooperation across AI, climate and energy policy, as well as bolstering shared work between the European Commission and the Canadian government as well as “Parliament to Parliament” and “Court to Court,” a reference to the European Court of Justice and Canada’s Supreme Court.

Such a status, she said, would be open “only to our closest partners outside of Europe, who are ready to open a new frontier together — and to chart the course together, to think beyond the terms of our partnership today, toward the most ambitious vision we can build.”

Von der Leyen’s use of the term associate membership — which she first mentioned in September — is likely to rub some EU capitals the wrong way after a group of countries led by Germany objected to including a reference to the term in a joint EU-Canada statement that was seen by POLITICO and is due to be published on Friday.

After days of talks, EU countries opted for softer language to describe the two sides’ future relations, including the “Alliance for the Future” — the term used by the Canadian side — as well as an “even closer association … short of full membership.”

EU diplomats have told POLITICO that while capitals support the broader aim of closer ties with Canada, they are wary of offering a status that has never been proposed before and whose legal contours remain undefined. Berlin had previously floated associate member status for Ukraine, including specific privileges such as observer status in the European Commission, but that effort was rejected.

Reacting to reports that EU countries would drop the “associate member” term, Carney said on Tuesday: “The good news is it doesn’t matter about specific names or nomenclature. What matters is the difference that it will make to the lives of Canadians … and Canada as a whole becoming a more independent, more sovereign nation, so we can live our lives as we choose.”

Both Carney and von der Leyen have cast this week’s summit as part of a broader effort to deepen ties at a time when both Ottawa and Brussels have clashed with the Trump administration, with von der Leyen warning in her speech about “deeper decay in the international order.”

“Alliances and assumptions that have enabled our prosperity and security are changing rapidly, and each nation or region is looking at how to secure its own interests and its own independence,” she said. “We can no longer let ourselves be shackled by the limits of the old-world order.”

This story has been updated. Camille Gijs contributed reporting from Brussels.

Christine Lagarde said she will step down as president of the European Central Bank on Feb. 7, creating a vacancy at the top of one of Europe’s most powerful institutions and fueling further speculation about a possible return to French politics.

An official familiar with Lagarde’s thinking, granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter, said she made her move now, almost a full year before the end of her term, to have “greater freedom to express her views and to engage in non-monetary matters, because she cannot remain neutral when she sees the developments taking place in her own country and in the world.”

The ECB said in a statement only that Lagarde had informed European Council President António Costa of the decision earlier on Thursday.

The announcement clears the way for a package deal among EU capitals over at least three appointments to the ECB’s six-strong Executive Board. Isabel Schnabel, head of the Bank’s markets department, is due to leave in January to take a senior role at the International Monetary Fund, while Philip Lane is due to depart the influential chief economist’s position in May.

Negotiations over the appointments are likely to be intense, given the ECB’s vital influence in international markets, and the never-ending pressure on European government finances. Former Dutch central bank chief Klaas Knot and Spain’s Pablo Hernández de Cos, who heads the Bank for International Settlements, are seen as the two frontrunners in the race for the top job.  German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said a decision would be taken by year-end.

The timing of the announcement means that President Emmanuel Macron will have a say in choosing Lagarde’s successor before he himself leaves office next spring. Marine Le Pen, the National Rally leader and a longtime critic of the EU, is currently well ahead in the polls to win the French presidency, and may take a radically different view about who should lead the ECB. 

“The EU is trying to guard at least somewhat against the risk that right-wing Marine Le Pen may win the French presidential election,” said Berenberg Bank’s head of research Holger Schmieding. 

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the hard-left France Unbowed party, protested that Macron had already engineered a similar situation at the Bank of France, where François Villeroy de Galhau’s early departure “allowed Macron to install his assistant,” Emmanuel Moulin, as governor.

Speculation has long swirled that Lagarde, formerly finance minister under President Nicolas Sarkozy, may throw herself back into French politics. She has stressed the need for “a pro-European voice” in the French elections, while still being consistently coy about running herself. Thursday’s announcement comes at a time when candidates from mainstream camps in France are all losing ground to Mélenchon, who wants the ECB to “set fire” to its French debt holdings. None looks likely to make the final round of the presidential election in May.

Whoever follows her as ECB president will inherit an increasingly tense situation in Europe’s bond markets, where borrowing costs are hitting their highest level in years due to a cocktail of war-fueled inflation, demographics and competition from capital from Big Tech companies chasing AI-related riches. 

The problems are particularly acute in France, the eurozone’s second-largest economy, which faces a political impasse and mounting pressure over its public debt.  

Lagarde succeeded Mario Draghi at the ECB in 2019, after leading the International Monetary Fund and, in her time in office, has been a stalwart of the centrist mainstream that is now being squeezed by both wings of the political spectrum across Europe. 

“Christine Lagarde has led the European Central Bank through difficult times,” German finance minister Lars Klingbeil said in a statement.  “Under her leadership, the ECB has kept the euro stable even during crises: when the coronavirus pandemic hit Europe hard, when Russia invaded Ukraine, and most recently in the face of the economic shocks caused by the war in Iran.”

“Christine Lagarde’s tenure at the helm of the ECB has only strengthened the confidence in the European single currency,” Eurogroup President Kyriakos Pierrakakis said in a statement, promising to give the council a “swift” recommendation on the succession to heads of government.

The ECB gave no  details about Lagarde’s plans after leaving Frankfurt. However, she has talked to the World Economic Forum about taking over as chair, according to its founder Klaus Schwab. Reuters reported that the organizer of Davos could announce her appointment as early as this month.  

“I leave this institution with a sense of good work done, and an ECB that is fit for the future,” Lagarde said in a video post on LinkedIn.

This story has been updated. Giorgio Leali contributed reporting.

Quebec’s separatist premier says that he will boycott the EU-Canada summit that opens in Montreal on Thursday, warning European leaders that deals struck there without his government’s consent may not be applied in the country’s second-biggest province.

Paul St-Pierre Plamondon confirmed his absence late Wednesday in an open letter to the European delegation, which he posted on X. His announcement followed two days of public sparring with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney over Ottawa’s refusal to let him address the summit.

“This dynamic creates uncertainty as to the application of the agreements you could negotiate during the summit,” he wrote in French.

In the letter, St-Pierre Plamondon says Ottawa has “decided to sideline Quebec” from the talks. He says this leaves his government with “neither a chair at the negotiating table nor the opportunity to speak,” even though the summit is on Quebec soil.

Under Canada’s federal system, he argued, the provinces implement international agreements that fall within their powers. Without Quebec’s consent, a deal that runs against its interests “will simply not be implemented,” he wrote. He also accused Ottawa of withholding “critical information” on the negotiations.

He offered to meet European leaders “in the near future, in a more opportune context.” He will send Quebec’s chief diplomat, Pascal Paradis, to the summit in his place.

Carney said Wednesday his office had offered the premier the honor of welcoming the Commission president to Montreal, and a seat at the head table. “I hope he will reconsider,” he said. On Tuesday, the prime minister had accused St-Pierre Plamondon of choosing to “leave an empty chair again.”

The row has soured the upbeat mood around the summit, which Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President António Costa have billed as a milestone. Leaders will launch an “Alliance for the Future,” a framework for shared prosperity and economic security.

St-Pierre Plamondon’s letter says many of its topics fall under Quebec’s responsibility, including health, education and natural resources.

The premier has also pursued his own contacts with European leaders.

He spoke by phone with French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday, and said the two had agreed on a possible meeting in France in the coming weeks.

At working level, ties have held so far, and officials describe the relationship as constructive.

Hélène Drainville, Quebec’s delegate general in Brussels, told POLITICO last week that Quebec was in talks with the European Investment Bank and the Commission, and that “all the signals are green.”

Carney, Costa and von der Leyen are due to hold a joint press conference on Friday.

Ein rein berufliches Frauenproblem bringt den Kanzler in Bedrängnis. Zwar stößt die Aussicht auf die erste Bundespräsidentin im kommenden Jahr auf breite Zustimmung, doch die historische Personalie entwickelt sich zur politischen Hängepartie.Friedrich Merz droht die Kontrolle über die Debatte um die richtige Kandidatin zu entgleiten. Dabei drängt die Zeit massiv vor der Wahl Ende Januar, sodass plötzlich wieder völlig offen ist, ob am Ende wirklich eine Frau oder doch ein Mann antritt.

Rasmus Buchsteiner analysiert die hitzige Diskussion um das höchste Staatsamt. Er beleuchtet das strategische Dilemma der Akteure und den wachsenden Druck vor der nahenden Entscheidung.

Während der außenpolitische Fokus auf der Asienreise des Kanzlers liegt, ist die SPD-Entwicklungsministerin Reem Alabali Radovan im Libanon unterwegs. Carlotta Diederich von POLITICO begleitet sie und ordnet ein, welche Auswirkungen die Wahl in Israel auf den blutigen Konflikt im Süden haben könnte und wie Deutschland versucht, seine humanitäre Rolle in diesem Teil des Nahost-Konflikts versucht einzunehmen.

Das Berlin Playbook als Podcast gibt es jeden Morgen ab 5 Uhr. Rixa Fürsen, Maximilian Stascheit und das POLITICO-Team liefern Politik zum Hören – kompakt, international, hintergründig.

Für alle Hauptstadt-Profis: Der Berlin Playbook-Newsletter bietet jeden Morgen die wichtigsten Themen und Einordnungen. Jetzt kostenlos abonnieren.

POLITICO Deutschland – ein Angebot der Axel Springer Deutschland GmbH
Axel-Springer-Straße 65, 10888 Berlin
Tel: +49 (30) 2591 0
information@axelspringer.de
Sitz: Amtsgericht Berlin-Charlottenburg, HRB 196159 B
USt-IdNr: DE 214 852 390
Geschäftsführer: Christoph Eck-Schmidt, Carolin Hulshoff Pol, Mathias Sanchez Luna

**(Anzeige) Eine Nachricht von YouTube: Ein verlässlicher Partner für die Medienbranche: Dass YouTube als digitale Infrastruktur ein wichtiger Motor für Medienhäuser ist und Redaktionen nachhaltig stärkt, belegt eine Studie von Oxford Economics im Auftrag von YouTube: Das kreative Ökosystem von YouTube unterstützte 2025 in Deutschland über 29.000 Arbeitsplätze (Vollzeitäquivalent). Hier klicken und mehr erfahren zum Beitrag von YouTube zur Medienindustrie.**

We live in an era where wars are fought not just on battlefields, but also on our screens, in our minds and through the narratives we are led to believe. Narratives are influencing perception while missiles destroy infrastructure. What happens when the war for truth becomes more dangerous than the actual battle itself? Who’s controlling the narrative?

When wars end, the fighting over what they meant begins: who won, who was to blame and who can be trusted to keep the peace. These questions are settled less on the battlefield than on screens, in feeds and in group chats. For a Middle East emerging from the war that began on February 28, that contest may decide whether any new security order holds.

The region is now asking what comes after deterrence. That question brought policymakers, military leaders and researchers from the United States, Europe, Asia and the Gulf to the TRENDS 6^th Annual Conference, held in Abu Dhabi and organized by TRENDS Global, in collaboration with its global offices. The answer cannot be measured only in missiles and alliances. Information resilience should be treated as security infrastructure, planned and funded like air defense, not managed as public relations.

What happens when the war for truth becomes more dangerous than the actual battle itself?

The struggle over perception can now matter as much as events on the ground. That is no longer hyperbole. In any crisis today, governments, media outlets, political movements and non-state groups compete in real time to define what is happening. Disinformation, coordinated propaganda and now content generated by artificial intelligence (AI) mean a false account can reach millions before an official one is drafted.

As former BBC correspondent Karen Allen put it at the conference, “Now in an instant, I’m able to influence millions of people,” and algorithm manipulation is what we are increasingly seeing.

This year’s war showed how real that is. Within days of the first U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran, an AI-generated video of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa on fire, with crowds fleeing, was viewed tens of millions of times, according to BBC Verify. Fabricated images of damaged U.S. facilities in the Gulf spread just as fast, some posted by Iranian state-linked outlets. UAE Minister of State Noura Al Kaabi later described the attacks on the country as coming “from the sky and behind our screens.” Her government’s answer was to treat “fake news and misinformation as a security threat.”

A more damaging false story was not a single video. It was the idea that the Gulf was a party to the war. The UAE did not want this war and said so. On March 3, Minister of State Reem Al Hashimy said the UAE did not “seek to expand the circle of confrontation,” that it had “repeatedly confirmed” its territory could not be used for any military operation against Iran, and that “returning to the negotiating table is the only rational way forward.” The attacks continued anyway. Reuters reported, citing UAE defense figures, that 186 ballistic missiles and 812 drones were fired at the country in the first days of the conflict.

Information resilience should be treated as security infrastructure, planned and funded like air defense, not managed as public relations.

Tehran sought to blur that record, framing strikes on Gulf cities as retaliation against American aggression. Its foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told NBC News that Iran had “not attacked our neighbors,” only “American bases,” and called the hotels hit in Dubai “collateral damage.” Countering that narrative does not require propaganda of our own. It requires putting the record in front of the world quickly and repeatedly: the UAE’s public calls for restraint before the war, its refusal to let its territory be used against Iran, and the hundreds of missiles and drones fired at it, most of which it shot down. Facts published fast, through verified channels, in Arabic, English and Farsi, are harder to bury than corrections issued too late.

Even after a war ends, the threats do not disappear; they simply take different forms. Ceasefires and reconstruction depend on public trust. If populations come to believe that the peace is a betrayal, or that a neighbor cannot be trusted, no deterrence framework or security pact will survive contact with domestic politics. Spoilers understand this. Their cheapest weapon is a story.

Seen from the Gulf, the lesson of recent years is that speed and credibility beat silence. Crisis communication is not a side function of security. When official channels inform the public quickly, consistently and honestly, rumors have less room to grow. When they hesitate, someone else fills the gap.

None of this is simple. Governments everywhere are still working out where countering disinformation ends and controlling speech begins, and that debate should stay open. But the common ground is wider than it looks: a society cannot be secure if it cannot tell what is true.

The harder test comes now. After a war, influence campaigns shift from shock to slow erosion: relitigating who was to blame, questioning whether Gulf governments can protect their people, and setting neighbors and communities against each other. Young connected audiences are the main target. They are also the best defense.

Protecting our societies from that influence does not mean closing them. It means official channels fast and credible enough that people turn to them first. It means platforms held to clear rules on labeling AI-generated conflict content, as X began to do in March. And it means a generation of young Emiratis and Gulf citizens equipped to verify what they see and able to tell the region’s story themselves rather than leaving it to others.

The harder test comes now. After a war, influence campaigns shift from shock to slow erosion.

This is not only a Gulf problem. The campaigns aimed at audiences in the Gulf also shape how Washington and Brussels understand the region. The UAE and its partners already work closely on defense and intelligence. Detecting and exposing cross-border influence operations belongs on that shared agenda as a joint effort between governments, platforms and researchers.

Diplomacy, investment, and deterrence will rebuild the region’s security. Whether that security holds will depend on something harder to measure: what people across the region believe about each other, and about who protects them. For the UAE, winning that argument with facts is not public relations. It is part of keeping the country safe.

---

Najla Al Midfa is an Emirati researcher at TRENDS Research & Advisory, a company under TRENDS Group. Her research focuses on geopolitics, international relations, economic diplomacy and regional security, with a particular interest in the UAE’s foreign policy and strategic partnerships. She holds a master’s degree in Global Affairs and Diplomatic Leadership from the Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy, where her thesis examined the UAE’s economic diplomacy through its Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement strategy.

---

Sources

• Sixth Annual TRENDS Conference 2026 kicks off on October 12 — WAM (Emirates News Agency), September 2026
• TRENDS 6th Annual Conference 2026 — Sustainable Security: programme and speakers — TRENDS Research & Advisory
• AI-generated Iran war videos surge as creators use new tech to cash in — BBC Verify, March 7, 2026
• Factbox: Iranian missiles and drones fired at Gulf countries — Reuters (republished by Al-Monitor), March 3, 2026
• X suspends revenue sharing for undisclosed AI war videos — AFP, March 3, 2026
• UAE urges the US, Israel and Iran to return to the negotiating table — Euronews, March 4, 2026
• Fake news treated as security threat during Iran war, says UAE minister — The National, September 15, 2026
• NBC News, “Iran’s foreign minister denies seeking war with neighbors,” March 2026. https://www.nbcnews.com/world/iran/irans-foreign-minister-denies-seeking-war-neighbors-rcna261954

The EU and Canada are betting they can deepen their partnership while Donald Trump looks inward at the U.S. midterms — and before European elections upend the political calculus.

Their strategy is to push for the broadest possible upgrade and hope Trump is too busy campaigning to respond, four EU officials and two Canadian diplomats familiar with preparations for this week’s summit in Montreal said.

Trump, whose Republican Party is fighting to retain control of Congress in next week’s midterms, has called the EU’s offer of associate membership for Canada “laughable” and threatened “serious tariffs” if the two sides get too close.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President António Costa will join Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney for two days of talks on trade, security, energy, education and the Arctic on Thursday.

The summit “is a very strong statement,” said Mark Camilleri, president of the Canada and EU Trade and Investment Association. “I don’t think there’s any feeling that this is going to be some discreet get-together.”

Canada is also looking to move before Europe’s politics shift. Ottawa wants changes to the partnership that will outlast Trump and Marine Le Pen, whose National Rally is polling ahead in France and has criticized the EU-Canada trade pact, CETA, said a Canadian diplomat. All the officials and diplomats in this article were granted anonymity to speak frankly about the summit preparations.

Avoiding Trump’s ire

Brussels and Ottawa are pushing to strengthen their relationship, including by cooperating more closely on trade and defense, international engagement and institutional links, according to a draft joint statement obtained by POLITICO.

In her September State of the Union speech, von der Leyen emphasized that the EU-Canada alliance is “not against anyone else.” Yet officials acknowledge that a stronger alliance risks triggering retaliation from Trump.

Von der Leyen, Costa and Carney “are fully aware that the eyes of the world are upon them,” said Camilleri.

The Europeans and Canadians know “the U.S. is watching,” a senior EU official said, adding that the bloc and Canada were nevertheless proceeding with business as usual and pushing for the most expansive possible relationship with Ottawa.

Another possibility is that the summit yields only “nice pictures” and little substance, a third senior official said, making it less likely to “trigger” the president.

European capitals, EU institutions and Canada’s provinces are all waiting to see what von der Leyen and Carney agree on in their meeting, the Canadian diplomat said, adding it was impossible to pre-judge how Trump would react.

Shadow of Le Pen

For Ottawa, pressure comes from another direction: Europe’s electoral calendar and the rise of the far right.

With Spain, France, Poland and Italy all set to go to the polls in the next year, Canadian officials want to secure concrete gains while EU governments remain receptive to closer cooperation and keep the topic front of mind, before elections across the bloc risk shifting priorities and upsetting the political balance.

When Carney came to Strasbourg to lay out his vision for a closer alliance in September, he was heckled from the gallery by the far-right Alternative for Germany MEP Siegbert Droese, who led chants of “USA!”

But it’s France’s presidential election in April — and the prospect of Le Pen in office — that is causing the most concern, according to a second Canadian diplomat.

“It’s very fortunate we’re doing this summit now and not in six months,” the diplomat said, referring to the French election date.

Canada is pushing for big, bold “structural changes” in its relationship with the EU now that will outlast Trump and Le Pen, the diplomat added. Carney has grasped the moment’s rarity and urgency and will not leave the summit without securing major wins, the first Canadian diplomat said.

Another question is whether Brussels and Ottawa can upgrade their partnership without eventually drawing the U.S. president’s ire. The midterms might buy them some time, but the vote will not keep Trump busy forever.

Trump might be even more dangerous and more likely to take out his anger on the EU and Canada after the election, given that he will retain many of his tariff and foreign policy powers even if the Republicans lose Congress, the second Canadian diplomat warned.

“At the end of the day, his reaction could be anything,” Camilleri said. “We can only control what we can control.”

Mathieu Pollet contributed reporting.

BRUSSELS — EU countries have dropped the idea of offering Canada “associate member” status in the 27-member bloc, opting instead for softer language promising “ever closer association” ahead of a landmark EU-Canada summit, according to the latest version of the draft statement, seen by POLITICO.

A group of countries including Germany, Greece and France all objected to mentioning associate membership in a joint EU-Canada statement to be issued in Montreal, the diplomats said.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen had originally proposed “associate membership” for Canada in her State of the European Union speech in September, catching some EU countries off-guard.

A previous draft of the joint statement had read that the EU and Canada would “work to define by the 2027 EU-Canada Summit the concept of Associate Member that will reflect, through this even closer association, our common endeavour and cooperation towards our shared goals of prosperity, economic security and strategic autonomy.”

In the final version, the text reads: “We will create an even closer association between Canada and the EU… and work to define by the 2027 EU-Canada Summit the concept of an ever closer association of Canada to the EU, short of full membership itself.”

Later in the statement, the language changes from “even closer” to “ever closer.” The text still needs final approval. EU countries have a deadline of 6 p.m. to raise objections.

While countries disagree over the wording to describe the relationship, Brussels is not softening its offering to Canada of a vastly expanded partnership.

“The good news is it doesn’t matter about specific names or nomenclature,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said Tuesday. “What matters is the difference that it will make to lives of Canadians.”

This story has been updated.

Europe’s united front on Ukraine is showing cracks. Finnish President Alexander Stubb and Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre have opened a direct line to Vladimir Putin, drawing criticism from some fellow European leaders — even as Ukraine backs their efforts. Nicholas Vinocur and Paul Dallison examine the fallout and the growing scramble over who gets to speak for Europe in peace talks.

Also on the pod: Brussels unveils a sweeping overhaul of Frontex, giving the EU border agency a much bigger role in deportations, new powers to monitor social media and plans for a major expansion.

And after a summer of devastating heatwaves and wildfires, the European Commission wants governments to prepare for a world that’s three degrees hotter than preindustrial levels.

Finally, you can see the ghostly turnip that freaked Nick out here. And if you have someone spooky in mind for Paul’s story on the figures haunting the EU bubble, please write in! Find us on WhatsApp here or at +32 491 05 06 29.

Articles mentioned in this episode:

• Leaders of Finland and Norway hold direct talks with Putin.
• EU prepares for a grim future with new climate-proofing law.
• Frontex gets power to track migration talk on social media.
• ⁠Frontex set for new powers to deport beyond EU borders in latest overhaul.⁠
• This summer’s heat was Europe’s deadliest on record, scientists say.

Kanzler Friedrich Merz sucht in Asien nach Antworten auf die wirtschafts- und sicherheitspolitischen Krisen. Die Reise könnte auch eine Blaupause für die Unabhängigkeit von chinesischen Rohstoffen liefern. Hans von der Burchard, der auf der Reise dabei ist, ordnet ein, was die deutsche Industrie jetzt davon mitnehmen kann und ob Merz die Lieferung japanischer Patriot-Raketen an die Ukraine beschleunigen kann.

Im 200-Sekunden-Interview erklärt der niedersächsische CDU-Fraktionschef Sebastian Lechner, warum das europäische Verbrenner-Aus schnell rückgängig gemacht werden muss.
Mit Blick auf die Krise bei Volkswagen skizziert er, wie eine neue Regulierungsstrategie aussehen könnte und warum der Konzern den Hybridmarkt nicht der Konkurrenz überlassen darf. Zudem bewertet er den umstrittenen Auftritt des Audi-CEOs Gernot Döllner bei einer Wahlkampfveranstaltung von Donald Trump.

In Berlin leitet Vizekanzler Lars Klingbeil derweil eine Kabinettssitzung und versucht, sozialdemokratische Kernthemen auf die Agenda zu setzen. Rasmus Buchsteiner analysiert die Machtdynamik am Kabinettstisch in Abwesenheit des CDU-Kanzlers.

Außerdem liefert Daniel Dylan Böhmer die neuesten Entwicklungen zur Wahl in Israel, die zwischen Benjamin Netanjahu und Gadi Eisenkot entschieden wird.

Das Berlin Playbook als Podcast gibt es jeden Morgen ab 5 Uhr. Rixa Fürsen, Maximilian Stascheit und das POLITICO-Team liefern Politik zum Hören – kompakt, international, hintergründig.

Für alle Hauptstadt-Profis: Der Berlin Playbook-Newsletter bietet jeden Morgen die wichtigsten Themen und Einordnungen. Jetzt kostenlos abonnieren.

POLITICO Deutschland – ein Angebot der Axel Springer Deutschland GmbH
Axel-Springer-Straße 65, 10888 Berlin
Tel: +49 (30) 2591 0
information@axelspringer.de
Sitz: Amtsgericht Berlin-Charlottenburg, HRB 196159 B
USt-IdNr: DE 214 852 390
Geschäftsführer: Christoph Eck-Schmidt, Carolin Hulshoff Pol, Mathias Sanchez Luna

**(Anzeige) Eine Nachricht von YouTube: Ein verlässlicher Partner für die Medienbranche: Dass YouTube als digitale Infrastruktur ein wichtiger Motor für Medienhäuser ist und Redaktionen nachhaltig stärkt, belegt eine Studie von Oxford Economics im Auftrag von YouTube: Das kreative Ökosystem von YouTube unterstützte 2025 in Deutschland über 29.000 Arbeitsplätze (Vollzeitäquivalent). Hier klicken und mehr erfahren zum Beitrag von YouTube zur Medienindustrie.**

BELGRADE — Brussels has lost its man in Belgrade.

The opposition Student List’s landslide victory on Sunday ended Aleksandar Vučić’s 12-year run as the EU’s key interlocutor in Serbia. For more than a decade, every step of the candidate country’s accession process and trade negotiations had to pass through him.

“Aleksandar Vučić acted like the go-to person for everything while ignoring all the laws in the country, including the constitution,” Jugoslav Gašić, an assistant professor in medicine at several universities and soon-to-be MP, said in an interview.

When POLITICO reached him, Gašić was in the middle of grading student papers — a fitting snapshot of a new parliamentary majority made up largely of professors, doctors and other political novices.

The Student List won an outright parliamentary majority at the weekend: a stunning result for a leaderless movement born out of protests.

The party’s first order of business will be undoing much the legacy of Vučić and his Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), starting with reversing years of rule-of-law rollbacks. But it will also reset Serbia’s relationship with Brussels, which the Student List argues the former leader managed more as a transactional tool than a genuine path to EU membership.

“Ultimately, [Vučić] always represented his own interests and not the interests of Serbia,” said Gašić.

Representatives for the SNS didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Even among Serbia’s most committed pro-Europeans, Brussels’ willingness to route all progress through Vučić personally has left a bitter aftertaste.

“The key lesson that should be drawn from the case of Serbia is that the EU can very easily lose credibility and integrity if it ignores the causes of democratic backsliding in a country,” said Srdjan Majstorović, chairman of the governing board of the European Policy Center (CEP), a think tank.

According to CEP data published earlier this year, as many 41.6% of citizens believe the EU is more interested in pursuing its own political and economic interests in the region than improving the state of democracy and the rule of law in the country.

For years, anytime non-governmental organizations, journalists or activists argued that Brussels should try to include other voices in the EU negotiation process, they were told “that there was no alternative to the regime in Serbia,” Majstorović continued.

The Student List’s election program casts the EU as Serbia’s most important economic partner and pledged to deepen Belgrade’s existing strategic partnerships with EU members such as Greece, Italy, Hungary and France, while seeking closer bilateral ties with other European capitals.

It does not, however, explicitly name EU membership as an immediate goal.

Gašić wouldn’t be drawn on concrete aims for the Serbia-EU relationship, but said: “We don’t want to be cut off by Europe. We don’t want to be an isolated island.”

“I respect how well-ordered they are, the rule of law and democratic principles,” he added. “Yet I think we need to reset our priorities with the EU, where we consider Serbia’s interests first. A one-sided approach doesn’t foster long-term cooperation.”

The Student List grew out of a mass protest movement sparked by a 2024 railway station roof collapse that killed 16 people. Students blamed the deaths on corruption in state construction contracts and began blockading universities, and within months the protests had swelled into the largest Serbia had seen in decades.

Brussels’ response was muted as students marched across the country, with EU officials largely avoided criticizing Vučić directly. EU flags were conspicuously absent from the demonstrations.

The European Commission didn’t respond to a request for comment for this article.

“The Commission must first restore its long-lost credibility after years of propping up Vučić,” said Djordje Bojović, a foreign policy advisor for Greens in the European Parliament.

He said that Serbia has long been demonized and struggled to reinvent its image since the 1990s, an image “only further cemented by Vučić’s repressive authoritarianism.”

Despite those concerns, Serbia’s economic ties with Europe flourished during Vučić’s time in power, with the country becoming one of the region’s leading destinations for foreign investment.

Under Vučić, Serbia went from about €750 million in foreign direct investment in 2012 to more than €30 billion over the following decade, more than the rest of the Western Balkans combined.

In Brussels, figures such as Bojović and representatives of the opposition parties would plead with institutions such as the Parliament and the Commission to meet with them or take their concerns seriously.

“Vučić had convinced all of them that the opposition is not worth talking to and that they’re not credible,” Bojović said.

Now, with SNS firmly relegated to the opposition, Brussels will need to rethink how it works with Serbia. To many Serbians, the EU has 12 years of looking the other way to answer for first.

Quebec’s new separatist government accused Ottawa on Tuesday of barring the province from this week’s EU-Canada summit in Montreal and warned it would have the last word on any deals struck there that concern its powers.

The dispute erupted Tuesday morning when Quebec Justice Minister Marie-Claude Sarrazin said in a statement that Ottawa had refused Premier Paul St-Pierre Plamondon’s request to address the summit, which opens Thursday.

St-Pierre Plamondon said in a post on X that the decision revealed a “serious lack of respect,” adding that Ottawa would rather he “serve shrimp cocktail” at a function rather than address one.

Ottawa also turned down a September request from the previous Quebec government to host a reception on the sidelines of the summit, Sarrazin noted.

Prime Minister Mark Carney hit back, saying St-Pierre Plamondon had himself turned down an invitation to the Thursday night summit dinner. “It’s his decision to leave an empty chair again,” Carney told reporters in French.

The tiff threatens to overshadow an international gathering that Carney, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President António Costa have billed as a step change in mutual relations, driven by U.S. President Donald Trump’s aggressive tariffs and scorn for the postwar Western consensus.

Early drafts of the joint declaration include a digital trade deal and a pact that lets the European Investment Bank finance Canadian critical minerals projects. Many of those deliverables fall under provincial jurisdiction, such as natural resources.

“‘When you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu,’ Prime Minister Carney told us,” Sarrazin said in her statement. “The federal government has chosen to prevent Quebec from having a say on its own territory.”

Whatever agreements are signed at the summit, “Quebec is sovereign in its fields of jurisdiction internationally, so it will have the last word,” Sarrazin warned.

Her statement evoked the 1965 Gérin-Lajoie doctrine, a principle of Quebec’s international policy that holds it can conduct its own foreign relations in areas the Canadian Constitution assigns to the provinces. It also noted that Quebec had a seat at the table during negotiations on CETA, the EU-Canada trade deal signed in 2015, attending more than 100 meetings.

Yves-François Blanchet, leader of the separatist Bloc Québécois in the federal parliament, also said he had been refused a request to attend. “You’re invited to come, but above all, keep quiet. Don’t speak,” he told reporters on Parliament Hill.

The plot thickens

On Tuesday midmorning Ottawa time, Trump congratulated St-Pierre Plamondon on his election victory — three weeks after the actual Oct. 5 ballot — sharing an article headlined “Separatists win Quebec provincial election in blow to Mark Carney.”

Trump and Carney have been at odds since the dramatic implosion of mutual trade talks in late August, with the U.S. president deploring the Canadian leader as “nasty.”

The Quebec premier, meanwhile, is all-in on sovereignty in a province where support for separating from Canada reached a three-decade low of 29% earlier this year.

Carney rejected St-Pierre Plamondon’s claims of exclusion, saying Quebec had been consulted on the summit. “We have had three consultations with the Quebec delegation already on the agreement with the European Union,” he said. Carney’s office told POLITICO on Tuesday that it had invited every premier to attend the Thursday dinner in Montreal.

St-Pierre Plamondon also skipped a federal meeting with Indigenous leaders and premiers on Monday, an absence Carney criticized.

Industry Minister Mélanie Joly said the premier was “welcome” in Montreal, but that the summit was a federal meeting, with geopolitics a federal area of responsibility. “With everything going on in the world, we just need to make sure we can reach an agreement with the European Union,” she said. “That’s what Quebecers want.”

Despite the public spat over the summit logistics, working-level officials described the relationship between the different levels of government as constructive.

Hélène Drainville, Quebec’s delegate general in Brussels, told POLITICO last Friday that federal and provincial officials have set up joint working groups to implement the summit’s outcomes.

Quebec is also in talks with the European Investment Bank and DG GROW, the Commission’s industry department, about the bank’s entry into Canada, she said.

“Right now, all the signals are green,” Drainville said. She underlined, however, that the province “has to be at the table” if Ottawa and Brussels strike deals in its areas of jurisdiction.

Mickey Djuric and Sue Allan contributed reporting from Ottawa.

BRUSSELS — The European Commission is exploring whether to use revenue from a global tax agreement on multinational companies to finance the EU’s next seven-year budget, four EU diplomats with knowledge of the proceedings told POLITICO.

The idea could facilitate an agreement on new EU-wide taxes, known as own resources, which has emerged as a major stumbling bloc in the ongoing budget negotiations.

The European Council President António Costa has urged countries to approve the new taxes to reduce national contributions to the bloc’s budget, which is worth €1.82 trillion according to the latest proposal from earlier this month.

Costa, who is brokering budget talks, is pressuring leaders to reach a budget deal among themselves by the end of the year — before elections in Poland, France and Italy threaten to derail the negotiations.

Yet after more than a year of haggling, EU governments are still at odds over five proposed new taxes that the Commission estimates would generate €65 billion per year. 

Among the options on the table, a corporate tax known as CORE — which charges a lump sum on companies’ revenues exceeding €100 million — has emerged as the most unpopular option and is particularly toxic in Germany.  

To break the deadlock, French President Emmanuel Macron supported funneling part of the tax on multinationals to the EU budget during a leaders’ summit in October, said two of the diplomats. They were granted anonymity, like others, to discuss the sensitive plans.

Supporters argue that this idea could garner more political support than CORE as it targets companies’ profits as opposed to their revenue.

“The corporate income tax is about taxing companies based on their profitability. CORE is not about that, CORE is about taking a toll blindly,” said Pascal Saint-Amans, a former OECD official and one of the architects of the global tax arrangement.

The tax deal

Under the OECD tax deal from 2021, EU countries are compelled to levy a 15 percent minimum corporate tax on large multinationals with an annual turnover exceeding €750 million.

Controversially, the U.S. secured an exemption from the rules as it introduced a national tax arrangement that was deemed equivalent to the OECD framework.

The end goal is to prevent countries from competing to offer lower and lower corporate tax rates to attract large multinationals.

Historically, many foreign multinationals operating across the EU such as Apple and Google have set their headquarters in Ireland because of its low taxes and light-touch regulation.

To tackle this phenomenon, the OECD deal compels countries undercutting the 15 percent rate to levy a “top-up tax” on large foreign companies. Currently, the revenue is collected by national governments.

However, European capitals could funnel part of these proceeds to the bloc’s budget, the diplomats said. 

This could hit countries such as Ireland and the Netherlands which charge low corporate rates and collecting large sums from the top-up tax. The Dutch government alone collected €449 million in 2026 from returns related to the global minimum tax, according to Bloomberg.

Saint-Amans defended the potential new own resource on the grounds that the multinationals’ “activities are taking place in Ireland, but are about managing the EU markets.”

“That’s how I believe that it could make sense to visualize” the top-up taxes, he added.

Costa’s team and the Commission are looking into this option ahead of bilateral discussions with EU countries starting next week.

Costa will test the waters with governments before proposing new budget figures and EU taxes ahead of a leaders’ summit on Nov. 26 and 27.

The European Investment Bank is due to sign a framework agreement with Canada this week that will pave the way for investments into critical raw materials and other areas, a Bank official told POLITICO.

The deal with the long-term lending arm of the European Union is expected to be signed on the sidelines of an EU-Canada summit on Thursday in Montreal, said the official who was granted anonymity to discuss internal preparations.

Such a deal would mark a concrete step toward closer ties amid broader discussions about cooperation on arctic security and the EU’s potential offer of “associate member” status to Canada. The summit will aim to highlight deepening ties between like-minded partners.

The signing follows a September visit to Ottawa by EIB President Nadia Calviño, during which she took the first steps toward establishing a permanent Canadian presence for the bank.

The imminent framework agreement is significant given that the EIB typically operates only in developing countries or members of the EU or the European Economic Area.

Earlier this year, Canada offered G7 members “priority access” to its critical raw minerals stockpile, according to a letter seen by POLITICO. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has also said he wants to boost EU-Canada cooperation on critical raw materials.

BRUSSELS — The EU was split Tuesday over whether to offer “associate membership” status to Canada, with several countries refusing to sign off on a statement containing that phrase just 48 hours before a summit between the two sides in Montreal.

After EU capitals could not agree on the language in the statement in talks between ambassadors Monday, they used the so-called silence procedure on Tuesday. That meant a new text would be adopted automatically without a formal meeting or vote, if no countries objected by midday.

But Germany, which is leading the push to have the term “associate member” fully removed from the text, was among at least four countries that broke the silence procedure before that deadline, said two EU diplomats, granted anonymity to speak freely. That means the topic will be discussed Wednesday at another meeting of EU ambassadors, just one day before the EU-Canada summit kicks off.

The fracture shows how divided the EU remains on the idea of “associate membership,” which European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen offered to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney during her State of the Union speech in Strasbourg last month.

Four EU diplomats told POLITICO at the time that she did not consult European capitals before floating the idea.

Von der Leyen, European Council President António Costa, the EU’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas and a host of commissioners will fly to Montreal for a summit with Carney on Thursday and Friday, aiming to deepen ties and cooperation on everything from trade and energy to education and the Arctic.

Israel wählt in einer Zeit nie dagewesener Isolation und steht vor einer Richtungsentscheidung. Während Benjamin Netanjahu um sein politisches Überleben kämpft, bringt sich Ex-Generalstabschef Gadi Eisenkot als volksnaher Herausforderer in Stellung. WELT-Korrespondent Daniel-Dylan Böhmer analysiert aus Tel Aviv, warum dieser Wahlkampf tief in die israelische Seele blicken lässt und was ein Machtwechsel für Gaza und den Iran-Krieg bedeuten könnte.

Im 200-Sekunden-Interview ordnet Armin Laschet die geopolitischen Folgen der Abstimmung ein. Der Vorsitzende des Auswärtigen Ausschusses erklärt, warum er auf eine israelische Regierung ohne rechtsextreme Minister hofft und welche realistischen Chancen er aktuell noch für einen Friedensprozess sieht.

Auf landespolitischer Ebene droht der Berliner Linksfraktion derweil weiter die Zerreißprobe um die israelfeindliche Abgeordnete Vanessa Emde. Cedric Looks beleuchtet den Machtkampf zwischen Bundes- und Landespartei und zeigt auf, warum nicht nur ein ausbleibender Fraktionsausschluss die anstehenden Koalitionsverhandlungen weiter gefährdet.

Das Berlin Playbook als Podcast gibt es jeden Morgen ab 5 Uhr. Rixa Fürsen, Maximilian Stascheit und das POLITICO-Team liefern Politik zum Hören – kompakt, international, hintergründig.

Für alle Hauptstadt-Profis: Der Berlin Playbook-Newsletter bietet jeden Morgen die wichtigsten Themen und Einordnungen. Jetzt kostenlos abonnieren.

POLITICO Deutschland – ein Angebot der Axel Springer Deutschland GmbH
Axel-Springer-Straße 65, 10888 Berlin
Tel: +49 (30) 2591 0
information@axelspringer.de
Sitz: Amtsgericht Berlin-Charlottenburg, HRB 196159 B
USt-IdNr: DE 214 852 390
Geschäftsführer: Christoph Eck-Schmidt, Carolin Hulshoff Pol, Mathias Sanchez Luna

**(Anzeige) Eine Nachricht von YouTube: Ein verlässlicher Partner für die Medienbranche: Dass YouTube als digitale Infrastruktur ein wichtiger Motor für Medienhäuser ist und Redaktionen nachhaltig stärkt, belegt eine Studie von Oxford Economics im Auftrag von YouTube: Das kreative Ökosystem von YouTube unterstützte 2025 in Deutschland über 29.000 Arbeitsplätze (Vollzeitäquivalent). Hier klicken und mehr erfahren zum Beitrag von YouTube zur Medienindustrie.**

BRUSSELS — Quebec’s new separatist government is treating this week’s EU-Canada summit in Montreal as the start of a wider diplomatic push to get the province in the room whenever Ottawa and Brussels strike deals that concern its powers.

The separatist Parti Québécois returned to power this month at the head of a minority government in the province, promising to assert greater control over Quebec’s affairs and eventually hold another referendum on independence. 

“Quebec has to be at the table, and Canada understands that very well,” Hélène Drainville, the province’s delegate general to the Benelux and the EU institutions, said in an interview in Brussels.

Prime Minister Mark Carney hosts Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President António Costa on Thursday and Friday for a summit the two sides have billed as a step change in relations, driven by Donald Trump’s tariffs and a shared need for new partners. Von der Leyen has even proposed to make Canada an “associate member” of the EU — an offer that goes too far even for some of the bloc’s member countries. 

Early drafts of a joint summit declaration include a digital trade deal, a pact to let the European Investment Bank finance Canadian critical minerals projects, and a consignment of Canadian water bombers for Europe’s emergency services.

While Canada is responsible for negotiating the text, much of it lands in areas where its 10 provinces have extensive powers, such as over natural resources, education and health. Quebec is the second-largest province by population after Ontario and has a territory more than twice the size of France — with which three-quarters of its people share French as their mother tongue.

“Canada negotiates the umbrella agreement, and where we come in is when what’s negotiated touches our areas of jurisdiction,” said Drainville, who has been in post for a year. Natural resources are a provincial matter, she added, noting that Quebec has deposits of 22 of the 34 minerals on the EU’s critical list.

The province is already talking to the European Investment Bank and DG GROW, the European Commission’s industry department, about the bank’s entry into Canada, she noted. 

Asked whether Quebec’s interests line up with those of Ottawa, Drainville said federal and provincial officials have already set up joint working groups to implement the summit’s outcomes. “Right now, all the signals are green,” she said.

New arrival

The cooperation comes at an unusual moment. Quebec’s new premier, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, won power on Oct. 5 while promising a third referendum on sovereignty, though not as long as Trump is in the White House. His cabinet includes the new position of minister for “accession to independence.”

However, support for independence in the province is the lowest it has been for three decades, around 29% in a poll from earlier this year — hardly a popular mandate for the project.

The Parti Québécois has nevertheless pledged to double Quebec’s 34 offices abroad. A party blueprint published last year would raise the number of countries with a Quebec office from 19 to 38 and, if the referendum delivers a “yes” to sovereignty, would turn those delegations into embassies and consulates.

“Quebec is going to start to exist and shine everywhere in the world,” St-Pierre Plamondon said last year, describing the representative network as a prerequisite for independence.

Drainville said the new government, which has been in office for three weeks, has not yet set its line on Europe. 

“Our political leaders haven’t taken a position yet, which is normal,” she said. “But if they decide to double [the network], it’s because they believe in this partnership.” As for the associate-member label, she declined to engage: “We’re not really into semantics. That’s Canada.”

What Quebec does want from the EU, she said, is “win-win partnerships,” noting that the province and Ottawa complement each other and are stronger together when it comes to relations with Europe.

It hasn’t always been so amicable. 

Quebec’s diplomatic ambitions date back to the 1960s, when the provincial government asserted the right to pursue international relations in areas under its constitutional jurisdiction.

Its international aspirations became politically contentious when French President Charles de Gaulle publicly embraced Quebec’s independence movement in 1967 — ending a speech in Montreal by proclaiming: Vive le Québec libre! (“Long live free Quebec!”) 

The Brussels office opened in 1972, and the province now counts 10 posts in Europe, which Drainville called the most of any Canadian province.

Quebec never consented to the constitutional changes Canada enacted in 1982, and its 1995 independence referendum failed by the narrowest of margins (49.4% to 50.6%). A decade ago, Quebec lobbied Europe for a seat at the table in negotiations on the CETA EU-Canada trade deal.