European leaders are a fickle lot. After years of moaning about former European Council President Charles Michel – whom they considered a self-aggrandiser lacking either the diplomatic aplomb or organisational acumen for the task – they installed their dream candidate, Portugal’s former socialist premier António Costa.
Costa, a gregarious political operator in the final stages of his career looked to be the perfect choice to both broker consensus among the EU’s 27 leaders and handle “Ursula”.
Yet just three months into Costa’s term, the leaders are back to their whinging.
Annoyed Spaniards
Costa, diplomatic sources from four different member states tell us, has run afoul of member states big and small, who accuse him of being out of his depth and over his skis.
Even socialist Spain, the sources say, has expressed frustration over what Madrid sees as a lack of leadership, initiative and tangible action from the Council president in the face of Donald Trump’s attacks.
To be fair, when he has shown initiative, it hasn’t gone well either. At the Munich Security Conference, the Council president granted an interview to the Financial Times in which he called for negotiations on a “new security architecture” with the US and Russia. The comments caught many leaders by surprise, sparking criticism that he hadn’t coordinated with them first.
A number of countries were also irked that Costa did not call an extraordinary Council meeting to discuss the crisis in the transatlantic relationship after Munich, agreeing instead to jet to Paris for a mini-summit with Emmanuel Macron, von der Leyen, NATO chief Mark Rutte, and a handful of other European leaders. Some of the countries not included – the vast majority of the 27 – grumbled that Costa ignored them.
Axis of MAGA
The real issue lay in Budapest – and Rome and Bratislava. Costa has the unenviable task of coordinating discussions about Europe’s strategy towards Trump and Russia with Viktor Orbán, Giorgia Meloni and Robert Fico, leaders other EU capitals suspect of working in cahoots with either Trump, Vladimir Putin or both.
The distrust over leaders’ loyalty to Europe has made Costa’s jump particularly fraught. At last week’s Council on Ukraine, for example, staff were ordered to leave the room at one point and mobile phones were banned. But some leaders, our sources say, were still reluctant to speak openly as long as Orbán, Meloni, and Fico were in the room.
If the whispers about Costa sound familiar, that’s because they echo the Europe’s age-old challenge: speaking with one voice.
The same capitals grumbling about Costa were also annoyed by EU chief diplomat Kaja Kallas’s declaration on 28 February that “the free world needs a new leader”, a position many member states share privately but are not ready to advertise so forcefully.
Where’s Ursula?
Speaking of voices, von der Leyen, who normally doesn’t shy from the spotlight, has gone underground on the transatlantic front, apparently worried about exacerbating tensions further.
The Commission president, we’re told, tried hard to win an audience with Trump at Mar-a-Lago before the inauguration and was rebuffed. She was forced to make do with brief meeting with JD Vance on the sidelines of an AI trade fair in Paris last month. How did it go? A few days later, Vance delivered his withering attack on Europe at the Munich Security Conference as von der Leyen looked on. Trump, who recently accused the EU of trying to “screw” the US, likely regards von der Leyen as a Merkelist, which isn’t wrong. But if there’s one person you don’t want to be associated with if your trying to win over Trump, it’s the former German chancellor. Divide and conquer
With out without von der Leyen, the EU appears hopelessly divided when it comes to settling on a strategy for dealing with Trump. Even as many leaders are declaring a new era as the US withdraws, others are doing whatever they can to get back into Washington’s good graces.
Case in point: Just a day after US Secretary of State Marco Rubio stood up Kallas in Washington, he met with Greek Foreign Minister Giorgos Gerapetritis.
The episode underscored how easy it is for Washington to divide and rule Europe. That’s particularly true now, given the lack of trust between the leaders. That’s not Costas’ fault, but instead of improving the situation, he appears to be making it worse. | 