European leaders’ summit marred by conflicts and absences

Receive free Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict updates

We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict news every morning.

Good morning from Granada, where the EU’s leaders — and some quarrelling friends from the neighbourhood — have gathered for two days of talks. 

More on that below, but first a scoop from Laura: Belgium’s security services are monitoring Chinese tech group Alibaba’s logistics hub at Liège airport for “possible espionage and/or interference activities”.

And we have a report from our Brussels correspondent on the €8bn of EU funds that auditors say was misspent last year.

Awkward in the Alhambra

The European Political Community was set up a year ago to show continental togetherness in the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As its leaders gather in southern Spain today, the bonhomie is now starting to look a little frayed around the edges.

Context: Forty-seven countries are part of the EPC, from Iceland to Azerbaijan, Portugal to Norway. It is an informal talking shop, not a decision-making body. The 27 EU leaders will remain in Granada for their own (also informal) summit tomorrow.

The war in Ukraine isn’t the only conflict menacing the EPC’s big tent. There’s Azerbaijan’s blitz assault on Nagorno-Karabakh last month and the resulting allegations of ethnic cleansing of its Armenian residents. And in the Balkans, Kosovo has accused Serbia of building up troops on their border, prompting calls from Albania for Nato to reassert control.

Oh, and Hungary and Turkey are still blocking Sweden’s bid to join Nato. An EU-brokered attempt to address this formerly fell apart yesterday.

Azeri leader Ilham Aliyev is skipping the summit and thus a planned meeting with his Armenian counterpart Nikol Pashinyan, French president Emmanuel Macron, German chancellor Olaf Scholz and EU Council president Charles Michel.

Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Aliyev’s close ally who has given him military and political backing for his move into Nagorno-Karabakh, is also staying away. That also avoids any awkwardness with his Swedish counterpart. (Erdoğan, for the record, says he has a cold.)

As for the tension in the Balkans, most officials expect little in the way of a breakthrough, given Kosovo will be represented by president Vjosa Osmani, not its more powerful prime minister Albin Kurti. Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić, who knows Osmani can’t enforce any agreements she may strike, will probably go through the motions with some western counterparts instead.

All that might make the EU leaders feel rather relieved as they sit down for dinner in the Alhambra tonight and reflect on their relatively more trivial disagreements over a larger shared budget or who to run their in-house bank.

But expect that feeling to dissipate as soon as Friday’s fractious debates on migration begin, and the discussion on enlargement of the union moves from the theoretical to the practical (especially now we know they know how much it could all cost). 

“We have had no discussions on what we are actually talking about,” said one senior EU diplomat of the enlargement debate. “Let’s start there.”

Chart du jour: Still very hot

Climate change (unsurprisingly) continues to make headlines, as the world experienced its hottest September ever. Last month’s global average temperature of 16.38C was an “extraordinary” 0.5C above the previous warmest September in 2020, the European earth observation agency said.

Lemon-aid

EU funds disbursed for a non-existent plantation of Italian lemon trees are only one example of around €8bn squandered from the EU budget according to auditors, writes Ian Johnston.

Context: The European Court of Auditors publishes today its yearly audit of the EU’s budget spending. As member states prepare for fractious negotiations to shore up the bloc’s budget, this year’s report has identified a “significant increase” in erroneous spending.

4.2 per cent of EU spending assessed by the ECA in 2022 was spent wrongly, compared with 3 per cent in 2021. That amounts to around €8.2bn of the total €196bn EU spending for that year.

Errors are not examples of fraud but of an inappropriate use of funds, such as when money is sent to ineligible beneficiaries or projects.

In one example, an Italian farmer received EU support for a plantation that, as satellite images revealed, did not exist. An on-the-spot site visit by auditors confirmed that the area was devoid of lemon trees and had not been farmed for years.

With greater spending comes greater risk of mistakes, warned ECA president Tony Murphy. But he also said “risk has to be better managed” to avoid errors repeating.

The ECA is also concerned about rising borrowing costs related to the bloc’s €800bn pandemic recovery fund, especially in the context of high interest rates. €46.9bn of spending was paid out under the scheme in 2022, contributing to EU debt jumping from €236.7bn in 2021 to €344.3bn.

“The debt is definitely something where we are concerned. We can’t just keep borrowing money without having a plan in place for how it’s going to be repaid,” said Murphy.

What to watch today

1. European leaders meet for European Political Community summit.

2. EU parliament holds final vote to appoint Wopke Hoekstra as climate commissioner and Maroš Šefčovič as vice-president for the Green Deal.

Now read these