POLITICO Brussels Playbook Plus: Fico comes in from cold — Parliament ghost town — Macron-o-meter

Your weekend guide to what’s driving Brussels and Europe

By RYAN HEATH with HARRY COOPER and QUENTIN ARIÈS

THE PM WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD

Like a scolding parent with a trust fund and a dose of affection up their sleeve, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker hugged Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico close this week. While Slovakia looks set to lose its court appeal against the EU’s refugee quota system, and Fico is far from popular in his Socialist political family for his hard-line migration rhetoric, Slovakia is now also the only member of the Visegrad Group of Central European countries to avoid Commission legal action over refusing to take asylum seekers. Indeed, Fico is all Juncker has left in the Visegrad Group: both EU and Slovak diplomats know it. While Slovakia handled its EU presidency with widely-recognized maturity and restraint, Poland and Hungary are derailing from the EU track, and the Czech Republic is in election mode, with the potential to elect Andrej Babiš, a Euroskeptic liberal.

Here’s the new deal between Brussels and one of its problem children, according to Playbook’s sources: Fico agrees to compromise on migration and the EU makes him their point man in Central Europe. Fico can do with the Brussels love. He has to look over his shoulder at a neo-Nazi party in parliament and at regular opposition-led street protests over leasing an apartment from businessman Ladislav Bašternák, who has been under investigation for tax fraud.

BREXIT LATEST …

U.K. Home Office officials admitted the department has not spoken to any experts on the impact of its Brexit policy on the Irish border. The U.K. Local Government Association said councils need billions in EU funding replaced after Brexit to create jobs and roll out infrastructure.

EU CONFIDENTIAL TALKS TRAINS, DRONES AND SELF-DRIVING AUTOMOBILES

Playbook spoke with European Commissioner for Transport Violeta Bulc about why every farm should use drones, how self-driving cars will take over Europe, her respect for Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary and what it would take to get more fast train lines in Europe. Playbook also talked to POLITICO transport reporter Joshua Posaner about the scandals engulfing the German car industry. Listen now with just one click, or download and listen offline, via iTunes.

See you soon: Playbook Plus is taking its summer break for the next three weekends (a rather shorter holiday than the European Parliament’s) and will be back in your inbox on Saturday, August 26. Weekday Playbook rolls on all the way through the summer.

WHO’S UP?

Euclid Tsakalotos: Greece’s finance minister successfully took his country back into international bond markets, against the advice of ECB chief Mario Draghi, and raised €3 billion.

Jean-Claude Juncker: Keeping busy as others take a holiday by expanding his refugee policy, ramping up pressure on Chinese investment in European industries, and successfully cracking jokes about Angela Merkel at his press conferences.

AND WHO’S DOWN?

BBC: Attacked all week for paying popular female stars far less than male counterparts.

Polish government: Got an unexpected slap when President Andrzej Duda blocked planned laws on the country’s judiciary.

PARLIAMENT’S SECOND GHOST TOWN

The European Parliament has a message for citizens and other politicians this summer: don’t call us (and we won’t call you). The Parliament in Brussels is closed until August 18, won’t conduct any business in Brussels until August 28, and is off limits to journalists until September 4 — they’ve even put up metal shutters to hammer the point home. Too bad if you use one of the banks located inside the Parliament, because you won’t be allowed in. In Strasbourg, it’s a similar story, except that the French city is used to it as the Parliament building there is closed for most of the year anyway.

Things are so slow that Czech MEP Pavel Telička resorted to tweeting a picture of snails. One Parliament staffer and library user was not amused at the answers he was given as to why some of the library’s services are unavailable. Read the exchange here.

The rest of the EU has been working harder. The European Court of Justice issued an important opinion on Wednesday about how flight passengers’ data is collected. (There was no one at the Parliament to give a response.) Three European commissioners addressed reporters Wednesday following the weekly meeting of all 28 commissioners, during which they held talks with ministers from Turkey and Egypt. EU ambassadors also met, as did 14 groups of diplomats, and competitiveness ministers held two days of talks in Tallinn, Estonia.

MEPs are, of course, entitled to a vacation but it doesn’t seem too unreasonable to suggest a shorter break, synchronizing calendars with other EU institutions and letting people know who’s in charge while Antonio Tajani & Co. are on the beach.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“Germany is not a professor, France is a not a student.”

— Martin Schulz reckons Germany should stop telling everyone else what to do.

FEUD OF THE WEEK

Donald Tusk and Andrzej Duda vs. Jarosław Kaczyński and Beata Szydło.: You’d be forgiven for thinking Donald Tusk is the leader of the Polish opposition rather than the European Council president given his willingness to pick fights in Poland and lack of interest in talking to non-Polish media. Perhaps he’s concerned about Polish President Andrzej Duda moving to steal his crown as the pro-EU conservative that Poles can vote for in the 2020 election. Duda surprised everyone this week by standing up to his political patrons in the ruling Law and Justice party and blocking judicial reforms they were pushing. That left Prime Minister Beata Szydło seething in a televised speech.

THE OFFICIAL EUROPEAN VEGETABLE

Thirty-nine MEPs have written to the European Commission saying: “We, members of the European Parliament, hereby request that the European Commission establish a European Day of Fruit and Vegetables, to be celebrated on a suitable date.” The MEPs went on to say that “this would alleviate the consequences of the Russia import ban as well as the difficult internal market situation that many producers have been facing over recent years.” A fruit and vegetable day would do neither of those things, though it would likely produce a small bump in sales and make MEPs feel good. If we are going to have a European Day of Fruit and Vegetables, we should at least get to choose which veg represents us best. Send your nominations to playbook@politico.eu (No jokes about cherry-picking, please.)

MASTERCLASS IN STONEWALLING

Romanian MEP Viorica Dăncilă gave a brilliant example of unnecessary stonewalling in the Parliament Magazine. Despite being asked only soft questions, she didn’t answer a single one. Asked to describe her political style in three words, she took 39. She couldn’t recall an achievement that would surprise readers, nor name a book that inspired her, despite claiming “I love reading and try to read whenever I can find the time.” Dăncilă was also unable to name an inspirational person she’d worked with.

MACRON-O-METER

“Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the greatest French leader of them all?” President Emmanuel Macron ignores polling showing his approval rating has plummeted by 10 points.

TWEETS FROM PARODY ACCOUNTS RULED FAKE NEWS

A German court ruled that the youth wing of the CSU, the Bavarian sister party of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU, must remove a tweet issued by a parody account run by them of SPD leader and former European Parliament President Martin Schulz, or face a hefty fine. The tweet in question, put out by @therealMartinSchulfter, suggested Schulz would strike an alliance with the far-left Die Linke and downplayed the seriousness of the violence at the G20 summit in Hamburg. Parody accounts of Brussels, beware: you too may be accused of spreading malicious fake news.

PLASTIC NOT FANTASTIC

Commissioner for Environment Karmenu Vella launched the campaign “World aquariums against marine litter” Thursday. Around 100 aquariums across the world are filling one of their exhibitions with plastic to show the problem of marine litter. Vella told Playbook “Aquariums are a TV screen to the ocean. The world’s aquariums have decided to become the oceans’ ‘breaking news’ to avoid becoming its history channel.”

CALLING ALL RIGHT-WING BEARDS

Thierry Baudet, a new hard-right Dutch MP and columnist, has challenged Dutch men to join him in not shaving until a new Dutch government is in place. His campaign stems from Netherlands going four months without a new government after inconclusive national elections. Talks to form a government restart August 9.

BY THE NUMBERS

25: Number of health ministers Romania has had in the past 27 years.

3,000: The number of refugees relocated around Europe in June 2017 — the best result since the relocation mechanism was put in place.

42: Number of days that nothing is happening at European Parliament over the summer.

GAFFES & LAUGHS

Empire state of mind: “Our capital is capable of serving more than the Hungarian state,” Viktor Orbán told party colleagues in his latest speech.

Color blind or simply blind? First reported by Playbook last week, the European Commission’s new diversity plan will not include any effort to measure inclusion of ethnic minority communities, and European Conservatives and Reformists leader Syed Kamall has written a letter of complaint to the Commission.

Toilet wall graffiti or Trump tweet? “The E.U. is very protectionist with the U.S. STOP!”. That did not amuse those who remembered the Pentagon changing a tender for refueling aircraft in 2011 because it was won by EADS (now Airbus) rather than an American company.

Time you got a watch: Playbook hears that several ministers were late to meetings in Tallinn, Estonia, because they forgot, or didn’t realize, that Tallinn is not in the same time zone as Brussels.

Swedes for the chop: Three ministers face a no-confidence vote after concealing from the prime minister a serious breach of classified data for a whole year. Infrastructure Minister Anna Johansson, Defense Minister Peter Hultqvist and Interior Minister Anders Ygeman have their necks on the block..

Punk diplomacy: How British diplomats were inspired by the Sex Pistols album “Never mind the bollocks.”

TOP 3 POLITICO READS

6 crises that could spoil Europe’s summer (Ryan Heath)

For Donald Tusk, Poland is personal (David M. Herszenhorn)

Too big to fail: Why Germany’s Autostate keeps winning (Florian Müller and Ginger Hervey)

TOP 3 WEEKEND READS FROM ELSEWHERE

Anthony Scaramucci called me to unload about White House leakers, Reince Priebus, and Steve Bannon (New Yorker)

Why offshore processing of refugees bound for Europe is such a bad idea (The Conversation)

Jediism: Caught between the dark side and the light (Cafébabel)

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