Maybe I was a bit too tired and cranky in my 6am Substack dispatch this morning. Yes, the optics of yesterday’s European Council are quite bad for the EU. President von der Leyen said the EU was going to deliver help to Ukraine, and in the end they couldn’t muster the political will to do it.
But as I explained in this Substack Live with Luke Johnson from Public Sphere this afternoon (following a well-deserved nap), they did agree to something very major: blasting through Northern Europe’s taboo against joint EU debt and agreeing a ‘Eurobonds for Ukraine’ plan that we had been told as recently as the day before the summit was impossible because of both German opposition to eurobonds and Hungarian opposition to aid for Ukraine. For some reason, both Merz and Orban easily caved last night. Why? We still don’t know the answer.
For European federalists, this is a major victory. No longer can we say that the EU doesn’t do Eurobonds. They’ve now done it for the second time, following their use for the Covid recovery fund in 2021. Back then Berlin insisted it was a one-off for an emergency situation that will never happen again. Well guess what Mimi, it did. After we suffered for years of the Eurozone crisis dragging on longer than it had to because of German intransigence on this issue, the Germans have finally accepted the principle of joint EU debt. And in the end, Ukraine will get the same amount over the next two years (€90 billion) that it would have gotten under the latest draft of the reparations loan which would have staggered payments.
As Luke and I discussed, this will make a huge difference to Ukraine in being able to stand up to Russia in the
