EU future on the agenda as Germany’s Scholz meets Council President Costa

The European Council’s president-elect, Antonio Costa, will present his priorities for the mandate to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Berlin on Thursday (10 October) amid hopes that Costa will be an ally in protecting the Social Democrats’ EU agenda. 

Costa (PS/S&D) will succeed Liberal incumbent Charles Michel as the chair of the EU’s leaders’ summits from 1 December after being picked during June’s post-election negotiations between EU leaders from the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP), the Socialists, and the Liberals. 

At the meeting in Berlin at midday, Costa will "give a little insight into his thoughts on what [he] intends to prioritise during his five-year term of office,” a government spokesperson told reporters in Berlin last week, adding that “the two gentlemen know each other well.”  

This will conclude six days in which Socialist Costa will have met the EU’s key social democratic leaders, starting with Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez (PSOE/S&D) last Friday and Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen (S/S&D) on Monday. 

Following the suspension of Slovakia's Smer's membership in the EU, only four of the 27 heads of state and government are members of the socialist party family, the Party of European Socialists (PES).  

This leaves their leftist policy agenda at risk of being undermined by a right-leaning Council and Parliament, whose affiliates have pushed to roll back progressive policies from the last mandate, such as the EU’s ‘Green Deal’. 

Scholz will use “special influence” 

“Mr Costa has close ties with the chancellor, who, as a Social Democrat from the same party family, supported him in the negotiations and helped to push him through,” Christian Petry, the lead MP on European affairs of Scholz’s SPD party, told Euractiv.  

“I can imagine that the chancellor, therefore, has special influence and will use it,” he added. 

Scholz’s SPD places hope in Costa, the first-ever socialist elected president of the Council. When he was prime minister, he shared the SPD’s goals of continuing programmes such as the ‘Green Deal’ and NextGenerationEU, preventing rollbacks, and exploring new sources of EU funding, Petry recalls. 

While the president is supposed to find common ground between EU leaders to facilitate decision-making, the role still comes with the agenda-setting power of organising and chairing leaders’ summits and representing the EU externally. 

Aside from insisting on properly implementing legislation from the last mandate, Petry hopes that Costa will use this to make the Council's opaque decision-making more transparent. 

“We expect that Mr Costa will ensure this,” Petry said. 

[Edited by Alice Taylor-Braçe]