It has been a tough few days for Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis.

After copping an earful from his eurozone colleagues on Friday about the lack of progress over the country’s bailout talks, taking to Twitter to suggest he was the target of hatred, and being largely sidelined in the negotiations process by Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras earlier this week, Mr Varoufakis says he was attacked by self-styled anarchists late Tuesday. Read More »

Top billing for the week ahead in the European Union is for the bloc’s summit meeting with Ukraine which takes place in Kiev on Monday. It’s the first formal summit since the crisis in Ukraine erupted last spring when Russian forces annexed Crimea.

Officials acknowledge it comes at a time of rising strains between Brussels and Kiev with the EU seeming unlikely to grant Ukraine’s requests for rapid progress on a visa-access deal, EU peacekeepers for eastern Ukraine or President Petro Poroshenko’s plea to open up a path for eventual EU membership for his country.

President Jean-Claude Juncker, European Council President Donald Tusk and a host of other top EU officials will make the trip.

Here are some of the other main events on the schedule in the week ahead. Read More »

Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis got an earful from his eurozone colleagues on Friday about the lack of progress in the country’s bailout talks. But on Saturday, he finally got some love—albeit from a minister without much say on his country’s financial future.

“Greek minister of finance Varoufakis. A nice guy except for those EUR329 billion of debt,” Czech Finance Minister Andrej Babis tweeted Saturday morning, along with a selfie of him and Mr. Varoufakis. The Czech Republic isn’t part of the eurozone and didn’t participate in the currency union’s bailout for Greece.

Mr. Babis wasn’t taking sides with his tweet, however. Shortly before posting the photo of with Mr. Varoufakis, he also posted a picture of himself and Wolfgang Schäuble—in which the German finance minister looked decidedly happier than he did after discussions with his European Union colleagues wrapped up in Riga, Latvia. Read More »

When he set up his college of 27 commissioners last year, Jean-Claude Juncker had one main demand: send me more women. But national governments (who made the nominations) stuck to the mostly-male line-up that the European Commission has been used to for decades. Only nine out of the 28 commissioners  – one for each country, including the commission president himself — are female.

Now Mr. Juncker is trying again. This time, it is about the directors-general, the commission’s top civil servants who oversee the work of the specialized services, ranging from farm policy to competition law. Out of 35 directors-general, only six are women. Including the most powerful of them all, the secretary general – Catherine Day, a 60-year old Irishwoman– whose task is to coordinate the work of all commissioners and ensure they are in line with Mr. Juncker.

Her job is secure “for as long as she wants it,” said one EU official familiar with the process, even though she has been in the post for ten years. She gets along well both with Mr. Juncker and his chief of staff, Martin Selmayr, the official said.

But there is a big question mark about at least a dozen of the others. Read More »

The European Union should protect its borders against immigration using military force because it doesn’t need new migrants, Hungary’s prime minister said the day after EU leaders agreed to increase funding to keep migrants from dying while trying to cross the Mediterranean.

The leaders of the 28-nation EU agreed in Brussels on Thursday to triple funding for patrols in the Mediterranean after hundreds of people drowned in one of the deadliest migrant shipwrecks on the Mediterranean in recent days.

Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban urged even more action.

“Europe’s borders must be protected. We cannot be like a piece of cheese with holes in it so that they [immigrants] can be crossing in and out. Serious police and military steps must be taken and also steps that they would remain at home,” Mr. Orban said in an interview on state radio on Friday. Read More »

Among the frequently-aired gripes about Jean-Claude Juncker is that he’s a rather absent European Commission president. There are complaints that he delegates too much of his work and claims that he shows up in his office in Brussels just two to three days a week, often arranging “working lunches” in his home country, Luxembourg, on Mondays and Fridays.

So Real Time Brussels decided  to take a look if these claims stand up — and how his schedule compares to other members of his commission.

Last week, Mr. Juncker’s agenda seemed to support the complaints: On Monday he was in Luxembourg, meeting the president of the Court of Auditors, and on Friday he was back in Luxembourg for a working lunch with Luc Frieden, his former finance minister and now vice chairman of Deutsche Bank AG. Read More »

After a couple of relatively quiet weeks, watchers of the European Union should prepare for a tenser few days of meetings and negotiations in Brussels and elsewhere. Greece is once again set to dominate news, as progress on a deal which would release desperately-needed cash to the debt-stricken country will be discussed at a meeting of eurozone finance ministers in Riga.

Meanwhile, foreign ministers will meet in Luxembourg and another round of negotiations on a major trade deal between the EU and the U.S. will take place in New York.  Over the jump, five things to watch in the week ahead. Read More »

It’s two years on and lawmakers in the European Parliament are still at odds with national governments about proposed European Union legislation over prioritizing traffic on the Internet and scrapping mobile roaming costs, according to a document laying out the latest state of play in negotiations.

Members of the Parliament are trying to hammer out the final version of the law in so-called trialogue negotiations with representatives of the national governments and the European Commission, the bloc’s executive body.

On one hand, the Parliament wants to have “net neutrality” enshrined in the bill, meaning that Internet “traffic should be treated equally, without discrimination, restriction or interference, independent of the sender, receiver, type, content, device, service or application,” according to the latest working paper seen by The Wall Street Journal. Read More »

European Union institutions are back in full swing after a two-week holiday, with a major anti-trust probe into Google possibly being announced on Wednesday. That same day, markets will be watching the European Central Bank for its monthly interest-rate decision and comments on Greece’s continued financial woes.

Gas talks between Russia and Ukraine, mediated by EU officials, are resuming in Brussels, but expectations for a deal are low. Meanwhile, the European Parliament will consider lifting the immunity of a far-right Hungarian MEP suspected of spying for Russia. And eurocrats with a soft spot for all things royal will rejoice at seeing the King of Spain, Felipe VI, who will be visiting the EU institutions on Wednesday. Over the jump for five top things to watch this week. Read More »

A very light schedule in this holiday-shortened week for the European Union institutions. The European Parliament will not be in session, and the only thing of major note on the diary is the meeting of top eurozone officials on Wednesday and Thursday. They’ll be discussing Greece and preparing for a meeting of finance ministers later in the month in Riga.

On Thursday, Athens is due to repay about €450 million to the International Monetary Fund. We’ll be watching that and anything else that comes up that isn’t on the schedule. Read More »