Why the EU’s Balkan peace deal needs action, not more talks

Good morning. For those who got one, I hope you had a great long weekend.

Today, our man in the Balkans explains why this evening’s meeting between the leaders of Serbia and Kosovo is likely to be more talk and no trousers. And Germany’s labour minister tells our Berlin bureau chief that the country’s “social contract” is intact despite a spate of recent strikes.

We meet again

Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić and Kosovo premier Albin Kurti will hold yet another summit in Brussels today, their first meeting since reaching a verbal agreement on resolving their decades-long disputes in March.

But both sides expect no breakthrough, writes Marton Dunai.

Context: After a unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia in 2008, Kosovo has strived for recognition by Belgrade, while Serbs have demanded wide autonomy for their ethnic kin in Kosovo. EU-brokered talks began 12 years ago. A framework deal on normalisation was reached in March.

While that deal — struck in Ohrid, North Macedonia — contained language to satisfy both sides, implementation is entirely another matter. Case in point: a by-election last month in northern Kosovo was boycotted by nearly all Serb voters after Pristina rejected the municipal association that the Serbs demand (after promising the EU they would accept it).

Vučić said last week he expected nothing from today’s meeting, and lambasted the international community for recognising the vote as legitimate anyway.

Nenad Rašić, the Kosovo Serb minister for communities, told the Financial Times that Pristina was preparing “light suggestions” for the summit. “At this moment that should be good enough because the gap between the wishes and the realities is wide.”
 
“But I don’t see a problem,” he added. “We are closer than we have ever been. That we are proposing anything at all gives me hope that we could compromise. As we get closer we will have another Ohrid — but this was the milestone of accepting from the Kosovo side that this kind of organisation could and will exist.”

Chief EU negotiator Miroslav Lajčák wrote on Twitter last week he was optimistic of the talks continuing in a constructive tone. “It will be a crucial step forward and it’s important to avoid any actions that could worsen the atmosphere,” he said.

Greater tests than provincial by-elections lie ahead for this nascent agreement. Nervous onlookers are desperate for more than just a willingness to keep talking.

Chart du jour: Best of frenemies

Allied against Russia and in support of Ukraine, and with growing economic interdependence, Poland and Germany find their relationship is nonetheless at its worst since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Raphael Minder and Laura Pitel explain why.

Labour pains

Germany has been hit by a wave of warning strikes that have brought the railways to a standstill and shuttered some of its biggest airports. But Hubertus Heil, labour minister, dismissed suggestions that a new era of industrial unrest had descended on Europe’s largest economy, writes Guy Chazan.

Heil told the FT that German workers were going through a tough time, battered by inflation and the economic effects of Russia’s war on Ukraine, but that Germany still had a “lot fewer strikes than other countries, such as France, Italy or even Canada”. The “social partnership” between workers and employers, one of the country’s “economic and social assets”, was holding.

He also defended the wage deals of recent weeks that had demonstrated the growing clout of organised labour in Germany. Last month, for example, the Verdi union agreed a two-year deal for about 2.5mn public sector workers that included a one-off payment of €3,000 and one of the largest pay increases in the sector in decades.

Heil said the agreement was “sensible” and would ensure that “workers won’t lose their purchasing power in the crisis”, noting that “we had a drop in real wages last year in Germany”.

Wage increases would also help to combat the shortage of skilled workers in Germany’s civil service, its public transport, hospitals and care homes. “We need decent wages and working conditions to make it attractive to work in the public sector,” he said.

But Heil also acknowledged the strain on Germany’s public finances. “We spent €42bn over the past three years on Kurzarbeit,” he said, referring to short-time work or furlough schemes. “It helped companies keep skilled workers on board but it was a big burden on the social security system and the federal budget.”

The government did not have “much room for manoeuvre” when it came to the budget for 2024, a huge bone of contention between Social Democrats, liberals and Greens in chancellor Olaf Scholz’s cabinet, Heil said, but he added: “By June we’ll find a solution.”

What to watch today

1. The Petersberg Climate Dialogue begins in Berlin. Various international officials will attend.

2. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen visits Czech president Petr Pavel and prime minister Petr Fiala

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