“Associate membership” is out and “ever closer association” back in.
The offer of the first phrase was made to Canada a month ago by EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen.
The phraseology, made during von der Leyen’s State of the Union speech, surprised many EU diplomats who claimed that they had not been consulted.
It was also never clear precisely what this would mean.
The idea of Canada having representatives or observer status in the EU institutions always sounded fanciful. Besides, there is no mention of ‘associate membership’ in the EU treaties, and this uncertainty appears to have persuaded Germany to demand that it be dropped ahead of Thursday and Friday’s (29-30 October) EU-Canada summit.
The draft communique circulated ahead of the summit talks of “work to define by the 2027 EU-Canada summit the concept of an ever closer association of Canada to the EU, short of full membership itself.”
Von der Leyen appeared not to have read the memo.
Officials would “start discussing how to make Canada the first associate member of the EU,” she said on arrival in Montreal, adding that “our ambition is to build the closest partnership we have ever had with a non-European country”.
Yet this is a dispute over language rather than substance. The EU and Mark Carney’s Canada see each other as their closest ally. Both have been repeatedly threatened with hefty trade tariffs by Donald Trump’s White House and the consequences of Trump’s foreign policy adventures in the Middle East and the Arctic. Carney’s remarks at the World Economic Forum in January that ‘middle’ powers should club together to avoid being squeezed between China and the US were aimed at the EU.
Commission officials may blench at the comparison, but the EU is a collection of middle ranking and small states. And it is yet to act like a world power on the political stage.
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Activists and MEPs want notoriously corrupt foreign officials to face EU visa-bans and asset-freezes, in a proposal backed by Estonia.
People guilty of “serious corruption” including “bribery, misappropriation of public funds, and the laundering of their proceeds” should be added to an existing EU list of global human rights abusers, said 71 MEPs in a letter to EU leaders dated 21 October.
The human rights blacklist includes Russian judges who tormented dissidents, Taliban virtue-enforcers, African warlords, and extremist Israeli settlers among the 151 individuals and 34 entities it names.
But the fact the EU did not have “corruption” as a criterion for inclusion, unlike similar legislation in Western allies Australia, Canada, the US, and UK, left a loophole, the MEPs warned.
“This allows corrupt foreign officials already sanctioned by other Western partners to continue to benefit from EU institutions and its financial systems,” they said.
The anti-corruption bolt-on would have a moral and a strategic value, said Polish rightwing MEP and former interior minister Mariusz Kamiński, who co-signed the letter.
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If you have come across messages such as “what Europe needs is a peaceful continent” on Facebook or X, you may have encountered coordinated inauthentic behaviour (CIB).
CIB is a manipulative communication tactic that uses a combination of authentic, fake and duplicated social media accounts to operate as an adversarial network across platforms such as X, Facebook or Bluesky.
By coordinating their activity, these accounts can amplify particular messages and create an online impression that may not reflect the reality of public opinion.
The tactic spread massively during Covid.
In a paper entitled ‘Coordinated inauthentic behavior: An innovative manipulation tactic to amplify Covid-19 anti-vaccine communication outreach via social media’, Monica Murero wrote that such operations could be “one of the greatest threats to freedom of expression and democracy in our society”.
But this distortion becomes particularly visible during elections.
Indeed, with political momentum, spreading messages and content online can influence how voters perceive the strength of an incumbent government and the prospects of its opposition.
Manufacturing political dominance
The latest example is Serbia.
Ahead of parliamentary elections in Serbia, the Balkan Free Media Initiative (BFMI), in collaboration with Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, investigated how coordinated networks promoted former Serbian PM and president Aleksandar Vučić while undermining independent media.
“CIB corrupts the public signal that democracies rely on to understand themselves,” head of research at BFMI Vanesa Valcheva told EUobserver.
The findings point to a broader problem for democratic debate: online visibility can be manipulated to sustain an image of political dominance, even when the picture on the ground appears different.
“Incumbents often try to look unbeatable to discourage opposition voters, reassure their supporters, and show outside partners that things are unlikely to change,” Valcheva said.
Before the rise of these coordinated online operations, the digital space offered dissent more room to breathe.
But nowadays, CIB networks can undermine the online space by repeatedly circulating messages that support a particular political interest and make it appear more widely shared than it is.
And indeed, Vučić dominated the space on X and Facebook while the streets suggested otherwise.
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Artificial intelligence is one of the economic sectors where the EU and China could be allies rather than foes; both are racing to close the gap with the United States. But until now, the EU has viewed China as a competitor and threat on AI and digital technology.
The two economies “have huge cooperation potential in new energy, AI, services trade, the digital economy and green low-carbon fields”, China’s ministry of commerce said in a statement following the second round of China-EU trade talks in Beijing earlier this month.
Those two days of talks between EU trade commissioner Maroš Šefčovič and Chinese commerce secretary Wang Wentao were widely viewed as a successful first step forward by EU leaders at last week’s summit in Brussels.
In particular, China has agreed to reduce exports of electric vehicles and guarantees continued access to rare earths without new export controls. It also commits EU and Chinese officials to at least six more months of negotiations on a raft of trade disputes.
A visit to a robotics factory was part of the itinerary for a delegation from the European Parliament’s international trade committee who will make a three day visit to China from 27 October.
Committee chairman Bernd Lange told reporters that Unitree Robotics, a Chinese robotics company that uses its own humanoid robots—powered by embodied AI —to help manufacture and assemble more robots would be “at the heart of Chinese industry in the future.”
China is the world leader in the robotics market, with Lange’s Germany its main European rival.
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More than a year ago, we launched our Hungary Briefing series, a weekly roundup of news from Hungary’s election campaign. The series continues, covering developments following the historic election and the actions of the Tisza government. This week’s topics:
The great Covid scam.
Former minister kept €25m in cash at home.
Closer ties with the Czech Republic.
Mixed results for the revolution’s anniversary commemorations.
Poll of the week: Tisza supporters lean liberal.
The Covid scam
Shortly after the Covid pandemic broke out in the spring of 2020, the Orbán government purchased almost 17,000 ventilators for 300 billion forints, equivalent to €860m at the exchange rate at the time.
The machines were imported from China through various foreign intermediary companies. Viktor Orbán later said he had consulted mathematicians about how many ventilators Hungarian hospitals would need under the worst-case scenarios.
They did not save lives
Yet most of these machines never reached hospitals — and even if they had, they would not have been able to save lives. György Velkey, a state secretary in the Tisza government, wrote on Facebook, citing a 2020 military medical report, that only around half the machines had been classified as usable. The remaining half were either recommended for hospital use “only with serious compromises” or not recommended at all.
Many of the machines are still gathering dust in warehouses.
In 2023, former opposition MP Tímea Szabó showed what 12,000 unopened ventilators looked like in a warehouse in Gödöllő. The Hungarian state was paying 80 million forints, or approximately €200,000, a month just to store them.
The middlemen cashed in
And that is not all: the companies contracted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, headed by Péter Szijjártó, made a fortune from procuring the machines. Further details emerged after a raid on Tuesday(27 Ocober) by the National Tax and Customs Administration (NAV).
NAV detained three people, while an international arrest warrant was issued for the suspected leader of the criminal organisation. He is believed to be in Indonesia — and the news outlet 444 discovered that he operates a Ferris wheel in Bali.
“Acting as part of a criminal organisation, the perpetrators who sold ventilators and medical masks to state bodies during the Covid-19 pandemic laundered more than three billion forints [approximately €7.5m] in profits, then deprived the state treasury of 660 million forints [approximately €1.7m] by evading tax,” NAV said.
Footage recorded during the raid also reveals the luxury in which the suspects lived. As 444 notes, this may be only part of the story: other companies may also have been involved in the overpriced procurement deals. There is no word yet on whether the authorities are investigating any responsibility Szijjártó or Orbán may bear in the case.
Presented as a success story
The Orbán government tried to portray its pandemic response as a success story. In early 2025, it released a short film entitled How We Defeated the Covid Pandemic.
Almost 49,000 people died in the pandemic in Hungary. According to international statistics, the country had the world’s fifth-highest death toll per million inhabitants.
Former minister kept €25m in cash
Hungarian authorities accuse Miklós Seszták, who served as development minister in the Orbán government between 2014 and 2018 and was re-elected to parliament this year, of accepting at least 11 billion forints, or approximately €27.5m, in bribes. On Wednesday (28 October), a court extended his pre-trial detention until the end of January.
Its ruling revealed an important detail in the corruption case.
During a search of Seszták’s home, investigators found an empty safe in which, according to the court, he had kept nine billion forints in cash — approximately €25m at the current exchange rate. He had arranged for the money to be hidden before he was questioned.
As 444 calculated, that amount of cash would be extremely heavy: 450,000 banknotes with a face value of 20,000 forints could weigh 450kg.
They did not know where to put the cash
Commenting on the news, investigative journalist Szabolcs Panyi wrote that “in principle, this is entirely consistent with what several colleagues and I have long been hearing from sources with inside knowledge of the NER” — the political and economic system built around Orbán.
According to Panyi, as early as the 2010s, one of the major problems facing people within the Orbán regime was how to store the vast amounts of cash generated by corruption. They could not deposit it in a bank without having to explain where it came from.
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The Russian army was killing city residents on Thursday morning.
Russia claims to have captured Dobropillia. Ukraine says its attack on the town failed.
The ceasefire in Oleshky is being observed, but preparations for further fighting are under way during it.
Maps of the day — Oleshky, Dobropillia
Videos of the day — the destroyed centre of Kherson; Kramatorsk prepares for street fighting; did one surface-to-air missile hit two Russian missiles?; an impressive shootdown of a jet-powered Geran by an F-16
The Russian army was killing city residents on Thursday morning. First, a warning to all readers: this latest edition of the Ukraine Battlefield update contains several videos and photographs of victims of Russian attacks that may be distressing. Consider whether you wish to continue reading today.
We do not usually publish such footage, but so much of it emerged within just a few hours today that we are publishing it to explain why, during October, Russia killed more Ukrainian civilians than at any time since the battle for Mariupol.
Ukrainian cities in the rear are currently suffering more than at any point since the start of the war. This is partly because the United States has stopped supplying missiles for Patriot systems — which Europe pays for anyway — and partly because of the mass deployment of jet-powered drones.
Shooting them down is more complicated, and the air defence success rate has therefore fallen. Russia is also attacking populated areas, which inevitably increases the civilian death toll.
Thursday morning was particularly tragic. Russian weapons killed people in Dnipro, Kremenchuk, and Chernihiv. In every case, the victims were ordinary residents, including children in several cases.
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The European Commission will not help journalists facing jail in Egypt even though its multi-billion-euro EU-Egypt deal signed in 2024 is conditional on human rights.
On Thursday (29 October), it read out a prepared statement, noting the importance of independent media outlets and that its agreement with Egypt includes a commitment to universal values of democracy, rule of law and human rights.
The statement was read after Cairo cracked down on Lina Attalah, chief editor of the independent media outlet Mada Masr.
The journalist was convicted on Wednesday by a court in Cairo for operating a website without a licence even though she had made multiple attempts over the years to obtain such a licence.
Her latest application for a licence has been pending without response since 2023 and her site has been blocked in Egypt since 2017.
She was fined some €48,000 and ordered to shut down the outlet, highlighting a pattern of abuse against journalists and civil society throughout Egypt, a country deemed an essential partner for the EU in its efforts to curb migration.
As of early October, Egypt has imprisoned 25 journalists.
In response, the commission at a press briefing re-read its short statement on the importance of independent media in Egypt.
Asked if this also means it would press Egypt to drop its case against Lina Attalah, a commission spokesperson said he would not “go further than what we have already put out there”.
Pressed if the crackdown against her is a demonstration of the values cited in its €7.4bn agreement with Egypt, he deferred to another spokesperson before walking off the stage. No other comment was made on the matter.
The response has drawn criticism from rights defenders.
“We don’t need the EU to tell us that Egypt jails journalists. We need to know what it’s going to do about it,” said Claudio Francavilla of Human Rights Watch.
He said the EU has been funnelling billions to Egypt, conditioned on “concrete and credible steps” on human rights.
The exact wording of the agreement, which is published here, says that assistance to Egypt requires it “to make concrete and credible steps” towards respecting effective democracy, the rule of law, and guarantees respect for human rights.
“Egyptian authorities don’t seem to have read the memo. Lame statements like this one are hardly a reminder,” Francavilla said of the commission’s reaction.
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On Sunday (1 November) Bulgarians vote in a presidential runoff. The question that will outlast the result is not who wins, but whether the winner is willing to say no to prime minister Rumen Radev.
Radev spent nine years as president with Iliana Yotova as his vice-president.
He resigned in January to enter party politics and the office passed to her automatically; she has never been elected to it.
In April his Progressive Bulgaria coalition won 131 of parliament’s 240 seats, and it now backs her for a full term.
In the first round she led Andrey Gyurov, a former caretaker prime minister backed by the pro-Western opposition, by fewer than three points. Turnout was 22 percent – the lowest on record.
The presidency’s power to say no
An elected majority is legitimate; so is cooperation between government and president. The constitutional risk begins where cooperation becomes an expectation of loyalty. An institution can keep every legal power and still lose the will to use it against political allies.
In Bulgaria those powers are modest but real.
A president can send a law back, and parliament must debate and vote on it again in public. Radev’s majority can pass it a second time with 121 votes, but the second vote is on the record.
A president can also refer a law to the Constitutional Court, commands the armed forces, and chairs the Consultative Council on National Security, where the state assesses threats to itself.
None of this can stop a determined majority. All of it can force one to explain itself.
Both governments suspect Russian involvement, although responsibility has not been conclusively established; more than two dozen sailors are dead or missing.
The first strike in Bulgaria’s exclusive economic zone came on 6 October. By then Yotova had been president for nine months without once convening the security council. She convened it the next day, after the opposition demanded it in public.
Yotova knows how to use a veto: in February she returned an Electoral Code amendment that limited the number of polling stations in countries outside the EU, calling it unconstitutional.
That parliament was not Radev’s. Against his majority the test came in July, with the 2026 budget. The reformist and conservative opposition, the Podkrepa trade union and a petition with more than 32,000 signatures asked her to return it. Y
Yotova argued that a veto would deepen financial uncertainty and promulgated the budget. On 20 October, the Constitutional Court upheld the budget as a whole but struck down two provisions inserted through it. The challenge came from MPs and the ombudsman, not the presidency.
Nato dispute
One policy dispute between the candidates concerns Article 4 of the Nato treaty. Gyurov wants Bulgaria to request consultations with its allies. Yotova initially opposed invoking it, but later acknowledged that coordinated action with other allies remained an option.
Radev ruled it out on the day of the first attack because the ships were struck outside Bulgarian territorial waters. Yet Article 4 does not require an attack on national territory; it applies whenever an ally considers its security threatened. Whether to invoke it is a political choice. Territorial eligibility is not the obstacle.
The test of an independent presidency is not whether it agrees with the government on Article 4. It is whether it would demand a public account of what the state knew, what it did and what went wrong, and publish it even when it embarrasses the people who put it in office.
The European Commission’s rule-of-law report in July noted that most of Bulgaria’s regulators had their mandates renewed without becoming any more independent. A renewed mandate is not proof of oversight. Neither is a convened council.
The same test applies to Gyurov, an independent nominated by the reformist parties We Continue the Change and Democratic Bulgaria, who told CNN on 23 October that Bulgaria needs a counterweight to its government. A counterweight that only ever pushes against Radev is a faction, not an institution. A president elected by the opposition would have to challenge the opposition too.
Both are entitled to a clear account of what Bulgaria saw, when it acted and what failed.
Brussels, for its part, should judge institutional independence not by formal procedures, but by whether those institutions are willing to challenge those in power. The question to ask is simpler: when did it last contradict the government?
Radev has a mandate to govern. The next president will hold a separate one: to question, to return, to refer and, when necessary, to refuse.
Europe does not need a Bulgaria that pretends it never makes mistakes. It needs one that can find and correct them before its sailors, its neighbours and its allies pay for them.
The London-based Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) has filed a complaint with the European Ombudsman, accusing the EU Commission of maladministration over its handling of the bloc’s methane rules.
The complaint, filed on Thursday (29 October), targets two recent commission decisions.
The first is for a July recommendation that member states hold off on fining importers that are in breach of the rules until 2030.
The second is a proposal made earlier this month to delay the import rules by a year over supply worries — a decision that was made following heavy pressure from oil and gas companies, the White House and eventually by the summer, a majority of member states.
But the EIA argues that neither decision is backed up by evidence that the rules actually threaten Europe’s energy supply or push up prices.
By delaying a law already adopted in 2024, the group says, the commission is “undermining integrity of both the legislative process and the EU rule of law.”
“Rather than ensuring that the EU Methane Regulation is implemented as agreed, the commission has responded to pressure from the fossil-fuel industry by weakening enforcement and proposing further delays, without providing credible evidence to justify these decisions,” said Jack Corscadden, senior climate campaigner at EIA.
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EUobserver is proud to have an editorial partnership with Europod to co-publish the podcast series “Briefed” hosted by Léa Marchal. The podcast is available on all major platforms.
Find the full transcript below:
The EU-Canada summit opens today in Montreal and runs until tomorrow (30 October). One idea is overshadowing the meeting: making Canada an “associate member” of the EU. However, the 27 member states are far from agreed on it.
So, what can we actually expect from this summit?
Canada is, let’s say, one of the EU’s favourite partners. And it went as far as this: Ursula von der Leyen proposing to make Canada an associate member of the EU.
This came as a surprise, because the idea had not been discussed with the 27 member states. And now that we are getting into the details, it has become a real issue.
So much so that the EU is scrambling at the last minute to agree on the wording to use during the summit with Ottawa.
As an illustration, as recently as yesterday, the EU still didn’t know what to do with the term “associate member” in the joint EU-Canada declaration. Council officials had suggested mentioning the status, while making clear it was the Commission’s idea. But even in that form, Germany, France, Italy and Greece objected.
Why? First, because no decision was ever taken through the proper channels. And above all, because the status simply doesn’t exist.
The word “member” is already a problem, because it implies some form of participation in the EU. And the treaties limit that to a certain geographical area, which, as you can imagine, doesn’t stretch across the Atlantic.
So what does the Commission actually have in mind? According to an EU official, associate member status would mean consulting each other even more on a number of policies: climate, energy, AI, security and so on.
Canada could also join some EU programmes more automatically. Although in reality, it already takes part in several of them, such as Horizon, the research programme, or SAFE, the defence loan instrument. The same official says there would also be more regular meetings to coordinate positions.
But all of this remains very vague. For many observers, von der Leyen’s proposal was above all a way to show the friendship between the EU and Canada, at a time when the United States is behaving in a threatening way.
Now, what does Canada think of this? When von der Leyen made her proposal in her speech, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney welcomed it, as diplomacy and politeness require.
Since then, according to Canadian media, he has avoided using the expression “associate member”. And in any case, Canada has no intention of joining the EU. It simply isn’t something it is interested in.
So whether there are ways to deepen cooperation is, once again, still to be seen.
The summit, will surely not bring answers or decisions on such a relationship. More time will be needed to discuss a new status, or leave it completely.
In the meantime, the two blocs will sign what they call an “alliance for the future”. It is less binding and more consensual.
That’s what bilateral summits like this are for: reminding everyone of existing alliances, or clarifying them in some cases. Both sides adopt a joint declaration, a document in which they try to announce shared projects and take common positions on major international issues.
But as for associate membership, that will have to wait.
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