BATTLES PAST AND FUTURE

PUDELWOHL: Budget Commissioner Günther Oettinger seemed happy with how Budget Day went for him: “Hopefully I’m criticized — hard but objectively — by north and south, east and west, Council and Parliament. Then I’m the middle and feel absolutely great,” he said in his native German, using the word pudelwohl — literally “as good as a poodle” — to describe his delight. POLITICO’s Lili Bayer and Andrew Gray report.

EUROZONE TURF WAR: It’s the privilege of the Commission president that his ideas are molded into legal terms while others’ are still only speeches. Jean-Claude Juncker had proposed a budget line for the eurozone (rather than Emmanuel Macron’s preferred extra pot). And so the MFF foresees a small dedicated eurozone budget within itself. It still might be an uphill battle for Juncker to get this through though.

Why? Juncker’s EU budget plan risks igniting a eurozone turf war. There are elements Germany might like, such as a “Reform Support Program” to provide financial and technical assistance to mainly eurozone countries, and others that France doesn’t dislike, such as a fund to deal with economic or financial shocks (called the “investment” facility), writes POLITICO’s Pierre Briançon. In both cases, it’s the Commission that would oversee, steer and manage the programs and hand out the money, not any intergovernmental structure new or old such as the ESM.

MAKING THE MFF SAUSAGE: It took the College of Commissioners approximately two hours on Wednesday to agree on the Commission’s MFF proposal. Those who were around in 2011 will remember that that College meeting lasted about 10 hours, with the presentation in the press room delayed ’til 7:30 p.m. The big battle between the institutions and national capitals is yet to come, but seemingly the one within the Commission was a smooth ride.

That’s remarkable given the size of the shift within the budget proposal. It would bring down funding for farmers and cohesion policy to roughly two-thirds in a reorientation toward new political priorities — including research, foreign policy, security and defense, migration and border management. When Juncker announced he wanted to do that at the beginning of his term, the outside world may not have blinked, but it was “a casus belli, or almost” one, for those who understood what it meant, one official recalls.

Why it passed muster: Officials involved name three factors for why in the end it went down smoothly with those, such as Agriculture Commissioner Phil Hogan, who’ll get less money to distribute in the future.

1. There was some money to play with for everyone. Exhibit A: Hogan, not Oettinger, will spell the overall figures out into concrete programs. Exhibit B: Commissioners dealing with foreign policy (Federica Mogherini, Johannes Hahn, Neven Mimica and Christos Stylianides) were eventually given an additional €109 billion as a group — but had to work out among themselves which programs they’ll propose to fund.

2. “Who else can whisper in Merkel’s ear about when to hold — and when to fold — in the final stages of negotiations?” Ryan Heath writes about Oettinger. And might we add: Who else brings the weight of the biggest net contributor and an understanding of its red lines to internal negotiating tables? Oettinger invited all fellow Commissioners to “confessionals,” perhaps to talk them out of über-costly ideas.

3. Lots and lots of talking to wear down any would-be renegades. A “steering group” of vice presidents, chaired by Oettinger, met 12 times over the past months; heads of Cabinets went on a retreat together in Knokke to talk MFF; some were summoned to a follow-up meeting to strike the deal. The College itself sat down over orientation debates three times. And finally, Juncker hired one of Hogan’s Cabinet members, Christine Canenbley, for the sole (unenviable) task of making a deal on agriculture with her old boss.

Side note: Regional Policy Commissioner Corina Creţu, the other prebend-holder, wasn’t regarded as requiring that level of extra effort.

EUROPEAN COMMISSION’S LATEST 2018 GROWTH FORECAST: Ivory Coast, Moldova, Poland, Hungary and Slovakia all manage 4 percent and over, while Italy and the U.K. bring up the rear on 1.5 percent growth.

GERMANY’S SCHOLZ REFUSES TO MELT

When Olaf Scholz took the role of German finance minister in March, Europe’s capitals were hot with hope that the frozen Wolfgang Schäuble era was about to end. This week it became clear that Scholz just can’t let it go, our own Matthew Karnitschnig writes in from Berlin to report. Far from loosening Berlin’s purse strings, Scholz, a Social Democrat, looks to have German finances in the same death-grip as his miserly predecessor.

Following in Schäuble’s footsteps, Scholz has taken the so-called schwarze null oath, pledging to maintain Germany’s balanced budget in the coming years. At a time when Europe is debating its own financial arrangements, Scholz’s hard line is as much a signal to Brussels as it is to Germany’s 16 states.

The message: Don’t get your hopes up. In Germany, critics complain that the budget Scholz unveiled represented a betrayal of the grand coalition’s promise to invest heavily in the country’s future. Instead of emphasizing investment in education, infrastructure or even Germany’s chronically underfunded military, Berlin will pump billions into boosting social spending to improve the lot of pensioners, a key constituency for both grand coalition parties.

There’s little reason, Matthew ends his note, “to doubt such narrow-minded clientelism won’t also drive Berlin’s strategy on the EU budget. Anyone still expecting a ‘summer breeze’ from this Olaf is in the wrong fantasy: Winter is here.”

PSA: CHANGE YOUR TWITTER PASSWORDS!

TRANSPARENCY SAGA

Green MEP Sven Giegold feels pudelwohl when he can fight for enhanced transparency, even more so if it annoys Parliament’s leadership. And so the saga on the institution’s precise negotiating mandate for the ongoing trilogues on beefing up the EU’s lobbying register continues. Reminder: Giegold wants the trilogue document to be made publicly available (backstory here). He now has the document, in an envelope marked “confidential,” but Giegold wants to publish it.

Not so fast: In an email that Playbook has seen sent to him and other recipients of that paper copy, the Parliament’s administration asks them to “please treat that document as confidential.” Giegold wrote to Antonio Tajani again, in an email on Thursday that we’ve seen, reminding the Parliament president of a recent ruling of the EU’s General Court, which he says “is directly applicable. Therefore, I would like to ask you to clarify that this and following four-column documents in the negotiations on the Transparency Register are public.”

Here comes the fun: Parliament previously adopted “guiding principles on communication” (we’ve got them here for you) during the lobby register negotiations, vowing to provide “a high standard of transparency in the tripartite negotiation on the new IIA [the inter-institutional agreement on a mandatory transparency register], allowing citizens and shareholders to be informed about the progress of negotiations” and to publish relevant information, including documents. Alas, that applies only to those documents “deemed appropriate.”

BEYOND BRUSSELS

UK LOCAL ELECTION UPDATE: In a nutshell, it’s still too early to get a real read of the results, but Theresa May’s fortunes seem mixed. More details in this morning’s London Playbook.

THERESA MAY’S NEXT PROBLEM: Britain will need to remain inside the EU customs union for another four or five years before it can implement either of its proposed post-Brexit customs arrangements, senior officials in both Whitehall and Brussels told POLITICO’s Tom McTague and Charlie Cooper. The story, for Brexit Pros, is available here.

ITALY’S POLITICAL ELITE HAS ONE LAST CHANCE TO STRIKE A DEAL.

PODCAST DU JOUR: Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager is this week’s guest on POLITICO’s EU Confidential podcast.

GAZPROM GETTING AWAY WITH MARKET ABUSE? Piotr Woźniak, CEO of Polish gas company PGNiG, writes: “When I heard that the European Commission planned to settle an antitrust probe into Gazprom in 2017, I was surprised. Now that I’ve seen a leaked version of the confidential legal charges against the Russian gas giant, I am both disappointed and embarrassed.”

THE NEW HOLLYWOOD: Bruno Maçães’ latest “The Coming Wars” column comes to you from Studio City, designed to transform Dubai into a film and television capital.

POSTCARD FROM SYDNEY

MACRON TROLLS BRITAIN WITH HIS AUSTRALIA VISIT: If Britain wants a post-Brexit frenaissance with Australia, it had better lift its game or lose another BFF to the world’s favorite charming raconteur Emmanuel Macron, writes Playbook’s own Zoya Sheftalovich. More from Zoya …

FUTURE OF RUSSIA, VIEWED FROM SYDNEY … 

On Thursday night, an almost full house packed into the gorgeous Angel Place Recital Hall to hear “The Future is History” author and journalist Masha Gessen and Moscow-based correspondent for the Telegraph Alec Luhn discuss the future of Russia at a Sydney Writers Festival event. The short answer: The future looks much like the past, Putin has no succession plan and youths aren’t likely to change much (approval ratings for President Vladimir Putin are about as high among young people as the old).

Best bit: Gessen, who translates the Moscow-based scenes in one of my favorite dramas, “The Americans,” into Russian, was asked what comes first: the deliciously multi-layered Russian dialogue, or the frankly inferior English-language subtitles. (Example for those playing along at home: The evocative “роскошная у тебя квартира” is translated to the rather flat “your apartment is beautiful.”) “It’s a little game that we play,” Gessen said. “The English script comes first. But we do have an understanding with the show-runners … that we have fun with the Russian, and the small community of Russian-speakers who watch the show get to enjoy really what we think of as fun Russian dialogue.”

Not having it: As with all events about Russia, this one had its fair share of Kremlin shills. One such fellow, sporting Jeremy Corbyn facial hair and an all-black jeans-shirt-blazer getup, monopolized the microphone, ostensibly to ask the guests whether NATO and the U.S. were responsible for the mess in eastern Ukraine, but actually to engage in a tirade. The audience (well-lubricated by this point at the venue’s bar) wasn’t having it, and responded in typical Australian piss-taking fashion. One of my companions for the talk, Brit-born, ex-Brussels-based reporter Laurel Henning who moved to Sydney this week, was shocked at the level (and volume) of public participation. “I’ve NEVER seen an audience like that!” she said. Welcome to the jungle Laurel, you’re going to love it.