ON THE AGENDA TODAY

GET OUT THE CHAMPAGNE: Here’s the update on consumer rights we promised you Tuesday: In what it defines as “mass harm situations,” the Commission wants consumers to claim rights not only individually, but also through collective action. In the words of one official, it’s a proposal Brussels hopes citizens view “as the next roaming” — a tangible consumer win that makes voters think of the EU and its blessings when they cast their ballots next year. Mais bon: At the same time, the Commission is keen to avoid the impression it’s Americanizing Europe’s legal culture by creating a business opportunity for professional plaintiffs.

The new rules, which Commissioner Věra Jourová will present today, take the form of a proposal for a new directive (the existing, less far-reaching law will be repealed) that would allow only “non-profit making organizations” or public bodies to come the rescue of individual customers. This will, one official said, “maintain the necessary balance” between satisfying disappointed people and preventing the rules from being abused.

A few more differences with the US: In Europe, according to Playbook’s conversations with people familiar with the proposal, collective action would only be allowed after a national court or authority finds that a company has breached the law (so you can’t start a litigation for the purpose of intimidating someone). The EU proposal foresees vetting organizations entitled to file a suit to confirm they continue to comply with the criteria; it also foresees that such organizations make their funding transparent to detect possible conflicts of interest.

Opt in or out? One last goodie for governments critical of the initiative, mainly those from industry-heavy countries: They can choose between the (American) opt-out system, meaning that any client affected is assumed to be part of the class action unless they actively choose otherwise; or an opt-in system, where people need to actively sign up to be represented.

YOU’RE FIRED: “Mr. Matthias Müller showed his general willingness to contribute to the changes,” Volkswagen said in an ad hoc note, referring to its CEO in an announcement declaring he was about to be given the boot. If we’re not mistaken, a letter sent a year ago by Müller complaining to Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker that Věra Jourová was overstepping her competencies was the trigger for her ambition to push her class-action proposal through — and it may even have given her the push over the line she needed, at least when it came to convincing her boss to back her move. Reuters said Herbert Diess, head of the company’s core VW brand, is poised to take over as the new group CEO.

Further questions might be directed to the Commission’s “coordinating spokesperson.”

SPITZEN UPDATE

Please, no broad support! The European People’s Party’s EU campaign chief Dara Murphy got in touch to explain what the party family meant by declaring that its Spitzenkandidaten hopeful should have “not more than two” EPP member parties supporting them. They did in fact mean what they said: To be nominated, you’ll need two external backers, so a total of three (including your own party) but not four or five, let alone a few dozen. “We want candidates nominated of course, however we have about 50 member parties and we do not see the value of a nomination contest,” Murphy said. The EPP wants its Commission presidency candidate chosen at its next election congress — meaning it wants to keep who will back whom a mystery until November.

Also, readers from both Council and Parliament pointed out that formally the Commission president is nominated by the European Council (and subsequently elected by Parliament), not by his or her country of origin. We’re aware of these potential political dynamics, but consider this: Would Xavier Bettel have really proposed Jean-Claude Juncker as Luxembourg’s member of the Commission back in the day if he’d had a true choice? Then again, we can also imagine that having a fellow countryman of a different political color as Commission president is more attractive to some than having a mere commissioner from the family. That’s all to say: This power play will be running through mid next year. Stay tuned.

TALKING RUSSIA WITH A RUSSIAN

Today’s Playbook interview comes to you from Sydney, Australia, where Zoya sat down with Igor Yurgens, one of the closest economic policy advisers of then Russian President (now prime minister) Dmitry Medvedev and current chairman of Moscow-based think tank the Institute for Contemporary Development.

Two poles: I asked Yurgens, who was in Sydney to give a speech at the Lowy Institute think tank, how he would categorize the current geo-political situation. “The world is becoming bi-polar again — it was uni-polar after the fall of the USSR. The ideological war of capitalism versus communism is gone, but you need two poles to balance the world. The general picture is it is East versus West again  — you can call it authoritarianism against democracy — with new leaders. Everyone is looking for allies, using any methods they can. During the time of the USSR we were all over the place — Angola, Guyana — and it was the KGB versus the CIA. It was the same then as now — we tried to interfere in each other’s operations, we created communist parties abroad, they cultivated and used dissidents. This is a new confrontation with new methods, but the same poles.”

Syria could trigger the worst: Relations between Russia and the U.S. today are worse than they have been at any time since the Cuban missile crisis, Yurgens said, because “there are no channels of communication open except barking at each other.” He warned the Syrian war is on the brink of exploding into a full-scale confrontation between the two. With Donald Trump blaming Russia for propping up Assad and threatening to act “forcefully,” and Russia responding by warning of “grave repercussions” if the U.S. carries out military strikes against the Syrian regime, how the crisis ends is “50/50,” he said. “It’s very difficult to predict what will happen.” If the U.S. attacks an airbase where Russians are located, Moscow “will retaliate … If you put [Putin] in a corner, he will react, and that could be severe.”

Can relations be salvaged? “Somebody with authority should step in to de-escalate this crisis.” French President Emmanuel Macron is one possibility, Yurgens said. German Chancellor Angela Merkel “is weak after the election,” so isn’t a good candidate. Chinese President Xi Jinping “could be a person interested in calming things down,” assuming Beijing can parlay its role in the North Korea detente into a truce in Trump’s trade war. “You know Chinese — they will never go out of their way unless it’s in their interest.”

How do the Russians view Trump? “Erratic and confined by hawks. But actually he’s confined by Congress and the Senate, which are generally divided, but united on the issue of Russia, and that’s bad for us.”

‘Deep state’ and the Skripals: I asked Yurgens who he believes was responsible for the poisoning of former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salibury. “The last person interested in this before his election and a soccer championship that he has invested so much PR and financial and political capital in is Putin. My guess, educated or uneducated, is probably it was the deep state. From which side, I don’t know.” In Russia, Yurgens said, the deep state is made up of former military and intelligence officers, ex-diplomats and members of the population at large, most of whom exalt Stalin and the USSR, and fiercely support “white orthodoxy.”

The one thing you should read to understand the current geopolitical situation: Yurgens recommended “Weary Policeman: American Power in an Age of Austerity,” which is “about how the U.S. has to, but is already tired of, policing the rest of the world. It explains why Trump started his presidency with isolationism, but will be dragged into intervention.”

BACK TO THE SYRIAN CRISIS: British PM Theresa May spoke to U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday about Saturday’s alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria. May also spoke to French President Emmanuel Macron. The three agreed that, “if confirmed,” the use of chemical weapons exposed the Assad regime’s “total disregard for its legal obligations not to use these weapons,” Tom McTague reports in today’s London Playbook (hitting your inbox at 8 a.m.). The three leaders also agreed “that the international community needed to respond.” Trump announced on Monday that he would decide on retribution within 48 hours. While that deadline is fast approaching with no sign of what action the president plans to take, air traffic control agency Eurocontrol on Tuesday warned airlines to exercise caution in the eastern Mediterranean over fears that air strikes could hit Syria in the next 72 hours.

NOW READ THIS: U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton was supposed to lead a White House meeting of the president’s national security team on Monday afternoon, but Mike Pence showed up and took the reins instead, report our colleagues in Washington. “Although some meeting attendees viewed his appearance as an attempt to upstage Bolton on his first day as national security adviser, others saw it as an effort by the vice president to offer a steadying hand as Trump confronts a thorny national security dilemma with a foreign policy team in flux and amid the distraction of multiple investigations.”

And let’s return to Yurgens for a minute: Bolton’s appointment as Trump’s national security adviser is bad news for those hoping for a de-escalation in Syria, Yurgens said in Sydney last night. “Mr. Bolton always spoke in favor of the most severe scenarios. And his first day on the job was the alleged chemical attack …”

WHAT ELSE IS NEW

HOW TO FIGHT TERROR: Bruno Maçães reports from Hargeisa, the capital of Somaliland, where he meets with Ali Waran Ade, a security adviser to Muse Bihi Abdi — the recently elected president of the self-declared independent republic. Terror group al-Shabab has run wild in Somalia and Mogadishu, but has almost no presence in Somaliland and Waren Ade credits the public for that success. “No security service can know everything its enemies are up to, but the people are everywhere.”

EU HOPES BREXIT WILL HELP DELIVER TRADE DEAL: EU27 countries are bullish that Brexit will make an India-EU trade deal easier, reports POLITICO’s Hans von der Burchard.

LETTERS, SPEECHES, AND POEMS

LOSING THE MOMENTUM: Back to inter-European debates. “In December, it looked as if Europe was … seizing the momentum” for reforms to its economic governance and the setup of the monetary union, said Klaus Regling, the European Stability Mechanism’s managing director, in a Brussels speech. “But only four months later I’m not so sure anymore. We seem to be losing the momentum, rather than seizing it. Let me explicitly warn here against the risk of political inaction. Countries need to understand that the current reform agenda is a package. One should not look at its individual elements in isolation.”

Regling, who in the absence of others’ action is increasingly active in spelling out what he thinks about a European Monetary Fund that his institution could be turned into, had a handy explainer ready on how the EU functions: “No country will get all that it wants — but each country will get something. For that to happen, national traditions and convictions will have to meet somewhere in the middle. That is how Europe works.”

LETTERS TO TAJANI: Parliament President Antonio Tajani is a sought-after correspondent these days. First, the House’s staff committee is still unhappy, even after a recent meeting, on the procedures followed when posting nine senior management jobs in Parliament’s administration. The committee’s chairwoman, Pilar Antelo Sanchez, urged Tajani to “cancel all current procedures and restart the whole recruitment process from the beginning” in a letter sent last week and obtained by Playbook.

Who’s better, Commission or Parliament? The Rethink Plastic Alliance, a group of NGOs, will send Tajani a letter today — you can read it here, perhaps even before he checks his inbox — complaining about Parliament’s extensive use of “single use plastics, judging from the large amount of plastic water bottles, single-use plastic cutlery and straws that we see in its facilities.” They call on Tajani to be a model first citizen … and get ahead of the Commission. There, Vice President Jyrki Katainen in January challenged Parliament to see which institution is first to abolish plastic water bottles (and the College of Commissioners at least already did so for their meetings). Now if that’s not incentive for Tajani to move quickly, we don’t know what is.

Respect please: Then, Green MEPs Sven Giegold and Jan Philipp Albrecht wrote to their president to say they don’t want him to rest until the European Parliament gets the respect that U.S. Congress gets (from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, at least). For an upcoming hearing on the Facebook data scandal, they “would like to insist” that Mark Zuckerberg appears “personally,” as “European Facebook users and citizens should not be treated as second class.” Their letter here.

Speaking of Zuck: Get caught up on his overnight testimony to Congress here. POLITICO’s Nancy Scola concludes that while Zuckerberg held up under hours of grilling by more than 40 senators, “his performance did little to mask Facebook’s growing political problems in Washington.”

GET TO KNOW YOUR COUNCIL PRESIDENT: “I don’t like Brexit. Actually, that’s an understatement: I believe Brexit is one of the saddest moments in 21st-century European history. In fact, sometimes I am even furious about it,” Donald Tusk said in a very personal speech at University College Dublin. We recommend reading it for those who want to detox from weeks of Orbán speeches that suggested the end of time is nigh. POLITICO’s David Herszenhorn listened in, too.

“You are the first generation of Irish people with nothing to prove, who look to the future with a calm optimism rather than a determined hope. I would want no less for my own country. Where Ireland goes from here is your free choice. It will be very interesting to see what you do with it. No pressure,” Tusk said. And on himself: “I am a Catholic, like the overwhelming majority of my compatriots. I love football as well as rugby … I am a fan of W. B. Yates [sic!], Samuel Beckett, U2 and Sinéad O’Connor (even if she did go a bit too far with John Paul II), Colin Farrell and Neil Jordan.” This, some poetry and more on what Poland and Ireland have in common, here.