You’re reading Rapporteur on Tuesday 4 August. This is Eddy Wax in Brussels, with reporters Elisa Braun, Magnus Lund Nielsen, Victoria Becker and Pietro Guastamacchia.

Need-to-knows:

🟢 Home affairs ministers log on for Ceuta meeting

🟢 Luxembourg sticks up for Schengen

🟢 Tragedy strikes committee that could ban AfD

On the Schuman Roundabout: French TV show stages an EU summit

Ambassadors are diplomatic by definition; ministers are political animals.

After a therapeutic meeting of EU envoys on Monday that helped calm tensions over the Ceuta fallout, home affairs ministers are meeting online this morning. Whether it erupts into another lose-lose clash between Spain and a right-wing bloc of states over migration depends largely on how Italy and Denmark’s ministers play it, a diplomat told Rapporteur.

Italy alone has suspended Schengen cooperation with Spain, but last night Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani poured fuel on the spat with his Spanish counterpart by publicly interpreting a letter from 22 countries over the weekend as full backing for Rome’s "decision to suspend Schengen.”

That is an analytical stretch, and likely to make the signatories of the letter uncomfortable, given they remain committed to Schengen, however battered it currently is.

At Coreper, the Spanish ambassador finally received the pledges of solidarity his government has accused the rest of Europe of sorely lacking. But that lip service came late, and only after he harangued his counterparts for half an hour in what one diplomat described as somewhere between a rant and a tantrum.

Ambassadors, the European Commission and the Irish presidency of the Council all made a concerted effort on Monday to lower the temperature. They agreed Spain had quickly got the situation under control, a third diplomat said. Ursula von der Leyen was also at pains to praise Spain’s handling of the crisis and – perhaps a little belatedly – expressed her full solidarity with Madrid in a letter first reported by Euractiv.

Ministers are instead expected to unite around a forward-looking plan to toughen Europe’s migration policy, from consolidating asylum processing outside the EU to fighting disinformation and smugglers, and reinforcing vulnerable border points with physical barriers.

But will it be enough to steer the meeting away from another bruising political showdown when so much is at stake domestically for Giorgia Meloni and Mette Frederiksen?

Piantedosi vs Grande-Marlaska

The big clash at today’s meeting – if there is one – is likely to be between Italy and Spain’s interior ministers, Matteo Piantedosi and Fernando Grande-Marlaska.

Both will log into the meeting to defend their governments’ radically opposing migration policies, armed with figures to show their respective approaches are pushing down migrant arrivals on their shores.

Piantedosi will pitch a network of migrant repatriation hubs modelled on Italy’s centres in Albania, to be built in non-European countries and paid for with EU funds, my colleague Alessia Peretti tells me.

His proposal focuses mostly on African states, with Rwanda, Uganda, Senegal and Tunisia reportedly among the potential hosts.

Grande-Marlaska will stress Spain’s long-term strategy of preventing migrants from reaching Spain in the first place, highlighting cooperation with countries of origin such as Mauritania, Senegal, The Gambia and Morocco. Read our preview of the emergency meeting.

Hands off Schengen, says Grand Duchy

Little old Luxembourg is emerging as the black sheep of the EPP on migration.

Luc Frieden, the prime minister and a centre-right heavyweight, insisted in an interview on public radio that the Schengen zone must be maintained no matter what.

In words that grate against the mainstream of the EPP, he said Italy and Denmark have “less European” migration systems than Luxembourg does.

Frieden said Madrid dealt with the Ceuta situation appropriately, describing the letter in which 22 capitals criticised Spain’s handling of the crisis as “unfair.” Luxembourg, home to the village of Schengen, didn’t sign it.

"We need to protect the external borders together. We need to cooperate with third countries, like here with Morocco,” he said.

‘Eminent persons’ rocked by tragedy

An obscure committee tasked with advising whether to ban the AfD’s EU-level party was hit by tragedy this week when one of its members died.

Spanish opposition leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo announced on Monday the death of Pablo Vázquez, who ran the centre-right Partido Popular’s think tank Fundación Reformismo21.

Vázquez, a 60-year-old economics professor, had sat on the six-member ‘committee of independent eminent persons’ since early 2025. The committee has never met, but is now expected to convene for the first time as a controversial procedure gets underway that could ban the Europe of Sovereign Nations party, founded by the Alternative for Germany. The Commission just nominated two members, as Rapporteur first reported.

Leaders of the European Parliament’s political groups will need to nominate a replacement for Vázquez in a process likely to become politicised now that this committee is, for the first time, being called into action.

The European Parliament could not immediately confirm whether committee members are expected to be alive.

‘Bring weapons,’ Zelenskyy tells envoys

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has told his ambassadors that their performance will be assessed on the amount of weapons and financial support they secure for Ukraine, Pietro Guastamacchia reports.

Speaking at an annual meeting of the country’s ambassadors, Zelenskyy said every envoy should know where air defence missiles could be sourced in their host countries, and that arms procurement “is not only the work of military attachés” but a direct responsibility of ambassadors themselves.

Here are three new stories from Euractiv:

• Can Brussels rescue Europe’s wool industry?

• Drought puts the EU’s power grid under pressure

• Meta smart glasses face growing privacy scrutiny