Brussels warms to efforts to organise summit with Trump

Good morning. Pope Francis has died aged 88, sparking an outpouring of grief from global leaders and mourning among the world’s 1.4bn Catholics. The first non-European pontiff in centuries, Francis leaves a legacy as a “compassionate reformist”. Here’s our explainer of the process to choose his successor, and a list of the most prominent runners and riders to fill the role.

Today, we report on discussions regarding a possible EU summit with Donald Trump, and calls for Europe to step up funding for Ukraine’s healthcare sector.

Talks about talks

EU officials are pinning their hopes on the overtures of Italian premier Giorgia Meloni to win them an EU-US summit with Donald Trump, write Alice Hancock and Andy Bounds.

Context: The Italian premier was in Washington last week to meet the US president. The warm meeting, during which Trump described Meloni as “a great person”, yielded few concrete results beyond talking up the possibility of a trade deal between the US and EU.

“There’ll be a trade deal, 100%,” Trump said. “But it will be a fair deal.”

The question of what the US considers fair looms large over frantic efforts by EU officials to work out a possible trade deal with the White House, after Trump announced a 90-day reprieve on 20 per cent “reciprocal” tariffs slapped on the bloc this month.

Trump has previously said he believed the EU was founded to “screw” with the US, and that the bloc “rips us off” in trade matters.

Brussels-based officials hope that Meloni might have nudged Trump, who has historically preferred dealing with individual member states rather than the whole EU, towards agreeing to a summit with EU leaders.

“Italian counterparts shared information with us on the meeting between Meloni and President Trump,” said one EU official, adding that this included a potential Trump visit and the idea of an EU-US summit.

They said that Meloni had earlier discussed the summit possibility with António Costa, who as president of the European Council is in charge of convening such meetings, and that Costa viewed such an idea “positively”.

Officials in the European Commission had similarly warm words about the plan.

Separately, Trump said last night he would attend Pope Francis’s funeral in Rome later this week — an event where he’s likely to meet a number of EU leaders.

Despite the commission holding sole competence for negotiating the bloc’s trade affairs, Trump has not spoken to commission president Ursula von der Leyen since his return to the White House.

The EU and the US have the world’s largest trading and investment partnership, with a fifth of EU goods exports sold to the US.

US presidents typically lump together multiple European meetings during one visit to the continent. Trump is scheduled to travel to the Netherlands for the Nato leaders’ summit in June — just before the tariff reprieve ends on July 8.

Von der Leyen told the FT this month that a good time to meet Trump would be “when we have a good deal”.

Chart du jour: Chokehold

Medical device makers have raised the alarm over a potential supply chain crunch because of the disruption from the US-China trade stand-off. 

Band-aid

EU lawmakers are calling on the bloc to step up support for healthcare in Ukraine and fill gaps left by US funding cuts to the World Health Organization and aid programmes, writes Alice Hancock.

Context: Ukraine has been the biggest recipient of funds from the USAID programme since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. But Donald Trump’s administration has pulled back from its international aid programmes as part of a drastic reshuffle of US government resources.

Over the weekend, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine had been subject to fresh attacks from Russia, despite Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ordering his army to suspend combat operations as part of an “Easter ceasefire”. Trump said he hoped both sides would come to a peace deal this week.

Liberal MEPs have penned a letter to the European Commission, urging it to reassess support for Ukraine and “propose a plan to compensate for the USAID and WHO financial shortfall”.

“The withdrawal of this support leaves Ukraine’s already strained healthcare system under enormous pressure — and it is civilians who will pay the price,” says the letter, seen by the FT.

Veronika Cifrová Ostrihoňová, a Slovak member of the European parliament’s public health committee, who wrote the letter with the liberal Renew group’s leader Valérie Hayer, said that Ukraine risked “another wave of invisible but lasting consequences” akin to those of Covid-19.

“Ukraine needs roads, schools and homes rebuilt — but just as urgently, it needs a people-first approach that includes mental health recovery,” said Cifrová Ostrihoňová.

What to watch today

1. IMF publishes world economic outlook.

2. EU competition chief Teresa Ribera visits Mexico.

Now read these

• Breaking it up: The EU has been investigating Google’s ad tech monopoly for more than a year. Now Europe should finish the job, argues Daron Acemoglu.

• Still vulnerable: Big risks to global energy supplies remain, IEA warns ahead of summit.

• Bertelsmann’s moves: Europe’s largest media company wants to revive an aborted merger between French broadcasters M6 and TF1.