BREAKING: 11 EU countries are calling for limits on the use of “obstructive” vetoes in EU foreign policy.

Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Romania, Spain and Sweden have put forward a joint proposal aimed at reducing the use of national vetoes in the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy.

The proposal does not seek to abolish the veto or amend the EU Treaties.

Instead, it calls for:
• greater use of constructive abstention;
• avoiding the blockage of foreign-policy decisions over unrelated national issues;
• fuller use of qualified-majority voting where the Treaties already allow it;
• clearer justification when a government invokes vital national interests to oppose a decision.

The initiative argues that the necessary legal framework is already in place.

It is a step forward in the right direction: a coalition of willing Member States seeking to make European foreign policy more effective within the current Treaties.

The broader challenge remains open: moving from managing national vetoes to eventually overcoming them.

Five Luxembourg banks began introducing Wero on 1 September. Merchant migration runs during September, Payconiq and Wero coexist through 30 September, and Wero becomes the sole service from October. Why it matters: A whole-country migration to a bank-backed European payment rail is a concrete cross-border deployment, not merely a product announcement.

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Finance Minister Andrzej Domański said Warsaw is seeking greater influence in “shaping the global economic order.”

Swedish solar manufacturer Midsummer formally shelved its planned factory in Flen and declined the EU grant awarded to the project. It said a rejected Swedish support application had affected financing and that future factories would use a less capital-intensive partner model abroad. Why it matters: The decision is a concrete retreat from planned domestic European solar manufacturing and a strategic shift in how the company intends to finance new production capacity.

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Cerebras and Compute Nordic Finland disclosed seven-year service orders for phased capacity at a Mikkeli AI data centre. The first 50 MW phase is already under construction and total contracted IT capacity is planned to reach 165 MW. Why it matters: This is an executed, construction-stage addition to Europe’s AI-compute infrastructure. A prior Ramboll assessment estimates €1.0-1.7 billion of regional investment and 80-250 permanent jobs at full scale; those figures remain estimates, not completed outcomes.

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OHB signed a contract with SES to develop and build 18 medium-Earth-orbit satellite platforms for IRIS². OHB described it as the first major order under the European secure-connectivity concession. Why it matters: The signed award converts an earlier programme milestone into a large European space-manufacturing order for sovereign communications infrastructure. It is allowed as an outcome-changing same-day-repair follow-up; routine rewrites of the IRIS² programme remain embargoed.

Source: https://www.ohb.de/aktuelles/ohb-erhalt-auftrag-im-wert-von-knapp-1-milliarde-euro-fur-die-entwicklung-und-den-bau-von-achtzehn-satellitenplattformen-fur-das-europaische-satellitenkommunikationssystem-iris%C2%B2