If at first you don’t crush your institutional rival, try, try again.

EU leaders exited a mini summit on migration on Sunday without issuing any formal joint statement. Instead, they emboldened the European Commission to make another power play.

Commission officials quickly summarized the mini summit into a proposal to amend the Council’s draft conclusions for the regular EU leaders’ summit to be held later this week.

An email with the Commission’s new, proposed wording was fired across the Rue de la Loi shortly after 9 p.m. It will likely be received as intended — as a stink bomb that despite its odious (to the Council) origins also includes a serious set of policy proposals, which cannot be entirely ignored or discarded.

Commission Secretary-General Martin Selmayr, acting on behalf of President Jean-Claude Juncker, stirred controversy last week by proposing a draft leaders’ statement for the mini summit that was clearly intended for the same purpose: to supplant the draft conclusions on migration issued to national capitals just a day earlier by Council President Donald Tusk.

The move infuriated the Italian government, which was angered at the content of the text, as well as Council officials, who were annoyed by the substance of the statement and also the incursion onto their turf. The Commission text was torpedoed at the behest of German Chancellor Angela Merkel after Italian Prime Minster Giuseppe Conte threatened to boycott the mini summit.

But not for long.

The Commission’s summary largely revived the statement, proving that Selmayr, who has a running if unspoken rivalry with Tusk’s chief of staff, Piotr Serafin, is not a man who accepts defeat easily — if at all.

The Commission stepped in to host the mini summit after Tusk declined to do so, citing his unwillingness to preside over any gathering that does not include all 28 EU leaders. But with Merkel under pressure at home from her Bavarian coalition partners and eager to shift the conversation to Brussels from Berlin, Juncker saved her day.

In the end, 16 leaders attended the mini summit (Tusk wasn’t among them). There, they found a “plate in which everyone should find something to his taste,” Juncker said, according to one participant. And it was that plateful of migration policy bounty that the Commission summarized in its proposal to the Council.

Among the tasty morsels: a pledge of an additional €500 million for the EU’s Africa Trust Fund, money for the next tranche in the €3 billion facility for refugees in Turkey, and a plan for “reception,” or “welcome,” or “disembarkation” centers outside the EU for processing migrants who are rescued or intercepted at sea.

According to the summary, which was seen by POLITICO, leaders would support “the development of regional disembarkation possibilities in line with international law and in close cooperation with UNHCR [United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees] and IOM [International Organization for Migration].”

Also included in the Commission proposal is a plan to strengthen EU border patrol operations, with 10,000 additional guards deployed by 2020.

The Commission suggests the following language: “The European Council welcomes the Commission’s intention to swiftly propose a further strengthening of the European Border and Coast Guard, enabling it to deploy 10,000 border guards by 2020, strengthening its powers in the field of return and enabling it to fully operate in partner countries outside the EU.”

Nothing like proposing a statement in support of your own policy initiative.

And, in an added bit of grandstanding, the Commission also proposes setting an ambitious target for increasing the numbers of returned illegal migrants: “The European Council calls on the member states to take immediate action to achieve an EU return rate of at least 70 percent by the end of 2019.”

The target comes with an explanation: “More also needs to be done to ensure a reinforced, more coherent and effective common European return policy. The European Council therefore welcomes the intention of the Commission to swiftly make a legislative proposal to this effect.”

The Commission also suggests an array of steps directed at so-called secondary movements — migrants who register in one EU country, but then end up crossing into another.

These include a revision of the “Reception Conditions Directive,” making it possible for countries to deny housing and money for asylum seekers they’re technically not responsible for, and to impose residency restrictions by ordering migrants to live in a specific place. In addition, an asylum qualifications regulation would allow sanctions on those who are found in an EU country where they don’t have the right to stay — for example, by restarting the clock on the five-year waiting period needed to get EU long-term resident status. And a reinforced Eurodac fingerprint database would facilitate returns at the border.

All these pieces of legislation have been agreed in trilogues with Parliament, but were put into the freezer by EU ambassadors last week, POLITICO’s Brussels Playbook reported.

The Commission’s proposal also urges that the conclusions state that the “European Council calls for the adoption by the end of July of five of the seven proposals to reform the Common European Asylum System which are already close to conclusion” and for “adoption of the remaining two proposals by the end of the year.”

So far, the Council has had little success in building consensus for the revision of the so-called Dublin Regulation on asylum procedures, and in that sense the Commission proposal may be inviting the Council to set itself up for failure.

The Council seems unlikely to take the bait. A Council official said: “At this stage, no substantial change is foreseen in terms of our draft EUCO conclusions on migration.”

The official focused primarily on the consensus among leaders attending Sunday’s mini summit on strengthening the EU’s external borders.

“It’s positive that the discussion at today’s mini summit confirms that the main focus of our actions should be on protecting the external borders,” the official said. “This reflects the emerging consensus, which has been built step by step since September 2015. It’s for Europeans to decide who enters European territory.”

As for the Commission’s continuing invasion of Council territory, there was no further comment on what sort of tougher border enforcement might be in development.

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