Anyone who has followed this blog over the years knows that I not only write about EU politics here, but live it, and try to shape it in any way I can, pretty much every day. Trying to change the EU through party politics has been a part of that. […]
Back almost five years ago I spent a week live blogging from Greenpeace’s Arctic Sunrise ship in the English Channel – you can find all my posts from that trip here. Now I am writing this on my way to another live blogging trip – I am going to Charleroi […]
Tomorrow – Wednesday 7th February – the plenary of the European Parliament votes on a proposal from the Parliament’s Constitutional Affairs (AFCO) committee about the rules for the 2019 European Parliament elections, now just 16 months away in May 2019. What makes this matter controversial this time is the issue […]
In my major post about Joseph Mifsud I put “professor” in inverted commas. That was before I knew the extent of Mr Mifsud’s activities, but now having looked into it, it seems to me that this Professor title Mifsud has been using is highly questionable. To be clear from the […]
The world has been asking themselves who the “mystery professor” Joseph Mifsud is. The British press – Byline and Carole Cadwalladr in The Guardian – have been connecting Mifsud to Alok Sharma and Boris Johnson. Mifsud has good Russian connections and is supposed to be the person who facilitated the […]
The original blog post became so complicated and unwieldy that it has all now been re-organised, although the content is essentially the same. tl;dr: Joseph Mifsud is at the heart of a network of questionable political, business and academic practices, some of which are connected to Russia. The connections between […]
Every one in a while a Brussels media outlet or public affairs firm tries to show they are digital-aware by publishing a kind of league table of something to do with social media in the EU bubble. Yesterday it was Euractiv and ZN’s turn – they held an event called […]
I’ve spent the last three days in Barcelona, observing the 1st October independence referendum, not in any sort of official capacity, but as an interested politics nerd. Political tourism if you like. After my fascinating trip to Scotland prior to the independence referendum there in 2014, it was obvious that […]
A story caught my eye in The Guardian this morning. “Former candidates sue Conservative party after missing out on MEP posts” it is titled. Remember that MEPs are elected on regional lists, and each party puts up as many candidates as there are to be MEPs elected in a particular […]
(Part 1 of this remembrance story explaining the background can be found here. This blog entry recounts the trip.) The train from Kortrijk to Poperinge rumbles its way through little villages and across the potato fields and pastures of West Flanders. Past the obligatory Frituur beside each small station. Cows munch […]
(Part 2 of this remembrance story about the trip itself can be found here. This blog entry explains the background.) This coming Sunday I will travel from my home in Berlin to West Flanders in Belgium for a very special and personal act of remembrance. I will meet my parents […]
Timothy Garton Ash, in a column for The Guardian about the task facing Macron after his election on Sunday, sums up the new French President’s challenges in the EU thus: it’s great that Macron also wants to reform the EU, but that’s not in his gift. With Brexit talks already […]