Brussels, Strasbourg and Luxembourg are distant places: what happens there rarely gets any attention. Does the corruption scandal also represent an opportunity for Europe?
Corruption is actually a subtle business: Favors here, odd bills there, that sort of thing, then after a few years the police, mountains of files in court, jail. But now the boring parliament of the EU comes along and writes a groovy story about pockets stuffed with banknotes under a children’s cradle. The main suspect is a parliamentary vice-president who has since been deposed and is so borderline beautiful that the Süddeutsche is currently debating in two texts whether Eva Kaili is “allowed” to be described as attractive.
Sacks of money from Qatar for a beautiful criminal, it’s a scandal straight out of a funny paperback. What’s next? Criminals in red prison garb and black blindfolds break into a coin-filled building to rob a top-hatted billionaire?
The point of absurdity was of course the timing: One day after the police had collected the bags full of money from a member of parliament, the same parliament froze 13 billion euros in subsidies – because of corruption in Hungary. With such a good template, even Viktor Orbán managed a passable joke.
Out of fright, I went to get my hair cut first, because a conversation with my hairdresser usually leads to a quick grounding. The most standout thing in the salon here are ideas for a pony. My barber read about the pockets full of money, of course. “Of course everyone is now thinking that those in Brussels are corrupt!” I say and practice a deeply concerned look in the mirror. “That’s the way it is,” my barber hums happily as he shaves a hair out of my ear with gracious casualness. He doesn’t seem worried, nor is he surprised.
It becomes clear to me that he has long since given up and, if not politics as a whole, then at least that in Europe. It’s also far away, blue-grey and quirky, this trio from Brussels, Strasbourg, Luxembourg. Parliament has 14 vice-presidents. Why so many posts? Apparently nobody knows that exactly, not even the people sitting on them: “Well, you’re asking the absolutely wrong person now,” says the absolutely right person, namely Vice President Katarina Barley, to the ZDF journalist Christian Sievers. She adds: “It was like that when I came here”. Her vice-president colleague Nicola Beer from the FDP justified the deputy gluttony on Deutschlandfunk by saying that parliament was being discussed “around the world”.
My hairdresser brushes the hair away while singing to Karel Gott: “Around the world and my pockets full of money”.
Where only a few pairs of eyes look, nobody asks big questions. This is fatal: although most of the law in Germany is settled in Brussels, Brussels is rarely a real topic of conversation. You can feel that there too: you are among yourself, you know each other, you speak English or French, you laugh at the same inside jokes and you go to a handful of restaurants. At best, a bit of the international press and a few EU correspondents are watching – often enough they have to charm their home editors first so that they are even interested in the supposedly boring topics.
This regularly leads to our lives being determined by rules that have hardly been disputed. Example: the petty data protection law, the “General Data Protection Regulation”. It fell out of the sky more or less suddenly and undisputedly and costs companies money every year, ties up staff and, according to the Bitkom industry association, even makes digitization more difficult.
And the next surprise rules are already on the way: After the EU has properly denatured people’s data, it now wants to encourage the internal market to engage in digital activities with all sorts of laws that only a few experts in this country know about: Do you know the data Governance law, the data law (yes, they are two different ones), the digital markets law, the digital services law (two different ones again, I am not making them up), the open data directive and the AI -Law? If you find these names confusing, first explain the difference between Council of Europe, Council of the EU and Council of Europe.
Proximity to the citizen is not necessarily the top priority in Brussels. When a corruption stink bomb bursts into the political idyll and journalists suddenly start asking really urgent questions, it can even overwhelm the President of the Commission. When Ursula von der Leyen was asked about the money bags at a press conference, not surprisingly, she didn’t want to answer. Her deputy had previously vowed to Qatar that the notes should come from there, so the question is actually obvious. The journalists get really angry. “You haven’t answered a single question,” one exclaims, first in English and then in German.
Meanwhile, Parliament President Roberta Metsola is presenting herself as the top anti-corruption fighter. On this occasion, the FAZ maliciously mentions that Metsola pushed through her head of cabinet as Director-General of Parliament in a “non-transparent process” and with “one of those package deals that are common in Strasbourg but do not count among the highest ethical achievements”.
Another story from the blind spot of politics. In principle, it might be worth taking a closer look at the European centers of power – or sing a little Karel Gott and carry on as before.
