Continuing my quest for “cool people of the European Parliament”, I present you Nathalie Loiseau, former diplomat, former director of ENA, former French Minister for EU affairs and much more. Loiseau’s clear and direct communication style makes her a prominent figure in European politics; I had the great pleasure to learn about her inspiring life and ideas.
It is quite rare to find ministers among the politicians who share my memes on social media; Baiba Braže, incumbent Latvian minister of foreign affairs (MFA) and former ambassador, is one of them, a sign that she has some sense of humor and a very direct communication style.
Kaja Kallas has been high on my list of cool people to meet for a couple of years. Not only did she inspire lots of memes, but she also retweeted some of them when she was Prime Minister of Estonia. It felt very natural to talk to her: she has a very direct communication style and a great sense of humour, as the genuine and colorful pictures on her social media accounts show.
Defence and Space are very hot topics these days; at EU level they are energetically managed by Andrius Kubilius, a sixty-eight years old physicist and former Prime Minister of Lithuania. I had the pleasure to sit down with him and talk about his life and experiences.
At DG MEME we keep hearing that the EU does not invest in research and that we lose our best minds to other continents. So I decided to go out and check if this is really the case; and what we could do to improve the situation. I will collect these articles in EUREKA (European Union’s Research, Enterprise, and Knowledge Aces), a new section of the website. For this first article, I was looking for a start-up that is:
And that’s how I met Suzanne and Mattia, the two co-founders of NitroVolt, a Danish start-up that is revolutionizing the ammonia production.
Have you ever had that feeling of living in a continent that is not entirely ruled by insane people? Cool, then you’re probably in Europe, in Australia or in Antarctica.
I started reading about Greenland after it made the headlines a few months ago, and I found it very fascinating: it is one of the biggest countries in the world, but it has less than 57,000 inhabitants; Greenlanders are EU citizens through their Danish nationality, even if Greenland left the European Economic Community in 1985, partly because of concerns over fishing rights; Greenland is an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark, and it is on its way to independence since 1979, even though only a few of the political and legal competences have been taken over by the Greenlandic government from Denmark.
In my continuous effort to maintain a certain inter-institutional balance, I had the pleasure to interview the former (and youngest) European Commissioner, and now Member of the European Parliament, Virginijus Sinkevičius. What came out is a long, yet very inspiring, net zero to hero story.
It is the first time I venture out of my Commission comfort zone, interviewing a truly elected politician from the European Parliament. In these difficult times, when popular support is needed to take important decisions, a good Director-General knows he must get closer to those who are close to the people. And I am glad to start with Mārtiņš Staķis, manager, coffee expert, TV host, church treasurer, mayor of Riga and Member of the European Parliament.
At Colours of Ostrava, one of Czechia’s biggest culture and music festivals, I had the pleasure to meet and interview Martin Dvořák, the Czech Minister of EU affairs over a Czech beer and Belgian fries. As a passionate traveler, I couldn’t miss the opportunity to ask him about his life and his many missions abroad.
