This summer I finished a five-year term as a member of the European Parliament (EP), so I was not as shocked as I might have been when, in July, Italian celebrity philosopher and fellow Member of Parliament Gianni Vattimo said that he “would like to shoot those bastard Zionists” and suggested that we Europeans ought to raise money “to buy more rockets for Hamas.” This was extreme even by the standards of the European political and academic elites. (Continue...)

Is European culture a fantasy? Is it more or less so than European politics? These are the questions that cross my mind over and over again when I try to think of how to reverse the ongoing tragedy of the EU – namely, its silent and slow demise, which is a fact of reality, to my dismay. (Read more...)

Is politics free of criminals? Has it ever been so? In fact, it hasn’t. Far from war criminals, who, as a cynic’s dictionary would suggest, are statesmen who lost the war (whereas the heroes solely remain on the winning side), felons squeeze into politics from time to time. Crooks, charlatans, various other dodgy figures and even mobsters become part of the classe politique. As the witty saying goes, the dividing line between parliament and prison tends to be quite thin. (Read more...)