Good morning,
As well as daily opinion pieces, my role as comment editor encompasses our weekly roster of columnists.
Today, with the publication of new columnist Alberto Alemmano's third piece (on the proposed austerity gutting of EU institutional staff), it's probably a good idea to introduce (or re-introduce) them.
Alemanno himself probably needs very little introduction to Brussels Bubble readers — a lawyer (one of the good sort), an academic in Paris, Tokyo, Bruges and Harvard, and founder of The Good Lobby initiative, and — on these pages and elsewhere — an advocate and activist for the power of NGOs to enhance and improve Brussels decision-making and policy.
Shada Islam, likewise, has been a major figure on the Brussels scene for many years — but mostly bursting the bubble, rather than inflating it. I first saw her, as the only female/non-white face moderating a panel in 2015 and a decade later she is still a trailblazer in a very white Brussels world of institutions and think-tanks. Her columns in the past year have reflected the public outrage at the genocide in Gaza that the EU (as a political body, rather than the individuals who work there) has resolutely refused to listen to.
Caroline de Gruyter, now based back in Brussels, is an author and journalist who has worked in Gaza, Jerusalem, Vienna and Oslo as well as Brussels, who writes also for Foreign Policy and De Standaard, and whose most recent book drew comparisons between the EU and the Habsburg Empire. Her columns often draw on historical, political, and even artistic parallels between the current-day bloc and past events.
Anton Shekhovtsov, based in Vienna, is an expert on Russia, rather than the EU per se. He is the director of the Centre for Democratic Integrity in Vienna and a visiting professor at the Central European University. His most recent book came out in 2023, Russian Political Warfare from Columbia University Press.
Michael Meyer-Resende, based in Berlin like myself, has been writing for us for nearly five years, largely on election-monitoring, the rule of law, and democratic backsliding (both outside and inside the EU, sadly). He is the executive director of Democracy Reporting International, an NGO which does sterling work globally (it has offices in Lebanon, Libya, Myanmar, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Tunisia and Ukraine, as well as Germany) on governance, elections, participation, online disinformation and constitutional rights.
My boss's boss, our publisher Alejandro Tauber, also probably needs little introduction, due to his tireless emails/work making EUobserver function behind the scenes, ie finding innovative ways of finding enough readers and grants to pay the bills and keeping the lights on, in an ever-darkening world of shrinking NGOs and institutional retreat. But he's also an excellent tech-head, able to wade through the white noise of digital hype and disinfo, to actually work out what's happening at the intersection of news media and the internet.
They rotate on a six-weekly basis (it used to be a little simpler, when we had four columnists, since there are four weeks in a month, they were all monthly), so keep your eyes peeled and enjoy!
- Matt Tempest, comment editor
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