Ok, now let’s twitt a bit more about going in the footsteps of Sakharov Prize winners of 2009, couple of days before the award.  

Kremlin

 Last-minute surprise visa on Friday, call to one of Moscow’s hotels, desperate efforts trying to find warmer coat and boots in Brussels right before leaving… No chance of sleeping during the night flight to Moscow.  

In focus: Oleg Orlov

Young, strict, but in the end helpful immigration officer filling in a form for me. Critically thinking bright taxi driver and nice hotel staff not charging me for an extra (previous) night. 

 Some sleep, a hasty steps past the Kremlin crossing the Moscow river to the press conference during the Conference ‘Sakharov’s Ideas Today’.

St. Basil's Cathedral

Catching the legendary Lyudmila Alexeyeva and Sergei Kovalev for couple of quotes. Chatting with journalists from grani.ru and Interfax while finally getting something to eat. 

Sergei Kovalev

Passing Lubyanka (ex-KGB building); hearing a familiar French accent when asking the way while searching for the Human Rights Centre Memorial.  

Seeing the courageous people risking their lives when doing their everyday work. Intensive Facebook chat (huge thank you to Maria for help!) with Oleg Orlov, leaving you extremely exhausted, but happy. 

Oleg Orlov and Lyudmila Alexeyeva

A sip of an excellent Caucasian cognac while hearing an account of  Memorial staff on being questioned by authorities the same day. Conversation with Katia who’s going to study in (…surprise) – Brussels. 

A very rewarding interview with Oleg Orlov and its hasty translation into English before everyone leaves the office. Dead-cold walk through the streets of Moscow, with hot bath at the hotel saving me from „permafrosting“.  

Sorry for 11 twitts packed in one text. Warning: twitting and writing synopses can make your language terribly telegraphic :)  

Special thanks to Oleg, Maria, Tatiana, Aleksandr, Jan, and everyone in Memorial for the friendly atmosphere and sharing their office with me for half a day. Big TNX to Anete, Christian, Rafa, Evita, Tibo, Steve and the whole Webteam for making it happen ;)  

Golden quotes:  

Taxi driver no 1: “Until this country starts producing something, it will go nowhere”  

Lyudmila Alexeyeva: “It is not awarded to me, but rather to all of us, especially those, who have lost their lives for the cause. If they were alive, they would be happy”   

Sergei Kovalev: Russia is currently a stumbling block in the way of international progress. It’s not alone; some other countries are also “splendid” enough.  

Oleg Orlov: “Sometimes you feel that you are scooping the sea with a spoon”  

Taxi driver no 2: “Airports, hotels, nightclubs, you wouldn’t service them without payoffs to gangs”  

@ the Airport café: “Man, move to another café. They sell the same stuff there, I’m busy”  

Fishing for public attention is the daily business of politicians; therefore it is always a pleasure to witness some original and positive ideas in this respect. One such election project was a Czech MEPs idea to cycle from Prague to Strasbourg and to announce it as a central pre-election promise. “If you vote for me and I get elected, I will pedal all these six hundred forty seven kilometres or so to get to the Strasbourg plenary!” (He told us about his project when he was one of eight new MEPs we interviewed for the website)

Well, he did it! And in order to attract the well-deserved attention, he took a shower, shaved, combed his long hair and instead of slipping into a business suit, he put his cycling gear back on and walked into the plenary chamber for all to see as if he would be saying: “Look, I am a cyclist! In case you wonder why I am dressed like that … I came by bike to the plenary … yes … not just from the hotel, but all the way from my home county … the Czech Republic … this “far away country of which we (you) know little …”.

What a voter-friendly and ecologically inspiring deed! We can sit back in our chair and start daydreaming … “if we all could take our bikes to work, or even to Strasbourg … what a wonderful world this would be …”.   

Now to be honest, I was a bit jealous at first. I like bike tours as well. However, somehow I do not have the luxury to take out twelve days in order to go to work, however … to be honest, neither did he. In the middle of his commuting, on his “way to work”, soaked wet by sudden rain showers somewhere in the Bohemian-Bavarian borderland, reality caught up with him – the next day his presence was required at a political group meeting in Brussels. “How to cover the distance between Nuremberg and Brussels by bike in a day?” might have crossed his mind. Well, the only way is air travel of course and there goes the purity of the ecological commitment … but let’s not be unfair.

The life of a politician is not easy. Especially if one does not live up to election promises made. Our cycling MEP did indisputably live up to his election promise. This is even more impressive because his political profile is not centred on ecological themes, but rather on the reduction of regulation. And being part of a club with a majority of middle-aged men who maybe give the impression that they prefer limousines, for his cycling exploits at least he is destined to stand out during the coming five years. A nice political PR job!

PS: The bike trip eventually turned out to be 871km long and was concluded with a bitter aftertaste. Edvard’s fellow traveller, Czech globe trotter František Šesták, who has cycled tens of thousands of kilometres around the world, was deprived of his bike in Strasbourg. After having served him for more than 32,000 km, it was stolen. Links:

http://www.kozusnik.eu/

http://tinyurl.com/lkrzor – Edvard Kožušník on Facebook

Our main job consisted of waiting. Here, Manja was waiting for Mr Colombo...

When you want to meet a VIP (and you are an editor for the European Parliament’s website) you have to respect several rules. First, you inform the organizers and get an appointment, second, you go there half an hour in advance just in case and third you wait, without disturbing the VIPs interacting with each other.

Before I met Pat Cox face to face, I thought him stern and distant. I didn’t expect an ex-EP president to be so friendly and helpful. He shook my hand for one whole minute, while I was doing my best to explain what I wanted from him. He was very happy to meet us, the editors for the Parliament’s website. And he was quite docile moving around in different kinds of light, so that our photographer, Pietro, can take the best photo of him. “The European Parliament makes continental scale laws and budgets that impact on the citizens’ day to day lives”, said Mr Cox. His remarks were quick and sharp: “If it matters to you, this is the place you can make it happen”. Irish clarity and conciseness. So, go and vote!

I had never met a lord before meeting Lord Plumb last week. I was conscious about the way to address him (Mr Plumb, Lord Plumb, Sir Plumb?) and whether I had to bow while shaking his hand. I remember having met Prince Charles while I was working for the British Council; I did have to take a bow. But a Lord is not a Prince after all. Even so, Lord Plumb is really tall, which makes him even more impressive. I was quite surprised when he treated me as an equal.

Lord Plumb told me about peace, which is no longer such an obvious benefit. Everybody expects peace in Europe and thinks it inherent. But things were different in the past.

When you talk about the benefits of the EU and what MEPs do for citizens, you mention the last, more visible achievements: low roaming rates, equal opportunities, free movement etc. Lord Plumb told me about peace, which is no longer such an obvious benefit. Everybody expects peace in Europe and thinks it inherent. But things were different in the past. The British Lord experienced World War II, and is still affected remembering its atrocities. “I find it very difficult to understand why people as old as me who lived through the last world war, and some people still around who lived through the one before, don’t recognize the fact that the only way we can work is to work together in trade terms, in social terms and in political terms”, he told me. He said he was a committed European and was extremely convincing in saying it.

... and Barbara is waiting for Mr Baron Crespo

Last week I was also lucky to talk with the only two women-presidents of the European Parliament – both French. Simone Veil was also the first president after the first European elections, in 1979. 16 years after she left the Parliament she still felt at home on its premises. She took her time to explain the importance of the common work of Europeans, now more then ever, so EU can come out of the economic crisis in the best way.

Still an MEP, Nicole Fontaine knows that the Parliament can do a lot for the citizens and that this institution’s role cannot be ignored (“le rôle du PE est tout à fait incontournable”). Ms Fontaine also mentioned democracy, which is only a dream in other countries. She wants the Europeans to realise how important it is to be able to vote. In Chile, she said, people were enthusiastically queuing to vote. She called the EU states “bien ingrats de ne pas se rendre compte de la chance qu’ils ont de pouvoir voter”, thinking probably of the low turnout in the last European elections.

My colleagues Bárbara, Manja and Anete interviewed the other ex-presidents. Up to them to tell you about it. In the meantime you can read the president’s reasons by clicking on ”meet the presidents” in the central column on our Elections website.

We need quotes. There are the red cells carrying precious oxygen of wit through the bloodstream of our discourse. A good quote is like peanut butter on your toast, a drip of tabasco in your Bloody Mary, a seventh-level spell you cast upon your readers, the primo mobile of your text, the salt of the earth, Amen.

A wall in Dublin (photo: author)

We fish for quotes in sometimes troubled and muddy waters in the pool of politics’ opinion. We comb the internet, we sieve through the piles of parliamentary reports. We run here our own little Bletchley Park where, in forage for an ultra-quote, we listen to endless hours of speeches of the Members, from Adamou to Zwiefka, from Cohn-Bendit to Farage.

It is better to be quotable than to be honest, said guess or google who. The politicians we interview try hard to be both. We do support them – wholeheartedly and philanthropically – for a common good.

Once we pin down an attractive quote and before we pin it up on our page it has to be translated into 22 languages. Good luck, but remember, that a hemicycle is not half a bike. Here you can observe a sprout of so called internal culture: we evoke this meant-to-be-funny-haha slogan from EP website launch campaign in 2005 to boast to our colleagues that we can translate nearly anything. 

Some unidentified misogynist polyglot insisted that translations, like women, could be either faithful or beautiful. This time, for a change, I believe, the Members would support the Editors engaged in their daily struggle between sense and sex appeal. 

Some of my colleagues announced some time ago an internal Web Communication contest for the quintessential empty quote. We have a universal winner. I would daresay it can be applied to the very craftsmanship of quoting and to the art of being quoted. And here goes, the quintessential quotoid: enormous progress has been made, but there is still a lot to do.

One perhaps unexpected consequence of the crisis is a general re-awakening to the fact that politicians are fundamentally necessary and have a very real job to do. 

Whether anyone actually KNOWS what to do is a moot point. But that said, everyone knows that someone HAS to do something, and that that some-one is a politician. One perhaps unexpected consequence of the crisis is a general re-awakening to the fact that politicians are fundamentally necessary and have a very real job to do. The notion that politicians should stay out of economic life has taken something of a battering lately. Now everyone wants to know what they are going to do. People are interested in what they have to say.

It can’t be easy for them. This recession seems to have caught everyone off-guard.  It seemingly came out of nowhere. You only have to go back a few months (say in a book , magazine or a movie) to find people inhabiting a different world, where the assumptions of big money, fatcat self-indulgence and consumerist self-gratification for the masses are unchallenged. And now, what a difference a (metaphorical) day makes… 

Another difficulty is that a large proportion of Europe’s workforce is unfamiliar with recession. Maybe once upon a time people would assume that they came round now and then. Certainly, that’s how it seemed to me, growing up in the coal-mining areas of the English East Midlands in the late seventies and early eighties. Now that it looks like the 3 million plus unemployment of that time in the UK is coming back, I can’t help wondering whether the depressing and rather grey “feel” of that time will also return.

But now seems psychologically very different. Then, in Britain, it all felt like the outcome of a long process of decline, a reckoning stored up over decades. (This notwithstanding the bitter arguments which raged over the remedies applied by Mrs Thatcher’s government of the time.) And in day to day life it was met with a kind of acquired stoicism, leavened with a fair dose of social solidarity, neither of which is easy to identify in contemporary British mores. Now is also different because, this time, the crisis comes seemingly from an external cause, which, for all that it might be associated with “Anglo-Saxon” capitalism, is truly global in impact. This is not a national recession, but one we all share. It is consequently impossible to see the current recession as something that any single government can hope to address with any success alone.

Gordon Brown at the European summit 20 March (http://www.flickr.com/photos/downingstreet)

Maybe because of this mixture of personal recollection of a past British recession, the new experience of global downturn and the central role of politicians, I was particularly hoping to talk to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who will be in Strasbourg this week to address the Parliament on the subject of the G20 summit on 2 April. 

Interestingly, Mr Brown is coming at the express request of the UK government, not because it was his duty (as President of Council or whatever) or because the Parliament asked him to. No, he actively wanted to come to address the European Parliament. This is a fascinating sign of the times. More and more, it seems that politicians who want or need to talk to “Europe”, by which I mean the people of Europe, realise that there is a body which allows them to do just that – the European Parliament. (President Obama take note!) Brown’s predecessor Tony Blair did so to great effect in 2005, perhaps providing Mr Brown with some inspiration.  As Tony Barber of the FT reminds us, Brown matched Blair’s ovation count in the US Congress, now perhaps he thinks he can match his European Parliament enterprise too?

So the “big cheese” of the title is Gordon Brown. I won’t be meeting him, by the way. My request for an interview for the EP website was politely declined by his people, because he had “no time” (the only saving grace for me being that they gave the same answer to every other request too).  It’s a shame, because I thought I had interesting questions for him which he might actually have relished answering. And so to our “sacred cows”.

I read an interesting article recently in “Prospect”, which pointed out that the three long-standing orthodoxies of European economic policy were teetering – or had definitively teetered – in the storms of the economic slowdown. I found the point fascinating. Are we seeing – yes, I’ll say it – a paradigm shift?

Are the orthodoxies set to change? I would have liked to hear Mr Brown respond to that.

First, balanced budgets, the heart of the single currency, will be hard-pressed to survive the huge public expenditure needed to stimulate the economy and keep banks and businesses afloat, especially when combined with declining tax revenue. So Keynesian deficit financing, here we come? Second, the leading economic role of the private sector (reflected inter alia in the long-standing fashion for privatisation across Europe), is under attack as governments nationalise and prop up businesses and set conditions for executive pay and bonuses. Third, free trade and open competition seem at least under threat, as least to the extent that politicians around the world feel the need repeatedly to restate their commitment not to slip into protectionism. 

So the issue is: are we undergoing a sea-change in European economic policy? Are the orthodoxies set to change? I would have liked to hear Mr Brown respond to that. Perhaps, if he reads this, he could leave the answer in a comment.

But there are people that mean something to us personally, that can touch us with their story and whom we really want to take the opportunity of talking to: it can be now or never. I am sure each one of us has at least a name to say, someone they would really like to ask about an experience, an opinion, a fact. In my case one of those big names is Ingrid Betancourt.

Even before she was freed, I found her story fascinating. Not knowing very much the details, she had “the essentials”: compromised, touching, brave, she had become a symbol. The Parliament had many times asked for her release, she had even been nominated for the Sakharov prize. And there is a poster in front of the door of my office asking for “libertad para todos”, freedom for all, with a photo of a much youger looking Ingrid.

When she was released, my journalistic instinct made me jump from the sofa and run to write the news. It was difficult to convince myself of the fact that the news rythm in the EP is a different one: I am not longer at a news agency! But that instinct made me stay awake until very late, when I finally saw her getting out of the helicopter. It was true, she was free.

The day after, the President of the Parliament, Hans-Gert Pöttering, invited her to come to the Chamber. She was the “most wanted” guest of the moment, but I knew the European Parliament was different, it had a meaning to her, as she would explain months later during her speech in the plenary chamber in Brussels. So I though the opportunity was there, I could interview Ingrid Betancourt. But then she came to the Parliament for two days and… I just saw her from the distance.

We wanted to do an interview together with EuroparlTV, it seemed like the perfect plan, but I did not think of what finally happened: she refused to do any interview, after having already fixed an appointment, saying that she was very tired. My first thought was that I could not understand. She had said she was tired, but speaking for five minutes sitting comfortably on a sofa wouldn’t be that tiring, would it? I looked for all sorts of ways of convincing myself that I would get it in the end. Finally a red light turned on in my head: maybe I had idealised her, maybe I had built an image of her that did not match with the idea of her refusing to attend any interview. Just a press conference. I thought all that until I saw her speaking in front of the plenary in the most moving speech I had seen since I work here.

Now I know: it is not sitting or standing, it is not lights or flashes. She is mentally and emotionally tired. I wish I could have written that interview, but I wish even more that she will have the opportunity of resting. In the Chamber she said she will not, until the ones who are still in the jungle are freed… I hope we will all see it. Maybe then I will have my interview and I will tell her about this post.

1) I am the Spanish language editor!
-Yes, it is true, but I am not the only Spanish speaker…)

2) I am one the editors in charge of External Affairs (we divide the topics between the group, I share this topic and Development with my German and Swedish colleagues).

-Yes, it is true, maybe this interview would not fall under the category External Affairs… at least not only…

3) I combine the fact of being the Spanish editor with following External Affairs
- Ok, I am not the only Spanish  speaker covering External Affairs…

4) I asked fot it the first!!
-…

(to be continued)