Everyone dies at the end.

The play, set in Denmark, recounts how Prince Hamlet exacts revenge on his uncle Claudius, who has murdered Hamlet’s father, the King, and then taken the throne and married Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother. The play vividly charts the course of real and feigned madness—from overwhelming grief to seething rage—and explores themes of treachery, revenge, incest, and moral corruption.

We, informing about an institution we belong to, cannot use the full tool box.

This is the synopsis of Hamlet, as proposed by Wikipedia. Anyone having watched or read the play would start commenting: Hamlet is so much more than that. It’s full of emotions, plots, twists and so on. Others would object it’s boring, long, over-estimated. When reporting on what the European Parliament does, we find ourselves in this exact situation. We are bound to the quest of impartiality and objectivity. The play performed within the Plenary or the committees may be extremely passionnated or boring like hell, our role is to wait for the final outcomes and to present them in the most accurate and interesting manners.

Our own Elsinore - from our Flickr profile.

The difficulty lies in the “being interesting” part. People read books, watch movies or plays because something is happening. There are conflicts between characters, main protagonists have a goal to reach and obstacles to defeat. News media use the same trick, filling up their reports with emotions, strong characters, human touches. They allow some of their staff to use their voices, turning the piece of news in an editorial or a personal opinion.

Most European politicians have jumped on the storytelling trend too, often replacing traditional political messages with good, simple stories to tell.

We, informing about an institution we belong to, cannot use the full tool box.

Take the hearing: they hardly started and corridors are already full of rumours. We will daily write about the hearings that will have taken place the previous day, but there is no way we can jump to any conclusion. This is because, for each heard Commissioner, the parliamentary committee will first meet in camera (meaning nobody else than the Members can know what is discussed in the said meeting), then they’ll write a confidential letter to the President of the Parliament. In this letter, the committees’ members give their view about the candidate Commissionner they’ve questioned. Then the Conference of Presidents (all political groups leaders) considers the results of all hearings and decide on the vote they will recommend to all Members when the College of commissionners will be presented in a Plenary meeting.

Now, I’ll reveal an open secret: the “confidential” letters? Every journalist in Brussels gets them before we do.  At least it sure seems that way.  As you guess, the whole process is surrounded by rumours, speculations, crystal ball gazing. It’s great. Even for people who don’t give a damn about the whole EU thing, you could sell it.

Brainboxes unsure to get their job.

This is how I would tell the story complying with Hemingway’s six words’ rule.

Unfortunately: we just cannot.

Because we belong to this Institution, we must respect the rules. The procedure.  By doing so, we establish, piece after piece, the reputation and the personality of the institution as a locutor (or a speaker if you’re not into linguistic theory as I am). You, as a citizen, want this locutor to be reliable – all the time. You want it to help you to understand what is really going on, to clarify what belongs to the fairy tales told by some politicians, to the extravaganza shouted by others and to the simple, factual, procedural truth. But this, my friends, requires a little time. And waiting is often boring. You, as a citizen, want, need perhaps, us to be boring. So you can be super interesting and funny in your pieces of news, your blog’s posts, your coffee time chats. We will back you up: facts, real quotes, heavy processes. We’ll be here to be your reference, the footnote in your essay, the hyperlink to source your argumentation.

We do our best to be as un-boring as possible – but try to describe a soccer game with no adjectives, no personal judgement, and no discrimination amongst 22 players even if some didn’t touch the ball. And don’t forget all referees, please. This is cramping.  This is what we do.

It's difficult to find new challenges after the elections... Photo by Koshyk on Flickr

And now? What’s next? After the tension of the election night (“Here are the first results! Tweeeeeeeeeeeet please! Asap!”), we’re coming in what I call a “post-electoral depression”. Nothing matters any more. Day-to-day work seems quite boring. What’s the aim of the articles we write, if not to increase the turnout in the elections?

On top of that, after having been in the “centre of the world” – or the “centre of Europe”, with hundreds of thousands of visits (i.e. readers) each day, nobody cares about us now. The stats are going down. We will become anonymous again on the web. No banner campaign, no Google adwords. Well, is that strange to be a normal citizen, waking up each morning for going to work instead of changing the world!

Retrospectively, overmotivation is probably dangerous. We should now wait five years until we can experience again an electoral campaign. For the time being, I will go on holidays. Just to forget a little bit the work, just to remind me that there are some wonderful things in the world which have nothing to do with my job. And when I will come back, I will be highly motivated for the next challenges. Because fortunately, we will find new goals, new projects, new deadlines … La vie est un éternel recommencement, en somme…