The return of the humble…and very occasional blogger. Apologies. Deep apologies for not blogging more often in English.
Last year at this time I thought I would be able to manage two blogs in two languages. I failed miserably.
For those who do not read Finnish it does not help much that I posted close to 300 entries last year…Most of them were in Finnish.
Well, this is a new try. I won’t promise anything, but you will probably see a lot of video footage from the corridors of the European Parliament.
Our EU-webTV is a new feature. As is the occasional podcast.
The Finnish blog is now open for comments. Please feel free to participate in English.
We are off to Strasbourg tomorrow. It will be a week of elections. Two and a half years down, two and a half to go.
Custom holds that there is a circulation of posts at midterm. The President of the European Parliament, Josep Borrel, will give way to Hans-Gert Pöttering. The latter has been a member of the European Parliament since 1979!
We will be voting and distributing all the posts for the remaining term. I made a calculation with my colleague Richard Corbett: it turns out that there are some 615 posts up for grabs!
This basically includes everything on offer: President and Vice Presidents of the Parliament plus chairmen and vice chairmen of the groups, committees and delegations. When you add on all heads of national delegations, coordinators and vice coordinators, you realise that there is pretty much something for everyone. Even after Bulgarian and Romanian enlargement on January 1, which brings the total number of MEPs to 785!
