What the youngest female MEP said to the oldest

Your essential companion on the #EU2024 campaign trail.
By EDDY WAX
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HELLO. There are 20 days until June 6. I’m back and raring to go as parties across Europe prepare for the red-hot campaign period before the election. Across Europe, thousands upon thousands of candidates for the 720 seats in the European Parliament are dreaming of the hemicycle, knocking on doors and putting up posters. 
What’s EU-speak for smörgåsbord? Among them are career politicians, political staffers, celebs, award-winning jockeys, former Olympians, former prime ministers and commissioners, and probably a fair few dodgy types who are mainly interested in gaining parliamentary immunity. This week I’m interested in what kind of background is best when it comes to the hard work of being a member of the European Parliament.
TWO MEPs, A 53-YEAR AGE-GAP: MEPs Mercedes Bresso, an Italian in the Socialists & Democrats group, and Kira Marie Peter-Hansen, a Danish Green, could not have taken more contrasting routes to get to Brussels. That became apparent when I introduced them to each other recently in the European Parliament, for a multilingual joint conversation about how their very different political backgrounds had impacted their time in the EP.
At age 79, Bresso is 53 years older than 26-year-old Peter-Hansen, who was the youngest MEP ever elected to the European Parliament when she unexpectedly won a seat aged 21 in 2019. Bresso is the oldest female MEP in the chamber, and already had two stints as MEP before returning in 2023.
This way please: Peter-Hansen said that being visibly young has led to its fair share of awkward moments. “I’ve … experienced that the guards think that I’m an intern and lead me to the other entrance,” she said, adding she’s had “some colleagues coming with some comments as a joke that maybe aren’t that funny when you’re young and nervous.” But her political rivals on the employment committee have treated her with respect, she said: “I was expecting to have more opposition being a young woman than I’ve had.”
Benefits of a bigger contacts book: Bresso, a committed federalist from Italy’s Democratic Party, had already had a long career in academia as an economics professor and then in regional politics, including presiding over the EU’s Committee of the Regions. Becoming an MEP for her “was like coming home,” she said. 
Experts vs. decision-makers: The pair disagreed on what kinds of people should ideally make it to the hemicycle. “I think you have to have competencies, this is very important … we can’t have a Parliament full of inexperienced people,” Bresso said, before adding: “But there are also exceptions.”  
Give the guy a break! The oldest current MEP is 83-year-old former Parliament President Jerzy Buzek, whose assistant said his schedule during the final plenary was too busy to do an interview. 
Don’t hold us back: Peter-Hansen said the expectation that MEPs arrive with a ton of experience is holding back a lot of promising young candidates. “As politicians we are not elected to be experts on a topic” but to have opinions, she argued, warning that electing only experts would create a “technocracy.” 
Too old for TikTok: Peter-Hansen dropped out of university to take up her seat, and has been studying for a bachelor’s degree in international relations while working as an MEP. She joked that she now feels “too old” for social media, what with the rise of TikTok and all the updates on Instagram. 
Bresso said part of her motivation for returning in 2023 was to fight against the notion that it’s normal to be an older man in politics but not a woman. “Is it only women who should be young?” she asked, noting that she would be mistaken for a secretary rather than a professor at her university decades ago. “A lot of parties are not actively pursuing having a gender-balanced list and supporting different kinds of candidates,” said Peter-Hansen. 
Rise of the far-right men: Both were adamant that the Parliament, though still not fully gender-balanced (it’s 60 percent male to 40 percent female) was doing better than national parliaments on this metric. But could that be about to change? “It’s clear that the possible rise of the right … would mean a reduced number of women MEPs,” Bresso predicted.
The average age of an MEP at the end of this mandate will be 54.
At 21, Danish Greens lawmaker Kira Marie Peter-Hansen was the youngest-ever lawmaker to enter the Parliament in 2019. But on average, MEPs’ age has actually remained remarkably stable throughout the EU Parliament’s nine terms. According to the Parliament’s own data, the average age consistently hovered between 53 and 55 at the end of every Parliament term.
Age distribution of this Parliament’s MEPs, by lawmakers’ age when they left — or will leave — the Parliament.
With an average age of, respectively, 50 and 51 years, the Greens and Left groups had the youngest lawmakers. European Conservatives and Reformists MEPs (averaging 56.5 years at the end of their mandate) and European People’s Party lawmakers (at an average age of 55) were the oldest. 
There were no major differences between countries either; almost all EU countries’ MEPs were — on average — in their fifties when their mandate finished.
But there are some outliers: The EU’s youngest Parliament delegations are from Malta and the Nordics. Maltese, Swedish and Danish MEPs were 47 going on 48 as they wrapped up their mandate.
Polish, Latvian and Lithuanian MEPs were the oldest of the pack, with an average age above 60. In Lithuania’s team of lawmakers, the average stands at 65.
MEPs’ ages at the end of their mandate, by country. Darker dots indicate the average per country.
The small town that opened its arms to migrants
Not a lot happens in Riace, a small town in the bone-dry hilltop scrub of southern Calabria, right on the toe of the Italian mainland. Yet it’s become part of the frontline in the battle over migration.
That’s down to Domenico “Mimmo” Lucano, the town’s former mayor.
In 2004, Lucano took Riace’s town hall and set to work on ambitious plans to transform the town into a permanent refuge for migrants, thousands of whom were arriving annually on Italian shores. Lucano believed that welcoming and settling the migrants would address Riace’s peculiar double-bind: that it had “homes without people, and people without homes,” as he once put it.
For almost 15 years he pursued this ideal, building a “Global Village” in Riace’s crumbling historic center, welcoming hundreds of refugees escaping war and poverty. At one point, some 500 migrants lived in the town, supported by state funding that supplied them with food, accommodation, schools, work and even an alternative, locally minted currency. The town’s population bloomed, and Lucano cultivated a global following, even ranking in a list curated by Fortune of the 50 best leaders in the world.
In 2018, however, legal trouble put the dream on hold.
Just as the issue of migration was fully entrenching itself as the Italian right’s bete noir under the auspices of then-Foreign Minister Matteo  Salvini, Lucano was indicted by state prosecutors on a raft of charges ranging from embezzlement of state funds to the facilitation of illegal migration. He was arrested and, in 2021, sentenced to 13 years in jail. For the first 11 months after the charges were levied he languished under house arrest in the neighboring (and equally desolate) town of Caulonia.
During that period, the Global Village suffered. Blocked from accessing state funding, the influx of new residents slowed, and those who couldn’t support themselves without subsidies were forced to leave. The mayor who replaced Lucano diverted his attention to tourism and EU-funded development projects, and Riace returned to being just another small town full of small-town people with very little to do.
Last year, however, Lucano was unexpectedly exonerated by an appeals court. He is now running for the town hall as an independent and for the European Parliament as part of Italy’s Verdi e Sinistra coalition — such electoral two-timing is permitted for mayors of towns with under 15,000 inhabitants — and he told POLITICO he plans to export his progressive model across Europe. 
“It’s very important what happens on 6 June,” Lucano, now 65, said. He described both the local and EU-wide elections as an opportunity to oust the right-wing, anti-immigration forces spreading across Europe and becoming ever more cozy in Brussels, in large part thanks to the careful political calculations of Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni.
Many locals desperately miss the way the town was, and were bemused at the decision to jettison what they viewed as its one hope of survival. “It was a paradise,” sighed one glamorous patron at the cafe in the town center
“There was life, and joy, and commerce,” one old-timer said wistfully of the Lucano era. “A town full of foreigners,” he said, “is better than one that’s dead.”
by Ben Munster
Ben’s full story will be published next week.
CAMPAIGN CALENDAR: 
— Ursula von der Leyen is in Luxembourg this afternoon, where “a cross border walk to Germany and France is foreseen.” Don’t expect Les Républicains to be whooping and cheering her across the border. 
— Socialists’ lead candidate Nicolas Schmit is campaigning on an organic farm and fire-fighting center in Bordeaux, and will be in Thessaloniki, Greece, on Monday to meet platform workers and commemorate the Larissa train crash disaster. 
— The Greens’ Terry Reintke will campaign in Finland next Friday, with her counterpart Bas Eickhout heading to Portugal.
DEBATE ONE: Bruegel and the Financial Times are hosting an EU election debate on Tuesday at 4 p.m., featuring Ursula von der Leyen, Nicolas Schmit, Sandro Gozi and, notably, the far-right’s Anders Vistisen. But no Greens, far-left or European Conservatives and Reformists.
DEBATE TWO: The European Parliament hosts its debate organized by the European Broadcasting Union on Thursday at 3 p.m., featuring Ursula von der Leyen, Nicolas Schmit, Sandro Gozi, Terry Reintke, and Walter Baier. Funnily enough, von der Leyen will be standing on the far-left of the stage, and Austrian communist Baier on the far-right. Topics: Economy & jobs, defense & security, climate & environment, democracy & leadership, migration & borders, innovation & technology.
ITALIAN PEOPLE’S VOTE: A former MEP from the U.K., Graham Watson, is running on a centrist list in Italy, the Guardian’s Lisa O’Carroll reports. Watson, who has an Italian wife and Italian citizenship, was the leader of ALDE at the time it was a parliamentary group in the Parliament.
**The EU elections are almost here! Tune in to the Eurovision Debate on May 23 at 15h CEST to watch lead candidates for European Commission President present their vision for the EU and answer questions from voters. Have your say using #EurovisionDebate. More info.**
RENEW’S WILDERS HEADACHE: I reported on Thursday about the new Dutch government coalition — which includes the liberal People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) and Geert Wilders’ far-right Freedom Party (PVV). 
It could make it difficult for the VVD’s top MEP Malik Azmani to mount another bid for the presidency of the group, as he did only recently. I’m hearing from two people that June 25 and 26 are the dates for Renew to vote on its new president. 
Far-right complain over exclusion: The far-right Identity & Democracy group this week sent a letter  — seen by Playbook — to Parliament President Roberta Metsola, complaining that its chief debater Anders Vistisen is not being allowed to take part in Thursday’s Eurovision debate in a dispute over the Spitzenkandidat process.
“As ID-affiliated parties are leading in the polls in several Member States, the role of ID in the newly elected Parliament is very likely to become one of the debate’s topics … it would be strange to be the subject of such a discussion without being able to reply,” wrote Italian League MEP Marco Zanni and Gerolf Annemans, the chair of the ID party. “We kindly ask you to urge the European Broadcast[ing] Union to admit all the political parties to the debate,” they wrote.
SCHMIT’S MUTED CRITICISM OF VDL: The Socialists’ lead candidate Nicolas Schmit has been reluctant to really challenge Ursula von der Leyen, my colleagues Barbara Moens and Jacopo Barigazzi report in this piece.
POLITICO’s Leyla Aksu has made another playlist of songs to get you in the mood for the election. This week’s has some top tunes on the theme of aging. Here it is. Enjoy.
No trivia this week, instead a quiz: Have a go at it here.
Last week, Paul asked you to name the most famous musician to have appeared in front of the European Parliament. 
Congratulations to former MEP Richard Corbett who wrote in to mention violinist and composer Yehudi Menuhin, who has a space in the Parliament named after him, and Jo Swabe of Humane Society International who said former Beatle Paul McCartney. McCartney spoke at a panel event encouraging people to eat less meat for the sake of the climate in 2009. Austrian singer Conchita Wurst, the 2014 Eurovision winner, also performed in the EP. 
Casual reminder: We’re also on WhatsApp! Follow our account here to stay up to date on the latest European election news in between Playbook editions.
Send in your campaign posters! Eddy’s building an online collection of EU election campaign posters around the Continent. Please send him your posters if you spot some on your travels.
LISTEN UP — WILL THE BOTS WIN THE ELECTION? Deepfakes and AI are supercharging Moscow’s army of trolls ahead of the European election. Are voters actually falling for disinformation about the war in Ukraine, and is there any way to stop it from spreading? Mark Scott, POLITICO’s chief technology correspondent, and Jakub Kalensky, deputy director of the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats, join host Sarah Wheaton on this week’s edition of the EU Confidential podcast to debate which is the bigger threat to EU democracy: the fake-news bots — or your credulous aunt who forwards their lies. Listen here.
Current election excitement level: Calm before the storm.
Last word: “I want to communicate my total disapproval and my strong worry about the evolution of the coalition government talks in the Netherlands. The PVV is opposed to what we stand for on values, rule of law, economy, climate and of course Europe,” said Renew leader Valérie Hayer.
THANKS TO: Hanne Cokelaere and Paul Dallison (and thanks to Paul and Stuart Lau for stepping in for me over the past fortnight). 
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