European Parliament: The Orgy Is Over

A libertine atmosphere is all very well, but without consent, it’s troubling. In March 2024, the MeTooEP collective (EP for “European Parliament”) presented the results of a survey on the omnipresence of sexual and psychological harassment within the European Parliament. Of 1,136 respondents, 49.56% said that they had been victims of psychological harassment, 15.49% had been victims of sexual harassment, 8.10% had experienced physical violence, and 40% of those questioned had witnessed harassment. All journalists investigating the subject have been met with ‘omertà’, the code of silence traditionally attributed to the mafia world, which governs the European bubble. Absence of transparency. Lack of control. Few or no witnesses. Eddy Wax, a reporter at Politico, tells me that finding victims who will agree to talk is almost impossible. 

“They feel daunted or put off by the opacity of the system. Most give statements anonymously, because they’re scared of losing their job or being sued for defamation.” He adds: “It’s a mixture of impunity and impotence. MEPs are the ones making the rules, everything is done to protect them. Once they are elected, they’re in charge.” In February 2024, Wax revealed that a lecturer at the highly prestigious College of Europe in Bruges (which has trained generations of lawyers, diplomats and EU officials) was the subject of a sexual harassment investigation, reported by around 20 former students, who sent an open letter to Federica Mogherini, the former Vice-President of the European Commission, now Rector of the College of Europe. The lecturer’s attitude had been known about and covered up for years. In Brussels, there is the stage, and then there is behind the scenes. 

Back in 2012, I am working in the European Quarter as an external consultant to Parliament’s Communications service, an environment that is more PowerPoint than lyrical promises from the founding fathers. Every morning I trot along in the stream of 27,000 officials and even more lobbyists (unofficially estimated to be close to 30,000 people — the largest community in the world after Washington), taking the metro to rue de la Loi. I have signed a confidentiality agreement with the agency that employs me, my office is on the fifth floor of a grey building that could be a car park or the headquarters of a bank. ID checks, bag checks and swiping in with a badge to keep track of my hours. I burrow my way into a labyrinth of corridors, with lino-covered floors and false plasterboard ceilings, under icy neon lights. My colleagues are kind, my superiors are respectful; I don’t have much work to do and I earn a lot of money. I’m certainly not in journalism anymore.

So much drinking. So much sleeping around.

The overall atmosphere is unique, charged with a flirty energy. A little corner of “Temptation Island”. Lots of people passing through, over 27 different nationalities, who keep on bumping into one another at drinks in “Plux” (the local name for place du Luxembourg). Older men in grey suits, usually company directors or MEPs, surrounded by crowds of assistants and secretaries. One day, an official I meet for an interview, tries to stick his tongue down my throat as we’re saying goodbye. I don’t take offence — when you grew up in the 90s, hands on your bum, weirdos hitting on you, and attempted groping simply constitute collateral damage to the female condition. 

The #MeToo wave sweeps away everything in its wake. Everything? Everything but the European Parliament.

Helena is 23 when she gets her first job as an assistant for a British MEP in Brussels, well before Brexit. Life here is exciting, multicultural, chaotic. Nobody keeps track of their hours, there are parties almost every night, booze and money flow like water. Her colleagues spend their weekends in Barcelona or Berlin, they dress well, and hang out in the capital’s hot spots. Work hard and party even harder.

From the bars in Ixelles to the plenary sessions when Strasbourg is transformed into an open-air rave. So much drinking. So much sleeping around. “Life was all about excess, power and sex. I was part of that, we were all part of that.” Non-consensual touching is a rite of passage, getting laid during work hours is an open secret. “It’s as though everyone had a pass for partying or shagging. Everything was authorised, legit, encouraged even, the same thing happened in the other delegations. There is a culture of impunity within the European institutions that allows all kinds of abuse.”

One morning, my eyes are opened to the prevailing sexism by a message. It is in English and addressed to the mailing list for all of Parliament’s services: it is from a woman who has been dumped and humiliated, spilling all the details of her torrid affair with the Secretary-General of the European Parliament. I barely have time to read the email before it is wiped by IT. I start to wonder and ask questions of my colleagues: is there misbehaviour, hidden scandal? #MeToo is still a long way off, but I hear stories of German brothels being fully booked during monthly plenary sessions at the Strasbourg Parliament, the “explosion in the divorce rate” that coincided with the expansion to the East in 2004 (and the arrival of very young assistants from the former Eastern Bloc), illegitimate children or double lives, and even sex parties in the Parliament basements amid the EU’s contemporary art collection (500 paintings bought at exorbitant prices since the 1950s). “Off the record, yeah?” all my contacts say. Their tales, punctuated by giggles or winks, reveal nothing but the chauvinism that was standard and normalised throughout the 2010s.

The #MeToo wave

In 2017, the Weinstein affair breaks and the #MeToo wave sweeps away everything in its wake. Everything? Everything but the European Parliament. An indomitable institution where tongues are not always loose and harassment cases are carefully swept under the rug. Jeanne Ponté, a French woman working, at that time, as a parliamentary assistant to Edouard Martin, decides to keep a list in a notebook of all the stories of harassment and sexual abuse she hears from her friends and colleagues. She is shocked by the extent of the phenomenon. “I collected dozens of accounts and there was nothing within Parliament to manage the problem: no sanctions, no process to follow.”

In March 2018, Ponté launches a blog, plus a Twitter account on which she publishes some fifty anonymous accounts of abuses of power, mistreatment in the workplace, and even a case of rape. A dozen other people working in European institutions join her, and the MeTooEP collective is born. So begins a quiet feminist revolution at the heart of Europe. “Parliament is a complex institution governed by power struggles between MEPs and administration, three sites (Strasbourg and Brussels, but also Luxembourg), 27 nationalities, it can be like Erasmus +++, which leaves room for excesses”, Jeanne Ponté explains.

Three requests made by the collective are addressed in a first resolution (no. 2897), adopted by Parliament, a text that is in no way binding: mandatory anti-harassment courses for legislators (one for members of the administration, created in 2007, and one for MEPs, established in 2014); restructuring of two anti-harassment bodies that are neither neutral nor independent; and an external audit.

Based on Parliament’s code of conduct, these two anti-harassment committees have a purely advisory capacity and only issue recommendations. They have no investigative powers, even though they hear witness accounts, or powers to sanction. In the case of bullying or sexual harassment reported after investigations sometimes lasting several years, the perpetrators are taken to task: suspension of MEP emoluments (not salary) for 30 days, suspension of voting rights and the right to participate in debates for two weeks, and a mention of the decision by the Presidency at the plenary session. There is no real punishment, but it shifts the problem. Measures to protect the victims are also more of a made-up jobs strategy than an effective deterrent: sick leave, transfer to another post, change of political group or office. More of a sickbay than a court. 34 “confidential” actions were brought between 2019 and 2021. Only two reached a conclusion. The two people given disciplinary penalties were both women. Probably a coincidence. There was one single action regarding a sexual assault and it was dismissed. 

Somewhere between summer camp and chaos

This is the case of Amelia Martínez Lobo. It’s 2017, and she is working as a parliamentary assistant for a Spanish MEP on the far left, close to Podemos. Weeks running into one another at lightning speed, trains, planes, long nights spent staring into the blue light of a phone screen answering messages or preparing for meetings. The vibe is somewhere between summer camp and chaos. In Strasbourg, the delegation rents a huge apartment where any number of members might be staying according to their schedules and assignments. In March 2017, she is alone with a friend who is also employed by the European Parliament, but not in the political sphere. 

She goes to bed and the man knocks on the bedroom door. “He got into my bed and started touching my breasts and squeezing my nipples while he rubbed his penis against my leg.” She tells him no, several times. He still has his arms around her and tries to convince her to sleep with him, until she roughly pushes him away and he ends up leaving the room. It doesn’t really matter how the law defines his actions, he has blown a hole in Amelia’s life. There is a before and after this night. At first, Amelia is in denial, not least because she has previously slept with this man. There are other occasions when he has been insistent, pressuring, almost aggressive. She stays quiet, refuses to be a victim. After all, she’s a strong woman, this isn’t the first she’s seen of these things. And then anxiety consumes her, she can’t sleep, gains ten kilos from a diet of junk food and alcohol. She starts a therapy journey that will last two years. She speaks to friends, to people in the party. She wants this married man to do the feminist rehabilitation programme that has been set up in Spain, a forerunner in combatting sexual violence. The man apologises to her, he is even expelled from the party – she finds out that there have been two previous incidents with other girls, that he has behaved violently before. “The party took a strong and immediate step to make sure I was protected, while my place of work, the Parliament, was in no position to guarantee my safety”, she explains. 

In September 2017, she files a complaint for sexual harassment with the members’ anti-harassment committee. She wants compensation, or at least for the man to no longer be in her work environment. But there’s a problem: the man she is reporting has passed the competition to become an official, he’s under contract, a member of Parliament staff, endowed with privileged status (holidays, social security, bonuses) He is irremovable. With the help of a lawyer, she compiles a full case file (of which she has sent me a copy). All the documents are carefully submitted: her employment contract, witness statements, the request for assistance, SMS and email exchanges. One year later (the Committee guarantees a response in three months), in October 2018, the Committee concludes that there is “no evidence to suggest sexual harassment”. An internal body, there to protect her, which has no power to investigate or sanction, finds that what she has suffered is all in her head. This legal grey area is a slap in the face, almost an insult, almost as if she’s being treated like a liar. They suggest she takes the case to the European Court of Human Rights. But bringing a disciplinary proceeding before the Parliament only to get a non-existent result has already taken too much of an emotional toll. Disheartened, she decides to give it all up and go back to Madrid. “The only reason I’m speaking up in my own name is to help other women who have been through something similar”.

Six years after the first resolution, despite two new texts (resolutions 2855 and 2039 adopted in 2019 and 2021), none of the measures proposed by MeTooEP have yet been implemented. However, at the time of completing this article, Parliament finally voted, on 24 April 2024, in favour of mandatory training. For the first time, the 720 MEPs, who will be employing thousands of assistants when the new Parliament is inaugurated in July, will be required to take a course on how to prevent the harassment of their staff.

Yet the independence of the committees is still not guaranteed. “Who would take the risk of reporting someone internally when the committees are composed of members of Parliament or staff?”, Jeanne Ponté asks. After Qatargate, a serious wave of housecleaning is underway with announcements and reforms, but they remain cosmetic. In June 2023, under pressure from the FEMM committee, which is pushing Parliament to “act and finally prevent and combat all forms of harassment, including sexual harassment”, a fourth resolution (2138) was adopted. “This is not enough. Parliament wants to show that it’s doing something, but in reality it is still a lawless place.”

The MeTooEP collective has since been rewarded with the 2023 Simone Veil Prize for Equality and Diversity, but its activists still choose to remain anonymous. They believe that “their careers are not solid enough for them to take ownership of their feminist commitments.” On their website there are no names, no photos, just an email address. In 2024, making the case for women’s rights within the most democratic structure on the continent — despite equality between men and women being a fundamental value and legal obligation of the Union — still means putting your career on the line. Jeanne Ponté has distanced herself, citing “fatigue”. Patriarchal tradition, pressure from increasingly powerful conservative lobby groups and the administration’s resistance to reforms: “It’s even more depressing that with every new parliamentary term the personnel change and you have to start everything from scratch.”

Extraterritorial zone

In any criminal case, without a body, there is no murder. This is simultaneously what saves and sinks the European machine. The two disciplinary committees of the European Parliament have no sanctioning power in cases of bullying or sexual harassment. Offences classed as criminal, such as claims of rape, must, in theory, be brought before the Belgian courts. What makes potential criminal proceedings even more difficult is the legal limbo in which Parliament finds itself. It is still an extraterritorial institution. How can it be that the most democratic institution in the European Union, the one that imposes dozens of anticorruption and equality directives on member States, is not answerable to any legislation?

At Brussels central police station, obtaining reliable figures on rape claims filed by EU employees is impossible, a senior officer tells me. “There is no database that specifies the profile or profession of victims. Complaints are always anonymous.” When the assault is not taking place in public, but in administrative buildings, like those of the Parliament or European Commission, “no information about the place is entered”, she clarifies. “The European institutions are extraterritorial institutions. For the police to intervene there, they need authorisation from Parliament. If the perpetrators benefit from parliamentary immunity, the police lose their grip on the investigation. With a smile, she sums up the situation: “In the European Parliament, you are not in Belgium.”

A three-year wait

In spring 2023, the MEP Alexis Georgoulis, a popular Greek actor and member of the Syriza party, is the subject of a claim of rape and abuse, filed in Brussels in 2020 by Eleni Chronopoulou, 38. The victim’s name is quickly leaked by the Greek press, who accuse her of political manoeuvring, wanting to discredit the far-left party right before the 2023 general elections. On the phone, the lawyer and former European Parliament employee tells me about the remarkable handling of her rape by a Centre for Sexual Violence in Belgium. Plus the incredibly slow pace of the legal process. “The investigation isn’t moving forward. The European Parliament took over three years to lift Georgoulis’ immunity, in June 2023.” Why so long?

In the European Quarter, under a brilliant blue sky, women in trench coats have replaced the little men in suits. In Plux, bus horns sound because of the endless roadworks. Behind the statue of John Cockerill, the silhouette of the Altiero Spinelli building resembles a tired flying saucer on which large banners have been unfurled: “6-9 June. European Elections. Hashtag Use Your Vote.” These days, there is talk of gender budgeting, equality strategy, feminist diplomacy, but also of breakthroughs by far-right, anti-LGBT parties in the elections. The European Union is now run by three women: Ursula von der Leyen at the Commission, Roberta Metsola at the Parliament and Christine Lagarde at the ECB. The wood. The trees. And the wolves.

Médor chooses never to have its articles reviewed in full by a source, unless otherwise stated, as is the case here. This article has been sent to Jeanne Ponté and Amelia Martínez Lobo, who had the courage to give accounts in their own name (thank you to them), to check certain factual elements, and in an effort to protect victims and activists who fear for their careers.