Our conversation with Stanley Pignal, Charlemagne columnist at The Economist

Macron, Starmer and Europe

We meet with Stanley Pignal at the Brussels office of The Economist in the International Press Centre. The IPC is a stone's throw away from the Schuman roundabout in the European Quarter. Stanley has been writing the Charlemagne column — the weekly section on European affairs — since 2022. 

This is not our first encounter with Stanley. We already ran into him on Europe Day in May in the queue to visit the European Council building with his three children. “They were mostly interested in the amount of candy they could get from the various national delegations. Actually, it was a very good trick to get them interested in the EU”, he recalls.

France’s shrinking influence in Europe

Our conversation takes place the day after the second round of the French elections. In an unexpected turn of events, the left alliance Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) came first, followed by Emmanuel Macron’s party and Jordan Bardella’s Rassemblement National (RN). 

In the run-up to the elections, there was a growing fear in Brussels that the far right might come into power in France. “I think there will be a real sense of relief in Brussels, but also a sense that there will be fights coming ahead. And it is not clear how those fights will shake out”, Stanley tells us. With no clear majority, France’s next prime minister will likely not be from Macron’s party — what the French call “cohabitation”. 

How this will play out at the European level remains to be seen. Stanley notes: “Macron is going to remain a key player. By convention, the French president retains this kind of ‘reserved domain’ of foreign affairs and European affairs. He will keep on attending the European Council. But I spoke to a lot of people in this town who have no idea what a cohabitation might look like. The focus will now be on where the division of power lies between the French government and the French President. A lot of the Council of the EU meetings are spent preparing meetings of the European Council. And if those are done by people who don't necessarily get on, things will get complicated.”

The Brussels bubble is still trying to figure out what a hung Parliament will mean for the EU. “I think the ultimate result is likely to be a diminishing of the ambition that France will bring to the table”, Stanley acknowledges. “In the Franco-German relationship, France is the engine that proposes ideas. And then Germany decides which ideas it can or cannot live with — joint borrowing is the classic example. If you stop having that idea generation machine from Paris, do you still have ambitious responses to crises? Of course, it is not just the President that can come up with the ideas, but there will certainly be a concern here in Brussels that the level of ambition of France — and therefore of Europe — is going to be somewhat diminished.”

The French election result came as a disappointment for Viktor Orbán. “He would have hoped to have many allies from the RN in the Council — not the European Council, but EU Council meetings”, Stanley analyzes. “If France had had a far right government after the elections, there could have been a blocking minority, even in qualified majority voting (QMV) dossiers, with Italy, France, Hungary, the Netherlands and Slovakia.”

What Starmer in Number 10 means for the EU 27

Across the Channel, Labour swept into power with a comfortable majority. Not so long ago (in late 2023), its leader Keir Starmer had ambitious plans to rebuild ties with the EU. These included renegotiating the EU-UK free trade agreement, the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA). 

Starmer’s ambitions now seem more realistic. The EU had shown little appetite for a substantial revision of the TCA — Labour now intends to focus on technical additions: agreements on veterinary standards, professional qualifications, and mobility. 

It is less clear what the EU wants. “The UK priorities are always clearer than the European priorities for two reasons”, Stanley claims. “The first is that they think about us more than we think about them. For the UK, the relationship with Europe is existential. It's by far the biggest trading partner, and Brexit has roiled both the UK’s economy and politics. As a result, people in the UK think about the EU a lot. Whereas the EU has kind of more or less moved on after the Windsor Agreement. And the second thing is that the 27 national capitals and the institutions in Brussels all have slightly different views on the UK.”

“I think what we have on the table right now is the most ambitious of the unambitious possibilities. We are not having a broader conversation about a more ambitious trade agreement. I do not see why Keir Starmer would spend a huge amount of political capital doing this”, he adds.

The next meeting of the European Political Community (EPC) — a forum created after Russia’s invasion in Ukraine where European leaders, including the UK and Turkey, discuss all things cooperation — will take place in the UK on 18 July. Leaders will be meeting in Blenheim Palace, the birthplace and home of Winston Churchill.

“The EPC is a great opportunity for Starmer to kind of anchor himself back into Europe. The EPC has always been a funny beast. It is very leader-led, and it does not have what you have in other European meetings, which is all the layers of discussion building up towards a joint communique, and substance being created. This is very much a kind of ‘get-to-know-you’. It is useful being in the same room as all these other European leaders. But, let's be honest, the EPC has been a bit of a sideshow to EU and NATO summits. I don't think it has really found a very happy place”, Stanley observes. “I think Starmer has a different approach from Sunak’s. He will probably look to have a slightly broader agenda, broader than just migration.”

How to write about the EU in plain English 

One thing we appreciate about Charlemagne is the balance between the nitty gritty of EU policy making and the big picture. Such a balance is necessary when writing for a global audience. In Stanley’s office, we notice Ashoka Mody’s excellent book, “Euro Tragedy” (2018) but also an EU law textbook. 

“One of the big difficulties of covering the EU is firstly understanding it for yourself, which is not simple, and then finding ways to make it understandable for readers, some of whom are very familiar with the principles of codecision, trilogues and all the good stuff, and others who are not (or just do not care). If you write for a global audience — which is what I do — you really have to make a huge effort to translate technical, jargon-heavy decisions into: Why should I care about this? Why is this important beyond Brussels?”

Covering the European institutions involves talking to everyone. "One of the key contrasts of Brussels with national capitals is that there are so many people to speak to on the same issue that there are never enough bridges that you could burn as a journalist to get yourself in trouble. If you are a journalist covering the finance ministry in Germany, and you burn bridges with the top five officials there, then you're cooked.” 

However, “the disadvantage of being in Brussels is that, in order to make sense of it, you need to spend a lot of time outside of it”, Stanley adds. “You only see a very partial picture if you only hang out in places like Place du Luxembourg, the Berlaymont, and go to European summits. It is very important to travel to EU capitals, but also travel outside of capitals, to get a sense of what is going on there.”

“Covering the EU is a weird beat because it's not quite a foreign posting, but it's not quite a domestic posting either”, Stanley adds. “You have elements of covering politics in the same way that a national correspondent would cover Westminster, the Elysée or the German Chancellery.”

On journalism and living in Brussels 

We ask Stanley about his writing process, and if he has any writing tips. “The one piece of advice I would give is if you can get (or give yourself) a deadline in the morning rather than the evening. For me, this is a game changer. My deadline is at 11:00 on Wednesday mornings. It means that I can write the bulk of an article on Tuesday afternoon or Tuesday night, then come back to it in the morning just to finish it off. And it just makes all the difference.” 

The writing of the Charlemagne column is far from being a solitary job. “I have the huge benefit of having a network of people within The Economist who will edit, read, and give their thoughts on the articles (...) This is not a job that anybody can do by themselves. If you go it alone, you risk getting things wrong in terms of the importance that you attribute to events, or you wouldn't have the confidence to attribute importance to certain events that might not seem important.”

On life in Brussels, Stanley’s take strikes a chord. "The best thing about the city is the people. And what I tell to colleagues who consider moving to Brussels is the following: how would you feel about going to a cocktail party and bumping into the deputy Italian ambassador who wants to talk to you about food regulation? If that sounds like a nightmare to you, stay away. But if you think, 'oh, I might learn something quite interesting here', then you know Brussels is the place for you. (...) If you move to Brussels, I think you have to jump in with both feet. The EU is a fascinating set of institutions. You learn new things every day, and you learn them by meeting new people all the time. This is the best thing about Brussels. The worst thing about Brussels is Sundays. They're too quiet."

Restaurant-wise, Stanley recommends Casa Italiana, rue Archimède. He can also be spotted at Le Jardin du Sommelier, rue Stevin. One thing that mystifies Stanley more than the excessive use of fried onion in Belgian restaurants is the starter-to-main ratio.

"Something that has been bothering me for over a decade is the ratio of the price of a starter to a main course in Brussels. Elsewhere, this ratio is kind of the same. You go to a restaurant and if the starter is €14, the main is going to be around €22. But in Belgium that ratio is basically 1 to 1. And I just cannot figure out why this ratio is so different."

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