What use is Europe to Europeans?

I have asked myself many times. And perhaps putting it into words and sharing it may help those asking the same question.

If employees, shopkeepers, farmers, homemakers, professionals and young people truly representative of the real Europe sometimes sat in that chamber, could they contribute? Would they make the same choices as their representatives?

This is not contempt, but an elementary observation: an astronomical distance has opened between those who live and those who decide. What crushes us is that those who decree almost never pay the price. The bill always arrives at another table: mine. I, who clock in each morning and raise my children.

Take the most brazen symbol of uselessness. Twelve times a year the entire EU Parliament packs its bags and moves from Brussels to Strasbourg, then makes the reverse journey: over a hundred million burned each year, admitted by the institutions themselves. A shopkeeper who counts receipts one by one would close that second seat the same afternoon. Continental politics, meanwhile, celebrates its pilgrimage while asking us to save energy and paper. The solution seems obvious to any sensible citizen: a single seat, a binding timetable, an open vote for anyone insisting on preserving the waste. Let them say so to taxpayers’ faces, and answer for it. Or pay out of their own pocket: life teaches that reaching into someone’s wallet makes them immediately responsive. All the more so since sitting in that chamber entitles that someone to a daily subsistence allowance of 359 euro a day. And collecting it requires only a signature in the attendance register. On plenary voting days, those who sign and then miss more than half the votes still get half: 179.50 euro.

Then borders. Those raising children in a real neighbourhood, rather than behind a guarded gate, know the difference between welcome and surrender. Throwing entry wide open as though every arrival were an act of civilisation is not generosity: it is abdication, paid for by the same people every time, in outskirts politicians visit only when an election approaches. We need a stern external border, returns that do not remain on paper, binding agreements with countries of origin, legal channels open only where there is genuine need.

Then there is industry. Would someone who had spent a lifetime in a car factory have handed the steering wheel to Chinese manufacturers to meet a date on a calendar? Industry has had an electric course imposed on it so rigid that it threatens supply chains, craftsmanship, engineering and a century of history. No conspiracies are needed: just look at who benefits. The transition must not be repudiated; it must be made technologically neutral: electric, hybrid, biofuels, e-fuels, hydrogen, provided industry remains ours and able to compete.

Even data. Protecting it is right; but privacy legislation has become a torment permeating every everyday action, ultimately treating the honest as suspects — precisely those for whom transparency is a way of life, rather than a maze of incomprehensible signatures. No reasonable citizen would have devised it like this. Standard templates, obligations proportionate to real risk and genuine exemptions for small operators would suffice.

Finally, the greatest deception: a continent proclaiming itself united while remaining fragmented into a thousand national rules and technicalities. A professional seeking to work across borders soon discovers that the single market is often merely a notarised promise. Common procedures, automatic recognition, a single European point of contact are needed. And free movement of people.

The real Europe is precious and demands to be preserved: its cities, workshops, fields, law, art, language, our own particular way of inhabiting our world.

So I return to my question, and the answer does not change: Europe will serve us again the day those who decide return to inhabit, at least a little, the world of those who live. Less distance and sermonising. More protection.