Among the many misfortunes currently besetting the European institutions is that they've been headed for the last few years by two people like Antonio Tajani, president of the European Parliament, and Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission. The number of scandals, awkward situations, political errors and slip-ups they've committed over these years has contributed to diluting the almost never controversial behaviour of two public figures, both from the right, who have become true snipers in various conflicts. Already on his way out, Tajani, the Roman who not that long ago praised the infrastructure projects promoted by Mussolini, has protagonised an unheard-of incident. First, preventing MEPs-elect Carles Puigdemont and Toni Comín from entering the European Parliament building as others had been doing. What's more, they had been there to collect their accreditation. Presumably, given the evidence of the illegal act that had been carried out, no other option occurred to them this Thursday than to revoke all the Spanish accreditations that had already been collected and whose owners had publicised them on social media.
That Tajani as a politician is neither institutional nor neutral is common knowledge around the chambers in Brussels and Strasbourg. It's not just what Catalan journalists are saying, the international media have put their heads in their hands in the last few hours over his actions. We'll see what the courts in Luxembourg end up saying. Tajani probably doesn't care about this because he'll already be out of office when it's all settled. In fact, he's only got a few weeks left. Meanwhile, there remains the arbitrary act; we'll see if there's the apparently illegal one too. "The best Spanish commissioner", they said of Tajani when he was at the European Commission and in the middle of conflicts which were worth the name of a street in Gijón for a key man during the Berlusconi years. A former air force officer, he's got (or at least he had got when he was a commissioner) a Spanish infantry flag in his office. He became so close to Spain that, for example, in 2010, when speaking to the UN as European Commissioner, being unable to use Italian as it's not one of the official languages, ahead of French or English, he chose Spanish which is, alongside Russian, Arabic and Chinese.
That proximity to Spain has been rewarded with multiple awards, the most important being the Prince of Asturias prize. So, Tajani doesn't do anything he doesn't believe in. What he forgets is that things have to be legal and not a show. And that trampling over MEPs rights will end up having its consequences as has already been seen with Spain's legal defeats over the European Arrest Warrants. Brussels isn't Madrid.