LETTER FROM BRUSSELS
“This story is worth listening to Game of Thrones “, said one observer of the European bubble. At the end of October, a chill spread through the corridors of the European Commission headquarters: the “Berlaymont monster” was announced to be returning to Brussels. Martin Selmayr has been given this unflattering nickname since serving as chief of staff, from 2014 to 2018, under Jean-Claude Juncker, then president of the Commission, and then serving as secretary general of the European executive for a year. At the time, the brilliant German lawyer, highly political, and known for the brutality of some of his decisions, was presented as the most powerful man in Brussels.
In 2019, upon her arrival as Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen and her loyal chief of staff, Björn Seibert, decided to immediately relocate their citizens, to Vienna to lead a European delegation and more recently to Rome to visit the Holy See. But in the fall of this year, Kaja Kallas, head of European diplomacy, decided to recruit him as deputy secretary of the European External Action Service (EEAS) for geoeconomic and institutional questions.
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