MCC Brussels Podcast

When the world gets serious, the Berlaymont gets nervous.Greenland gets leaned on, farmers get sold out, and Hungary gets “managed” like a hostile province.John O’Brien sits down with Richard Schenk and Agnieszka Kolek to say what Brussels will only ever imply.Greenland and the Comfort Blanket of NATOGreenland isn’t some far-off abstraction. It’s tied to an EU member state, plugged into NATO, and still had to announce—out loud—that it isn’t for sale. The moment pressure comes from inside the club, the Western security story starts wobbling. Europe outsourced its seriousness decades ago, then convinced itself conferences and communiqués were a substitute for capability. The Arctic doesn’t care about talking points.MercosurThen Brussels turns to the budget and does what it always does when it wants money: it raids the countryside. The Mercosur deal lands like a boot on the neck of European farming, while the Commission tries to repackage the damage as “competitiveness”. The Hungary “Pause”And in Hungary, the mask slips entirely—files “frozen” before an election so the Commission doesn’t accidentally look neutral. It’s not rule-of-law enforcement. It’s political choreography. And it’s exactly why more Europeans are starting to see the EU not as a guardian of democracy, but as a manager of outcomes.

Brussels insists it only acts where member states allow it. MCC Brussel's Deputy Research Director Philip Siegert shows that is simply untrue. h exists down with John O'Brien to talk about his latest report: Empire of Law: Pushing supranationalism beyond democratic legitimacy.For decades, EU institutions have quietly rewritten their own powers; through courts, crises, delegated acts and clever legal gymnastics,  creating a system where the centre expands and national democracy shrinks.This Deep Dive cuts through the mythology:• Competence creep is not an accident — it’s a methodCourts reinterpret treaties, the Commission legislates without legislators, and the Council ducks responsibility by outsourcing real decisions to the technocracy. The result is a Brussels that governs far beyond its mandate.• Crisis governance as a power machineFrom the Eurozone meltdown to COVID and now “values enforcement,” every emergency becomes an excuse for more centralisation. Whether the policy fits the crisis is irrelevant - the answer is always “more EU.”• Rule-of-law conditionality as political weaponryFunds can now be withheld from governments Brussels dislikes, on the basis of vague “country recommendations” and administrative judgments that never face democratic scrutiny.• And the warning that matters most:If this continues, Brexit will not remain an outlier. A Union that overrides sovereignty and ignores subsidiarity is a Union that erodes its own legitimacy.If Europe is to remain democratic, it must return to clear limits, respect for national self-government, and the principle that powers come from the member states, not despite them.Read the report here: https://brussels.mcc.hu/uploads/default/0001/02/406b613a4df11a5e76c55230e18034bbaa0a39bf.pdf

This week, MCC Brussels’ John O’Brien sits down with Leonardo Orlando. He is an  evolutionary psychologist, co-author of Sex, Science and Censure, and one of the harshest critics of gender ideology in Europe.Orlando makes a simple but devastating point: you can’t understand society if you pretend biology stops at the neck. Yet universities have built entire “gender” departments on the denial of basic human nature. The result? A flat-earth worldview masquerading as scholarship, and an academic culture terrified of the truth.In this Deep Dive, we explore:Why evolutionary science is now taboo in universities.Researchers are punished for stating biological facts, while ideologues with tenure churn out theories that collapse on contact with reality.How the censorship works.Orlando explains how hundreds of cancelled events and silenced researchers point to a global pattern, not isolated incidents, where dissenters are pushed out of academia altogether.What the science actually shows.Across cultures and across time, behavioural sex differences are robust, measurable, and rooted in evolution. The evidence is overwhelming, which is precisely why activists work so hard to suppress it.Why ignoring biology leads to bad policy.From domestic violence to fertility decline to the gender-neutral toy obsession, policymakers burn public money because they refuse to accept basic human nature.And the heart of the argument:Biology isn’t destiny — unless you ignore it.For anyone tired of ideological propaganda dressed up as scholarship, this conversation is a breath of fresh air.Follow MCC Brussels on social media:https://twitter.com/MCC_Brusselshttps://facebook.com/MCCBrusselshttps://linkedin.com/company/mcc-brussels/website:https://brussels.mcc.hu

This week, Jacob Reynolds is joined by Pieter Cleppe and Anthony Gilland to review 2025 – the populist surge, the elite fightback on speech and elections, and Europe’s growing weakness from Washington to Ukraine.Populists surge – and the public stops whisperingThe conversation opens on the mood-shift of 2025: farmer protests across Europe, citizens stepping in where the state won’t (including border pressure), and parents scrutinising what schools are teaching. They run through the electoral and polling picture – from anti-centralisation politics in Czechia to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, and a Germany where broken promises and a spending splurge fuel a protest mood and push the AfD higher in the polls.The elite fightback – Democracy Shield, “pre-bunking”, lawfareAs pressure rises, the panel argues Brussels reaches for control: the Democracy Shield’s language of “safeguarding” and “protecting” elections, and a wider push to police online discourse. They dig into “pre-bunking” as proactive narrative management (AI plus NGO fact-checkers), link it to the Digital Services Act, and discuss headline-grabbing interventions – including a major fine on X and the pattern of legal-institutional moves around high-stakes elections (from France to Romania).US–EU reality check – then the Brussels scandals pile upOn the global stage, they frame EU–US relations as a clash over regulation and values – with America increasingly hostile to Europe’s speech regime and Europe looking strategically irrelevant. Ukraine exposes that weakness: arguments over sanctions, Russian assets, and the EU’s limited leverage. Then the year’s “unmasking” theme returns via scandals – NGO funding and influence operations, Jean Monnet-style academic patronage, PfizerGate, and the College of Europe affair.Follow MCC Brussels on social media:https://twitter.com/MCC_Brusselshttps://facebook.com/MCCBrusselshttps://linkedin.com/company/mcc-brussels/website:https://brussels.mcc.hu

This week, Jacob Reynolds is joined by Philipp Siegert, Deputy Research Director at MCC Brussels, to unpack the EU’s migration pact blow-up, a College of Europe fraud probe, and the vandalism of Brussels’ Grand Place nativity scene. Pay up or take migrantsThe Commission sells the Pact on Migration and Asylum as “solidarity” – but the rollout is exposing open fractures across Europe. The Council is discussing relocation quotas (around 21,000) and a “solidarity contribution” of €20,000 for states that refuse to accept relocations, with Central European governments signalling pushback. The result is a policy that’s legally adopted, politically contested, and heading towards a confrontation that could run well past its planned June 2026 start date. A ‘quiet’ tender, then the real moneyA new scandal centres on the College of Europe and an EEAS-linked tender that allegedly stayed below a transparency threshold (around €143,000), before larger sums followed. The episode walks through how a dormitory requirement narrowed the field, how funding then jumped via additional grants (including ~€650,000) and later a much larger figure (~€960,000), and why investigators are now circling figures connected to the project. Defaced nativity, stolen JesusBrussels’ Grand Place nativity scene went “inclusive” – with faceless figures – and then got desecrated: the baby Jesus figure’s head was stolen and the tent was tagged “Free Palestine”, alongside reports of a major demonstration and clashes around the Christmas market opening. Philipp argues it’s not just vandalism, but a wider cultural pattern – a politics of deconstruction that leaves Europe’s Christian heritage permanently on the defensive. Follow MCC Brussels on social media:https://twitter.com/MCC_Brusselshttps://facebook.com/MCCBrusselshttps://linkedin.com/company/mcc-brussels/website:https://brussels.mcc.hu