EU Parliament: Sonneborn stops laughing

That’s what Martin Sonneborn gets out of it now. Instead of sitting back as a member of the European Parliament – as he announced during the election campaign – he really got involved with EU politics. He wanted to be knowledgeable so that he could educate people about the workings of Brussels politics. And at the end of his second legislative period, which he writes about in his new book, he comes to a tough analysis.

Brussels means »Presidents with criminal records, corrupt commissioners, MPs with handbags full of cash, contracts worth billions that are negotiated via SMS. And a policy that is made less for 450 million than for 450 millionaires. This is what the party politician writes in the foreword. Right from the start, the European Parliamentarian wants to take away any belief in integrity, competent politicians in Brussels and Strasbourg.

You can also learn a lot about EU politics and smile about the current legislative period from 2019 to 2024 in his new book “Mr. Sonneborn stays in Brussels”. It’s always entertaining to see his assistant and him visit the office of an unsuspecting CDU MP, which was converted at a cost of hundreds of thousands of euros in tax money. Or he bums champagne and cream cake at a celebration of the new vice president.

The educational work about allegedly incompetent or corrupt politicians is packaged in anecdotes, as in the first book about his first legislative period. But Sonneborn has become more serious. After all, when the new book was published, he had already been looking at the EU in Brussels and Strasbourg for over nine years. Now the educational work comes to the fore more than the humor. This can be observed not only in the book, but also in his internet videos.

This may also be because there seem to be few allies in the Brussels political bubble for the humorous approach. Almost ten years of unfunny guys around you, not even Sonneborn, the eternal satirist, can easily put up with it. In the book, he often has informative exchanges about designated EU commissioners or parliamentary colleagues with his two loyal companions. His office manager and legal advisor Dustin Hoffmann and a nameless “European policy advisor.” His satirist colleague and MP Nico Semsrott left the party in January 2021 due to allegations of racism against Sonneborn.

If you’re wondering how Sonneborn feels about these allegations against him in retrospect, you can read that too. The satirist published a photo of himself on Twitter in which he was wearing a T-shirt with a slogan alluding to Donald Trump’s anti-China course. Some “Rs” had been replaced by an “L” (in reference to the fact that many Asians supposedly cannot pronounce “R”). Many users saw anti-Asian racism in the tweet.

In the book, Sonneborn writes what was already reflected in his apology at the time: He still considers it a joke – admittedly a failed one – and dismisses the accusations of racism as the outrage of primarily young people. He cites a Spiegel interview with him from back then, in which he demands “that not every small group declares itself the center of the world.” Ultimately, it’s about the fight against social inequality. For Sonneborn, racism is a minor pain compared to the fight against capitalism. Whether the incident and his handling of it will have an impact on his election result if Sonneborn runs again will become clear in the European elections in June.

As funny or controversial as people in Germany find him, his European counterparts from other EU countries are unlikely to understand him: he always gives his speeches in the Strasbourg Parliament in German, all of which are printed in the book. The simultaneous interpreters can hardly keep up with his style. (To Angela Merkel in 2020: “If I read correctly, you are planning to suffocate the coronavirus with a lot of money; by the way, something that the EU unfortunately did not manage to do with the no less shabby dictator Orbán.”). Sonneborn himself discusses the fact that the joke is probably not conveyed in the translations. But he leaves it at that and doesn’t come to the conclusion that he is speaking in English.

He is just as unwavering in sticking to the political issues that were close to his heart from his first five years in Brussels: he criticizes Azerbaijan’s handling of the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave and calls for the official recognition of Nagorno-Karabakh as a republic. He talks about his campaign with the left-wing Bundestag member Sevim Dağdelen to nominate Wikileaks founder Julian Assange for the Nobel Peace Prize. And he and his party want to prevent the introduction of a threshold clause in the European elections, contrary to the attempts of the SPD and CDU. Serious topics that go beyond the drinking jokes and beer-centricity of some other party members.

All of this is packed into short texts, arranged chronologically and given place names from Brussels to Nagorno-Karabakh. A significant portion of the 432 pages are comments from the Internet as well as newspaper reports about him and excerpts from interviews he gave. For this collection of media, Sonneborn and the publisher are using the same structure as in his first Brussels book, which landed on the Spiegel bestseller list. This could seem as if Sonneborn didn’t put much effort into writing it down. But there are so many stories, situations and actions in the lines that it becomes clear: Sonneborn is really committed as a politician.

Martin Sonneborn: “Mr. Sonneborn stays in Brussels”, KiWi, born, 432 pages, 20 €.