Leave it to a German to get EU-Europe properly encircled.
As a historian who also happens to be German, that was my spontaneous reaction to Ursula von der Leyen’s annual grand – and always grandiloquent – “state-of-the-union” address to the European Parliament in Strasbourg.
It’s not really a “union,” of course, and not really a “parliament,” either: technically, the EU is a confederation messed up by the ideological construct of “supranationalism”; and the parliament has no independent legislative power, but let’s not dwell on the obvious.
At the head of her Commission (read: over-reaching Central Committee) of career bureaucrats, von der Leyen is the unelected de-facto leader and personification of the Frankenstein wanna-be-super-state that has long gobbled up idealistic dreams of European unity.
