The one who embraced his emotions

“For when I talk to the elderly, it is easy to get into an emotional narrative: their parents suffered from the war and it means a lot to them to see Germans and French people voting in the same chamber, for the same assembly, deciding on the same things.”

A swift Q&A with Jaume, director for communications at the European Parliament and spokesperson of the institution

Q: Barcelona or Brussels?
Barcelona I call my home. Brussels is the place where I spent half of my life, yet I still feel a bit like a tourist here - a tourist that knows the city extremely well (He laughs)

Q: How to communicate Europe?
People who are over 60 years old have a different life experience than the younger generation. For when I talk to the elderly, it is easy to get into an emotional narrative: their parents suffered from the war and it means a lot to them to see Germans and French people voting in the same chamber, for the same assembly, deciding on the same things. On the other hand, this seems quite normal and does not bring any emotions to people in their mid-twenties, who have grown up with the European Union and the cohesion it brought. They are used to this.

Q: You said that ‘communication has to embrace emotion’. How so?
I think that the European Union cannot be justified by tangible matters.

Q: Are you confident in the state of our European democracy?
I am but I am also aware that it is fragile. A fairly clear example of this fragility is Brexit - the British youth did not see it coming.

Photo and story by @soundous.boualam