.png)
9 months ago
9
ARTICLE AD BOX
A conservative Estonian activist made history last fall by proposing to his girlfriend in the European Parliament.
Yet while Kuldar Lepp, 26, and Marta Schönberg, 18, were the first to get engaged in such a manner, they are hardly the first love story to begin in the house of European democracy.
Lawmakers, assistants, lawyers, and others have long met while at work and gone on to form an ever closer union. And they’re just a subset of the power couples populating Brussels, where pillow talk and shop talk get mixed together and political rivals sometimes make loving bedfellows.
In honor of Valentine’s Day, POLITICO is highlighting 14 Brussels power couples. Each couple was asked a standard set of questions about how they met, to what extent they work together, and how they manage conflicts of interest, should they arise.
On a scale of one to five, they were each assigned a power rating, as well as a “raised-eyebrow” factor for controversy or risk of conflict of interest.
Double Dutch
Pieter Jan Kleiweg de Zwaan and Delphine Pronk
Raised Eyebrow Factor 🤨🤨🤨
Power Rating: 💪💪💪💪💪
At the helm of the EU’s powerful Political and Security Committee, Deputy Political Director of the European External Action Service Delphine Pronk chairs high-stakes negotiations among member countries on how to respond to wars and other threats. Back when her hubby Pieter Jan Kleiweg was the Netherlands’ ambassador to Belgium, they were known as a dynamic duo, attending diplomatic receptions and networking in tandem. Their power factor has shot up since his recent promotion as The Hague’s top EU envoy. The couple said they keep their “private relationship private, but we encourage the whole Brussels bubble to buy Dutch flowers for their loved ones.”
Eurocrat Union
Pia Ahrenkilde Hansen and Denis Redonnet
Raised Eyebrow Factor: 🤨
Power Rating: 💪💪💪💪💪
Few play a more fundamental role in projecting the EU’s ideals and soft power than this understated Franco-Danish couple. Pia Ahrenkilde Hansen oversaw the Commission department charged with communicating the EU’s mission and values to its citizens and the world, before her recent switch to director general in charge of education and culture. Denis Redonnet, as No. 2 in DG TRADE, is the EU’s top trade enforcer, now leading the EU’s probe into Chinese electric car subsidies. Despite (or perhaps because of) Ahrenkilde Hansen’s communications background, neither replied to requests for comment.
Mr. and Mrs. Right
Marion Maréchal and Vincenzo Sofo
Raised Eyebrow Factor: 🤨
Power rating: 💪💪💪
Marion Maréchal is the niece of far-right French presidential hopeful Marine Le Pen, but she broke away to join a party even further to the right, Reconquest, founded by Eric Zemmour, the right-wing firebrand. Maréchal’s husband Vincenzo Sofo is more au fait with Brussels, as an MEP for Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party. Sofo actually left the far-right League party during this term to join Meloni’s crew. Reconquest is on track to get six MEPs in June.
Marion Marechal and her partner Vincenzo Sofo | Sameer Al-Doumy/AFP via Getty ImagesThey met at a conference on the future of Europe that Sofo organized in Milan. “Then I kept organizing political conferences because I wanted to invite her again in Italy,” Sofo added. “After some time the strategy, I must say, worked out.”
Maréchal told POLITICO through a spokesperson: “We are both fervent patriots and it can happen that French and Italian interests are not always aligned. In theory, we avoid talking about Napoleon.”
Last week the pair held a joint press conference to announce that Reconquest’s sole MEP Nicolas Bay was joining the broader political grouping where Sofo also sits. They whispered to each other in Italian on the sidelines.
Green Deal
Terry Reintke and Mélanie Vogel
Raised eyebrow factor: 🤨🤨
Power: 💪💪💪
German MEP Terry Reintke co-leads the Greens in the European Parliament, which is where she first met her partner Melanie Vogel, a French senator for the Greens representing French voters abroad. Tying them together in a relationship that began in 2019 is a visceral opposition to fascism and the far-right, and advocacy for women’s rights and greener policies.
Both also have big roles at the EU level. Reintke was recently made one of the Greens’ lead candidates for the European election in June, and Vogel is the co-president of the party that picked her, the European Greens.
The couple are proudly open about their relationship. “For me being out and visible is an integral part of my freedom,” Reintke wrote on Instagram last year. But they are also cautious about possible conflicts of interest. “We do not share information with each other that is not supposed to be shared,” Reintke texted POLITICO. When it came to Reintke’s nomination as the Greens’ lead candidate for June’s election, Vogel says she stayed well out of it.
“I just didn’t take care of designing the procedure proposed to our delegates and I didn’t mingle into our member parties’ support to the different candidates,” Vogel said in a message.
Public-private partnership
David Earnshaw and Josephine Wood
Raised Eyebrow Factor: 🤨🤨
Power Rating: 💪💪
Josephine Wood and David Earnshaw met at a consultancy in the 90s and overlapped as lobbyists for the drugmaker GSK before going their separate ways professionally: Wood worked in ex-Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes’ Cabinet and advised the Parliament’s Socialists before landing at the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking in charge of supercomputing, where she’s head of unit for strategy and governance. Earnshaw led Burson Marsteller’s Brussels outfit before heading back to pharma, with MSD.
The crisp policy differences risk getting blurrier in Earnshaw’s next gig, as president of Portland Brussels, which boasts computer hardware clients. But he says he’ll be sticking to his preferred subjects of health care, environment and food issues.
The Marvelous Mrs. (and Mr.) Maydell
Eva Maydell and Niklas Maydell
Raised Eyebrow Factor: 🤨🤨🤨
Power Rating: 💪💪💪
Eva Maydell (née Paunova), had already managed to establish herself, as she put it in her POLITICO 28 Class of 2015 profile, as “the person to go to for digital issues” during her first term as an MEP when she married Niklas Maydell, a prominent M&A lawyer, in 2017. Their overlapping professional interest in tech policy is clear: In 2016, she highlighted the Austro-Swedish attorney’s insights at a panel she hosted about “#Regulation4Innovation.” Now a partner with Weil’s antitrust practice and head of its Brussels office, Niklas Maydell’s varied portfolio includes work on mergers for tech clients — including Microsoft and NVIDIA — as well as manufacturing and energy deals.
These days Eva Maydell is frequently cited as a future commissioner for Bulgaria. She’s developed a reputation as a friend to Big Tech on the Industry, Research and Energy Committee, where she’s led her EPP group’s work on the Chips Act, cybersecurity rules, and the data strategy. Neither Maydell responded to POLITICO’s standard questions, including those about potential conflict of interest.
Labour of love
Saar Van Bueren and Diederik Samsom
Raised Eyebrow Factor: 🤨🤨🤨
Power Rating: 💪💪💪
These acolytes of former EU climate chief Frans Timmermans may need to lean on each other through a political rough patch. The pair, who tied the knot last year, both ranked on POLITICO’s Brussels Power 40 list in 2023 — Diederik Samsom as Timmermans’ right-hand man on climate policy and Saar Van Bueren as the European Socialists’ top campaign strategist — but have seen their patron and party suffer in the polls. Timmermans was replaced in the Commission by a center-right politician, who in turn replaced Samsom with a center-right politician, leaving him without much to do over the last months of the mandate. Van Bueren has lots to do, with polls suggesting the Socialists are on track to lose seats and influence in the June election.
Nonetheless, this couple has ridden out adversity before: Their relationship was the subject of plenty of political gossip in The Netherlands, and Van Bueren had to change roles in 2019 to avoid working directly under her partner. Neither replied to requests for comment.
Sex and drugs
Christian Ehler and Pernille Weiss
Raised Eyebrow Factor: 🤨🤨🤨🤨🤨
Power Rating: 💪💪
This MEP love story has a side plot that could affect how much you pay for medicines. MEP Christian Ehler, a German European People’s Party lawmaker, is the chair of an independent Parliament research panel. His girlfriend, Danish EPP MEP Pernille Weiss, sits on the Panel for the Future of Science and Technology (STOA) as well. Both were targets of intense lobbying by Big Pharma to discredit a STOA report that was critical of the industry’s lucrative incentives system — before that report was removed from the internet.
Pernille Weiss and Christian Ehler | POLITICO photo-illustration (Source images via EP)The couple has acknowledged their relationship publicly — and then some.
“Before I became friends with Christian, I experienced three years without being in a relationship and without being sexually active,” Weiss told the Danish podcast Fantasier in August. “It has been really nice.”
Weiss posted on a Facebook group for Danes in Belgium last year: “Looking for a strong physiotherapist for my huge boyfriend who has a stupid neck and shoulders.”
Nonetheless, it’s unclear whether other STOA members knew about the pairing. A Parliament spokesperson said there’s no particular requirement to formally disclose in this context. They’ve also teamed up on a missive about German-Danish border policy. Neither Ehler nor Weiss, who POLITICO spotted holding hands on a late-night stroll around Strasbourg last month, replied to questions for this article.
When they’re not discussing the future of science and technology, the couple attend Copenhagen Fashion Week events together among other official missions.
Keep your enemies closer
Antony Beumer and Vula Tsetsi
Raised Eyebrow Factor: 🤨🤨🤨
Power Rating: 💪💪💪 💪
These lovers are rivals.
Tsetsi, a Brussels power player who hails from Greece, runs the day-to-day operations of the Greens in the European Parliament, while her Dutch partner Beumer runs the Socialists.
Both secretaries-general have powerful positions at the head of their groups, handling multi-million-euro budgets and managing internal scandals closely with the top MEPs. “We, as a general rule, do not attend the same meetings. Furthermore, we do not engage in direct negotiations with each other,” the couple wrote in a joint email.
Lobbyist powerhousehold
Francesca Siciliano Stevens and James Stevens
Raised Eyebrow Factor: 🤨
Power Rating: 💪💪
Bruges, at the College of Europe, was the start of this love story of public affairs pros who now find themselves at the top of the field. James Stevens is founder of the Brussels office of Rud Pedersen’s consulting empire, whose exponential growth quickly made it one of the biggest policy shops in town. Francesca Siciliano Stevens has spent the past four years at the helm of EUROPEN, the big-tent trade association for the packaging supply chain fiercely haggling over the EU’s sprawling packaging regs.
Inter-institutional love interest
François Gabriel and Mariya Gabriel
Raised Eyebrow Factor: 🤨
Power Rating: 💪💪💪💪
The Gabriels’ romance began in the Parliament in 2010, but it’s extended across the EU institutions — and the Continent — since then. Mariya Gabriel is now deputy prime minister and foreign affairs minister of her native Bulgaria, after serving as EU commissioner for digital issues and later research.
Mariya Nedelcheva met François Gabriel shortly after her election to the European Parliament. He was assistant to Joseph Daul, then head of the EPP group. Daul, an eminence grise of the center-right, was reportedly the best man at their 2012 wedding.
Today, François Gabriel is a deputy head of cabinet for Parliament President Roberta Metsola, responsible for foreign relations with the EU’s southern neighbors and western Balkans. There’s never been much overlap in their work, François Gabriel said; if anything, he wishes for more: With his wife split between Sofia and Brussels — and his time divided between Brussels and Strasbourg — he added: “It’s difficult.”
Luxembourgish lovers
Claude Wiseler and Isabel Wiseler Lima
Raised Eyebrow Factor: 🤨
Power Rating: 💪💪
Teenage sweethearts Claude and Isabel Wiseler have been together for 45 years, and are the Luxembourgish power couple par excellence. He is the president of Prime Minister Luc Frieden’s Christian Social People’s Party, part of the center-right EPP, which gave Europe such greats as Jean-Claude Juncker. He’s also the speaker of Luxembourg’s Chamber of Deputies. Isabel Wiseler Lima, an MEP, has worked on human rights and was recently made one of the European Parliament’s Quaestors, giving her a say over the internal functioning of the institution, and reforms such as on harassment rules.
“In case there are disagreements — which happens — each of us follows our own convictions,” Wiseler Lima said. “That’s indispensable for the harmony of our life together.”
Socialist socialites
Laura Ballarín and Javi López
Raised Eyebrow Factor: 🤨🤨
Power Rating: 💪
The Catalan socialist pairing is well-known in Spanish circles. While Javi López is an MEP active on Latin American topics, his partner Laura Ballarín was until recently more of a behind-the-scenes operator, as the Head of Cabinet to Iratxe García, the Spanish lawmaker who leads the entire Socialists and Democrats faction in Parliament. Ballarín also featured in headlines around Europe when she appeared in holiday snaps with Francesco Giorgi, a former Socialist staffer swept up in the corruption scandal dubbed Qatargate. Ballarín is not accused of any wrongdoing. After a tough year, things looked up for her and when the MEP Adriana Maldonado became an MP in Spain it opened up a space for her in Brussels, and she now sits alongside her partner in the hemicycle.
Both MEPs declined to comment on their personal life.
Great minds think (tank) alike
Ann Mettler and Paul Hofheinz
Raised Eyebrow Factor: 🤨
Power rating: 💪💪
Ann Mettler and Paul Hofheinz have two children, sure, but they’ve also spawned think tanks. After meeting at Davos, they founded the Lisbon Council in 2003, and it’s still helmed by Hofheinz, a former Wall Street Journal reporter. Mettler went on to run the European Political Strategy Centre, an in-house think tank at the Commission, churning out policy ideas for then-Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker from 2014 to 2019. These days, Mettler reports to Bill Gates, heading the Europe operation for his private office, and as vice president of Breakthrough Energy, the billionaire’s initiative for net-zero emissions by 2050.
Jacopo Barigazzi, Camille Gijs, Aoife White, Agathe Legris, Carlo Martuscelli, and Zoya Sheftalovich contributed reporting.
English (US)