The better you know Brussels, the more you realize that EU lawmakers can be grouped into categories far more suitable than mere political affiliation or nationality.

Here’s your guide to how to distinguish members of the European Parliament from one another — and if you’re a lawmaker reading this, you’ll recognize right where you fit in.

Wannabes

Arriving in Brussels with grand visions of breathing new life into the European project, you’ve spent the summer gobbling up reports from think tanks, wading through the history of the European Coal and Steel Community, and agonizing over which committee memberships to shoot for. “Am I the next Robert Schuman?” you wonder.

After subjecting potential staffers to grueling interviews, you’ve hired a team of five diligent assistants — all of whom look identical, are fresh out of the College of Europe, and have a thirst for amending legislation. Collectively your young team has a working knowledge of all 24 official EU languages — but communicates mainly through niche EU memes on WhatsApp.

You’re pumped up when named shadow rapporteur on the Parliament’s nonbinding resolution regarding single-use toothpicks. With the far right rising and Euroskepticism on the march, you think to yourself: “If I just write a few more own-initiative reports, I’ll have made my contribution.”

Baggage

The national party leadership had a really exciting idea to present to you last year: “You know what you should do next? Go to Brussels … we really need someone of your caliber there.”

You failed to read the message between the lines: You were being shunted off to the no-man’s-land of EU politics because you’d become too much of a burden back home. Maybe it was that harassment scandal, or the allegations that you were fiddling your expenses. Or maybe it was just that you were useless, but somehow remained popular with the base.

Instead, you congratulated yourself on having received a promotion. And what had been a problem for a single country was now a burden shared by all 27.

Zombies

You’ve just been elected again. Quelle surprise!

They say Europe is built through crises, but somehow you always remain standing. You’ve been in the European Parliament so long you resemble its buildings: crumbling ruins propped up by taxpayers.

You’re an expert on the Parliament and can quote from the rules of procedure and its annexes as if from the Holy Bible. You dazzle everyone you corner in the elevator with inane trivia: “It was actually the British conservatives who created the Internal Market Committee, you know.”

The fuss over new rules to stamp out harassment or phase out the special double pension fund annoys you; freedom of mandate is your mantra. Back home, the party is seething because no one has dared compete for your spot on the list. They make dinosaur sounds behind your back at the party congress.

But next election, a young challenger might emerge …

#MEPtivists

You despise lobbyists, but that hasn’t stopped you from adopting all their tricks. Your natural habitat is doing photo ops in gaggles outside the Parliament hemicycle, waving bits of paper emblazoned with hashtags.

You send mass emails to other MEPs asking for signatures to declaim the latest outrage uttered by a right-winger in the plenary (which no one noticed until you told them). You’ve kept a gruesome clothing factory in South Asia running at full capacity for a year to create piles of T-shirts emblazoned with slogans — precisely the sort of thing you profess to deplore. (A cupboard in the Parliament contains 300 such T-shirts declaring: “END FAST FASHION NOW.”)

Despite refusing to meet any interest groups you oppose, and only communicating with commissioners via pro forma parliamentary questions, you’re still considered an agenda-setter in Brussels. Probably because you shout the loudest.

Swindlers

Brussels was a hotbed of corruption and nefarious federalists before you arrived, you tell yourself, so why not make some quick coin while you’re here? If EU budget funds aren’t spent on your third apartment, they’ll only go toward destroying national sovereignty.

Knowing your amendments will be rejected out-of-hand due to the cordon sanitaire, you concentrate what skill you have on extracting every cent from the EU’s gelatinous underbelly.

Kickbacks from fake assistants, essential “missions” to exotic locations, consulting for foreign governments with dubious human rights records, picking up an appearance bonus on an empty Friday in Strasbourg, funneling EU money back to the national party — you’re game for anything. Manipulating the system like a skilled masseur, you’ve become better at accounting than legislating.

After all, it’s low risk, high reward. Even if the the EU’s anti-fraud office starts to investigate you, it’s not likely anyone will find out. And if it becomes a criminal case, the authorities will either bungle it or — at worst — politely ask for the money back.

As you lean back into your armchair, you think: “Maybe the EU’s not so bad after all.”

Ghosts

Once upon a time you were a household name in your home country — a foreign minister, perhaps, or even a prime minister who led a short-lived technocratic government or negotiated your country’s entry into the EU.

But that was long ago, and was exhaustively chronicled in your memoirs, which nobody bought. In Brussels you hold prestigious-sounding roles such as the second vice chair of a fancy committee. But you’re bored stiff, and journalists stopped calling long ago.

Here, you’re just another MEP — and the center of your world is still your capital city. You’re watching the news, not making it.

“Do you think I could get back into national politics?” you ask your advisers, who encourage you to do so. But with every passing day your country continues to change, and people back home find it a little harder to remember who you were.

Soldiers

On a tight leash from the governing party back home, your job is not to think, but to act — and to whip others into shape as well, for the sake of the government. If the prime minister wants a law voted down, it shall be done.

Striding down the corridor, fresh from a meeting of the Constitutional Affairs Committee, you preach about the importance of strengthening the Parliament — but you yourself are an extension of the European Council. Your talking points in the hemicycle hit exclusively national themes and you frequently appear on national political TV shows — even when you should be in Strasbourg voting.

With every government reshuffle you find yourself willing your phone to buzz: “Is this the call that makes me a minister?”

Yet your fate is entwined with your leader’s: If they fall, you’ll be just another MEP. That might give you more freedom to act out your beliefs on the European stage — but who would want that?