In the otherwise ugly EU quarter in Brussels, something of a building boom is going on. There’s the €300m (£241m)-plus being spent to convert an art deco pile into a palace fit for a European president. In a nearby park another €100m makeover is creating the European parliament‘s version of the continent’s postwar history. That’s after the parliament splashed out another €20m just down the street to create a multimedia tribute to itself last year, the Parliamentarium visitors’ centre.
Austerity Europe? Not at the European Union‘s Brussels HQ. While budgets, public spending, and civil service staffing levels are being slashed from Portugal to Poland, Greece to Great Britain, to be one of the 56,000 EU eurocrats is to escape most of the pain felt in almost every country in the union.