The imposed state of emergency has created unprecedented circumstances. Many cannot make use of their prepaid holiday to a destination abroad and what they share is that their efforts to cancel the arrangement and get a refund or postpone the reservation have been unsuccessful. That is where we come in. The experts of the ECC-Net are tasked with informing consumers about the stipulations laid out in the European and the national legislations, says Sonya Spasova, Director of European Consumer Centre - Bulgaria, in an interview to EUROPOST.

In times of crisis, there can be a blind “rally around the flag” response from the public, the sheep behaviour to follow the leader. People are simply too scared to ask questions or provide oversight and this could result in ceding unwarranted authority, says Laura Thornton, Director for Global Programs at International IDEA, in an interview to EUROPOST.

Covid-19 clearly showed us that Europe is far from a finished product and needs a reboot. The world is changing and geopolitical layers are shifting. If we want to avoid getting squashed between global players, we need a different European Union, a union that is able to protect the interests of our citizens. As currently constructed, the bloc is not equipped to do so, says Ilhan Kyuchyuk, ALDE Party Vice-President and MEP, in an interview to Europost.

EU budget rules are not designed for rescuing, but for operating under normal conditions. Now we have an emergency and you tell Member States that they will get all this money, expecting them to quickly prepare a programme and also spend the funds quickly, but in reality a year will pass until the first euro is spent. If there were absorption problems before, why shouldn't there be absorption problems with this recovery package, says Dr Jorge Nunez Ferrer, Senior Research Fellow at CEPS, in an interview to Europost.

The fight over the Mobility Package is a very long one and it is too early to tell whether it has been won or lost. When it is all said and done, it will most likely be neither of those things because we are talking about a compromise. What we need to do is get as good law provisions as possible. It is clear that the industry is going to undergo reforms. So we can safely say that this is among the bad periods we have had in this fight, but it is not the last, the MEP said in an interview to Monitor.

The main role of the European Data Protection Supervisor, apart from the supervision of European institutions, is to take part in the legislative processes in the EU in order to help the institutions in drafting legal acts. We try to be as open as possible to any kind of consultations and contacts. We are taking part in consultations, we are organising our own events, and we are putting special emphasis on the cooperation with civil society, the European Data Protection Supervisor says in an interview to Europost.

Society has often dismissed art and culture, considering them children of a lesser god in the vast scale of the world’s economy. So, we need to stimulate the arts and prove that notion wrong, says former Venice Biennale curator Francesco Bonami, while answering questions by the readers of ArtNews.

Migration is a complex, long-standing and absolutely ordinary phenomenon, which can entail challenges at times, but also plenty of opportunities. And, as such, it should be addressed and dealt with in a comprehensive way. When one considers migration as a problem, then the whole discourse is in a way misled. I would say that the pandemic has exacerbated an already existing attitude that, very broadly, the EU has kept over the years, Italian political researcher Federico Alagna says in an interview to Europost.

I believe the EU must start to view itself more as a political force with geostrategic instead of technocratic priorities, keeping in mind that territory, size of market, building a sense of civilisational belonging are all pressingly urgent milestones if Europe as a continent seeks to remain a global power, says Katerina Kolozova, professor of political philosophy, in an interview to EUROPOST.

The European integration of North Macedonia depends on its ability to overcome the inherited hatred that has been dividing us and to muster up the courage to break the cycle of perpetuating lies with every young generation, says Andrey Kovatchev, MEP from EPP/GERB, in an interview to Monitor.