Let it go! How the EU would benefit from being more like Disney

Welcome to Declassified, a weekly humor column.

Is being the president of France a Mickey Mouse job?

The answer is clearly yes, as Emmanuel Macron will spend Friday at Disneyland Paris, visiting the opening of an exhibition dedicated to the film “Frozen” (and it’s imaginatively titled sequel, “Frozen II”).

If you haven’t seen “Frozen,” it’s about a place that’s cast into a perpetual winter (Europe) and is governed by a blonde woman in a tower (European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen). Among the other characters are a love interest who turns out to be a baddie of the highest order (U.S. President Donald Trump), and an annoying sidekick who keeps getting into trouble and threatening to ruin everything (Hungarian Prime MinisterViktor Orbán). At the end, everything’s resolved and they all live happily ever after (which seems unlikely).

European Commissioner Apostolos Tzitzikostas, who is in charge of the transport and tourism brief, will also be in Paris for the opening of the World of Frozen, which is neither a frozen food shop nor about proposed legislation that’s stuck in a Council of the EU working party.

Declassified reached out to OLAF for comment and received this reply: “We think you’re confusing OLAF, the EU watchdog, with OLAF, the annoying snowman from the Frozen series. Please, leave us alone.”

The last time the EU intersected with the Paris branch of the Disney empire was in 2023, when a train carrying hundreds of MEPs and European Parliament officials took a wrong turn on the way to Strasbourg and ended up at the theme park instead. Wouldn’t the EU be much more relatable if, instead of heading off to the Grand Est region (or Alsace, for our older readers), the Parliament went to Disney once a month instead?

“Right kids, I know you want to go to Star Wars Hyperspace Mountain, but first let’s join the line for the new Hemicycle ride. You’ll get to write as many amendments as you can in 90 seconds and hope they aren’t rejected for falling outside of the regulation’s scope.”

Meanwhile, staying in France — but away from Paris — the far right has been showing it truly doesn’t care about foreigners by publishing maps that are waaaay off.

According to Libération, the latest edition of Cahiers de l’Europe — a journal published with money from the Patriots for Europe group in Brussels and edited by Philippe Olivier, an MEP who just happens to be French far-right leader Marine Le Pen’s brother-in-law — makes some rather rudimentary geography errors.

One map highlighting the “New Silk Roads” is particularly poor, with Cairo located where Tripoli should be, and Moscow where Istanbul should be.

Perhaps the far-right journal’s target audience is Trump, who has publicly mentioned the countries of Nambia, Nipple and Button (we think he meant Namibia — or maybe Zambia or perhaps Gambia — and Nepal and Bhutan, but we can’t be sure).

CAPTION COMPETITION

“Yes, it is surprisingly lifelike and can almost speak in full sentences.
Oh, you meant the robot, not Donald!”

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“I thought I asked for Big Macs, not vegetables!”

by Silas Kennedy