That Brussels slows down during August is well known. Though European Commission spokespeople repeatedly stress that the EU’s executive arm remains hard at work – especially this year – anyone strolling through the corridors of its Berlaymont headquarters can see there are more than a few people out of the office.
Now in the age of social media, it might be a bit easier to establish who is working and when. To wit: of the eight EU commissioners who regularly use Twitter, four of them have gone completely quiet for the whole month of August, with another commissioner managing only one entry.
All told, the group have tweeted 23 times in as many days. That’s less than a tenth of the usual Twitter activity. In June, for instance, the eight tweeters managed 270 messages, including retweets, between them.
A breakdown of Twitter summer stats after the jump.
June August
Hedegaard (climate) 21 0
Andor (social affairs) 29 4
Potocnik (environment) 22 1
Kroes (telecoms) 86 5
Kallas (transport) 28 0
Damanaki (fisheries) 57 0
Georgieva (humanitarian) 15 13
Reding (justice) 12 0
TOTAL 270 23
Similarly, three of the five commissioners who maitain blogs (Kroes, Piebalgs and Damanaki) have not had a single entry.
This new Brussels Blog metric is of course arbitrary, if only because those commissioners who bother to tweet are included. And it may reflect staffers being on holiday rather than the bosses themselves, as many commissioners get their teams to tweet and blog for them (some of them openly, some of them less so).
But by our measure, the least-rested commissioner appears to be Kristalina Georgieva (or her team), the energetic commissioner for humanitarian aid, who has managed 13 tweets in August (more than half the total) and 6 out of 8 blog entries. The events in Libya, Syria and especially Somalia have kept her busy. She also has a new spokesman who started in the run-up to the summer, already well rested.
By the way: follow Brussels Blog on Twitter (@ftbrusselsblog) for our updates.
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