Tip if it’s your first plenary: there’s only one true Strasbourg. Don’t get off the bus at the wrong one

Back in Strasbourg for SOTEU and just saw an ad targeting millennials the way we used to make fun of boomers. It’s happened, my friends, we’ve been boomerized

Questions? Ask. I'm a boomer with these things too. Deadline: Tues, Sept 15, 23:59. No amendments. Not even for MEPs. Open to everyone — including von der Leyen herself. Madam President, do send me your 8 picks. Especially the Wild Card... May the best Brussels bubble oracle win

Example Team name: COREPER Hotspur Announcements: initiative on affordable housing; programme to boost fertilizers production Topics: wildfires; generational renewal in farming Person/Country: Trump; Macron Number: €100bn for Erasmus Wild Card: new EU-level intelligence body

To make things easy, here’s a blank ticket you can copy and use to file your entry: Team name: Major Announcements: Topics: Person/Country: Number: Wild Card:

How to play: reply with your 8 picks AND a team name. Bonus respect for terrible EU puns: Draghi Me to Victory, Macron and Cheese, Kallas of Duty, Art 7 Nation Army... Or DM your entry. Half of Brussels has my number anyway. Then wait for VALID. Until you get it, you're not in.

⚠️No double dipping. If something on migration is one of your Major Announcements, you can't also pick migration as a Topic or a migration initiative as your Wild Card. ⚠️Announcements/Wild Cards must be specific enough that I can unambiguously decide whether they happened.

No prize, because otherwise I suspect this starts looking suspiciously like gambling. The winner gets something much more valuable: eternal glory — and potentially evidence that they understand the Berlaymont better than the rest of us. Now, the rules:

You think you know what's going to be in Ursula von der Leyen's State of the Union? Prove it with FantaSOTEU. Yes, I'm launching a very unofficial State of the European Union Fantasy League ahead of Wednesday's speech in Strasbourg. 8 predictions. 32 points. Highest score wins.

It’s clearly renovation, but part of me hopes they just stole the Commission logo from the Berlaymont entrance and a modern-day Hercule Poirot shows up to question me as one of the main suspects