Fix the E.U.'s weakest link

INSIDE ROBERTA METSOLA'S PLANS TO SHAKE UP EUROPE'S PARLIAMENT

- - ADAM RASMI/BRUSSELS

ROBERTA METSOLA HAS PLENTY OF SUPERLATIVES TO HER name. She is the youngest ever President of the European Parliament; the first from Malta, the bloc's smallest country; and the first woman in two decades. But there's one thing that landed her in the history books that she never expected. On Dec. 10, 2022, Metsola became the first President of the European Parliament to join a police raid against a fellow lawmaker. "It was sad," Metsola, who turns 45 in January, tells TIME from her office in Brussels. It was like "a punch in the stomach."

Earlier that day, Belgian authorities had notified Metsola that to comply with local law, she had to join police by 9 p.m. for a raid against lawmaker Marc Tarabella as part of a corruption investigation. So Metsola hopped on a three-hour flight from Malta to Brussels, then rushed some 70 miles into the Belgian countryside. With armed police at her side, she knocked at Tarabella's door with minutes to spare.

The bust happened to come during the FIFA World Cup quarterfinals. "There was France and England playing in a bar next door," Metsola recalls, "and I just remember hearing the cheers and thinking, Look at what I'm doing." The coincidence was not a happy one. A day earlier, police began carrying out raids and arrests across Brussels, where the European Parliament does most of its work, amid an investigation into whether World Cup host Qatar had bribed European Parliament officials. Bags of cash totaling some €1.5 million ($1.58 million) were seized during raids in homes and offices in Belgium, Italy, and Greece in the days that followed, in a scandal that ripped through not only the European Parliament but also the E.U. at large. Dubbed Qatargate, it was one of the biggest corruption scandals to hit the bloc in decades.

Metsola, who had campaigned against corruption in Malta and had a reputation as strong on the rule of law, saw the scandal as a threat to the institution and its credibility.