Qatar in Brussels

Suspicions of corruption hit the European Parliament squarely.

In recent days there have been arrests, searches and all the spotlights are on the institution given the presumption that Qatar has paid hundreds of thousands of euros to MEPs and members of the European Parliament to sweeten the resolutions on this autocratic monarchy with a proven track record of violation of human rights.

Its already former vice president, the Greek socialist Eva Kaili, has been arrested: she is the best-known face of a scandal that affects assistants, former MEPs and even relatives of the parliamentarians involved.

The spectacular episode should set off all the warning signs in the European democratic institutions, not so much because of its scope —the European Parliament has 705 MEPs and thousands of workers, and the investigation, although it is still open, affects around twenty people— but for the enormous weaknesses it reveals.

The president, Roberta Metsola, warned on Monday that "the enemies of democracy will stop at nothing."

Thus, she came to say that in the current geopolitical context, corrupting the representatives of the citizenry is a way to undermine democracies from within, almost a variant or a new form of hybrid attack.

But Metsola and the European Parliament in general lack large doses of self-criticism in such a sordid case: the case shows that there is a lack of firmer rules and, above all,

The European Parliament, and the European institutions in general, are obliged to strengthen their surveillance mechanisms to the maximum after a scandal that has exposed its weaknesses and that still has a long way to go: the Belgian police and the Prosecutor's Office have been investigating for four months.

The European Parliament already has a code of conduct and internal control bodies, which must be strengthened as much as possible.

But

forces us to go much further and also activate independent inter-institutional control bodies in the EU, with the capacity to investigate all the European institutions.

In that respect for now there are only vague promises.

The European Parliament has been claiming for some time the role of moral guardian of the EU;

not in vain is it the only institution elected by direct suffrage.

But the information disseminated as a result of the case that affects one of his 14 vice presidencies greatly threatens that status.

If he wants to maintain his role as a moral conscience, he will have to draw lessons from what has happened these days and, above all, be extremely vigilant: it is at least shocking that there is a record to record the meetings of the MEPs with the lobbyists, but not with representatives of foreign States that, as in the case of Qatar, are autocratic regimes where homosexuals are victims of serious violations of rights, and 25% of the population are women, all under the guardianship of a man and without any trace of rights comparable to a liberal democracy.

The US has spent months investigating the alleged corruption in the concession of the World Cup to Qatar.

That suspicions of corruption and bribery to clean up the image of the emirate now reach the European institutions is most worrying.