EU Commission President's anual "State of the European Union" speech means an update to my dataviz analysing the languages used.

To the chagrin of some, it was again a predominantly English address, even more so than 2 years ago.

German and French got <4 min. each.

#soteu2025 #SOTEU 🇪🇺

Cartography ladies and gents, check out this watch I was gifted recently 😎

Dataviz in my local paper. 🙃
Front page

For the fun of it, since Ursula von der Leyen is getting confirmed today:

A history of the political affiliation of the European Commissioners 🇪🇺

In preparation for the Romanian presidential (round 1) and parliamentary elections this Sunday, Hotnews has prepared some election maps/analysis of 2014 to 2019 results.

Among them this arrow map.

alegeri.hotnews.ro/cum-s-a-schi...

I make maps and charts on the subject of the 🇪🇺 European Union, sometimes Romania and languages.

My one claim to faim is that I was the first to harmonize EU election data to the municipal level and in 2019 and 2024 we mapped it with ZeitOnline.

I also made etymology maps that went viral long ago.

And using the same python script I did a "Collapse of the Roman Empire" version as well.

arnoldplaton.wordpress.com/2019/03/24/c...

Oh I remember when these were making the round on the bird app. @awoodruff.bsky.social had a version.

Inspired me to make a radial one, to "bring the 🇪🇺 EU closer to Bruxelles". Literally 😂

arnoldplaton.wordpress.com/2018/05/28/h...

Since Commission President von der Leyen has now joined this place, here is a visualisation I've been making for a few years now on the languages she and her predecessors used in the annual State of European Union address in the plenary chamber of the 🇪🇺 Parliament

I suspect no such speech this year

I really love the coat of arms of Nuuk, which features a silhouette of Mt. Sermitsiaq 🏔️

Want to visit ever since I saw the stunning images of the city's environs in the episode dedicated to Nuuk, in the Netflix documentary series "Inside the World's Toughest Prisons" (s5e3)

I really love that the French Wikipedia article on the 🇪🇺 2024 EU elections gives you the majority coalitions that can be formed given the results.

(But it annoys me that they use the same colour for EPP and ECR)

fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89l...

I refuse to join Bluesky — I don’t want to become part of an El Greco chamber

The second advantage is the "Two Big Parties" model. You have a Big Left party and a Big Right party and the winner is the one that outweighs the other.

How do you translate that into the EU political system where you vote for national parties that sit in 7-8 political groups (+ unaffiliated)

Any arrow map needs a someone to create a synthetic grid to which municipalities should be aggregated. The existing municipalities are too different to show arrows in an aesthetically pleasing manner.

Below attempts made some years ago to replicate the NYT style on the 2019 EU election (unfinished)

For example, EU member states not only have organic-shaped admin divisions but their sizes vary between countries.

Take even the harmonized across EU divisions called "NUTS/LAU". They can vary quite a lot by size, as one can see in the chart below comparing the 3 NUTS levels.

For those unfamiliar with European Parliament groups, here is the gist for 2014.

In 2019, liberal ALDE rebranded as RE, far-right ENF as ID and opulist EFDD didn't have enough MEPs to form a group.

In 2024, ID became PfE and a second far-right group sprung up: ESN 🙃

Here are the 3 elections individually

[Caveat: voters behave differently in FPTP vs. Proportional]

Interestingly enough, the governing coalition in Europe, made up of the center-right EPP, center-left S&D and liberal RE would still command a majority in Parliament

2/

What if the President of the European Commission was voted in via Electoral Colleges 🗳️

My simulation of what the last 3 🇪🇺 European Elections would have looked like if the EU used an winner takes it all system à la USA

Small 🧵