Manny’s: What We’ve Learned from the European Elections

2024 is an election year like no other, but not just here at home. About half of the globe’s population will go to the polls at some point this year, and the European Union elections that occured in June were an interesting window into the future of the continent as a whole. Who won big and what does it tell us about broader trends in right-wing politics around the world? How do the other elections happening in Europe impact the direction of foreign policy, trade, and relationships with other nations? Why should we as voters in the US care about the outcome of elections in the EU?

Joining us at Manny’s to discuss the results and impact of the European elections are two phenomenal experts on European politics, democracy, and international relations!

Christophe Crombez is a political economist who specializes in European Union (EU) politics and business-government relations in Europe. His research focuses on EU institutions and their impact on policies, EU institutional reform, lobbying, party politics, and parliamentary government.

Crombez is Senior Research Scholar at The Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University (since 1999). He teaches Introduction to European Studies and The Future of the EU in Stanford’s International Relations Program, and is responsible for the Minor in European Studies and the Undergraduate Internship Program in Europe.

Furthermore, Crombez is Professor of Political Economy at the Faculty of Economics and Business at KU Leuven in Belgium (since 1994). His teaching responsibilities in Leuven include Political Business Strategy and Applied Game Theory. He is Vice-Chair for Research at the Department for Managerial Economics, Strategy and Innovation.

Crombez obtained a B.A. in Applied Economics, Finance, from KU Leuven in 1989, and a Ph.D. in Business, Political Economics, from Stanford University in 1994.

M. Steven Fish is a comparative political scientist who specializes in democracy and authoritarianism, religion and politics, and constitutional systems and national legislatures. His most recent book is Comeback: Routing Trumpism, Reclaiming the Nation, and Restoring Democracy’s Edge (2024). Previously he published Are Muslims Distinctive? A Look at the Evidence (2011), which was selected for Choice’s Outstanding Academic Titles, 2012: Top 25 Books. He is also author of Democracy Derailed in Russia: The Failure of Open Politics (2005), which was the recipient of the Best Book Award of 2006, presented by the Comparative Democratization Section of the American Political Science Association, and Democracy from Scratch: Opposition and Regime in the New Russian Revolution (1995). He is coauthor of The Handbook of National Legislatures: A Global Survey (2009) and Postcommunism and the Theory of Democracy (2001).

Fish writes and comments extensively on international affairs and the rising challenges to democracy in the United States and around the world. He appears on BBC, CNN, and other major networks, and has published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The American Interest, The Daily Beast, Slate, and Foreign Policy. He has served as an expert consultant to U.S. federal agencies and international organizations such as the European Commission for Democracy through Law.

Fish studied international relations, economics and history at Cornell and the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies before receiving his Ph.D. in political science from Stanford. In addition to UC Berkeley, he has taught at the University of Pennsylvania and universities in Russia, Poland, China, and Indonesia. He served as a Senior Fulbright Fellow and Visiting Professor at the Airlangga University, Surabaya, Indonesia, and at the European University at St. Petersburg, St. Petersburg, Russia. He has also been the recipient of the Distinguished Social Sciences Teaching Award of the College of Letters and Science at Berkeley.