alt Hacker NewsI have a pet theory on why that is. In EU to become a Brussels career bureaucrat you need to be able to speak a couple of languages fluently. This serves as a kind of a filter. Whatever they are, dumb they most certainly are not. To a lesser extent this applies to European politicians too.
Bureaucrat yes, politicians no. Every eu law is translated in to every language of the union and EU employees an army of interpreters that translate in real time sessions of EU parliament- you can be an EU politician only knowing your mother tongue. Expense spent on these translation services has a side benef though- you have a large volume of publicly accessible multilingual text which came in handy for training machine translation (eg deepl) even on smaller languages.