Michael Rupp
“I have worked and lived in Germany, the UK, Belgium and Turkey and travelled privately and professionally throughout this beautiful continent with its rich and varied history. The EU is the biggest chance of our societies to make Europe collectively a better place in terms of social, economic and environmental policies and to try to spread European values of fundamental rights and a fair participation of each individual in society to other regions of the world.
Through my participation in this mentoring programme I would like to help spread the knowledge about how the EU works and what each of us can do to make it better.”
Overview
Dr. Michael Rupp is Head of Sector regarding Connectivity and the Green Deal in the European Commission. From 2015 to 2018 he was Head of Section for – amongst others – migration, border management and justice reform in the EU Delegation in Turkey.
Approach
Michael Rupp has experienced that the European Union always needs a crisis to understand that small-scale national approaches in each policy-field are not sufficient. National politicians are reluctant to give up the national regulatory power although they see that even the big member states are too small in the global competition of the 21st century. It does not always need supranational integration but at least better and tighter coordination and cooperation at the EU-level in order to address the challenges of the 21st century. The global pandemic has only underlined this. The EU needs to show itself more cohesive when facing Russia, China or the USA. This mentorship programme endeavours to help aspiring young people to find their vocation in a European context and with an international mind-set.
Career History
Michael started his career as an academic researching at his Alma Mater – the university of Heidelberg – and later teaching EU politics at the Universities of Kingston upon Hull and Leeds in the UK. There he completed his Doctoral thesis on the EU accession process of the Visegrad countries. He switched to the European Commission in Brussels endeavouring to implement his research by helping Slovakia and Hungary to join the European Union. He was recruited by the European Parliament as enlargement coordinator in the foreign affairs committee secretariat and helped guide reports and resolutions through the EP until the first big accession was finished in 2004. Thereafter he helped build up the new Subcommittee on Human Rights in the European Parliament. Always interested in new challenges he switched to the Cabinet of the Slovak Commissioner Ján Figel’ and later Maroš Šefčovič to get a bird’s eye view of Commission politics from the Berlaymont. In his last posting 2015-2018 he was Head of Section in the EU Delegation in Ankara responsible for numerous difficult files including border management and the migration crisis. He is now responsible for Connectivity and Green Deal policies for the regional programmes in the Eastern Partnership.
Personal
Michael is married and lives in Brussels. Apart from tennis and volleyball he is interested in music and theatre if his busy time allows. He speaks his native German tongue with a slight Southern twang and speaks and writes English and French fluently. He has a good grasp of Turkish and some Spanish.