Roberta Metsola was elected President of the European Parliament in January 2022, becoming the youngest ever person to occupy this role. In July 2024, she was re-elected to lead the institution for another term, as only the second person and first woman to serve as President for two terms.
 

Leading the only directly elected European institution, President Metsola has been very vocal and firm in Europe’s support to Ukraine, following Russia’s brutal invasion. On 1st April 2022, she became the first President of an institution of the European Union to visit Ukraine since the start of the war. As President of the European Parliament, she has led reforms towards a Parliament, which is more modern, efficient and accountable.
 
Since the start of her mandate, President Metsola has also made it a priority to reach beyond Brussels and Strasbourg, by visiting European Union Member States and candidate countries, meeting with people, visiting schools and taking the message of Europe to the various cities, towns and villages. She has also invited EU Heads of State or Government to the European Parliament to discuss current challenges and opportunities for the Union, under the “This is Europe” debates. 

She was first elected to the European Parliament in 2013, becoming one of Malta's first female Members of the European Parliament. President Metsola was re-elected in 2014 and then again in 2019 and 2024.


In 2020, she was elected as the First Vice-President of the European Parliament, becoming the first Maltese national to hold the post. She was responsible for the European Parliament's relations with national parliaments and for the Parliament's participation in the interreligious and non-confessional dialogue (Article 17 TFEU).

Within the European Parliament, President Metsola was the European People’s Party Group's Coordinator in the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs, between January 2017 and 2020. President Metsola was the Parliament's rapporteur on the European Border and Coastguard Regulation (FRONTEX) in 2019. She also co-authored the Parliament's own-initiative report on the need to protect journalists in the European Union from Strategic Lawsuits against Public Participation (SLAPP).


Prior to her election as a Member of the European Parliament, President Metsola served within the Permanent Representation of Malta to the European Union and later as the legal advisor to the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. In her student years, she campaigned actively for Malta's European Union membership, and was active in various organisations, acting as the Secretary-General for the European Democrat Student organisation between 2002 and 2003. President Metsola credits the referendum on Malta’s accession to the European Union as the catalyst for her political career at such a young age.


Professionally she is a lawyer who has specialised in European law and politics. She completed an Erasmus exchange in France and graduated from the University of Malta and the College of Europe in Bruges.


Born in 1979, Roberta Metsola is married to Ukko Metsola and is the mother of four boys.

The Global Islamic Revival represents one of the most significant sociopolitical transformations of the past half-century – marked by exceptional religiosity, support for sharia, and gender segregation. Yet existing theories cannot explain its particular timing or global spread across diverse economies, geographies, and political systems. Why did this movement gain traction from the 1970s onward, transforming societies from Egypt to Indonesia to Britain? This review synthesizes cross-regional evidence to assess competing explanations: deep historical roots, contingent shocks, and economic modernization. I then offer a novel theory. First, I argue that there was a crucial transformation in Muslim identity: from locally-based syncretism to state-attempted secular modernization to a reinvigoration of a transnational Muslim identity. Second, I propose the Prestige-Piety Feedback Loop:  modernization paradoxically amplified strengthened adherence to jurisprudential Islam and deference to credentialed religious authorities. As Muslims gained unprecedented access to jurisprudential knowledge, piety and gender segregation became primary markers of status, with profound consequences for women’s status. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Dr. Alice Evans is a Senior Lecturer in the Social Science of Development at King's College London. She has also been a Faculty Associate at Harvard Center for International Development and has held previous appointments at Cambridge University and the London School of Economics. Her research focuses on social norms and why they change; the drivers of support for gender equality; and workers' rights in global supply chains.

Dr. Evans is writing a book, The Great Gender Divergence (forthcoming with Princeton University Press). It will explain why the world has become more gender equal, and why some countries are more gender equal than others.

European state development is often used as a model for the emergence of modern nation-states and the international state system. Yet despite many accounts seeking to explain how the European state developed, there is disagreement about fundamental concepts, including what counts as “Europe” and which polities qualify as “states.” This paper examines the implications of different definitions of the European state for our understanding of political development. We give special consideration to political fragmentation, long viewed as a critical prerequisite for Europe’s development of pro-democratic and growth-promoting political institutions. We find that the distinct measures lead to very different conclusions, undermining the idea of European state formation as a uniform process.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Anna Grzymała-Busse is a professor in the Department of Political Science, the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor of International Studies, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and the director of The Europe Center. Her research interests include political parties, state development and transformation, informal political institutions, religion and politics, and post-communist politics.

In her first book, Redeeming the Communist Past, she examined the paradox of the communist successor parties in East Central Europe: incompetent as authoritarian rulers of the communist party-state, several then succeeded as democratic competitors after the collapse of these communist regimes in 1989.

Rebuilding Leviathan, her second book project, investigated the role of political parties and party competition in the reconstruction of the post-communist state. Unless checked by a robust competition, democratic governing parties simultaneously rebuilt the state and ensured their own survival by building in enormous discretion into new state institutions.

Anna's third book, Nations Under God, examines why some churches have been able to wield enormous policy influence. Others have failed to do so, even in very religious countries. Where religious and national identities have historically fused, churches gained great moral authority, and subsequently covert and direct access to state institutions. It was this institutional access, rather than either partisan coalitions or electoral mobilization, that allowed some churches to become so powerful.

One of the hallmarks of successful democratization is programmatic party competition, whereby parties compete for office by offering distinct sets of policies to voters. However, there are signs across the advanced democracies of challenges, or alternatives, to policy competition. Elected officials rely on emotion, anti-system rhetoric, or identity to mobilize voters and make representative claims; further, affectively polarizated voters may care little about policy. This project develops a theory of programmatic decline, conceptualizing it as distinct from the typical programmatic-clientelistic dichotomy in comparative politics. It considers the limitations to programmatic competition, and bridges a gap between the study of party systems (focusing on what parties offer) and political behavior (focusing on how voters make choices). It develop potential indicators and measures of programmatic decline in the United States, with implications for the broader study of policy-based competition and democratic erosion. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Didi Kuo is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is a scholar of comparative politics with a focus on democratization, political parties, state-building, and the political economy of representation. She is the author of The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t (Oxford University Press) and Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the rise of programmatic politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

She has been at Stanford since 2013 as the manager of the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective and was previously co-director of the Fisher Family Honors Program at CDDRL. She was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America and is a non-resident fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She received a PhD in political science from Harvard University, an MSc in Economic and Social History from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, and a BA from Emory University.

The 2026 Hungarian parliamentary election marked a historic turning point in European politics, as the Péter Magyar-led Tisza Party secured a landslide victory and a two-thirds supermajority, ending Viktor Orbán’s 16-year tenure. Dan Kelemen will analyze the significant implications for the European Union, focusing on how this shift from illiberalism to a pro-European stance may unfreeze crucial EU funds and reshape the balance of power within the European Council. Hanna Folsz will delve into the domestic political landscape, examining the structural factors and rapid mobilization that allowed the Tisza Party to overcome a skewed electoral system and the long-standing dominance of Fidesz. Together, the speakers will evaluate whether this result represents a restoration of liberal democracy in Hungary or a complex transition within a deeply entrenched political and economic framework.

R. Daniel Kelemen is McCourt Chair at the McCourt School of Public Policy. He is also Professor of Law (by courtesy) at Georgetown Law. Kelemen has published widely on the politics and law of the European Union, comparative politics and law, and comparative public policy. Prior to joining Georgetown University, Kelemen was Professor of Political Science and Law at Rutgers University. He also served as Chair of the Department of Political Science and Director of the Center for European Studies at Rutgers. Prior to Rutgers, Kelemen was Fellow in Politics at Lincoln College, University of Oxford. Kelemen is a Senior Associate (Non-Resident), in the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a member of the Executive Committee of the European Union Studies Association. Kelemen comments regularly on EU affairs for European and American media. He was educated at UC Berkeley (A.B. in Sociology) and Stanford (M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science).

Hanna Folsz is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Stanford University. Her research focuses on opposition parties in authoritarian dominant-party regimes, with a particular focus on the challenges and opportunities they face in countering autocratization. More broadly, her work examines the causes and consequences of democratic backsliding, populism, media capture, and political favoritism — primarily in East-Central Europe and, secondarily, in Latin America. She uses a multi-method approach, including modern causal inference and text analysis techniques.

Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the American Political Science Association, among others. She is the co-founder and co-organizer of EEPGW, a monthly online graduate student workshop on East European politics, and a co-founder and regular contributor to The Hungarian Observer, the most widely read online newsletter on Hungarian politics and culture. At Stanford, she is an active member of  CDDRL's Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab (PovGov).