Giles Merritt
Biography
Giles Merritt joined the European Affairs Programme of the Egmont Institute as a Senior Associate Fellow in April 2023.
He is the author of a forthcoming book entitled “Europe’s Demographic Time-bomb” that examines the likely impact of ageing on the EU’s political economy. His previous book, “People Power: Why We Need More Migrants” (Bloomsbury 2021) looked at European attitudes and policies on immigration.
In 1999, Giles founded the Brussels think tank Friends of Europe. A former Financial Times Brussels Correspondent, he is a journalist, author and broadcaster who has for over four decades specialised in European public policy questions. In 2010, he was named by the Financial Times as one of 30 most influential “Eurostars”, along with the European Commission’s President and NATO’s Secretary General.
Giles Merritt joined the Financial Times in 1968, and from 1972 until 1983 he was successively FT correspondent in Paris, Dublin/Belfast, and Brussels. From 1984 to 2010 he was a columnist for the International Herald Tribune (IHT), where his Op-Ed page articles ranged across EU political and economic issues.
In 1982 he published “World Out of Work”, an award-winning study of unemployment in industrialised countries. In 1991, his second book “The Challenge of Freedom” about the difficulties facing post-communist Eastern Europe was published in four languages.
His 2016 book “Slippery Slope: Europe’s Troubled Future” (Oxford University Press) was shortlisted for that year’s European Book Prize. An updated paperback edition assessing the likely effects of Brexit was published by OUP in 2017, followed by a French language version in 2018.