Brussels - Anyone who thinks that the European Parliament is a cluster of grey-faced bureaucrats arguing about bananas has clearly not read the list of candidates for the elections scheduled in early June. The EU-wide race to fill the 736 seats in the next parliament has thrown up a kaleidoscope of colourful characters, with former models, ministers and Soviet strongmen jostling for a five-year stint in the parliament's two homes of Brussels and Strasbourg in France.
France has certainly contributed to the glamour of the race, with former justice minister Rachida Dati, 43, running for the ruling UMP party in Paris.
Dati is best known in France for her Dior dresses, her outspoken criticism of opponents and a private life which she herself calls "complicated" - including a daughter born out of wedlock in January.
Dati, who returned to work five days after the birth, has declined to reveal the father's name. So far, Spain's former premier Jose Maria Aznar, French Sports Minister Bernard Laporte and Qatari Public Prosecutor Ali bin Fetais al-Marri have denied begetting the child.
But Dati might well have to compete for the Brussels limelight with Elena Basescu, 29, the daughter of Romania's president Traian Basescu and sometimes called "the Paris Hilton of the Carpathians."
Before her candidacy, Basescu was chiefly known for her Cleopatra hairstyle, love of nightclubs and reputed problems with grammatical details such as the difference between singular and plural.
Yet another touch of glamour comes from Italy, where former TV announcer and Miss Italy pre-finalist Barbara Matera, 28, is running for the People of Freedom party of premier Silvio Berlusconi.
The ageing premier had originally called for a bevy of showgirls, starlets and comely female TV personalities to represent his party, but had to backtrack after his wife publicly assailed the policy as "shameless trash."
At least as controversially, Latvia is expected to elect Alfreds Rubiks, 74, the country's last Soviet head, to the parliament.
After the Baltic state voted to leave the Soviet Union in 1990, Rubiks backed a military counter-revolution which ended in the death of five pro-democracy demonstrators. That won him a six-year jail term in 1991 and a ban on standing for election in his homeland.
At the other end of the political spectrum, the 36-year-old Prince Emmanuel Filiberto of Savoy, grandson of Italy's last king, Umberto II, is bidding for a seat in Strasbourg with Italy's opposition Union of Christian Democrats (UDC) party.
Before his entry into politics, the prince was best known in Italy for his glittering footwork in the Italian version of TV reality show Dancing with the Stars.
Meanwhile, the grandson of the last Austro-Hungarian emperor, Paul Georg Maria Joseph Dominikus von Habsburg, is campaigning with the conservative Democratic Forum in Hungary.
Known in Hungary as "Gyorgy," the godson of Pope Paul VI is following a family tradition of multinational politics: his father, Otto, long represented Bavaria in the parliament, while his elder brother, Karl, represented Austria.
Moving from princes to pirates, one of Sweden's most controversial candidates is Christian Engstrom, 49, deputy head of the Pirate Party, a one-issue group whose aim is to "fundamentally reform copyright law (and) get rid of the patent system."
The party was founded in 2006 as a platform for computer users who wanted to download copyrighted films and music for free. Its popularity has steadily risen, driven in part by public reaction to a court case against unrelated file-sharing website The Pirate Bay.
In Britain, meanwhile, experts say that the head of the openly anti-immigration British National Party, Nick Griffin, 49, could well win enough support to become his party's first ever man in Europe.
"Not all immigrants are terrorists, but all terrorists are immigrants or their immediate descendants," said Griffin when asked to explain his party's policies.
But following the emergence of a major scandal concerning British parliamentarians' expenses, the BNP has sidelined its anti- immigration rhetoric in favour of a call to "punish the pigs."
