Werner J. Patzelt is Research Director of the Brussels MCC, and formerly full professor of Comparative Government at the Technical University of Dresden (1992-2019) and a senior fellow at the MCC Budapest (2021-22). Throughout his academic career he has combined a comparative perspectives politics with theorizing as well as extended empirical research. His career has included being guest professor at the École Pratique de Hautes Études in Paris and the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, and he has been a member of the Executive Committee of the International Political Science Association for many years as well as former chair of the IPSA Research Committee of Legislative Specialists. In addition to publishing 15 monographs, 16 edited volumes, more than 100 journal articles, more than 260 book chapters and more than 300 journalistic texts, he has been active as a political commentator on radio and TV. Married and with two grown-up children, he uses his leisure time for music, actively both as a choirmaster and as a cellist. His hope for MCC Brussels is that the new institution will become a centre for fundamental reflections about and for policy advice on European coherence, sustainable EU institutions, and Europe’s place in a looming post-occidental world.