Massive flagpoles are all the rage, and hugely divisive

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Congratulations to Bulgaria, which has won the prize every country was hoping to win … the EU’s highest flagpole!

The 1,110 square meter flag — chosen to symbolize the size of Bulgaria’s territory, which is 111,000 square kilometers — was hoisted up a record-breaking 111-meter pole in the Rhodope mountains. Simeon Karakolev, the organizer of a historic annual folk festival in the village of Rozhen, helped raise $560,000 for the pole in a campaign championed by Bulgaria’s pro-Russia President Rumen Radev.

Not everyone was keen on the big flag. “I felt unwell when I saw this rod sticking out of the ground in the middle of the meadows and the surrounding forests. This is human interference in nature,” business consultant Sofia Botusharova, from nearby Chepelare, told AFP.

Bulgaria takes the title from Finland — which has a puny, pesky 100-meter flagpole. But it remains a long way off the international record. In Columbia Falls in Maine in the U.S. (population 485), an even more divisive flagpole is planned that would be 445 meters tall (taller than the Empire State Building). The project would cost a cool $1 billion and allow visitors to travel by elevator to the top and look at, er, Canada. This question of why has yet to be properly answered.

Flags are of course beautiful yet problematic — kind of like Brigitte Bardot. And it’s not just national flags that get people agitated. Earlier this month, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to prohibit the Defense Department from displaying non-approved flags, just weeks after the Air Force and Navy drew criticism for tweeting pictures of rainbow banners to celebrate Pride.

And in the U.K., the Mirror reported that villagers in the ludicrously named Brightwell-cum-Sotwell, Oxfordshire have taken to flying the EU flag in a bid to annoy their new neighbor, a certain Boris Johnson.

Johnson and wife Carrie have just moved into a £3.8 million property with nine bedrooms (almost enough for all of his children) in the leafy village. The ex-prime minister can certainly afford it thanks in part to his Daily Mail column, which started off by talking about eating cheese at night but has now shifted to weightier matters such as Ukraine’s ambitions to join NATO (presumably because high-ups at the Mail sent him an email titled “we pay you this much to talk about cheese???”).

Incidentally, the greatest country flag in the world belongs to the western Pacific island of Palau. Light blue background with a big yellow circle on it. It says “the sun shines here. All of the time.”

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“Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s another meaningless summit in Brussels.”

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Paul Dallison is POLITICO‘s slot news editor.