Bid to clear obstacle on political party funding

Date: 04/01/01

By John Shelley

THE European Commission is set to unveil draft rules which could clear the way for pan-European political parties to be directly funded out of Union coffers without having to wait for the Nice Treaty to enter into force.

Under plans being drawn up within the EU executive, political parties operating across several member states could be given official Union funding before new rules governing their legal basis agreed as part of the new treaty changes have been ratified.

There are currently four main European political parties which roughly correspond to the four main groupings of MEPs. Most Socialist MEPs are, for example, members of the European Socialist Party.

In response to scathing criticism from the Court of Auditors last year that European political parties were forced to rely on back-door funding from groups of MEPs, heads of state and government agreed at last month's summit to provide above-board EU cash.

But Union officials, keen to put an end to allegations that taxpayers' money is being spent without proper controls or srcutiny, believe they can push ahead with reforms and implement new rules before ratification of Nice gives them a full and clear legal basis for doing so now that member states have given their political backing to the idea.

They say that by referring to existing treaty provisions on the internal market, they can cobble together a legal platform on which to launch a statute for political parties and the rules can then be firmed up when Nice comes into force.

Details of the plan, likely to be unveiled next month, are still being worked on, although insiders say the Commission will propose mechanisms to prevent a rush of applications from tiny political groups bidding for EU cash for their activities. "We have been trying to avoid the problem of having European political parties springing up all over the place by making sure that they do represent some legitimate political expression," said one.

Chief among these controls is likely to be a requirement that in order for a group to be recognised as a European political party, it will have to have representatives from at least one-third of member states.

The amount of money which political parties would get is still far from decided and this is likely to be the source of intense wrangling further down the road between the holders of the EU purse strings - the member states and the European Parliament itself.

In the meantime, officials have been working on a formula to govern how the cash should be divided up. Insiders say they are likely to suggest that 15% to 20% of the available money should be distributed equally among all recognised European political parties, with the rest handed out according to the number of members each group has.

The European Commission is set to unveil draft rules which could clear the way for pan-European political parties to be directly funded out of Union coffers without having to wait for the Nice Treaty to enter into force.