Parliament split over seats

MEPs are deeply divided over plans to share out European Parliament seats among member states with German, Italian, Finnish and Irish deputies proposing rival schemes for calculating the distribution.

MEPs on the constitutional affairs committee are to vote on Tuesday (2 October) on a draft report on allocating the 750 seats in Parliament for the next term. But German, Italian, Finnish and Irish MEPs want changes to the draft prepared by French centre-right MEP Alain Lamassoure and Romanian Socialist Adrian Severin.

German centre-right MEP Ingo Friedrich has proposed delaying a change in the system until the EU moves to a new system of voting in the Council of Ministers, the double majority, in 2014 and wants the number of MEPs to be directly proportional to population size. This would give France 84 seats, Italy 79 and the UK 81 compared to the 74, 72 and 73 they would get under the Lamassoure-Severin plan. But Parliament officials said that the proposal was unacceptable because it did not respect the principle laid down in the treaty of degressive proportionality.

Italian MEPs want to get rid of the Lamassoure-Severin method for sharing out seats.

Finnish MEPs want 14 seats rather than 13 the current draft would give them, while Irish deputies want 13 seats instead of 12.

UK Liberal Democrat MEP Andrew Duff warned that Parliament had to take a united line on how to allocate seats or risk messy horse-trading by EU leaders at the 18-19 October summit in Lisbon, when they meet to agree a new treaty. "It’s important that Parliament comes to a conclusion with a large majority. It would be a complicating factor if seats were traded at four o’clock in the morning in Lisbon," Duff said.

MEPs are deeply divided over plans to share out European Parliament seats among member states with German, Italian, Finnish and Irish deputies proposing rival schemes for calculating the distribution.