Opposition to carve-up of European Parliament seats

Italy, Ireland and Finland are expressing the strongest opposition to plans for sharing out the 750 seats in the European Parliament after 2009, according to one of the MEPs drafting the assembly’s recommendation.

French centre-right MEP Alain Lamassoure said that the three countries were lobbying most strongly for changes to a proposal to share out MEPs’ seats for the next term of Parliament.

While ten countries would gain seats for the 2009-14 term compared with their current allocation, Italy would end up with 72 seats, fewer than other large countries such as France (74) and the UK (73). Ireland would have 12 MEPs although the government has been lobbying to keep its current allocation of 13, while Finland wants to avoid going down to 13 MEPs so that the Swedish-speaking islands of Åland can continue to have their own MEP.

Lamassoure and Romanian Socialist MEP Adrian Severin are drafting a proposal for sharing out seats in the Parliament to take account of the decision by EU leaders in June to limit the total to 750 and set a maximum of 96 MEPs and a minimum of six deputies per member state.

Their proposal, which is to be debated and approved by the Parliament in the plenary in October, aims to allocate seats based on "degressive proportionality" where the larger the population a member state has, the greater number of constituents each MEP has to represent.

In Germany, the largest member state, each of its 96 MEPs would represent nearly 860,000 constituents, whereas in Malta there would be one MEP for every 67,000 people. Compared to the existing plans for the 2009-14 period, the proposal would see Spain making the greatest gains, four more MEPs, taking its total to 54. France would gain two MEPs, increasing to 74, Sweden would gain two, giving a total of 20, as would Austria, with a new total of 19. Poland, the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Latvia and Slovenia would all gain one MEP.

While the two MEPs were at pains to stress that no state would lose out, countries will have fewer seats than in the last two years of the current Parliament’s term, as the overall number of MEPs, which reached 785 after Bulgaria and Romania joined on 1 January 2007, must be cut to 750.

The proposal opts against setting aside seats for Croatia if it joins the EU around 2010. The number of MEPs would temporarily be increased to 762 to give the former Yugoslav republic 12 seats.

EU government leaders will make the final decision on the distribution of MEPs’ seats. But Lamassoure said that he hoped that the proposal would win a "broad majority" in the European Parliament so that it could be taken up by the Council.

Italy, Ireland and Finland are expressing the strongest opposition to plans for sharing out the 750 seats in the European Parliament after 2009, according to one of the MEPs drafting the assembly’s recommendation.