Changes in Parliament’s party ranks

Date: 03/10/1996

MEPS are playing musical chairs, forcing European Parliament officials to tear up the Vade Mecum and start again.

Leonie van Bladel, for instance, has stormed out of the Socialist group in a row with her own Dutch labour party, and joined the centre-right Union for Europe (Gaullists, Forza Italia, Fianna Fáil).

Van Bladel, formerly a prominent journalist, delivered a curt, one-line statement to Socialist group leader Pauline Green and then jumped ship. Now the Dutch Socialists are claiming she made a prior agreement to give up her seat. She is refusing to do so, which is good news for the Union for Europe group, as her adhesion gives them another nationality and thus extra staff paid for from the parliamentary budget.

Meanwhile, John Iversen, formerly Environment Commissioner Ritt Bjerregaard's spokesman, has joined the Socialist ranks, moving across from the Confederal Group of the European United Left.

His move was prompted by a decision to leave Denmark's Socialist People's Party and join the Social Democrats - quite a useful decision, as it turns out, because it means Iversen no longer has to pay a hefty levy of about 2,500 ecu a month which his former party imposes on its parliamentarians.

But the Socialists are still one member short, because Spain's Antonio Gonzalez Trivino, who has parted company with his own PSOE party, has moved across to join the European Radical Alliance.

Speculation is also growing that Portuguese liberals may be about to leave the Liberal Group. Certain French members of Sir James Goldsmith's Europe of Nations group are also said to be under pressure to return to the Gaullist fold. That could weaken the group, raising the prospect of the search for an electoral deal between Goldsmith's anti-EU Referendum Party and Jörg Haider's far-right FPÖ party.