IGC rejects ‘double majority’ voting

Date: 15/06/2000

By Simon Taylor

SUPPORT is growing for changes to the Union's decision-making procedures which would make it harder for small groups of governments to join forces to block planned legislation.

But member states remain divided over how to share out votes in the Council of Ministers to give larger countries more political power, despite speculation that France had agreed to give Germany a greater allocation at a bilateral summit late last week.

In talks on planned changes to the EU treaty due to be agreed by the end of this year, most governments have rejected proposals which would have required all decisions taken in the Council to have the support of both a majority of member states and a majority of the EU's population.

Instead, most member states believe that new legislation should continue to be approved only if it commands a weighted majority of votes in the Council. "We are moving away from the double majority. The Commission proposal has not received much support because most people thought it was unrealistic," said one EU diplomat.

Officials say ditching the double-majority approach would make it harder for small groups of member states to block legislation they opposed and make it easier to take decisions when the Union expands.

For example, under one scenario drawn up by the Portuguese presidency, if the EU enlarged to 28 member states and the total number of votes was increased to 288 from the current 87, the 13 largest member states would be able to muster the 206 votes needed to approve new legislation even though they were in a numerical minority.

But Union governments remain divided over how to share out votes to reflect the size of the population in bigger countries such as Germany and France. Under the current system, Luxembourg, with a population of less than half a million, has two votes while Germany has a population of more than 80 million but only ten votes.

Intergovernmental Conference negotiators have considered various options for redistributing votes, but have not yet identified a system acceptable to all.

At present, countries are grouped into six bands with an equal number of votes. Italy, for example, gets the same number of votes as Germany although it has almost 25 million fewer people. Sweden has proposed calculating the square root of each country's population and then doubling this figure to determine the number of votes each state wields. This would give Germany 18 and the UK and Italy 15, compared to the ten they each have currently. But Luxembourg would see its number of votes fall from two to one.

Support is growing for changes to the Union's decision-making procedures which would make it harder for small groups of governments to join forces to block planned legislation.