Let battle commence – parties plot power sharing after marathon vote

By Martin Banks

Date: 10/06/04

JUST over 14,000 candidates representing 481 parties on 947 electoral lists are standing in the world's second biggest electoral contest after India - the European elections. The main battleground will be between the centre-right (mostly Christian Democratic) parties of Europe and their centre-left Social Democrat rivals.

As in 1999, the Right looks set to dominate. Recent studies suggest the European People's Party (EPP-European Democrats) will win about 285 of the 732 seats in the new Parliament (38.9%), compared with 232 in the last election, with the Party of European Socialists (PES) pulling in about 217 seats (29.6%), 42 more than last time round.

Although the Socialists would still lag behind the EPP, the combined forces of the three left-wing parties - the PES, Greens and European United Left - are expected to garner about 296 seats, making the Left, should it act cohesively, a challenger to the dominance of the centre-right.

With a centre-right majority in the Council of Ministers as well as the Parliament, an EPP-ED backed politician is likely to have little difficulty winning approval as the next president of the European Commission.

In the Parliament's day-to-day legislative business, the Liberals (ELDR) could, if forecasts prove correct, be in a powerful position, able to choose to form coalitions with either the Left or the Right. If they decide to go with the Socialists, the EPP-ED may need to ally with the eurosceptic group Europe of Democracy and Diversities, which would then hold the key for the election of the next Commission president.

The biggest question mark on the sharing of power in the new Parliament concerns the Liberals, which are set to form the basis for a new centrist pro-European group, together with Commission President Romano Prodi's Olive Tree coalition in Italy. If such a group emerged - a final decision will only be taken once the results are known - some of the more federalist-minded present members of the EPP should be attracted to migrate towards it. Depending on how it will be built, such a group could have anything between 30-100 members, insiders say, which could completely shift the balance of power in the assembly.

The national balance inside party groups is also likely to change. While the German Christian Democrat delegation should again dominate the EPP-ED, the Italians may replace the UK Conservatives as the second largest national delegation.

Inside the PES, the French, British, German and Spanish delegations are likely to be evenly balanced.

From the EPP-ED, two big hitters, group leader Hans-Gert Pöttering and German compatriot Elmar Brok, chairman of the influential foreign affairs committee, are almost certain to be re-elected, as are fellow senior MEPs Doris Pack, president of the assembly's southeast Europe delegation, and Ingo Friedrich, one of Parliament's vice-presidents.

One of the best-known candidates expected to be elected for the Socialists is the former Danish prime minister, Poul Nyrup Rassmussen, who has been tipped as a possible president of the Parliament. High- profile Liberal candidates with realistic chances of being elected include Georgs Andrejevs, a former Latvian foreign minister and current ambassador to the Council of Europe, former Lithuanian prime minister Eugenijus Gentvilas and ex-journalist Silvana Koch-Mehrin, who, in 2000, was chosen as the Woman of the Year in Germany.

The Greens expect some well-known candidates to be elected, including their co-leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Arnold Cassola, who helped found the Green Party in Malta, as well as Finnish ex-environment minister, Satu Hassi, Milan Horacek - a Czech citizen running on the German list - and Jean-Luc Bennahmias, former secretary-general of the French Greens.

Well-placed independent candidates include Jaroslaw Walesa, son of former Polish president Lech Walesa, and Austrian Hans-Peter Martin, who famously exposed alleged expenses fiddles among MEPs.

Article forms part of a European Voice 'European Election Special'.