MEPs suffer enlargement ‘growing pains’

Date: 24/02/2000

By Gareth Harding

MEPS are slowly waking up to the drastic impact that enlargement to central and eastern Europe will have on the number of members sitting in the Strasbourg-based assembly.

The European Commission estimates that if the EU were to take in all 13 countries now bidding for Union membership without any change in the current arrangements for allocating seats, the number of MEPs would increase from 626 to almost 1,000 In a bid to prevent the European Parliament turning into the European equivalent of the Chinese Communist party congress, governments agreed to cap the number of seats at 700 when they drew up the Amsterdam Treaty in 1997.

Although MEPs have given their support to the freeze, little thought has been given to what effect this would have on the number of deputies existing member states send to the assembly.

In its latest report on the Intergovernmental Conference, the European Commission warns that there is now an urgent need to tackle this problem as the 700-member ceiling will probably be passed with the first wave of enlargement, which is likely to occur before the next Euro-elections in 2004.

The Commission's paper, which was unveiled earlier this month, leaves it up to the Parliament to propose new arrangements for allocating seats. But it does offer a few helpful hints.

It argues that assigning seats according to countries' populations is not a realistic option, as this would leave small member states such as Luxembourg with virtually no members. Likewise, retaining the current system would reduce the representation of the EU's most populous countries even further than in the past.

Instead, the Commission appears to favour an across-the-board reduction in numbers along the lines of a proposal recently tabled by UK Socialist MEP Richard Corbett. This would mean Germany losing seven seats; the UK, France and Italy six; and other, smaller member states between one and five.

Corbett says that even allowing for the addition of 120 MEPs from the six front-runners in the race for EU membership, this would keep the total number of deputies below 700.

Most Union governments acknowledge that the number-crunching is going to be tortuous when they get around to addressing the problem during their year-long treaty talks, which kicked off in Brussels earlier this month. However, they also accept that a solution will have to be found before the first wave of enlargement.

The UK's position paper on the IGC argues that the 700-member ceiling is necessary to avoid the European Parliament becoming "unwieldy and inefficient". The paper is agnostic about the method which should be used to cut the number of seats per country, but calls for a "sustainable formula that can be applied at successive enlargements".

Greek Socialist Dimitrios Tsatsos, one of the Parliament's two representatives at the IGC talks, says that while MEPs have agreed to the principle of capping the number of seats at 700, much more thought will have to be given to how this would be done in practice.

Tsatsos, however, welcomed the Commission's proposal to elect a number of MEPs on the basis of Europe-wide lists. But the Parliament's own resolution on this subject says this is unlikely to happen before the 2009 elections and most observers believe the suggestion has little chance of making it on to the IGC agenda.

Parliament President Nicole Fontaine used the opening session of the treaty talks last week to call for a more ambitious conference agenda than that agreed by EU leaders at the December summit in Helsinki.

The French Christian Democrat MEP said the charter of fundamental rights which is currently being drawn up should be tacked onto the treaty when it is finalised in December. She also made a plea for the EU pact to be brought into line with a Union which will be required to legislate for "half a billion men and women". This, she said, meant doing away with unanimity in most areas in favour of a greater use of qualified majority voting.

MEPs are slowly waking up to the drastic impact that enlargement to central and eastern Europe will have on the number of members sitting in the Strasbourg-based assembly.