Parliament suffers from growing pains

Midway through the term of the European Parliament, the last few weeks have seen an interesting recomposition of political forces within the assembly.

The creation of a new far-right group, Independence, Tradition and Sovereignty (ITS), has produced the most media buzz. This was not least because it was the controversial decision to admit Romania and Bulgaria this year that gave the 14 MEPs who were in the non-attached group the extra members and countries they needed to meet the Parliament’s threshold for forming a group (20 MEPs from six countries).

But, as Monica Frassoni, co-president of the Greens/EFA, pointed out, most of the extremist MEPs like the French Front National and the Flemish Vlaams Belang were already in the Parliament so the move does not signal a major rightwards lurch in the assembly. The group’s formation owes more to the relatively low proportion of MEPs required to form a group.

UK Socialist MEP Richard Corbett has pointed out that it is possible to form a group with only 2% of members rather than the 5% which is common in other parliaments. The ease with which groups can be formed is in contrast to the strong incentive to form a group in terms of the rights to funding, staff, committee chairs and vice-chairs and the right to table amendments and request emergency debates.

The new group is unlikely to have any influence on policy in the Parliament as attempts to win vice-chairmanships of committees will be blocked by the other groups. Socialist and Green MEPs are also challenging whether the group has a coherent political programme as the Parliament’s rules require.

But ITS’ formation will give its members a platform for publicising their views, especially as French Front National leader and MEP Jean-Marie Le Pen is standing in the French presidential election. Graham Watson, the leader of Liberal MEPs, is predicting the group will fold soon. In any case Romania and Bulgaria are holding elections for their MEPs in May which may deprive the newly hatched group of the headcount it needs. There is, however, a risk that the nationalist parties may pick up protest votes against the incumbent governments in the two countries.

Last week also saw the Union for a Europe of Nations (UEN) profit from its new-found strength. As the fourth biggest group with 44 members it is entitled to nominate a vice-president of Parliament. Adam Bielan of the Law and Justice (PiS) party, the main party in the ruling Polish government, was elected, albeit with the lowest number of votes, 128.

Though the decision of UEN, jointly chaired by Fianna Fáil’s Brian Crowley and Alleanza Nazionale’s Cristiana Muscardini, to take in five League of Polish Families (LPR) MEPs raised a few eyebrows, Simon Hix, professor of European politics at the London School of Economics, points out that the group of nationalist conservatives is more politically homogenous than the Independence and Democracy group which the five MEPs joined when this Parliament took office in 2004. The group ranges from its president, Jens-Peter Bonde, a Eurosceptic Socialist, to the Thatcherite UK Independence Party, as well as representatives of hardline Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox Christian parties.

More significantly in terms of the balance of political forces within the Parliament is French UMP member Joseph Daul’s narrow victory over Swedish Moderata MEP Gunnar Hökmark in the contest to head the Parliament’s biggest group, the 277-member European People’s Party-European Democrats (EPP-ED). Daul only won 134 to Hökmark’s 115 in the third round of voting after two other candidates were eliminated. His predecessor, Hans-Gert Pöttering, by contrast, has been elected by 95% of the group in previous internal contests.

Daul, a German-speaking Alsatian farmer, is not popular with the UK Tories and the EPP-ED members from the new member states who dislike the group’s increasingly anti-enlargement line, but he was put forward by French UMP leader Nicolas Sarkozy who wanted one of his MEPs in a key position in Parliament. Hix sees this as a potentially major development if the French government starts to take the Parliament seriously and to use it to influence legislation, as the Germans have been doing for years.

Ironically the ascent of Hans-Gert Poettering from EPP-EP leader to president of Parliament may, contrary to common belief, herald a weakening of German influence within the assembly as the two biggest groups, the EPP-ED and the Socialists, are no longer both headed by Germans (German SPD MEP Martin Schulz being president of the Socialists), preventing what Hix calls "cosy German stitch-ups".

Hix points out that the balance of power between the groups is unchanged with the Liberals still in the powerful position of being able to influence key legislation by deciding whether to side with the centre-right or the Socialists to form commanding majorities.

Given this strength in numbers and the advantages for any national delegation’s MEPs of being in a big group, it seems unlikely that the UK Tories and the Czech ODS members will leave in 2009 as the Conservative leader David Cameron has threatened to do.

But Daul’s struggle to win the top EPP-ED job seat and the audacious attempts of Polish EPP-ED MEP Jacek Saryusz-Wolski and Czech Miroslav Ouský to wrest control of the prestigious foreign affairs and environment committees show that German dominance in the Parliament is facing attrition, because of the recent waves of enlargement, the large numbers of MEPs from the new members and the rights to key jobs that the D’Hondt system of allocating important posts gives them.

It is in the EPP-ED that the change in political culture following enlargement with the entry of transatlantic, pro-free market countries, is causing the greatest strains.

Midway through the term of the European Parliament, the last few weeks have seen an interesting recomposition of political forces within the assembly.