The place to be?

MEPs will gain new rights to make laws under the Lisbon treaty, but they have several other obstacles to overcome, writes Simon Taylor.

In 2009, the 751 MEPs who will be elected will sit in the most powerful Parliament since the assembly first met in 1958. If the Treaty of Lisbon is ratified in all 27 member states before June 2009, MEPs will see the number of areas where they have powers to decide legislation along with EU governments more than double.

MEPs will gain new rights to make laws dealing with energy policy, climate change and many aspects of the fight against terrorism and cross-border organised crime. Graham Watson, leader of the Liberal (ALDE) group, says: "Parliament is going to be the place to be."

But there are obstacles on Parliament’s path to enhanced stature. While those on the inside need no convincing of the importance of the institution, it is a very different story outside the Brussels beltway and the Strasbourg ceinture.

One of the priorities of a communication strategy agreed by Parliament’s political leaders at the end of October is simply to try to make sure that the EU’s 375 million eligible voters know that European Parliament elections are taking place in June 2009. Voter turnout fell to the lowest level in the Parliament’s history, 47.3%, at the last elections in 2004. MEPs have set a target for turnout of over 50%, a level which would give some degree of legitimacy, even if it did mask a distinct lack of interest in some member states.

In order to smarten up its act for the 2009 elections and beyond, the Parliament has embarked on a plan to identify and implement key reforms to the assembly’s organisation and procedures. The aim is to improve the effectiveness and public profile of the Parliament in time for 2009.

Spanish Socialist Josep Borrell, president of the Parliament in 2004-06, tried to push through a similar set of reforms during his two and a half year term of office. Borrell’s plans focused on improving the plenary as an arena of political debate. But his efforts were stymied by a combination of institutional conservatism and a degree of resistance to reform ideas from someone who first became an MEP in 2004.

The Parliament decided to set up a working group chaired by former vice-president Dagmar Roth-Behrendt, a German Socialist, with a representative of each of the political groups, often the group’s leader.

The group will work in three phases looking at different aspects of the Parliament’s organisation and procedures: the assembly’s calendar and plenary sessions, committees and relations with other institutions and external aspects. The group has presented its first report and a number of recommendations for changes which were approved by the bureau, responsible for administrative issues, and the leaders of the political groups.

These include a greater focus on priority subjects in the main days of plenary business, the Tuesday and Wednesday of the Strasbourg session, as well as giving more speaking time to MEPs who have drafted reports. There should also be more time for "spontaneous" contributions rather than predictable set piece debates although time will still be shared according to the size of political group.

Monica Frassoni, joint president of the Greens/European Free Alliance, says that the changes appeared cosmetic. But, she ads, "for the plenary the core substance is presentation. We have to make plenary more interesting and effective".

One interesting change agreed is to introduce a cooling-off period between votes being adopted in the specialist committees and going to plenary. The idea is to give MEPs more time to consider amendments so that they have a better idea what they are voting on in the plenary. There are often thousands of amendments to sensitive reports and members struggle to keep track of the impact of their votes. But the change has its critics. Frassoni says that an "automatic" cooling-off period could allow industry lobbyists to regroup their forces ahead of a plenary vote and reintroduce amendments which the specialist committees had rejected.

But even though the working group identified that a lot of plenary debating time was taken up with own-initiative reports, where MEPs have no formal powers, the Parliament has not yet decided to cut down on this type of excercise which is often seen as keeping otherwise unoccupied MEPs busy.

The reform working group will present a report on committees early next year. With MEPs set to gain co-decision powers in a wider range of areas, the problem of occupying 751 members at a time when the flow of legislative proposals from the Commission has eased may be lessened. Some observers believe that the number of committees may increase. For example, the temporary committee on climate change may become a fully-fledged body when the Parliament gains co-decision over this area thanks to the new treaty. The internal market and consumer protection committee may split into two.

But there is an inescapable sense that the Parliament cannot properly address some of its biggest problems. First, its workload is set by the other institutions, depending on the appetite for new laws in the European Commission and the Council of Ministers. Second, even though the ranks of MEPs will be shrunk from 785 to 751 under the new treaty, the numbers are chosen with democratic representation in mind rather than the optimal size for a legislature.

The Parliament is also debarred from deciding one of the key issues which affects its credibility, the monthly caravan trek to Strasbourg, even though reform-minded MEPs keep the issue on the agenda.

One of the aims of the Parliament’s communication strategy for the 2009 elections is to convey the message that the assembly determines policies which directly affect citizens and that there are ideological alternatives on offer. The problem is that the political groups are ideologically diverse, with the centre-right EPP-ED group ranging from British and Czech Eurosceptics to continental Christian Democrats. The Socialist group houses genuine, if unreconstructed, French, Greek and Portuguese Socialists, and British and Scandinavian free-marketeers. The groups in practice lack the voting discipline of parties in national parliaments so the large national delegations wield a lot of power. This weakens any sense of a direct link between voters’ choices and a specific ideological outcome.

Ensuring that the Parliament is more focused on its key responsibilities is a desirable end in itself. But it is unlikely to be the magic formula for raising voter turnout above the 50% bar.

MEPs will gain new rights to make laws under the Lisbon treaty, but they have several other obstacles to overcome, writes Simon Taylor.