Absence makes the heart grow fonder, so the old saying goes. With the European Parliament deep into its summer break, I found myself wondering whether I prefer the Parliament when it is on annual leave. And if so, is that my fault or the Parliament’s?
I blame Jean-Claude Juncker for putting those questions into my head. It was the president of the European Commission who, at the July plenary session of the Parliament — the last before its summer holiday — denounced the behavior of MEPs as “ridiculous,” precipitating an unseemly spat with Antonio Tajani, the president of the Parliament.
Juncker was upset that so few MEPs attended a debate reviewing Malta’s six-month stint presiding over the Council of the EU. Ever since, I’ve been wondering if the presence of MEPs in the chamber is a reliable measure of the value of the Parliament. After all, plenary debates don’t usually make much of an impression on the outside world. (If, in the last few months, you’ve heard anyone enthuse about a speech given in the Parliament, chances are that the reference was to Bill Clinton or Felipe González at the funeral rites for Helmut Kohl.)
A week after their tiff, Tajani sent Juncker a letter formally notifying him that the Parliament was on vacation until the end of August.
So how do I miss the Parliament while it’s on holiday? To help me count the ways, I turned to a work by the late Julian Priestley, who for 10 years (1997-2007) was secretary-general of the Parliament.
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His 2008 book “Six Battles That Shaped Europe’s Parliament” — recommended holiday reading for EU nerds — is a lively account of the powers of the Parliament and how, formally and informally, they were acquired.
The first battle Priestley recounts was for the Parliament to have a decisive say on the EU’s budget, one of its most important powers. And this is what Tajani’s letter to Juncker on July 13 was essentially about. The EU’s financial rules say that the Parliament is supposed to respond within a specified time to Commission proposals concerning the budget — and that would apply to adjustments to this year’s spending as well as proposals for future spending.
During holiday time, those deadlines would create problems, so Tajani was warning the Commission not to send any such routine requests. In this case, how do we miss the Parliament? We don’t — because budget matters are put on hold for the summer.
The consequence, however, is that discussion of the Commission’s proposal for the 2018 budget will be compressed into September-November, which won’t leave much margin for maneuver if discussions get sticky. The timetable can get complicated: France complained to the European Court of Justice about last year’s parliamentary vote on the EU budget because it was taken in Brussels rather than Strasbourg.
At the grown-up table
The second battle that Priestley identifies is the struggle for the Parliament to win recognition from the member countries — to get the president of the Parliament a place at EU summits and to get national leaders to attend sessions of the Parliament.
Ironic then, that what so irritated Juncker was the Parliament’s casual abuse of such recognition. Joseph Muscat, Malta’s prime minister, came to the Parliament to debate his country’s EU presidency and hardly any MEPs bothered to show up. Like a moody adolescent, the Parliament demands to be taken seriously, but when treated as an adult responds with churlish contempt.
In the summer, there are no EU summits and no plenary sessions, so I miss this unattractive attention-craving behavior not at all.
My relief will, however, be short-lived, because Juncker will deliver a “State of the Union” speech to the Parliament on September 13. Juncker has promised that his speech will take on board responses to the Commission’s various reflection papers on the future of the EU. And if you believe that, you qualify for a Charlemagne Prize in Naivety. Avert your eyes from the sight of two EU institutions propping each other up with their own insecurities.
Battle No. 3 was to acquire for the Parliament a role in the appointment of the European Commission. The upshot is that once every five years, after the election of a new Parliament, the summer is taken up with preparation for a new Commission: the commissioners-designate and the keenest MEPs spend their summer holidays prepping for the confirmation hearings in September.
But this is not one of those summers — the next change of the Commission isn’t due until 2019. Instead, just before the summer break the European Parliament subjected the new commissioner from Bulgaria, Mariya Gabriel, to only the gentlest of examinations, perhaps because she’d been an MEP for the past eight years. I wish that the Parliament was capable of maintaining rigorous standards of scrutiny of appointments, but in practice, the Parliament’s independence is compromised by MEPs’ deference to instructions from political groups and national interests.
Fourth on Priestley’s list was the struggle to get MEPs employed on the same common EU statute with a standardized salary (rather than earning the same as national lawmakers). The reform was characterized by Josep Borrell (president of the Parliament between 2004 and 2006) as something that all the EU institutions needed but nobody wanted.
Priestley’s account gives credit to Juncker, who was then prime minister of Luxembourg, for using his presidency of the Council of the EU to get the change pushed through.
Despite that breakthrough, and the introduction of a common statute for MEPs’ assistants, scandals still taint the Parliament — whether an individual MEP’s abuse of allowances or the allegations against France’s Front National MEPs that they diverted EU funds to national political activities. Those accusations are denied, but evidence accumulates that the Parliament’s internal controls are inadequate. One of the comforting aspects of the Parliament being on holiday is that the opportunities for skulduggery with attendance and travel allowances are reduced.
Search for work
It’s hard to excuse the Parliament’s failure to invest time in safeguarding its reputation given that its legislative workload has slackened. The fifth battle that Priestley describes is the struggle for legislative power. Successive treaty reforms have given the Parliament more and more say over legislation. All but the most hardened Euroskeptic would concede that this is the area where Parliament does its most valuable work — in the scrutiny of draft legislation. It’s through the unglamorous labor of the Parliament’s various committees, where individual MEPs have to combine political savvy with a mastery of technical detail, that the Parliament contributes most to the EU, and to its own reputation.
By definition, during the summer break, when the committees are not meeting, I miss that work. But here’s the rub: the difference between holiday-time and term-time is not as big as it used to be. The marked reduction in legislative proposals from the Juncker Commission has reduced the opportunities for the Parliament to respond — and for individual MEPs to burnish their reputations.
That’s not to say there aren’t important legislative dossiers before the Parliament — reform of the common European asylum system, rules on passenger name records and data privacy, a directive on copyright in the digital single market, for instance. Still, there are fewer than in the past. So this summer, I miss the Parliament’s legislative work, but not as much as in previous years.
The sixth battle was arguably the most dramatic — the one that saw the Parliament precipitate the resignation of Jacques Santer’s European Commission in March 1999. Priestley characterizes that as a battle to hold the Commission to account. But his record of events shows how accidental and haphazard was the sequence of events that toppled Santer: the holding to account was an improvised response to a confluence of scandals in 1998-1999. What the EU’s good health requires is routine run-of-the-mill mechanisms of accountability.
It’s not just the financial crisis and the migration crisis that have raised doubts about accountability. Notwithstanding a parliamentary inquiry, I’m unconvinced that the EU has got to grips with the regulatory failures that gave rise to Dieselgate. The ongoing crisis about contaminated eggs carries uncomfortable reminders of a 2011 outbreak of E. coli that was a much more serious failure of RASFF — the EU’s rapid alert system for food and feed.
Parliament’s record of holding the Council and Commission responsible after such failures is patchy at best. There was a valid point underlying Juncker’s irritation with MEPs for not wanting to review the Maltese presidency: the Parliament has to earn its credibility by doing the dull but worthy stuff.
All of which suggests that my starting point was ill-defined. I don’t want a Parliament that is desperate for my attention or affection. I want a Parliament that wins my grudging respect; one that is not — to borrow Juncker’s well-chosen word — “ridiculous.”
Tim King writes POLITICO‘s Brussels Sketch