Given demographic developments, the composition of the European Parliament no longer conforms to the Treaty rule. This is why the Committee on Constitutional Affairs (Afco) proposed, on Monday evening, for the next European elections in June 2024, to create 11 additional seats. Ultimately, the decision will have to be taken unanimously by the Council. The vote in committee was favorable with 15 votes for, 8 against and 5 abstentions. The plenary of the European Parliament will vote on Thursday.
Article 14 of the treaty lays down the principle of representation of citizens by “degressive proportionality” with a low limit – no country must have less than 6 representatives – and a high limit – Germany, the most populous country, cannot exceed 96 seats. Third point to respect: Parliament cannot exceed 750 seats. Brexit has reduced the gauge to 705 seats. This leaves room for future expansions.
But how should the 11 seats to be created be distributed among the Member States? “We got into the horse-trading,” laments Pascal Durand, MEP from the Social Democrats group, sitting in Afco. Result: Spain and the Netherlands will each gain two seats, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Slovakia, Ireland, Slovenia and Latvia will each gain one additional seat.
The discussion was not easy because, officially, the Christian Democrats of the EPP felt that nothing should be touched one year before the elections and that the Council should be allowed to do its thing. However, the Treaty requires Parliament to initiate the adjustment proposal. Not proposing anything was again contrary to Article 14 of the Treaty. “In truth, some EPP delegations were not on the status quo line because they feared that in the end the eastern countries, with their declining demographics, would find themselves on the losing end,” an EPP source said. Romania, for example, could have lost seats. So as not to offend anyone, it was quickly decided that no State would decline in the number of seats… An easy solution, some would say.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz expressed his own views on the matter in his first major speech on Europe. “The Treaties rightly provide for a limit of 751 MEPs. But we will exceed this number when new countries join the EU – at least when we enlarge the Parliament of the seats to which the new member states would be entitled under the rules in force so far, he said in his speech. at Charles University in Prague on August 29, 2022. If we do not want the European Parliament to become a bloated institution, we must find a new balance in its composition. And we must do so respecting the democratic principle that each electoral vote has approximately the same weight. »
Olaf Scholz therefore dared to challenge the degressive proportionality which requires that each MEP from a more populous Member State represents more citizens than each MEP from a less populated Member State. Doubtless the Chancellor considers that the degressive proportionality puts his country at a too great a disadvantage. In fact, a Maltese MEP represents 86,422 citizens while a German MEP represents 866,000 citizens, ten times more. If we applied proportionality without degressivity, Malta would only have one MEP in Strasbourg… Unacceptable for Valletta.
