Brussels, 20/03/2014 (Agence Europe) - European Parliament President and candidate to succeed European Commission President José Manuel Barroso, Martin Schulz from Germany has again been confronted with criticism over his two hats. This was the subject of a letter on 13 March from the German political delegations to the European Parliament (CDU, CSU, die Linke, FDP and the Greens), asking Schulz to resign from his post as president and to return to his normal Twitter account, said the news website Contexte on Thursday 20 March. A second Twitter account has been created to house the activities of Schulz “the candidate for the European Commission”, but which brings all his faithful followers into the operation.
Schulz had already been the subject of calls for resignation from the Greens, but he has always refused to do so. On the EPP side, the party's leader, Joseph Daul from France, said in a press conference in Strasbourg in February that he did not believe it necessary for Schulz to resign as president, and Daul saw no particular legal problem. However, in an interview with Germany's Spiegel last weekend, the EPP candidate to succeed Barroso - Jean Claude Juncker - did not hesitate to tackle his competitor, saying “any president of a national parliament would resign” if he was brought to lead the interests of a party. Schulz says, however, that Juncker never once in 19 years resigned from his place as prime minister of Luxembourg during parliamentary elections.
Questioned on this issue on the sidelines of the European summit in Brussels on Thursday 20 March, Guy Verhofstadt from Belgium, ALDE's candidate to succeed Barroso, believed that the elections “are not about this, but rather about debate”.
European Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs and the Euro Olli Rehn, another ALDE challenger for the top EU jobs, noted a paradox, however, between the obligation on commissioners to take unpaid leave during their campaign and the lack of such a requirement for the president of the European Parliament. Rehn has said that he will leave the Commission in April after the last plenary of the Parliament and would return to work just after the elections. If he was elected to the Parliament, he would doubtless have to resign just before the constitutive session of the new Parliament, which is planned in early July. (SP/EL)