Against all expectations, it took three rounds of voting (two by qualified majority, which took place yesterday with no definitive results, the third by simple majority, won today by 132 votes to 84) for Stella Kyriakides of Cyprus to be elected to the Presidency of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE).
This result draws a line under a saga of several months, which saw the previous president, Pedro Agramunt of Spain, toppled by parliamentarians who withdrew their trust in him, for instance stripping him of the right to chair plenary sessions.
The crisis, which was triggered by a meeting arranged by Russia between Agramunt and the Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad, in March and fed into by suspicions of Azerbaijani corruption involving certain current and former members of PACE, including Agramunt, intensified until its denouement last Friday.
In the afternoon, the Spaniard announced a resignation that nobody had dared to hope for. He said that he had decided to step down “for personal reasons”, but there is no doubt in anybody's mind that the impeachment proceedings scheduled for Monday morning, at the start of PACE's autumn session, ultimately got the better of his determination to cling onto his position.
Like Agramunt, Kyriakides is a member of the European People's Party, as is her rival, Emanuelis Zingeris of Lithuania. This was necessary in an assembly in which a political agreement governs the succession of presidencies. The British Conservative Sir Roger Gale, who stood in briefly for Agramunt, reiterated this by stressing that he had not himself stood, as it was “necessary for the EPP to reach the end of its mandate”, in other words the beginning of the 2018 PACE session on 22 January of next year, when Michele Nicoletti, the current chair of the Socialists & Democrats, will take over, notwithstanding any further theatrics.
On paper, therefore, Kyriakides is expected to close this final session of 2017 and open the first of 2018, in what will admittedly be an extremely brief mandate, but one that may carry much weight in an institution whose “credibility and integrity have been called into question”, she stressed. In the fight against corruption, which she has set out as a priority, she will have to manage the conclusions of the external group of investigation set in place in April to look into the Azerbaijani affair. Made up of Sir Nicolas Bratza of the UK, former judge and President of the European Court of Human rights (ECHR), Jean-Louis Bruguière of France, former magistrate and anti-terrorism expert, and Sweden's Elisabet Fura, former ECHR judge, former parliamentary ombudsman-in-chief of Sweden and legal adviser, this group is to submit its report in December.
Kyriakides will also have to examine the Russian dossier. The delegation has not sat in the assembly since April 2014 in a hemicycle it abandoned after having some of its powers - such as its voting rights - withdrawn in response to the annexation of Crimea.
Economic tit-for-tat measures followed this empty chair policy, with Moscow announcing on 30 June that it would not pay the balance of its contribution to the budget of the Council of Europe for 2017- a figure in the region of €11 million.
A joint Committee of Ministers and PACE will take place in Strasbourg this Thursday to attempt to resume dialogue with the Russian Federation. Kyriakides will therefore be involved in some extremely important matters from the word go and may make all the difference to the outcome of the negotiations. (Original version in French by Véronique Leblanc)