The Conference of Presidents of Political Groups (CoP) of the European Parliament finalised on Thursday 9 January a draft resolution on the organisation and work of the Conference on the Future of Europe, which is due to start on 9 May, Europe Day, and last for 2 years (see EUROPE 12394/12).
The issue of the governance of the Conference, including the presidency of the steering bodies, is still under discussion among the major groups. At the heart of the system, according to MEPs, should be an “executive coordination board” made up of the three main European institutions and led by the European Parliament, itself part of a steering committee.
The first body would be responsible for the day-to-day management of the Conference, while the second would prepare the holding of plenary sessions (at least 4 times a year) involving 135 Members of Parliament, the Council of the EU, national parliaments, the European Commission, the European Economic and Social Committee and the social partners at the European level.
The political groups have not yet reached agreement on who from Parliament would chair the Executive Coordination Committee.
Referring to last summer’s agreement at the European Council on the distribution of the main European high offices, which would include the presidency of the Conference on the Future of Europe, the Renew Europe group is insisting on the nomination of Belgian Guy Verhofstadt. “The subject needs to be discussed again”, but “we hope it will be Guy Verhoftsadt”, said Pascal Durand (RE, France), who said that “few people are prepared to devote themselves to this substantive work”. After discussions with the former Belgian Prime Minister, he expressed his confidence that, once appointed, Mr Verhofstadt would leave his position in Parliament related to the Brexit negotiations.
Accused of doing everything possible since the rejection of his own candidacy for the presidency of the European Commission to sabotage an agreement signed by French President Emmanuel Macron, EPP group chairman Manfred Weber of Germany is reportedly pushing the candidacy of Antonio Tajani, president of the Committee on Constitutional Affairs. He is apparently more interested in the Conference presidency being handled directly by the President of the European Parliament, David Sassoli, with a view to taking over this function himself at the end of 2021.
However, the co-chair of the Greens/EFA group, Belgian MEP Philippe Lamberts, believes that an individual capable of “dedicating time” to this exercise and to “bringing people together, playing as a team” is needed. He said that he is open to a dual presidency, particularly one man and one woman, as is the case in his political group. With this in mind, the name of Danuta Huebner, former European Commissioner, has been mentioned.
The text of the resolution is “sufficiently vague” to accommodate the Sassoli or Verhofstadt option, said Daniel Freund (Greens/EFA, Germany), who thinks the issue could be decided at the CoP meeting on Thursday morning (16 January), or even after the resolution is adopted as part of the interinstitutional negotiations. According to Mr Freund, other elements of the text “are much more important for us, such as citizen participation and equal representation of MEPs and national representatives”.
Involving European citizens in deliberations
One of the MEPs’ major concerns is to involve European citizens as much as possible in the Conference and to ensure that their views are taken into account, so as not to reproduce the arrangement of the Convention on the future of the EU, which in the early 2000s primarily mobilised specialists in European issues.
This time, we have “an innovative scheme” that consists of “clearly involving citizens in the deliberative process, not just the consultative process”, Mr Durand said. He noted a certain fear of citizens’ involvement, both among the S&D group, who spoke of the importance of democratic representativeness, and among the environmentalists, who feared that citizens would be overwhelmed by specialists in European affairs.
According to Mr Lamberts, “we need to make sure there is follow-up. Everybody agrees. The question is, how?”
Organised in a decentralised manner in the Member States, citizens’ agoras will focus on thematic issues corresponding to the priorities of the von der Leyen Commission, such as fundamental values, climate and security. Representatives of these agoras will come to present the results of their work at the plenary sessions in order to participate in the deliberations, according to the draft resolution to be adopted in plenary on Thursday 16 January.
As the issue of selecting citizens remains a thorny one, MEPs have not set out a specific procedure. However, they specify that it will be up to independent national institutions to choose the citizens participating in the debates and that they should reflect as much as possible the diversity of the European population. Persons holding political office or linked to lobbies will be excluded.
It should also be noted that the CoP requests that ways be found to involve representatives of countries negotiating their accession to the EU in the work.
Parliament will then advocate its position to the European Commission, which is expected to present its proposals on Tuesday 14 January, and to the EU Council. The objective is to develop an interinstitutional Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that establishes the modalities and objectives of the Conference.
“Work in the Commission and the EU Council is much less advanced. The Commission originally imagined that the Conference would be a Citizens’ Consultation 2.0”, noted one parliamentary source.
As initially envisaged, the Conference should, as early as this summer, make recommendations on how to make the conduct of the European elections more democratic, perhaps through the creation of transnational lists led by leading candidates (‘Spitzenkandidaten’).
See the draft resolution: http://bit.ly/36FkNzV (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)