The President of the Renew Europe Group, Romanian Dacian Cioloș, announced that the European Parliament will hold an extraordinary plenary session on 16 April in Brussels, during a videoconference exchange with the press on Friday 27 March.
According to Mr Cioloș, the European Council meeting on the European response to the COVID-19 pandemic is "an important first step". Despite the observation of a relative failure, he stressed the need for Member States to cooperate. With this advice being equally valid for the European institutions, the MEP insisted on the role the European Parliament will have to play in the coming weeks to provide a comprehensive response to the health crisis.
"Yesterday, in a discussion between the leaders of the political groups and (European Parliament President) David Sassoli, it was decided that the European Parliament would work through April without physical presence in order to respect social distance" said Mr Cioloș. "The European Parliament committees will work, the groups will work and it has been decided to hold another extraordinary plenary session on 16 April", he added.
The already revised timetable published on Thursday will therefore have to be updated (see EUROPE 12455/5).
This plenary session would be the right time, according to the president of the Renew Europe group, to present a joint European Parliament resolution on the health response and also to take a position on an economic recovery plan once the epidemic has been resolved.
In the short term, Mr Cioloș will contact all European leaders belonging to the centre-right political family. Notably, the Dutch Prime Minister, Mark Rutte, who is reluctant to consider further emergency budgetary measures beyond those already approved. "I hope that Mark Rutte and others - Denmark, Sweden, Austria and also Germany - will find the way to a strong Union. Because their economy depends on what happens in the single market", he said.
In the medium term, the question of the Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) 2021-2027 will come up again. On Thursday, the President of the European Council, Charles Michel, gave assurances that he had consulted his counterparts on this dossier, even though the impossibility of meeting physically is complicating the negotiations.
The leader of the Renew Europe group said that the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, "took very seriously the idea of coming up with a different vision for the MFF". In his view, it will be necessary to reopen the question of own resources and, in particular, to integrate a recovery plan directly into the MFF.
COVID-19 will also have an impact on the functioning of the European Parliament. The epidemic has revealed some shortcomings, with the European Parliament having been taken "a bit by surprise" Mr Cioloș acknowledged. In his view, Parliament's rules of procedure will have to be revised in order to allow remote voting.
April 16 or 22?
According to another source within the European institution, however, the date for a plenary session has still not been decided. There will be a plenary session in April, but 22 April has also been mentioned. A decision could be taken during the Conference of Presidents of Political Groups (CoP) on 2 April.
According to a third European Parliament source, it was not possible to have the European Parliament not holding a plenary session for over a month, while other national parliaments continued their legislative work.
At a previous CoP, the EPP, S&D and Renew Europe groups supported holding a 'physical' plenary session with a reduced number of MEPs. The Greens/EFA, GUE/NGL and Identity and Democracy Groups were not in favour (see EUROPE 12450/10). (Original version in French by Pascal Hansens and Marion Fontana)