Spanish Socialist Domènec Ruiz Devesa will submit his draft resolution on reforming the European Union’s electoral law to the European Parliament’s Committee on Constitutional Affairs on Tuesday 15 June.
Presented in early June to his counterparts, this document sets out and details its ideas for making the 2024 European Parliament’s elections truly European: making 9 May the only day for elections, standardising the voting age, making candidates’ membership of European political parties visible, and considering the introduction of postal and electronic voting (see EUROPE 12691/4).
Spitzenkandidat. Above all, Mr Ruiz Devesa believes that voters should be allowed to indicate their preference for a candidate who would lead a pan-European list committed to a joint constituency.
To be eligible, a pan-European list would have to prove that it has the support of 0.01% of voters in at least a quarter of the Member States.
Such a constituency would allow European citizens to elect 46 MEPs. The candidate at the top of the electoral list representing the winning European political party in the European elections, who would be able to form a political majority in the European Parliament, would become the President of the European Commission.
Such a process has only been realised once, in 2014, with the accession of the Luxembourg Christian Democrat Jean-Claude Juncker to the head of the Commission, after the EPP party won the European elections. But Mr Juncker was not a candidate in the European elections. In 2019, Germany’s Manfred Weber was the EPP’s leading candidate. However, while the EPP again came out on top in the elections, it was opposed by the European Council and failed to secure a majority in the newly elected Parliament.
The rapporteur warns: “the objective of establishing a common constituency is only achievable if a geographical, demographic and gender balance is guaranteed, ensuring that small Member States are not placed at a disadvantage compared to larger Member States”.
It therefore suggests introducing binding demographic criteria, “such as maximum thresholds for candidates residing in the same Member State and a minimum mandatory representation of citizens from different Member States”.
In an annex to the legislative proposal amending the EU Electoral Law, Mr Ruiz Devesa suggests the creation of five categories of countries according to their population and carries out a simulation of how the votes obtained by a transnational list in each of the categories could lead to obtaining, or not, seats in the European Parliament.
See the draft report: https://bit.ly/3wr8R1H (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)