Transparency International (TI) and The Good Lobby announced on Tuesday 13 September that they will file a complaint with the European Ombudsman regarding the controversial appointment of Italian Alessandro Chiocchetti as Secretary-General of the European Parliament by the Bureau of the European Parliament the previous day.
Head of Cabinet to European Parliament President Roberta Metsola since January 2022, Mr Chiocchetti will take up his post at the beginning of 2023, replacing the German Klaus Welle, who has held the post since 2009. Before becoming a European official in 2004, his first role for the European institution was as a parliamentary assistant to Marcello Dell’Utri, an MEP sentenced in Italy in 2010 to seven years in prison for association with organised crime.
Asked about the procedure leading to the appointment, Ms Metsola said it had been “the most transparent” ever for such a position in the Parliament, with four candidates treated in a “fair and equitable” way and checked for eligibility, with a decision made by “a very large majority” (out of 14 voters, “only one vote against and three abstentions”) without her taking part in the vote.
She promised to work to “reform” the European Parliament to make it “efficient, pragmatic and as representative as possible from a geographical and gender equality point of view”.
For TI and The Good Lobby, the informal agreement between political groups that certain groups would get positions - a Deputy Secretary-General post for Renew Europe and the head of a new department for The Left - in exchange for support for Mr Chiocchietti, constitutes “a case of institutional corruption”.
“EU citizens expect the EU institutions to be transparent and accountable, instead of stitching up sordid backroom deals to further the personal and political agendas of senior officials, MEPs and party groups”, said the Director of TI’s EU office, Michiel van Hulten.
Completely backing Ms Metsola, Renew Europe group President Stéphane Séjourné of France said he “fully” supported the change in practice that the appointment of Mr Chiocchetti would bring. In his view, those who criticise this procedure want to return to the situation of the previous legislature, marked by “co-management between two groups” - in this case, the EPP and S&D groups - which between them held the political majority until the 2019 European elections, and during which decisions were taken “ without political plurality, without candidates, without hearings”.
“I understand that the S&D group would have preferred a backroom deal with the EPP, but that is not what happened”, he stressed, convinced that “good people” had been chosen.
Iratxe García Pérez (S&D, Spanish) replied that the position of the social democratic group she chairs is in line with the demand for greater transparency. “If we ask for transparency in others, we must also apply it here”, she insisted, no doubt referring to Parliament’s criticism of the controversial 2018 appointment of Martin Selmayr as head of the European Commission’s administration (see EUROPE 12297/3).
The co-President of The Left group, Martin Schirdewan from Germany, promised that the radical left group had not supported Mr Chiocchetti. “Our group did not support the EPP candidate and we regret more broadly the highly politicised functioning of the European Parliament administration”, he said.
See Mr Chiocchietti’s CV: https://aeur.eu/f/31f (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion and editorial staff)