On Wednesday 26 June, the Renew Europe group in the European Parliament approved membership applications of three new MEPs, bringing the provisional total to 75 seats in the plenary chamber.
The new members are Bulgarians Nikola Minchev and Hristo Petrov of the ‘We Continue the Change’ party and Romanian Eugen Tomac of the ‘People’s Movement Party’, the latest to join the group after leaving the ‘European People’s Party’ (EPP).
This follows last week’s announcement by Belgian Yvan Verougstraete, whose party ‘Les Engagés’ has also turned its back on the EPP (see EUROPE 13436/26).
It should be noted that the Czech party ‘ANO 2011’ withdrew from Renew Europe on 21 June, causing the group to lose 7 seats (see EUROPE 13437/13).
If the ECR group becomes stronger (83 seats at the time of writing) (see EUROPE 13435/7), Renew Europe will no longer have much chance of maintaining third place in Parliament. However, the group expects the number of members to “continue to grow over the coming days”.
The day after the re-election of France’s Valérie Hayer as group president (see EUROPE 13439/12), Renew Europe also appointed its first vice-president, Ireland’s Billy Kelleher, of the ‘Fianna Fáil’ party, and its seven vice-presidents.
They are Gerben-Jan Gerbrandy (Dutch), João Cotrim de Figueiredo (Portuguese), Irena Joveva (Slovenian), Ivars Ijabs (Latvian), Morten Løkkegaard (Danish), Dan Barna (Romanian) and Anna-Maja Henriksson (Finnish).
“Renew Europe is growing again, not only in size, but also in experience and ambition”, said a delighted Valérie Hayer. (Original version in French by Pauline Denys)