German EU lawmakers are the most influential in the European Parliament, in addition to holding the presidency of the European Commission, according to new research published on Tuesday (18 October).
The delegation of 96 German MEPs is the most influential overall and also one of the best performing proportionally to its size, said the research platform EU matrix.
This is primarily because of the number of senior positions in the parliament administration, political groups and committees held by German MEPs, and because they have a significant presence in all of the Parliament’s main groups.
The study, put together by Doru Frantescu, CEO of EUmatrix.eu (and former CEO of VoteWatch Europe), uses a methodology based on the positions MEPs hold in the Parliament and the role they play in crafting legislation, as well as their seniority, both within their party and national politics.
Unsurprisingly, Parliament President Roberta Metsola and Manfred Weber, who leads the largest political group, the European People’s Party, are ranked as the most influential deputies. They are followed by Green lawmaker Heidi Hautala, a vice president of the Parliament who has also piloted a series of files on international trade.
Three MEPs in the top ten chair legislative committees – Bernd Lange, Johan Van Overtveldt and Juan Fernando López Aguilar, while three are leaders of political groups – Weber, Socialist and Democrat group leader Iratxe García Pérez, and Renew Europe’s Stéphane Séjourné, who is also the secretary general of his national party, the Renaissance of French President Emmanuel Macron.
The study concluded that the EPP is still the most powerful political group.
“It seems that the EPP and its allies have become better equipped to counterbalance the centre-left majorities that were more prevalent in the European Parliament at the beginning of the term”, the study said, pointing to the EPP’s success in obtaining both the Parliament president and secretary general positions.
Elsewhere, members of the Greens/EFA group “punch above their weight with regards to leadership positions in the EP, getting hold of key legislative files and their overall voting performance”.
Meanwhile, members of the far-right Identity and Democracy group “remain isolated” in the Parliament, a reflection of the cordon sanitaire used by centrist groups to prevent them from obtaining leadership positions in the assembly.
Among the small countries, the Maltese, Luxembourgers and Finns punch above their weight the most, while Slovaks, Cypriots, and Slovenes are the most underperforming national groups.
The two EU members with long-running rule of law disputes with the EU institutions – Hungary and Poland – also struggle in the Parliament.
The influence of Polish MEPs remains stagnant, due to their concentration in a single group, the European Conservatives and Reformists.
Hungarian EU lawmakers are the least influential when it comes to legislation, largely because the governing Fidesz party is currently without a political group and, as such, unable to obtain legislative files even if it wanted to.
In terms of policy, North-Western Europeans have bigger clout, on average, on energy and agri-food topics, while MEPs from Central and Eastern Europe remain more influential than average on digital policy.
[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic]
Source: euractiv.com
