The Brief — Smaller is better

Few things get EU lawmakers more agitated than debates over how many of them should sit in Parliament and from which country.

This bunfight crops up every few years, but this time, there is more room for haggling than usual.

Lest we forget, the Brexit process had not been concluded by the last European elections in June 2019, meaning that 73 UK MEPs were elected, only to lose their jobs when UK MPs finally ratified the Withdrawal Agreement to leave the bloc.

The Parliament had a contingency plan for this, meaning that 27 observers were elected and then took their seats when Brexit was legally confirmed. The Parliament has had 705 MEPs ever since.

The treaty states that the Parliament can be up to 751 seats – 750 plus the president, who is also a deputy. Incidentally, That number was a compromise to keep Italy happy when the Lisbon Treaty was negotiated, which ensured they had as many seats as the UK.

The surplus seats are, with grim inevitability, now being fought over, initially by MEPs and now by EU governments.

The other rule in the treaties beyond the 751 limit is that the principle of ‘degressive proportionality’ – a classic piece of eurospeak – should be applied. According to this formula, Spain and the Netherlands should get two extra seats, with Austria, Denmark, Finland, Slovakia, Ireland, Slovenia and Latvia getting one more each.

That should be the end of the matter, but now EU governments have taken the proposal and turned it into a Christmas tree.

France and Belgium are leading the way in demanding four and two extra seats, respectively.

However, in many ways, they have the wrong argument altogether.

At 751 MEPs, or even 705, the Parliament has more members than any national parliament in the EU.

The result of having too many members is that, too often, it is an unwieldy institution. Nor does the assembly’s workload justify having so many MEPs. Several hundred MEPs go through a five-year mandate without ever taking a rapporteurship on a legislative file or tabling more than a handful of amendments or questions to the European Commission.

Nobody would miss them if they weren’t there. In fact, the Parliament’s lack of unity often weakens its negotiating power with EU ministers.

That argument has been taken up by the Netherlands and Germany – which recently trimmed the size of its own legislature – who say that the priority should be to either reshuffle or decrease the number of seats to keep the degressive proportionality principle.

The disagreement between ministers and MEPs will likely ensure that the chamber remains at 705. That would be a missed opportunity because when it comes to lawmaking and parliaments in general, smaller is better.

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The Roundup

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The leaders of Serbia and Kosovo failed to agree in EU-mediated crisis talks in Brussels on Thursday on efforts to end weeks of violence in predominantly Serb areas of northern Kosovo.

EU ambassadors meeting in Brussels Thursday (22 June) approved a €3.5 billion second top-up of the European Peace Facility (EPF) after months of negotiations, with it set to be endorsed by foreign ministers on Monday.

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