Migration from Strasbourg

Martin Schulz, the president of the European Parliament, has appealed repeatedly to Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council, not to schedule summits of national leaders during plenary weeks. Van Rompuy, however, appears to enjoy doing precisely that: half of the ten European Councils that have taken place since the beginning of last year were held in plenary weeks, and the summit that starts in Brussels today (24 October) continues the tradition.

Schulz’s problem, of course, is that he does not want to miss the chance to lecture the national leaders during the summit’s opening session, which he is invited to attend. On the other hand, this forces him to miss the plenary debates that take place on Thursdays (today – 24 October – there is a debate on a strategy for the Carpathian region. What a dilemma!)

This week, Schulz, who is campaigning to become Germany’s European commissioner and, he hopes, president of the European Commission, appears to have decided that if he cannot change the schedule of the European Council, he should try to shape its agenda. A plenary debate yesterday morning (23 October) focused on refugee policy and migrant deaths in the Mediterranean – even though the summit agenda suggested that the national leaders were not planning to have a serious debate about asylum and migration. To drive home the point, Schulz left Strasbourg yesterday evening so that he could meet Rosario Crocetta, a former MEP who is now president of Sicily, and Maria Giuseppina Nicolini, the mayor of Lampedusa, in Brussels this morning to discuss the deaths off Italy’s coast.

A thin agenda

The agenda of this week’s plenary – the second in October, to compensate for the summer break – was rather thin, especially once the vote on the EU’s long-term budget and some 20 associated acts had been cancelled. The main event, a vote on data-protection rules, took place not in plenary but in the civil liberties committee. But there was still rather a lot of legislative activity going on, at least at the symbolic level: yesterday, Martin Schulz, the president of the Parliament, signed nine acts into law (the very last step before they take effect), including such controversial items as the Schengen package, the single supervisory mechanism (a cornerstone of plans for a banking union), and the revised staff regulations (see opposite page).

Party funding

With just seven months to go until the European Parliament elections, a proposal for a new statute for EU-level political parties is still languishing in the Council of Ministers. The European Commission proposed new rules on EU-wide parties in September last year, and MEPs adopted their position in April. Since then, the draft legislation has barely budged in Council. But Lithuania, current holder of the rotating presidency of the Council, hopes to lift the draft out of its working-party misery to the level of national ambassadors in the coming weeks, after which three-way talks between MEPs, the Council and the Commission could start.

Lithuania’s hopes were raised when the three institutions agreed in principle to launch an independent authority to monitor whether European parties break their more technical obligations under the new rules, while a separate inter-institutional panel would monitor whether they fail in their commitment to ‘European values’. The main sticking point in the Council now appears to be differences between the draft rules and existing national legislation on the caps for individual contributions to political parties.

Something to shout about

Own-initiative reports are not legally binding and rarely get MEPs excited. Not so on Tuesday (22 October), when a small but loud group of far-right MEPs heckled Edite Estrela, a centre-left Portuguese MEP, over her own-initiative report on sexual and reproductive health, which promotes the legalisation of abortion across the Union.

With the help of a group of social conservatives from the centre-right, they managed to disrupt voting and – after the vote had started – send the report back to the committee on women’s rights and gender equality, from where it had emerged last month with 17 votes in favour, seven against and seven abstentions. Mikael Gustafsson, a far-left Swede who chairs the committee, helpfully pointed out that the committee would simply vote again on the report and that the plenary would eventually have to vote on it too.

The joy of freedom

MEPs took a break from the usual squabbling and sparring to listen to Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s main opposition leader, who was in Strasbourg to pick up the Sakharov Prize she won in 1990.

Only one false note was struck during the ceremony, when the ‘Ode to Joy’ was played and MEPs from the UK Independence Party and a fair number of UK Conservatives, never ones to miss an opportunity to underscore their national allegiance, refused to stand up for the EU’s unofficial anthem.

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