the potemkin parliament

"Who that admires, and from the heart is attached, to true national assemblies, but must turn in horror and disgust from such a profane burlesque, and parody of that sacred institution.”
Edmund Burke

It is said that Russian minister Grigori Aleksandrovich Potemkin ordered that the facades of villages be built along the banks of the Dnieper River in the Crimea, in order to fool Empress Catherine II that the territory he had won for her was prosperous and fertile. These empty facades became known as "Potemkin villages".

The European Parliament (EP) is the centrepiece of many pro-EU arguments. Since it can no longer be denied that the EU has taken over most of the functions that national governments used to perform – it now accounts for 80% of all new legislation in member states – Europhiles argue instead that the EU, rather than undermining democracy, is simply democracy on a larger scale than nation states. Since the EP is the only EU institution whose members are democratically elected, it is naturally enough held up to demonstrate how democratic the EU is. But to what extent is it a real parliament like those that exist at national level throughout Europe, and to what extent merely a Potemkin parliament, designed to fool casual observers from a distance?

It is often claimed that, although the European Commission is unelected, this doesn't matter because any new law it proposes has to be agreed by the democratically elected EP. In fact, even this is not quite true. Many legislative acts fall under either the assent procedure, whereby the EP can only veto proposals outright, not amend them, or the consultation procedure, whereby the EP is formally informed of the new law but has no influence over it. Only in policy areas where the co-decision procedure applies can the EP have any input into legislation. What proportion is that?

"[Unelected bureaucrats] decided on over 3,000 rules last year (2006), only 57 of them in co-decision with the European Parliament."
Jens-Peter Bonde, Danish MEP

But even in areas where co-decision applies, how effective is this safeguard? The EP has no right to initiate new legislation – only the unelected Commission can do so. Should any legislation be voted down, there is nothing to prevent the Commission resubmitting the same proposal with only cosmetic changes, and in the meantime doing backstairs deals and calling in favours so that this time it gets through.

There is nothing in the EP that resembles the spirited and sometimes rowdy debates Europeans are familiar with in their own national assemblies. Any MEP who wishes to speak in favour of or against a motion is given precisely 90 seconds. This is not because of the sheer number of people wishing to speak – at 785, the number of MEPs is only slightly higher than the number of Westminster MPs, and anyone who speaks will usually find him/herself addressing an almost empty chamber. As Daniel Hannan MEP wryly notes, when the hemicycle is anywhere near full, you can be certain that a motion affecting MEPs' salaries or perks is being discussed. Not surprisingly, the EP does not wish this to be known and has voted to ban the media from certain parts of the building, following an incident where a German TV crew filmed MEPs signing in to receive their daily attendance allowance of €268 and going home immediately. (One might have thought that attendance at the EP was pretty much a central part of the job, not an extra duty for which MEPs should be rewarded.)

The vast majority of MEPs are federalists of one stripe or another, perhaps as a result of a misguided tendency amongst Eurosceptics not to vote in European elections on the grounds that they are "against the whole thing anyway". It is perhaps also partly because elections to the EP have to be conducted under a system of proportional representation, meaning that candidates have a incentive to be loyal to party bosses (who will decide which candidates will fill any seats won by that party) rather than to voters (who are voting for parties, not individuals). This means that any measure to increase European integration is almost guaranteed safe passage through the EP, and only comes unstuck on the rare occasions when it is put before the people of Europe, as with the European Constitution in 2005.

However, it is worth noting how unbearable the Commission finds it to have even a tiny minority of non-federalists in the EP. It sought to change this by introducing the European Political Parties Directive which provided state funding for political parties, but only those that met certain criteria which, it was assumed, Eurosceptic parties would not be able to meet – for example, the requirement to belong to a transnational group with a minimum level of support in at least 7 countries. The justification offered was, of course, the need to keep extremists out. As Polish MEP Michal Kaminski commented,

"This is exactly what the Communists did in Poland. They didn’t ban elections: we had elections all the time. They didn’t even ban opposition parties, at least not by the 1970s. All they did was to ban the opposition parties from contesting the elections. And do you know what their official excuse was? Exactly the same as this. They said it was to stop fascist parties. Only pretty soon that came to apply to everyone except the Communists and their Agrarian allies."

(In the event, Eurosceptic parties did form transnational groupings allowing them to receive the funding and the Commission, no doubt, went back to the drawing board.)

The EP also plays a significant role in bringing new member states into the EU, thus allowing Europhiles to claim that the EU must be a good thing since so many countries outside it are keen to get in. Delegates from countries considering membership are allowed to spend a year in the EP as "observers", watching and even participating in debates but not voting. Brussels cunningly decided that they should be paid the same as actual MEPs and fonctionnaires, thus giving them a strong financial incentive to stay on at the end of the year. An Estonian newspaper calculated that a civil servant moving from Tallin to Brussels at the same grade would increase his salary twenty-two fold. Not surprisingly, at the end of the year these people tend to feel that they would rather stay in Brussels than return to their former lifestyle.

With every new member state the number of translators required grows exponentially, since it is necessary to translate between the new language and all the existing languages. However, the cost of this is peanuts compared to the EP's primary ways of wasting money. MEPs' expense payments bear no relation to expenses actually incurred, and in any case are never audited. Travel between the EP and the home country, for example, is compensated at the rate of a first class ticket plus 10% – an MEP who travels via a cheaper method, for example a budget airline, simply keeps the difference, tax free as it counts as an expense payment rather than income. As mentioned above, they receive an attendance allowance purely for showing up at the EP, even if they go home immediately after signing in.

Best of all, once a month the EP is required by the Amsterdam Treaty to relocate from Brussels to Strasbourg. As well as the MEPs themselves, the 400 km journey is made by 5,000 support staff as well as 10 large trucks full of documents. The cost of this arrangement is estimated at €200 million a year, to say nothing of the unnecessary carbon emissions.

Not surprisingly, even within the EU there is strong opposition to this colossal waste. Swedish MEP Cecilia Malmström started a petition (see oneseat.eu) calling for the EP to be located solely in Brussels. In September 2006 the petition reached one million signatures (the number is significant because the proposed European Constitution includes the rather empty promise that any legislation which gained the support of one million European citizens would be "considered" by the Commission). However, no action has been taken.

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