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Irish reformer picked to lead Europe's Parliament

Stephen Castle
Wednesday 16 January 2002 01:00 GMT
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The European Parliament, faced with a wall of public apathy and the lowest ebb yet in its political fortunes, turned to an Irishman with a reforming zeal to lead it.

Pat Cox, a smooth-talking former TV journalist and leader of the Parliament's Liberal Democrat bloc, was elected president after an unexpectedly tough contest against a Scottish Labour MEP, David Martin.

Acknowledging that the European Union's only directly elected body has failed to connect with voters – who stayed away in droves during the last elections – Mr Cox said: "If we are to become a communicating parliament we must find ourselves the space, we must find our time for our message, tell our story, sell our story."

The new president won by 298 votes to 237 for Mr Martin. He takes over from Nicole Fontaine when the Strasbourg assembly has almost disappeared from the public gaze.

Three years ago it all looked very different. With allegations of cronyism and nepotism levelled against the European Commission, the EU's powerful policy-making executive, MEPs, long derided as overpaid political irrelevancies, moved in for the kill.

Their relentless pursuit of commissioners such as Edith Cresson, who famously employed her dentist as a scientific adviser, helped to force not just her resignation but that of all 19 of her colleagues.

"For the Parliament itself," Mr Cox said at the time, "this entire debate has represented a coming of age, a new maturity in understanding its democratic rights and in its capacity to empower itself to act in the public interest." But yesterday even he admitted the Parliament had failed to raise its profile in the intervening years.

The political impotence of the Strasbourg assembly is all the more surprising because it is hardly the powerless talking shop of Eurosceptic myth.

Wide powers of "co- decision" mean MEPs can amend or reject, but not initiate, legislation in areas ranging from the environment to telecommunications.

Last year the Parliament wielded its power, delivering a huge setback to EU governments by bringing 12 years of work on a new directive on takeovers shuddering to a halt

The average MEP has more influence over the shape of laws that will come into force in Britain than almost any backbench MP at Westminster.

But asked to name the Parliament's biggest achievement since September 1999 MEPs struggled lamely through a catalogue of important but dull legislation. Decision making is not only obscure, it is often hidden from view, at private meetings of the political blocs that control the voting.

While its technical powers have grown steadily, the institution's confidence was shattered by the European elections in June 1999. Turn-out fell to a record low with less than one in four Britons voting.

As participation in the democratic process in Europe has dwindled the EU has become a growing focus of street level discontent. Anti-globalisation protesters wreaked havoc at its summit in Gothenburg last June and mounted another big, but peaceful, protest in Brussels in December.

The Parliament lost the moral high ground by flunking its big opportunities for internal reform.

When, in 1999, the Liberal Democrat bloc allied itself with the centre-right group, part of the deal was that there should be a reform of MEPs' notorious expenses regime. The Parliament was to agree a common salary and sweep away the current rules whereby each nationality is paid a different sum based on national MPs' payscales – the worst-off using a lax expenses regime to make up the difference.

Two years after the deadline passed, there is still no sign of this most basic of reforms.

Another potential reform is completely off the agenda. At present MEPs are forced to commute between Brussels, the EU's formal home, Strasbourg, where they meet one week in four, and their constituencies. This arrangement was the fault of member state governments but the politics of finding the Parliament a single, permanent home are too complicated even to broach.

Meanwhile, some nations still use the Parliament as a dumping ground. There may be more young politicians in the latest intake but its corridors seem full of lined and vaguely familiar faces of politicians coming to the end of their careers. After his humiliating exit from the Commission presidency, even Jacques Santer fetched up as an MEP.

Some believe the motivation for Silvio Berlusconi – now the Italian Prime Minister – to serve in the last European Parliament was that it provided him with immunity from prosecution at home.

Mr Cox, at least, comes with a commitment to try to reconnect the European Parliament to its voters, to reform MEPs' expenses and make debates more relevant to public concerns.

But as Nick Clegg, a British Liberal Democrat MEP and a close ally of the new president, puts it: "In the long run I don't believe the Parliament can survive on the back of such overwhelming indifference.

"It is vitally important to the long-term survival of this place that voters come out to vote next time. There is a mountain to climb."

For Mr Cox and the European Parliament, the only way is up.

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