Europe No committee chairs for far-right groups in the EU Parliament
The two far-right groups in the European Parliament will not have committee chairs. Both the alliance around Hungary's head of government Viktor Orban, the "Patriots for Europe", and the "Europe of Sovereign Nations" (ESN) group, in which the AfD is the strongest force, came away empty-handed in the allocation of posts, according to information from the Parliament. This means that the firewall against the right of the pro-European groups, known in Brussels and elsewhere as the "cordon sanitaire", has held for the time being.
23.07.2024, 18:07
SDA
The committee chairs in Brussels should actually be allocated according to a procedure named after the Belgian Victor d'Hondt. The mathematician's system is used, among other things, to convert votes from voters into seats as accurately as possible. It is intended, but not mandatory, to use the D'Hondt method for the allocation of committee chairs. As the third-largest political group in the European Parliament, among others, now does not chair a committee, the system was deviated from.
All other political groups receive leadership positions
A total of 20 committee chairs and four subcommittee chairs were allocated. The center-right EPP alliance, which also includes the CDU and CSU, won eight leadership posts. The Social Democrats will have five chairs and the Liberals three.
The right-wing conservative ECR group will also have three committee chairs in future. A Green politician and a Green politician also won committee chairmanships, while the Left Group also won two of these posts. In addition, a politician from the Volt party will chair one of the committees.
Before the election, there had been debates about whether the "cordon sanitaire" should also apply to parties in the ECR group. Before her election, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen had not ruled out the possibility of being elected with votes from the party of Italy's right-wing Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, for example.
Similar situation in Berlin
There is a similar conflict in the German Bundestag. The AfD is currently fighting in Karlsruhe for the right to chair several committees. The Federal Constitutional Court wants to clarify by September whether the AfD parliamentary group's rights of participation and involvement under the Basic Law restrict the Bundestag's business autonomy. In particular, the judges in Karlsruhe want to get a "clearer picture of parliamentary practice and tradition to date", as Deputy Court President Doris König said in March.
