In other words, a week is a long time in politics, but in the European Parliament, two and a half years is not long enough to engender the slightest uncertainty. Mr Buzek was duly elected today, and thanks to the second half of the deal, the party that lost the 2009 Euro-elections will appoint a president to take over from him at the end of 2011.
This is a trick used before, and the theory is that it shows the parliament is going to be run by a grand coalition of left and right (with the centrist liberals joining in, in exchange for a couple of plum committee posts), to guarantee that big bits of legislation can be passed by absolute majority.
Why is it so important to achieve an absolute majority, as opposed to a simple majority, which the EPP could probably achieve most of the time by striking a deal with the Liberals and the breakaway British Conservatives? Well, it betrays a distinctive vision of what the parliament is for. An absolute majority (ie a majority of all MEPs, and not just a majority of the MEPs present when a vote is taken), is what the parliament needs to overturn the combined will of the European Commission and national governments of the EU (on a first reading vote) and to amend legislation against the will of the national governments (on a second reading vote). And for many people in this sprawling parliamentary complex, their dream is biffing and bashing national governments as much as possible: people like Martin Schulz, the socialist (S&D) leader never fails to attack the "Council”, which is the body that gathers together the national members.
The cost of seeking the power to bash national governments is ideological coherency. The Socialists, Liberals and EPP have pretty different views of how to regulate financial markets, for example. At the elections in June, they told voters that they stood for radically different visions of regulation and capitalism. Yet now, in order to maximise parliamentary power, they are happy to bury those differences and form a grand coalition, rather than form something closer to a centre-right/liberal majority, with a socialist opposition.
Or, rather, they seek a different sort of ideological coherency. One of the interesting new forms of rhetoric going around here is the idea that there must be a grand alliance of “pro-European” parties. That is code for minimising the clout of the (mostly British) Eurosceptics from the new British Conservative led grouping, the European Conservatives and Reformists, and to their right the anti-European/anti-immigration group that joins the United Kingdom Independence Party to the Northern League of Italy, and other angry nationalist parties.
The Times grabbed a revealing interview [see - "Federalist demagogue betrays his anti-democratic intentions" sent yesterday] with the outgoing president of the parliament, Hans-Gert Pöttering, in which he said:
By anti-Europeans, he presumably means British Conservatives and everyone to their right, plus the hard-left.
So to sum up, it is more important for Christian Democrats, Liberals and Socialists to be able to defeat the massed national governments, and to marginalise British Eurosceptics, than to defend a coherent ideological line.
Does that make the European Parliament wicked? No. But it surely undermines that glib assertion at the heart of the “common statement” put out today, that the parliament is the “deepest expression of European democracy.” Note that the statement did not claim that the stitch-up over the parliament presidency was an expression of democracy. It said that the parliament is an expression of democracy: that is a telling distinction. Basically, MEPs convinced themselves long ago that they are the answer to the problem of the EU's democratic deficit, therefore everything that makes them stronger advances the cause of European democracy.
But that is not true. Real, democratic parliaments with lots of competing parties do not stitch-up their top jobs for the next five years like this. The European Parliament is not really an expression of democracy. Instead, the European Parliament is the deepest expression of a form of supranational elected representation that people here in Strasbourg think of as democracy.
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