Committee chairs elected: Far-right excluded, but centrist parties row over gender balance

The gentleman’s agreement among the EU’s centrist parties to keep extremes at bay held as the European Parliament elected chairs and vice chairs of its committees, but rows over gender balance exposed tensions between the mainstream parties.

During last week’s plenary session, Europeans got a preview of the political climate in the next five-year mandate.  

The cordon sanitaire, the mainstream’s agreement to exclude far-right groupings Patriots for Europe and Europe of Sovereign Nations, proved to hold as the groups saw none of their MEPs elected to top positions in the Parliament.

However, the hard-right ECR, the conservative Eurosceptic group led by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, saw its members access to senior positions in the parliament.  

While a coalition of pro-European forces easily re-elected Commission President Ursula von der Leyen for another term, the election of two vice presidents and one questor from the ECR suggested that the group is an acceptable partner for the centrist coalition.  

Going into this week, it remained to be seen whether last week’s plenary session was truly indicative of the general state of affairs in the chamber.  

The election of committee chairs on Tuesday (23 July) was the last item on the agenda before the Parliament goes into a month-long recess. 

In none of the 24 committees and sub-committees did the Patriots for Europe, the Parliament’s third biggest grouping, or the smaller far-right Europe of Sovereign Nations, have members elected to committee chair or vice-chair. 

Conversely, the ECR received three chairs and ten vice-chairs. The group now presides over the Committee on Budgets (BUDG), the Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development (AGRI), and the Committee on Petitions (PETI). 

The committee chairs are important in the Parliament as they decide on the committee’s agenda and preside over the meetings and trilogues with the member states and the Commission when negotiating legislation. Vice chairs are substitutes for the president. 

In the run-up to this week, when the leaders of the political groups met in the so-called Conference of Presidents (CoP) to divide the chairmanships of the committees between them according to the D’Hondt method, the Patriots claimed the Committee on Culture and Education (CULT) and the Committee on Transport and Tourism (TRAN).  

The D’Hondt method is a system for allocating seats in proportional representation electoral systems.

But when committees convened for the first time on Tuesday, the Patriots saw their candidates lose out to Green MEP Nela Riehl in CULT and EPP’s Elissavet Vozemberg-Vrionidi in TRAN.  

In the CULT Committee, however, the support for the Patriot’s candidate, Malika Sorel of the French Rassemblement National, seemed to extend beyond the parties outside the cordon sanitaire.

Sorel won 11 votes in the secret ballot, more than the sheer number of MEPs from parties to the right of the EPP. This would suggest that at least two MEPs from either the centrist alliance, the Left, or the Greens voted in her favour. 

Members of the Patriots for Europe, led by France’s Rassemblement National and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party, expressed their disappointment that they have been left out from senior positions in the committees and called out the Parliament’s biggest group EPP.

“It clearly shows that they are not ready to accept democratic election results and cannot accept the fact that the Patriots are the third largest group,” vice-president of Patriots, Kinga Gál told reporters after appointments finished. 

Asked by Euractiv about the ECR’s cooperation with pro-European forces to get chairs and vice-chairs elected, Austrian Patriots vice-president Harald Vilimsky said: “They have made a deal with the devil”. 

Still, the centrist forces clashed during the committees’ constitutive sessions on Tuesday. 

During a meeting in the Conference of Presidents on Monday, EPP leader Manfred Weber pushed for a derogation from the Parliament’s Rules on Procedures on gender equality in committee leadership. Without a majority going against the move, the derogation was adopted, according to an insider. 

The vice-chair of The Left, Hanna Gedin, opposed the move: “It is only natural that a European Parliament that talks about the need for balanced representation and gender equality also practices what it preaches,” she told Euractiv in a statement.  

The infighting came to a head in the AGRI committee, where the S&D blocked the election of an EPP candidate for fourth vice-chair on gender equality grounds.  

Although the committee had elected a female chair in ECR MEP Veronika Vrecionová, the first three vice-chairs from the EPP and S&D were all male. When the EPP tabled Krzysztof Hetman, the S&D suggested postponing the vote so a female candidate for fourth vice-chair could be tabled.  

A similar situation unfolded in the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs (ECON) when the ECR candidate for the fourth vice presidency was rejected and the election postponed, paving the way for a female candidate to counterbalance the three male vice presidents. 

For now, the election of the last two fourth vice-chairs has been postponed until Parliament reconvenes in September.

[Edited by Aurélie Pugnet/Zoran Radosavljevic] 

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