Parliament’s AGRI committee clashes over gender balance in lead positions

The European Parliament’s Agriculture Committee (AGRI) elected on Tuesday (23 July) Czech MEP Veronika Vrecionová as its chair but postponed a vote on one of the vice-chairs after a dispute about gender balance. 

At the committee’s constitutive meeting, members of the European Parliament (MEPs) were due to elect a chair and four vice-chairs, with the final composition of the bureau to be gender-balanced in line with the Parliament’s rules.  

The hard-right European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group proposed Veronika Vrecionová, who served as the group’s coordinator in AGRI during the 2019-2024 term, for the chair position.

With no other candidate standing, she was elected by 32 votes in favour, eight against and 10 abstentions.  

After voting on three vice-chairs, Vrecionová was obliged to postpone the vote on the last candidate to September.

What happened

The centre-right European People’s Party succeeded in nominating Romanian MEP Daniel Buda as first vice-chair and German MEP Norbert Lins, who chaired the committee during the previous mandate, as second. 

French MEP Eric Sergiacomo of the Socialists and Democrats (S&D) group was then elected as third vice-chair, disrupting the gender balance in the vice-chair positions. 

After the EPP proposed Polish MEP Krzysztof Hetman for the fourth seat, which would mean all four vice presidents were men, Socialist MEP Christophe Clergeau called for the vote to be postponed.  

“We have just elected a woman chair, I celebrate that, but we now have three candidates who are men,” he said, calling for respect of the parliament’s rules on gender equality.  

Clergeau explained that on Monday evening the Conference of Presidents – made up of the political groups’ leaders and the president of the European Parliament – agreed on an exemption to the parity rules for the appointment of the bureaux of certain committees, including AGRI. 

Clergeau regretted the decision and won enough support to postpone the decision on AGRI’s fourth vice-chair until September, with 23 votes in favour and 21 against.  

MEPs from the far-right group Patriots for Europe (PfE) did not take part in the vote, having walked out after their candidate for second vice-president, Spanish Mireia Borrás Pabón (Vox), was defeated by Lins.  

The ‘cordon sanitaire’ holds 

Borrás’ candidacy for second vice-chair received 10 votes, while Lins was supported by 36 MEPs.  

The pro-European coalition made up of the EPP, S&D, the liberal Renew group, and the Greens held together to oppose her candidacy – to which the PfE responded by leaving the meeting. 

The spokesperson for Vox – Borrás’s party in Spain – said the group was opposing the “cordon sanitaire”, a strategy by which mainstream political parties systematically prevent the far right from getting lead positions in the European Parliament, despite the PfE being the third largest political force in the hemicycle. 

[Edited by Angelo Di Mambro and Zoran Radosavljevic]

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