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The Conference on the Future of Europe is back on. Barely.
The EU on Friday was on the verge of turning the launch of the conference — a months-long examination of how the bloc should reform itself for coming generations — into a debacle.
With less than 48 hours to go before a scheduled event in France to kick off the conference, officials still couldn’t agree how the initiative would actually make its final decisions. One group wanted to ensure a smaller group of executive board officials had the last word, another insisted that hundreds of participants in a plenary should get more of a say. Some EU lawmakers called for the event to be canceled altogether.
The internecine squabbling was becoming more attention-grabbing than the fanfare planned for Sunday: a speech by French President Emmanuel Macron, music from a famous French violinist, a collection of 27 EU exchange students in the audience. Once again, the EU’s institutions — the European Commission, the European Parliament and the European Council — were locked in a power struggle that was stalling the bloc’s agenda.
But in a last-minute plot twist Friday morning, Guy Verhofstadt, the European Parliament’s chair on the conference’s executive board, triumphantly issued a statement that “after three rounds of very intensive negotiations in the past two days,” a provisional agreement had been reached.
The conference could go on as planned.
Verhofstadt portrayed the deal as a win for the Parliament, which wanted more decisions in the hands of the conference’s plenary, a group that would include MEPs, but also average citizens and national-level lawmakers. But the agreement could also be seen as a compromise — the executive board retained the ultimate say, but its decisions must be informed by the plenary’s recommendations. Notably, representatives from all involved institutions must also agree with the results.
“Despite strong resistance from the Council and the Commission,” Verhofstadt said, the Parliament had “defended our united and firm position and managed to include a strong role for the plenary in the decision making of the Conference’s conclusions.”
Such contentious negotiations have marred the conference for since the idea was first floated roughly three years ago.
In March, EU leaders finally signed off on a plan to launch the Conference on the Future of Europe. The outline gave extensive control over final decisions to the nine members of the conference’s executive board. The board was meant to synthesize recommendations gathered over months of public consultation with EU citizens and national lawmakers. Last month, the Commission launched a multilingual online platform, intended to give EU citizens the ability “to contribute to shaping their own future and that of Europe as a whole.”
A launch event was then planned for Sunday in Strasbourg, France.
But days before the official launch, Verhofstadt and MEPs made a push to increase the power of the “conference plenary,” a group of MEPs, MPs, EU officials and citizens that was supposed to meet “on an equal footing” at least every six months. Many Parliament officials interpreted the Council’s resistance to relinquish some of the executive board’s power to fears that the broader group could offer ideas that would require changing the EU’s treaties, which many countries are not eager to support.
The deal announced Friday strikes a balance.
The executive board will draw its own conclusions on what recommendations should be turned into EU policy, but those decisions must be “based on the proposals approved by the Conference Plenary,” Verhofstadt wrote.
Those final proposals would need to be agreed “by consensus between the representatives of the European Parliament, the Council and the European Commission, as well as the representatives from all national Parliaments, and this on an equal footing,” Verhofstadt added.
“This secures that the four constitutive pillars of the conference will play a crucial role in determining the outcome of the conference,” he added.
The plan agreed on Friday also includes details about the composition of the plenary, which will consist of a “total of 433 participants,” including 108 from the European Parliament” and 108 from national parliaments.
On Friday, a Council official told POLITICO he was “satisfied” with the agreement reached between the Parliament, the Commission and the Council. “It’s an excellent outcome,” the official said.
After Verhofstadt’s announcement, the Parliament almost immediately issued a statement confirming the launch event was indeed on for Sunday on the Parliament’s grounds in Strasbourg.
In addition to Macron, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Portuguese Prime Minister António Costa — whose country currently holds the presidency of the Council of the EU — will speak.
French Violinist Renaud Capuçon and Karski Quartet, a Brussels-based string quartet, will perform live music. Anyone can join the ceremony remotely.
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