Tuesday 14 July 2009

Jerzy Buzek new European Parliament President - vice presidents' election a disaster

Not at all surprisingly - it had been predicted by a blogger three month ago -, Jerzy Buzek has been elected as new President of the European Parliament, with 555 votes against the 89 votes for Eva-Britt Svensson (GUE).

I have already voiced my opinion why I think Buzek is the wrong choice for the EP presidency. Still, I have to admit that he made a rather good impression today, and I like the determination in his eyes while he leads the session. He has they eyes of an experienced boy, lively but knowledgeable. Let's see what he makes out of this.

In contrast, the election of the 14 vice presidents was a disaster and a clear sign of collective distrust of MEPs against each other.

Only three candidates got elected in the first round:
None of the other candidates got elected in the second round (see the results here). So the voting had to go into a third round where a simple majority was enough to get elected.

These are the MEPs that got elected into the EP's bureau:Michał Tomasz KAMIŃSKI (European Conservatives and Reformists, Poland) did not get elected with only 174 votes.

The catastrophic results for most of the candidates - one has to remember that the European Parliament has 736 members by now - are no good sign, and to a certain extend it is sad that the last three bureau members could be elected with just around or less than one third of the votes of the whole Parliament.

This was no good day for the European Parliament, and it shows that the horse trades before today were not of help for the European democracy but rather counter-productive.

PS: In some ways, this is the continuation of the catastrophic European Parliament election process - the same MEPs that ran this process were sitting in the plenary today...

4 comments:

Andrea said...

During the Vice Presidents election, do they have up to 14 votes to express in their ballot or less?

Julien Frisch said...

They were having up to 14 votes, but they could also use less - this is what Jerzy Buzek said before the election procedure.

Andrea said...

Thanks. I didn't listen carefully to Buzek yesterday when he introduced the election procedures.
I assumed that they had 14 votes, but then I realized that I just assumed it and not heard/read it. So I wondered.
With 14 votes, looking at the number of votes got by candidates, there were lots of MEPs preferring not to use all their 14 votes instead of giving it to some of the candidates in the race.
On a another, but somehow related note, the Quaestors election was contested today too. Was it expected to have 8 candidates for the 5 positions?

Julien Frisch said...

Couldn't follow the election of the Quaestors today, and I didn't read anything about the process around their election. The position is not public enough to create discussions.