Are the European Conservatives passing up a great political opportunity?

The Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformists have announced that they will not be putting forward a candidate for the Commission presidency in the 2014 elections. As an anti-federalist party, the main reason being given is that participating in the presidency contest will play into the hands of the more federalist parties. But are they giving up an electoral opportunity by giving the "federalist" candidates a free run? And does their main argument fit in with the AECR's general political position?

Obviously the AECR must consider it a good tactical and electoral move. Presumably the AECR is setting itself up to oppose any move by the European Parliament to prevent the European Council from ignoring the contest when it nominates the next Commission president, but their support of a nominee will probably be more dependent on how closely he or she reflects their free market and anti-federalist positions. The biggest advantage is probably the freedom of movement it gives the AECR's member parties, such as the UK Conservatives, in the elections. European elections have typically been viewed through a national lens, and AECR parties will be free to highlight the any embarrassing policies that their opponents may be connected with through their European political families.

The common decision to not run a candidate gives the national parties a good Eurosceptic response to any questions over why they're not supporting a candidate, which could help protect them on their Eurosceptic flank. Finally, the AECR is unlikely to go from fifth to first place in the European Parliament so they are not going to miss out on a chance to actually win the office of Commission President for themselves. Therefore it probably seems to be a small sacrifice for a potential tactical advantage.

Despite these advantages, I think that the AECR have missed an opportunity. While it was left to Daniel Hannan to give the Europarty's reasoning for the decision (that the EU doesn't have a common demos and therefore the contest cannot be democratically legitimate), unlike Hannan the AECR is not for withdrawal from the EU but for a looser, more free trade orientated Union. This means that it's not necessarily ideologically inconsistent to take part in the contest: votes for a common candidate espousing a more decentralised EU wouldn't by definition contradict the demos argument (agreement on an anti-federalist message should logically indicate an unwillingness to identify as a pan-European demos). It's not as if the European Conservatives don't want the European Parliament to have a stronger say over the Commission - they called for reform of the confirmation process of nominated commissioners back in 2010!

Politically, it is a missed opportunity to promote an anti-federalist but pro-free trade message. If the European Conservatives want to revise the free movement of people, then a common candidate will be able to put that opposing viewpoint to the other candidates in the televised debate, and the national parties could draw on their alliance - and perhaps the opinion polls - to argue that their proposals for changing the EU are possible and have support. The European Conservatives don't have a member party in each Member State, but the campaign could raise those issues where they haven't been raised before and it would help set the AECR up as an alternative political home for the more Eurosceptic member parties of the centre-right European People's Party, or put pressure on the EPP to move closer to them politically. When it comes to the televised debates, the AECR is probably betting that they won't attract much attention, but there is a risk that they might, and that the conservative viewpoint doesn't get that air time.

The European Conservatives believe in the single market and the EU as a market (though they are increasingly questioning the free movement of people) but want to return some powers to the national level, so the question is if they can advance that view within the EU. A common candidate could be a valuable tool in campaigning for that version of the EU, while surrendering that political space to more federalist parties actually makes it harder for the AECR to differentiate itself from the out-and-out anti-EU Eurosceptics. Without a credible voice for a more decentralised Union, the European Conservative position will lose support to parties like UKIP. After all, if the EU appears to be captured by the other Europarties, then the supporters of the AECR may increasingly wonder if their approach is worthwhile or if they should just abandon the hope of changing the EU. Not running a candidate is a political move that is more likely to benefit the Hannanite position than the Cameronite one.

I may not be a supporter of the European Conservatives, but their decision not to run a common candidate could be a loss to the quality of the public debate as well as a missed opportunity for the AECR itself.

James Nicholson MEP: One Year On

[Part of the series on the Northern Irish MEPs' first year in the 7th European Parliament]

James Nicholson (ECR) (UUP). Member of the Agriculture Committee, Vice-Chair of the Delegation to the ACP-EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly. (Substitute for the Environment Committee, Regional Development Committee, and Delegation for relations for the Korean Peninsula).

Statistics:
Attendance in plenary: 98.28%
Loyalty to Europarty: 91.58%
Loyalty to national majority: 81.14%
Speeches: 29
Parliamentary Questions: 6
Motions for resolutions: 6
Written declarations: 0
Reports Amended: 10 (Mostly on the CAP and agriculture, but also on cancer, organ donation and transport, and food information for consumers).
Drafted Reports: 0
Opinions: 0

Nicholson’s speeches mainly focus on agriculture and food security, but he has also given speeches on cancer, organ transplants and donations, animal transport, the South Korean Trade Agreement, and on CFP reform. He’s spoken on behalf of the ECR group a surprising number of times: on the debate on agriculture in non-diary sectors, the EU-South Korean Trade Agreement, on Europol (deputising for the ECR rapporteur), the regulation on agriculture in the outermost regions of the Union, and the transportation of animals (he was in this case the “opposite number” Bairbre de Brún, the rapporteur for this piece of legislation – at least for this debate).

James Nicholson’s main focus is agriculture (where he, for instance, supports country of origin logos and opposes an EU logo), and, from these speeches, supports a limited role for Europol (stressing the sovereignty of member states), considers the 2002 CFP reform a failure, and is supportive of the legislation on animal transport and the report on organ donation and transport.

The 6 Parliamentary questions cover negotiations with Mercosur, property ownership in Spain, EEC pensions, tyre pressure safety regulations and the EU strategy against organised crime. Some of the questions are oral and some are written. Some of the written questions are fairly detailed, but all seem specific – asking about the details of EEC pension payouts, impact assessments of Mercosur trade and agricultural imports, etc.

The motions for resolution are mainly to wind up the debate on a topic or used to make a political statement, e.g. on North Korea or the diary crisis. The amendments to reports are mostly agricultural, and several are for the Future of the CAP After 2013 report. There are also amendments to the reports on organs, consumers and agricultural product quality.


Analysis:

James Nicholson’s national party, the Ulster Conservatives and Unionists – New Force, is part of the European Conservatives and Reformists, so his role is that of a party MEP. Groups get certain resources and being part of a political group increases your chances of forming alliances and getting high profile roles such as rapporteur, etc. So the role of the party MEP would be different to an independent MEP. Nicholson hasn’t acted as a rapporteur in the first year of this Parliament, though he has deputised for one in plenary and he has spoken on behalf of the ECR group on several issues. The questions seem to be specific and show the concern for free trade agreements and anti-red tape stance that you might expect from the right-to-centre-right, free trade, sovereigntist-leaning ECR, and the focus on agriculture in his speeches and his position on the Agriculture Committee echoes the rural interests of the constituency. The high attendance rate and high loyalty rate with the ECR group shows that he supports the ECR Europarty – an advantage in that you can vote for him or not based on the policies/ideology of the party and that the group is a voting bloc that can form alliances (whether or not it’s very successful at that is another question). According to his website: “Due to his experience and expertise in this field, Jim was appointed as coordinator for the ECR group for this policy area at the beginning of the new legislature.” Other constituency work isn’t measured on VoteWatch.eu or put on the European Parliament website.

The number of questions and report amendments seem to both be generally 10 or under for most MEPs (though there are a few that ask a lot more). Though the number is low, it’s roughly equivalent to the performance of the rest of the MEPs. I think that Nicholson is generally doing a good job as a party MEP.


[For analysis on the other Northern Ireland MEPs and an overall analysis: link]

Edward McMillian-Scott joins the LibDems

Edward McMillan-Scott, who ran for - and won - one of the Vice President posts of the European Parliament ahead of the ECR's preferred choice, Kaminski (now ECR leader in the EP), has now joined the Liberal Democrats (who are part of ALDE in the EP). McMillan-Scott had been expelled from the ECR after winning the VP post, and has now been expelled from the Tory party altogether. Instead of appealing the decision, the MEP has joined the LibDems and publicly bashed the Tory party as a "nasty party" - exactly the image party leader David Cameron has been trying to dispel:

""David Cameron shields his europhobes," he writes. "No murmur was made when last weekend Lord Tebbit in effect encouraged Conservatives to vote Ukip in the general election against the Speaker, John Bercow. The dog whistle is really at a lower pitch: that Ukip supporters know that there is a real home for them, back in the Conservative party.""

Nick Clegg has appeared alongside McMillan-Scott to portray the LibDems as a credible and pragmatic European party in comparison to the Conservatives. Labour has also been bashing the Conservatives and using the party's European policy as a means of showing them up as a unpragmatic, nasty party.

So this could hurt the Tories, though it's unclear how far it would affect public opinion. McMillan-Scott could be portrayed by the party as a malcontent who disobeyed party orders and is lashing out now that he has to pay the price - but then again, this is hard to square with his success in the EP. How can a successful parliamentarian with enough support to win against the ECR's preferred candidate be a dangerous radical opposed to sensible party policy? His methods of political engagement seem to work better in the EP than current Tory policy, and MEPs such as Daniel Hannan are far more radical and potentially dangerous to the Tory's image than McMillan-Scott (particularly as Hannan played a poster-boy role in the US Republican's campaign against health care reform by portraying the NHS [a holy of holies in UK politics] as a national disaster). Explaining how radicals such as Hannan are protected while McMillan-Scott can be so easily ousted may be uncomfortable, even if he did disobey the ECR/Tory whip.

McMillan-Scott has written a column in the Observer hitting out against the Tories' euroscepticism.

On Phone Chargers

The EU has managed to get the top 10 mobile phone companies to agree to adopt a single phone charger that will be compatible across their brands. The companies include:

"...Apple, LG, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson – [and they] represent 90 percent of Europe's mobile phone market."

The story has been covered by Stephen Spillane and Gulf Stream Blues.

There will be no legislation to enforce this; the move is an agreement between the companies and it won't be enforceable in law. However, the agreement only came about when the EU applied pressure by threatening to introduce legislation in this area - which would probably pass in the Council and the European Parliament, just like the roaming charge cap.

The benefits of such a move will be mostly environmental, since there will be less electrical waste of old, incompatible chargers being thrown away, but there will also be benefits to the consumer in terms of convenience.

Dave Keating at Gulf Stream Blues touched on what could be one of the most interesting aspects of this story as it (might) develop:

"Since most of these companies also design phones in the US and the rest of the world, I would assume that this standardization will eventually spread to the rest of the world. After all, why would they make phones with different electrical input jacks specifically for Europe?"

If the single charger is adopted by these companies outside of the EU, it will demonstrate the economic power that comes with the single market. As the economy globalises, it's likely that market access will become more essential in the calculations of the economic and political consequences of regulation. The bigger the market, the more insulated that market is from the negative economic effect of regulation: so it's easier for big markets such as the EU to set higher standards than small (and sometimes even medium) states as the relative economic power of big companies is reduced when they want to ensure they have market access.

Not that the EU should go mad regulating, and I'm not denying that EU regulation can have negative effects on the economy - it all depends on the regulation, and views on particular examples of regulation will vary depending on political priorities. But the single market enables states to re-assert (some of) their political power and relevance at a time when economic power is growing and limiting the political options of states.

Another thing to note is that the Tories in the EP have welcomed this new move:

"British Conservative MEP Malcolm Harbour, member of the consumer affairs committee in the European Parliament, also welcomed the agreement.

"The days of drawers full of useless old mobile phone chargers will soon be over. Common sense has prevailed," Mr Harbour stated.

"We will no longer have to worry about forgetting our chargers and having to ask around to find one that is compatible. This agreement will also encourage more chargers to be recycled, preventing electronic waste," he added."

Perhaps an attractive aspect of this deal for the Conservatives is that it was reached without any actual legislation (though it's still strange to hear the Tories hailing a European move as a victory for "common sense"), but it shows that there is recognition in the Conservative party that the single market is worth something as a working reality, and not just a free-market ideal to pay lip-service to - and what's more, there's a recognition that common rules/policies mean something.

Now it could easily be countered that the Tories could hardly mean anything else when they say they support the single market as you can't have a single market without common rules. Still, the recent political message of the Conservatives gives a different impression. If the Tories are serious about this new group, and are serious about the single market, they will have to show in their rhetoric that some decisions need to be made in Brussels. They also need - and this is a big step that they might never take - to accept that it follows that there should be some form of political contest in the EU, since the question of economic governance is a left-right issue. They will have to accept the value of politics while (if they remain committed to the ECR) rejecting political union itself.

A coherent political vision from the ECR will probably never occur to anyone within the group, let alone see the light of day, yet that is what they'll need if they don't want to be outflanked by withdrawlists and if they wish to avoid being cornered into policies that will weaken the single market itself. In other words, their political group at the very least needs to get political. Politics isn't bad, you know.

European Conservatives and Reformists

The UK Conservatives, Polish Law and Justice Party, and the Czech Civic Democrats have formed a new grouping called the European Conservative and Reformist Group. The new conservative grouping in the European Parliament will be officially formed/recognized on July 14th when the EP holds its first meeting after the elections. Their manifesto/values can be found here.

The news has been well covered in the Euro-Bloggosphere over the last few days, by Nosemonkey, Jon Worth, Julien Frisch, Grahnlaw, to name a few. The ability of the new group to hold itself together over the next Parliament has been called into question by Jon Worth and Nosemonkey after the Finnish member decided to stick with ALDE instead of making the leap to the ECR.

The Group has 55 members, making it the fourth biggest group in the EP, outstripping the European Greens-EFA by a narrow margin. At the same time, in order to fulfill the EP's rules on group formation, the Group has no less than 5 individual MEPs from several countries in order to show some element of the pan-European support necessary to justify the civil service and funding support they will get as a group from the EP.

As Nosemonkey has commented:

"...that’s five individual MEPs that the new group has to keep sweet in order to maintain the requirement for all groups to have members from at least seven member states. They can afford to lose one, and that’s it. Any more and their new group is kaput."

Now, the Tories have come under attack for the strange parties they would likely have to get into bed with to form the new group. This attack hasn't worked out for those who oppose the new grouping because the Tories could point to a few strange MEPs in all of the main EP groupings. I agree, however, with Jon Worth's assessment that it's the percentage of nuts in your party that counts.

Still, there are a number factors which will give rise to arguments that the Conservatives will have a harder time ignoring.

1. Committees:

In the EP, committees count. There parties can play a key role in shaping legislation, and as the fourth largest party, the ECR will only be entitled to 1 committee and 1 sub-committee, and they won't get one of the more prized ones as under the D'Hondt system the bigger parties get the first few picks. It is likely that the Conservatives and the Law and Justice party will get the two chairs as the biggest parties within the group, but in return they may have to give the "independent" MEPs of the group more of the group's speaking time in plenary sessions.

Fewer Committees means less influence. And more speaking time won't offset that.

2. Cohesion:

The new group is unlikely to be cohesive when the loss of 2 "independent" MEPs would result in the collapse of the group. The relevance of the group naturally depends on the cohesion of its vote. If the group cannot muster its votes for common policies/stances on legislation, then it doesn't lend the ECR much weight. It also affects some of the other factors.

3. Alliances:

The Conservatives have said that they will work together with the EPP when they can find agreement. The ECR, however, may not be an attractive partner if it cannot display a good level of cohesion - why bother chasing votes if they'll slip away when it comes to the vote? The EPP may turn back to the traditional alliance with the PES and ALDE out of habit and reliability. The ECR will have influence, however, and it would be a mistake to discount it completely. It is, after all, mainly made up of 3 parties and if they can stick together for votes then an alliance with the ECR on several issues will be worth something - I doubt that the "independents" will threaten dissolution too much if they're satisfied with talking time and office facilities.

4. Opposition:

Federalism or integrationism is hardly ever a part of the work of the EP, given that the member states decide on the level of integration and on the competences of the EU and the EP. Most of what the Parliament does has a left-right divide to it, and this will probably mean that the ECR will end up - or the Tories will end up - supporting the Commission a surprising amount of the time. In other words, they're more likely than not to be a pro-Government party, despite the rhetoric of being the "first real opposition".

This will depend on the PES to a degree - the more the PES can influence legislation, the more the ECR is likely to oppose it. Still, the Commission will be dominated by conservatives for the next five years, and is likely to produce legislation that the ECR will - or could bring itself to - vote for. There will be more regulatory impulses now due to the economic crisis, but Barroso is likely to propose quite weak regulations, and the ECR will probably try to resist attempts by other parties to strengthen Commission proposals. The ECR could end up voting the Commission's way more than its rhetoric lets on.

Also, if (when) the Tories get into government it will be harder to be obstructionist in the EP, since they can hardly build good diplomatic relations by making deals in the Council and then trying to torpedo them in Parliament.


Conclusion:

I think that the ECR will have some influence: it will be periodically sidelined and have occasional moments when it can wield real influence - depending, of course on its ability to capitalise on such moments. The ECR could be quite an "establishment" party, in the sense that it will probably seek to back up the more conservative Council and Commission's position in Parliament, unless it sets out to be purely obstructionist. This could give rise to a strange situation where the "first real opposition" ends up defending Commission positions in times of division in the Parliament.

Finally, the lifespan of the group is hard to tell, but I'd say that it will probably survive at least until the Tories come to power in the UK, since it will be easier to indulge the "independents" while in opposition, and the collapse of the group would be a damaging story the Tories would want to avoid before the election. So failing a group crisis where it would be more embarrassing for the Conservatives to make the sacrifices necessary to keep the group going, I think it will stay alive this side of a UK general election.