Friday

29th Mar 2024

Pole attempts to breathe new life into EU legislature

  • Jerzy Buzek is the first eastern-European president of the EU legislature (Photo: European Parliament)

The new president of the European Parliament, Jerzy Buzek, has given himself the task of making his institution more internet friendly and livening up debates in the notoriously dull EU legislature.

At 69 years of age, Mr Buzek is everything but a typical grandfather enjoying his retirement. Not only is he the first eastern European to preside over an EU institution, but he is also a strong advocate of using new media to re-connect European citizens with political life in Brussels and Strasbourg.

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On Facebook, the website linking friends and allowing groups to form around political causes, the former premier of Poland already has more supporters than Donald Tusk, the current Polish Prime Minister. While Mr Buzek may not be updating his 'wall' himself, and he has yet to discover Twitter, online users as well as MEPs find his approach refreshing and welcome.

In his inaugural speech on Tuesday (15 September), Mr Buzek spoke about the need "to use new technologies more widely" in order to ensure political debate across the European Union. "Citizens must know to whom they give their votes in the European dimension," he said, pledging to ensure access to satellite and web streaming to all of the Parliament's works, not just the plenary sessions.

He is overseeing the introduction of new rules to the make the debate in the 736-strong house livelier, and pointedly allowed MEPs to comment directly after his speech.

The Polish politician plans to "reinforce parliamentary scrutiny" of the European Commission and increase its "accountability" before the legislature.

"I also encourage parliamentary committees to review legislation that awaits in the pipeline, to see if the commission amends, scraps or maintains its proposals," Mr Buzek said.

Veterans in the European Parliament say they are pleased with Mr Buzek's initiatives.

"I'm all in favour of livelier debates. What we need is more of the Westminster style," British Conservative MEP Geoffrey van Orden, already ten years in the EU legislature, told this website. "We need more real debate. At the moment, people just come in, read out one-minute speeches and nobody listens to anyone else," he said.

His remarks were echoed by those of German Social Democrat Jo Leinen, also an MEP since 1999.

"We had a first taste of this today and it will probably increase in the future, as we will hold more attractive debates. And if he engages himself in the use of new media – Facebook, web streaming – this can only be helpful. We represent the European citizens, but still we are very far from them and this distance must be minimised," he told EUobserver.

Symbol of European re-unification

Almost all of the Euro-deputies who took the floor spoke about Mr Buzek's chairmanship as a symbol of the continent's re-unification after the breakup of the Soviet Union and the two consecutive enlargements in 2004 and 2007 which brought Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia , Hungary, Slovenia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Malta, Cyprus, as well as Bulgaria and Romania to the fold.

'Solidarity' was another key-word used throughout the debate, in reference to the famous Polish civil movement Mr Buzek was part of, and which 20 years ago managed to push for the first free elections behind the former Iron Curtain.

Unlike his predecessor, German MEP Hans-Gert Pottering, who was almost unknown in his home country and kept a discreet profile, Mr Buzek's popularity is close to that of a national hero in Poland, with speculation that he may run for presidency.

His "realistic", but "ambitious" approach in the European Parliament also appealed to German Christian-Democrat MEP Ingeborg Grassle, who saw the need for a strong personality in the power struggle with the other EU institutions.

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