The Constitutional Affairs Committee of the European Parliament has proposed that an extra 25 MEPs should be elected to the parliament from EU-wide lists.
It has proposed that in European Parliament elections, each voter would have two ballots, one for national lists and the other for EU-wide ones. The proposals are to be put to a plenary vote in June.
The proposals were made even though additional MPs elected on the strength of the Lisbon Treaty (such as Malta's Joseph Cuschieri) have not taken their place in the parliament while wrangling over procedure continues.
"We are seeking to exploit for the first time the new powers we have as a result of the Lisbon Treaty, to improve the popular legitimacy of this House. We have a great chance to establish a coherent modernisation of the electoral procedure" said rapporteur Andrew Duff (ALDE, UK), in a debate. His draft report was approved in committee today with 20 votes in favour and four against.
Transnational lists
The EU political parties would be in charge of drawing up the transnational lists, with 25 candidates on each list. The candidates should come from at least one-third of the EU Member States, MEPs said. Each voter would have two ballots, one for the national lists and one for the transnational ones.
National authorities would be in charge of counting the EU-wide votes as well as national ones, and they would report the results to a new EU electoral authority that would have to be created to oversee the EU-wide elections. The 25 MEPs elected from the transnational lists would join the 751 MEPs chosen from national ones, so the number of MEPs would rise to a total of 776.
Other proposals
The committee also proposed bringing the timing of the European elections forward from June to May. This would give each new Parliament more time to prepare for the election of the President of the European Commission in July. An earlier date would also mean that the elections do not take place during the summer holidays in the northern Member States.
Furthermore, MEPs asked the Commission to propose ways to make it easier for EU citizens living outside their own countries to take part in European elections.
Mr Duff's original draft report also included a proposed mathematical formula for redistributing the seats in the European Parliament. This formula was dropped – instead, MEPs propose a dialogue with EU Member States at European Council level to assess whether such a formula can be found.