Future of Europe proposals head for final presentation to EU institutions

The executive board of the Conference on the Future of Europe, MEPs who headed working groups and citizens’ representatives of the different panels met on the weekend to present their feedback on the conference and proposals.

The citizens’ panels and multilingual digital platform, as well as the many days of deliberation and work on the CFOE, resulted in 325 proposals clustered around 49 objectives across nine chapters of the document.

Co-chair of the executive board, MEP Guy Verhofstadt said during a delegation meeting: “You will see that the citizens' recommendations now heading for the plenary are ambitious, some require a better enforcement of legislation, some require new legislation and some proposals require treaty change.”

Verhofstadt believed that many of the proposals reflected an ambition to make sense of the recent developments in Ukraine. “The question that we have now today is if we can support this package in the plenary,” he said.

MEPs and working group appointees Manfred Weber (EPP), Iratxe García Pérez (S&D), Pascal Durand (Renew) and Daniel Freund (Greens) were all very positive about what the conference had achieved and looked forward to keeping up the momentum in the implementation phase.

Weber underlined that “during discussions in the working groups there was always a readiness to find a compromise” which he appreciated. “I think we, the parliament, achieved a lot for itself, especially in terms of rule of law this conference is giving us the platform for the next steps.”

García Pérez highlighted that the conference had been a challenging few months. Notwithstanding this, there was an imperative to send a clear political message: “The message is ‘ok these are our reforms for the future of the European Union and we have to do the next steps to implement them’.”

García Pérez made clear that translating these recommendations into reality would mean accepting that treaty reform would be necessary.

Similarly, Durand said that the parliament needed to be courageous and bold enough to take the next steps. “We must not disappoint the citizens,'” he said.

Daniel Freund was also generally happy with the result, but expressed confusion over a very popular proposal from the youth group on removing member states’ veto ability on Article Seven conditionality mechanism, which had vanished from the document. “We can all have different opinions but that things disappear in between meetings, and it’s not clear why... I don’t think it is something that should be happening in this conference,” he said.

As Verhofstadt made his way around the delegation chamber, this became more of a common theme with Gunar Beck of ID and Michiel Hoogeveen of ECR essentially challenging the legitimacy of the whole conference. This was on grounds that in large part the multilingual digital platform, which had many more respondents (51,000) than citizens as part of the panels, had been largely sidelined, with the organizers favouring recommendations from the citizens in the panels. The ID and ECR representatives accused the Conference of having cherry-picked europhiles for the panels and for expert speakers.

“Our distinct impression is that much less weight has been given to the recommendations and opinions expressed by the platform users compared to the final recommendation of the working groups,” Beck said.

The two right wing MEPs were also joined by Arza Barena of the Left group, who also said: “I don't think we can be complacent about how the conference was run. There was a lack of improvisation, and frustration without knowing if what we were doing would achieve anything.”

Barena complained that the conclusions of the working group on EU democracy hadn’t taken on board the second most voted for proposal from the digital platform which was establishing a parity mechanism to resolve territory issues in the EU.

But Barena joined Garcia Pérez in reminding all present that “if we don’t get to work on these recommendations we’ll just be feeding Euroscepticism.”

The Conference plenary itself was characterised by a less contentious atmosphere than the delegation, with each citizen representative standing to briefly explain their groups proposals and then later interventions from members of the Commission and MEPs.

Dubravka Šuica, the European Commission’s vice president, said that although many proposals are breaking new ground in terms of policy and would require substantial budgetary and human resources, she and her colleagues stood ready to honour their commitment.

On 9 May, the final document will be submitted to the European Council for review and for them to begin working to implement the recommendations percolated through all the various panels and groups.

The Executive Board is responsible for taking decisions by consensus regarding the work of the Conference, its processes and events. It oversees the Conference as it progresses and prepares the meetings of the Conference Plenary, including citizens’ input and their follow-up. 

The Executive Board is co-chaired by the representatives of the three EU institutions: Guy Verhofstadt, Member of the European Parliament, Clément Beaune, State Secretary for EU Affairs for the French Council Presidency, and Dubravka Šuica, Vice-President of the European Commission in charge of Democracy and Demography

The Executive Board reports on a regular basis to the President of the European Parliament, the President of the EU Council and the President of the European Commission as the Joint Presidency. In due course, it will draw-up and publish the conclusions of the Conference Plenary and present the final outcome of the Conference in a report to the Joint Presidency and their three institutions.