Maarten Messiaen

BRUSSELS, Nov 23 (IPS) - The new European Commission gets going this week after a three-week delay but the start was clouded by a debate over the integrity of some of its commissioners.

French transport commissioner Jacques Barrot was revealed last week to have been convicted in 2000 for illegal party financing. Liberal and Socialist leaders in the European Parliament have demanded a full explanation from the commission why Barrot did not inform members of the European Parliament (MEPs) about the funding scandal at a meeting with them earlier this month.

Barrot had received a suspended eight-month sentence for his involvement in a funding scam as former secretary-general of the French Social Democratic Centre (CDS) party, which later became a part of the now ruling Union for a Popular Movement (UMP).

The Liberal Democrats, the third largest group in the European parliament, want Barrot suspended until the matter is resolved. The Socialists, the second largest group, see a betrayal of trust because the European parliament approved the new commission without knowledge of the conviction.

José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, which is the executive arm of the European Union (EU), says he still has confidence in his transport commissioner.

The revelations about Barrot marked the latest in a long line of problems. Three nominated commissioners came under fire in the European Parliament, which has to approve the new Commission team. Two commissioners were replaced as a result, and a third was assigned a new portfolio.

Italian commissioner designate Rocco Buttiglione was replaced by Franco Frattini, the Latvian Ingrida Udre was replaced by Andris Piebalgs, and Hungarian László Kovács was transferred from the energy to the taxation portfolio. All the changes followed objections by the European Parliament.

The European parliament now prides itself on a strengthened role. Its president Josep Borrell said Monday that the crisis sparked by a row over Buttiglione's opinions on women and homosexuals had had a positive effect.

”Everyone agrees that the institutional role of the parliament is stronger now,” Borrell said. ”During a debate on November 17 almost all fraction presidents, Barroso himself and the president of the European Council the minister-president of the Netherlands, Jan Peter Balkenende - have made statements that underline this point.”

But most observers say the weight of the European parliament in the triangle of EU institutional power remains limited. The real power remains with the big European governments. ”The European parliament has no power to exert pressure on the Commission,” EU expert Bernard Bulcke wrote in the Belgian newspaper De Standaard. ”The same is true for the Commission with regard to member states.”

The crisis had made it clear that member states do not want to loosen their grip on European power, he said. ”On the contrary in the last ten years, under the rule of Jacques Santer en Romano Prodi, they have limited the playing field of the European Commission in a hidden manner and without much protest.”

Bulcke said an institutional crisis will be needed if the Commission is to find solutions to the problems caused by globalisation such as outsourcing, climate change, migration, terrorism and international crime. ”It was (German Chancellor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate) Willy Brandt who said about the European Parliament that it will never get power if it does not conquer it. The same holds for the European Commission. Crises are the ideal tool to achieve that.”

Several non-governmental groups are concerned that the new Commission will be biased towards the interests of corporations. While the 25 new commissioners settled down in their newly refurbished headquarters, NGOs protested outside the Berlaymont building in Brussels, where the European Commission is located, against ”excessive influence” of corporate lobby groups in the commission's decision-making process.

A giant Mandelson puppet operated by a ”European corporate lobbyist” welcomed the new European commissioner for trade on his first day at work.

”Peter Mandelson has an established reputation as someone with an intimate relationship with the business community,” Erik Wesselius of the democracy group Europe Observatory (CEO) told IPS. ”His predecessors Leon Brittan (1993-94) and Pascal Lamy (1999-2004) have developed a practice of close cooperation between trade negotiators and business. When in office, Peter Mandelson should urgently break with this tradition of secretive corporate influence over EU trade policy and actively support the introduction of EU legislation on transparency and ethics for lobbyists at the EU institutions.”