A founder member of the Partito di Unità Proletaria, you were several times elected to both the Italian National Assembly and the European Parliament. How long did you serve as an mep ?
For twenty years, from 1979 to 1999. Before 1979, the European Parliament was formed by delegations of the national parliaments, but since then it has been directly elected by universal suffrage. At the time we all supported this move, thinking it would make the Parliament more democratic, but that’s proved nonsense. Before, there was more of a link between the European and the national parliaments, because the same people were involved; now that the deputies to one are not the same as those elected to the other, they have no occasion to meet. As a result, what happens at the European Parliament is unknown at the national level. You end up with this paradox: questions are discussed in Strasbourg, but when the moment comes for national assemblies to ratify the decisions made there, no one knows what members of their own party said in the European Parliament.
The newspapers rarely talk about the European Parliament either—in my case, the Italian papers wrote about my work there only once in twenty years, because a monkey bit me when I was in Zambia with a parliamentary delegation. Naturally, the decisions of the European Parliament do get publicized, but not what accompanied them—the debate, discussions and so on. The most interesting feature of the European Parliament is that representatives from different countries and cultures, with different histories, gather to discuss a single question; but none of this makes it through to the national arena; it is all lost, vanishing somewhere between Strasbourg and Brussels.
Looking at the European Parliament from a British perspective—but perhaps also, a future Italian one, if the ‘Legge Truffa’ is passed—wouldn’t one have to say there is one positive feature, which is the rule that these elections have to be more or less proportional in representation? So even if Italy abolishes any kind of proportionality, you would still have it at the European level.
It’s true that the proportional representation system means that there is a Green British mep, for example, whereas it is unimaginable that there could be a Green mp at Westminster, any more than a Green us Congressman, given the first-past-the-post system there. But each country adapts the European pr system as it sees fit. Thus, some have a higher or lower threshold; Britain has a thorough-going constituency system, whereas Italy has just five constituencies, and party lists. And whether or not proportionality is abolished in Italy—currently Berlusconi wants to keep it, because it aids the far left against the Democratic Party—it could still be dispensed with by the European Parliament. It depends what rules it sets for itself, since this is within its competence. It is possible that there may come to be party majorities at eu level in favour of abolishing pr. Of course, that would wipe out many of the smaller parties represented there.
Where is most of the life of the Parliament conducted?
In Brussels, on the whole. One plenary a month is held in Strasbourg, so deputies spend four days there. But all the Committees are in Brussels, and all meps are members of one or more of these, so they stay in Brussels two, three or four days a week. And supplementary plenaries are held there four times a year. Then there are regular meetings of the parliamentary groups, also mostly held in Brussels. Essentially, what you have is a band of nomads constantly on the move. In the beginning it was even worse: parliamentary meetings were held in Luxembourg as well as in Brussels and Strasbourg. Now that is no longer the case, but there is still a lot of shuttling between the two bases. Every year, a large majority of deputies would vote to say they did not want to go to Strasbourg any more, and that everything should be moved to Brussels, to save time and money. Strasbourg is much harder to get to—you have to go via Paris, whereas there are plenty of direct flights to Brussels. But from the start, even when there was only the European Coal and Steel Community, it had been decided that Strasbourg would be the centre—France insisted on this symbolic point—while the 1965 Brussels Treaty says that the city is the seat of the European Parliament. So the annual vote to move remained the mere expression of a wish. The thing can’t be changed, even if everyone complains. The deputies have to carry reams of papers, going back and forth between airports; it’s a terrible way of working.