The European Parliament is the only directly elected EU body. It represents the people of the EU in contrast to the Council of Ministers, which represents the governments. Elections have been held every five years since 1979 – before that members were drawn from national parliaments. The European Parliament’s powers have steadily increased with each change of the EU treaties. Most new laws in member states now stem from the need to implement European legislation and most of that is amended and adopted by the European Parliament.

<B>Parliament’s powers</B>

The Parliament amends, approves or rejects EU laws, together with the Council of Ministers. The process of “co-decision” – by which a law is only passed when approved by both bodies – applies in areas including consumer protection, the single market, workers’ rights, asylum and immigration, the environment and animal welfare, but not foreign policy or agriculture. The Parliament also shares authority over the EU budget with the Council of Ministers and supervises other EU institutions, including the Commission. It vets new commissioners and can sack the commission en masse.

<B>Locations</B>

The Parliament has two chambers – one in Brussels, the other in Strasbourg – and a secretariat in Luxembourg. For three weeks of the month the Parliament operates in Brussels, where most committee and political group meetings take place, then for one week it decamps to Strasbourg.

This perpetual movement adds to the cost of running the Parliament, and is unpopular with members of the European Parliament (MEPs), because of the extra travel involved. However, the Strasbourg Parliament is a matter of national prestige for France. Situated on the border between Germany and France, which fought two world wars in the last century, it is also a symbol of Europe’s peaceful new order.

<B>Party groups</B>

Most MEPs belong to one of the Parliament’s political groups. None has an overall majority, so amendments need the support of more than one group to get through. On most issues the Parliament divides along classic left-right lines. A group must have at least 16 members, from one fifth of member states. The larger the group, the more funding it receives, the more key committee posts it gets and the longer it can speak in debates. Some groups are broad churches: the EPP-ED includes euro-enthusiast Christian Democrats and eurosceptic British Conservatives while the UEN includes the moderate Irish Fianna Fail party and Italy’s post-fascist National Alliance.

<B>Enlargement</B>

Before enlargement on 1 May 2004 the Parliament had 626 seats. After enlargement it had 788 seats, but that figure will drop to 732 seats after the June elections – until Bulgaria and Romania join in 2007. This means that most of the older member states have had to take a cut in seats – Germany avoided this fate because it had the fewest seats per head of population. Enlargement also puts huge new burdens on the Parliament’s translation service, which must now provide simultaneous translation of all debates into 20 languages. This amounts to 190 different language combinations – Finnish-Czech, German-Portuguese, English-Maltese and so on. In future, more translations will take place through a third language, such as English or French.

<B>Salaries and expenses</B>

MEPs receive the same salary as members of their national Parliaments. As a result, Italian MEPs earn four times as much as their Spanish counterparts and about 14 times more than MEPs from some new member states. Unofficially, it is accepted that MEPs on lower salaries will supplement their incomes from their expenses budget. MEPs get 150,000 euros per year for office expenses and are not obliged to account for this expenditure. They are also reimbursed for full-price air travel to and from their home country even if they fly by low-cost airline. An attempt to reform the expenses system and agree a flat salary of 8,600 euros per month for all MEPs was blocked by Germany in 2004, on the grounds that the proposed new salary was too high and the overall bill would be too big.