Mr. Francis Jacobs:

I thank the Chairman for the invitation to speak to the committee today. I know that just after the elections in June the committee held a session on what happened in the elections in terms of turnout and so on. I will concentrate today on what has happened since the elections in terms of the structure of the Parliament and also the background to the involvement of the Parliament in the investiture of a new European Commission.

First, to the structure of the European Parliament. The most important question following the election is which political group the newly elected MEPs join because as this committee knows, the political groups are of huge importance in the European Parliament. There was a lot of discussion in the run-up to the elections about the possibility of the structure of the Parliament being affected by a very good performance by anti-system, populist and Euro-sceptic parties. Indeed, the two big political groups have a few less seats than they did in the past, but they still have 55% of the members of the Parliament. The European People's Party, EPP, has 221 members and the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats, S&D, has 191 members. The question arose as to which group the members of the Euro-sceptic and populist parties would join.

There are a number of familiar groups which have been reconstituted. The liberal group - Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, ALDE, lost quite a few seats but still ended up with 66 in the new Parliament. The left wing socialists - European United Left - Nordic Green Left, GUE-NGL - of which Ms Boylan is a member, returned a pretty large total of seats, with the Greens and a number of regionalist groups joining together in one political family - the Greens-European Free Alliance, Greens-EFA.

The key question was what would happen to the others. The group with the most power of attraction was the group of which the largest component is the British Conservative Party because it was seen as less extremist. It is composed of a wide range of parties, some of which are not even Euro-sceptic. The parties are mildly Euro-sceptic and the group is sustainable in the sense that it is well over the required threshold for a group. In fact, there are two thresholds involved here. The first is to have a minimum number of members, which is relatively easy to obtain. The second is a minimum number of member states - nine - which is much more difficult to achieve. Some of the new groups had great difficulty meeting the second threshold. The conservative group - European Conservatives and Reformists, ECR - now has 71 members and is the third largest group in the Parliament. Nigel Farage of UKIP managed to recruit the big party in Italy, Beppe Grillo's Five Star Movement to form a group. That group is fragile in the sense that it only just managed to get the number of nationalities required and if one leaves, the group is in trouble.