Notebook

Arrival and departure

Erik Bánki, a centre-right member of Fidesz, Hungary’s ruling party, has become a member of the European Parliament and attended his first plenary this week in Strasbourg. He has replaced János Áder, who left the Parliament early in May after being elected Hungary’s president. Áder’s name was still circulating in the Parliament this week, because the plenary was voting on a report that he drafted last year, on the control of major-accident hazards involving dangerous substances. Áder led negotiations with the Council of Ministers, and reached an agreement at first-reading in April, just before he left the Parliament. A tidy conclusion, therefore.

Off to court

Iliana Ivanova, a centre-right MEP from Bulgaria, will be leaving the Parliament, after the confirmation yesterday (13 June) of her appointment as Bulgaria’s member of the European Court of Auditors. Ivanova holds several finance degrees and worked in the private sector as a financial analyst before entering the Parliament in 2009, where she has been a vice-chairwoman of the committee on budgetary control. Ivanova, who is in her mid-thirties, will be among the Court’s youngest members.

Finnish defender

Carl Haglund, a Finnish Liberal, is to leave the Parliament after being named Finland’s defence minister. He will take over from Stefan Wallin, who is to step down as a minister and as leader of Finland’s Swedish People’s Party. Haglund was elected party leader on Sunday (10 June) and was appointed defence minister on Tuesday (12 June). The 33-year-old, who became an MEP in 2009 and is a vice-chair of the fisheries committee, will leave the Parliament after its July session. Nils Torvalds, a member of Helsinki city council, will replace Haglund as an MEP.

Off the pitch

A meeting room tucked away on the fifth floor of the Parliament’s main building in Strasbourg saw considerably more debate and passion than the hemicycle during the opening debate on Monday evening. It fell to Karel De Gucht, the European commissioner for trade, to address an almost empty parliamentary chamber. The excitement was somewhat greater in the meeting room, where the England vs France match was being shown on a giant screen.

Building bridges

It has been Macedonia’s fate to be a very small country at the mercy of much bigger neighbours, from an uprising that was brutally crushed by the Ottoman Turks in 1903 to Greece blocking Macedonia’s membership talks with the EU in 2005. Last week (6 June), a joint committee of members of the European Parliament and the Macedonian parliament met to discuss the country’s relations with the EU. It was chaired by Jorgo Chatzimarkakis, a German MEP, and Kenan Hasipi, a member of Macedonia’s parliament – an ethnic Greek and an ethnic Turk respectively. There’s a message in there somewhere.

Atlantic crossing

Members of the European Parliament and members of the United States Congress met in Copenhagen at the weekend as part of the Transatlantic Legislators’ Dialogue, to debate jobs and growth and a few other issues.

Seven of the 11 members of Congress then continued on to Strasbourg for a meeting with the Parliament’s foreign-affairs committee, drawn, according to a member, by the star power of Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy chief.

The European co-chairman, Christian Ehler, a centre-right German MEP, said that since the dialogue’s launch in 1999 the Copenhagen meeting was the first in Europe at which US lawmakers outnumbered their European counterparts – a sign of increased US interest in the Parliament. Cliff Stearns, a Republican Congressman from Florida, said that the debate on jobs and growth had shown that the US-EU relationship “transcends party politics”. But party lines were quite evident in the debate, where the main split was not between the US and Europe but between left and right.