The goal of the NGOs study is two-fold: on the one hand, to look into how the MEPs contributed, through their activity, to stimulating participative democracy, and, on the other hand, to consolidate people’s trust in the European Parliament by empowering them to take an informed decision when voting for their MEPs in June 2009. The study is based on activity reports (voluntarily submitted to the NGO by a part of the MEPs), personal pages on the EP website, personal websites and/or blogs as well as the presence at plenary debates and at committee meetings. The main criteria used throughout the study were the way the MEPs relate to the citizens they represent, the transparency of their activity, as well as the relevance of their actions for the overall EP output.

The study is mainly made up by short profiles of each Romanian MEP, containing both quantitative data (presence at debates, number of reports and amendments drafted, number of interventions in plenary, etc), and qualitative information about their work (main topics addressed, social groups represented, other activities in which they were involved, etc). Moreover, the communication with the citizens was also analysed, focusing on accessibility (email address and other contact details), the quality of the information posted on the website, as well as the openness to discuss with the people though a blog.

Taking into account all these various aspects, the MEPs activity ìs assessed as either: ” weak”, “medium”, “good” or “very good”. Overall the picture does not look too bad, and the fact that the study sheds light on the specific areas each MEP focused on turns out to be very useful and reduces the risk of generalisation. Moreover, the study (which you can read here) is written in a very clear and reader-friendly manner and can be a very good information tool in the upcoming elections campaign.

And, what is more important, it sets a good example of what more NGOs (and not necessarily think tanks!) from other member states could do in a drive towards more transparency and increasing people’s interst and trust in the MEPs they are electing.

So where are similar reports from other countries that assess the performance of MEPs? What happened to the MEP tracking website? Votewatch.eu is still not launched… and the EP elections are coming closer. In an ideal world this kind of data would have been used by political parties in the nomination process…

Moreover, this seems to constitute the main reason behind the “war of candidates” that is taking place within the main Romanian parties. A good enough reason, it seems, to give up ambitions for a career at the national level and to stay away from the spicy, circus-like political arena in Bucharest for a while. Interesting to note that in the rush of signing up for candidacy, most of the politicians forget to consider, or completely ignore the final goal and what it entails: becoming a member of the European Parliament. There is no substantial debate, one can hardly hear about proposed programmes and ideas; the motivation seems to remain on a superficial level, of a rather material nature, and this is easily visible for an insider as well as an outside observer.

Still, such a great competition should not be in itself something bad, quite on the contrary. With or without the right motivation, it is quite a good sign that Romanian politicians start getting interested in politics at the EU level. Arguably, the parties should organise a very thorough selection procedure to make sure the best candidates get on the eligible places of the lists. Well, here again, Romanian politics style kicks in. No, there is no democratic way of choosing the candidates and determining their place on the list.

Every party seems to have an “inner mechanism” for that purpose and, come to think of it, this practice is pretty much in line with the Brussels job market: any party member can send in the CV, but in the end, a “jury” formed by party leaders gets to choose the top candidates, and, guess what, no transparency or accountability can be traced throughout the process.

This is why it is very likely that we will end up with MEPs such as Elena Basescu (picture), the daughter of President Traian Basescu (a 28 years old model who became stagiaire in the European Parliament, for one of the Romanian MEPs), or the Presidential advisor and the Government’s spokesperson. The opposition (PNL) also have a tough decion to make, since lots of high ranking and ambitios members were left with their careers jeopardised by the failure in the 2008 parliamentary elections. Furthermore, to complete the surreal picture, MEPs who have been quite active in Brussels in their current mandate (Corina Cretu, Adrian Severin), are in danger of not being offered an eligible place because they are not (always) following the mainstream position of their party (PSD).

Three worrying thoughts:

1. the material incentive proves to be stronger than any political motivation to candidate for an MEP mandate; even worse: in the presence of the former, no one even bothers anymore to invent the latter;

2. The system used to select the candidates is far from being democratic and transparent; even worse: I suspect no one even bothers to present it as such;

3. The European Parliament is not present in the Romanian media in the context of substantial debates and analyses; even worse: it is now further discredited by being linked to names that have nothing to do with serious politics. And no one even bothers to notice that.