Lamassoure - Severin Project

At their first meeting after the summer recess, European lawmakers have kicked off a highly political debate about how seats for MEPs should be distributed between 27 EU states.
On 3rd of September, French conservative Alain Lamassoure and Romanian socialist Adrian Severin presented to the European parliament’s constitutional affairs committee their report on the future composition of the 785-strong legislative house.

The two parliamentarians suggested three main rules:

a) The total number of deputies should be limited to 750 (there are currently 785),
b) the ceiling for a national delegation would be decreased from 99 to 96 seats
c) the minimum threshold would rise from five to six seats.

These rules would slightly reduce the weight of some countries, while other will gain one or few extra seats.
The Lamassoure-Severin report argues against reserving at this point any seats for EU-hopeful countries (Croatia).
Within the three main limits, the seats would be shared on the basis of “degressive proportionality” principle, which the two MEPs’ report describes as an “ideal solution”.
The principle suggests that “the bigger the population of a member state, the higher must be the number of citizens each MEP represents” (and vice versa), but this advantage will be reduced with the number of the citizens.
A new system of the seats redistribution should enter into force with the next parliamentary elections in 2009, but Mr Lamassoure has predicted the talks will generate “a lot of passion and emotion”.

In case of failure of this project, the present rules would be automatically modified in 2009 in such a way that the total number of deputies would fall to 736. Only Germany, Slovenia, Estonia, Cyprus, Luxembourg and Malta would maintain their current numbers. The rest of the member states would lose several seats.

(Good to know that a Romanian MEP is so actively involved in EU lawmaking)