I’m writing this at 9pm on Thursday on the train home. I admit it takes a bit of willpower to put fingers to keyboard after 4 intense days ☺ – but actually it’s a great privilege to be able to write these updates, so here goes!

On Monday I travelled to Strasbourg, staying overnight in London on Sunday with the lovely Caroline Russell, one of our two Green London Assembly members. I have to leave home at 6.30pm on Sunday in order to be able to get to Strasbourg in time for our 4pm Monday Green Group meeting. It’s a lot of travelling, but actually it’s not wasted time at all – I spent it reading committee papers, working on text for my website, catching up on emails from constituents, and also writing the updates I should have done the previous week ;-).

Anyway. This was the first week of ‘normal business’ in the Parliament, with debates, resolutions and votes on several topical issues (more of that later). But it was also the week when we voted on the Council’s candidate for President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen. I’ve posted a couple of videos about this already, but I’ll recap briefly here.

The short summary is that the Greens voted against von der Leyen, she was elected with a narrow majority of just 9 votes, and the upshot in my view is that it’s clear she now needs to reach out to the Greens if she wants there to be a stable majority in the Parliament when it comes to the vote on her whole Commission in October.

Time for a quick reminder/explainer here, perhaps: each of the EU member states (currently 28, including the UK) has to nominate one Commissioner. The President of the Commission (von der Leyen) spends the summer negotiating with the member states and their proposed Commissioners about which portfolio each will have (e.g. Trade, Agriculture, Competition, Fisheries, etc). Basically Commissioners are a bit like Cabinet members in the UK, each heading a department or ‘DG’ (Directorate General). So although e.g. Estonia and Germany each get one Commissioner, they don’t get equally ‘weighty’ portfolios. Once the portfolios are allocated, each Commissioner has to come to a 3-hour public hearing in front of the relevant Parliamentary Committee in September. If the Parliament isn’t satisfied with the quality of the Commissioner, they can reject him or her. The final make-up of the Commission has to be approved by the Parliament in a binding vote in October, so MEPs actually have quite a bit of power here. (Contrast this with the UK, where Parliament has no influence at all over who gets to be in the Cabinet, and indeed no influence over who gets to be Prime Minister. Anyway, I digress…). The other element in the mix is that von der Leyen has said she’s committed to having a gender balanced Commission, which is excellent news.

So all this means that although von der Leyen was elected by a slim margin this week, she’s going to be very conscious that it’s not enough to be confident that her full Commission will be approved in October – not unless she does more to build a really stable pro-European coalition. In the vote on von der Leyen on Tuesday, quite a few members of the three-party alliance (EPP, Renew and S&D – rightwingers, centrists and leftwingers) did NOT vote for her, and she depended for her election on the votes of some people much further to the right, including Poles from the PiS party and Italians from Salvini’s La Liga. That’s definitely not a good look for her.

So. It will be very interesting to see how von der Leyen plays her cards now. Her speech to the Parliament on Tuesday was actually very good in some ways – certainly much better than when she came to see the Green group the previous week. She made several moves towards addressing concerns of Greens, socialists and liberals – for example committing to zero carbon by 2050, and supporting the right of Parliament to initiate legislation. She also made all the right noises in terms of explicitly distancing herself from the extreme right wing, and emphasising the need to uphold democratic standards and human rights in all member states. As a conservative politician trying to build a cross-party coalition, she was clearly trying hard to reach out. Those were all good signs.

But a single speech wasn’t enough to convince Greens to vote for her. We have always said that we focus on content, on policies. Our Group representatives spent June engaging in negotiations on policy detail with the other main political groups – until they all got distracted by their 3-way deal. Now the four groups, including the Greens, need to get back around the table together with von der Leyen’s team, to see if they can agree a policy programme that responds to our concerns sufficiently for us to be able to support the proposed Commission in October.

I hope all of that makes sense. Let me know in the comments if you have any questions on any of this.

I’ve written too much already, but there is lots more to report… Just briefly on one more thing: I made my first speech in the Parliament! That was on Wednesday morning, in the debate on the Presidency of the Council, which is in Finland’s hands from July to December this year (I’ll explain more about the Council Presidency another time). I spoke under the ‘catch the eye’ procedure, which MEPs can use if they haven’t managed to get official speaking time as part of the Group’s allocation – basically you go to the President’s platform at the front before the debate starts, and say you want a ‘catch the eye’ slot. It means you don’t actually know whether you will get a speaking slot until the moment they call your name, so I sat through two hours of debate without knowing if I’d get my chance, but luckily I did! You only get one minute, so I’d carefully written a short speech on climate and on Brexit. One minute of speaking time = 140 words (roughly). It’s always tempting to try to squeeze a little more in, but it’s not worth the risk. During that session we had a Chair who was a stickler for timing; he banged his gavel if a speaker ran 5 seconds over, and at 10 seconds he banged his gavel again and cut off their microphone! Quite a few people had the final parts of their speech cut off in this way. I just managed to condense my last couple of lines and squeeze it all in ☺. I quite appreciate this abrupt approach to chairing, though, because otherwise the really verbose people simply get away with over-running, and it’s unfair on those who stick to their time.

I was going to write a bit more about the human rights resolutions that we voted on last week – but I’ve just realised I’ve already written two pages and if you’ve followed me this far you probably want a break! So I will save that for next week’s update, in which I will explain more about the Council and the rotating Presidency, and more about how motions, resolutions and voting works in the Parliament.

Thanks for reading! And let me know in the comments if you have any questions or indeed suggestions ☺. Also, check out the podcast on my new website: www.EllieChownsMEP.org.uk.