Tag Archives: ALDE party

Readers, please note that this is not an official report of the Council meeting last weekend, but represents my report back.

One of the things that I observed from my two years as consort to the Party President was that, if you’re chairing a potentially fractious group, especially a political one, it really helps to be able to spot potential disagreements beforehand, allowing you to have those critical conversations prior to the meeting, and to consider how best to manage the debate.

The ALDE Party isn’t entirely like that, as was demonstrated on Saturday morning.

But, having gathered in Lithuania’s charming capital, we did have more than a Council meeting to attend. My weekend started with a session sponsored by the European Liberal Forum, discussing what a liberal narrative for the next five years might look like, including our own Sal Brinton. Sal talked about our current campaign, noting that it had liberal values at its heart, offering concrete proposals to improve our public services and the environment.

There’s always something to distract you during a General Election campaign. And, in my case, that’s the ALDE Party Council meeting that will take place on Saturday in Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital. Yes, we’ll be sending a full delegation, albeit with an element of substitution, including a guest Baroness, but flights have been rearranged to keep absences as short as possible.

The main topic of conversation is going to be the fallout from the European Parliament elections last week, and the impact on Europe’s direction in the coming years. Whilst Renew Europe might not …

Escaping Storm Babet, albeit not by much, Thursday saw me heading to the Paris of the East, and capital of Romania, Bucharest. After the various travelling calamities that befell the delegation to Stockholm in June, I wasn’t taking any chances on arriving on the day of the meeting, and reached my destination to find the sun shining and the temperature pleasantly warm. Perhaps it was a good omen…

In truth, the most controversial item on the agenda was always going to be the urgency resolution on the situation in Israel and Palestine, given that European liberals have quite divergent views on who is to blame and what should be done. However, our delegation leader, and Chair of Federal International Relations Committee, David Chalmers, had decided that the best way forward was to draft something which might attract majority support in advance and, after some discussion amongst our delegation, with valued input from our Parliamentary Foreign Affairs team, we had been able to circulate something to our sister parties that, I thought, had a real chance of success.

And so, once again this year, I find myself heading for Bratislava, this time as a member of the Party’s delegation to the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) Party Council meeting which takes place on Saturday morning. Here’s what’s on the agenda…

Preparations for the 2024 European Elections

A tricky, and somewhat painful, agenda item for us, given that we won’t be fighting them and don’t have a vote on the manifesto, but work is underway on designing the campaign, drafting a Europe-wide message and building stronger links with non-ALDE members of the Renew Europe group in the European Parliament. Our position as a European nation which doesn’t have any formal arrangement with the European Union, nor ambitions to join, does leave us a bit like a small boy with his nose against the outside of the shop window.

Finance

The Commission is being difficult about receipts from third countries (for example, us), and there are suggestions that our rights within the ALDE Party are in jeopardy. Indeed, the key European Regulation 1141/2014 does offer challenges in terms of having non-EU member parties. But it does seem strange that the Commission would discourage participation from EEA states (Iceland, Norway and Switzerland), Schengen micro-states such as Andorra, or even candidate nations such as Bosnia-Hercegovina or Moldova.

I would expect quite a lot of horse trading before this resolves itself, but we will continue to make the case for wider inclusivity within all European political families.

Friday morning and, for those of us that aren’t naturally early risers, the hour time difference between Brussels, the nerve centre of the ALDE Party, and the United Kingdom was the cause of a slightly hurried morning routine for your correspondent.

First, there was a rather sad piece of business, as the Congress was asked to make a decision on how to proceed following the sad demise of Party President Hans van Baalen. There had been some consultation as to whether or not a by-election should take place to fill the vacancy, amidst rumours that a candidate was already “working the room”, and our delegation had concluded, having read the Statutes, that it should wait until the regular Autumn Congress, on the basis that the post would have been up for election then anyway.

We apparently weren’t alone, as Congress voted pretty overwhelmingly to postpone, leaving the senior Vice Presidents, Senator Timmy Dooley from Fianna Fáil and Ilhan Kyuchyuk MEP from the Bulgarian Movement for Rights and Freedom, to act as joint President for the time being.