Parliament committee-reshuffle due

All important posts have been dealt out in advance between the Parliament's main groups; key MEPs will normally stay with the committees on which they have built a reputation and acquired expertise. 

The following table gives an overview of the likely changes: 

In practice, most of these votes will be uncontroversial. A quarrel between the German and Polish EPP-ED delegations on the redistribution of top jobs resulted in the vote on the composition of parliamentary committees being postponed from the Parliament's mid-January Strasbourg plenary. 

As a part of the deal, Jacek Saryusz-Wolski of the Polish Civic Platform party will replace German Elmar Brok as the head of the Foreign Affairs Committee (AFET). Brok, widely respected for his foreign policy experience and his engagement for the constitutional treaty, steps down after almost ten years as an AFET chair. 

Saryusz-Wolski, the former state secretary responsible for European affairs in Poland, is now expected to put more emphasis on the EU eastern policy and EU-Russia relations as well as promote Ukraine's EU membership. The decision came as a surprise for some of Brok's proponents, while MEPs from some eastern member states, notably Lithuania, expressed satisfaction and hopes for more EP pressure on Russia. 

The AFET chair, despite its relative irrelevance in the EU legislative process, stirred the most controversy in the EPP negotiations. Yet it is the Budget Committee that will be the key decision-maker in the upcoming Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reform in 2008, with German MEP Reimer Böge taking over the chair from Polish MEP Janusz Lewandowski. 

In the meantime, more negotiations have taken place and no major conflicts on committee chairs are likely to emerge between the two large groups. Some controversy may arise around the following issues: 

• The Greens/EFA group says that an agreement was found on upgrading the Sub-Committee on Human Rights, which is chaired by French Green MEP Hélène Flautre, to a full committee by June 2007. EPP-ED MEP Karl von Wogau chairs the Parliament's other sub-committee, concerning security and defence. The EPP-ED says that if one of the subcommittees were to be upgraded, the same would have to apply to the other one. A Conservative source said that an upgrade is unlikely as part of the present deal, because its feasability was not entirely clear. 
• The extreme-right group IST claims the chairmanship of the Culture Committee for MEP Marine Le Pen, the daughter of 'Front National' founder Jean-Marie Le Pen. The EPP-DE and the PSE have agreed not to vote for any candidate from that group.