FORMER POLISH prime minister Jerzy Buzek was elected president of the European Parliament in Strasbourg yesterday.
All of the Irish MEPs, except Socialist Party MEP for Dublin Joe Higgins, told The Irish Times they had voted for Mr Buzek in a secret ballot.
Mr Buzek, a former leader of the Solidarity movement in Poland, said his election was “a measure of how Europe can change”.
He is a member of the parliament’s largest grouping, the European People’s Party (EPP). Mr Buzek said his election was important for the eastern and central European countries that joined the union in 2004.
“There is now no ‘you’ and ‘us’. We can say loud and clear that this Europe belongs to us all,” he said.
European Commission president José Manuel Barroso welcomed Mr Buzek’s appointment as “a resounding victory for a united Europe”.
A vote to re-appoint Mr Barroso to his position has been deferred until September.
Mr Higgins was the only one of the 12 Irish MEPs to vote in favour of the other candidate contesting the election which Mr Buzek won, Swedish MEP Eva-Britt Svensson. Ms Svensson, a member of the European United Left/Nordic Green Left group received 89 votes to Mr Buzek’s 555.
Mr Higgins claimed Mr Buzek’s election was a “stitch up” between the groups in the parliament which included Fine Gael, Labour and Fianna Fáil representatives.
Fine Gael is part of the EPP, and Labour is attached to the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (PASD). The Alliance of Liberals and Democrats in Europe (ALDE) includes the European Liberal Democratic and Reformist party (ELDR), of which Fianna Fáil is a member.
“After only one day in the parliament, it is already clear to me that the differences between the major political parties in Europe amount only in many cases to differences in letters,” Mr Higgins said.
Meanwhile, Fine Gael’s MEP in the northwest constituency Jim Higgins said he expected to be named as a queastor today.
The parliament’s five queastors deal with administrative matters affecting MEPs.
Mr Higgins said he should be a “shoe-in” because he got a very high vote at the group meeting last week. He added that the party, which has 36 per cent of the seats, usually votes en bloc.
“There’s a whipping system in place but we won’t know for definite until tomorrow. But it’s looking fairly good.”
The leader of the eurosceptic UK Independence Party, Nigel Farage, told the parliament that the guarantees given to Ireland ahead of a second Lisbon Treaty referendum “aren’t worth the paper they’re written on”.