On behalf of Jeunesse Valdôtaine, Jeunes Unser Land, Giovani per l’Autonomia and Femu Ghjuventù
Motion nr. ……….. (to be filled by the EFAy staff)
Date of introduction of the motion: 07.05.2025
Name of the people introducing the motion: Daniel Dujany (Jeunesse Valdôtaine), Alban Brüchig (Jeunes Unser Land), Martin Nazzi (Giovani per l’Autonomia) and Jean-Baptiste Geronimi (Femu Ghjuventù)
On behalf of the parties: Jeunesse Valdôtaine, Jeunes Unser Land, Giovani per l’Autonomia and Femu Ghjuventù
Motion: Redefinition of European Electoral Constituencies on a Cultural, Linguistic and Transnational Basis
Jeunesse Valdôtaine, conjointly with Jeunes Unser Land, Giovani per l’Autonomia and Femu Ghjuventù
WHEREAS Article 3 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU) establishes that the Union "respects its rich cultural and linguistic diversity, and shall ensure that Europe's cultural heritage is safeguarded and enhanced", recognising the plurality of identities as a founding value and not as an obstacle to integration;
HAVING REGARD TO Article 4, paragraph 2, of the TEU, which obliges the Union to respect "the national identities of Member States, inherent in their fundamental structures, political and constitutional, inclusive of regional and local self-government", implicitly extending this protection to regional, cultural and linguistic identities recognised at the level of domestic constitutional law;
HAVING REGARD TO Article 14, paragraph 2, of the TEU, which establishes the principle of degressive proportionality in the composition of the European Parliament among Member States, ensuring that even the smallest States are allocated a number of seats greater than their population alone would justify, a principle that must be extended and applied
consistently within sub-national constituencies, in order to protect demographically minority regions;
HAVING REGARD TO Article 223 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), which confers upon the European Parliament the power to draw up a draft for the election of its members "in accordance with a uniform procedure in all Member States or in accordance with principles common to all Member States", opening the way for a profound
reform of European electoral geography that takes into account cultural and linguistic identities predating national borders;
HAVING REGARD TO the Act concerning the election of the members of the European Parliament by direct universal suffrage of 20 September 1976, as amended by Council Decision (EU) 2018/994 of 13 July 2018, which introduces the possibility for Member States to establish sub-national constituencies for European elections, without however providing mechanisms for cross-border or cultural-linguistic coordination between regions of different States sharing common history, language and traditions;
HAVING REGARD TO the European Parliament Resolution of 3 May 2022 on the implementation of the Electoral Act (2021/2099(INI)), which expressly calls for strengthening the link between voters and representatives through constituencies closer to the territory, and recommends that territorial cohesion and regional identities be taken into account in the definition of European electoral constituencies;
HAVING REGARD TO the European Parliament Resolution of 7 July 2022 on the proposals for reform of the Union Electoral Law (2022/2114(INL)), which introduces the institution of transnational lists and a single European constituency for a share of seats, but which does not address the complementary and equally urgent problem of cross-border sub-national constituencies founded on historically established cultural and linguistic affinities;
HAVING REGARD TO Regulation (EC) No 1059/2003 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 26 May 2003 on the establishment of a common classification of territorial units for statistics (NUTS), as amended by Regulation (EU) 2016/2066, which classifies European regions into comparable units by population and area, providing an already available
technical and demographic basis on which to ground a fair and objective redefinition of European electoral constituencies;
HAVING REGARD TO Regulation (EC) No 1082/2006 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 5 July 2006 on a European Grouping of Territorial Cooperation (EGTC), as amended by Regulation (EU) No 1302/2013, which establishes a legal instrument for cross-border cooperation between authorities of different Member States, demonstrating that the Union already recognises the legitimacy of institutional groupings based on geographical and cultural proximity rather than on national borders;
HAVING REGARD TO the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages of the Council of Europe, signed on 5 November 1992 and entering into force on 1 March 1998, ratified by Italy by Law No 302/1999 and by France by Law No 2000-147/2000, which in Article 7 commits the Parties to recognise regional or minority languages as an expression of European cultural wealth and to take into account the needs and wishes of the communities concerned in the definition of relevant institutional frameworks;
HAVING REGARD TO the Recommendation of the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe (CDL-AD(2002)023rev2-cor) — Code of Good Practice in Electoral Matters — which affirms the principle that electoral constituencies must reflect existing administrative, geographical, historical and cultural units, and that demographic disparities between constituencies should not exceed 10–15% of the average, a principle systematically violated by the current geometry of European constituencies in numerous Member States;
RECALLING the Alpine Convention, signed in Salzburg on 7 November 1991 and ratified by Italy by Law No 403 of 14 October 1999, which recognises the Alpine space as a unified cultural, ecological and economic area spanning the territory of eight national States and constitutes the most solid legal foundation for the recognition of transborder cultural macro-regions in Alpine Europe;
RECALLING Recommendation 240 (2008) of the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe on linguistic minority regions and cross-border cooperation, which invites States to develop forms of institutional collaboration between border regions sharing minority languages and cultures, so that they may be represented collectively within European bodies and are not forced to compete in constituencies dominated by demographically prevalent metropolitan areas;
HAVING REGARD TO the opinion of the European Committee of the Regions CdR 1035/2022 on the reform of European electoral law, which highlights the insufficient representation of peripheral regional areas and linguistic minority communities in the European Parliament, and calls for the introduction of corrective mechanisms to guarantee every region, regardless of demographic size, effective and non-residual representation;
HAVING REGARD TO Articles 5 and 114 of the Italian Constitution, which recognise and promote local autonomies, and Article 116, which grants Regions with Special Statute — including the Aosta Valley/Valle d'Aosta and Friuli-Venezia Giulia — particular forms and conditions of autonomy, which have nonetheless found no adequate reflection in the definition of the current European electoral constituencies;
HAVING REGARD TO Italian Law No 18 of 24 January 1979 and subsequent amendments, laying down rules for the election of members of the European Parliament allocated to Italy, which divides the national territory into five macro-constituencies — North-West, North-East, Centre, South, Islands — grouping together in the North-West constituency the regions of Piedmont, Liguria, Lombardy and the Aosta Valley, with an electorate of approximately 15 million voters in which the Valdostan share amounts to less than 0.8% of the total, making the election of a representative of Valdostan expression to the European Parliament de facto impracticable;
HAVING REGARD TO the French Electoral Code, in particular Law No 2003-327 of 11 April 2003 on the election of representatives to the European Parliament, which introduced a
single national constituency in France in replacement of the eight regional constituencies provided for by Law No 77-729, thereby eliminating any form of infra-national territorial representation and making it impossible for distinct regional communities — including Savoy and Occitania — sharing history, language and identity with regions of other Member States to express themselves separately;
CONSIDERING that the Autonomous Region Aosta Valley/Valle d'Aosta, with approximately 125,000 inhabitants, shares with part of the French departments of Savoie and Haute-Savoie (Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region) and the Alpes-Maritimes (Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region) a historical, cultural and linguistic heritage of Franco-Provençal origin, a system of consolidated economic relations and mobility, and a common belonging to the Alpine space recognised by the Alpine Convention; and that a Western Alpine transnational constituency encompassing these territories would be geographically coherent, culturally legitimate and demographically far more balanced than the current Italian North-West macro-constituency;
CONSIDERING that the same structural distortion affects other minority regions of Europe: the Ladin and Occitan communities of the Alpine arc, submerged in constituencies dominated by metropolitan areas; Northern Catalonia in the Pyrénées-Orientales, electorally separated from Spanish Catalonia by a national border that reflects no cultural reality; the Slovene-speaking communities of Friuli-Venezia Giulia and Austrian Carinthia; the Frisian communities divided between the Netherlands and Germany; and Brittany in France: all areas for which a cross-border electoral arrangement would be culturally grounded and democratically necessary;
ASSESSING that the principle of degressive proportionality already applied by Article 14 TEU for the composition of the European Parliament among Member States constitutes a well-established legal and political precedent, which can and must be extended to the allocation of seats within sub-national and transnational constituencies, ensuring that no historically recognised regional community remains voiceless in the European Parliament solely on account of being demographically in the minority;
CONSIDERING that the European Union pursues, through Cohesion Policy (Regulation (EU) 2021/1060 of the European Parliament and of the Council) and structural funds, the objective of reducing disparities between regions and strengthening economic, social and territorial cohesion; an objective that is contradicted by the current European electoral system, which instead produces an apparent political cohesion founded on the erasure of minor regional specificities;
BELIEVING that a reform of European electoral constituencies founded on cultural, linguistic and transnational bases would strengthen the democratic legitimacy of the European Parliament, bring citizens of peripheral regions closer to Community institutions, and give
concrete effect to the principle of unity in diversity that constitutes the motto of the European Union;
In light of all of the above, EFAY commits to:
1. Promoting, at European level, a proposal to amend the 1976 Act (as amended by Decision 2018/994/EU) and Article 223 TFEU, aimed at introducing transnational European electoral constituencies based on objective criteria of cultural, linguistic and geographical affinity, identifying cross-border macro-regions through: geographical continuity and belonging to common orographic or territorial systems (e.g. the Alpine arc, the Pannonian Plain, the Iberian Peninsula); the documented presence of historically shared linguistic communities recognised by the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages; the existing NUTS classification as a technical starting point; and the economic, cultural and mobility flows between the territories concerned;
2. Requiring that the reform of European constituencies mandatorily introduce the principle of degressive proportionality at sub-national and transnational level, guaranteeing:
(a) a guaranteed minimum seat for each historical or special-statute regional unit included in a constituency, regardless of its demographic size;
(b) that the actual demographic disparity between constituencies does not exceed the 15% threshold recommended by the Venice Commission (CDL-AD(2002)023);
(c) the introduction of an automatic corrective mechanism for regions with recognised linguistic minorities, in recognition of the distinctive identity they represent within the Union;
3. Supporting, as a pilot case and concrete model of application of this reform, the establishment of a transnational Western Alpine constituency grouping together the Autonomous Region Aosta Valley/Valle d'Aosta and the neighbouring Piedmontese provinces on the Italian side, with the departments of Savoie (73) and Haute-Savoie (74) of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region and the Alpes-Maritimes (06) of the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region on the French side; this constituency, united by Franco-Provençal history, Franco-Italo-Provençal bilingualism, belonging to the Alpine space enshrined in the Alpine Convention and by centuries-old economic and cultural relations, would represent a model of transnational representation founded on genuine identity coherence rather than on a mere aggregation of voters;
4. Calling on the European Parliament and the European Commission to commission a technical-legal study, in coordination with the Committee of the Regions and the Venice Commission, that maps all potential transnational constituencies based on cultural and
linguistic affinity within the European Union, assesses their demographic feasibility using NUTS data, defines the criteria for balancing seats among the States involved, and proposes a framework for the revision of national laws consistent with this reform;
5. Establishing, within the European Parliament, a Special Committee for the Redefinition of European Electoral Constituencies on a Cultural and Transnational Basis, composed of representatives of the European Parliament, the Committee of the Regions, organisations of European linguistic minorities, Regions with Special Statute of Member States and relevant associations, with the mandate to draw up, before the end of the current legislature (2024–2029), a concrete reform proposal to be submitted to a vote of the Assembly;
6. Promoting, in coordination with EFA member parties and youth organisations affiliated to EFAY, an awareness and advocacy campaign directed at European institutions and national governments, so that the question of the representation of minority regions and linguistic communities in European elections becomes a permanent fixture on the Community political agenda, with particular attention to the next European elections of 2029 as the first available opportunity to pilot the new system in trial form;
REAFFIRMING that national borders trace the history of States, but do not exhaust the history of peoples: the Aosta Valley, Savoy, Friuli, Northern Catalonia, Brittany and all the minority regions of Europe have the right to carry their voice to the heart of European democracy; and that a European Parliament that cannot listen to its smallest voices cannot claim to be fully representative of that heritage of diversity which constitutes the true strength and the true identity of the Union.