Double majority

The Treaty of Amsterdam foresaw “double majority” voting in the Council. This involves two stages. First, the votes are counted in the traditional way to obtain a qualified majority. Then, the qualified majority would then be regarded as effective only if it also represented states containing a set proportion of EU citizens.

This system was envisaged as a measure to be established before enlargement to avoid the many smaller member states possessing too strong a voting position. The alternative option was to provide increased voting weights for the larger countries. The Treaty of Nice adopted both options.

Notes

• Increased voting weight: the four biggest states nearly tripled their votes from 10 to 29 votes each. Whereas smaller states, like Ireland, Denmark and Finland only increased their votes from 3 to 7.
• ”Qualified” qualified-majority: a qualified majority would have to represent states with at least 62% of the citizens in the EU. This special “double majority” was seen as compensation to Germany for accepting the same numbers of votes in the Council as France, although Germany has 82 million citizens as opposed to the 60 million in France.

The future

The EU Constitution proposes that a qualified majority in the Council be obtained by a double majority consisting of the majority of Member States representing at least 65% of the EU population and at least 55 % of the member states. This is to come into effect from 2009.

The four EU countries with the largest populations would therefore be able to block a decision even though 21 of the 25 EU Member States support it.

Links

http://europa.eu.int/scadplus/leg/en/cig/g4000d.htm#d4