Modernization by Experiment
How an Informal Network of MEPs Is Experimenting with Debate Inside the European Parliament
BY BEATRIZ REY
When people talk about modernization in parliaments, they usually mean systems, tools, or procedures. New workflows. Better oversight. Digitization. Inside the European Parliament, some of the most interesting modernization work happening right now looks nothing like that. It doesn’t sit inside a committee. It doesn’t have a chair, a mandate, or a report. Instead, it lives in a loose monthly conversation among dozens of Members who have become convinced that the institution has a deeper problem – not how it works, but how it debates.
This is the most recent chapter in a longer reform story.
Over the past few years, modernization in the European Parliament has moved through successive formal initiatives. The first emerged under President David Sassoli in the aftermath of the pandemic, when the sudden shift to hybrid work demonstrated that parliamentary procedures were more malleable than many had assumed. Sassoli convened a cross-party reflection on how Parliament should function in the future, leading to trial changes in plenary organization and new opportunities for interaction.
His successor, Roberta Metsola, expanded that effort through a Working Group on Parliamentary Reform, examining how to improve legislative coordination, scrutiny, and plenary exchanges. Among the proposals were new opportunities for Members to react to one another more directly and new hearing formats designed to sharpen oversight.
Now, a new formal initiative – Parliament 2040 – is looking even further ahead, asking what the institution should become over the long term. And yet, alongside these structured reform cycles, something else has taken shape.
How it Started
Damian Boeselager, Member of the European Parliament, has been part of an informal cross-party effort to make parliamentary debate more interactive through small-scale procedural experimentation.
As Damian Boeselager, Member of the European Parliament, described to me, the issue is most clearly revealed in the plenary chamber. “The debating culture is a bit weird in the European environment,” he said. “These are just speeches, but nobody’s really reacting to each other.” Members take the floor. They speak. Then someone else speaks. But they rarely respond to one another directly. What results is less a debate than a sequence.
For Boeselager, this is a flaw in representation. “If there was a real debate,” he reflected, “it would fulfill its role as a representative house more, because citizens would feel that people are actually fighting about the issues they care about.”
That conviction – that Parliament needs to feel more like a place of contestation – is what brought together a cross-party group of younger Members a few years ago. They never formalized themselves. “We actively decided not to formalize the group,” he told me. Formalizing, in their view, brings hierarchy, ownership, and procedural drag, which can make change difficult within large institutions.
What emerged instead was something closer to a legislative member organization: a cross-partisan group of like-minded members who share concern over the same issue. Today, around sixty Members coordinate loosely, meeting monthly and mobilizing around specific procedural questions. They talk about hearings and plenary formats, about how the parliamentary calendar structures participation and how to make exchanges more interactive. They do not produce reports nor advise the Parliament’s leadership. “We also don’t hold any form of power,” Boeselager said plainly. But they try things.
Back in 2019, some of them began experimenting with more interactive exchanges during debates, referencing one another and asking questions mid-flow. The point was less to win arguments than to show what a different debating culture might look like. Over time, some of the changes they advocated began to seep into practice. One of them was surprisingly basic: encouraging Members to speak from a central podium rather than from their seats.
Before that shift, Boeselager noted, plenary sessions often looked empty. Only those who were particularly invested in the debate would sit nearby. The visual effect was a sparsely attended chamber, even when engagement was higher than it appeared. Moving speakers to the front did not transform Parliament. But it changed how debate looked – and therefore how it was perceived.
Another adjustment followed later: randomized speaking order in certain sessions. Boeselager is skeptical about its direct impact. “I don’t think it really helped a lot,” he admitted. But what mattered was how it was introduced: as a pilot. For him, this word carries unusual weight. The most important reform underway in the European Parliament is not a single procedural change but a mindset shift, that is, a growing willingness to try things without committing to them permanently.
This is harder than it sounds in a rule-bound institution where procedural innovations are rarely temporary. Members worry that once something is introduced, it may be difficult to undo. That fear produces inertia. This is where the informal group operates differently from the formal reform processes that came before it – and from the long-term vision of Parliament 2040 now taking shape. While institutional initiatives tend to move through mandates, reports, and implementation phases, this network focuses on small, immediate adjustments.
“I really care a lot more about instant changes rather than long documents that nobody ever reads,” Boeselager said. The real question, then, is not whether Parliament adopts any single reform. It is whether it becomes more comfortable experimenting at all.
Today, modernization inside the European Parliament is unfolding along multiple timelines: past reforms initiated under Sassoli, institutional changes developed under Metsola, long-term planning through Parliament 2040 – and, in parallel, a monthly conversation among Members who are trying, in small ways, to make debate feel more like politics again.
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