José Manuel Barroso, the new European commission president, was warned on Thursday that MEPs would vote out his entire commission unless he backed down over his choice of Rocco Buttiglione as the EU’s new civil liberties chief.
Martin Schulz, the leader of the European parliament’s Socialist group, said he could muster a majority among the 732 MEPs for the move, which would provoke a constitutional crisis in the EU.
Buttiglione, an Italian Catholic and opponent of gay rights, was rejected by the European parliament when he was presented to a commission that had to ratify his appointment. He had said during the hearing that he considered homosexuality a sin, and that marriage was intended ”to allow women to have children and to have [the] protection of a male”.
Under pressure from his backbenchers and spurred by the unprecedented public repudiation of Buttiglione by Göran Persson, the Swedish prime minister, Schulz said: ”If [Mr Barroso] repeatedly shows me and the parliament the cold shoulder and there’s no change in the justice portfolio, I would recommend that my group reject him.”
He demanded that Barroso explain himself before parliament.
The Socialist leader, whose group numbers 200 MEPs, believes he can count on the support of 88 liberals and 175 Greens, Communists and independent eurosceptics if Barroso refuses to meet the parliament halfway by stripping Buttiglione of his portfolio and offering him another post.
The crisis put more pressure on the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, but in Italy Buttiglione was receiving support from some who saw him as a potential martyr to ”political correctness”.
In a front-page article for the Corriere della Sera, the commentator Ernesto Galli Della Loggia said he could not decide whether the reaction in Brussels was more ”ridiculous or chilling”.
The Vatican view is that being gay is not sinful, but that homosexual acts are immoral and unnatural.
Vittorio Messori, who wrote a best-selling book with Pope John Paul, said Catholics had joined ”smokers and hunters” as the new pariahs. In an article for the daily Il Messaggero, he added: ”Thank God anti-semitism has passed, but it has been replaced in western culture by anti-Catholicism.”
As the row continued, Berlusconi learned that he was coming under further pressure from the EU’s court of justice. The advocate-general, Juliane Kokott, said Italy’s judges should ignore a law that led to the dropping of false-accounting charges against Berlusconi two years ago. The trial that gave rise to the charges is still being heard.
In one of the first acts to be passed by parliament after Berlusconi took power with an outright majority three years ago, the government pushed through a change in the law making it effectively impossible for anyone to be convicted and jailed for false accounting.
The law has been repeatedly criticised as a licence for swindlers, particularly since the Parmalat scandal.
Kokott said that the law failed to meet the EU’s requirement for legislation that was ”effective, proportionate and dissuasive”. She added: ”Where a more lenient criminal law adopted after the event is incompatible with the requirements of Community law, the national courts are obliged to give priority to the application on Community law”.
The judges hearing Berlusconi’s case are unlikely to act until there is a full ruling from the European court of justice, which is expected within six months. The ECJ is not obliged to follow the advocate-general’s advice, but usually does. – Guardian Unlimited Â