Danish MEP Jens-Peter Bonde is to retire his seat in the European Parliament. The oldest MEP in Brussels, elected to power in 1979, will be 60 on April 4.
But he will be forever remembered in Malta as the European face of Euro-scepticism during the EU referendum campaign of 2003, although his work in the EP was instrumental in making the European bureaucracy more open and transparent.
The former Labour candidate Sharon Ellul Bonici, who led the NO2EU campaign in 2003, would later become a working member of Bonde’s EU Democrats, the small bloc formed for eurosceptic MEPs.
His seat will be taken over by Hanne Dahl, 37, the leader of the Danish June Movement.
Bonde will remain active in his June Movement party, which he founded in August 1992 after the Danish referendum on the Maastricht treaty in response to a call for greater transparency, subsidiarity and democracy in the European Union.
“At the time the internal telephone book in the Commission was a secret document as in the Soviet Union. We succeeded in having it published by Commission president Jacques Santer. The agendas and minutes of the Commission’s meetings did only exist in French and were very secret. We got them published on the net under President Romano Prodi,” Bonde said in a statement yesterday.
His name also became synonymous with the list of the European Commission’s hundreds of secret working groups, which he got published under Commission president José Barroso – the “Bonde-list” contains 3,094 working groups.
“They nicknamed it with my name because the Commission staff thought I was the only odd MEP to insist on transparency in the working groups. In the end, we were unanimous in the budget control committee to insist on also having the names.”
He described his role in the EP as “polite but determined, critical but also constructive opposition”.
He was the co-founder of the Peoples’ Movement in 1972, working to avoid Danish membership with the EU – what he called ‘The Club of the Rich’. “We wanted a Europe for poor and rich, east and west. I changed my position when the EU was enlarged. First with poor former fascist countries, then with Sweden, Finland and Austria and finally with 8 former communist countries together with Malta and Cyprus.”
He said today the EU is a place “where Europe unites… I have gone from withdrawal to reform. I am still critical towards the lack of democracy in the EU, more critical the more I learn and see behind the scenes. But I am also convinced that it is the real existing Europe we must reform with transparency, closeness and democracy.”