An employee cleans the empty hemicycle of the European Parliament in Strasbourg | Archive Plenary postcard Strasbourg after dark What happens after the European Parliament’s traveling circus leaves town.

STRASBOURG — On a typical Thursday afternoon, as the European Parliament closes its monthly session here, a woozy post-party atmosphere suffuses the assembly’s 220,000-square-meter building.

Groggy-eyed staffers run along nearly empty corridors in a mad dash to catch their trains. Bartenders and waiters wrap up food and stack dishes. Cleaning staff converge on a deserted hemicycle chamber to vacuum floors and throw away papers and leaflets.

By nightfall, most of the 10,000 people who descend on this picturesque Alsatian city 12 times a year — MEPs, their assistants, civil servants, lobbyists, journalists and even doctors — are gone.

The nearly abandoned buildings they leave behind buttress the argument of the many critics of the Strasbourg plenary sessions, who say it is pointless and wasteful to maintain an entire European Parliament campus for use only a few days every month. Maintaining two seats is estimated to cost an extra €180 million per year. Most MEPs favor scrapping the Strasbourg sessions, but ending them would require a change to the EU treaties, something France has vowed to oppose.

“Never will France authorize any modification of any kind,” President François Hollande said earlier this year as he signed new agreements providing close to €1 billion to the city and the region.

For four days a month, thousands of people who work in and around the EU decamp from Brussels to debate and vote on legislation, to meet and influence parliamentarians, and to make sure the sessions run smoothly and according to the rules.

But for the other 320-or-so days per year, the imposing European Parliament headquarters building — which was completed in 1999 — becomes an almost totally empty and largely unused monument to modern architecture.

Only a skeleton crew shows scattered signs of life when the Strasbourg EU quarter is supposed to be dark, dormant, or even dead.

It includes permanent support staff who work full-time even during down-time. And it also includes contract workers, such as Christian Gast, 53, a resident of Strasbourg who distributes documents for journalists at the press center during plenary sessions.

Gast, like other temporary employees of the institution, must wait another month for work to come again.

“I am always nostalgic when sessions end,” Gast said on a recent Thursday as his co-workers packed up and headed for the exits. “I look forward to the next.”

Gast has worked part-time for the Parliament for 16 years. He is on the clock for 32 hours a month, from 8 am to 6 pm on the days when the plenary is in session. He doesn’t have another full-time job and receives the R.S.A (earned income supplement), the minimum wage for unemployed or under-employed people in France.

Cab driver Armand Stahl is another of the locals who ride the Strasbourg plenary wave. “When it ends, we have the impression that the city is dead,” he said. “These sessions wake the city up.”

When Parliament is in session, Stahl’s taxi is always parked in front of the Parliament’s main entrance to “catch the late-night workers,” he said. “At night, they get out in waves, every five minutes. It’s a good type of customer for us, because tourists don’t take taxis.”

France has fought hard against efforts from many MEPs to end the Strasbourg sessions, which critics say are a waste of time, money and energy.

About 200 people work permanently for the Parliament in Strasbourg. The die-hards include nine security officials, a few maintenance engineers, about 20 employees of the communication directorate-general who organize tours for around 500 people who visit the Parliament each day.

The Strasbourg crew also includes 70 officials who work for the office of the European Ombudsman, which has its headquarters here.

The engineers, employed by the Parliament’s department for infrastructure and logistics, spend their days making “corrective and preventive maintenance” of the building, a Parliament official said. They also check the building’s electricity, fire detectors, lighting, air conditioning and take care of the “cleaning and managing of waste and green areas.”

The structural integrity of the building has been a concern: A large chunk of the plenary chamber’s roof famously collapsed in August 2008. In this case, there was an upside to the two-seat arrangement. The incident occurred during one of the many days when the room was completely empty, so nobody was injured.

Once-a-month surge

The monthly influx of parliament officials at the European Parliament starts on Mondays and generally goes through Thursday afternoon.

Hundreds of MEPs, flanked by their assistants and other hangers-on, walk briskly along the corridors, fill the 750-seat hemicycle mainly for the voting session, squeeze themselves into the futuristic glass elevators, and chat over glasses of white wine at the members-only “Bar des députés.” When they are not voting, MEPs spend their time in 1,133 offices, 18 committee halls and several catering areas.

During plenaries, they dine in restaurants in the city center and sleep in hotels where prices of rooms more than double when the assembly is in session. One of the private dining rooms of the famous Alsatian restaurant “Chez Yvonne” is booked a year in advance for parliamentarians.

“It’s a city in the city,” said Elisabeth Morin-Chartier, a French MEP who sits on the panel of quaestors who oversee administrative matters for the legislature. “With 10,000 people coming in here, we are obliged to have doctors, as well as social assistants.”

Most of the people who work at the Parliament during the plenary sessions are full-time employees of the assembly. These ushers, assistants, administrators, security officials, and medical staff, temporarily swap their offices in Brussels or Luxembourg for similar ones in Strasbourg for just four days a month.

But the Parliament also grants temporary contracts to local people, including ushers, technical assistants and medical staff.

“It’s a job which is worth its weight in gold,” said Gast. “You need to have good manners and be careful. I never look at my watch.”

The city of Strasbourg claims not to need the European Parliament to survive economically. But France has fought hard against efforts from many MEPs to end the Strasbourg sessions, which critics say are a waste of time, money and energy. The city was chosen as the official seat of the European Parliament to be a symbol of the historic reconciliation between France and Germany after two world wars.

According to the Single Seat campaign, a cross-party group of MEPs who want to end the monthly Strasbourg sessions, the city gets an economic boost of €20 million each year.

A 2013 parliamentary report on whether to continue the Strasbourg sessions listed other institutions with permanent staff in the city, including the Council of Europe, Eurocorps (a military force for the European Union and NATO), the European Court of Human Rights, the Franco-German TV channel Arte, and diplomats.

These institutions, the report said, generate “gains of some €17 million from the presence of Parliament’s seat in Strasbourg and some €400 million from the other bodies that contribute regularly and permanently to the local economy.”

With its exceptional 15th and 16th century architecture and its gothic cathedral, Strasbourg’s city center is listed on the UNESCO World Heritage list, and attracts tourists from all over the world. In 2014, Strasbourg attracted more than 3 million tourists, according to the local tourist office.

Those tourists, and not the monthly political tourists, are the throngs that really interest the locals.

“The life of European institutions is not a matter of concern for many residents here,” said an official from the local Chamber of Commerce. “They don’t pay too much attention to what goes on there.”

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