The Secretary-General of the European parliament Klaus Welle Alan Porritt/EPA | Alan Porritt/EPA Top MEPs seek to starve fringe parties of funding Klaus Welle’s report calls for stricter rules on who can get EU money.

STRASBOURG — Senior MEPs want to change the European Parliament's funding rules to make it more difficult for Euroskeptic and fringe parties to be given cash.

Klaus Welle, the Parliament's powerful secretary-general, has drawn up a report, seen by POLITICO, which calls for changes to rules on how many MEPs are needed for a political party to be given money from the EU's coffers.

Smaller parties would be the ones to lose out if there is support for the plan, backed by the Parliament's Bureau — made up of the assembly's vice presidents and MEPs who look after financial and administrative issues — on Monday.

At issue is funding for pan-European political parties, which are different from the Parliament's political groups — although there are often close links between the two, and they often share names.

At present, a political party is eligible to receive money from the Parliament's budget if it has representatives in seven different national or regional parliaments or assemblies, or the European Parliament, or if it received at least 3 percent of the votes cast in those EU countries in the most recent European Parliament elections. That means a pan-European party could technically have no MEPs and still receive funding, as long as it has elected officials in regional or national parliaments.

Welle wants to change the rules so that parties must have MEPs before they can receive EU funds. He proposed setting the minimum number at seven, to curb the growth of "one-man parties." His report even suggests going further, and raising the minimum to 22 MEPs.

"A handful of politicians only able to contribute to forming European political awareness and to expressing the political will of citizens of the Union on an extremely limited and not representative level hardly justifies financial support from the European Union budget," Welle wrote.

"A strengthening of the minimum representation criteria could remedy this situation, at least for the allocation of funds."

The rule change would not affect the largest Euroskeptic blocs — Marine Le Pen's Europe of Nations and Freedom, and Nigel Farage's Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy — but it would make it more difficult for smaller parties to get funding and free up more money for the big political beasts.

"There is a big common funding pot for all European political parties, so the more of these that meet the entry criteria, the more the pot gets spread around," a Parliament administration official said.

Senior MEPs also discussed creating an "independent authority" to oversee funding for political parties and foundations, led by a director who would assess if applicants for money comply with "European values." Disbursement of the money has so far been handled by the Parliament's finance department.

According to a recruitment notice obtained by POLITICO, a "Director of the Authority of the European political parties and European political foundations" is being sought — with a monthly wage of €10,656.56. Whoever gets the job would be responsible for "registering, controlling and imposing of sanctions on European political parties and European political foundations."

Welle was urged to write the report after it was discovered that Parliament funds were being used by far-right groups to organize anti-EU protests.

Manfred Weber, the head of the center-right European People's Party bloc in the assembly, wrote to other parliamentary leaders in April after finding out that the Alliance for Peace and Freedom — a far-right political group which received €600,000 in funding from the Parliament in 2016 — was planning an anti-EU rally in Stockholm.

"The change of the rules is necessary to avoid the European Parliament's money being used by populist parties against Europe," said EPP group spokesman Pedro Lopez de Pablo.

The plan will now be passed on to the Constitutional Affairs Committee for further discussion, and if passed would be activated in 2018.