A man cycles past the European Commission headquarters | Carl Court/Getty Images Anything Trump can do … EU plans presidential inauguration European Parliament’s top staffer wants a grander way of welcoming new Commission president.

We know that Donald Trump had the largest ever inauguration crowd (because he told us so), but could it be topped by the next president of the European Commission?

Well, no. But the European Parliament's top staffer on Monday gained approval for a "formal inauguration" that's as close as possible to the U.S. presidential model, as part of his plans to boost awareness of the 2019 European elections — think of an open-air spectacular in front of the largest possible crowd.

Klaus Welle, the Parliament's secretary-general, tried to get support for the idea at a meeting of leading MEPs in Strasbourg on Monday — and he got it, according to two people present in the closed-door meeting.

The Parliament’s bureau — President Antonio Tajani and the 14 vice presidents — took a decision on the Parliament’s 2018 budget Monday evening, the sources said.

The section of the agenda on the budgetary implications of the European elections in 2019 foresee a total expenditure of €33 million in 2018 and 2019, the bulk of it for "publication, information and participation in public events" ahead of the campaign. It is not clear how much a public inauguration would cost, if it went ahead.

There are only a few solid plans on what the campaign itself should look like. It will be based, according to Welle's report, "on the key element of the 2014 campaign: the lead candidates, an irreversible process."

That process, pushed by Welle, Jean-Claude Juncker and Martin Schulz, saw the leader of the largest political group in the election become president of the Commission — the so-called Spitzenkandidaten process that handed Juncker the top job after his center-right European People's Party won the most seats in the parliamentary election.

But not everybody bought into the idea of a public swearing-in of Juncker's successor.

Juncker didn't want to comment on the plans but people familiar with his thinking say that he is happy with the way Commission presidents (and commissioners) currently get sworn in: before the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg during a decades-old, decidedly un-fancy ceremony.

Welle wants to make changes to it. "The secretary-general has a huge interest in American democracy," said Sylvie Guillaume, a French vice president of the assembly. Since he took office in 2009, Welle’s ambition for the Parliament has been to model it on the U.S. Congress, including an in-house think tank similar to the U.S. Congressional Research Service.

The idea of a public swearing-in isn't new. The idea was "scrubbed" a few years ago, Guillaume said. According to people involved in the talks, former Parliament President Schulz was furious when he learned about the potential implications of a "formal inauguration" of the Commission chief.

Now that Schulz has left for Berlin to try his hand in domestic politics, Welle is trying again, Guillaume said.

Welle told POLITICO that a decision was a long way off. "The conception for the 2019 election is being designed by the working group on communication of the newly elected bureau and then being put in front of the bureau for a decision, presumably in the fall," he said in an email.

Guillaume isn't convinced, saying, "I have the feeling that everything is already written" in stone.