Sittings · Document
ORDINARY LEGISLATIVE procedure
Follow up to the European Parliament legislative resolution on the proposal for a regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council on the transparency and targeting of political advertising
1. Rapporteur: Sandro GOZI (Renew / FR)
2. Reference numbers: 2021/0381 (COD) / A9-0009/2023 / P9_TA(2024)0090
3. Date of adoption of the resolution: 27 February 2024
4. Legal basis: Articles 16 and 114 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union
5. Competent Parliamentary Committee: Committee on Internal Market and Consumer Protection (IMCO)
6. Commission's position: accepts all amendments. The Commission presented the following statement in writing:
The provisional agreement resulting from interinstitutional negotiations between the European Parliament and the Council includes an obligation for the Commission to set up a European repository for online political advertising. This repository has the tasks to enable public access to online advertisements, together with the information provided by political advertising publishers via a single portal, i.e. the European repository, and to ensure that this information is stored, hosted, indexed and made available to the public through a dedicated single portal for a period of seven years. The Commission recalls that, in comparison to the initial Commission proposal (COM(2021) 730 final of 21.11.2021), this constitutes a significant development which entails a substantial financial and administrative burden for the Commission.
Indeed, the provisional agreement introduces a number of tasks and obligations for the Commission which will entail a substantial increase in workload, both in the short and in the long-term i.e. beyond the current programming period. These include:
- the adoption of implementing acts in areas which the Commission had not envisaged,
- the development, deployment and future maintenance and upgrades of uniform and effective IT tools for this repository, including to ensure:
- that political advertising publishers are able to access this mandatory service;
- that the public, interested entities and competent national authorities are able to access the information provided by this Repository; and
- that compliance with relevant laws is guaranteed, including during periods affecting national elections.
This has a direct impact on the human resources required for the Commission services, as well as on the budget, which was not anticipated when the Commission submitted its proposal, amounting to around four to six additional FTEs at the European level and, at minimum, around EUR 1,5 million additional annual budget costs. The Commission has prepared a Legislative Financial Statement to this effect.
For the current Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF), tasks that are to be performed internally in the Commission will need to be addressed by reallocation and redeployment within the services, and financed through redeployments within the available financial envelope of existing programmes or prerogative budget lines, which would therefore be reduced so as to increase the EU contribution to an agency or other management body entrusted with the management of the Repository. Funding after 2027 cannot be prejudged and will depend on the outcome of the preparations and negotiations of the MFF post-2027.
In parallel, the Commission will explore possible options to entrust the responsibility for the management and operations of the European repository for political advertisements to an agency or management body, which is a flexibility that is provided for in the provisional agreement.