The EU plans to splash out €6 million a year in rent on a swanky “House of Europe” building in central Paris — and spend almost €12 million doing the place up.
The high cost is stirring criticism in the European Parliament at a time when the institution has made significant investments in real estate, partly to expand its facilities and make the EU more visible to citizens.
According to a note sent on June 26 by Klaus Welle, the secretary-general of the Parliament, to the assembly’s Bureau — which includes the president and the 14 vice presidents — several locations in the French capital were scouted as potential venues for a building that would be shared with the European Commission. Their preferred choice is 51 Boulevard Haussmann, which would contain offices for both EU institutions and be an interactive information center.
The Parliament and Commission already share a Paris base, in the St. Germain-des-Prés area. They’ve been there since 1990 and pay a combined annual rent of €1.7 million for more than 2,700 square meters of space. The lease is up in April 2018 and the building “no longer fulfills all the requirement of a House of Europe, and in particular lacks public space,” according to the note by Welle, the Parliament’s top staffer.
MEPs’ preferred replacement is a neoclassical 4,000 square meter building on Boulevard Haussmann — a wide, tree-lined street once home to Marcel Proust and also to SPECTRE, an evil (fictional) organization that does battle with James Bond.
No deal has yet been struck, but “technical, legal and economic negotiations” are to take place with the owner, “with the aim of preparing all the preliminary steps necessary for the signature of a lease contract,” Welle’s document to senior MEPs said, with a planned opening date of 2020.
Speaking to POLITICO on Tuesday, Welle said the proposed project would include an “Experience Europe” information center “comparable” to the one it already has in Berlin. The Boulevard Haussmann site, he added, “has very heavy pedestrian traffic and makes it very attractive for information purposes.”
Welle ruled out the Paris site becoming a “House of EU History,” saying the new site “will not deal with history at all.”
“The Haussmann building won’t be a museum,” added French MEP Elisabeth Morin-Chartier, who went on the Paris real estate scouting mission. “It will be a communication space for all citizens because [Parliament President Antonio] Tajani’s goal is to bring Europeans closer to the EU.”
How much?
The amount of money planned for the Paris site has drawn the ire of some senior MEPs who would prefer a cheaper option for an institution that has made expensive real estate investments in recent years.
It opened a €56 million museum — the House of European History — in Brussels in May and is in negotiations with the Belgian state to acquire the art nouveau Solvay Library next to its Brussels base. The Parliament also plans to convert a 19th century private mansion into a “House of Citizens” at a cost of €1.9 million — despite it being dubbed a “cocktail” club for MEPs.
In addition, negotiations on the Boulevard Haussmann rental would take place at a time when the institution is weighing plans to destroy its main building in Brussels and build a new one for nearly half a billion euros.
According to minutes of a recent meeting involving members of the Bureau’s “working group on information and communication policy,” German MEP Rainer Wieland, a vice-president, told his colleagues that the Haussmann building would cost “€143 per square [meter]” and was therefore too expensive. Wieland said he would prefer a cheaper building located on Quai Voltaire, which would cost “€75 per square meter.”
Wieland was unavailable for comment on Tuesday.
The building on Quai Voltaire, Welle’s note said, is a “historic building” on the banks of the Seine in the chic 7th arrondissement. But it would need “a complete reconfiguration” and its position on Paris’ cultural heritage list “would prevent most types of signage or identification on the facade.”
Other MEPs have different views on the need to spend millions of euros to build a showcase for the EU.
“Building a Parlamentarium in Paris won’t solve the issue of how we get citizens closer to the EU,” said Jean Arthuis, a French liberal MEP and chair of the parliament’s powerful Budget Committee, referring to the assembly’s visitor centre in Brussels.
“To get citizens closer to Europe, Europe must relate to citizens and deal with their needs,” Arthuis said, adding that people who walk by 51 Boulevard Haussmann are mainly tourists “who don’t give a damn about Europe.”
Experience the EU
The “Europa experience” in Berlin, one of the EU’s more modern visitor centers, has a 360-degree cinema and allows you to “directly slip into the role of a member of the European Parliament or a commissioner of the European Union.”
Morin-Chartier said the new building on Boulevard Haussmann would also have enough space to house meetings of the Parliament’s political groups as well as press conferences.
Parliament officials, according to Welle’s note to MEPs, negotiated with the owner of the Haussmann building to secure a 20-year lease but will pay an extra €11.7 million for “redesign work.”
The Commission will cover 60 percent of the office space costs — just as it does in Berlin — and “[undertake] to examine the extent to which it could bear part of the cost relating to the ‘Europa Experience’ or whether the interactive space will become a ‘Parlamentarium,'” Welle’s note said.
The Parliament secretary-general’s note to senior MEPs has more than a touch of realtor speak about it, describing 51 Boulevard Haussmann as having “an exceptional location” with “18,000 passers-by per hour … which is even four times the level of footfall in front of the House of Europe in Berlin.”
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“If extrapolated,” the document says, that would add up to “half a million visitors per year.”
Another document, issued by the Parliament’s communication department, said that renting the Haussmann building would improve the image of the institution “in a political context where people care about European questions after the French elections” — a reference to the election of Emmanuel Macron, an ardent Europhile, as president.
The document also says the new House of Europe should be a place that is “connected to France’s major center of powers,” as a way to “show the importance of European institutions in the national political system.”
Besides Boulevard Haussman and Quai Voltaire, Welle’s note to senior MEPs said Parliament officials visited other fancy locations in Paris in their search for a new home, including on Boulevard Malesherbes (rejected “due to low footfall”) and Rue du Louvre (which exceeded “institutional space requirements”).
However, 51 Boulevard Haussmann is a “landmark building” close to Paris’ most famous department stores including Galeries Lafayettes and has an “ideal central and visible location,” according to Welle.