Are meetings systematically held in English in Brussels?

Guest on BFMTV on Wednesday January 12, Eric Zemmour says he will ask “so that European meetings stop being systematically in English. There are other languages ​​in Europe” if he is elected President of the Republic. What is the place of English and French in the Council, the Commission and the Parliament?

“The place of the English language within the European institutions has become preponderant, even hegemonic.” So says a report submitted to the government last October. In fact, at the Council of the European Union, which France has chaired since the beginning of the year, 2% of the documents are French against 95% in English. English at the European Commission represents 85% of documents before translation, less than 4% for French. At the end of the 1990s, there were still a third of documents written in English is also the majority in writing in the European Parliament, but French remains predominant at the Court of Justice of the European Union.

On the other hand, in official meetings, French representatives speak only French. If elected, Eric Zemour will not necessarily need to speak English if he wants to express himself in Brussels. But orally too, English seems to have taken precedence within the European institutions. In the informal meetings, in the working groups, there is little translation if the exchanges take place in English, specifies the report.