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PARIS - Once it was lauded as a pilgrimage of unity. Now it is dismissed as a multimillion-euro joke, and a campaign is building for it to end.
To critics, the European Parliament is the European Union's travelling circus. Once a month or so, thousands of files are locked inside metal cases and dispatched on a 350km trip from Brussels in Belgium to Strasbourg in eastern France. Thousands of people - legislators, lobbyists, secretaries, administrators, translators and journalists - follow suit. The files and the people are then decanted. There is a debate lasting four days, then everything is packed up again and makes the reverse trek.
Strasbourg is the official seat of the European Union's legislature, even though its members meet there only 48 days a year. The rest of their work is done in Brussels.
Under an EU treaty, the Parliament - a mainly consultative assembly with few real powers - has to meet 12 times a year in Strasbourg. But the huge cost, the inconvenience of shuttling backwards and forwards and the humiliating image this gives the EU are stoking a groundswell of demands for Strasbourg to be given the chop and for the Parliament and its 785 legislators to be officially headquartered in Brussels.
"The constant commuting is irresponsibly expensive," says Hans-Peter Martin, an independent Austrian MEP. "It paralyses the efficiency of the Parliament."
Gary Titley, leader of Britain's Labour MEPs, said: "It is time to break with tradition and to make Brussels the only seat of the European Parliament.
"As long as we have to travel to Strasbourg, people will rightly say that the EU is wasting money."
By some estimates, the to-and-fro costs the 27-member bloc ¬203 million ($429 million) each year, comprising transport bills, payments to freelance interpreters and a fixed allowance to Parliament staff of about ¬1000. The Green Party says the commute also adds about 20,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) to the atmosphere, an embarrassment for the continent that styles itself as the world's spearhead against global warming.
For decades, Strasbourg was the uncontested choice as the location for a big pan-European institution. Located on the western bank of the Rhine in eastern France and, in the space of 70 years, a football kicked around in three wars between France and Germany, the Alsatian city was a handy symbol of reconciliation.
But times have moved on and those who want Strasbourg to remain the Parliament's base are mainly French politicians, who look out of date or driven by self-interest.
The frontier between France and Germany has remained unchanged since 1945 and trust - among Western European nations, anyway - is now so rock-solid that the so-called Schengen agreement enables citizens to travel from the Arctic Circle to Sicily and from the Atlantic to the Baltic without facing a systematic passport or customs check. The capital of the EU, in all but name, is Brussels.
In this changing light, more than 1.2 million Europeans have signed a petition for the "One Seat Campaign", started by Alexander Alvaro, a German Liberal, and the Labour MEP group has begun its own online campaign. More than four-fifths of MEPs also want to axe Strasbourg, according to one poll.
Hopes of a change were given a powerful boost after a 200sq m section of ceiling, weighing about 10 tonnes, collapsed in the Strasbourg chamber on August 7. Checks of the building showed other problems. Two plenary sessions have already been staged in Brussels because of ongoing refurbishment work, saving ¬3-4 million, according to the news and analysis site EUobserver.
At some point, though, the irresistible force of public opinion will collide with the immovable object that is EU law.
At French insistence, EU treaties require a dozen plenary sessions to be held in Strasbourg each year.
Any modifications are highly unlikely, given the disarray over the reform of Europe's institutions - and the fact that France, under Nicolas Sarkozy, is president of the EU.
So, vaudeville or not, the show must go on.
