Monica Frassoni (born 10 September 1963) is an Italian politician who served as a Member of the European Parliament from 1999 to 2009 and as co-chair of the European Green Party from 2009 to 2019. In 2018, she was elected at the local Council of Ixelles in the Brussels Region, representing the Ecolo party.
In 2010, Frassoni co-founded and leads the European Alliance to Save Energy a multi-stakeholder, business-led organisation which aims to promote and advocate energy savings and a new energy model. She is also a member of the steering committee of the Coalition of Energy Savings. Since 2013, Frassoni has been president of the Management Board of the European Centre for Electoral Support (ECES), one of the most important organisation worldwide to implement electoral and democracy assistance projects mainly funded by the European Union and its Member States.
Frassoni is a member of the board of trustees of "Friends of Europe" a leading think tank that works to promote a more inclusive, sustainable and forward-looking Europe. She is also a board member of the Foundation ceci n'est pas une crise, created in 2013 in Belgium to respond to the challenges of cultural and identity populism.
Early life and education
Frassoni is a Political Science graduate from the University of Florence Cesare Alfieri.
Early career
From 1983, Frassoni became actively involved in the European Federalist Movement. In 1987, she moved to Brussels, having been elected as Secretary General of the European organisation of Young European Federalists (“JEF Europe”). She was appointed president of the European Co-Coordinating Bureau of Youth NGOs, a position she held from 1991 to 1993.
In 1990, Frassoni started working for the Greens/EFA Group in the European Parliament in charge of constitutional matters, rule of law, procedures and immunities. In that capacity, she worked closely with Adelaide Aglietta, Alexander Langer and Paul Lannoye and was heavily involved in the implementation of the European Parliament's new legislative competences, subsequent to the institutional reforms culminating in the Treaties of Maastricht, Amsterdam and Nice.
Political career
Member of the European Parliament, 1999–2009
In 1999, Frassoni was elected as a member of the European Parliament for her first mandate with Ecolo, becoming the first non-Belgian politician to be elected in a Belgian political party and the first Italian national to be elected abroad. During her first legislation, she was active in constitutional affairs and human rights issues, closely following the negotiations for enlarging the EU to include Cyprus and for reform of the EU. She also became involved in several specific environmental issues with a clear European dimension in terms of EU law, such as protection of the Ebro River in Spain, high-speed infrastructures like the Lyon-Turin tunnel, waste in Naples, etc.
From 2002 to 2009, Frassoni served as co-chair (alongside Daniel Cohn-Bendit) of the Green/EFA group which by then had grown into the fourth largest group in the European Parliament in terms of number of MEPs.
In June 2004, Frassoni was re-elected for a second term, this time with the Italian Federation of the Greens. During the 2004–2019 legislative period, she was a member of the Committee on Legal Affairs and a substitute member of both the Committee on Constitutional Affairs and the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety. For three years, she was also rapporteur on the yearly report of the European Parliament on the implementation of the EU law, thus following closely the review of infringement procedures carried out by the European Commission. She was also a member of the European Parliament negotiating team in the working group on the reform of the Parliament, led by Dagmar Roth-Behrendt, and on the Interinstitutional Agreement on Better Law-making.
In addition to her committee assignments, Frassoni was part of the delegations for relations with Mercosur, Iran, and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Mediterranean.
In her capacity as parliamentarian, Frassoni was appointed by European Commissioner on External Relations and European Neighbourhood Policy, Benita Ferrero-Waldner, as chief of the European Union Election observation missions to the 2006 Bolivian Constitutional Assembly election and to the 2006 Venezuelan presidential election.
In 2007, Frassoni was her group's candidate for the presidency of the European Parliament, standing against Hans-Gert Pöttering. She secured about three times the number of voters of her own group.