Political groups in the EP are a "key entry point to the various aspects of parliamentary work" (Vauchez, 2020). They play a variety of roles: on the inside, they act as "banks of political resources" (Beauvallet, 2015) for MEPs and their staff, ensuring the convertibility of national political capitals and their (re)distribution amongst the members of the group; on the outside, they regulate the power distribution (positions, reports, etc.) within the Parliament.
The political groups are perceived by some of the smaller actors as domination tools by the bigger groups, EPP and S&D. The procedural rules of parliamentary work, partially inherited from the non-elected European Assembly (Cohen, 1997), bear the mark of the primacy of socio-democrats and christian-democrats on European politics, and ensure the control of bigger groups over the prestige and power positions (Vauchez, 2020).
Adopting a sociohistorical point of view, this paper will analyse the construction of a political group, looking at the dynamics of competition and arrangements that characterize the power plays between actors and sub-groups of actors in the group. To do so, I will compare the formation of the Green group in 1989, when the ecologist group became autonomous, and in 1999, when it started to professionalize and develop a body of permanent staff. Based on a mixed-method approach (75 interviews, a prosopographical database, archives, ethnography), the paper will first analyse the political competition between the green group actors for the most central positions. I will then look at various ways of resistance used to circumvent d'Hondt's inequal rules, within the Green group through a parallel organisation of redistribution of the political resources, and outside the group through an attempt to create an "anti d’Hondt group" in 1999.
