If the Lisbon Treaty is not in place by June 2009, member states should keep their word on slimming down the European Commission, centre-right MEPs have argued, warning that parliamentarians would be reluctant to support a prolonged mandate for the current team of commission President Jose Manuel Barroso.

“Time is against us,” Spanish conservative deputy Inigo Mendez de Vigo from the constitutional affairs committee in the European Parliament told journalists on Thursday (9 October), following this week’s visit by the Irish foreign minister Micheal Martin in Brussels.

Ireland was originally supposed to indicate what it wants to do about the Lisbon Treaty, a reform of the 27-strong Union that was rejected in June by Irish voters, to the heads of states and governments set to gather for a two-day summit on 15 October.

But Mr Martin confirmed to MEPs on Monday (6 October) that Dublin needs time for “comprehensive research” and only by December does the country “expect to be able… to outline the necessary steps to achieve our objective of continued full engagement in the Union.”

Mr de Vigo thinks, however, that it would be too late for the new institutional set-up to come into effect before the European elections in June, meaning that the pre-vote campaign would be again focused on the treaty rather than on other issues of concern for EU citizens.

Moreover, it would mean that the bloc’s assembly would be elected under the current Nice Treaty with a different distribution of seats – 736 instead of 751 MEPs with fewer seats for 12 member states – and less power than envisaged by the reform document.

If that is the case, argued Mr de Vigo, the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP-ED), the biggest parliamentary group in the 785-member legislature, would press for the rules on the composition of the EU executive also to be respected.