The room went silent. Eickhout, who became visibly emotional as he spoke, then walked out. Many were confused, and some tears were shed. But there were no goodbyes, no thank yous, and no applause for his 17 years of service to a political family that has more than 50 MEPs. A meeting was called on Thursday morning between the leadership and party staff to discuss the matter further.<\/p>\n
The group secretariat was notified early this week of a previously undisclosed workplace relationship involving a staff member. Relationships between MEPs and staffers are allowed as long as they are disclosed, according to the Greens’ code of conduct. <\/p>\n
After that came to light, Eickhout decided to resign, two more people aware of the situation told POLITICO. They were granted anonymity to speak about the delicate situation.<\/p>\n
POLITICO\u2019s Brussels Playbook\u00a0last week reported<\/a>\u00a0that\u00a0Eickhout, 49, had revealed to party colleagues that he was in a relationship with\u00a0Lena Schilling, 25, the youngest member of the Parliament. The resignation \u201chas nothing to do with the relationship with Lena,\u201d Eickhout told POLITICO via a spokesperson.\u00a0He did not respond to further requests for comment.<\/p>\n Progressive Netherlands (known as PRO), the party into which Eickhout’s Green-Left party is in the final stages of merging, issued a statement indicating there had been more cases. “He made this decision in part because he did not report past workplace relationships.”<\/p>\n The reason Eickhout resigned is that he broke internal party rules<\/a> by failing to disclose his relationship with a staff member, said the second two people familiar with the matter. Those rules were introduced in the wake of sexual harassment allegations against German lawmaker<\/a> Malte Gall\u00e9e in March 2024. Gall\u00e9e denied the allegations but resigned his post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The room went silent. Eickhout, who became visibly emotional as he spoke, then walked out. Many were confused,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":16770,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5],"tags":[10915,18,10916,3585,1676,496,318,249,346,351,1937,1396,940,473,10917,279],"class_list":["post-16769","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brussels","tag-bas-eickhout","tag-brussels","tag-career","tag-cars","tag-development","tag-elections","tag-emissions","tag-energy","tag-european-green-deal","tag-media","tag-meps","tag-parliament","tag-rights","tag-services","tag-sexual-harassment","tag-social-media"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@be\/116617359008277844","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16769","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16769"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16769\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16769"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}