Jean-Claude Juncker said the European Commission would propose giving control over setting the time to member countries, some of whom want “permanent summer time.”
“The people want it, we do it,” the Commission president said in an interview with German broadcaster ZDF in the wake of an EU-wide survey on whether to scrap daylight savings time, saying it did not make sense to ask people what they want and then ignore them.
The Commission said Friday it would propose that member countries be allowed to decide whether to change their summer time arrangements. Both the Council and the European Parliament will have to give their green light to the proposal.
Some 4.6 million EU citizens participated in a public consultation on the issue, with 84 percent saying they are in favor of abolishing daylight savings, according to the Commission.
All EU countries currently change their clocks on the last Sunday in March and then again on the last Sunday in October.
“The purpose of EU rules was not to harmonise the time regime in the EU but to address the problems, notably for the transport and logistics sectors, which arise from an uncoordinated application of clock-changes in the course of the year,” the Commission said in a statement.
A number of German politicians in the European Parliament have called for “permanent summer time,” and Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia and Finland also support the change, according to ZDF.
The public consultation, which isnt binding, followed a February request from the European Parliament to carry out a “thorough assessment” of the issue.
This article has been updated.
