BRUSSELS, July 12: Young Europeans backed a strong federal Europe at a convention on Friday, but dissenters hit back by saying they had been put up to it by EU bureaucrats.

The three-day European Youth Convention endorsed a strongly integrationist resolution seeking governmental powers for the European Commission, more say for the European Parliament and less for member state governments.

The “mini-parliament” was attended by 210 young people aged 18-25 from the 15 EU member states and 13 candidate countries.

“The majority of young people would like to propose a federal structure for the future of Europe,” the youth forum’s Danish vice-president, Ellen Trane Norby, told the Convention on the Future of Europe working on an EU constitution. But 57 dissident members denounced the exercise as an “attack of the clones” manipulated by the executive European Commission and the federalist youth movement which it finances.

One of the British members, Sam Dobbyn, called the Youth Convention “unrepresentative, undemocratic and too concerned with vested interests and political factions”.

Only 102 of the participants, many of them political science graduates, endorsed the final document at 2 a.m. after hours of wrangling that combined the virulence of student politics with the opacity of EU jargon, Miles Kemp, a pro-European British Young Conservative, told Reuters.

GISCARD DISAPPOINTED: The president of the grown-up Convention, 76-year-old former French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing, pledged to listen to the aspirations of young people and civil society when EU leaders appointed him last December.