There’s no simply swiping left or right in the EU’s great dating game to find a perfect match for European Commission president.
But Manfred Weber and the other lead candidates vying for the top job did not immediately appear to satisfy the desires of the EU’s 28 national leaders gathered for dinner in Brussels on Tuesday to analyze the recent European Parliament election results and begin discussions on how they intend to fill nearly all of the bloc’s senior leadership posts.
It was the start of what is likely to be a protracted, agonizing process — potentially so contentious that officials took the rare step of blocking mobile phone and data service at Tuesday night’s meeting to prevent any leaks.
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Officially, the discussion was focused not on the names of individual candidates for specific positions but rather on how the 28 leaders envision fulfilling their obligations under the EU treaties — to take account of the Parliament election results; and seek geographic, demographic and political party balance — as well as how they might increase the number of women in senior jobs, which in addition to the top executive post include the presidencies of the Council, Parliament and European Central Bank, as well as the high representative for foreign affairs.
European Council President Donald Tusk reiterated that the leaders would not be bound by the Spitzenkandidat, or “lead candidate” process. According to that concept, championed by a majority in Parliament, the Commission president should be someone who ran in the European Parliament election as a “lead candidate” for a pan-European alliance of parties.
“For the European Council, the treaty obligations are more important than political ideas and inventions,” Tusk said at the closing news conference, though he insisted that leaders would fully respect the Parliament’s role in the process, which requires confirmation of the Council’s nominee by majority vote.
Tusk was so insistent on avoiding any assessment of individual candidates that he refused to say if leaders had articulated any characteristics that they want in a new Commission president. “That’s a tricky question,” he told POLITICO. “It gets too close to the names.”
In reality, the fates of some candidates indeed seem all but decided, though no formal announcements will come for weeks, likely not until leaders meet again for a regularly scheduled summit in late June.
The candidacy of Manfred Weber, the German MEP who is the nominee of the center-right European People’s Party (EPP), seems to hang by a thread. The EPP won the highest number of seats in the Parliament election, but it will hold a slimmer plurality in a more diverse and divided Parliament, where a coalition of at least three or four pro-EU groups will be needed to form a majority.
The other pro-EU groups — the Socialists & Democrats, the Liberals and the Greens — have signaled they do not want Weber. Portugal’s Socialist Prime Minister António Costa publicly rejected him; and aides to French President Emmanuel Macron have also said the Elysée Palace will oppose Weber’s bid, which would likely be a fatal blow.
Weber wobbles
Some officials said that Tusk’s insistence on avoiding any discussion of names was partly designed to avoid putting a swift end to Weber’s candidacy — out of sensitivity especially to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who as the most prominent EPP leader reiterated her support for Weber on Tuesday. “Merkel would not be comfortable if Weber was killed tonight,” an EU diplomat said.
“We could see Weber would not pass, and if he doesn’t pass, Merkel would lose face,” another EU diplomat said. “It was in everyone’s mind that the guy would not pass.”
Some leaders, notably Macron and Costa, used their public remarks before or after the summit to stress the importance of executive or managerial experience for the next Commission president — comments that were immediately interpreted as criticism of Weber, whose entire career in Brussels has been in the Parliament.
The Council in recent decades has demonstrated a clear preference for choosing Commission presidents who had previously sat among them, and no one has been named to the EU’s top job without having served as a head of state or government since the French statesman Jacques Delors was tapped for the post in 1985.
“We need strong leaders with a strong experience, a strong legitimacy,” Macron told reporters as he left the dinner. “We talk about the European Commission as the greatest executive power of Europe so one must know what an executive power is, and have the competence to do it.”
But other leaders, including Merkel and Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, insisted that parliamentary experience should also be taken into account. Merkel appeared to warn that Parliament would likely reject European commissioners as nominees — such as Socialist lead candidate Frans Timmermans or Liberal favorite Margrethe Vestager — if the legislature is told that one of its own members does not have relevant experience.
“We in the EPP stand by our lead candidate, Manfred Weber,” Merkel said. “Others are standing by their lead candidate. That’s completely clear.”
“We also talked about profiles — what do these lead candidates need to bring to the table? And we agreed that it must be experience,” Merkel said, adding: “I pointed out that five years ago, the Socialists proposed someone who had gathered experience in Parliament, in the form of [then-Parliament President] Martin Schulz. And that was a very acceptable lead candidate for us, and I warn against telling the Parliament that someone who has experience in Parliament doesn’t have experience whereas someone who has experience in the Commission does have experience. I don’t think we should trade in that kind of currency.”
While Tusk’s decision to move judiciously, despite setting an ambitious goal of settling the leadership discussions by the end of June, indeed kept Weber’s hopes alive, it also reflected the complex nature of the negotiations, in which it is just as important to figure out where unsuccessful candidates and parties will end up, as it is to identify the winners.
It is the nature of the EU that none of the prominent players will go empty-handed — a point that officials said was ever more crucial given the election result that now requires a broad coalition to find a majority in Parliament.
Merkel emphasized the need to maintain harmony in her remarks to reporters before leaving the summit, noting that while the Council chooses its nominee for Commission president by a qualified majority, unanimity is required to make other extremely important decisions, including approval of the EU budget.
“We have a complicated task here,” Merkel said. “We need a qualified majority [to nominate the Commission president] but we must be careful that we don’t tear open wounds among those who perhaps cannot agree, which then means we can’t succeed with the medium-term budget, which has to be approved unanimously.”
Officials briefed on the leaders’ discussion said that there was some disagreement over the extent to which filling the presidency of the European Central Bank should be included in the broader discussions, given the bank’s need for independence and the typical lack of partisan political activity among the central bankers who would be candidates for the job.
“Some made the point that the ECB is different,” an official said, adding that leaders could still take nationality into account when filling the bank post, even if party affiliation is not a factor. “You can have a passport balance,” the official said.
Parliament talks
Officials said that Tusk, as required by the EU treaties, would begin consultations with the Parliament and step up his individual meetings with party officials and national leaders. One official said Tusk had hoped to meet with the Parliament’s Conference of Presidents — which includes the leaders of the different political party groups — as soon as Wednesday morning, but they were not ready.
“We will find the best possible way to negotiate with the Parliament, because it is our common interest to find the political majority not only among the leaders in the Council but also in the Parliament,” Tusk said at a news conference after the dinner. “No one is interested in institutional conflict, especially between the Council and the Parliament.”
Several EU diplomats said they expect Tusk would return from his consultations to tell the 28 leaders that the numbers simply don’t exist to support Weber’s candidacy. The EPP won 178 out of 751 seats in Parliament in the election, while the Socialists, Liberals and Greens together now control more than 320 seats.
The Liberals refused to put forward a single nominee for Commission president, in part to protest the Spitzenkandidat system. Instead, the liberals put forward a slate of names, including Vestager, the Danish competition commissioner, who appeared to be emerging as a favorite choice for some.
Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen, who has been a domestic rival of Vestager (both politicians are liberals, but from different parties) announced before Tuesday’s dinner that he would support her bid. Denmark, however, is not part of the euro common currency zone and some officials said for that reason they found it difficult to envision a Dane leading the Commission.
Vestager’s work as competition commissioner, enforcing antitrust and other regulations, has also made her an enemy of some big business interests, and brought her into conflict with some national governments when she accused them of providing illegal state aid in the form of tax breaks.
As part of the overall negotiating process, EPP leaders chose Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovič and Latvian Prime Minister Krišjānis Kariņš as their coordinators; the Liberals chose Rutte and Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel, while the Socialists tapped Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and Costa.
Several EU diplomats said they hoped Parliament leaders would reach a conclusion on their own that none of the lead candidates could win a majority and that a compromise nominee would have to be found.
Michel Barnier, the French statesman who has served as the EU’s Brexit negotiator, has made little secret of his interest in potentially serving as such a compromise candidate. Some officials, however, said that they expect if Weber’s candidacy was ended in part because of Macron’s opposition, the Germans would refuse to back Barnier. Others said that if the EPP were denied the nomination of its lead candidate, the conservatives would similarly insist on blocking Timmermans, the Socialist nominee.
Officials said they expect that other current or former EU leaders would express interest in the Commission post. “There are names,” Macron said. “Maybe others will emerge in the next days and weeks. My priority is to have the most qualified people.” Macron also said he envisioned four of the top EU jobs split equally: “two women and two men.”
Some, like former Finnish Prime Minister Alexander Stubb, have already made their availability clear. Stubb ran against Weber for the EPP nomination and lost. But he is less conservative than Weber, who is a member of the Bavarian Christian Social Union, and is more fluent in English and French than the German. Despite the predominance of English in the EU these days, Paris still places great weight on having senior EU officials who speak French.
Many of the EU leaders hailed the unexpected surge in voter turnout in the European Parliament election, which rose above 50 percent for the first time in a quarter-century. Several said this should be taken as a call to action from European citizens in the decisions ahead.
“This proves that the EU is a strong, pan-European democracy, which citizens care about,” said Tusk, who is a former Polish prime minister. “Whoever will lead the European institutions, they will have a genuine mandate from the people.”
Tusk also called the outcome of the election, in which pro-EU parties will control more than 500 seats in Parliament, “a good omen for the EU” and he gave part of the credit to Brexit. “One of the reasons why people on the Continent voted for a pro-European majority is also Brexit,” he said. “As Europeans see what Brexit means in practice, they also draw conclusions. Brexit has been a vaccine against anti-EU propaganda and fake news.”
Leaving the dinner, Luxembourg Prime Minister Xavier Bettel said the leadership contest is not a beauty pageant.
“The goal is not to elect Miss or Mr. Europe,” he said. “What citizens are interested in is the substance and not the label associated with one or any name. The priority must be to set political priorities for the five years to come.”
Lili Bayer, Jacopo Barigazzi, Andrew Gray, Rym Momtaz, and Eline Schaart contributed reporting.