Last night’s first debate between four of the five candidates to be the next president of the European Commission did produce a winner, but the audience were among the losers.

Guy Verhofstadt, the leader of the ALDE group of Liberals, undoubtedly performed best – aided by his superiority in English, the language of the debate. Martin Schulz, the candidate of the centre-left, was overly combative with the moderators and was off form. Ska Keller, the candidate of the Greens, was at times naïve and unconvincing but was better than Jean-Claude Juncker, the candidate of the centre-right, who performed worst. He appeared tired, sometimes cranky, and struggled with his English. By the end of the debate he had apparently lost interest, even yielding his allotted speaking time to other candidates.

The organisers of the debate had chosen to follow closely the model of a modern US-style presidential debate, using a complex calculation for speaking time that sometimes left the candidates with only 20 seconds to answer a question. The candidates did not seem to have grasped its complexities and too much of their allotted time was spent disputing the allocation. Candidates were repeatedly talking over each other.

The substance of the debate, which took place in Maastricht before an audience dominated by students, frequently veered into inter-institutional rivalries that would have perplexed the average voter. Juncker, an ex-prime minister of Luxembourg, became the personification of the European Council, arrayed against three MEPs (though Verhofstadt was a member of the Council from 1999 to 2008). They criticised the Council frequently, complaining that member states are blocking progress and saying that the next European Commission president needs to be more assertive.

Martin Schulz, who used to lead the centre-left MEPs, and Guy Verhofstadt, who leads the liberal ALDE group, had old scores to settle between them about past votes and parliamentary procedures. But they lapsed into almost impenetrable detail. People outside the EU bubble would probably have found that of the four, Ska Keller, the youngest and most inexperienced of the group at 32, was the most intelligible.

It was unfortunate that the debate included only four of the five official candidates. Alex Tsipras, the firebrand Greek politician who is the nominee of the far-left GUE group, declined to participate. His party Syriza said he was focused on campaigning in Greece, but the debate was diminished by not having a participant from outside the ‘EU bubble’.

Tsipras will take part in the next all-candidates debate on 15 May, which will take place in the European Parliament and be aired by public broadcasters across the EU. His inclusion ought to make the debate less esoteric.

Despite the occasional confusion, the debate generated a lot of interest on social media. The official hashtag for the debate was used 47,000 times, and it became a top trending topic in Greece, Italy, Spain and Belgium. But there was a very clear divide – the debate was being discussed in Southern Europe while it was almost completely ignored by social media in Northern and Eastern Europe.

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