The process for selecting the Commission’s next president remains troublingly opaque
Transparency is essential to democracy. People need to see how leaders are elected, and they need to know that they can see. That is why the often imperfect rituals of opinion polls, vote counts and TV debates are so important. They are there to reassure us that we know what happened; that we know who won and, deep down, we know why.
But despite efforts to improve transparency, the process for selecting the European Commission’s president still falls short. Many of us will vote in May, but even full-time political nerds struggle to visualise or describe exactly what will happen next.
In theory, the Council of Ministers—the leaders of the 28 member states—will determine a favoured candidate for the presidency, who must then be endorsed by the freshly elected European Parliament. In practice, at least the first part of that process will be far from transparent.
It is generally accepted, for example, that the chosen one must be acceptable to the self-anointed big three of France, Germany and the UK. It is further accepted that the Council won’t put someone up unless he or she is virtually certain to be approved by the Parliament. That would indeed be prudent, as a prolonged toing and froing between the Council and the Parliament would leave the EU paralysed.
Despite the stipulations of the Lisbon Treaty, which says the Council should take the results of the Parliamentary elections into account, this opaque process is not hugely different to the one that allowed José Barroso to serve two undistinguished terms. In 10 years, the former prime minister of Portugal has achieved little of note and has failed to raise public confidence in the Commission’s presidency.
Barroso’s record is perhaps epitomised by his clumsy intervention in the Scottish independence referendum, when he made the risible claim that it would be “difficult or impossible” for an independent Scotland to quickly re-secure its EU membership of 40 years standing. This assertion wasn’t even distinguished by pragmatism: the Commission doesn’t, after all, have a dog in the Scottish independence fight. It betrayed, instead, Barroso’s desire to pander to the governments of Spain and the UK, whom he presumably hopes will help secure his next role, as secretary-general of Nato.
It is essential that the Parliament pushes its candidates as vigorously as possible ahead of the election, despite the indifference of some national political parties and many voters. Democracy demands that people know whom, as well as what, they are voting for.
MEPs are moving to identify recognisable candidates. The conservative EPP group may choose Jean-Claude Juncker, the former prime minister of Luxembourg; the socialists are set to back the Parliament’s president, Martin Schulz, and the liberals group ALDE has already nominated former Belgium prime minister Guy Verhofstadt.
But the risk remains that the Council will ignore the Parliament’s nominees and select someone who will offend no-one and achieve very little. That would suit many of the member states’ leaders just fine—but it would be bad news for the EU and its increasingly sceptical voters.