The trouble (not only) with gender parity: On the weaknesses of the nomination procedure for the European Commission

Deutsch

By Manuel Müller

Ursula von der Leyen would like to have more female commissioners. But she is dependent on national governments. 

The appointment of the European Commission is a cumbersome procedure. According to Art. 17 TEU, the members of the Commission are “chosen on the ground of their general competence and European commitment from persons whose independence is beyond doubt”. They are selected by the Council “on the basis of the suggestions made by Member States” and “by common accord with the President-elect” (currently Ursula von der Leyen, CDU/EPP). Subsequently, all commissioners are subject to a “vote of consent” by the European Parliament and are finally “appointed by the European Council, acting by a qualified majority”.

The Council only rubber-stamps

In practice, however, the procedure is somewhat different. As there is exactly one Commissioner from each country (following a decision by the European Council), it is customary for each government to propose its “own” commissioner – in more or less close consultation with the Commission president. The Council usually does not discuss these proposals further, but simply rubber-stamps them. The Commission president then announces the distribution of portfolios and the internal structure of the Commission, in particular the coveted vice-presidencies.

A real test of the candidates’ “general competence” only comes later, in the European Parliament, where the relevant committees organise long and intensive hearings with them. After these hearings, the committees vote for or against each nominee – since 2004 there has always been at least one rejection. The rejected candidates are then replaced by new ones, who are again put forward by the national government of their country, until the Parliament is satisfied with all of them. The final appointment by the European Council is a mere formality.

This model of nomination is unique in the world. Compared to the purely parliamentary nomination procedures for most national executives in EU member states, it has some obvious and some less obvious weaknesses.

A gateway for national interests

First: The convention that each member state proposes one commissioner is intended to ensure that all member states identify with the Commission’s work, that nobody is overlooked and that there is no feeling of alienation. In practice, however, it often leads to governments and national publics expecting their “own” Commissioner to represent national interests in Brussels.

Even Manfred Weber (CSU/EPP), leader of the European People’s Party, recently publicly praised Commission candidate Raffaele Fitto (FdI/ECR) as a “strong defender of Italian interests”. This undermines the idea that commissioners represent a common European interest and should therefore be independent of national influence.

Devaluation of the European election

Second: The national right of nomination also implies that, from a party-political point of view, the Commission is always a mixed bag. Its members represent the colourful variety of the national governing parties of the member states at the time of nomination. This fosters a culture of compromise, but it also makes it difficult for the Commission to pursue a coherent policy. In particular, it hinders democratic alternation and a government-opposition dynamic in the European Parliament, thereby making the European elections less meaningful.

While national ministers have to win elections with their parties in order to stay in office, commissioners only have to get along with their respective national governments. And if they already know that they will not be nominated again (for example, because their party is now in opposition at national level), they are often happy to leave the Commission team several months before the end of their term of office.

Less trust within the Commission

Third: The Commissioners’ dependence on national governments also damages the relationship of trust between them and the Commission president. Over time, the president’s role has been enhanced: she now has the power to “lay down guidelines within which the Commission is to work” and can force individual commissioners to resign (Art. 17 (6) TEU). However, she still has a very limited say in the selection of her team.

Combined with the party-political heterogeneity and the presence of national interests within the Commission, this can easily lead to acrimony. For example, von der Leyen has repeatedly clashed with both her internal market commissioner Thierry Breton (RE/close to ALDE) and her high representative Josep Borrell (PSC/PES).

Harming diversity and gender balance

And finally, the selection procedure also has a problematic impact on diversity and gender balance within the Commission. There is now a broad political consensus that democratic bodies should not be made up entirely of white men. This problem is often solved through formal or informal quotas: For example, parties take care to ensure a certain gender mix when drawing up electoral lists. This works fairly well when there are several equivalent positions to be filled at the same time, such as seats in a parliament or ministerial posts in a government. It is more difficult when there is only one position, such as head of government or governor of a central bank.

In the EU, the gender balance in intergovernmental bodies such as the European Council (currently 89% men) or the Governing Council of the ECB (currently 92% men) is therefore much worse than in the European Parliament (currently 62% men). Thus, in a Commission where each member state nominates exactly one commissioner, it is much more difficult to reach gender parity than in most national governments, where all or most ministers are chosen by the same instance.

Trying to apply soft pressure

In recent years, gender balance in the EU institutions has become an increasingly contentious issue between national governments and the European Parliament – as in 2012, when the quota of men in the ECB Council reached 100 per cent. And the European Parliament is no longer prepared to simply accept the traditional male bias in the Commission either, especially as at national level the goal of gender parity has long become a common consideration in the formation of governments.

But how can national governments be persuaded to put forward more women? Commission presidents Jean-Claude Juncker (CSV/EPP, 2014) and Ursula von der Leyen (CDU/EPP, 2019 and 2024) tried to apply soft pressure, calling on governments to put forward not just one name but a gender-mixed duo in their “suggestions” under Art. 17 TEU. The president would then be able to choose between the two and thus present a gender-balanced Commission.

In addition, Juncker and von der Leyen made it clear that they would also take gender criteria into account when allocating portfolios and vice-presidencies. Governments that don’t meet the demand for a gender-mixed duo and only propose a single male candidate must expect “their” commissioner to be given a less interesting portfolio and less influence within the Commission.

Thirteen countries ignore von der Leyen

But this approach did not work out as hoped. While in 2014 and 2019 at least some governments complied with the request for a gender-mixed duo proposal, Bulgaria was the only one to do so in 2024. Seven other governments proposed a single female candidate, and five proposed a man who had already served in the outgoing Commission – an exception accepted by von der Leyen herself.

However, thirteen governments (Italy, Poland, Romania, Greece, Czechia, Austria, Denmark, Ireland, Lithuania, Slovenia, Cyprus, Luxembourg, Malta) decided to ignore the Commission president’s request and nominated a single male candidate.

A self-reinforcing momentum

For this, they came up with a number of justifications, some of them so bizarre as to be almost comical. For example, the Maltese prime minister did not nominate a female minister but a less experienced male candidate because he did not want to “disrupt the work of the ministry”. The Irish head of government argued that the candidate he had proposed had already given up his post as national finance minister to prepare for his new job in the Commission and that it would therefore be “unfair” to nominate a woman as well. Several governments claimed that they had already done enough to achieve gender parity, as there had been female commissioners from their country in the past.

Most importantly, the nomination of single male candidates became a self-reinforcing dynamic. The male bias of the new Commission could already be seen in the spring, when the first member states made their proposals. Therefore, the governments that decided on the nominations later knew that, given a choice between two options, von der Leyen would always opt for the female candidate. As a result, some male candidates such as Apóstolos Tzitzikóstas (ND/EPP) from Greece explicitly refused to be part of a gender-mixed duo.

The authority of the Commission president is at stake

And now? Von der Leyen knows that a Commission that is two-thirds male is unlikely to be accepted by the European Parliament. At the same time, her own authority is at stake; after all, the member states ignored an explicit request from her.

On the other hand, there are not enough uninteresting portfolios in the Commission to penalise all thirteen non-incumbent male commissioners with a loss of importance. Moreover, more than half of them belong to von der Leyen’s own party, the EPP, and were nominated by governments whose support she needs to implement her political agenda in the Council.

Instead of bringing the matter before the Council ...

Von der Leyen therefore essentially has two options. One would be to submit the matter to the Council, which after all has the formal right of nomination under Article 17 (7) TEU. Instead of dealing with each member state individually, von der Leyen could have asked the Council as a whole to present a gender-balanced Commission, leaving it to the governments to agree (by qualified majority) which male candidates would be withdrawn and replaced by women.

This approach would have emphasised that the Treaty does not give individual governments a right to choose the commissioner from their country, but only to make “suggestions” to the Council. However, it would also have put von der Leyen at odds with influential governments, which would have come under pressure to defend their male nominees against their counterparts in the Council.

... von der Leyen relies on bilateral renegotiations

Instead, von der Leyen opted for a different strategy, confronting not the Council as a whole but only individual governments whose proposals are perceived to be particularly weak, either because of the candidate’s profile or because of the size or political status of the country. For example, von der Leyen asked the Maltese government to replace its proposed male candidate with a woman. The Romanian government withdrew its male nominee – which it had already announced in public – and nominated a woman instead, saying she would be given a “more relevant” portfolio. Other similar announcements could follow in the coming days.

These bilateral renegotiations could somewhat improve the gender balance of the new Commission. But the approach also has serious drawbacks: First, von der Leyen is shifting the responsibility for a common European challenge – achieving gender parity in a supranational body – onto individual governments that are perceived as weak, while large, influential countries such as Italy and Poland do not have to take account of this when selecting “their” commissioners. Second, there is a risk of creating perverse incentives if, for example, Romania is now favoured over governments that have been cooperative in putting forward female candidates or a gender-mixed duo in the first place.

And the European Parliament?

Meanwhile, the European Parliament is still waiting to see what happens – but the hearings are likely to cause a stir there too. For one thing, even if von der Leyen’s pressure on Malta is successful, the  gender balance of the new Commission would be mediocre at best, with around 40 per cent women. And then there will also be party-political arguments.

Compared to the outgoing Commission, the European People’s Party will gain significant weight and will have about half of the members of the new Commission. The European Socialists, on the other hand, will lose power and will have no more than four commissioners. Moreover, the Socialists are particularly unhappy with the Luxembourg government, which preferred to nominate the largely unknown former MEP Christophe Hansen (CSV/EPP) rather than the outgoing labour commissioner and PES lead candidate, Nicolas Schmit (LSAP/PES).

A rough autumn

So the atmosphere is already somewhat heated. If, in addition, the socialist governments in Romania and Malta replace their male nominees by women, there would only be one man among the four PES commissioners (Dan Jørgensen from Denmark).  The Socialists will therefore predictably demand that the other parties also do more to improve the gender balance. Of these, the EPP currently has eight men and six women, the Liberals two men and two women. The remaining five candidates (one from the Patriots in Hungary, one from the ECR in Italy and three independent candidates from Slovakia, Slovenia and Cyprus) are all male.

The Hungarian Olivér Várhelyi (Fidesz/P) is particularly unlikely to pass the parliamentary hearing, but it could also be close for some EPP candidates. However, if the Socialists block one or more EPP candidates, the EPP is unlikely to just let that pass. As a result, this autumn could be even rougher for the prospective commissioners than 2019, when the Parliament rejected three of the nominees.

There is another way

The bottom line is that the nomination process for the European Commission is not a good one. It is lengthy and cumbersome, encourages governments to prioritise national interests, devalues the European elections, weakens the Commission president, harms diversity, invites posturing and blackmail, and leads to conflict rather than cooperation in the Parliament.

Does it have to be this way? The European Parliament itself has made proposals for a reform in its Article 48 report last year. According to these plans, the Commission president-designate alone would select the members of the Commission, who would then have to be approved as a body by both the Parliament and the European Council. The procedure would be similar to that in Italy, where the government is chosen by the prime minister and then approved in a vote of confidence by both houses of parliament. This “perfect bicameralism” is not an optimal solution either. But it would certainly be an improvement on the European status quo.

Picture: Von der Leyen: Steffen Prößdorf [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons.