Democracy takes time: The European Parliament must not rush the hearings of the new Commission

Deutsch

By Manuel Müller

Who will join Ursula von der Leyen in the new EU Commission? Three months after the European election, the Council has still not proposed a list.

The resignation of the French candidate Thierry Breton, staged on the social media service X and accompanied by attacks on Ursula von der Leyen (CDU/EPP), was just the latest spectacular twist in the increasingly protracted search for a new European Commission. Von der Leyen’s election as Commission president in July had gone very smoothly. Since then, however, the timetable has been pushed back further and further. It already seems illusory that the Commission will be able to take office on 1 November as originally planned. But even 1 December will probably only be possible if everything goes very smoothly from now on.

These delays are of course a problem for the EU’s ability to act, not least because only the Commission has the right to initiate new legislation. Politico Europe has already described the timetable as a “fiasco” – and public pressure is building on all those involved to stop playing political games and approve the new Commission as soon as possible.

Governments are at fault for the delays so far

But those who call for haste now ignore the institutional logic of the European timetable. The delays so far have been almost entirely caused by the national governments, many of which – despite the long summer recess – have been unable or unwilling to put forward an acceptable candidate in time. By contrast, the time pressure that is now being exerted is mainly on the European Parliament, which is due to scrutinise the candidates in the coming weeks.

This is a fatal signal: If governments delay their proposals long enough, they can effectively neutralise the Parliament’s rights of scrutiny and co-decision in the process. This cannot be in the interest of European democracy, also with regard to the appointment procedures of future Commissions.

Even the timing of the elections was controversial

In fact, the struggle between the institutions over the timing of this European election year goes back a long way. After the 2009 and 2014 European elections were held at the end of May, the European Parliament, in its 2022 proposal for a reform of the European electoral law, suggested bringing the elections forward to 9 May. This earlier date would have eased the timetable for appointing the Commission, leaving more room after the elections for coalition talks between the parties in the Parliament, for example.

However, the governments in the Council were unable to agree on a date for the elections at all, so they took place in the first week of June (as provided for as a default option in the current direct elections act). The European Council’s formal nomination of von der Leyen then took place on 27 June, just three weeks before the Parliament’s summer recess. The parties thus refrained from negotiating a written coalition agreement and elected von der Leyen as Commission president on 18 July.

Governments prioritise national party logics

As a next step, the procedure in Art. 17 (7) TEU stipulates that the member states make “suggestions” on the basis of which the Council, in agreement with the Commission president-elect, proposes the commissioners. In late July, von der Leyen therefore asked each government to suggest a man and a woman by 30 August so that she could put together a gender-balanced Commission.

This was not a new procedure: in 2014 and 2019, the then Commission presidents had also called for a gender-mixed pair of candidates. However, hardly any government was willing to really go for it. Their priority was not so much the composition of the Commission as a whole, but rather the national party or coalition logic of filling their “own” national commissioner post.

First delays

The first delays in the timetable occurred in two member states that currently only have caretaker governments: Bulgaria, where a cabinet of technocrats has been in office since March 2024 with a mandate limited to organising new national elections, and Belgium, where no new coalition has been formed since the national elections in June. Still, both countries submitted proposals by early September.

More problematic was the fact that the sum of national logics in the nomination of candidates resulted in a massively male-dominated list, with which von der Leyen could not venture before the European Parliament. The Commission president therefore began to exert pressure on various member states, trying to persuade them to nominate a woman by promising them more interesting portfolios. As a result, the Romanian government changed its proposal in early September, while Malta publicly rejected it.

The Slovenian case

But the real sticking point was Slovenia. Its liberal government had originally proposed its candidate for the Commission, Tomaž Vesel (independent), back in April – earlier than anyone else, but obviously also without consulting von der Leyen, who at the time was still in the middle of the European election campaign. When the Commission president pushed for a woman instead, the Slovenian government initially refused. A few days later, however, Vesel himself declared that he no longer wanted to run under these conditions. Shortly after that, the government named Marta Kos (GS/close to ALDE) as a replacement candidate. By now it already was 9 September.

However, under Slovenian law, the European Affairs committee of the national parliament must first hold a consultative vote before the commissioner is formally proposed by the government. This vote was originally scheduled for 13 September, but was then postponed without a date by the committee’s chairman – a member from the opposition SDS party (EPP) – on the official grounds that the committee needed more information on the background to Vesel’s resignation.

In theory, the Council could now explore the legal option of simply adopting the list of commissioners without waiting for a formal proposal from Slovenia. The wording of Art. 17 (7) TEU does not preclude this, nor is there any systematic reason why a single member state should be able to block the appointment procedure (in which the European Council and the Council otherwise always vote by qualified majority) by not submitting a proposal. After all, the Council was also able to propose a Commission in 2019 even though the UK did not propose a member at that time.

The Parliament can only wait

However, neither the Council nor von der Leyen herself seem to want to go down this road, so the European Parliament has little choice but to wait. Having planned to present her team to the European Parliament last week, von der Leyen will now meet the group leaders today, on 17 September. However, given the incomplete list of names, it is still unclear whether she will be able to present an allocation of portfolios.

And as long as MEPs (and the candidates themselves) do not know who has been nominated for which portfolio, they cannot prepare for the hearings that the Parliament will hold before the final election of the Commission. According to the current timetable, the hearings are likely to take place in early November and the election of the Commission at the end of November.

The hearings are essential to the Commission’s legitimacy

The hearings are an essential part of the European Commission’s supranational democratic legitimacy. Each commissioner candidate is questioned for several hours by the committee responsible for his or her portfolio. The committee then votes by a two-thirds majority on whether to give the candidate the green light. If a two-thirds majority is not reached, a second vote is held (if necessary after a further hearing of the candidate), in which a simple majority is sufficient. If the candidate still fails the second vote, the national government must make a new proposal and a new hearing takes place – meaning an additional delay of several weeks. Only when all the candidates have been approved by their respective committees does the actual election of the Commission take place in plenary.

On the one hand, the Parliament uses the hearings to check the professional suitability of the candidates. On the other hand, the hearings also indirectly serve to negotiate (party-)political interests. While at the national level this kind of negotiation usually takes place in the coalition talks before the formation of the government, at the European level it is only here that the elected representatives have the opportunity to influence things like the gender balance and the party-political composition of the Commission or the organisation and distribution of portfolios.

This influence is weaker than that of parties at national level, which is a serious problem for the democratic meaningfulness of European elections. But it does exist, and the more MEPs use their right to have a say, and if necessary to defeat individual candidates, the more visible it will be to European citizens that their vote can make a difference in European elections.

Several candidates facing headwinds

And indeed, this year in particular, there are a number of candidates who are facing political headwinds in Parliament. To name but a few:

• Raffaele Fitto (FdI/ECR) of Italy is, alongside the Hungarian Olivér Várhelyi (Fidesz/P), the only candidate from a far-right party in the new Commission. Nevertheless, according to media reports, von der Leyen has him in mind as one of her vice-presidents. Socialists, Liberals and Greens oppose this.
• Teresa Ribera (PSOE/PES) of Spain is the most prominent Socialist candidate and could become vice-president, with responsibility for climate change, among other things. However, she is seen as a supporter of renewable energy and opposes nuclear power. This displeases some MEPs, especially on the right.
• Olivér Várhelyi (Fidesz/P) from Hungary is the most right-wing of the candidates and did not make himself popular with MEPs during the last parliamentary term. Some observers have suggested that the Hungarian government does not expect the Parliament to confirm him anyway, but is merely using him as a pawn to buy time and increase pressure on MEPs to approve a replacement candidate that will be nominated later.
• Ekaterina Zaharieva (GERB/EPP) from Bulgaria was involved in a citizenship-for-money scandal in 2018. She is therefore criticised by the Liberals (who had hoped for the Bulgarian commissioner post themselves).
• Christophe Hansen (CSV/EPP) from Luxembourg was proposed by his country’s liberal-conservative government, although the European Socialists’ lead candidate, Nicolas Schmit (LSAP/PES), is also from Luxembourg. This has been strongly criticised in the PES – especially as the Socialists are already severely under-represented in the Commission compared to their European election results.
• Glenn Micallef (PL/PES) from Malta was proposed by his government, despite several female candidates with more political experience. Many see him as an embodiment of the gender problem in von der Leyen’s team. Other weak male candidates are, for example, Apóstolos Tzitzikóstas (ND/EPP) from Greece and Kóstas Kadís (independent) from Cyprus.

Coalition debates can create public visibility …

This doesn’t mean that the Parliament will necessarily reject all these candidates. Some parties will oppose some candidates while others will support them. In the end, some groups may compromise and accept each other’s candidates. This is just normal in a coalition government.

But for such a compromise to create democratic legitimacy, it must be transparent to the electorate. The parties should therefore communicate as clearly as possible what they want from the new Commission and what concessions they are prepared to make to other political forces in the Parliament.

Negotiations on the partisan composition and policy orientation of the new Commission are not parliamentary navel-gazing, but can be an important element in the creation of a pan-European political public sphere. Controversies during the hearings are the first opportunity for many European media to report on the candidates and the first opportunity for many citizens to learn about them.

… but they need time

But for this to work, the European parties need time to deal with these controversies without pressure. MEPs must have a real option to reject candidates (and, as in the case of Hungary, possibly also their replacements). If this leads to further delays, the blame should not be put on the Parliament, but on the governments of the member states, some of which took months to propose a single candidate due to their national party and coalition dynamics.

By comparison, the pan-European party and coalition dynamics, which will only be able to unfold in the coming weeks during the hearings in the European Parliament, are far more important for the democratic legitimacy of the European Commission as a whole. The European parties must therefore take their time now – even if this means that the Commission will not take office until the new year.

Picture: European People’s Party [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.