Has Merkel lost her touch?
THE nasty mess over the possible appointment of Jean-Claude Juncker as the next president of the European Commission- wrote economist.com- was all too predictable. An arcane squabble about Brussels jobs has become a moral argument about different visions of democracy and a battle about Britain’s place in Europe. The partisans on either side are pushing Angela Merkel and David Cameron into a fight that neither wants. How did they lose control of the process? Mrs Merkel is, after all, Europe’s master tactician. On this issue, though, she seems to have lost her sure touch.
The origin of the trouble lies in the 2009 Lisbon treaty, which changed the procedure to select the new president of the commission. What makes this constitutional question potentially explosive is the combustible mixture of the European Parliament’s ambition, Britain’s disenchantment, the growth of Euroscepticism across the union and a sense that the European project needs greater democratic legitimacy.
Start with the constitutional question. The president of the commission, the EU’s civil service, has traditionally been chosen by consensus among European leaders, and the decision rubber-stamped by the European Parliament. But the Lisbon Treaty now permits leaders to make the choice by qualified majority, so that no one country can block a candidate alone. Moreover, leaders are required to pick the nominee “taking into account the elections to the European Parliament”. The parliament, in turn, must elect the nominee with an absolute majority of the 751 members, an unusually high threshold.
The change means, firstly, that Mr Cameron cannot veto candidates as his predecessors had done with two Belgian hopefuls—the late Jean-Luc Dehaene and Guy Verhofstadt—deemed to be too federalist. More importantly, the treaty tilted the balance of power towards the European Parliament, which has sought to aggrandise itself further through the expedient of “Spitzenkandidaten”, German for “leading candidates”. Each of the main political umbrella parties picked a candidate for commission president, with the understanding that the Spitzenkandidat of the largest grouping would be the parliament’s nominee to run the commission.
“Who put this in the treaty?” a bemused Mrs Merkel is said to have asked confidants when she realised that the European Parliament was making a power grab. The answer is: she put it in without realising its meaning. It was Mrs Merkel who concocted the Lisbon treaty out of the wreckage of the Constitutional Treaty that had been voted down in referendums in France and the Netherlands in 2005. One of the articles that survived was the modified procedure to choose the commission president.
Like many leaders, Mrs Merkel was reluctant to allow the parliament to dictate terms to elected leaders. Her European political “family”, known as the European People’s Party (EPP), was last to choose its champion. But in March Mrs Merkel caved in and the EPP selected Mr Juncker, the veteran former prime minister of Luxembourg and president of the Eurogroup (the euro zone’s finance ministers). The EPP could not afford to be painted as anti-democratic by its opponents, particularly because the EPP itself had experimented with the notion of Spitzenkandidaten in 2009, when it named José Manuel Barroso for a second term as commission president.
Having decided to play along, Mrs Merkel needed a candidate who could cross swords in German with the Social-Democratic candidate, Martin Schulz, the German president of the European Parliament. Tellingly, Mr Juncker’s campaign manager was Martin Selmayr, a senior German EU official affiliated with Mrs Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union.
Mr Juncker was something of a reluctant candidate. It was an open secret that he preferred the backroom power of president of the European Council (representing leaders) to the detailed administration of the EU’s central bureaucratic machinery. At first he trailed Mr Schulz, the main force behind the campaign for Spitzenkandidaten. But by the time the ballots were counted on May 25th, the EPP had emerged with a small but clear lead over the Mr Schulz’s Socialists & Democrats (S&D).
In a sense, Mr Juncker had almost done too well. Throughout the campaign he rejected all suggestions that he was interested in any other job. Now he expected to be recognised as the winner. Asked about Mr Cameron’s objections, he replied curtly: “I don’t care.” He was not going to give leaders an easy way out of their predicament.
At a dinner of European leaders on May 27th, Mr Cameron made clear his opposition to Mr Juncker as a “man of the past”. Hitherto the bête noire in Downing Street had been Mr Schulz; now Mr Juncker was seen as an unacceptable federalist. In its reconstruction of the post-election battle, Der Spiegel reported how Mrs Merkel had seen the parliament’s move as a “declaration of war”, and recounted that Mr Cameron had given her a private warning that Mr Juncker’s elevation might hasten Britain’s departure from the EU.
The ever-cautious Mrs Merkel gave Mr Juncker only lukewarm support and tried to keep her options open, seeking a grand bargain to satisfy all sides. But when the German press started to denounce her for failing to support the democratic experiment, she quickly reversed course, and declared that she supported Mr Juncker after all. Even Alexis Tsipras, leader of the radical leftist Syriza party in Greece, himself a Spitzenkandidat for the hard left,said Mr Juncker should have the first crack at becoming president of the commission.
The vehemence of the criticism in the German press has been quite unusual. Bild, the main German tabloid, published an op-ed by its publisher, Matthias Döpfner, which described Cameron’s opposition to Juncker as a scandal
This much is certain: Europeans want Juncker as EU president. Schulz got the second-best result. A third, who didn’t stand for election, can’t be allowed to get the job. That would turn democracy into a farce. You may get away with something like that in the GDR [the former East Germany] or in far-right banana republics. But not in the EU. Otherwise it will abolish itself.
And Der Spiegel declared in an editorial that the EU faced an “historic turning point”:
The EU cannot allow itself to be blackmailed by the British for another three years and refuse to give the people of Europe what was assured to them before the election—that they could use their vote to determine the next president of the European Commission. If the EU doesn’t fulfill that promise, it will lose all credibility and acceptance […] Britain is important to be sure. But the choice between a more democratic EU and Britain’s continued membership is clear. Europe must choose democracy.
All this places Mr Cameron in an awkward position. Unwisely, no doubt, he chose publicly to draw a red line over Mr Juncker, instead of playing the ambiguous backroom game, or leaving himself the option of demanding concessions on two other important issues: the job for the next British commissioner (the British want a big economic post) and the political priorities for the new commission. As happened in December 2011 with Mr Cameron’s Pyrrhic veto over the fiscal compact, the British prime minister may again be misreading Mrs Merkel’s margin for manoeuvre. Or perhaps he has put too much store by her private views without understanding the political dynamic that the Spitzenkandidaten process has created.
Many leaders sympathise with Mr Cameron’s view that the European Council will never regain its prerogative if it surrenders it now. But they are are also bemused that Mr Cameron has painted himself into a corner. Since his Bloomberg speech outlining his intention to renegotiate Britain’s membership and call a referendum in 2017, the British brand has become increasingly toxic and few dare ally themselves publicly with Mr Cameron. For now, Mr Cameron does not have the votes to lead a blocking minority.
Having declared his opposition, Mr Cameron would be gravely weakened were Mr Juncker to be appointed. And having accepted the principle of Spitzenkandidaten, Mrs Merkel would come under fierce attack if she were to go back on the promise to give voters a say in who “governs Europe”, even though many had no idea they were making such a choice. Can a head-on collision be avoided?
One of the few Germans trying to restore sanity in the discussion is Jan Techau, the director of Carnegie Europe, a think-tank in Brussels. He argues that the idea that the winning Spitzenkandidat would automatically become commission president is a breach of the treaty that was bound to end badly.
Even so, finding alternatives to the Spitzenkandidaten is not easy. Some (including this paper) hope that Christine Lagarde, the IMF’s respected boss, can be persuaded to take up the commission job. But that would require France’s Socialist president, François Hollande, to nominate someone close to conservatives (Ms Lagarde had served as finance minister under Nicolas Sarkozy). If not, would a free-trading French socialist like Pascal Lamy, the former boss of the World Trade Organisation, be more palatable? The European Parliament might find that even more unacceptable: Mr Lamy was neither a Spitzenkandidat nor even a member of the EPP.
Beyond legal and political issues, the fight over Spitzenkandidaten is really about competing visions of democracy, and what constitutes a “demos”. Is democracy limited to the nation-state, or can there also be a pan-European form? We discussed the issue in a recent Charlemagne column. Gideon Rachman captures the issue well in the FT.
As always, the problem is that the EU is a hybrid, part international organisation and part federation. The tension between the two was apparent in the euro crisis, and it is apparent again over the nomination of the commission president. The danger is that the tension will break the EU, or at least the commission. If the commission becomes more politicised, then it might have to hive off the semi-judicial functions that require it to be impartial, for example when adjudicating competition cases and policing compliance with the single market.
Take the strange cameo appearance in Brussels this week of Olli Rehn, the commissioner for monetary affairs (the Rehn of Terror, as some critics of austerity liked to call him). The Finnish commissioner had taken leave for several weeks to campaign for a seat in the European Parliament and will soon take up his seat. In between, though, he has returned to the commission to hand down judgmenton the national economic and budgetary policies of all governments. He told France and Italy they had to do more to meet budget targets and implement structural reforms, and urged Germany to do more to boost domestic demand.
Something has to give: the commission cannot be both impartial and party-political, Olympian and human. The idea of Spitzenkandidaten is making the problem worse, not better.
source: economist.com , Jun 3rd 2014, 20:25 by Charlemagne | – See more at: http://www.economist.com/blogs/charlemagne/2014/06/battle-european-commission#sthash.v9twbmdz.dpuf
