The new European Commission: a very personal take
After the forthcoming hearings at the European Parliament, the Commission von der Leyen 2 will take office, barring accidents, at the beginning of December. What to think of the new College and its agenda? I offer here my personal remarks, articulated in four points: 1) the role of the Commission President, 2) who to watch amongst the new Commissioners, 3) the Commission agenda, and 4) the approach to enlargement of the EU.
- Hyper presidentialism
As pointed out in press comments, Ursula von der Leyen has redefined her role of Commission President in radical fashion. One can describe it as Reine Soleil. The ‘presidential’ nature of the role of the President, from the original primus inter pares, is not new. It emerged with the presidency of José Manuel Barroso after the 2004-06 Eastern enlargement that brought the number of Commissioners to 28 (27 after Brexit). A centralisation of the running of the Commission proved necessary to avoid the “curse of the large numbers” and was embodied by a very powerful role of the Head of Cabinet of the President that directed the Commission with a firm hand. Martin Selmayr, Head of cabinet of President Juncker, famously quipped: “you cannot run the Commission as a Montessori school.” However, the degree of centralisation has been brought to a new level in the formation of the College 2024-29.
The complexity of the reporting lines between Commissioners and Executive Vice Presidents imply that the policy decisions will end up on the table of the President not only ‘in fine’, but also in the phase of planning and elaboration. In the light of this, one can expect that the coordinating role of the Executive Vice Presidents (enlarged from three in the previous college to six) would be quite bland – this also in consideration of the statement in the mission letters that “all Commissioners are equal”, so no hierarchical relations can be established between Executive Vice Presidents and ‘normal’ Commissioners.
The power of Ursula von der Leyen was displayed vividly in the replacement of the French Commissioner, Thierry Breton, in the days before the announcement of the compositions of the new College. In his resignation letter, Breton indicated that the Commission President had asked President Macron to appoint a new Commissioner against the promise of a more powerful portfolio. The French complied by appointing Stéphane Séjourné, a close collaborator of President Macron and former French Foreign Affairs Minister. However, he ended up with a much reduced portfolio compared to that of Thierry Breton during the 2019-24 Commission. For Brussels insiders, the power of Commissioners is measured by the number and the quality of Directorate Generals (DGs) reporting directly to them: Breton controlled three DGs (Internal Market, Defence, Digital), compared to only one (Internal Market) for Séjourné.
In the current desert of political leadership in the EU, a strong role of the Commission President is a good thing. We can now respond to the question attributed to Heny Kissinger on what the telephone number of Europe is: it is the one of Ursula von der Leyen. Such powerful and visible role is not however a guarantee that the EU’s agenda will have a better chance to be delivered.
The reason lies with the weakness of national political leaders. Always in the past, important steps forward have been accomplished when leading countries were run by strong pro-European leaders with a “low political discount rate”: Helmut Kohl and Francois Mitterrand that worked with Jacques Delors to launch the Single Market and the euro in the 1980s, and, closer to us, Emmanuel Macron (during his first term) and Angela Merket who joined forces with Ursula von der Leyen in setting up Next Generation EU as the response to Covid. Invariably, instead, when national leaders have been bogged down by short term domestic concerns, the latter have taken prevalence over the common European goals and stagnation ensued. One can doubt of whether Next Generation EU could have been pushed through with Olaf Scholz and Emmanuel Macron, given their current political weakness.
In the present political environment in Europe, a strategic alliance between the President of the Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and the new President of the European Council, António Costa, may be the only chance of mustering the political support for a strong pro-European agenda à la Draghi. Unlike his predecessor, Costa is a formidable political operator, ready to be an engine of consensus between EU leaders. A strong bond between the two Presidents would also reduce the risk that the EU reverts fully to a neo-mercantilist agenda after next year’s German elections. The experience of the fraught relationship between the Commission President and the European Council President in the past five years, is there to show that the two sides of Rue de la Loi have all to lose – domestically and abroad – from a battle of (institutional) egos.
- Who will surprise us?
Unlike the first von der Leyen college who sported strong and well known personalities – suffice referring to Margrete Vestager, Frans Timmermans, Paolo Gentiloni, Josep Borrell, Thierry Breton – the new college does not include household names. Nonetheless, the following characters are worth watching closely:
The new “competition tzar”: Teresa Ribera, the first Executive Vice President in charge of the green transition and competition policy: her eclectic portfolio is typically “high risks, high returns”. Keeping the green transition top of the agenda whist combining it with an innovative approach to industrial policy will fall on Ribera’s shoulders, more than Séjourné’s. A danger here may be the temptation to achieve these objectives by lowering the bar on national state aids that would undermine the functioning of the Single Market (here the mission letter to Ribera may raise some legitimate concerns).
The “Baltics powerhouse”: Kaja Kallas (Estonia) as High Representative for foreign policy, Andrius Kubilius (Lithuania) as defence Commissioner and Valdis Dombrovskis (Latvia) as Commissioner in charge of the implementation of the new fiscal rules will exert a strong influence on tackling the security-economy nexus that will represent the key policy challenge in the next five years. Whilst applying ‘national lenses’ to judge the distribution of portfolios may not give the correct perspective, it is heartening to see that the Commissioners appointed by the three Baltic countries (totalling a population of just over 6 million inhabitants), which were hit hard by the global financial crisis 15 years ago and are feeling disproportionally the threat of Putin’s aggressiveness, are given such high responsibilities in the new College.
The “digital wizard”: to complete the strong role of the Nordic Commissioners, it is worth looking at Henna Virkunen, the Finnish Executive Vice President in charge of the digital transition. Observers will closely observe her first moves to detect how much (dis)continuity there will be compared to the strong (and controversial) regulatory approach by Commissioner Breton – including his muscular posture vis à vis Elon Musk’s activities that attracted the reprimands of the President last summer.
The “budget saviour”: a powerful role in the next college will be played by Piotr Serafin, the Polish Commissioner. A consummate and highly skilled insider (including as Head of Cabinet of Donald Tusk during his spell as EU Council President), he will report directly to President. The preparation of the new multiannual budget post 2028 will be his main strategic task. Whether the new EU budget will be fundamentally reoriented t o align it to the new EU priorities- as hoped for by many pro EU forces – will require Serafin to shed the typical Polish preferences for intergovernmental solutions and embrace the Community approach. Key in his mandate is also the alignment between the Commission bureaucratic structure and the new EU priorities – a task where all the past Commission rulers have failed. Executive Vice President Fitto, who is required to work with Serafin on the design of the future cohesion policy, will be well advised to establish early on a strong relationship with him.
“Nixon going to China”: a number of Commissioners will have to overcome their national red lines to succeed in delivering on their assignments. This is the case of Wopke Hoekstra, the Dutch Commissioner for the green transition, who will be in charge of taxation; Manfred Brunner, the Austrian Commissioner, who has been given the responsibility for migration; Olivér Várhelyi, the Hungarian Commissioner for health (recall the affaire of the purchase of Russian anti-Covid vaccines by Hungary). The maturity, independence and courage of these Commissioners will determine whether they will succeed in their endeavour. This will start by convincing their country of origin to take a different turn compared to their entrenched national positions.
- Draghi à la carte?
Enrico Letta, in presenting his report on the Single Market last April, said that his bigger enemy was be ‘the drawer’ where the report would be locked, together with many others, and quickly forgotten. Given the high visibility, the depth of the analysis and the concreteness of the proposals, the drawer is not the enemy of Draghi’s report on EU competitiveness published on 9 September. A more subtle, but not less corrosive danger is that the new Commission would pay lip service to the report and then pick and choose what is politically and institutionally easier to push through.
In reality, as has been noted, probably the most innovative element of Draghi’s report is its internal consistency: by bringing together stringent analysis and regulatory, budgetary and governance remedies, it nails down the strategic challenges that the EU needs to face to avoid a long agony. The report does not represent a blueprint for action ‘à prendre ou à laisser’. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to undo its unity of purpose and internal coherence for the sake of short-term political expediency: regulation, financial resources and governance have to be kept together. In the past, the Commission has often tried to compensate for the lack of financial resources by a doubling down on regulation: Draghi has shown the limitations of such an approach. Going back to European history, the report by Draghi cannot be looked at as the 1985 Delors-Cockfield White paper that set the agenda on completing the Single Market by 1992. However, it should neither suffer a fate of the Delors’ swan song, the White paper on growth, competitiveness and employment of 1994, which was hailed as a farsighted plan but proved politically out of reach.
Two early tests will allow to assess the seriousness of the President’s goal of making the new one an ‘investment Commission’ in the spirit of Draghi.
First, the implementation of the new fiscal rules that will come to fruition before the end of the year with the presentation, assessment and adoption of the national fiscal-structural plans, the recommendations to correct the excessive deficits, and the opinion on next year’s national budget laws. The Commission will need to take seriously the clause that allows to lengthen the adjustment period from four to seven years in exchange for reforms addressing the country’s structural problems and the EU priorities. Second, by end-June 2025, the Commissioner will need to come forward with its initial proposals on the EU multi-year budget for the next planning period post-2028. These two separate initiatives will provide a reliable indication of whether the new Commission will intend to pursue ‘vertical’ fiscal coordination between the national and the EU level that is essential to come to grips with the root causes of the current EU economic predicament so well laid out by Mario Draghi in his report.
- Enlargement, a political imperative, but…
President von der Leyen could not have been clearer in her mission letter to the Commissioner for the enlargement, Marta Kos: whilst confirming the so-called merit-based approach (according to which each candidate country will be judged based on its own progress in fulfilling the requirements of the acquis communautaire), enlargement is defined as a “geostrategic, economic and moral imperative” to heal the historical divisions of the Continent and respond to Putin’s aggression against Ukraine. In no previous mission letters, enlargement has been characterised in such stark manner.
What worries, however, is the absence of an equally strong commitment to change the decision-making rules (including the extension of majority voting) in advance of or at least in parallel with the enlargement. This was a key call of the Manifesto for the EU of October 2023 and Open Letter of European think tanks of last July. Without such reforms, any relevant decision would be postponed until a major crisis hits the EU. That would heighten the risk of a slow agony highlighted in Draghi’s report.
To apprehend such a risk, it is useful to go back to the experience of the big Eastern enlargement of 2004-06. That process was predicated on three underlying assumptions: a) a rapid economic catching up of the new Members states; b) a convergence of political preferences between East and West arising from economic and institutional integration; c) the existence of high political capital for the EU that would allow to absorb the unpopularity of that decision in the public opinion. Only assumption a) turned out to be correct. Assumption b) failed spectacularly. Finally, on assumption c), given the current grim state of the EU, one may be tempted to proceed with enlargement via the backdoor, without a full democratic debate. That would be a mistake.
In short, EU enlargement in the next years is indeed an historical imperative, as was the one of the mid-2000s after the fall of the Berlin wall. However, it should go hand in hand with the inevitable institutional changes – coupling widening and deepening – to avoid that it results an UN-type drift of the EU. Here again, a strategic alignment with the European Council President will be key.
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In 2014, President Juncker defined his Commission as that of the “last chance”. In reality, European institutions have always a further chance. Sometimes, they seize it (the response to Covid generated NGEU), often they do not. Today’s extraordinarily difficult political circumstances require enormous courage on the part of the Commission President and her college. Gradualism may be an ex post outcome; it cannot be an ex ante strategy. Draghi’s report has offered President von der Leyen the ‘esprit de géometrie’. She will have to put in the ‘esprit de finesse’.
This article is based on the author’s remarks at a recent Aspen roundtable on the future of Europe.
