The member-states and the EU: Taking back control? by Agata Gostyńska-Jakubowska
In early February, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson rehashed old British fears that the EU aims to “create an overarching European state”, citing this as one of the reasons that the British people (rightly in his view) voted to leave the EU. But ten days after his speech, on February 23rd, a meeting of European leaders demonstrated that in reality the political winds in Europe are blowing in a different direction. The topic of the meeting was the future of the EU after 2019 – an important year, in which EU voters will elect a new European Parliament, and the presidents of the European Council and the Commission will pass the baton to their successors. EU leaders showed that they were ready to oppose any further shift of power from the member-states to the Commission and the Parliament. Those who favoured a United States of Europe could go whistle.
Photo: © European Union, 2018
First, EU leaders took back control of the procedure to appoint the next Commission president. In 2014, the European Parliament managed to impose a procedure of its own devising: the leading candidate (Spitzenkandidat) of the party that won the largest number of seats in the European Parliament automatically became the Commission’s next president. That is why Jean-Claude Juncker – the Spitzenkandidat of the European People’s Party (EPP) – is Commission president. But this year, national leaders decided that the Spitzenkandidaten process would not define their choice. Instead
they would follow the wording of the EU treaties to the letter. The treaties only oblige the European Council to take account of the result of the European elections when proposing their candidate for Commission president to the European Parliament. The European Parliament then votes on this candidate. The Commission and the Parliament continue to argue for a rerun of the Spitzenkandidaten experiment, on the grounds that it will increase public interest in EU affairs. In the view of the EU institutions, it makes dull, low-turnout elections more interesting. Lead candidates promote their parties’ political objectives on visits to European capitals, and compete with each other in televised debates. But EU leaders are not buying this. In 2014, only 5 per cent of voters indicated that they went to the polls in order to influence the choice of Commission president, and the decades-long drop in voter turnout continued unabated. Many member-states think that the Spitzenkandidaten system is designed mainly to strengthen the alliance between the Commission