Before the office of president of
the European Commission can be elected by the European Parliament by a simple
majority, the European Council must nominate a candidate. The nomination is by
qualified majority vote, in that at least 55% of the states must be in favor
and the combined population of the states voting yes must be at least 65% of
the total population of the European Union. Were any state represented in the
Council to have a veto (i.e., unanimity being required), the infeasibility
alone of getting a candidate nominated would be astounding and prohibitive for
the Union and especially its executive branch, the Commission. Just imagine if
every sitting state governor in the U.S. meeting as the Senate (which
represents the states) had to sign off on a candidate for that union’s executive-branch
president before the House of Representatives (which represents citizens) could
elect the candidate by a simple majority! From this comparison, we might wonder
whether the European Council should be tasked with nominating two candidates,
whom the representatives in the Parliament would then vote on in electing the
president of Union’s executive branch. After all, there is more than one
candidate when the U.S. House of Representatives votes (by member state!) to
elect the president if no candidate receives a majority of the votes of the
states’ electoral colleges. Indeed, the E.U. is not the only federal union in
which states have a significant role in electing the head of the (federal)
executive branch. I contend that the members of parliament should have a choice
of more than one candidate when voting for the president of the E.U.’s executive
branch. This is as of June, 2024, when the European Council was busy coming up
with a nominee; being able to present two nominees to the Parliament would have
made the Council’s job easier and the Parliament’s voting more democratic.
With no decision on a nominee at
the Council’s informal dinner on June 17, 2024, a meeting was set for June 27th
to make another attempt, doubtless after ten days of horse-trading in private. With
the European People’s Party having amassed the most seats of any party in the Parliament,
that party was able to continue its coalition agreement with the Renew Europe party
even though it had lost 20 seats compared to 2019. With the Green party and the
Socialist party, the coalition could have 400-plus seats. The right-wing
Identity and Democracy party and the European Conservatives and Reformists
party gained members, though not as many as expected, so the People’s Party did
not have to reach out to those parties in putting together the governing
coalition. Such a coalition was necessary because the EPP did not get a
majority of the 720 seats. To be sure, political groups at the state level in
some states, such as Le Pen’s group in France and the Alt group in Germany
could feed into the right-wing parties in the Parliament and affect how they
relate, and those parties in turn had the option of combining into one larger
party to act as a united opposition to the grand coalition. However, the ID
party’s efforts had not borne fruit as of the Council’s informal dinner.[1]
Rather than get consumed by the various
mechanizations of the state-level groups, a matter of more importance on the
federal level is that of how much of a say the federal-level parties represented
in (and recognized by) the European Parliament that were not in the majority
coalition should have in the nominating process.
At the informal dinner, a “raft
of bilateral and trilateral meetings between the three main parties—the European
People’s Party (EPP), the Socialists and the Liberals—helped bridge the gaps
but became bogged down by the EPP’s maximalist demands.”[2]
Those likely included the demand to split the term of the Council’s president
to have an EPP person in for 2.5 years even as Von der Leyen, who wanted a
second term as president of the Commission and was in the EPP, was likely to be
nominated. That the parties on the right were left out of the discussions even
though they had gained seats in the Parliament was not lost on Viktor Orbán of
the E.U. state of Hungary, who said, “The will of the European people was
ignored today in Brussels,” at the end of the meeting.[3]
Those parties would have been justified in objecting to the “custom” whereby
the candidate from the party of the most seats, the EPP in 2024, is supposed to
be automatically “rubber-stamped” by the Council as its nominee; at least as of
2024, the Council had a free hand constitutionally (i.e., in terms of the E.U.’s
basic law) in picking a nominee, as the Council is independent of the
Parliament. On a basic level, the Council represents the states while the Parliament
represents E.U. citizens (and residents). That the largest party in the
Parliament should have its candidate automatically nominated by the Council
also runs up against the separation between the legislative-branch Parliament
and the executive-branch Commission.
Were the Council tasked with
presenting at least two nominees to the Parliament, the nominating process
would obviate (or eviscerate) the custom of rubber-stamping the wishes of the
largest party in the Parliament. The E.U. parties on the right that were not
included in the EPP’s majority-coalition could perhaps have seen a candidate
representing the right compete with the other nominee at the election stage at
the Parliament. Should the Council come up with more than two nominees in the
future, then the Parliament could simply include a process of elimination
feature in its voting process. Rather than risk the Parliament rejecting a sole
nominee from the Council, which would bring the process back to the Council, and
so further delay the selection, the Commission would not have to face the
possibility of being without a head for so long. In the midst of the Russian
military menace on the eastern flank of the E.U. in 2024, elongating the
nominating and electing process would not be in the interest of the European
Union.
As it stood in 2024, the nomination of just one candidate followed by a vote in the legislative lower house was more like the nomination by the U.S. president of one person to be a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and the subsequent majority vote by the U.S. Senate than the way the U.S. House of Representatives elects the President if no candidate has received a majority of the combined electors of the states’ electoral colleges. I contend that the selection of the head of the E.U.’s executive branch should not be like that of a U.S. justice, for unlike the latter, the former is not supposed to be immune from politics. This is not to say that the dominant coalition of the Parliament, or the largest party, should have political control the President of the Commission. Rather, it is to say that democratic competition at the election stage of that president is fitting (whereas it wouldn’t be for selecting a justice). Comparing the E.U. and U.S. can thus be seen as a beneficial project for both unions as each seeks to be better as systems of public governance.
2. Ibid.
