José Manuel Barroso’s campaign for a second term as European Commission president is coming along nicely. Last week he secured a public endorsement for the first time from Gordon Brown, the UK premier.
Of course, it’s hardly a campaign in the normal democratic sense. European voters aren’t directly involved. The vast majority probably has no idea what’s going on. The selection of the Commission president, one of Europe’s most powerful jobs, rests with the 27 leaders of the European Union’s member-states.
This is an electorate so small that it rivals those obscure English university clubs whose members are said to launch ritual attacks on foxes with champagne bottles. Even the body that chooses the pope, which is drawn from the Roman Catholic Church’s College of Cardinals, is at present more than four times bigger, with almost 120 cardinals aged under 80 and eligible to vote.
Still, this is the way Europe operates, it’s written into the EU’s rules, and very few leaders seem inclined to change it. You can’t blame Barroso for working the system as he finds it.
And there can be no doubt that he is working it very cleverly. Brown likes Barroso not only for his liberal economic instincts, but because he thinks the centre-right former Portuguese prime minister would strike up a good relationship with President Barack Obama – an important consideration for Europe in the early months of the new US administration.
With Brown in the bag, you may ask, how can Barroso fail to get a second five-year term? For Barroso already has the public backing of centre-right heavyweights such as France’s Nicolas Sarkozy and Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi. Other centre-right leaders such as Germany’s Angela Merkel and Jean-Claude Juncker, Luxembourg’s long-serving prime minister, have also signalled their support, as has Hans-Gert Pöttering, president of the European Parliament.
On the left, meanwhile, Portugal’s José Sócrates and Spain’s José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero are behind Barroso. So, too, is Matti Vanhanen, Finland’s centrist prime minister.
Doubtless this explains why Martin Schultz, the German leader of the European Parliament’s socialist group, says of Barroso: “In terms of his politics, he is a very vague person. One day he is left-wing, the other he is liberal, the next he is conservative. We want a socialist at the head of the Commission, but unfortunately it is the European Council [of national leaders] that nominates.”
But perhaps European public opinion may exert some influence on the process, after all. The European Parliament is up for re-election in June, and if centre-left and liberal parties across Europe were to inflict a heavy defeat on the centre-right – at present, the largest group in the legislature – then it is conceivable that pressure would grow to replace Barroso with a nominee from the political family that had triumphed at the polls.
After all, the man or woman picked by EU national leaders as Commission president must still win approval from the European Parliament in a vote of confidence. And EU leaders are anxious to settle the matter of who should run the Commission as quickly as possible – in other words, at a summit scheduled for June 18-19. If the left had just scored a big election victory, the legislature might not be in the mood to offer a tame endorsement of Barroso’s re-nomination.
Knowing how the EU works, however, one can imagine a more likely scenario: a compromise under which Barroso is re-appointed, but he agrees, when putting together his new Commission, to give it a political balance that reflects the European Parliament election results.
It’s not exactly democracy as practised in the recent US presidential election campaign, primaries and all. But it’s very, very European.
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