Brussels blog

Is José Manuel Barroso’s reappointment as European Commission president in trouble?  Probably not.  But the jury is still out on whether he will secure formal approval from the European Parliament as early as mid-July.  If he does not, it will be difficult to dispel the clouds of doubt that will linger over his future for two months or more.

Such uncertainty is hardly what the European Union needs at a moment when its banking system faces hundreds of billions of euros in losses this year and next, and when Germany and France, the eurozone’s two biggest economies, appear utterly at odds over when and how to rebalance their public finances.

The EU’s 27 national leaders decided unanimously at a Brussels summit last week to support Barroso’s reappointment.  It was not a legally binding decision.  They could, in theory, change it if there were massive resistance in the European Parliament.

But that’s certainly not Plan A.  Leaders such as Fredrik Reinfeldt of Sweden, which is about to assume the EU’s rotating presidency, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel want the European Parliament to hold a vote next month to confirm Barroso for a second five-year term.

Barroso’s centre-right allies, known as the EPP, are the legislature’s largest political group.  They are happy enough to hold an early vote.  But they control only 264 of the assembly’s 736 seats.  Three other groups – the socialists, centrist liberals and Greens – say they would prefer to delay the Barroso vote until September or October.

Barroso correctly sees that he must win an absolute majority – 369 votes or more – if he is not to suffer serious political injury.  If we assume that he will pick up every single EPP vote, where is he going to get the other 105 votes from?  He knows it would be fatal to turn for backing to the far-right, nationalist and anti-EU fringe elements in the legislature.

Barroso can probably count on three sources of support.  First, there is the new conservative, “anti-federalist” group led by the UK Tories.  It has 55 members (or even, as of Tuesday, 56 – a politician from Lithuania’s Polish minority appears interested in joining).  Secondly, up to half of the 80-strong liberal group in the European Parliament can surely be coaxed into supporting Barroso.  Finally, there are even some socialists – especially in Barroso’s native Portugal as well as Spain and the UK – who are inclined to back him.  All told, that should see Barroso over the 369-vote mark.

But this is not the whole story, because even some of these parliamentarians may object to holding the vote in mid-July.  In the end, this whole saga is less about Barroso’s leadership qualities than it is about the European Parliament’s desire to assert itself as one of the EU’s most powerful institutions.

“Brussels 2009″ doesn’t have quite the ring of 1641 in the English House of Commons, or 1789 in Versailles.  But the situation contains some interesting dramatic potential, that’s for sure.