Like much public life in the European Union, José Manuel Barroso’s battle to win reappointment as European Commission president is a battle of low politics dressed up in high ideals. Barroso will be denied a second five-year term unless he secures the approval of the European Parliament, where a vote on his future should have taken place in July but was postponed until mid-September. Now the moment of truth is close. What can Barroso say and do to win over his socialist, Green and liberal critics?
One clue came in a speech, almost entirely ignored by the media, that Barroso delivered last week at a Barcelona business school. Here he all but set out his policy programme for the next five years. The speech’s most important passage read as follows: “The recent recovery spots are fragile and do not allow for any complacency. In any case, it is clear that global growth will not return to pre-crisis levels for some time – if at all. Those growth rates – and the economic model behind them – were simply not sustainable.”
Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Barroso’s opponents will not be alone in asking whether the Commission president did not in fact spend much of his first term promoting the very same growth model, based on financial market innovation, deregulation and cheap capital, that he now says was unsustainable. Still, as he points out, “the failure to predict and head off the crisis was a collective failure”, with economists, bankers, regulators, supervisors and politicians all sharing responsibility.
What model should the EU embrace in the future? Barroso lists seven “new sources of growth”: a) open global markets and investment regimes; b) maximising the potential of the EU’s single market; c) building networks such as high-speed broadband and energy interconnections; d) innovation policies, including a new emphasis on government procurement and intellectual property strategy; e) improving employees’ skills so that they can switch from declining industries to new sectors; f) developing a low-carbon economy; and g) improving the quality of public expenditure.
It all sounds sensible enough. A Commission president is not an economic policy tsar for Europe. But he or she can offer a vision, speaking up for the EU’s collective interest when national leaders find it inconvenient to do so. Barroso, in his speech, was consciously selecting policy areas where he knows he could make a difference by stating the case for common European action.
Whether it will be enough to appease his parliamentary critics is another matter.
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