Transforming representative democracy in the EU? The role of the European Parliament

Abstract

Parliaments are not generally conceived of as leaders. However, the European Parliament (EP) has played a pivotal leadership role in transforming the character of representative democracy at EU level. For much of its history the EP argued for a representative system based on competition between institutions operating on the principle of a separation of powers. However, following the Lisbon Treaty and the 2014 European elections, a rather different paradigm has grown in prominence, namely an embryonic form of parliamentary government where executive power is channelled through the elected representatives of the people. The Parliament has thereby been at the centre of a transformative development in the structures of representation of the EU. The precise consequences of this change remain uncertain but it is likely to prove difficult to reverse the 2014 institutional revolution, with its profound implications for the debate about the character of representative government at EU level.

Keywords:

• European Parliament
• representative democracy
• separation of powers
• parliamentary government

Introduction

Parliaments are not structured to be leaders. They lack the financial and bureaucratic resources necessary to guide and manage the direction of policy in the way that executive bodies can. Their role as supervisors of governments ill suits them to assume the functions of those they seek to control and their participation in the making of legislation is shaped by party competition and, normally in the European Union (EU), by the composition of the government. They do not have followers that they can persuade to take their lead: voters are drawn to parties, not parliaments. In short, political leadership can be displayed in parliaments but is not constituted by them as institutions.

The European Parliament is (EP) no exception to these general rules. Its bureaucracy, compared to the Commission, is relatively small and its budget is devoted to administrative, not operating expenditure. It acts to control the various executive bodies of the European Union, without claiming to want to take their place, and its legislative role, though substantially enhanced over the last 30 years, continues to be shared with the Council of the EU and is heavily conditioned by bargaining between the main political groups, with no single group enjoying a dominant role. It does not have followers (except on Facebook), with voters in European elections more strongly influenced by the desire to express a view about national concerns than about what kind of institution the Parliament should be. The European Parliament has certainly become a more significant actor in EU politics over the last thirty years but it does not ‘appear even in the peripheral vision of most commentators when they scan the horizons of leadership in the EU’ (Judge and Earnshaw 2008, 245).

However, the position of the European Parliament is not the same as that of national parliaments. The latter exist within national systems of governance where the locus of executive leadership is well-established and accepted as legitimate, even if specific office holders and the policies they espouse may be heavily contested. In the European Union, it is much more difficult to establish who leads, still less agree as to who should lead. There is a constant jostling between institutions with all defending their prerogatives and none ready to acknowledge the leadership claims of others. In such an environment of inter-institutional competition, the European Parliament has proved remarkably successful in influencing the nature of individual policies as well as in co-shaping the agenda of system development (Judge and Earnshaw 2008; Corbett et al. 2016; see for a discussion of agenda-setting in the Commission Müller 2017). Does this influence justify calling the Parliament a leader in EU affairs?

This contribution will suggest that the Parliament has always played and continues to play a pivotal leadership role in the determination of the character of representative democracy at the EU level. At first sight, such a claim may seem exaggerated. After all, the Lisbon Treaty does not give a preeminent position to the Parliament as a representative body. The ‘Provisions on Democratic Principles’ in the Treaty on European Union do specify that ‘the functioning of the Union shall be founded on representative democracy’ (TEU Article 10) but the subsequent paragraphs place the European Parliament alongside the national standard bearers of democracy, the elected members of the Council and national parliaments, as well as the European Citizens’ Initiative, the last of these a form of direct rather than representative democracy. The European Parliament is not the privileged interlocutor between electors and governments that national parliaments are.

However, the Parliament has been able to shape the debate about representation at EU level. Over several decades we have witnessed ‘the gradual institutionalisation of representative democracy as a constitutional principle of the EU’ (Rittberger 2012, 18). There has been a recognition that the EU is not like any other international organisation and that its decisions require a different kind of legitimation. The member states have essentially divided into two groups, those who felt that such legitimation required a strengthening of the role of the European Parliament and those who looked to a reinforcement of the role of national parliaments as a way of democratising the system. The Parliament has been an active player in this argument and enjoyed remarkable success in persuading the member states to reinforce its role, particularly in the legislative arena with the development of the codecision procedure, now known as the Ordinary Legislative Procedure.

This gradual empowerment of the institution has been the subject of a considerable literature but less attention has been paid to the kind of representative system that was being created by the successive Treaty changes reinforcing the Parliament’s role. The argument here is that throughout much of its history, the Parliament has envisaged a system based on competition between institutions operating on the principle of a separation of powers. It sought to establish an identity for itself that was separate from that of the executive bodies of the EU, including the Commission, and that enabled it to aspire to parity with the Council. This process culminated in the Treaty changes that were introduced by the Lisbon Treaty. However, the Lisbon Treaty also paved the way for the development of a rather different paradigm, namely, the prospect of a form of parliamentary government where executive power is channelled through the elected representatives of the people. This approach was most visible in the dramatic events of May/June 2014, when Jean-Claude Juncker was elected President of the Commission, after the European Council voted by 26 votes to 2 (with Prime Ministers Cameron and Orban in opposition) to propose him as its candidate.

Both sets of ideas or paradigms have marked the development of the EU but the balance between them has been shifted by the events surrounding the 2014 European elections and the actions of the newly-elected Parliament that followed. As a result, the Parliament has been at the centre of a transformative development in the structures of representation of the EU. It has been the leader in challenging the way in which representative democracy is conceived and has obliged those who disagree to justify an alternative. In this sense the contribution suggests that the Parliament has displayed ‘transforming’, rather than ‘transactional’ leadership as presented by Burns and discussed in Tömmel and Verdun 2017.

The implications of the innovation wrought by the EP remain uncertain. The contribution does not seek to predict the future direction of change and does not suggest that we can expect the creation of parliamentary government at EU level. As indicated in the contribution, there are plenty of obstacles to establishing such a government, not least the existence of several sources of executive action. However, it has brought about a change in the way in which the Commission President is elected which will be difficult to reverse and which will necessarily have an impact on what is considered the normal form of executive selection in the EU. The shape of representative democracy at European level is not fixed but a source of ongoing argument and it is the Parliament that has led the way in that argument, as no other institution wished or was able to do.

The paper is divided into three sections: the first recalls that the process by which the Parliament acquired powers in the budgetary and legislative arena established a trajectory which favoured the development of a separate, autonomous legislature; the second contrasts that past trajectory with the 2014 institutional revolution and shows how the remarkable reinforcement of the ties between the European Parliament and the Commission has created an embryonic form of parliamentary government; and the third considers the potential consequences of this revolution for the future of the idea of representative democracy in the EU.

Developing a separate representative institution

Throughout its history, the Parliament has been at the epicentre of a debate about the extent to which representative government subject to parliamentary control and direction can be replicated beyond the nation state. The original decision to have a parliament at European level came with a price. It put pressure on governments, whether they liked it or not, to consider whether and to what degree the doctrine of no taxation without representation obliges them to give a budgetary role to the EP; it forced them to address the principle that the people should take part in the exercise of legislative power through the intermediary of a representative parliament; and it put on the agenda the issue of the extent to which the choice of the Commission, and in particular its President, should be determined by the Parliament.

The position of the Parliament has been remarkably consistent throughout its history, before as well as after direct elections. Five years after the entry into force of the Treaty of Rome, the Furler report (European Parliament 1963) argued that the Parliament should be responsible for the final adoption of the budget, have the power to ratify all international agreements, exercise a right of approval or consent over all legislation and be able to choose the Commission President from a list of names submitted by national governments. In other words, in seeking to establish its credentials as a representative democratic organisation, the Parliament wanted to play a role in the three classical areas occupied by parliaments: lawmaking, controlling the budget and appointing and supervising the executive. Having created a parliament, governments found it impossible to deny the institution a role in these three arenas, however much some of them might prefer an intergovernmental approach with representation guaranteed by ministerial accountability to national parliaments.

However, the argument about the classical powers of a parliament only reveals part of the story. It leaves open the way in which potential prerogatives should be linked together to create a representative system of government at European level. Such a system could take two distinct forms:

The first would involve creating a parliamentary system with a fusion of executive and legislative power, with both deriving their authority from the same set of elections and the executive resigning in the event of its losing majority support in the legislature … The second supposes a clear separation of powers with holders of executive power elected separately from the legislature and not forming part of the legislative body. (Shackleton 2005, 128)

The former option looks much more like the kind of parliamentary system that Europeans are familiar with, whereas the latter corresponds more closely with the federal arrangements that exist in the United States.

The Parliament has consistently sought to develop its role in both directions: it has wanted to be seen as separate from the executive, with its own identity in legislative and budgetary affairs, but it has also wished to have a role in controlling the executive, through appointments and scrutiny. However, its choices have been constrained by the way in which the EU has developed and, as a result, it is the idea of a separation of powers that has dominated the way the EP has evolved.

The reason why the Parliament has evolved towards becoming a separate representative institution is primarily due to early decisions taken by the governments of the member states themselves in the 1960s and 1980s. The Parliament acquired new powers within the context of interstate bargains about new competences to be exercised at Community level. In other words, it was policy integration that provided the occasion for a review of the distribution of powers between the institutions. During the 1960s it was the movement towards the creation of own resources and the consolidation of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) that were the drivers of the budgetary treaties of 1970 and 1975. In the 1980s, it was the agreement to establish the Single European Market via the Single European Act (SEA) and the acceptance of the need to expand Qualified Majority Voting (QMV) that opened the way to giving the Parliament a role beyond consultation, via the cooperation procedure.

In both cases governments recognised that increased policy integration was creating what Rittberger (2005) has called a ‘legitimacy deficit’. They saw that what they were proposing to do removed powers from national parliaments and were obliged to consider how best to remedy that loss. The lack of obvious alternatives to empowering the Parliament, combined with the pressure of national parliamentarians, many of them themselves MEPs at that time, contributed to the acceptance of the principle of such empowerment. This constituted a vital step in acknowledging that representation in the EU could not depend on national mechanisms alone.

To accept a principle was not the same as agreeing on how far that principle should be applied. The level of enthusiasm of different governments to expand the prerogatives of an institution that they could not control was very variable. In the negotiations leading up to the adoption of the budget treaty of 1970, the French delegation made it clear that it had a very precise mandate, namely to make the powers given to the Parliament ‘as circumscribed and limited as possible’ (Council of the European Communities 1970). Similarly, in the 1980s the British government was adamant that the creation of the cooperation procedure did ‘not involve the transfer of democratic power from any national Parliament to the European Parliament’ (Geoffrey Howe quoted in Rittberger 2005, 160).

The readiness of the two governments to accept limited expansion of the Parliament’s powers was linked to their desire to achieve other objectives. Hence in the case of the budget treaty of 1970, the French government wanted to ensure that the CAP would be properly financed at EU level and in return could accept a circumscribed right for the EP to have a say on the Community budget. In the 1980s the UK was prepared to countenance giving the EP a legislative role because it wanted to obtain a commitment to the SEA and was willing to envisage the wider use of QMV on the grounds of efficiency.

In both cases, the concern was not to tighten the relationship between the executive and the legislature, but to give the Parliament limited space in new procedures that governments and the Commission would essentially continue to control. The Commission would still have the right to initiate budgetary and legislative procedures and would influence the legislative procedure by determining the majority requirements in the Council to adopt amendments; governments would maintain the right to have the final say in both procedures in most circumstances. As a result, the Parliament was being invited to play a manifestly subordinate role but one where it could see that further Treaty changes offered the opportunity to broaden the scope of its influence. In particular, it could envisage the potential for parity with the Council. Governments had ceded the principle of a parliamentary role and had thereby sown the seeds of a movement to challenge the position of the Council. It was this challenge that dominated the Parliament’s attention in subsequent decades and led ultimately to the provisions of the Lisbon Treaty.

The predominance of the narrative to create a separate representative institution did not mean that the Parliament lost sight of the objective of influencing the shape of the executive. The right to dismiss the Commission by a vote of censure, granted already in the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) Treaty, was complemented in the Maastricht and Amsterdam Treaties by the right to approve the Commission as a whole and the right to approve the Commission President. The Parliament also introduced the use of hearings for prospective Commissioners and devoted considerable energy to obtaining commitments from the Commission on its future legislative action. In 1999 it was able to force the Santer Commission to resign; in 2004 it succeeded in obliging Barroso, the Commission President, to change the shape of his proposed Commission when it became clear that he would not otherwise gain a vote of approval; and it has secured modifications to the composition of both of the subsequent Commissions appointed in 2009 and 2014 (on Commission leadership see Ross and Jenson 2017, Müller 2017 and Cini and Šuplata 2017).

However, all of this activity was far from creating some kind of parliamentary government. As Simon Hix has pointed out, the right of censure is ‘more similar to the power of the US Congress to impeach the US President than to the power of a parliamentary majority to withdraw the support of the government’ (quoted in Shackleton 2005, 129). Thus the resignation of the Santer Commission in 1999 arose not because of differences of policy but rather because of allegations of incompetence. Similarly, the Buttiglione affair in 2004 was much less a party political matter than a judgement on the suitability of the candidate for a particular portfolio. And the hearings of prospective Commissioners proved highly successful in judging the technical capacities of candidates but have witnessed extreme reluctance to make party political judgements. More generally, the Parliament has traditionally restrained any desire to control the Commission because it has wanted to keep the institution on its side as an ally in the wider power struggle with the Council. The two institutions defended their prerogatives jealously, whilst considering themselves to be in important respects objective allies.

Hence the development of control of executive appointment fell far short of any kind of parliamentary government. It confirmed the broader limitations imposed by an institutional architecture where there is a multiplicity of sources of executive power and where there are horizontal relations of mutual control between competing institutions, rather than hierarchical relations of command. In such a system did it even make sense to talk of parliamentary government in the form that is familiar from national experience in Europe? Was the acquisition of a position of parity¹ in a bicameral structure not sufficient for the institution?

In fact, the idea of some kind of parliamentary government never disappeared. In the Constitutional Convention in 2002 and 2003 there was considerable discussion of linking the nomination of the Commission President to the outcome of the European elections. The result was the compromise, taken over in Article 17(7) of the Lisbon Treaty on European Union, which states that the European Council shall propose a candidate for Commission President, ‘taking into account the elections to the European Parliament and after having held the appropriate consultations’, a phrase expanded in Declaration 11.² It was this phrase and the use of the word ‘elects’ to describe the EP vote on the President that were to open up a challenge to the dominant paradigm and to create the conditions for a very different set of relations to develop between the Commission and the Parliament.

Creating a parliamentary government

The impact of Article 17(7) was quite different from all the Treaty changes that had reinforced the position of the Parliament since the 1960s. Above all, it was not solely about the Parliament, but rather concerned the relationship between European elections, the Parliament and the Commission. The role of the elections was effectively widened from that of simply choosing MEPs to determining the candidate who would seek to win the support of the Parliament to become the next President of the Commission. In other words, for the first time, a link was established at European level between an election and the holder of an executive office (Shackleton 2014).

However, the text left totally unclear how that link would work in practice. Where would the candidates suggested in Declaration 11 come from and when would their names be put forward? The idea that the European political parties should put forward names had a long pedigree: it was discussed in academic and think tank circles as long ago as the 1990s (Peñalver and Priestley 2015, 54–58). Hence it was not surprising that the treaty change hastened its arrival on the political scene. President Barroso argued in front of the European Parliament in September 2012 that the European political parties should put forward candidates ‘to further Europeanise the European elections’ (quoted in Shackleton 2013, 2). His position was not contradicted early the following year when the EU European Affairs Ministers met in Dublin. They discussed how to improve the mechanisms for enabling citizens’ voices to be heard and expressly stated in their press release that ‘… one proposal which attracted considerable support today was the possibility of candidates for the position of President of the European Commission being nominated by the political groups in the European Parliament (sic)’ (Council of the European Union 2013). In the event, five of the European political parties (European People’s Party/EPP, Party of European Socialists/PES, Liberals and Democrats/ALDE, Greens and European Left) presented six candidates for the post in the six months leading up to the elections.

A number of academics argued that this development was to be welcomed, using a classical defence of the value of competition for executive office in a representative system:

The open competition that is taking place is adding a new layer of public debate about Europe, offering voters a chance to hear and evaluate different recipes for reforming the EU. All the candidates are opening themselves up to public scrutiny in a way that none of their predecessors ever had: any other nominee, however worthy, would conveniently escape such an examination. And the electorate is being offered a chance not only to vote for their MEP on 22 May but also to shape the character of the executive of the EU. This is more democratic than leaving the choice of commission president to the whims of a fireside chat at a European Council meeting. (Financial Times 2014b)

However, they did not underline that such a system would effectively eliminate any degree of discretion for the European Council in selecting a candidate. Many assumed that the European Council would not accept such a loss of influence. The Financial Times, for example, at the time of Juncker’s selection as EPP candidate in early March 2014 was highly sceptical about the likelihood of his getting the job. A blog by one of its Brussels correspondents, Peter Spiegel, suggested that Juncker:

is ambivalent about the job. He may not get it – Europe’s political leaders could ultimately decide that none of the candidates chosen by the party groups is suitable. But even if the EPP wins the European parliament elections in May, and Juncker isn’t given the top job, he may not care too much. Asked after his selection what he would do if he was not nominated, he replied: ‘I will be angry’. Tongue very firmly in cheek as he spoke. (Financial Times 2014a)

In fact, the situation was dramatically changed by what the Parliament said after the elections. On 27 May 2014 the leaders of the main groups in the European Parliament (except one³) made it clear to Herman Van Rompuy, then President of the European Council, that they expected the European Council to propose as candidate for President of the European Commission someone who had declared their candidacy in advance of the European elections (see Dinan 2017). They argued that Jean-Claude Juncker should be given the first opportunity to win the support of the Parliament as his party, the European People’s Party, had won the most seats in the elections. They added that no other candidate, however able, who had not been a Spitzenkandidat would win a majority in the Parliament.

It was a dramatic challenge to the authority of the European Council and, not surprisingly, provoked strong reactions. It was seen by many as a crude power grab by the Parliament which constituted a threat to democracy in the European Union as expressed by the Heads of State and Government (Cameron 2014). However, it presented them with a difficult binary choice. It was not a question of granting part of what was requested in the course of the ‘appropriate consultations’ but rather accepting to nominate Juncker or else entering into an uncertain institutional conflict with the newly elected Parliament. They eventually preferred the first option.

This decision can be presented as a simple power play between two institutions, the European Parliament and the European Council, with the former turning out an unexpected winner (for a full analysis, see Hobolt 2014). However, it was more than meets the eye. The assertiveness of the EP served to forge a very different kind of relationship between the Parliament and the Commission. The link between the two institutions was tighter than it had ever been, with the two institutions

bound together in a governing coalition, not dissimilar to the way governments and parliaments throughout Europe are tied to each other, with the executive body depending on the support of the legislature and the legislature promoting the agenda of the executive. (Shackleton 2015)

The tightness of this bond can be seen in the way the policy programme of the Commission was developed. Already before the elections Juncker had campaigned on a set of five points (the promotion of jobs and growth, an energy union, a balanced trade agreement with the United States, reform of the monetary union and a fair solution to the British problem). After the elections, these five points were expanded into ten priorities that bore the marks of his discussions with the political groups in the Parliament (European Commission 2015). The ability to compare the evolution of a document before and after the elections was a quite different process from what had taken place five years earlier when Barroso came to the Parliament after the elections with his own programme for the Commission.

The ten priorities effectively established a joint framework for the EU over the next five years. It contained detailed commitments, including a 300 million euro infrastructure fund (later known as the European Fund for Strategic Investment (EFSI), a shifting of resources to jobs and growth following the review of the multiannual financial framework in 2016 and a firm promise that a trade agreement with the United States would not be drawn up at the expense of European standards. The plan was highly political in nature, designed to win the support of as many of the political groups as possible, and constituted a significant challenge to the European Council, which adopted a much less detailed roadmap at the meeting when it confirmed Juncker as its candidate (Peñalver and Priestley 2015, 167).

The Parliament for its part has started to see itself playing a different political game from the one it played before. It has been willing to change its behaviour significantly as a result of having accepted the Juncker framework for the five year term. New kinds of institutional links have been forged to further the joint agenda of the two institutions.

The most striking example is the creation of the so-called G5 meetings, bringing together on a regular basis Juncker and Timmermans, his first Vice-President, with Schulz, the Parliament President, and Weber and Pittella, heads of the EPP and Socialists and Democrats (S&D) groups in the Parliament (Politico 2015). These meetings are more than opportunities for a good lunch; rather they offer a chance to find solutions to common problems. It was thanks to one of these meetings that the impact of the Luxleaks affair whereby the Luxembourg government, headed at the time by Juncker, was said to have given favourable tax treatment to multinational companies, was substantially reduced. There was discussion of a possible vote of censure but after one of these dinners, Schulz and Pittella persuaded all but one of the members of the S&D group not to support it and subsequently, ensured that the matter be examined by a temporary committee rather than a committee of inquiry, whose remit would have included seeking to establish personal responsibility.

Schulz has also used his position to make sure the new relationship with the Commission is protected. He had wanted to become Juncker’s deputy as the candidate of the party that won the second largest number of seats in the EP (and incidentally, the largest number of votes). In the event, he succeeded in being re-elected as EP President, something that none of his predecessors since direct elections had managed.⁴ He immediately saw his own role as needing to be different, more political than that of previous Presidents: ‘If we want to be taken seriously with our more politicized role, we need the president of the Parliament to act at the same level as the two other presidents’ (quoted in Politico, 29 October 2015, 18). Acting on a higher level has meant extending invitations to Heads of State and Government (Tsipras, Merkel and Hollande all spoke and responded in plenary debates in the Parliament in 2015) but perhaps even more importantly, a readiness to further the Commission’s priorities. Schulz ensured, for example, that the vote on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Pact should be delayed for a month in June 2015 to allow more time to find a joint position on the Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) procedure. The extra month made it possible to find a compromise which did not support the exclusion of ISDS, as most Socialists wanted, but proposed a replacement system for reconciling private interests and public policy objectives (European Parliament 2015).

At the level of the plenary the EPP and S&D groups worked more closely together than they had done in the past. Voting cohesion increased markedly, with the two groups voting together around 80% of the time in the first six months of the legislature (Votewatch 2015). In fact, co-operation extended to the Liberals so that the three groups constituted what Votewatch has called a ‘super grand coalition’, with the three groups on the winning side substantially more often than any other group in the Parliament. In substantive terms, this majority backed rapidly and massively the Juncker plan to boost the European economy through the European Fund for Strategic Investment and the Commission proposals to relocate 120,000 asylum seekers by the use of compulsory quotas, the latter within a week of receiving the proposal. The executive was winning the backing of the legislature that had helped to get its President elected; the legislature was developing a programme for government with the executive that it had chosen. A new form of politics has certainly emerged out of Article 17(7) of the Lisbon Treaty, but will it fundamentally call into question the paradigm of representative government that has dominated the Parliament throughout its history?

What kind of future for representative democracy in the EU?

The suddenness of what happened in 2014 and the fact that it is not explicitly enshrined in the Treaties raises the question as to what we can expect in the years ahead. Was 2014 a special case or has it really succeeded in challenging the dominant paradigm of the way the Parliament can and should operate? Can one episode alter the whole fabric of governance of the EU, when it took decades for the Parliament to acquire substantial legislative and budgetary powers? Is not a long march likely to have longer lasting effects than a one-night stand? Are we really witnessing the beginnings of a move towards a different kind of representative democracy in the EU? Or are the two paradigms outlined earlier still compatible?

The circumstances surrounding the election of Jean-Claude Juncker were particularly favourable to the Parliament. He was well-known to other Heads of State and Government and enjoyed the status of having been a long-serving Prime Minister himself. The situation would have been rather different if the Socialists had won the most seats in the Parliament. Martin Schulz has never been in government at the national level and he would have been confronted with a European Council, in which the EPP had a clear majority. It is by no means certain that the Heads of State and Government would have been ready to support a German Social Democrat, a choice that Angela Merkel would have had particular difficulty in explaining to her own party. The pressure that EPP governments could have exercised on their MEPs in the Parliament might have been similar to that exercised by Socialist governments to ensure that Santer got the support of the Parliament (by a narrow 22 votes) in 1994.

Nevertheless, there is much evidence to suggest that European political parties will present candidates in advance of the next European elections in 2019. In writing their comprehensive account of the Spitzenkandidaten experiment, Peñalver and Priestley, interviewed 50 or so politicians and bureaucrats from all the Brussels institutions, as well as journalists and outside observers. All agreed that the process had acquired sufficient momentum for it to be repeated, that there was no going back to the old method (Peñalver and Priestley 2015, xiii and 184). The European Parliament, for its part, already assumes that lead candidates will be part of the next election campaign and is pressing for changes to electoral law designed to improve the candidates’ chances of having an impact. At the November 2015 plenary, it backed a proposal to set a common deadline of 12 weeks before the elections for the nomination of lead candidates by European political parties so as to give time for them to mount a serious campaign. It also proposed that the names and logos of the European parties appear on ballot papers to counteract the tendency for the elections to be seen as a set of purely national contests.

Moreover, the debate does not simply involve the Parliament and the Commission. A central actor will be the European Council, which will be obliged to respond to the Parliament’s proposals and the pressure for a repeat of the Spitzenkandidaten mechanism for choosing a Commission President. It is already committed to review the system before 2019, a commitment adopted at its meeting in June 2014 in part to soften the blow for Cameron and Orban after they were outvoted on the choice of Juncker. Will it be able to find a common, unanimous response to the central claim of the Parliament that only candidates chosen before the elections can be considered for the post and that the candidate from the party that won the most seats should have the first claim to win the support of the Parliament?

The answer that the European Council gives is of profound importance for the future governance of the EU. To accept the Parliament’s position would be to accept that the previous system suffers from a ‘legitimacy deficit’ in terms of representative democracy. It would suggest that the Heads of State and Government agreed that a fireside chat is not an appropriate mechanism for choosing a Commission President under the terms of Article 10(1) of the TEU. Whatever restrictions were imposed on such an interpretation (and they surely would be) would not alter the fact that the European Council had also accepted the principle that a degree of fusion between executive and legislative power was possible at EU level.

The risk of adopting such a position would be considerable. It would open up the possibility that the scope of the application of the principle would be widened over time. It would encourage the Parliament to look for a broader role in the appointment of other Commissioners, such as obliging Member States to put up two names instead of one for the Commission President to consider,⁵ or even to call for the merger of the posts of President of the European Commission and President of the European Council in the name of executive efficiency. It could provoke calls for some kind of compensation for national parliaments, such as the monitoring of the choices for Commissioners made by governments. It might revive the discussion that took place at the Constitutional Convention about the possibility of making it possible to dissolve the Parliament in the course of its mandate. Just as happened with the powers granted to the Parliament in the 1960s and 1980s, to cede on a principle is to create space for a wider revision of the representative structure of the EU.

What factors may influence the choice that the European Council makes? I would suggest that there are at least four issues that will weigh on the debate.

First, there is the ability of the Parliament and Commission to maintain their alliance for the five years of their respective terms of office. It is by no means certain that the centrifugal forces at work in the Parliament can be contained. At some point, for example, the Parliament may well have to take a firmer position on TTIP and it is not clear that the institution would automatically choose to take the Commission’s side in the face of widespread popular dissatisfaction with the agreement that starts to emerge. And if this happened, how would the Commission react? Would it be sufficient reason for the Commission to consider resigning on the grounds that it had lost the confidence of a parliamentary majority? And if so, who could be invited to take its place, given there is no provision for anticipated elections?

Second, there is the attitude of national political parties towards a repeat of the Spitzenkandidaten experiment. Unlike national parliaments in the 1960s (or at least all except the French) that were very enthusiastic about reinforcing the position of the Parliament, national political parties are much less enthusiastic about supporting a process that challenges their own priorities in the European electoral process. It is by no means clear that they will be willing to deploy a significant level of resources to back a candidate, particularly if they happen not to have voted for her or him at the meeting of the European political party that selected the candidate. Will they be ready to give prominence to a candidate who is likely not to be a national of their country and whose positions may conflict with some of their national preferences, or prefer to use their resources to back their prospective MEPs, without reference to the candidate? An extreme case of a possible reaction emerged in the electoral campaign in the UK in 2014. The Conservatives had no candidate, with the ECR opposed to the very principle of Spitzenkandidaten, while the Labour and Liberal parties declined to invite their European candidates, Schulz and Verhofstadt, to come to Britain because they were seen as holding views that could embarrass the national parties. More generally, it will never be easy to persuade national voters to listen to a national of another country in campaigns normally dominated by domestic issues. It is no coincidence that the countries where there was the greatest awareness of Spitzenkandidaten in 2014 were those in which German is spoken, a common language of the two main candidates.

Third, much will depend on the perceived success or otherwise of the Juncker Commission, which Juncker himself has dramatically called a ‘last chance’ Commission. If it can claim to have managed to give life to the ten priorities, then both of the principal European parties (EPP and PES) will be able to argue that they were responsible for that success or that where the Commission failed, this was due to the weaknesses of the other main party in the coalition supporting the executive. The 2019 election would acquire a stronger European tinge and the ‘Grand Coalition’ could be renewed, with EPP or Socialist leadership of the Commission, depending on the outcome. However, the situation would be more complex if the Commission were not seen as having adequately fulfilled its mandate, failing, for example, to make a success in promoting growth via the EFSI, to deal adequately with the migration crisis, or to overcome the Greek debt crisis. The blame game could easily lead to less readiness on the part of the European Council to subscribe to the Parliament’s claims concerning the Spitzenkandidaten process.

Last and perhaps most importantly, there is the role of the parties opposed to further integration. If they overcame their reticence about the procedure (as Tsipras did in 2014) and put forward candidates as a way of winning more publicity for their own vision of a very different kind of Europe, the nature of the election would change radically. From one perspective, it would offer an opportunity to compare the real strength of populist discourse at European level, making the contest more politically attractive. However, it would introduce an element of uncertainty that the Heads of State and Government might prefer to try to neutralise, particular in view of the repercussions it could have in reinforcing anti-European forces at the national level.

Conclusion

All of the above factors of uncertainty underline that there is no inevitability about the development of parliamentary government in the EU. The European Council may not give way so readily in 2019 and the Parliament may not want to replicate the experience it has had with the Juncker Commission. Nevertheless, it is the central argument of this paper that the events of 2014 witnessed the Parliament playing a leading role in challenging the institutional status quo and obliging a reconsideration of the future of representative democracy in the EU. The question at stake is whether the EU is ready to legitimate the idea of the Commission and Parliament constituting an embryonic form of parliamentary government, each deriving their authority from a single electoral contest. As Judge and Earnshaw (2008, 247) suggest, ‘authentic contested electoral choice over the tenure of leadership positions … serves as a basic and fundamental distinction between democratic and authoritarian regimes’. Can the EU become democratic in this sense, creating a direct link between a leader and followers?

From an intergovernmentalist prospective, there are ample grounds for dismissing the idea as fanciful. After all, the European Union has been constructed around a split between executive roles. It is the European Council, not the Commission, which has played the preeminent role in handling the various crises of recent years and it remains outside the purview of control by the Parliament (see, for example, Bickerton et al. 2015). Similarly, the Council is still the opposite branch of the legislative and budgetary authority, with which the Parliament is obliged to deal as a separate institution and over which it has no formal mechanism of control. Tighter links between the Commission and the Parliament will not alter the fundamental desire of member states to retain their dominant executive position. Moreover, the Commission is not equipped to challenge that position. It is obliged to look for common ground between member states and cannot impose its view where such ground does not exist. And its links to EU citizens remain very thin, with few inclined to accept its authority over that of their own governments. So Ross and Jenson 2017 may be right in their concluding comment of Contribution 2 to this volume that enlargement has led to more complex intergovernmental bargaining which has reduced the scope for the kind of activism displayed by the Delors Commission. Similarly, it can be claimed that the creation of the competing post of a permanent President of the European Council has served to reinforce the intergovernmental character of the EU (see Tömmel 2017). If so, the changed position of the Juncker Commission in relation to the Parliament will be seen by some as of limited significance.

Yet this takes too narrow a view. First, there are reasons to challenge the claim that the Commission has become a much less important executive actor in recent years (Bauer and Becker 2014; Savage and Verdun 2016). The economic crisis has provided a wide range of opportunities for the Commission to act as an executive, even within the range of action prescribed by the European Council. Once such autonomy is acknowledged, the legitimation of what the Commission does still has to be addressed. Second, the debate about the nature of representative democracy in the EU remains open, regardless of the influence of the different actors, What the Parliament did in 2014 was to take a lead in broadening the debate about how the EU should be governed. No-one can say where this debate will end any more than it was possible to see what would become of the Parliament when it was established in 1952; few today see the EU developing along the lines of European states with a single executive standing and falling on the basis of majority vote. But we can now witness a competition over the shape of representative government that was not possible throughout most of the EU’s history. The doctrine of a separation of powers is no longer unchallenged. Those who have argued that it is not possible at European level to choose between different policy options and to throw out an executive that is seen to have failed are now obliged to justify their position. One can now imagine a Commission that is not beyond democratic electoral reach and a European Parliament that can offer the possibility of policy change through executive renewal, a system where ‘rascals can be thrown out’. This transformation of the debate about representative government has been brought about by the Parliament in its role as the constant challenger of the principles of EU governance. The genie is out of the bottle and cannot be put back.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding

This work was supported by European Commission Erasmus+ programme – Jean Monnet ‘Policy debate with academic world’ [grant number 565351-EPP-1-2015-1-CA-EPPJMO-PROJECT].

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the anonymous referee and the principal investigators on the project for their comments and wishes to acknowledge the financial support of the European Commission Erasmus+ programme – Jean Monnet ‘Policy debate with academic world’ Reference number of the grant: 565351-EPP-1-2015-1-CA-EPPJMO-PROJECT (Principal Investigators: Amy Verdun and Ingeborg Tömmel).

Notes

1. The extent of that parity remains the object of dispute. In relation to legislative codecision, see, for example, Rasmussen et al. (2013).

2. Declaration 11 on Article 17(6) and (7) of the Treaty on European Union:

The Conference considers that, in accordance with the provisions of the Treaties, the European Parliament and the European Council are jointly responsible for the smooth running of the process leading to the election of the President of the European Commission. Prior to the decision of the European Council, representatives of the European Parliament and of the European Council will thus conduct the necessary consultations in the framework deemed the most appropriate. These consultations will focus on the backgrounds of the candidates for President of the Commission, taking account of the elections to the European Parliament, in accordance with the first subparagraph of Article 17(7). The arrangements for such consultations may be determined, in due course, by common accord between the European Parliament and the European Council.

3. The European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), including the British Conservatives, now the third largest group in the Parliament, maintained their consistent opposition to the Spitzenkandidaten process.

4. Indeed he did not hide his ambition to be elected a third time as Parliament President in January 2017 but finally decided in November 2016 to return to German politics.

5. As proposed in an EP resolution adopted on 8 September 2015 on a report entitled ‘Commissioner hearings: lessons to be taken from the 2014 process’.