Why the European Parliament lost the Spitzenkandidaten-process

ABSTRACT

Research has demonstrated how the European Parliament has expanded its powers vis-à-vis other EU institutions by strategically exploiting powers it already holds and appealing to its contribution to democratic legitimacy. However, established theories are challenged by the failure of the EP to secure the election of a so-called Spitzenkandidat to the post of European Commission President in 2019. Was this failure an incidental set-back or does it point to a structural limit to the EP’s ability to expand its powers? Exploring the latter option, this article proposes that the 2019 events warrant the revision of the EP-centred parliamentarisation thesis that dominates our understanding of EU inter-institutional politics. Instead, it develops an alternative theory that departs from the conception of the EU as a demoi-cracy. Using the events in 2014 and 2019, the article constructs analytical narratives for both theoretical positions. Reading the 2019 case through the demoi-cratic perspective suggests that national leaders are unlikely to allow the EP to reclaim the Spitzenkandidaten-process. More generally, it follows from this perspective that the EP can only successfully get the member states to share powers, not to cede them.

KEYWORDS:

• Commission President
• demoi-cracy
• European elections
• European Parliament
• EU inter-institutional politics
• Spitzenkandidaten

Introduction

On 16 July 2019, the European Parliament (EP) elected Ursula von der Leyen as President of the new European Commission with a relatively slim majority of 383 against 327 votes. In doing so, the incoming EP retreated on the commitment of its predecessor that had insisted that it would be ‘ready to reject’ any candidate for the position of Commission President who had not been put forward by one of the European parties as a so-called Spitzenkandidat for the EP elections (European Parliament, 2018). What is more, in confirming non-Spitzenkandidat von der Leyen as Commission President, the EP also gave up on the inter-institutional ‘win’ that it seemed to have secured in 2014 when Spitzenkandidat Jean-Claude Juncker was elected Commission President.

The Spitzenkandidat-controversy is a high-profile illustration of European Union (EU) treaties being ‘incomplete contracts’ (Farrell & Héritier, 2007; Hix, 2002). In this case, the culprit is Article 17.7 TEU as it was formulated in the 2007 Treaty of Lisbon:

Taking into account the elections to the European Parliament and after having held the appropriate consultations, the European Council, acting by a qualified majority, shall propose to the European Parliament a candidate for President of the Commission. This candidate shall be elected by the European Parliament by a majority of its component members.

This formulation was inherently under-determined and an open invitation to inter-institutional politics (Christiansen, 2016; Heidbreder & Schade, 2020; Raube, 2020). It seems to presume that the European Council and the EP will naturally come to converge on the candidate for the Commission presidency. The treaty makers did not anticipate that the EP would want to exploit the article’s incompleteness by seeking to pre-empt the European Council’s choice of nominees. All they provided for in case the EP would not approve the nominee was to require the European Council to come back within a month with another nominee.¹ That solution seems untenable as it risks fostering a permanent stand-off between the EP and the European Council and creates exactly the void that the EP sought to exploit by initiating the Spitzenkandidaten-process.

While the 2014 hijacking of the Spitzenkandidaten-process by the EP and its party-groups fits the dominant scholarly understanding of EU inter-institutional politics, the 2019 roll-back by the European Council poses a fundamental puzzle. Notably, the established literature sees the EP as the prime beneficiary of EU inter-institutional politics (Hix, 2002; Stacey, 2003) and each of its wins as setting the EU on a longer-term course towards parliamentarisation (Héritier et al., 2019; Rittberger & Schimmelfennig, 2006; Shackleton, 2017). From this perspective, analysts saw the Spitzenkandidaten-‘success’ in 2014 as heralding ‘the institutionalisation of the Spitzenkandidaten’ (Christiansen, 2016, p. 993; Hamřík & Kaniok, 2019; Héritier et al., 2019, p. 75). The events of 2019 seriously challenge this reading and the few analyses that we have so far of these events (Heidbreder & Schade, 2020; Raube, 2020) remain notably cautious in their theoretical conclusions.

The question is whether the 2019 events were an incidental set-back or point to a structural limit to the EP’s ability to expand its powers? Exploring the latter option, this article proposes that the 2019 failure of the Spitzenkandidaten-process warrants the revision of established theories of the EP’s informal inter-institutional power. To develop an alternative to the EP-centred parliamentarisation-thesis, it draws on theories that conceive of the EU as a demoi-cracy (Cheneval & Schimmelfennig, 2013; Nicolaïdis, 2013). The demoi-cratic perspective highlights that the EP’s expansion of powers is only one side of a process in which the EU member state governments have allowed it to share in powers that, originally, they held exclusively themselves. In this view, the logical end-point of this process is not an EP-based government, but rather a full and equal sharing of powers in legislation and executive oversight between the EP and the EU governments.

The fate of the Spitzenkandidaten-process offers a critical test to discriminate between the two theories. The EP-centred parliamentarisation-thesis can only be upheld if the events of 2019 turn out to be an incident and the Spitzenkandidaten-process is revindicated in the European elections in 2024. In contrast, the demoi-cratic perspective suggests that the member governments may be willing to share power with the EP but will block any claim to dominate them. The implication of that would be that, even if attempts are made to reinstate the Spitzenkandidaten in 2024, the process is not viable to turn into a permanent procedure.

This article starts from the established theories of EU inter-institutional politics and of the EP’s ability to expand its powers over time (section 2). It then explicates the EP-centred parliamentarism thesis that tends to underlie these analyses (section 3) and proposes the EU demoi-cracy perspective as an alternative (section 4). The argument then turns to the events in 2014 and 2019 to develop and illustrate an analytical narrative of each perspective. The conclusion reflects on the wider implications of the difference between the two positions for 2024 and for our thinking about EU inter-institutional politics in general.

Explaining the ascent of the European Parliament

The history of the EP has been marked by a steady expansion of its powers (Héritier et al., 2019; Rittberger, 2005; Rittberger & Schimmelfennig, 2006). Originally established in 1958 as the European Parliamentary Assembly for the European Communities with mostly a consultative role, the Assembly renamed itself into a Parliament. In 1979, its members, who up until then had been delegated by the parliaments of the member states, were directly elected for the first time. In the series of treaty revisions that started with the Single European Act of 1986, the EP expanded its involvement in EU legislation. This process was completed with the 2007 Treaty of Lisbon that recognised the EP as a full co-legislator besides the Council of Ministers, with full amendment powers and a veto on all EU legislation.

In a similar way, the EP has been able to increase its powers over the appointment of the members of the European Commission (Crum, 2012; Moury, 2007). The Treaty of Rome (Art.158 EEC) provided that the European Commission would be appointed by the member state governments acting by common accord. It did not foresee any role for the Parliamentary Assembly. However, after the first direct elections in 1979, the EP made the incoming Commission the object of a debate and a vote. This practice was formalised in the 1991 Treaty of Maastricht with the recognition of the EP’s right to be consulted on the appointment of the Commission President and the introduction of a parliamentary vote of confidence on the College of Commissioners as a whole (Westlake, 1998, p. 439). However, political reality soon made it clear that it would be very hard to ignore a negative vote of the parliament on the Commission President nominee (Hix, 2002, p. 276; Moury, 2007, p. 376). Hence, in the 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam, the EP’s vote over the Commission President was recognised to be binding (Hix, 2002, p. 270).

By now there is a well-established understanding of the conditions that allow the EP to expand its powers. Its essential logic has been characterised by Rittberger and Schimmelfennig (2006) as ‘strategic action in a community environment’ (cf. Héritier et al., 2019). More specifically, the prevailing explanations for the EP’s rise in powers conceive of it as a rationalist power game between the EU institutions, but one in which normative appeals carry considerable weight. In this ‘game’, the EP is motivated by an inherent institutional interest to expand its powers. Its main antagonists are the member states who are the ‘masters of the EU treaties’ originally, and therefore control the allocation of powers in EU decision-making. Typically, the EP uses issue linkage to attain new powers: it leverages powers that it holds already, like the power to reject the EU budget or the power to censure the Commission as a whole, to attain further and more detailed powers in the EU’s decision-making processes. The EP can complement and reinforce this strategy with a host of other strategies, like delaying decision-making and cross-institutional coalition building (see Héritier et al., 2019, section 2.1.2 for a comprehensive catalogue of strategies). The success of these strategies is premised on the ability of the EP to maintain a united front, with its members prioritising their collective institutional interest over the political differences that divide them (Hix, 2002, p. 271).

Critically, however, besides this crude bargaining power, the EP also holds a normative card, which lies in its ability to appeal to democratic legitimacy. As European integration has removed power outside of the direct control of national parliaments, the most logical compensation for this is to be found in the empowerment of the EP. Hence, whenever the member governments are inclined to adopt decisions on their own, the EP can effectively shame them for bypassing the democratic representatives of the people (Héritier et al., 2019). Importantly, the EP’s appeal to democratic representation and its potential to shame the other institutions requires an audience. Thus, it only works on issues that are of importance to the European peoples and that are sufficiently visible (de Wilde, 2020; Rittberger & Schimmelfennig, 2006, p. 1148).

Furthermore, it is essential to recognise that the different EU institutions depart from different starting positions and hence also calculate their wins and losses in different ways (Hix, 2002). As the EP started out with very limited powers, it has everything to play for. Hence, institutional wins for the EP are often considered a big prize for which its members are willing to set aside short-term interests and internal political divisions. However, what may be a major win for the EP, may appear as a small concession of limited consequence to the Council. An indicator of this is the different time horizons which preoccupy the institutions. As Farrell and Héritier (2007) argue, the member states in the Council are generally under greater pressure from their domestic constituencies to secure a legislative decision than the EP. Under these conditions, the EP enjoys a structural advantage in inter-institutional politics.

EP-centred parliamentarisation

While we can thus explain the stepwise empowerment of the EP, the literature so far offers little clarity about where this process may find its limits. It is generally recognised that once powers have been granted to the EP, they cannot be rolled back. Stacey (2003, p. 953; cf. Hix, 2002, p. 280) labels this ‘the ratchet effect’:

the phenomenon by which any powers transferred from one of the Three [EU institutions] have without fail been transferred in one direction, i.e., from either the Council or the Commission to the Parliament and never in reverse (moreover, once a power has been won or given, it has never been taken back).

More broadly, the overall process has been characterised as a process of ‘parliamentarisation’ (Rittberger & Schimmelfennig, 2006). This conceptualisation suggests that the expansion of EP powers ultimately is to lead to a situation in which it exercises power over all competences and all executive agents in the EU system. More concretely, Héritier et al. (2019, p. 187; cf. Hix, 2008, Ch. 9; Shackleton, 2017) link this process to the emergence of a proper EU ‘government’, which would then be ‘supported by a majority of members of a democratically elected parliament to which it is accountable’. Thus, the telos of the expansion of EP powers comes to look very much like the parliamentary political systems of many EU member states.

Héritier and her co-authors recognise that the completion of parliamentarisation is still far off as it encounters important counterforces. In particular, these counterforces involve tendencies to (new) intergovernmental governance in which EU competences are delegated to member state-controlled authorities beyond the EP’s sphere of direct influence. Still, Héritier et al. (2019, p. 192) also note that even these new EU competences need not be immune to the logic of the EP’s power expansion, since its involvement can be seen as a process of co-evolution rather than as a zero-sum game between the EU institutions; the power losses primarily fall at the national level.

If we then take it that the EP is the key driver in a continuing process of EU parliamentarisation, the Spitzenkandidaten-process appears as a perfect fit. It logically constitutes the next step of the EP taking control over the election of the European Commission and it contributes to attributing a government-like status to the Commission. Thus, Article 17.7 offered itself as the next battleground on which the EP could expand its competences. The success of such an expansion would rely on the twin factors of a) the party-groups in the EP prioritising the institutional interest of attaining this new power over the party-political differences that divide them and b) the majority of the member state governments in the European Council considering the costs of conceding to the EP lower than the costs of an outright inter-institutional confrontation. The perceived costs of such an outright confrontation could moreover be increased if the European parties would seize the Spitzenkandidaten-process by putting forward candidates with a prominent and pan-European profile and select them in a pan-European and open way. Thus, one could envisage a pan-European campaign between the candidates, which would increase the saliency and publicity of the European elections as a whole.

After the Spitzenkandidaten-‘success’ in 2014, analysts built on the parliamentarisation-thesis to affirm ‘the institutionalisation of the Spitzenkandidaten’ (Hamřík & Kaniok, 2019). Héritier et al. (2019, p. 75) recognised the creation of a new rule and considered it a demonstration of the EP’s ability to impose its preferences as a ‘first mover’. Christiansen saw the events as ushering ‘a new era of European Union politics in which leadership changes result from popular choice rather than bargaining behind closed doors’ (Christiansen, 2016, p. 993; cf. Shackleton, 2017).

However, the events of 2019 have left analysts at a loss. The few post hoc analyses so far (Heidbreder & Schade, 2020; Raube, 2020) are notably cautious in their theoretical conclusions.² They review the different strategies with which the EP and the member states approached the 2019 election of the Commission President. Beyond that, however, they shy away from identifying any generalisable aspect from the 2019 events. Instead, they underline that the Spitzenkandidaten-process remains under-institutionalised and that hence it is an open call how things will unfold in 2024.

EU demoi-cracy as an alternative perspective

The central claim of this article is that the failure of the Spitzenkandidaten-process in 2019 forces us to rethink the parliamentarisation-thesis. Specifically, I argue that accounts of EU inter-institutional politics have remained deficient in their focus on the EP as the main agent of institutional change. For an alternative to EP-centred parliamentarisation we can draw on theoretical accounts that emphasise the multiple sources of legitimacy on which the EU relies. Most notable among these is the understanding of the EU as a demoi-cracy, that is, as a polity that is composed of multiple self-governing peoples that are never fully integrated into one. The dominant understandings of the EU as a demoi-cracy conceive of it as a simultaneous union of citizens – who constitute an overarching EU demos – and of its members states, which are based on self-governing national demoi (Cheneval & Schimmelfennig, 2013; Nicolaïdis, 2013). Thus, demoi-cracy offers a perspective on the democratic nature of the EU that is not exclusively centred around the EP and the integrated EU demos that it purportedly embodies. Instead, it underlines the continuing relevance of the democratic legitimacy enshrined in the member states' governments.

In institutional terms, this perspective is made more concrete in conceptions that see popular sovereignty in the EU as embodied in a ‘multilevel parliamentary field’ (Crum & Fossum, 2009) or a ‘Euro-national parliamentary system’ (Fasone & Lupo, 2016) that is composed of the EP together with the national parliaments of the EU member states. Both these conceptions depart from the provision of article 10.2 of the Treaty of Lisbon that stipulates that the EU relies on two chains of democratic representation. On the one hand, ‘Citizens are directly represented at Union level in the European Parliament’. On the other hand, ‘Member states are represented in the European Council by their Heads of State or Government and in the Council by their governments, themselves democratically accountable either to their national Parliaments, or to their citizens’.

Such understandings of the EU as a demoi-cracy suggest that a complete account of the EU inter-institutional politics needs to recognise the double nature of EU’s representative legitimacy, which does not exclusively rely on the EP but also on the representative qualities of the member governments assembled in the Council of Ministers. The demoi-cratic perspective need not contest the logic of the EP’s expansion of powers as presented above. It does, however, frame these events not merely as a series of EP wins but rather as an evolving relationship between the EP and the member state governments in the Council. Obviously, the two institutions – the Council and the EP – have followed different evolutionary trajectories. The member governments have always been prominent at all levels of EU decision-making. As a consequence, they did not need to seek an expansion of their powers through inter-institutional politics. Rather they were the ones granting concessions: delegating powers (under their ultimate supervision) to the Commission and other EU executive agencies, and sharing powers with the EP (cf. Moravcsik, 1998, p. 67). Thus, under considerable political and normative pressure, the member state governments have allowed the EP to emancipate itself and achieve a more or less equal standing in EU decision-making.

This alternative perspective highlights that all power concessions by the EU member states to the EP involve the sharing of powers; they have never transferred powers in legislation or executive oversight. Thus, in EU legislation, the Council and EP have come to operate side by side as co-legislators and, if the Council can no longer impose laws upon the EP, neither has the EP come into a position in which it can impose laws upon the Council. As a consequence, any step forward requires the agreement of both institutions; otherwise, the proposed decision fails, and we return to the pre-existing situation.

This demoi-cratic reading has several critical implications for the parliamentarisation-thesis. The first one is that the limits to the expansion of the EP’s powers are inherent in the EU’s inter-institutional politics. Specifically, the EP can successfully use its leverage potential to come to share powers with the member state governments. However, since any extension of powers is ultimately dependent on the consent of the member state governments, they will not allow the EP to take powers away from themselves: powers may be shared but not transferred. Furthermore, if we then consider where the process of parliamentarisation may lead eventually, we also need to include the Council: a parliamentarised EU is unlikely to be built upon the EP alone, rather it will need to involve some kind of joint or bicameral structure in which powers are shared between the EP and the Council (cf. Lupo, 2020).

The demoi-cratic perspective underlines that the treaty provisions on the election of the Commission President are premised on a back-and-forth between the member state governments and the EP. In that sense, the aspiration of the Spitzenkandidaten-process differs from preceding EP claims in that, rather than a claim to attain equal standing, it involves an attempt by the EP to outflank the member state governments. This fact fundamentally changes the calculations of the member state governments, and significantly raises the costs that a concession on this procedure would have for them. By this reasoning, the Spitzenkandidaten-process is expected to be blocked by the European Council as it asserts its own place in the procedure and the right to choose its own nominee. However, the EU’s double legitimacy may also already leave an imprint earlier in the process. Thus, it would suggest that national parties may claim a dominant role in the nomination processes in the European parties and seek to ensure that the selected candidates remain under their control. Furthermore, it is less self-evident that EP-delegations, and especially those affiliated to national governments, will let the collective institutional interest of the EP prevail over party-political differences.

Essentially, then, the EP-centred parliamentarisation thesis and the notion of EU demoi-cracy offer competing theories of the election of the Commission President (Table 1). In the remainder of this article, I use the events leading up to the election of the Commission President in 2014 and in 2019 to develop two analytical narratives that illustrate and elaborate the two theories. My premise is that the events of 2014 very much align with the EP-centred parliamentarisation-thesis, but that the events in 2019 are best understood in terms of the demoi-cracy perspective.

Table 1. Two theories of the election of the president of the European Commission.

	EP-centred parliamentarisation	EU demoi-cracy
Premises
Main source of EU popular legitimacy	EP - uniquely and exclusively	EP and member state governments (accountable to their national parliaments) jointly
Key features of EU inter-institutional politics	EP expands its powers combining power politics with normative claims	Council shares powers with EP because of low costs and normative claims
Telos of EU parliamentarisation	The EP controlling single-handedly an EU government	Full sharing of powers in legislation and executive oversight between EP and member state governments
Expectations regarding the Art. 17.7 process
Interpretation of Art. 17.7	Art 17.7 offers an opening for the newly elected EP to take control of the election of Commission President	Art. 17.7 requires a back-and-forth between member state governments and EP
Party-group dynamics	Party-groups organise selection procedures in pan-European and open way Candidates have a prominent and pan-European profile	National parties seek to dominate nomination procedures National parties ensure that the selected candidates remain under their control
EP reception	EP party-groups prioritise their institutional interest to control the election over party-political differences	Party-political interests limit EP delegations’ commitment to the Spitzenkandidaten
Decision-making in the European Council	Majority of European Council considers costs of conceding to the EP lower than the costs of outright confrontation	Majority of European Council is intent to maintain its place in the procedure and to choose its own nominee

The analytical narratives essentially build on well-established facts, complemented by original sources, contemporary news coverage and earlier analyses to substantiate points that are of particular relevance in light of the theoretical expectations. The narratives are organised in four parts that correspond to the four kinds of expectations in Table 1:

• - The interpretation of Article 17.7 TEU

• - The role and internal dynamics of the European party-groups in the run-up to the European elections

• - The EP’s reception to the election outcome

• - The dynamics of the nomination process in the European Council

We can reconstruct these four themes for each of the two episodes. The mechanisms that are thus revealed yield insights that may be indicative of the future of the Spitzenkandidaten-process and for other inter-institutional issues of contention in the EU.

The 2014 Spitzenkandidaten-success as a case of EP-centred parliamentarisation

The interpretation of article 17.7 TEU

On the face of it, the changes that the Treaty of Lisbon introduced into the procedure for electing the Commission President were mostly presentational. On the one hand, it added a formulation that underlined that the European Council had to take ‘into account the elections to the European Parliament’ in deciding on its nominee. On the other hand, it stated that the nominee would be ‘elected’ by the EP rather than ‘approved’ as it had read before. Still, these relatively minor changes were easily picked up to give fuel to the idea of having European party-groups promote lead-candidates for the Commission Presidency in the campaign for the EP elections, an idea that had already been circulating among EP members and their supporters as far back as the negotiations on the Treaty of Amsterdam in the 1990s (European People’s Party, 2014; Hamřík & Kaniok, 2019; Hix, 2008, Ch. 9).

In November 2012, the EP (2012) adopted a resolution, authored by Carlo Cassini from the European People’s Party (EPP), which called upon ‘the European political families to nominate candidates for the Presidency of the Commission’. These candidates were ‘to play a leading role in the parliamentary electoral campaign’. In support of this proposal, parliament added that it expected this procedure to reinforce ‘the political legitimacy of both Parliament and the Commission by connecting their respective elections more directly to the choice of the voters’. In its considerations, the EP referred to the treaty phrases that ‘political parties at European level contribute to forming European political awareness and to expressing the will of the citizens of the Union’ (Art. 10.4 TEU) and it echoed the first part of Article 10.2 that ‘citizens are directly represented at Union level by Members of the European Parliament’.

Thus, the Spitzenkandidaten-process was launched with a strongly EP-centred reading of the treaties. Typically, the EP resolution ignored the second part of Article 10.2 that adds the second leg of EU democratic representation through the democratically accountable governments of the member states. In their reading of Article 17.7, the EP party-groups overrode the critical role for the European Council in deciding on the nominee for the presidency of the Commission as they set out to pre-empt that decision by determining the slate of possible candidates by themselves.

The role of the European party-groups

European party families quickly moved to live up to the role that this interpretation of Article 17.7 offered them (Put et al., 2016). While few Heads of Government supported the idea (Dinan, 2015, p. 96), their hesitations were overtaken by the dynamics that were unleashed within the party-group organisations, the entrepreneurial role played by members of the EP, and the normative appeals to a democratisation of the election of the Commission President.

Particularly the second biggest party family, the Party of European Socialists (PES), was keen to push forward with the initiative as it felt that it had underperformed in the 2009 elections and wanted to challenge the primacy of the EPP (PES Council, 2011). In November 2013, without any challengers, EP president Martin Schulz was put forward as the Social-Democratic lead candidate (Christiansen, 2016).

While the EPP committed to an internal nomination process already in 2012, it ran on a slower schedule. Eventually, at the party’s congress in March 2014, delegates were offered the choice between two prominent candidates: Michel Barnier, former Minister of Foreign Affairs of France and a two term European Commissioner, and Jean-Claude Juncker, who had just been forced to step down as the Prime Minister of Luxembourg after having served in that function for eighteen years.³ By 382 votes against 245, EPP delegates voted for Juncker over Barnier as their lead candidate.

Other party families followed suit (Put et al., 2016). The Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) put former Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt forward as its Spitzenkandidat. The European United Left–Nordic Green Left (GUE/NGL) opted for Alexis Tsipras, leader of its Greek member party Syriza. The European Green Party pushed the democratisation of the nomination process to the next level by opting for two lead candidates and having them elected in an open primary. Eventually, 22,676 voters chose the tandem of German MEP Ska Keller and French MEP and agricultural activist José Bové. All in all, the European parties succeeded in putting together an impressive line-up of Spitzenkandidaten with distinctively pan-European profiles.

The EP’s reception of the election outcome

In the EP elections of 2019, the EPP remained the biggest party-group even if its seat share went down significantly from 36% to 29%. The Socialist & Democrats group consolidated its share at 25%, while the ALDE went down from 11% to 9%. The Greens stabilised, while wins were secured by the United Left, the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), the Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy (EFDD), and some not (yet) aligned parties on the extreme right parties that would form the Europe of Nations and Freedom (ENF) group later in the term. Notably, the latter three groups had not run a Spitzenkandidat.

The EP quickly seized the initiative. Leaders of the party-groups convened after the elections and the five groups that had ran a Spitzenkandidat, together good for three-quarters of the EP’s seats, called for the EPP Spitzenkandidat, Jean-Claude Juncker, to be put forward as Commission President (Nielsen, 2014). Thus, four groups set aside their party-group interests and endorsed the EPP candidate to secure an inter-institutional win for the EP. Most notable in this case was the quick siding of the S&D-group, including its own candidate Martin Schulz, with Juncker, instead of exploring the possibility of building a majority coalition of its own. Being a twenty-year veteran of the parliament, Schulz was happy to set his personal ambitions aside for the sake of the EP’s institutional interest and the promise of him securing its presidency again.

The dynamics in the European Council

Confronted with the normative claim of the EP, the closing of ranks by the party-groups, and the EP’s apparent preparedness for a full-blown clash, the majority of the members of the European Council acceded to the nomination of Juncker, even if they had been less than enthusiastic about the Spitzenkandidaten-procedure (Dinan, 2015, p. 96/7). The few member states who did object – the Prime Ministers of the UK and of Hungary – were unable to overturn this assessment of the (super-)majority. In any case, no alternative candidates were forthcoming, and it was hard to challenge Juncker’s qualifications given his extensive track record as a European Council veteran (Christiansen, 2016, p. 1001). Hence the European Council nominated Juncker for the presidency of the Commission, and on 15 July 2014 his election was completed by the EP with a majority of 422 votes (56% of all MEPs).

The European Council reclaiming its autonomy in 2019

The interpretation of article 17.7 TEU

Compared to 2014, all actors were better prepared for the election process of the Commission President in 2019. The success of the 2014 Spitzenkandidaten-process certainly emboldened the EP party-groups. This was reflected in the report, prepared by the Spanish EPP-member Esteban González Pons, that the parliament adopted in January 2018 (European Parliament, 2018; Raube, 2020, p. 28). In this report, the EP presented the Spitzenkandidaten-process as part and parcel of a process of EP-centred parliamentarisation, claiming that its reading of Article 17.7 ‘reflects the interinstitutional balance between the Parliament and the European Council as provided for in the Treaties’, and adding that ‘this further step in strengthening the Union’s parliamentary dimension is a principle that cannot be overturned’. The EP proceeded to warn that:

the European Parliament will be ready to reject any candidate in the investiture procedure of the President of the Commission who was not appointed as a ‘Spitzenkandidat’ in the run-up to the European elections

In its sideling of the autonomous role for the European Council, this reading goes directly against the conception of the EU as a demoi-cracy. From a demoi-cratic perspective Article 17.7 rather appears as a three-step back-and-forth procedure: the opening shot is issued by the European voters in the European elections; then the member state governments weigh in; and eventually, the choice of Commission President is endorsed by the EP. For member state governments who were not willing to succumb to the EP’s interpretation of the article, the main concern thus became how they would retain control over the second step of nominating a candidate without that step being forced by the EP party-groups.

The role of the European party-groups

Following the Spitzenkandidaten-success in 2014, most European parties kept the same procedure for selecting their candidates in 2019 (Wolfs et al., 2021). Only in the case of the ALDE party it was apparent that member state governments had become more attentive to the process. Rather than promoting a single Spitzenkandidat, ALDE opted for a ‘Team Europe’ of no less than seven candidates. While formally insisting that there was little point to the Spitzenkandidaten-process without the introduction of transnational lists for the EP elections, the adoption of a team of candidates ultimately reflected divisions among the party membership and, specifically, the envisaged joining of French MEPs of President Macron’s La République en marche (Christiansen & Shackleton, 2019, p. 50; de Wilde, 2020, p. 38). Macron was known to be critical of the Spitzenkandidaten-procedure and unwilling to have the EP party-groups tie the hands of the Heads of Government on determining the Commission President nominee.

In most other parties the process seemed to proceed very much like five years earlier. The Social-Democrats gathered around Commission Vice-President Frans Timmermans as their Spitzenkandidat. The European Left followed the example of the Greens by opting for a tandem of two candidates: Slovenian parliamentarian Violeta Tomic and Belgian trade unionist Nico Cué. The Greens reverted from the open primary to an election by representatives of the member parties. German MEP Ska Keller emerged again as the most preferred candidate, and she teamed up with Dutch MEP Bas Eickhout. What is more, this time two more European parties put forward a candidate. The ECR party family chose Czech MEP Jan Zahradil, and the European Free Alliance (EFA, regionalists) ran with Oriol Junqueras, removed vice-president of Catalonia.

Because it was bound to become the biggest parliamentary group again, the most important nomination process was that of the EPP. The EPP had again two prominent candidates running against each other: EP party-group leader Manfred Weber and former Finnish Prime Minister Alexander Stubb. Eventually, Weber beat Stubb by a considerable margin of 492 against 127 votes. Weber succeeded in not only capitalising on his relations with members of the EP but also in securing the support from most member parties, including most importantly the big CDU/CSU-delegation from his fatherland (Herszenhorn, 2018).

Still, Weber appeared as a much less compelling candidate than his predecessor Jean-Claude Juncker. Unlike Juncker (and, indeed, unlike Stubb), he had no experience in government. What is more, his leadership of the biggest EP party-group had not necessarily secured him the respect of other political groups. Specifically, Weber was criticised for pandering to Fidesz, the Hungarian EPP member, while it ran a government that, by all indications, was engaged in a domestic campaign of backsliding on the rule of law and democracy (Kelemen, 2019). Obviously, Weber’s German nationality and membership of the CSU-part of Merkel’s CDU-CSU tandem, guaranteed access to the main national government in the EU. However, it also risked making his political fortune dependent on the willingness of Berlin to support him.

The EP’s reception of the election outcome

At the EP elections of May 2019, the EPP and the S&D continued their trend of long-term decline, each of them losing about 40 seats (Crum, 2020). Still, with 182 seats (just short of 25%), the EPP remained the biggest group. However, for the first time since 1979, the combined seat share of the EPP and the S&D fell below 50%. Hence, any candidate for the Commission presidency would need the support of at least three party-groups.

Two days after the ballot boxes closed on Sunday 26 May, the presidents of the EP party-groups met. However, contrary to what happened in 2014, they did not issue a joint statement that it would be up to the Spitzenkandidat of the biggest party-group, i.e., Manfred Weber of the EPP, to be the first candidate to be considered for the Commission Presidency. Instead, they merely confirmed the general commitment that the next Commission President was to be chosen from among the candidates that had been put forward by the party-groups (European Parliament, 2019).

Thus, the position of the EP was less unified and outspoken than it had been five years earlier. Notably, it were the big parties other than the EPP that were more hesitant this time around. As seen, with Macron gaining leverage over the ALDE group, the group’s commitment to the Spitzenkandidaten-process had become less than half-hearted. In turn, the S&D was this time less willing to trade its party-group interest for the institutional interest of the EP than it had been under Martin Schulz. With the EPP having lost seats, it became a less unassailable partner to construct a majority in the EP.

The dynamics in the European Council

In the European Council, the political divisions as well as the resistance against Weber’s candidacy were even stronger than in the EP (Herszenhorn et al., 2019). These divisions were sharpened by the fact that the EPP share in the European Council was exceptionally small. With Sebastian Kurz having been stepped down in Austria and Kyriakos Mitsotakis only coming into office after the Greek elections of 7 July, the number of EPP Heads of Government was down to eight, while S&D and ALDE/RENEW each had seven affiliates in the European Council. What is more, a coalition between the Liberals and the Social-Democrats emerged to prevent the Christian-Democrats from claiming the Commission presidency. Whereas the Social-Democrats, led by Spanish Prime Minister Sánchez, were mostly keen to break the EPP’s grip on the EU’s top positions, Macron spearheaded the Liberals in seeking to break the EP’s claim to power.

After a first European Council on 20 June failed to reach agreement on a Commission President nominee, the coalition of Social-Democrats and Liberals seemed close to win Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel over to accept the Social-Democratic Spitzenkandidat Frans Timmermans (Herszenhorn et al., 2019; de Wilde, 2020, p. 48). However, Merkel was called back by other EPP Prime Ministers who were not going to allow her to trade away the Commission Presidency. What is more, Timmermans’ candidacy ran into vehement objections from governments from Central and Eastern Europe who considered him the main advocate in the Commission for imposing sanctions on Hungary and Poland for violations of the rule of law.

On Sunday 30 June a special European Council was called to resolve the issue. For two days, the meeting remained deadlocked. Eventually, it was French President Emmanuel Macron who came up with German Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen as a suitable candidate (d’Hoore & van Haver, 2019). Von der Leyen was an option that Bundeskanzlerin Merkel could not refuse – even though she would eventually be the one Head of Government withholding her vote under pressure of her Social-Democratic coalition partner – given that she came from her own country, from her own party, and was a personal confidante. Promoted by Macron, von der Leyen was acceptable to the Liberals, who had in the meantime already secured the position of European Council president for Belgian Prime Minister Michel. Von der Leyen’s nomination was also acceptable to the governments from Central and Eastern Europe as it promised to end the candidacy of Timmermans. Eventually, also the Social-Democratic Prime Ministers realised that they could not trump a Franco-German agreement, and Spanish Prime Minister Sánchez saw the position of EU High Representative being handed to PSOE veteran Josep Borrell.

Now the question was whether the newly elected EP would stand by the commitment of its predecessor: would the parliament reject von der Leyen for the fact that she was no Spitzenkandidat? As it turned out, most EU party-groups quickly rallied behind the agreement reached by the Heads of Government. The only party-group where a rejection was seriously entertained still was S&D, particularly among the 16 members from the German SPD. With their former leader Martin Schulz, they had been most wedded to the Spitzenkandidaten-process (Herszenhorn et al., 2019). However, most EP party-groups realised that the chances of the Spitzenkandidaten were finished. Weber had withdrawn and Timmermans’s candidacy had no chance of being revived. Hence, rejecting von der Leyen would return the issue to the European Council. Even if the Heads of Government would be willing to look for another nominee, they were not going to return to a Spitzenkandidat. Thus, von der Leyen succeeded in securing the majority support of the EP, even if she attained only seven votes above the required majority.

Discussion and conclusion

The critical difference between 2014 and 2019 is that in 2019 the European Council reasserted itself and was unwilling to hand the institutional win to the EP. In 2014, the Heads of Government were ill-prepared: the European parties were given free rein in nominating their candidates and the European Council did not have an alternative to Juncker as he was put forward by the EP party-groups (Christiansen, 2016, p. 1001). Having learned from these events, in 2019 the governments reasserted their control over the process and prevented the Spitzenkandidaten-process from becoming an institutional rule. Guided by Emanuel Macron, they quickly rejected the candidacy of Manfred Weber and, after that, the possibility that they would nominate any other Spitzenkandidat. Thus, the 2019 events give credence to the demoi-cratic perspective.

Apart from the decision-making in the European Council, intimations of a more double-handed approach came to the fore already earlier in the process. Among the party-groups, ALDE decided to revise its nomination procedure and the EPP elected a candidate who, given his particular vulnerabilities, could be manipulated by the governments. Political divisions and the wishes of affiliated national leaders also resonated in the EP party-groups. They backtracked on their commitment to the Spitzenkandidaten-process and did not close ranks around Weber as their key candidate.

It is an open question what will happen in 2024. If one is committed to the EP-centred parliamentarisation thesis, then one may consider the 2019 events as a temporal setback and expect the EP to relaunch the Spitzenkandidaten-process. In contrast, the findings in the various stages of the 2019 process suggest that national leaders are unlikely to allow the EP to reclaim the Spitzenkandidaten-process.

If the EP is indeed unable to reclaim the Spitzenkandidaten-process, then this reveals some critical limits to the EP-centred parliamentarisation-thesis that is implied in most theories of inter-institutional politics in the EU. EP-centred parliamentarisation misjudges the power awareness of the Heads of Government and, more fundamentally, it has a deficient understanding of the power balance that underlies the Union. Instead, the demoi-cratic perspective as it has been developed in this article underlines that the national governments maintain critical controls over the distribution of powers in the EU and that they retain a claim to legitimising EU decisions independent from the EP. For these reasons, they can be pressurised to share powers, but it would fundamentally undermine their standing if they were to allow powers to be fully transferred to the EP.

If we follow the demoi-cratic perspective, the way forward for the election of the Commission President cannot lie in resolving the balance in favour of either the EP or the European Council. Instead, the procedure of Article 17.7 needs proper completion, including a process for inter-institutional resolution in case the two institutions end up in a deadlock. Taking a cue from the conciliation procedure in the EU legislative process, one might for instance establish a joint search committee following the EP elections, or at least in those cases where the present process does not lead the European Council and EP to agree on the candidate for Commission President. A joint search committee would still strengthen the position of the EP compared to the situation before the Treaty of Lisbon, but it would place it on a par with the European Council rather than seeking to dominate it.

More generally, as an alternative to EP-centred parliamentarisation, the demoi-cratic perspective offers important hypotheses for future research on EU inter-institutional politics. One is that it underlines that the co-legislation procedure is the end-point of the EP’s emancipation in EU legislation. The EP may gain powers in the few legislative domains in which it does not enjoy equal standing to the member states, but it would not be expected to gain a procedural advantage over the Council – for instance by acquiring a right to legislative initiative – without the Council securing the same right. Instead, the main domains in which the EP still stands structurally behind the member states are executive in character, for instance foreign policy, economic policy coordination, and implementation oversight. Although there is a developing literature on the position of the EP in these domains, it has not been systematically connected to theories of EU inter-institutional politics to explain which factors have prevented the EP from asserting itself so far and under which conditions it may be able to emancipate itself still. Also in these cases, the central tenet of the demoi-cratic perspective is to be tested as it predicts that the EP can come on a par with the member states but that it will not overtake them.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Valentin Kreilinger, Alvaro Oleart, and three anonymous reviewers for excellent comments on earlier drafts of this article, and to the JEPP editors for their guidance through the review process. A very first version of the argument of this article was presented at the Conference ‘10 Years Treaty of Lisbon. Still fit for Purpose?’ on 6 December 2019 at the RENFORCE Centre for Regulation and Enforcement in Europe at Utrecht University.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

Research for this article has been carried out as part of the RECONNECT project, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Framework Programme under grant agreement No. 770142.

Notes on contributors

Ben Crum

Ben Crum is Professor of Political Science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

Notes

1 Also the (non-binding) Declaration 11 that was attached to the Treaty of Lisbon offers nothing but good intentions as it submits:

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.

2 An exception is the constitutional law analysis by Lupo (2020), who relies on the fate of the Spitzenkandidaten-process to argue that the EU is on its way to a particular parliamentary form of government, which he labels ‘assembly-consensual’, and in which also the Council retains its role. While taking a different approach, there is considerable convergence between Lupo’s position and the position argued for in this article.

3 A third candidate, Latvian Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis, withdrew his candidacy shortly before the vote.