Juncker’s triumph would be revolutionary for the EU
Revolution is a strong word. But if, as looks likely, EU leaders bow to the European Parliament’s will this week and pick Jean-Claude Juncker to be the next European Commission president, it will represent a shift of power to the legislature at the expense of the other EU lawmaking institutions – the commission and the bloc’s 28 national governments.
More quickly than their opponents thought possible, the political parties that control parliament are forcing government leaders, for the first time in the EU’s 56-year history, to endorse a presidential candidate they themselves have not chosen. True, the precedent set will not be as stunning as the 1964 legal case, Costa v Enel, which established the supremacy of the EU over national law. But it is substantial and possibly irreversible.
An attachment to legal procedure runs deep in EU traditions. This redistribution of power will occur without the sanction of an inter-governmental treaty, such as the Maastricht and Lisbon accords of 1992 and 2009. It will be a political reality nonetheless. Two consequences will surely flow from it.
First, as a heavy political defeat for David Cameron, the UK prime minister, it will push Britain closer to the EU exit door. It will increase the likelihood of an in-out referendum in which pro-EU forces risk being on the back foot.
Not only will Mr Cameron have failed to block Mr Juncker’s appointment, the European parliament will also become more powerful just when British influence there will be at its lowest ebb. Such are the fruits of the success in last month’s EU elections of the anti-EU UK Independence party – and the self-exclusion of Mr Cameron’s Conservatives from the legislature’s largest group, the centre-right European People’s party.
Come a referendum, many British voters will have a mental picture of a strange, Strasbourg-based parliament that shapes laws for the UK but in which the British voice struggles to be heard.
Second, the parliament’s triumph will damage the commission’s authority by making it more subservient to the EU legislature. It will politicise a body supposed to consist of commissioners who, working with their non-partisan civil service, represent the general EU interest rather than their home nations.
Even on a good day, the salty smell of politics wafts through the commission’s corridors. But Mr Juncker’s appointment will put the commission in uncharted territory. No president has been in such thrall as he will be to the parliament’s dominant political parties. The Commission’s role as an impartial regulator of business competition, fiscal rules and much more will be in question from day one.
David Cameron is under pressure from all sides and faces a delicate balancing act in attempting to renegotiate an acceptable UK membership settlement with the EU
Likewise, the political parties will seek to capture the 27 commissioners who will serve Mr Juncker. Before taking office, every would-be commissioner must undergo a confirmation hearing, akin to a grilling by the US Senate. The EU legislature bared its teeth in 2004 by forcing the withdrawal of Rocco Buttiglione, an Italian candidate. In 2010 it skewered Bulgaria’s Rumiana Jeleva. This time, the political parties are trying – with what success remains to be seen – to influence the choice of commissioner made by each national capital even before Mr Juncker toasts his appointment.
It will not stop there. During the parliament’s five-year term, parties that support closer EU integration and command a majority in the assembly will maximise their input into the laws that the commission, under EU treaty rules, has the main responsibility of drawing up.
The assembly itself cannot propose laws. But the parties can and will exert influence through the powerful legislative committees that scrutinise the commission’s activity – and through less formal political contacts with individual commissioners.
The parliament’s power grab should not surprise EU governments, least of all London. Under the banner of democracy, elected assemblies have done this for the past 400 years of European history, nowhere more famously than in 17th-century England.
Are some governments regretting the way events are unfolding? Yes. But it was national governments which, over the past two decades, increased the parliament’s powers in one EU treaty after another. Now they are reaping the whirlwind.