After every election of the European Parliament, one of the most challenging tasks of the operation of the European Union takes place: the confirmation, meaning putting into office the new European Commission.
The European Commission is composed of 27 commissioners, one nominated by every member state’s government. The governments are free to nominate whoever they wish and it is the task of the freshly elected president of the Commission to allocate the right task (“portfolio”) to every commissioner. Even though the commissioners are nominated by the member states’ governments, from the moment they take the office, they have to work for the interests of the EU and not the interests of the member state nominating them. This is vitally important for the work of the Commission: if any doubt of conflict of interest would arise related to any commissioner’s work, it would seriously jeopardise the Commission’s operation as a whole, especially when it comes to its responsibilities regarding control over member states’ activities.
The process
The process of the creation of the new college of EU commissioners involves several steps from practically all actors of the EU, meaning the member states and the European Parliament.
The first step is nominations by member states’ governments as mentioned above. The candidates are usually selected based on their experience and political background, reflecting somewhat the values of the nominating government. It is not a requirement, but a political practical reality, that governments usually nominate individuals who are not far from their political ideas, since they are practically free to choose their candidates.
The President of the European Commission plays a unique role in the process. Before the future commissioners are nominated, he/she is already in office as a president-elect: the candidate for the President has to be proposed by the European Council with a qualified majority, taking into account the results of the European Parliamentary elections (this process is unregulated, while there were constant attempts to formalise it via the so-called Spitzenkandidat-system, about which we have prepared an analysis quite early and revisited the question in a recent event of ours). The European Parliament then elects the proposed candidate with a majority of the votes cast. After this, the candidate is officially appointed as President of the European Commission by the European Council. This visibly lengthy process ensures that the President of the European Commission has the support of both the member states and the directly elected representatives of EU citizens, striking a balance between intergovernmental and supranational elements of EU governance.
The newly elected president is responsible for the distribution of the so-called portfolios (areas of responsibility), in consultation with the member states, to each of the commissioners nominated later. Here is an interesting point: the European Commission does not work with pre-determined structural entities, like ministries of governments in member states (where it is common to have a law about the ministries and often politicians are allocated to those, not the other way round), the President is free to organise various tasks into these portfolios – which usually happens when already knowing about the member states’ nominees.
The President-elect has to allocate these portfolios to the nominees, making a plan about the future Commission. He/she may have discussions with the member states to ensure a balanced and effective team, or in a worse case, a possible team, considering resistance from the European Parliament. Based on this, he/she may suggest changes to member states to ensure the best mix of skills and expertise, but the member states are not obliged to cooperate. To put it roughly: a member state is capable of blocking the whole process by sticking to the nomination of an individual being totally unacceptable to the majority of the European Parliament – something that we have already seen a few times during the history of the EU.
A vitally important part of the process is the hearing and approval of the new Commission by the European Parliament. The President has to present his/her plan for confirmation, and each nominee for each portfolio is subject to individual hearings before the relevant committees of the European Parliament. During these hearings, the nominees are usually questioned about their qualifications and their plans for their assigned portfolios. As this is a political process, these hearings are not only and exclusively are about professional qualities but may easily become political battlefields. Poor performance of a nominee leads to mounting political pressure on the President, on the European political party that had nominated him/her and may easily lead to changes, even withdrawal of the given candidate, to make sure that the European Parliament confirms the new Commission.
After the hearings, the European Parliament votes to approve or reject the entire Commission as a whole. In the case of approval, the Council of the European Union formally appoints the President and the Commissioners, and the new European Commission is in place, ready to start its work for the next five years until the next European election year.
The process and the European Parliament
As it is clearly visible from the above, the European Parliament plays a crucial role in the process of the confirmation of the European Commission. It is fair to argue that this is the only period of time, when the European Parliament exercises actual political power over the EU’s executive (not mentioning here the possibility of the withdrawal of the Commission as a whole). During the past years, the parliamentary confirmation process has often been used by the EP to try to apply pressure on the President, but it usually did not have long-lasting results. Its effect was rather more apparent on the preparatory work of the President-elect, like this year: Ursula von der Leyen has noticeably allocated relevant portfolios not only to please member states but also relevant political groups of the European Parliament. The result is, that we do not expect any harsh rejections this year – see more about that later.
There have been a few notable instances earlier, where EU Commission candidates were rejected by the European Parliament. When we talk about “rejection”, we have to emphasise again, that this is not a formal step, as the EP only votes about confirming the whole Commission, not the individual commissioners – strongarming the President-elect, to try to force him/her and threaten him/her with blocking the whole Commission to have the given candidate changed is politically risky, as the President-elect may easily call the bluff and still take the college to vote. So “rejection” usually takes the form of a consensual swap of the given candidate, negotiated by the President-elect and the nominating member state government – the latter also knowing the game so it is not unusual that the nominating government has other candidate(s) up to his sleeve. This political game is clearly not favourable to the President-elect, so Ursula von der Leyen tried to circumvent this by asking the member states to propose a man and a woman as candidate – this is not only a noble step towards gender equality, but also a smart attempt to have more space of manoeuvring for herself with the nominees.
Rocco Buttiglione from Italy in 2004 has been rejected due to his controversial views on homosexuality and women’s roles in society, facing intense criticism from Italian left-wing politicians. It has to be added that his nomination already raised some eyebrows as many argue that Silvio Berlusconi, then prime minister of Italy has intentionally tried to give a hard time to then president-elect José Manuel Barroso by nominating someone being totally unacceptable. 2019 has seen the rejection of Sylvie Goulard from France because of concerns over her financial ties to a U.S. think tank, and the rejection of László Trócsányi from Hungary (previous minister of justice), who was rejected by the European Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee due to concerns over conflicts of interest, as there were issues related to his previous roles and connections that raised questions about his ability to exercise his functions impartially. These were raised e.g. over his connection to the law firm still under his name, with a close connection to the government. Fun fact: this law firm still represents political cases and pro-government actors, and even the current Hungarian judge of the European Court of Justice has worked earlier for this law firm as an attorney, and despite not having relevant judicial practice, he was still put to the General Court in 2016, then to the European Court of Justice in 2021 as the candidate of the Hungarian government.
What will happen in the European Parliament now?
The current hearings are scheduled for this November. We are currently evaluating the different candidates (You can read those individual analyses on our website) and expecting intense situations with the following candidates:
The biggest question marks are around Olivér Várhelyi from Hungary, who has been serving as commissioner for EU enlargement during the last term, but is now set to be responsible for the portfolio on health and animal welfare, which is seen by many as a kind of demotion. Várhelyi, who was nominated in 2019 as a substitute for Trócsányi, is not only widely seen as a loyal ally of Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s right-wing extremist prime minister, but also raised criticism on his own right with his performance during the previous term. However, his current hearings in the European Parliament have gone more smoothly than expected by many.
Ekaterina Zaharieva from Bulgaria has to face hard time not only for political reasons, but could also fail to win approval because of being caught up in a criminal scandal: as the former foreign minister, her role is subject to scrutiny in a scandal at home involving the sale of Bulgarian passports. This is more than an ordinary political problem and may raise issues with the European Parliament.
Probably the right-wing populist political groups of the European Parliament will try to object to Belgium’s liberal candidate, Hadja Lahbib, but they cannot state any strong reason for a rejection, and her hearings have not produced any troubling signs. The candidate from Malta, Glenn Micallef has been criticised for having too little political experience to be an EU commissioner, even if he was allocated one of the “weakest” portfolios, the one for education, youth, sport and culture – but again, there are no real reasons that would make him unacceptable.
The right-wing-extremist candidate from Italy, Raffaele Fitto, may also have some hard time with the European Parliament and the hearings. But as we predict, he will not be rejected, as Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni will support him and her current pro-European stance and politically profitable connection to von der Leyen will be enough to keep him in the status. None of the relevant EP groups has expressed serious intent in rejecting him.
To sum up, the upcoming hearings in the European Parliament may be intense, but probably no blood will be shed this time. Still, the European Parliament will make its power felt by making some noise, but as mentioned earlier, it rather affects the preparatory work of the President-elect, Ursula von der Leyen. By allocating relevant portfolios according to the interests of member states and the relevant political groups of the European Parliament, she has tried to make sure that everybody has more interest in not blocking the new Commission, than in blocking it.
If all goes well, the next step will be the closure of the hearings dated at 21 November by the Conference of Presidents (EP President Metsola and political group chairs) based on recommendations by the committees, and then the evaluations will be published. The election of the full college of Commissioners (by a majority of the votes cast, by roll-call) is currently scheduled to take place during the 25-28 November plenary session in Strasbourg.