EU leaders: jobs for the boys (and girls)
After nearly 50 hours of negotiations, EU leaders emerged bleary-eyed last week, to announce that they had finally agreed their nominations for Brussels’s top jobs. Ursula von der Leyen, Germany’s defence minister and a close ally of Angela Merkel, was tapped to replace Jean-Claude Juncker as president of the European Commission; Belgium’s PM, Charles Michel, will take over from Donald Tusk as president of the European Council; Spain’s Josep Borrell will head up foreign affairs; and at the European Central Bank,
Christine Lagarde – the head of the IMF, and a former French finance minister – will replace Mario Draghi. These appointments must be approved by the European Parliament (EP), and it’s possible Von der Leyen’s will not be; but assuming they do go ahead, what does it mean for the bloc?
For one thing, it means that the EU looks pretty undemocratic, said The Independent. The Commission president is supposed to be selected by the Spitzenkandidaten (“lead candidate”) system, so that voters have a say in who runs the executive. The idea is that each grouping in the EP selects a lead candidate (who campaigns as such in the EU elections) and the one from the biggest group wins. But many national leaders do not like this informal system – and in this year’s inevitably complex horse-trading, they rejected, for various reasons, all the lead candidates. Von der Leyen emerged as the compromise choice. But while her nomination was welcomed in many parts of Europe, it was met with dismay in her own country, said Stephen Glover in the Daily Mail. In Germany, she is regarded as a weak minister, a failure at defence who is facing an inquiry into corruption at the ministry. Then there is Lagarde – a politician with no experience of central banking, who has a criminal conviction for negligence with public money. Throw in Michel, a close ally of Emmanuel Macron, and it looks like another “Franco-German stitch-up”.
On the plus side, both Lagarde and Von der Leyen are experienced administrators, said The Economist. They can be expected to act pragmatically and purposefully – and Von der Leyen in particular will need to. She will be leading an increasingly fractious EU as it faces tough decisions on everything from climate change to migration; and must respond to a more assertive Russia, a more powerful China and a more isolationist US. Added to that, she is due to start work on 1 November, one day after the UK may have crashed out of the EU without a deal. She is, in short, facing interesting times.