05 Sep 2018

Spitzenkandidat Spitball. The wide implications of the coming European Parliament elections

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In baseball, a spit-ball is an illegal but often easily concealed pitch where the deployment of saliva means that the ball moves in an unanticipated direction. The Spitzenkandidat process of choosing the President of the European Commission via the European Parliament elections which precede that selection is not illegal but it is constitutionally controversial and, as will be illustrated in this Insight, it can have a similar impact to that of an unconventional pitch in America’s national sport.

The significance of this starts with an event which is in the process of occurring today in Brussels. After a meeting of the European People’s Party bloc of MEPs, Manfred Weber, the leader of that grouping, is about to announce his intention to offer himself as the Spitzenkandidat for the ballot for the next European Parliament, which will take place on 23-26 May next year. He will do so now because he has received the blessing, if not yet the outright endorsement, of Angela Merkel to seek that position. As he will be the effective nominee of the largest single party (the CDU-CSU) of what is currently the largest pan-EU party (the EPP) and from the largest EU member state (Germany), he will start as the strong favourite to be the Spitzenkandidat and therefore the successor to Jean-Claude Juncker.

The very fact that Mr Weber is a German is contentious by itself in some quarters. No German has been the President of the European Commission since the first holder of that post, Walter Hallstein, served from 1958-1967 and that was when the then EEC had but six members and the role of its President was very modest. The reluctance to have another German is largely because the reality that Berlin is ‘top dog’ within the EU is clear enough without reinforcing the point by having one of its nationals at the helm of the Commission.

In different circumstances, Mrs Merkel would not have had much enthusiasm for the EPP, with whom she is aligned, nominating a fellow national. In 2014, she backed the centre-right Mr Juncker (despite a host of personal reservations she had about him) over Martin Schultz, a German, who was the leader for the Party of European Socialists (PES). This time, however, her domestic standing is much lower. Mr Weber is a Bavarian and from the Christian Social Union, the theoretically junior sister party to her own CDU, and the CSU is in a state of near revolt as it expects to lose its overall majority in Bavaria in the state election there on 14 October (see the BVCA Insight of 15 August). Backing Mr Weber may be the only means of quelling serious internal dissent. As will be outlined, if Mr Weber is indeed to be the chosen one, the ramifications are wide indeed.

What is this Spitzenkandidat stuff anyway?

A good question. It has emerged by something of a political coup by the European Parliament. For most of the history of the EU, the elections for the European Parliament and the selection of the President of the European Commission were unrelated to one another. There was a widespread sense, nevertheless, that the means by which the Commission President was anointed, which was essentially a backroom deal between the leaders of the various EU countries, was unseemly. As a result, the Treaty of Lisbon which came into effect on 1 December 2009, declared, via Article 17 (7), that all future Presidents of the European Commission would be nominated by the EU Council (national leaders) after “taking into account the results of the European Parliament elections” and would then require the positive vote of a majority in the European Parliament to assume office.

This wording is ambiguous to put it mildly. In the run-up to the European Parliament ballot of 2014 the various major parties in the Parliament did a deal among themselves. They would all choose leaders who would present themselves as alternative contenders to be the next President of the Commission and whichever party won the most votes across the EU would be regarded by all of the mainstream parties as the sole acceptable figure to become the Commission President thereafter. National leaders were basically bounced into accepting this interpretation of the EU Treaty and televised debates were held among the Spitzenkandidats in the months before the 2014 poll.

Why have I never heard of this before?

Probably because you may well be British. Interest in the European Parliament elections in the UK was always notoriously low. In 2014 a mere 35.6% of eligible UK citizens voted compared with an admittedly pathetic 42.6% of the EU overall. That meagre turnout was at least an improvement on the absolute nadir of 1999, when only 24% of UK voters actually voted. This was a state of affairs considered so awful that from there on afterwards, every five years the local council elections in Britain were moved to coincide with the European Parliament ballot in an attempt to make the participation rate for the Brussels/Strasbourg legislature less dire. This sort of worked but had the side effect in 2009 and 2014 of hugely increasing UKIP’s representation in council chambers too.

Two other factors explain the almost universal ignorance of the Spitzenkandidat system in the UK. The first is that as a sop to his right-wing, David Cameron, when campaigning to be the leader of the Conservative Party in 2005, promised to remove Conservative MEPs from the ‘federalist’ EPP. After a while, he managed to relocate them into the far smaller, freshly invented, European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) faction. So, the governing UK political party in 2014 was irrelevant to the EPP, and the ECR which it had created refused to put forward a Spitzenkandidat. All a bit embarrassing.

The second element is that the UK media (even the elements of it which quite likes the EU) has long been absolutely obsessed with the vertical distribution of authority within the EU (the relative power of nation states versus ‘Brussels’) while taking virtually no interest in the horizontal distribution of authority within the EU between the Council of Ministers, the EU Commission and EU Parliament. Yet for most of the last decade, the vertical activism has stalled to allow time for the effects of the arrival of the euro and hence the eurozone, the huge expansion of the EU’s membership in 2004 and consequent extension of the Schengen area to settle. The horizontal moves have been the real story.

Why will any of this matter?

There are multiple reasons why it matters but three are of immediate interest. The first is that if Manfred Weber is the EPP Spitzenkandidat then Michel Barnier, who has spent most of 2018 as the frontrunner, cannot be it. The UK has long suspected that Mr Barnier, who lost the EPP nomination to Mr Juncker in 2014, desperately wanted the prize this time and was playing the Brexit process with that in mind. If the EU’s Chief Negotiator concludes that he does not have the backing of either Mrs Merkel or Emmanuel Macron, the French President, who would prefer not to associate himself with the EPP but with the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats in Europe (ALDE), then he will not put his hat in the ring when the decision finally occurs at an EPP convention in Helsinki in November. He might be more inclined to have Brexit settled as swiftly as possible and move on to something else.

The second consideration is what it would probably mean for the European Union’s political agenda. Coming from the CSU, Mr Weber is very much on the conservative wing of the EPP and is extremely sensitive to the importance of immigration as an issue. Dealing with it could well become the most important priority for him and the Commission if he is put in charge of it.

Finally, if a German is to head the Commission, then it is virtually inconceivable that a German could be the next President of the European Central Bank, an utterly crucial role, when Mario Draghi stands down next year. That plum would be in the de facto gift of Mr Macron as part of an unstated political bargain. Enter the well-regarded Christine Lagarde, the (French) Managing Director of the IMF, into the ECB? The side-effects of the Spitzenkandidat saga on medium term Eurozone interest rates might prove profound.

Tim Hames
Director General, BVCA


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