We’ve discussed the workings of the Spitzenkandidat (lead candidate) system on this blog before but now let’s look at whether it’s really worth keeping at all. The Spitzenkandidat system was a valiant attempt to give greater democratic legitimacy to the position of European Commission President. But ultimately it has had very little cut through with the general public, fails to be a coherent system and is a solution to the wrong problem. It has not delivered on its promises and abandoning it would be no bad thing.
In theory, the logic is fairly clear. By tying the position of Commission President to the results of the European Parliament elections, the post can be given some democratic legitimacy. The idea was mostly built out of nothing, relying on only a very vague commitment in the Lisbon treaty that the election results should be taken into account when deciding who should hold the position at the head of the European Commission. The fact that the European Parliament was able to impose this method in 2014 goes to show how much more assertive and powerful the institution has become in recent years. Yet the lack of clearly defined mechanisms, that could have been heavily debated and thought through beforehand, also resulted in a system that is roughshod, and which does not make a lot of sense.
On one level the Spitzenkandidat system tries to be parliamentary in nature. It is after all tied to the result of the European Parliament elections and the Commission President appointee must be approved by a majority vote. There is a clear incentive for the European parties (the EPP, ALDE, PES etc) to campaign in the elections and ensure they win the most MEPs to have the best chance of their candidate winning the post. Or at least that should be in the incentive. In reality the European parties don’t exist in any meaningful sense. Citizens vote for national parties and it is national parties who do the campaigning. The European parties do not have any real legal basis on which they could carry out pan-European campaigning anyway. So if the role of these so-called parties is not to campaign and win votes, then what incentive is actually created at the European level? Here the key players are not so much the European parties but their corresponding groups in the European Parliament. Well, they focus on the other way that you can bring together lots of MEPs under your banner – not through effective campaigning but by having a group that is as wide as possible. In this regard, the EPP has been most successful, largely abandoning ideological coherence in favour of size. But the other groups are guilty of this as well to greater or lesser degrees and the net effect has been to create safe havens for a number of populist parties.
Meanwhile the idea of the Spitzenkandidat system being a parliamentary affair is further weakened by the fact that after the winning candidate takes their post, there is little sense among the general public of any link between the new Commission President and their European party. Is the EPP and its national member parties going to be held accountable for the actions of the Juncker Commission? Will members of the public reward or punish EPP parties on this basis? Of course not. To the extent that there is any link between the European Parliament and the Commission presidency, it does not last long.
Then there are aspects of the Spitzenkandidat system that do not feel parliamentary at all and that remind much more of a presidential election. The candidates themselves run highly personalised campaigns with very little in the way of connection back to the European Parliament. Certainly, the name of the European party will appear on promotional material but what does that mean anyway? It’s not something that most European citizens actually see, it’s very difficult to give it extra visibility because the European parties do not campaign as real parties and even if you could surmount those two obstacles, it’s not as if European citizens vote for the European party anyway. This all again highlights the disconnect between a supposedly parliamentary democratic process and the reality that once the candidate as the post, they become purely an individual, operating in an entirely separate institution, not at all connected to the European party to whom they are supposed to owe their position.
Finally, the whole concept of a clear democratic link between the election results and the shape of the European Commission is blown apart by a final truth. The Commission President does not choose their Commissioners. Of course the European Parliament itself gets a say in who these Commissioners are but you can’t get away from the fact that they are appointed by national governments and at some point MEPs have to approve one of the suggestions made by the national government. This means that whatever the results of the European Parliament elections are, the European Commission itself will be heavily influenced by the political hues of the national governments. Now, that may be a good thing – there are many people who would defend the idea that national governments get a key role in the formation of the European Commission. However it does seriously limit what the Spitzenkandidat system can do.
The role of national governments also raises another question: was the Spitzenkandidat idea ever the right solution? If one imagines that the only issue with the Commission was a lack of indirect democratic legitimacy then certainly, the Spitzenkandidat system makes sense. But if national governments have such a big role (under the old system the entire Commission, President included, was appointed by the national governments), then does it make sense to imagine that a lack of indirect democratic input was the problem? Perhaps the real issue is that the Commission’s current powers mean that indirect democratic legitimacy is not enough. This would raise two solutions: a scaling back of its powers, with those taken away to instead by exercised by the European Parliament, or a shift to direct election of the Commission President, with full power to then appoint the rest of the Commission. Either solution could work and both would have its proponents, indicating a shift towards a real parliamentary or presidential system, but what is certain is that the Spitzenkandidat system has failed and something else should take its place.
Europe Votes 