Eurobloat #0175 • November 2024
November was the month the Union installed its executive for the next five years, not through anything so vulgar as an election, but through five weeks of confirmation hearings, threats and trades that ended in the narrowest approval any Commission has ever managed.
Folly of the Month: an executive nobody chose, confirmed by the slimmest majority ever
On 27 November the Parliament approved the "von der Leyen II" Commission with 370 votes, the feeblest endorsement a Commission has ever received, and well down on the 401 von der Leyen herself secured in July. The body that will write the rules for 450 million people was seated not by their votes but by a backroom bargain, and even that bargain could barely be struck. A government this remote from the governed would, anywhere else, be called a democratic problem.
1. Five weeks of grilling to seat the chosen
The Parliament spent 4 to 12 November interrogating twenty-six commissioners-designate, three hours each, in a ritual whose outcome was never really in doubt. The theatre of scrutiny is elaborate; the result is decided in the corridors.
2. Sink the whole college? The threat that bought concessions
Socialist MEPs threatened to vote down the entire Commission unless Italy's Raffaele Fitto, a Brothers of Italy man handed the cohesion and reforms brief, was stripped of his executive vice-presidency. Government by hostage-taking is an odd look for the self-styled home of European democracy.
3. Votes for portfolios, portfolios for votes
The big groups ran a "package" in which the whole college rose or fell together, the EPP holding out for Fitto while the Socialists were bought off with Ribera, and the deal was done on 20 November. The college was assembled the way a cabinet of cronies always is, by swapping jobs for support.
4. A mandate shrinking by the year
That 370-vote tally, down sharply from July and resting on a coalition propped up by more right-wing forces, points to a centre that weakens with every cycle. The project's legitimacy is not growing; it is quietly leaking away.
5. Six vice-presidents and a baroque new hierarchy
The new structure came complete with a half-dozen executive vice-presidents and overlapping fiefdoms. When in doubt, Brussels answers a problem with another layer of senior titles.
6. Scrutiny as ritual, not check
Analysts called it "all chill, no grill", and noted that the big groups had agreed before the process even began that every candidate would sail through. A confirmation process whose outcome is settled in advance is not holding anyone to account.
→ ceps.eu
7. Confirmed by a parliament few voters can name
The whole edifice rests on a Parliament that turned out barely half the electorate in June and whose members most Europeans could not identify. Remote power, confirmed by a remote chamber, is the project's enduring design flaw.
8. The far-right surge it was built to keep out
June's elections had sent a record hard-right contingent to Strasbourg, and November's deal-making was partly an exercise in managing that reality while pretending it away. Ignoring the voters is, increasingly, the centre's main occupation.
9. First task: undo the last lot's rules
The freshly installed Commission, in office from 1 December, lined up a "Competitiveness Compass", complete with "omnibus" simplification, to unpick the very regulations its predecessor had piled on. Continuity, in Brussels, means the next team clearing up after the last.
Enjoyed this post?
Well, you could share the post with others, follow me with RSS Feeds and/or send me a comment via email.
Tags
Category:
Year: