Ursula Von Der Leyen’s comfortable re-appointment as EU Commission President by the European Parliament yesterday afternoon should come as no surprise, both given the makeup of the parliament and its very limited role in choosing who the Commission President is.
It should also be noted, as yours truly has written here a number of times, that the primary objection to her re-appointment here in Ireland – her stance on Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza – is simply not widely shared across Europe, where she is far closer to the political mainstream on the continent than anyone in Irish politics is. Listening to the speeches in the parliament ahead of the vote yesterday, it was readily apparent that Von Der Leyen’s opposition was much more widely drawn from those with concerns over immigration and climate policy than it was over those few MEPs disgruntled over her friendship with Israel.
For euroskeptics, the EU parliament is a troublesome body. On the one hand, it is the only directly elected democratic institution in the European Union, and just about the only way that voters can directly influence what happens in Brussels. On the other hand, the more powers it gets, the stronger the idea of Eurofederalism becomes and the more the EU drifts towards superstate status. In the case of the re-appointment of Von Der Leyen, there’s a natural conflict between those who might prefer that the parliament had a greater role in choosing an occupant of Von Der Leyen’s seat, and those who might rightly fear that empowering the EU Parliament to directly elect a Commission President would be a huge step towards a single EU state.
As it is, the compromise is somewhat unsatisfactory: The Parliament has the power to accept Von Der Leyen, or reject her, but it does not have the power to nominate any potential replacement. Had MEPs said “no” to her yesterday, the EU Council (the heads of member state Governments) would simply have nominated somebody else who held to broadly the same policy positions as Von Der Leyen.
There’s another troublesome element to this, which is that the parliament votes on her ratification by secret ballot, which strikes this writer, at least, as inherently undemocratic. Voters have a right to know, I’d argue, whether MEPs kept their promises when it came to ratifying her nomination: Fianna Fáil MEPs, for example, pledged to vote against her. Did they keep that promise? We do not know. There is, to my knowledge, no other vote that MEPs cast in secret. The system seems almost perfectly designed to allow candidates to say one thing to voters, and then to do another thing in private in order to keep themselves in good standing with a Commission President that they calculate is likely to win anyway.
Given all of that, there are I think reasonable questions to ask about what democratic utility is provided by the charade of having Von Der Leyen – or any other nominee – go before the parliament at all. There are many downsides, and few upsides.
The chief downside, I would argue, is that it imbues what is essentially an administrative position with democratic legitimacy. Most of the objections in Ireland to Von Der Leyen centre around her endorsement of Israel in the aftermath of the Hamas terrorist attack on that country on October 7th last. While one might disagree with the motivation behind that criticism, there is a more than reasonable case to be made that Von Der Leyen has no true mandate to speak on behalf of the people of Europe since her position is that of a civil servant. However, this proposition becomes harder to sustain when the European Parliament essentially votes her a democratic mandate and she is the choice of the people’s representatives.
At the same time, that democratic mandate is illusory, as the EU parliament which ratifies her doesn’t have any other candidates to choose from at the time it ratifies her nomination. The whole system ends up with the worst of both worlds: An appointed leader who can reasonably claim to have a democratic mandate from the only elected body in the EU.
The result of this is and will be, inexorably, further testing of the boundaries of her office from Von Der Leyen and her successors. It is often forgotten today that the post of US President, for example, is actually a relatively weak one in terms of domestic policy: The President cannot formally initiate laws, or pass a budget, or get the Congress to do anything. His power in that system comes almost entirely from the fact that politicians feel compelled to recognise him as the leader of that country and thus allow him to set the agenda. A similar trend is emerging slowly with the position of EU Commission President: Her democratic mandate allows her to speak on the world stage as the voice of Europe, when her position was designed to be anything but.
The irony here is that almost anything you do to make her position more democratically accountable would also strengthen her power to set the agenda in Europe. The objective of Euroskeptics, therefore, should not be to try and vote for someone else, but to remove the illusion of a democratic mandate from Von Der Leyen’s position entirely.