Once every five years the European parliament gets the chance of electing the president of the commission. The council makes a nomination, but it is the parliament that gets the final say. It is the chance for the parliament and its MEPs to flex their muscles.
This year the uncertainty over the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty added a bit of spice to the proceedings. Under the current Nice Treaty rules the commission president needs a simple majority, whereas under the Lisbon rules he would need to have over 50% of all MEPs voting in his favour. To be convincing Barroso needed a ’Lisbon majority’.
The socialists went into the European elections in June conscious that the majority of Europe’s governments are in the hands of the right or centre right. A good result in the euro elections would have given socialists in the parliament more leverage with the centre right dominated council. It was not to be. June saw left wing parties losing almost everywhere in Europe.
The council took the bull by its horns and did not wait to consult the parliament before nominating Jose Manuel Barroso, former centre right prime minister of Portugal, for a second term in office in the commission. The socialist prime ministers of Spain, Portugal and the UK gave full and public endorsements, much to the annoyance of some of their other European comrades.
The parliament, feeling that the council was acting without due regard to its institutional authority responded by delaying the vote on the commission president from July to September, thus putting more pressure on Barroso.
The multilingual former Marxist is not popular with most socialists. His first term brought more liberalisation, a luke warm response to the financial crisis and a standstill on social issues. Other than the Spanish and the Portuguese, drawn by Iberian solidarity rather than politics, no one was enthusiastic about voting for him, and some such as the French and the Greeks were behaving as if the socialists had won the election and could dictate terms. Political reality told the rest that there was no other candidate being put forward and that the best strategy was to extract from Barroso some pre-election promises on key issues.
The Socialists appeared to decide to vote against or at best abstain. They wanted assurances from Barroso that he would be proactive in sponsoring measures to fight unemployment during the recession, put right the ‘Posted Workers Directives’ to prevent workers from one EU country being brought in to undercut local staff and to make sure that the EU delivers on the promises it has made on climate change. Barroso tried to sweet talk the socialists but they held tight and decided to abstain and to withhold their full support until he comes back with his programme and with his full commission line up.
The EPP were always going to support him as their candidate, the Liberals mainly did, and so did the UK Tories, who most bizarrely swallowed Barroso’s pro Lisbon Treaty rhetoric and his talk of greater EU integration and gave him their vote. It was enough to give him a whopping absolute majority.
In his acceptance speech he called for ’a strong Europe led by a strong commission’ and promised to be accountable to all those who wanted an effective Europe. ‘My party is Europe’. Quite where that leaves the Tories no one really knows. As for the socialists their only card is to hope that Barroso, wanting the support of all three major political groups, will be good to his word. Meanwhile, we will keep the pressure on him to deliver the key parts of our programme during the next five years of his commission.