The prime minister delivered another chest-beating performance, designed and delivered for the pleasure of his backbenchers, when the question of the next commission president featured in this week’s PMQs, but the more nuanced intervention of John Major yesterday might be the way to go.
David Cameron has managed to paint himself into a Brussels corner, once again. His handling of the discussion around who will be the next European commission president has been a fine example of how to lose friends and alienate people, not least the German chancellor, who Cameron counts as one of the key leaders if he is to secure his European Union objectives.
If Cameron was so dead set against Juncker, he should have done his homework earlier. But, having removed his party from the centre-right EPP group, which brings together all the big European centre-right parties, including Angela Merkel’s CDU, he had no say on who the candidate of the party with the best chance to top the European parliament elections polls would be.
Furthermore, his opposition to the principle introduced by the Lisbon Treaty that ‘taking into account the elections to the European parliament […], the European council […], shall propose to the European parliament a candidate for president of the commission’ underestimated how seriously this institutional innovation was taken in Germany and elsewhere in the EU.
His statement that appointing Juncker could make an UK exit from the EU more likely was seen by many as a clumsy, to put it mildly, intervention and a major exaggeration. Juncker has been described as an ultra-federalist, a man from the 80s, someone unable to deliver reform and understand Britain’s vision of the EU. Such characterisations miss the point. Whether one thinks that Juncker is or is not the right man for the job, he is an experienced politician, who has steered his country, one of the most prosperous EU member states, for decades and led eurozone finance ministers through years of difficult negotiations and consensus building in an effort to resolve the financial crisis in the EU, to address the sovereign debt crisis in the eurozone’s peripheral countries and to redesign the governance architecture of the single currency.
As a result, he knows well how the European council works, the EU’s main decision-making body that brings together EU leaders, and how it relates with the EU’s civil service – the European commission – and the assertive and ever more powerful European parliament. He presided over the adoption of some significant reforms, which indeed secured the unanimous support of all eurozone leaders and were advocated by Cameron and George Osborne at the time. He is also the only candidate who expressed the wish to find a fair deal for Britain. So he is neither deaf to Britain’s wishes nor an alienating figure.
In fact he is a pragmatist, one that knows how to build alliances and find common ground, which is the essence of EU consensus-based politics, a domain that Major knows well, which is why yesterday’s intervention should have been an invitation for a more conciliatory tone by Cameron. If he engages constructively with his European partners he is more likely to get his way.
Would it not have been better if he had suggested, right after the EP elections, Juncker for another post, like the presidency of the European council, and put forward another candidate for the European commission?
Rather than wage an ‘Anyone But Juncker’ campaign, he should have built an alliance of member states to put forward an agenda for the next commission that would suit his priorities better. At the end of the day, it is the European council that sets the direction the EU takes, not the commission, whose role within the EU decision-making arena has been significantly minimised.
Instead of putting forward for British commissioner someone who feels the need to declare his Eurosceptic credentials he could send to Brussels a heavy-hitter with a track record of alliance building and an ambitious agenda for the EU’s future, something that would give him a better chance to secure an influential portfolio in the commission.
It might not be too late for Cameron to change direction but time is running out fast. Nobody, not least Merkel, wants the commission president saga to go on for too long. The writing is on the wall.
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Petros Fassoulas is chair of the European Movement
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Isn’t the vagueness of the requirement to “take into account” the results of the Euro elections, the cause of this sorry saga? Juncker believes those results gave him a mandate, Cameron feels they did no such thing. Perhaps democratic reform should have gone further, with the European Parliament alone electing the President of the Commission and requiring Commissioners themselves to be members of the European Parliament. Until this happens, the charge that Europe is run by unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats is likely to stick