EU Commission Presidency: Will von der Leyen run again?


analysis

Status: 05/06/2023 3:59 p.m

In Brussels, the question of whether the German Commission President will stand for a second term is being hotly debated. It’s about the top candidate principle – and the risks that von der Leyen would take with it.

Hardly anyone in Brussels doubts that Ursula von der Leyen is aiming for a second term as Commission President. But does she also want to be a top candidate? Campaigning as the current Commission President, touring through 27 EU countries and campaigning for votes for the European People’s Party? The EU has never had anything like this.

The issue is being discussed all the more passionately in Brussels. The next European elections will be held in just over a year, and the course must be set soon. But Ursula von der Leyen is silent, she has not yet explained herself. That leaves room for speculation.

She calmly led Europe through crises

The Christian Democrat was actually considered a natural candidate. President of the EU Commission for three years, highly respected throughout Europe and beyond, all the way to Washington – because she has calmly and safely led Europe through serious crises. She has procured vaccines for everyone, organized sanctions against Russia in packages (the eleventh package is currently being worked on) and put pressure on obstructors such as Orban and Morawiecki by withdrawing money.

If she weren’t Commission President, but head of government in an EU capital, for example Chancellor in Berlin or Prime Minister in Madrid – it would be clear that she would be the top candidate for her party in the next election campaign.

The principle of top candidates

But in the EU it’s different. In the EU there is little experience with the leading candidate principle. It is still young and it has only worked once in the Union’s history. It means that only those who have won the elections as Europe-wide top candidates can become President of the Commission.

In 2014, Jean-Claude Juncker was the successful lead candidate of the conservative EPP in the European elections, and the heads of state and government had no problem in subsequently appointing him Commission President. He was one of them, having sat at the summit table as Prime Minister of Luxembourg for 18 years. So no risk. And before the election, Juncker had agreed with his Social Democratic competitor Martin Schulz that the loser would support the winner. This secured the majority in the European Parliament.

In 2019, the EPP candidate crash-landed

However, the leading candidate principle no longer worked in the next European elections. In 2019, the CSU politician Manfred Weber experienced a crash landing. As the EPP’s lead candidate, he received the most votes, but several heads of state and government considered him unsuitable. No government office experience. Weber also had no parliamentary majority behind him.

Von der Leyen came to the head of the commission – a total surprise. French President Macron came up with the idea. The CDU MEP Dennis Radtke finds it all the more important that she is now running as the top candidate for the European elections. “I think the leading candidate principle is correct,” says the MP from the Ruhr area, “because politics always works through personalization and heads.” This is crucial for voter mobilization and fundamentally necessary “in order to further develop European democracy”.

Dobrindt’s blood slide

This is also the case in other parties. The reactions were correspondingly harsh when CSU regional group leader Alexander Dobrindt declared the top candidate principle to be unsuitable. “The fact that the CSU doesn’t want to know anything more about it must be understood as a bloody move in the direction of Ursula von der Leyen,” said FDP MP Moritz Körner.

In the meantime, the CSU grandees, including Markus Söder, have spoken out against Dobrindt and for the top candidate principle. But Dobrindt is not alone in his concerns; they are also voiced by political scientists.

top politicians are mostly unknown abroad

“The lead candidate system was a premature attempt to treat the European Union like a state,” says Michael Leigh, who teaches European politics at the renowned School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Bologna. The reality is very different, Leigh said. If only because renowned top politicians from one country are usually completely unknown in another EU country.

The scientist from Bologna speaks not only from an academic point of view, but also from practical experience. From 2006 to 2011, Michael Leigh was one of the powerful directors-general of the EU Commission, responsible for enlargement.

His conclusion: If the decision for the President of the Commission lies with the heads of state and government, as in most previous cases, they have the opportunity to look for experienced and distinguished ministers or former heads of government in the member countries on the basis of the election results and to send them to the head of the Brussels Commission. However, Parliament’s approval is still required.

Does von der Leyen shy away from an election campaign?

That’s what the EU treaty says (which doesn’t even mention the leading candidate principle), and that’s how it was in the case of Ursula von der Leyen in 2019. It is again important that she herself has not yet commented on the question of whether she wants to become a top candidate.

It could be due to the risks, it is speculated, that an election campaign as a top candidate for the incumbent Commission President would certainly entail. Namely, when there is a struggle for political content – environmental policy, for example, the Green Deal, von der Leyen’s most important project, a matter of the heart – from the quick end of combustion engines to halving the use of pesticides in Europe. With the Greens she has collected points, with her own party friends less. And that could become a real problem in the election campaign.

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