BRUSSELS, June 21, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – European leaders failed to agree
Thursday on a new top team to lead efforts to reform their union for the next
five years, and postponed a decision for a least a week.
The 28 heads of government met for dinner after Brussels’ main political
factions refused to fall into line behind a single choice to head the
European Commission.
The successor to Jean-Claude Juncker at the head of the EU executive is the
key leadership role in Brussels, and without a nominee the leaders were also
not able to agree the broader package of appointments, forcing them to call a
crisis summit for Sunday June 30 .
“The European Council has had a full discussion of nominations,” summit
host Donald Tusk, the president of the leaders’ council, said. “There was no
majority on any candidate.
“The European Council agreed that there has to be a package reflecting the
diversity of the EU. We will meet again on June 30.”
The new summit comes just two days before the new European Parliament
begins its first session, and the leaders are determined to agree on key
appointments before lawmakers choose their own speaker.
French President Emmanuel Macron said parliament’s “lead candidate” process
for choosing a Commission president is unworkable and that the 28 national
leaders must decide.
“The names of the three ‘lead candidates’ have been ruled out,” Macron
said. “They were tested out by Donald Tusk and he concluded that there is no
majority to back these names.”
But Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel defended the party political
process, and noted that whichever name the leaders come up with will still
have to be approved by a majority of MEPs in the assembly.
“Here it has emerged… that there is no majority for one of the top
candidates of the political parties,” she said. “We naturally want a joint
solution with the parliament.” – Hard man to replace –
None of the leading names to have emerged during last month’s election
have won consensus among four main parliamentary parties to replace Juncker
as president of the EU’s executive arm.
“I note with satisfaction, amusement and, yes, pleasure that it seems it is
not easy to replace me,” Juncker joked.
Other jobs up for grabs include speaker of the European Parliament, which
will sit for the first time on July 2, a replacement for Tusk as president of
the European Council, and foreign policy chief.
National leaders want to control the process and dole out the most senior
jobs in a way that balances men and women, east and west Europe, small
countries and large.
But the results of May’s European elections forced the main conservative,
socialist, liberal and Green parliamentary blocs to form a majority
coalition.
The parties, while working to draft a joint political programme, have not
united behind a particular package of candidates.
German conservative MEP Manfred Weber, whose centre-right EPP group took
the biggest single bloc of seats, failed to win over Dutch social democrat
Frans Timmermans’ S&D or the liberal Renew Europe group, which has backed
Danish commissioner Margrethe Vestager to take over from Juncker.
– Prize posts –
Whoever is eventually the nominee for the Commission presidency must win
the backing of least 21 of the 28 EU leaders and a majority in the 751-member
parliament.
According to three sources close to the negotiations, the leaders had been
expected to agree that the EPP will be allowed to propose an alternative to
Weber.
Renew Europe hopes to see a liberal replace Tusk as president of the
European Council, and the socialists will provide a foreign policy chief.
Finally, the Greens could share the job of presiding over the five-year
parliament with the socialists, with each providing a speaker for two-and-a-
half years.
One option for Commission president might be Europe’s ambitious Brexit
negotiator, Michel Barnier, a former French minister who is also a member of
Merkel’s EPP.
But the party is said to have other names up its sleeve and French and
German sources agree that the chancellor is not ready to cede the prize to a
Frenchman.
The six EU leaders invited to the G20 summit in Osaka on Friday and
Saturday next week — from France, Germany, Britain, Italy, Spain and the
Netherlands — will continue the discussion there before returning to
Brussels on July 30.