Liberal candidate Guy Verhofstadt and the “Federalist Cause”

Guy Verhofstadt, who has led the liberal ALDE group in the European Parliament for the last few years, will be the Liberals’ candidate forthe Commission Presidency in the May elections. He has fended off Olli Rehn, the Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs for the candidacy. It was unlikely that Rehn would have much appeal across Europe – he is the face of Eurozone austerity in the bailed-out countries and would represent a very fiscally hawkish face for the liberals – but he had a lot of support among the ALDE member-parties. The two will run together on a the same “ticket”, with Rehn proposed for another “senior post”. Perhaps the thinking is that if Verhofstadt doesn’t get the Presidency, he might stay as leader of the parliamentary group…?

Verhofstadt is probably a better bet than Rehn in that he’s a former Prime Minister (or Belgium) and has experience in both the European Parliament and in the European Council. He failed in his last attempt to become Commission President when Barroso first got the job in 2004… and I can’t see him having much hope this time around. Though some in his party have noted that he’s more centrist (and therefore more likely to be able to deal with either a right- or left- leaning Parliament), the liberals are probably going to have a very tough election. Two of the biggest liberal contingents – the Liberal Democrats in the UK and the FDP in Germany – are battered, with the FDP thrown out of the Bundestag last year and the Lib Dems predicted to come 4^th in the UK in the May poll.

Verhofstadt is an interesting choice given his very outspoken federalism. Having written a federalist book – The United States of Europe – and given tub-thumping federalist speeches in the European Parliament, I’ve come to think of him as the federalist Farage. He has tried to set out his vision of federalism as more democratic:

However, I can’t see a more nuanced version reaching people. And, as I said at the start of the last Parliament, a focus on federalism and pro-Europeanism is not the way to go. Federalism is a concept for organising things rather than a proper ideology that sets out values and priorities. Really, competing ideas for the Eurozone, economic growth, the CAP, etc., need to be put to people and then the decision is make on how much to do at the European level, and how to do it.

The Liberals, and Verhofstadt, will need to come out with credible policies to make their brand more bankable. It strikes me that civil liberties and data protection could be a good issue for them if they tap into it – certainly it would chime with a lot more people than vague sermons on “federalism”.

Keller and Bové to lead the European Greens in the elections

The online European Greens primaries ended with anti-globalisation campaigner and French Green MEP José Bové and German Green youth leader and MEP Ska Keller heading the election campaign.

22,676 people voted in the online primaries, and the four candidates debated in ten different cities. The turnout for the vote is disappointing, but as an exercise in democracy it was a good effort – with all the primary campaign hype in the Social Democratic camp, the Greens are the ones that actually held a competitive election.

The challenge for the winners now is to really add a European dimension to the campaign – visiting campaign events across the continent and explaining Green positions can not only add that dimension, but give extra credibility to the value of a vote for the Greens if they can show that they are an engaged and active parliamentary group worth supporting.

The idea of common candidates is becoming normalised now, with the main Europarty groups planning to run (at least) one. It’s unclear how much influence they have on the common platforms of their respective parties – the Green candidates appear to be campaign leaders, rather than being picked as parliamentary group leaders or potential Commission candidates – but there will be an incentive there for the candidates to promote themselves and their party platform.

It’s very much open whether the media and electorate will be attracted to these common candidates, but already the election is looking to be a more engaging prospect than last time around.

The European Green Primaries Open

The primaries of the European Greens opened yesterday, and anyone in the EU over 16 and who supports Green values can register and vote in them. The primaries will be open until January 28th.

Four candidates are running: José Bové, Monica Frassoni, Rebecca Harms and Ska Keller. They've already gone through two stages before the open primaries - first they have to be nominated by a national party of the European Greens, and then get the support of at least four member parties. This threshold is lower than the PES's (of 6 member parties), and coupled with the maximum limit of 8 supporting member parties, probably encouraged more candidates to come forward and be selected.

The primaries will select 2 leading candidates for the European Greens who will represent them in the election campaign and in debates with other Europarty leaders.

The Candidates

José Bosé is a French Green MEP who has been in the European Parliament since 2009 and is Vice-Chair of the Agriculture and Rural Development Committee. He got into the Green movement as a farmer in France and has campaigned against nuclear power and GMOs. He is against fracking. Bosé is anti-globalisation and campaigned for a No vote in the French referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. He has criminal convictions for destroying GMO crops and a McDonald's in France.



Monica Frassoni is the current co-president of the European Green party. In the last parliamentary term (2004-9) she was a co-leader of the Greens/EFA group in the European Parliament, but did not retain her seat in the election. She supports a "Green New Deal" and is a European Federalist. There has been some controversy over Frassoni running in the Italian elections on a list that competed with the Italian Greens (the Left Ecology Freedom list), which caused the Young Italian Greens to demand her resignation from the European Greens co-presidency.


Rebecca Harms is a German Green MEP who currently leads the European Green/EFA group in the European Parliament in debates (along with Daniel Cohn-Bendit). Harms was a landscape gardener before becoming a politician, and has also led the Green group in the Lower Saxony state parliament between 1998-2004. She got into the Green movement through the anti-nuclear campaign in Germany (over the infamous nuclear waste dump in Gorleben) and has spoken on energy transition and climate change in the EP. Harms supports further EU integration. As co-chair of the European Parliamentary group, she'll probably top the primary.


Ska Keller is a German Green MEP and the candidate nominated by the youth wing of the European Greens. She grew up behind the Iron Curtain and has worked on cross-border solidarity in her home on the Polish border. Keller is a member of the Committee on International Trade and a substitute on the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs. Her specialisms in the EP are migration and EU-Turkey relations, and she is for better protection of refugees.


It's great to see an open primary get off the ground. Probably inspired by the French Socialist presidential primary that engaged people from outside the party, the European Greens will hope to get people interested first in the primary, and then in supporting the member parties come election time. It will be interesting to see how many participate.

If you're interested in voting, you can vote here.

The Primary will not be Televised

Martin Schulz, president of the European Parliament, has become the candidate designate of the Party of European Socialists for the Commission Presidency. You didn't have to work for the NSA to know that Schulz wanted to run - it's been widely known for over a year that he has been the front runner in the centre-left camp - but the fact that his candidacy has pretty much been confirmed today was a surprise.

It certainly surprised me that the PES announced their candidate today. A few weeks ago I'd written about the PES primary process, so I thought that the nominees would be announced today, with a primary campaign being waged until the end of January. It turns out that out of all the names touted for the role - Helle Thorning Schmidt, Pascal Lamy, Margot Wallstroem, etc. - only one was nominated. So, with 19 member parties of the PES supporting him (out of 32), Martin Schulz has been elected PES candidate unopposed.


Bad for the PES, bad for Schulz

I'm sure Schulz is glad to have it in the bag, but the lack of a proper primary is a bad result for both Schulz and the PES. The primary race was going to be a way of connecting voters (or at least party members) with the European elections, which would boost the profile of the nominees and eventual candidate, make the elections more European (both within the national parties and in the media for the elections) and help energise and inform the grassroots for the election campaign. These factors would have supported and re-enforced each other. However, without a proper campaign, member parties are not so attached to their candidate and Schulz has lost out on the publicity that he will need (as a candidate who was never a prime minister and so not very well known outside the Brussels bubble). The PES have also heavily diluted out on their chance to boast about how democratic they are in comparison to the European People's Party's more intergovernmental horse-trading approach.

It is probably a sign of Schulz's success in his campaign for the nomination that he was the only candidate in the end. He will now spend the primary time touring member parties to talk to them and raise his profile. But it is a loss not to have a contest.


Positives

The good news is that the PES have a candidate! In a way this is a bit ridiculous to have something so basic as running a candidate to be a plus for a political party, but the PES failed to run one last year. Having a candidate will be a plus if placed within the campaign properly. Schulz is right to want a left-right debate in the elections, and it's the PES's best chance to win more seats. Especially within the Eurozone, the PES need to present themselves as the political group with policy alternatives, and a working alliance (demonstrated by having candidates for executive office) that can change things. The centre-left have done very poorly in polls nationally, and with the prospect of a strong Eurosceptic showing, simply waiting for voters to come to them as the party of opposition in most Member States will not work. (Whether Schulz is the best placed for this I'll leave til tomorrow).


The Merkel Factor

With Merkel re-elected, an PES win would complicate things. Schulz, as a German, would be taking the German slot in the Commission and despite the prize position, Merkel would probably be uncomfortable with loosing the power to pick a more CDU/EPP friendly person for the post. In fact, she has already spoken out against the winning Europarty candidate automatically becoming the Commission president. At the same time, the issue of Germany's Commissioner job has not come up in coalition talks between the CDU/CSU and Schulz's SPD (and Schulz has been involved in these talks). Having a CDU-SPD government should make the idea more realistic at the same time.

Primaries Update #2: ALDE and EPP

Last week we took a quick look at how the primaries are progressing with the Party of European Socialists and the European Greens. On the centre and centre-right, ALDE (Liberals) and the EPP (Christian Democrats) have also set out their process for selecting their candidates for Commission President.

The Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) will open up their nominations process at the end of November (28-30th) during their London Congress, where they will also adopt their election manifesto. The nominations will be made at a Congress on December 20th.

ALDE has introduced a role for their associate members as well, with nominees being put forward by at least 2 member parties from more than one member state, or by 20% of the ALDE Party Congress voting delegates (the December 20th Congress). This will include the associate member delegates, which have already been elected. It's a small role, but it's good to see a Europarty ensuring that its members can play an active role beyond just being members of national parties.

The ALDE candidate will be announced at a special Electoral Congress on February 1st in Brussels.

ALDE timeline:

• 28-30 November Nominations opens & Election Manifesto adopted at London Congress
• 19 December       Pre-Summit liberal leaders meeting to discuss nominations received
• 20 December       Nominations formally close
• 1 February           ALDE Party Candidate to be announced at special Electoral Congress, Brussels

The European People's Party will hold their special Congress announcing their candidate on the 6-7th March in Dublin. The 2,000 delegates at the Congress will select the candidate and vote on the election manifesto.

It's a late start for the largest Europarty in the Parliament, and you have to wonder if this could be damaging to this election campaign. Given that the Europarty campaogns and election manifestos have made little inroads in European elections so far, and that the EPP essentially stand for a continuation of current Eurozone economic policy, the EPP probably doesn't have that much to fear on this. But if the other parties manage to create a bit of a media splash with their candidates, then they could add to the struggle the EPP will have as the incumbant in many EU member states.

European Elections 2014 Update: State of the Primaries

After the failure of the European political families to turn the 2009 elections into a true battle for power with the lack of presidential candidates, the Europarties have started to set up their own procedures to select the men and women they'd like to see steer the ponderous European ship.

The Party of European Socialists have opened their nomination period this month, to close at the end of October. The timetable for the PES is:

• 1st October 2013: opening of nominations - candidacies, letters of nomination and support should be sent to the PES

• 31st October 2013: close of nominations 

• 6th November 2013: PES Presidency meeting to check that all criteria are fulfilled – Official announcement of the candidates’ list

• 1st December 2013 – 31st January 2014: internal selection process within each member Party/organisation.

• February 2014: PES Election Congress, to ratify the votes on the candidate and adopt the Manifesto – Launch of the PES European election campaign

• May 2014: European Parliament Elections

The timetable is actually the biggest weakness of the PES's process - will there really be much of a campaign over the winter months? It will be nigh on impossible to generate media interest in the candidates unless they're former prime ministers, and hard to engage the party base when everyone's geared towards spending more time with family.

(This raises a question I've heard hinted at by a few people - are prime ministers the only talent pool that is suitable to draw Commission Presidents from? I'm not so sure, but with such a small, barren window of opportunity for the PES to pick a candidate, it's hard to imagine them successfully establishing anyone from outside that pool).

The European Greens have also opened up their nomination process for their leading candidates. This call for candidates closes on Sunday, so if there are any Greens who'd like to give it a shot, they'll have to apply soon! Nominees will need at least 4 member parties supporting them to be successful in their bid for leadership positions. It's not clear if the Greens see these leadership positions as potential Commissioners in the event of a coalition, or if they are intended as parliamentary leaders.

I haven't found anything on the European People's Party's selection process so far, but EPP MEP Gay Mitchell (Dublin) has called for the EPP to nominate a candidate this year. Mitchell also proposed former Irish Taoiseach and EU Ambassador John Bruton for the job.

Europe Day 2013 - European Year of Citizens

Happy Europe Day! Although clearly the numbers of people happy with Europe have dropped sharply recently, so it's not likely that you will see many events celebrating it.


It's Europe Day in the European Year of Citizens, so it's probably appropriate to look at some of the issues surrounding EU Citizenship right now.

The European Citizens' Initiative, the big democratic innovation of the Lisbon Treaty, has come under attack recently for being too bureaucratic and inaccessible, though some ECIs have gained a lot of support - like Right2Water - or are using the ECI to push European Citizenship further with expanded political rights, such as Let Me Vote!

Speaking of citizenship and politics, after a successful campaign within the Party of European Socialists for primaries to select their candidate for Commission President for the 2014 elections, the PES has started the election run with a pretty tepid use of the primaries. Hopefully this initiative won't fade away - it could, after all, be used as an opportunity to bring party members into the debate on EU issues, and could be a good way of boosting party activity come election time.

On the legal front, EU Citizenship hasn't evolved much since the Zambrano case and the retreat of the ECJ afterwards in the McCarthy case and in subsequent other cases. I recommend the article over at European Law Blog on the European Court of Justice's approach to EU Citizenship. It can be a confusing area, with citizenship rights largely bound up in the exercise (and ability to exercise) free movement rights. A full definition of EU citizenship will likely only be decided by long years of court battles, it seems.

With all the social and economic problems confronting us today, and the difficulties in engaging with the EU and promoting change, it's hard to be in a celebratory mood from a citizen's perspective. However, with the ECI and the primaries, it's clear that there is a section of civil society out there that is trying to work for more participation and a more responsive EU. So here's to the people plugging away to make things better: that's where you see citizenship in action.

PES Congress 2012

Last week the Party of European Socialists (which sits in the Socialists and Democrats Group in the European Parliament) held its 2012 Congress in Brussels. There they adopted a resolution "Together for the Europe we need" (PDF). The resolution set out what the PES has to do:

"We need to convince people that a progressive European Union can be the answer to their problems. To do this we need to be a confident, relevant and visible political force. We need to create the conditions for our own success. Revitalised active democracy is needed to move the European Union forwards. Since the beginning of the crisis we have seen that despite feeling alienated from the establishment people do want to engage with what is happening in their societies. They want their voices to be heard. We must listen to what women and men across Europe are saying."

What is the PES alternative?

Economy:

A Financial Transaction Tax is still the centrepiece of the PES economic programme as far as defined policy goes. The general economic strategy focuses on longer periods for budgetary consolidation and greater investment at the European level. The PES mention a European redemption fund as a possible measure to help solve the crisis, but it's merely referenced as a possibility so it looks like there's not a consensus on this point within the party yet.

Along with advocating stronger regulation of financial markets, the PES supports measures against tax evasion and avoidance (no defined policies are name-checked here). When it comes to the EU budget, the PES says:

"A long run solution to the crisis would entail tackling the strong divergences of the economies in the euro area through common economic policies and common investments in innovation, growth and decent jobs. We need to implement effective policies in order to halt the fiscal race to the bottom."

It's a good aspiration - I hope to see some policies on this coming out for the 2014 elections.

Employment:

Here the PES is more radical, calling for a €10 billion EU programme to aid employment and a Youth Pact to ensure that young people have access to further education or training:

"A European youth guarantee must be gradually implemented in all Member States, giving a state guaranteed right to every young woman and man to a new job, training or further education at the latest four months after leaving the education system or becoming unemployed. A European Employment Programme of at least 10 billion Euros must be introduced immediately, financing the creation of new jobs and supporting better education and training. A strong gender perspective must be included in this programme in order to prevent bigger gaps between women and men in the labour market and across society at a later stage. Improving the competitiveness of European companies is essential for Europe’s economic success. Instead of the Conservative recipe of weakening social protection and lowering wages, the following structural reforms must be pursued:

- Investment in education, training and active labour market policies should be increased.

- Europe´s industries must play a central and dynamic role in transforming our economies and developing our regions by fostering world-class innovation and green growth. Therefore, a reindustrialisation process must be launched. The manufacturing sector, especially Small and Medium Enterprises, as well as microenterprises - which represent a motor of the European economy, need to receive more support and a high-quality infrastructure must be built, for example on access to clean, reliable and affordable energy, broadband networks and transport. To this end, a growth-oriented review at EU level of the relevant state aid schemes is necessary.

- Energy and resource use must be reduced with an emphasis on reducing carbon emissions.

- More efforts are needed to support all dimensions of innovation and more resources need to be invested in research and development.

- The representation of male and female workers in companies must be strengthened, giving them an active role in the economy. We need to remove barriers to women's entry to the labour market. Furthermore, we have to provide women with equal opportunities to access decision-making positions within companies."

The Social Pact is another key policy, aiming to fix Member State and EU spending on education and training at 6% of GDP for Member States, and 6% of the EU budget, and preventing a race to the bottom on social standards within the EU. There are quite a few ambitious aims under the Social Pact heading.

Environment:

The PES wants to strengthen the European Emissions Tradings Scheme and the introduction of an EU Carbon Tax. They also note the need to ensure that the EU's biofuels policy does not harm food security.

Institutional Reform and Democracy:

The PES wants the European Parliament to be strengthened along with Economic and Political Union, and wants an effective European monitoring of democratic standards not only for candidate countries, but also for Member States. The PES has promised to produce concrete proposals for strengthening the European Parliament.

Foreign Policy:

The PES supports enlargement of the EU in the Western Balkans, and wants to extend its domestic policies (FTT, climate change, etc.) to the EU's multilateral relations, dubbing it a "Global New Deal".



As a political programme, it's surprisingly ambitious for a European political party in some areas. It's a good statement of principles, and it gives us a statement to track PES policy development with. Personally, I think that there needs to be a more social alternative presented at the next election - too often, the EU is seen just as a mix of the internal market and CAP payments, as if there should be not social dimension to the EU (and as if the internal market is not a social and political project in itself). The challenge for the PES is to produce a more detailed manifesto for the 2014 elections along with choosing a candidate for the Commission Presidency, and to present it through a credible European campaign - after all, the programme is only credible if the national parties are selling it on the doorsteps as a programme that they stand for on a European level.

The PES confirmed that it would select a candidate for the European Commission Presidency for the 2014 European Elections through party primaries.

Europarty Congress Season and a Third Term for Barroso

There have been some comments in favour of Barroso winnning a third term as Commission President. It's interesting that the comments come from Reding, who was considered one of the front-runners for the race in 2014. However it's not an idea I'd warm to exactly - I'm not the biggest fan of Barroso - but it does raise an important question for the European conference season: how will the Europarties approach the next European elections and the election of the next Commission President?

The Commission President is nominated by the European Council (by Qualified Majority Voting), but it's the European Parliament that elects the Commission President, and later the President elect's nominated College of Commissioners. Since the Parliament elects the Commission, the European Council nominates a candidate from the same Europarty as the one that won the election. The European People's Party endorsed Barroso for the presidency in 2009, and the Party of European Socialists failed to make any nomination so the presidency wasn't an election issue. The centre-left PES governments of the UK, Spain and Portugal backed Barroso, preventing a common PES candidate, but the PES has committed itself to picking a candidate for the post in the future, and will hold primaries for deciding its candidate. The vote adopting these procedures will take place during its September Congress:

"The European Socialist Party is due to vote to change its party statute on 29 September. The plan is to have national parties put forward a candidate for commission president. The final socialist nominee is then expected to be unveiled in February 2014, just ahead of the June elections"

EUObserver reports that ELDR, the liberal Europarty, also intends to consider procedures for selecting a candidate:

""We will be making a recommendation to our party congress this autumn on what the procedure should be for the selection of a liberal candidate for the president of the commission. And we would see that process taking place in the autumn of next year," Graham Watson, leader of the European Liberals, told this website.

He said it is the first time the party has ever tried to set down rules for the procedure. Previously names "sort of emerged" from a "conclave of liberal leaders."

The European People's Party is likely to discuss the possibility of candidate selection as part of its election strategy at its conference.

Being able to vote for a policy platform and for candidates for the Commission presidency is essential if the EU is to become more democratic and open. This Congress season will be an important early test to gauge the commitment - and ability - of the Europarties to present alternatives when it comes to election time. It's not enough to blame the Commission and the Member States from the Parliament Chamber: Europarties have to be able to present and fight for alternatives if they're to pass themselves off as political parties.

The PES Congress will take place at the end of the month in Brussels, the EPP's will be held in October in Bucharest, and the ELDR Congress will be held in early November in Dublin.

Europe's soul is distinctly parliamentary

The European Council has stumbled from summit to summit over the course of this crisis, and the European Parliament, despite being the most democratically legitimate EU institution, has not been the site of the central debates about how to fix the Eurozone. Nosemonkey has just written a great article on the need for more democratic legitimacy in the EU, and the ability to finally make a decision. However, I disagree with him - and the German Christian Democrats - that a directly elected president is the answer. I don't think a presidency could work in practice because Europe's soul is distinctly parliamentary.

Out of the 27 (and soon to be 28) Member States, all but France and Romania are either parliamentary republics, or constitutional monarchies with a parliamentary system. Even France and Romania are only semi-presidential. Parliamentarianism is part of the political culture of the Member States, and part of European political culture generally. In the EU system, the European Parliament elects the Commission and the Commission President - who is nominated by the European Council on the basis of which Group in the Parliament won the election, which is reminiscent of the role of the monarch in many European constitutional monarchies.

Of course, the declining election turnout for the Parliament has caused a crisis of legitimacy for the institution. Without a clear platform for electing an executive, and because European elections are second-order elections, voters have few clear political options on the European stage. Europarty primaries and common campaigns centred around a Commission presidential candidate (read: prime ministerial) might eventually change that, but it's a long hard slog and is unlikely to give the boost in legitimacy needed overnight. In contrast to this, an elected president, usually seen as a directly elected European Council president or a combination of this role and the Commission President, is a relatively simple institutional tweak, a small treaty change, and it would establish a clear leadership position for election.

I don't think it would work culturally or institutionally.

Culturally, a presidential system would present too clear of a binary choice in a continent used to coalition-building on the national level. I don't necessarily just mean the Member States used to coalition government (though many of them are), since even in parliamentary systems where there is a single-party government, parties tend to be broad churches. It also provides for a strong government, which I  believe is culturally embedded across the continent, but not government that is simply built around one person, despite the growing presidentialisation of the parliamentary system (France is a bit of an exception here, although with a strong president, there is a strong executive). Parliaments provide a space for ideological debate between political factions, and a government based on a coalition of support across a majority of society as represented in parliament. While a directly elected president may have a strong mandate on paper, I think that this would be culturally undermined by the suspicion that the presidency's interests and loyalties are too narrow, and not sufficiently representative.

A presidency would also be quite weak institutionally, since he or she would sit in the European Council as head of an institution in which he or she had no power base. Sure, whoever is elected would have greater legitimacy than the national leaders in the context of the European Council, but those leaders represent important and valid electoral interests, and will not - and should not - simply bow to a European President. The president would also lack a power base in the European Parliament, and could be politically different to the Parliament's majority. It's hard enough for cohabitation to work in France or the US without trying at the same time to build up a profile and confidence in an elected EU president. Without a natural power base around which to build coalitions or majorities for proposals, the presidency would likely dash electoral hopes raised in the election due to the inability to honour his or her manifesto. This goes back to my point about the culture for strong government: weak elected governments rarely win a second term, institutionally weak systems are rarely respected. And who would vote for an institution that cannot deliver? Is that not the argument for the declining European election turnout?

I have the personal bias of believing in parliamentarianism, but it seems to me to be the only system that could possibly work on the European level. There needs to be a broad coalition which a majority can not just buy into at the time of a momentary choice between two candidates, but generally as well. This is best done by a parliamentary coalition comprising of a majority of opinions, not a single individual. The Commission could evolve into a cabinet with a Prime Minister figure at its head.

A lot of time and effort would need to be made to even attempt to deliver this, but a presidential system is the same old attitude of tinkering with the institutional set-up when you get down to it: real work needs to be done at the local level, and only political movements - parties - running for election on common platforms can provide the incentive and promise realistic results in order to sustain this work. Which is why I believe a working Europe could only ever be a parliamentary one.

Reding v Schulz

EurActiv has reported that Viviane Reding, the current Justice Commissioner, may be positioning herslf to run as the European People's Party candidate during the 2014 European Elections. She's in her third term as a Commissioner (I've heard it said that Luxembourg keeps sending her to Brussels to remove Junker's biggest party rival from the home stage), so she's very experienced when it comes to the EU and it's executive wing. Reding has also served as Commissioner for education and culture in 1999-2004 and as Commissioner for information society and the media from 2004-2010.

EurActiv comments that she had a base in the EP, which could serve her well in gaining the nomination. I'm not sure how well known she would be in the Member States come election time, however.

The possible challenger from the Party of European Socialists is current EP president Martin Schulz. The PES will hold primaries in the run up to the elections to choose a candidate, but timetabling issues (it looks like the primaries may run partially during the winter holidays) may mean that early positioning is an effective way to ward off competition that could struggle to gain momentum. He's not held a post in the Commission - I don't think he's held an executive post yet apart from being mayor of Wuerselen - but he has been an active MEP and served as the leader of the Socialists and Democrats Group in the EP before becoming the EP President.

So neither candidate has a continent-wide  profile in the same way that national heads of government have, but a good contest could quickly change that, particularly if the elections become a referendum on the economic direction of Europe. Both Reding and Schulz are able to give good speeches, so a head to head debate could inject more energy into the elections (certainly, they're more engaging than Barroso).

I can't help wondering how the other Europarties are going to react - will they run their own candidates, or will they try to gain policy concessions in exchange for parliamentary support (and would that mean that we'd effectively be voting for coalitions in the Parliament)...?

Re:New: Europarties and Primaries

When I wrote about the Re:New conference and the lack of policy at the PES level on Friday, I wanted to find out more about the Europarty and how things are done. Luckly there was a workshop on Transnational parties on Saturday, which I attended (annoyingly most of the workshops I would be interested in were on on Saturday afternoon: I would have liked to have asked a few questions at the citizenship workshop on Zambrano and McCarthy).

Understandably the structure of Europarties mitigated against more unified political platforms being put forward at European elections (and in between). Europarties have evolved over the last 20 years, with political foundations (such as FEPS for PES), and firmer legal regulation for their legal status and funding. While there was some interesting presentations on the history and structure of the Europarties (notably from Erol Kuelachi and Steven van Henke). However, of the three aspects raised by Sebastian von Thuena (1. institutional aspects of Europarties; 2. the legal structure; and 3. the role of the grassroots), the question of the grassroots was picked up on by the audience (which counted a few PES activists among its members). How grassroots activists should work alongside national parties - via exchanges and uring election campaigns - was debated. Apparently there have been PES activist exchange programmes trialed that haven't been very successful, and national parties are unsure of how to react to PES activists (in some cases perhaps fearing that the PES is a competitor for institutional control within the party).

I was disappointed that the PES primaries weren't being discussed, so I asked:

"What could be the effect of the PES presidential candidate (and does the PES see it as more parliamentary or presidential)? It could have a chain effect (if there’s enough momentum) – 1. Would it take away from activist influence on the manifesto? 2. Would it bring the Commission closer to the EP? 3. Would it mean coalition Commissions and provoke reorganisation in the Greens, etc.?"

There wasn't enough time to address all of these points, but Steven van Henke pointed out that the PES would confirm both the candidate and the programme, raising the prospect of the candidate not being able to stand on their own platform. Originally I had thought that it could push activists out of the role of manifesto-shaping that they had gained at the last election - it will be interesting to see how the PES balances the national parties, the activists and the candidate's view in the joint manifesto.

Another aspect of the PES primaries is their timing. I hadn't noticed anything about the timing of the primaries during my first glance through the procedure, but I've heard complaints about the process being held over the December/January before the election, since it is extremely difficult to organise events for national parties at that time (at least, I have heard these complaints from the Irish Labour activists; and Irish Labour has been one of the most enthusiastic parties for PES primaries). Together with the uncertainty of the number of parties which will hold direct votes and whether the candidate will have much control over his/her policy platform, the PES's seeming political coup could be strangled at birth. Since it has the potential to boost not only the PES but also push the other Europarties to be more coherent, it would be a big loss to EP democracy.

Re:New Conference in Brussels - Renewal for the European left?

The plight of the European left is well known by now: despite the victory in Denmark a few months ago, the left has lost Spain, and now doesn't hold any of the 6 major Member States (the big 3 plus Italy, Spain and Poland). So does it have the ability to fight back and put forward a viable alternative political vision? The Party of European Socialists are holding a Re:New conference in Brussels (25th-26th November), with NGOs and Trade Union representatives present as well as activitists.

First of all, the PES have decided on their primaries for selecting their Commission President candidate for the next European elections (PDF; Ralf Grahn has already commented on this here). A good step for European democracy, as PES are now committed to fielding a candidate, whereas they failed to providean alternative to Barroso in 2009. However, it is still left to national political parties to decide wheather they will hold a direct vote with their members or indirectly consult them. This could have a big effect as the envisaged proportional voting (that the votes per member party are distributed proportionally among candidates rather than a first past the post system where candidates could win all the votes of a national party at the PES level) could be undermined if few parties adopt direct votes. Political pressure through example by more democratic parties seems to be the hope behind this compromise. Still, it commits the PES to a more European campaign centred around winning power in the Commission.

So does there seem to be a PES alternative to the European EPP majority?

Probably not, if you consider a proper alternative to be a coherent policy platform. Though the PES seems to be fairly united around Eurobonds and the financial transaction tax (although UK Labour's Emma Reynolds looked a bit uncomfortable as she defended the Conservative-led government's position that an FTT would have to be global as the Labour party's own position), there doesn't seem to be a fully thought through programme yet. Added to this difficulty is the leftwards drift of the EPP (which can be seen by Barroso's SOTEU speech and the increasing promotion of Eurobonds and FTTs in right-wing circles). While the PES can berate the EPP and "Merkozy" for being too little, too late at every turn, it does not make up for the lack of a concrete plan. Not that the EPP has a plan, but if the left wants to well, it has to earn it rather than hope to profit from anti-incumbant votes.

The first workshop I attended was "Progressive Policy Responses to the Crisis". Apart from Eurobonds and FTT, barely any policy was mentioned. The failings of the right and the need for closer European integration were highlighted, but a lot of the hope for the left seems to be based on the French and German elections even though there's a recognition that the crisis is so urgent that key political questions need to be addressed quickly. Implicitly this means that it's up to a leftwing Merkozy, replacing our conservative one, to help solve the crisis, rather than attempt to provide a European leftwing platform in the meantime (and after all, what better time is there for the PES to articulate a vision if not when the left is in opposition and Europe is on everyone's lips?).

In terms of immediate policy, the only relevant contribution was from Walter Cerfada, who put forward 3 chages for the next EU budget: 1. that structural funds should be made available to the economically weaker nations without the requirements for co-funding when the money does not exist at a national level; 2. that this budget plans for the 2013 budget too so governments can make longer-term plans; 3. that the European Investment Bank quickly starts to invest more.

The audience very quickly picked up on the lack of policy content and a very challenging question was posed: if the PES has little power within the EU institutions, why don't the PES Commissioners resign in protest at EPP policies? There wasn't really an answer. If PES leave the Commission, then it would mean something else for their Commission presidential campaign too: that the PES would believe that the Commission should be politically coherent (and closer to the EP), not just the Commission President.

George Papandreou was actually one of the best speakers at the conference so far. The PES seem to be good at generating vision, but has problems communicating that vision nationally, and putting together practical policies (at least as far as I can tell from this conference so far). Is this a problem of organisation - is the PES too national? What organisational developments are needed or are taking place to make the PES more effective? Hopefully I can find out some more over the next day.

Our Commissioner, for a given value of "our"...

The Commissioner for Financial Programming and Budget, Janusz Lewandowski, has been held up by the ruling Civic Platform Party in Poland as a means of getting the country a lot more money from the EU budget:

"Speaking in a wood-panelled room among fellow Civic Platform members, Lewandowski says: "We're talking about billions, even 300 billion zloty [€69 billion]. Thanks to this money we could reduce youth unemployment, even by half."

Fellow party member and foreign minister Radek Sikorski then pops up, adding: "That's what these elections are about. They are about money for Poland and who will get more of it. Why do we think we will do better? Because we have a strong team [gestures to Lewandowski] which can negotiate successfully.""

This has raised questions over the Commissioner's oath of independence, which Commissioners give when they are sworn into office to pledge that they will work in the general interest, and remain independent of national governments. EUObserver has reported that the Commission asserts that this was in line with the Commission's Code of Conduct:

"Commission spokeswoman Pia Ahrenkilde Hansen on Tuesday (20 September) said he did not cross the line because his remarks were of a "general" nature.

"The president [Barroso] is aware of the participation of the commissioner in this specific activity and it's our opinion that the commissioner, who intervened in a personal capacity, passed a very general message about the benefits of the general budget to Poland ... This activity, for which the commission punctually gave its agreement, is compatible with the code of conduct," she said."

Having a "national Commissioner" is a big issue. While there are far too many Commissioners, reatining one per Member State is a sticking point that is unlinkely to go away soon - the prospective loss of a Commissioner for 10 out of every 15 years was a major reason for the Irish rejection of the Lisbon Treaty in the first referendum, despite equal treatment of the proposed rotation of Commissioners between big and small Member States. Though the Commissioners may swear independence (you can find the oath as a PDF here), they are generally held to be a national voice in the College of Commissioners.

At the moment Commissioners are nominated by national governments,* accepted by the Commission President elect, and elected by the European Parliament (as part of the Commission as a whole), with the Commission being accountable to the EP between elections. The independence of the Commission, and the indivdual Commissioners could be strengthened by bringing an end to the national nominations. So while there could still be one Commissioner per Member State, the choice of who the Commissioner actually is would be for the Commission President and the Parliament to decide. However, this would require a treaty change.

*The Council adopts a list of Commissioners based on the suggestions of Member States which are effectively Member State nominations in practice. (Art. 17(7) TEU.

Citizens will have to drag Europe closer to them

There's an interesting article in the New York Times (hat-tip Grahnlaw), "E.U. Elites keep the Power from the People", reporting on criticism from Habermas and others on the EU's democratic deficit:

"“The process of European integration, which has always taken place over the heads of the population, has now reached a dead end,” Mr. Habermas said at a forum hosted by the European Council on Foreign Relations. “It cannot go any further without switching from its usual administrative mode to one of greater public involvement.”

The political elites “are burying their heads in the sand,” he said, adding, “They are doggedly persisting with their elitist project and the disenfranchisement of the European population.”

Those who agree with Mr. Habermas often cite the behavior of José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, the Union’s executive, and Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European Council, which represents the 27 member states.

During these past months, both have failed to explain to a wider public what is happening to Europe and the euro. When they give interviews, they tend to address an elitist audience. Neither reaches out to citizens. “I doubt if they ever thought of doing town-hall meetings,” said Pawel Swieboda, director of DemosEuropa, an independent research organization in Warsaw.

“They don’t bother to do such meetings because they don’t have to stand for election,” added Reinhard Bütikofer, a German and leader of the Greens in the European Parliament."

I agree. However, the solution seems to be changing the Treaties, and this doesn't really address the problem. While Treaty change can help (for example, giving the Parliament the sole respobsibility for electing the Commission without Council input, and severing the national backgrounds of Commissioners from national nominations), the biggest and most urgent challenge has nothing to do with institutional tinkering.

The EU is already formally democratic. The Parliament is directly elected and has almost equal power with the Council, the weakness being mainly in the area of foreign affairs. This is real power, with US Vice President Joe Biden making the trip to implore the Parliament to pass the SWIFT Agreement between the EU and US last year. The Parliament elects the Commission (just like the government is in many national parliamentary systems), which is nominated by the Council. The Council consists of the elected national governments, and the European Council - the Member States' heads of government - direct general policy. So in all the main legislative institutions, offices are either directly or indirectly elected.

But despite this, the main focus on EU politics is the summitry that takes place every few months or to combat crises - an increasingly common event. Summits are the face of the remote decision-making that's going on. Member States gather together, not all with an equal say in practice, and hammer out compromises based on haggling over national interests, instead of working out what would be the best solution for the EU or Eurozone as a whole. If this sidelines the Commission, then it definitely sidelines the Parliament: after all, how can they reject emergency agreements made at a European Council summit? These summits could even be sidelining the ECB, which has been one of the most influential players in the crisis so far.

If the EU is formally democratic, then the problem is that it isn't functionally democratic. The addage that in democracies the electorate get the government they deserve doesn't quite apply as there hasn't been much political competition yet at the European level. That might change at the next election, with the PES considering running a primary to select a candidate for the Commission Presidency. Political competition is what's necessary to bring the EU closer to citizens. The EU can't be sold or airbrushed into people's lives: people need to be engaged on European issues, and we have to talk about these issues from the perspective of arguing for EU or Eurozone policies.

We're in the middle of a massive crisis, but when it comes to the solutions, we are talking about national solutions to European problems. When Irish politicans talk about Eurobonds, they're thinking of the next five years and Ireland's interest rates, not how to make the Eurozone work - without even thinking about what fiscal union means, and how it should be run, how can it be properly debated or sold to an electorate? These conversations with ourselves mean that we're talking past each other on a European stage, rather than properly discussing what are our best collective options. Which is why working on giving substance to the Europarties is much more important than institutional tinkering. Citizens need to be engaged with the issues - using citizens' assemblies would be a good way of involving people and informing them on the options ahead.

Oddly, institutional tinkering is the sexy and glamorous side to ideas to tackle the democratic deficit. Hard graft within political parties and outside them in civil society to make them more responsive to European issues - and to make them fulfil their political function as a way of enabling citizens to influence policy - is a much more substantial task, even if it doesn't yet the attention of another constitutional treaty.

Siedentop and Democracy in Europe

Last week I attended an interesting debate between Larry Siedentop, the author of Democracy in Europe, and several law Professors and lecturers in Leiden University. In his talk, and the subsequent debate, he discussed the direction of both the UK and Europe.

In Britain, he claimed that the social and cultural supports of the unwritten constitution are in decay, and that there would probably be a move towards a more codified constitution in the future. I agree that the support that the unwritten constitution rested on is decaying - just look at the debates in Parliament over sovereigny and parliamentary sovereignty and you can see that there's a worrying about of confusion over what the key principle of the British constitution actually means even to MPs: the very people the constitution gives absolute power to. With gorwing calls for referendums on issues (an aspect of popular sovereignty rather than parliamentary sovereignty), devolution, human rights and EU membership, more modern ideas of citizenship and the state seem to be seeping in, even if they are largely promoted with the language of the old constitution. If the UK is going to get a codified constitution, I doubt it will get it for a few decades.

On Europe, Siedentop focused on the problem that people aren't involved in the decision-making process and that they don't feel close to the EU. He remarked that nationalism had brought the state and the people closer together, but that it hadn't reached its full goal almost anywhere. Siedentop seemed to be against democratising the EU, saying that he would have prefered if the European Parliament wasn't elected as it hadn't brought people closer to the EU. Turning the clock back now was unrealistic, he accepted.

He proposed an EU were:

1. Member States could exit if they wanted (already the case under Article 50 TEU).
2. The European Parliament has an upper chamber consisting of the representatives of national parliaments (a "Senate").
3. Human rights was a focus.
4. The EU tried to do less, but did it better.

I'm not very convinced by this list. Apart from the first point, which is already the case, and I'm happy with, I can't the remaining points as particularly useful to solving the problem of bringing the EU closer to people and involving citizens in the decision making process.

Human rights have already been upgraded in the EU system. The EU Charter of Fundamental Rights constrains the EU institutions to act within the bounds of human rights, and the EU is committed to joining the European Convention on Human Rights to the ECHR in Strasbourg will provide an additional judicial check on the EU institutions. Article 7 TEU provides a mechanism for the EU to sanction Member States that seriously breach the EU's values (democracy, etc.). Perhaps the EU could be reformed so that it could do more before using this nuclear option, but I think that the ECHR does a lot without duplicating its role within the EU. promoting better democratic politics at an EU level would probably be a good break on more populist tendencies by having a pan-European public as a watchdog against breaches. It's a soft political "measure", but I think that it's a culture that needs to be encouraged and that could have a positive effect.

Getting the EU to do less, but do it better is much, much easier said than done. It would likely be a lot easier to change things in the EU if it was more democratic in substance, as there could be a clear political majority in the institutions for policies like CAP reform. However, the current system is a finely balanced equation of interests and priorities, with CAP and structural funds balancing out freer trade and more liberalised market integration. (Should the EU stop working in the area of cross-border crime? The Netherlands is a strong supporter of this area, so cutting back on the more political aspects of the EU wouldn't automatically please even the more "pro-market area" Member Sates). Remove one, and it's hard to garantee that anything will be done better in the face of bitter Member States.

The senate idea is one I'd reject too. There is little use for another chamber in European politics. I asked Siedentop if it wouldn't be a better approach to have stronger Europarties and EP elections that could decide the leadership of the Commission, so that people would be more engaged (over time) as there would be a clearer link between elections and politicians gaining office and implementing policies. Over time I think this would contribute to building up a common political culture over the EU, though it would admittedly be an extremely long and difficult process. Siedentop responded by saying that informing people about European issues was the point of the senate, so that national politicians would come back and discuss European politics more.

I disagree because we already have elected politicians that have to compete for votes to get elected to have a voice on European policy - having indirectly elected people who will face the same barriers in the media and national political cultures are hardly going to make much more difference. Perhaps Siedentop's focus was to Europeanise national politics by restoring the direct link between national parliaments and the EU. This would mean continuing along the segmented national political cultures, and that political debate is hghly unlikely to go beyond nthe summitry of European politics in the public mind, where a national interest is declared and heads of government arte locked in a room to strike a deal.

Focusing on more open democratic politics would be an uphill struggle - and less based on institutions - but it's a vital one if the decaying old consensus in Europe (the economic integration one) is replaced with something more democratic and long-lasting.

PES September Seminar: Primaries

The PES Primary Campaign activists have been invited to the September seminar of the PES in Brussels. The seminar is the beginnning of the internal PES debate on the Presidental candidate selection process. It's great to see this worthwhile campaign not only getting recognition from the party, but also being invited into discussions on how to shape the election process.

There are still many important questions on how a primary would be carried out:

"We will shortly provide details for supporters to give their ideas on what Desmond and José should present to the seminar in Brussels. We want to start a debate amongst PES activists and supporters on how they think the selection of our candidate should be organised. How should candidates be nominated? How should they be selected? Who should get to vote in the primaries? How should those votes be counted? Should the votes be weighted like the QMV votes are weighted in the European Council?"

Personally, I think that the voting should be internal to the party, to ensure that the PES and it's policies have a greater voice in the election. A criticism of the EP from Simon Hix, is that while the EP actually represents the average EU voter quite well, representing the average voter isn't really the point of the parliament. In the same way, the PES candidate should be selected by PES members, so that party membership has value (what better way to encourage participation in the Europarties than to give membership a real meaning by opening up opportunities for participation?), and that the candidate represents a truly "PES face" in the election. As for the internal electoral system, that's a more complicated question.

Thinking aloud, the candidate should be selected on the vote of the party members (without special weight attached to MPs, Councillors, MEPs), but I think that votes should be weighted to increase the say of the member parties of smaller member states. Otherwise it could lead to the debate and participation of the smaller states being neglected. On the other hand, the weighting needs to be carefully balanced, so that the majority needed isn't so great that only bland "all things to all people" candidiates are chosen. When it comes to nominations, I think that several methods could be used: a certain number of MEPs, MPs and members as supporters could be required to nominate someone for the primaries (perhaps the "voting value" of MEPs, MPs and members could be "translatable" at the nomination stage (e.g. 1 MEP = 15 MPs)).


Finally, an interesting question is how this would impact on the border make-up of the Commission. Since a coalition is likely to almost always be needed to elect the Commission President, what form will coalition politics at the European level take? Would PES coalition partners be satisfied with commitments to certain legislative proposals in the Commission's manifesto - or will coalition partners hold out for seats around the Commission table itself? Since the EP has to approve the whole Commission, the EP has the power to force the issue if the member states remain wedded to picking their own political favourites for the Commission; while there has to be a Commissioner member from every member state, it is not a requirement that each member be from the governing party of their member state. Even at a basic level we could ask, if there's an EPP majority in the Council, but a PES-led coalition majority in the EP and PES President of the Commission, then why should the Commission be conservative by majority? The Commission has votes on proposals it puts before the Council and EP, so why should a PES (or EPP) President be outvoted by an EPP (or PES) majority in the Commission? Afterall, the Commission is accountable as a body to the EP.

It's a question for the future, since we don't even have primaries yet. But it's an important issue, so I think we should keep it in mind. As the Commission becomes more accountable to the European Parliament, and its membership a question at the European elections, the rationale for allowing its membership to almost automatically mirror the Council's will be increasingly undermined.