A new design to control every decision and movement of the Community Executive. The internal opposition, eliminated, and the possible future critical voices, aware of what can happen if they move. The new structure outlined by Ursula von der Leyen for the new European Commission, which she revealed this week, guarantees her all the power. The scheme with several executive vice-presidents and commissioners, who in many cases will manage closely linked portfolios, consolidates the presidentialist approach of the German conservative. The leader – already a veteran – is also driven by the weakness of the two major partners of the European Union, Germany and France, and by the deterioration of the engine with which the duo has spurred the community club for decades.
At the top of the EU executive, the most right-wing in decades, the president wants to pave her legacy, prepare the way for the next great enlargement to the east and revitalise European industry so that it regains competitiveness against the United States and China. She proposes a genuine revolution of change. And she has made a strong start on the road to her second term.
Von der Leyen, 65, the first woman to hold the European Commission presidency, was almost unknown not only to EU citizens but also to many of its leaders when she was proposed as head of the EU executive by then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the French president five years ago. She was then Germany’s defence minister. Now, the Christian Democrat, who many in her team describe as almost a workaholic who finds it hard to keep up, who lives in a small studio in the large Commission building in Brussels, has become for some the face of Europe. And of its contradictions, as she showed with her criticised trip to Israel and her meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu on the day the Israeli army began the siege of Gaza in response to the Hamas attacks on 7 October.
For the moment, a veteran European diplomat points out, it seems at first glance that Von der Leyen will no longer have critics or free electrons on her team, such as the socialist Frans Timmermans, who began the last legislature as her number two and left the post to run in the elections in the Netherlands; the liberal Thierry Breton, with whom she has had several clashes – and whom she ended up getting out of the way in a pact with Macron in exchange for the French president sending a new commissioner to whom he would give a better title – or the high representative for Foreign Policy and Security, Josep Borrell.
Luuk van Middelaar, founder and director of the Brussels Geopolitics Institute think tank, believes that the next Commission – which still needs to be approved by the European Parliament – is indeed much more presidential than the previous one. But not so much because of the structural changes in the College of Commissioners (in which the 27 member states are represented with the same theoretical power), but because it is the German’s second term, she has five years of experience and already knows the “ins and outs” of the agenda.
Von der Leyen also knows that she has the support of the leaders of the member states, who nominated her in a clear way. This time, France and Germany, her driving forces in 2019, have less influence on her, says the expert, who was a member of the Cabinet of Herman Van Rompuy, the first full-time President of the European Council.[La alemana] She has given her major partners an important portfolio or role, she has a clear idea of where power lies, she is a keen observer and she has designed the leadership of the vice-presidencies with a kind of political balance, although the vast majority of commissioners [14] “They are from the European People’s Party, like her,” says Van Middelaar by telephone, who also highlights the new Community Executive’s shift towards the east.
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A “cross-functional” portfolio structure, for example, but not only in green and environmental issues, forces the commissioners to link up and work together, says Ditte Brasso Sorensen, a researcher at the Europa think tank. “This means that there will no longer be those pillars of power in the hands of a few commissioners and prevents them from having their own political aspirations,” she adds.
Alberto Alemanno, Jean Monnet Professor of European Law and Policies at the Paris School of Advanced Studies in Business, is highly critical. He believes that with the new structure – six executive vice-presidents, 20 commissioners and some other internal reforms, such as the General Secretariat being moved to the presidency – the Community Executive is being transformed into a presidential body. “Behind this process there is a marked politicisation of the European Commission, which, however, has been conceived as a collegial body responsible for pursuing the general interest of the Union. This, in turn, will call into question the Commission’s capacity to act as the driving force and guardian of EU policy-making,” notes the expert, who predicts that the dynamics between the Community Executive, the Council and the European Parliament will be transformed. “The principle of institutional balance that governs relations between these institutions may be altered,” he adds.
Ribera, the second most powerful person in Brussels
In this context, and especially with a majority of Popular Party commissioners, the Spanish socialist Teresa Ribera, appointed as first executive vice-president, and in charge of the powerful portfolio of Competition as well as Clean, Fair and Competitive Transition – the green agenda and part of the important industrial branch – will have a “crucial” counterweight role, Van Middelaar stresses.
The current third vice-president and Minister for Ecological Transition under Pedro Sánchez’s government is set to be the second most powerful person in the Commission, something that consolidates Spain’s role and strength in the EU. Also, because one of Von der Leyen’s great priorities, along with enlargement to the east and Ukraine, says the director of the Brussels Institute of Geopolitics, is to modernise the industrial and green base. This is the path marked by former Italian president Mario Draghi in his commented report on competitiveness, in which he warns that either the Union undergoes changes or it will be embarked on a “slow agony”. This is an existential question for the future of the community project.
The truth is that, given the geopolitical reality of the past five years and her assertive personality, Von der Leyen had already outlined a very presidential Commission. “It has had a greater role and a greater impact due to the European response to the coronavirus pandemic and Russia’s war against Ukraine. The Commission has become a much more powerful institution than it already was and in this legislature it will have an absolutely central role,” says Brasso Sorensen. With Germany awaiting elections in 2025 and France still to see how the government of conservative Michel Barnier functions and to analyse Macron’s resistance – without forgetting that the ultra tide continues to grow in both countries – the decisive role of the Community Executive may grow. “We should look to the Commission as a kind of driver of European integration, at least for the next few years,” says the expert.
