Just put Juncker in and do it better next time

A lot of the arguments we hear about the 'Spitzenkandidaten' process have focused on how 9 out of 10 people can't name the person who apparently won it. In Britain his name was scarcely mentioned until after the elections when David Cameron moved to block him as European Commission president.

They talk about how he's a figure from the 1980s when Europe needs change and reform, they talk about how he's too much of a Brussels politician, he's not dynamic enough, he's too "federalist" (which, ironically in this context means he favours centralising power in Brussels).

All of this is true but it also misses the point entirely.




True, Jean-Claude Juncker is a terrible choice for Commission President. He had to resign in less than glamorous circumstances last year and is the dictionary definition of a back-room, wheeling-dealing Brussels bureaucrat that the public despise. The most exciting and dynamic thing about him is this parody Twitter account.

But this is about something bigger which very few British newspapers appear able to mention. Juncker's block "won" the European Parliament elections. The 2014 elections were the first time the party groups in the Parliament nominated EU-wide candidates for the EU's most powerful executive position. Attempting to tie the results of elections to the EU's legislature to the selection of it's executive, as happens all the time in national elections. It's how we choose the prime minister in the UK and most other parliamentary systems.

Supporters of this (including me) believe that this is more democratic and that the process should be supported regardless of the qualities of the winning candidate. Opponents say that the current method of choosing the Commission President is more democratic as it expresses the wishes of the national governments which have a clearer democratic mandate and that's arguably true as national turnouts are always greater than European ones and European elections are normally seen through a prism of national politics. And the opponents also have a point in that the vast majority of people voting in the European elections were not voting for or against Juncker or Martin Schulz, they were voting for or against their national governments. It's a chicken and egg situation, voters don't treat the European elections as European so we shouldn't treat the results that way.

The Spitzenkandidat process is an attempt to break this cycle by showing that the results mean something in the hope that this will make voters take them more seriously because. At the core, the appeal of voting is to "throw the bums out" and vote in someone else. That's currently impossible at the EU level but the Spitzenkandidat process could bring it a little closer. No single change could do as much to resolve the democratic deficit that Europe suffers from. Of course it didn't really catch fire on the first go but how long did it take for the conventions governing the selection of prime minister in Britain to become established to the point where voters make the connection automatically? Create the connection first and voters will respond to it, otherwise the European elections will continue to not be worth the time for the 60%+ who don't vote in them.

But that's only if you want to make the EU more democratic and allow the elections to become about an actual change in power. That's what national leaders are really worried about, establishing the precedent that the European Parliament, not the heads of government, appoints the Commission president. Heads of government, particularly in the UK, don't want to cede that power because giving the pan-EU elections that sort of legitimacy because it's an admission that the EU is closer to a confederation than an intergovernmental organisation.

Again, national governments have a point in that voters currently invest them with a lot more legitimacy than they do for the European Parliament but their 'democratic' way of appointing the Commission is how things have been for decades and Europe's voters don't see this as particularly legitimate. Like it or not, the EU in many ways functions as a state which means it needs a level of democratic legitimacy beyond an intergovernmental organisation.

We talk about voters not knowing the identity of the Spitzenkandidaten but I'd expect if you ran a poll and asked people if they'd like to be able to vote on who should be head of the Commission you'd get a fairly positive response to the idea.

So appoint Juncker, establish the precedent, hope that the system improves next time and things start to click into place for an actual, democratic European election in 2019. The relative power of the Commission vs. the Council shouldn't change and the heads of government can still keep Juncker in check. If he turns out to be a disaster, then in 2019 voters can exercise the most basic impulse of democracy and throw him out.

UPDATE: To complicate things slightly, Daniel Gross points out that Mr Juncker's party group, the EPP, won more MEPs but slightly fewer votes than the centre-left S&D group (23.8% to 24.4%) so their candidate, Martin Schulz of Germany, has a better claim to a democratic mandate. The way each member state allocates MEPs means that in some countries (Luxembourg) it takes fewer votes to get a seat than in others (Germany). In truth, neither party group has an overwhelming claim to democratic legitimacy. These vote shares hardly indicate a landslide but the principle of the Spitzenkandidat process is that whoever has the most MEPs has the right to make the first go at assembling a majority in the Parliament for his appointment, the way it works in other parliaments with proportional systems such as Germany or Denmark. If Mr Juncker fails to muster support from the other party groups then Mr Schulz should be allowed to try. Either way, the Parliament should determine the executive, not the European Council.

UPDATE 2: This story in the Guardian sums up how I've been feeling for a while about David Cameron's campaign against Juncker and the Spitzenkandidat process. Opposing him so openly and vehemently was a tactical blunder, makes it seem like foreign policy is subject to the whims of the 'irreconcilables' on the Tory backbenches and sets him up for a defeat with no upsides. One has to hope that he will be able to use his high profile opposition to Juncker's appointment to extract some consolatory concessions forther down the line.