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| Gone but not yet forgotten |
Having installed Juncker as Commission President MEPs took the individual candidates, nominated by the member states, to task. According to the Treaties, the EP can accept or reject the entire Commission, but MEPs have turned this into de facto votes on individual Commissioners, with intra-EP politics meaning some nominees may be taken 'hostage'. Having called back the UK's Lord Hill for a second hearing - creating jitters in Downing Street - MEPs finally voted down Slovenian candidate Alenka Bratušek. She was today forced to resign - despite Juncker himself insisting on her candidacy. MEPs seemed to have made their point - it has voted down individual nominees in the past, and as we predicted, the EP was bound to claim a scalp.
MEPs now seem to be pushing their luck further - attempting to tell the Slovenian Government who they should appoint as their new candidate, with both the EPP and S&D calling for the nomination to go to social-democrat MEP Tanja Fajon. Slovenia, however, is pushing back. The country's PM has issued a statement saying:
"The Slovenian Prime Minister expects political groups in the European Parliament to abide by EU law and the fundamental democratic principle in selecting candidates for commissioners"In other words, the Slovenians say, this is for their Government - not MEPs - to decide.
Will MEPs stand back? We will see. To be fair, Slovenia has a new government and we can't blame it for events over the least few months. But we can't help asking, isn't this exactly what member states were asking for when agreeing to the Spitzenkandidaten in the first place?
2 comments:
Simply a powergrab. If you will go with this EP de facto appointments it will get from bad to worse (like not only for manure hole countries but also for those that matter).
Just kick them back in their cage.
There are many flaws in the process of selecting and appointing Commissioners, the most glaring of which is the "one Commissioner per Member State" rule, which means that a Maltese person is around 180 times more likely to become an EU Commissioner than a German citizen.
But surely everyone has an interest in ensuring that suitable, competent and experienced people get appointed to the Commission.
Unfortunately, the new Slovenian nominee Violeta Bulc seems not to be the sort of person who is capable of running a public administration or developing and implementing EU policies and legislation. So it appears that trusting national governments to nominate competent people does not work in every case.
Meanwhile, the MEPs are responsible for checking that candidates are competent and qualified. They have every right to show the red card if they consider that a particular candidate is not suitable.
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