BRUSSELS — On the menu was a starter of green asparagus and smoked salmon, with a main course of European discord.
After a two-day meeting in Brussels, European Union leaders said on Friday that they had failed to agree on who will lead the bloc’s key institutions — first and foremost the European Commission, the administrative branch — for the next five years.
In typical European Union style, as the leaders squabbled over dinner on Thursday in a room with jammed cellphone signal and few aides, they even disagreed on the process they would follow to reach a decision.
They said they would meet again on June 30 to give it another go.
The tussle over this esoteric but important choice of personnel to lead the institutions that make the bloc work — including the critically important European Central Bank, which sets monetary policy for the 19 member states that use the euro — is emblematic of the political disharmony at the heart of the world’s richest group of nations.
“It’s part and parcel of the process we need to pursue,” the bloc’s most powerful leader, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, told reporters on Friday.
The optimism she expressed that the leaders would reach an agreement at their next meeting reflected what many in Brussels instinctively know: That for the European Union to forge a common position on most matters, its member states first need to go through iterations of disagreeing.
This choreography is playing out against a pressing existential struggle: How to inject more democratic accountability and transparency into the business of governing a bloc that is increasingly important in the lives of more than half a billion citizens in 28 countries, but whose institutions remain largely opaque to those they serve.
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Momentous changes across the European Union can be attributed to this tension, in particular Brexit and the rise of populism, both in sharp focus after last month’s European Parliament elections.
The Parliament, the European Union’s only directly elected institution, is now more fragmented than ever, with the center of the traditional political spectrum — the conservatives and the socialists — weakened so significantly that they can no longer promote their own candidates to the bloc’s top jobs.
In 2014, when major institutions’ positions were last filled, the European Union conducted an experiment to select the European Commission president that it hoped would better link the bloc’s top official to the people’s will.
Under that plan, the Commission’s chief would be the anointed candidate of the political grouping with the most seats in the European Parliament. Luxembourg’s former prime minister, Jean-Claude Juncker, a veteran conservative politician, took the post.
Critics say this was a flawed and premature way of arriving at the appointment. The accountability link between the candidate and the electorate was not clear, they say, and gave too much power to the European Parliament and too little to the national, elected governments of member states.
“The processes were pretty transparent, sometimes I think too transparent to be productive,” said the European Council’s president, Donald Tusk, whose job is also up for grabs and is effectively to convene meetings of the bloc’s leaders, set their agenda and try to hammer out compromises on the issues of the day.
This time around, that process appears dead in the water, as none of the three candidates can command a majority in the Parliament, whose consent is needed to bless the appointment. Next week’s meeting seems set to be conducted purely on the basis of political horse trading.
The risk is that reconciling the demand among European leaders to give power to officials from different geographical regions, political ideologies and gender could lead to a bad outcome for actually doing the jobs at hand.
“You could eventually end up with someone not ambitious enough, because if you want to satisfy everyone, you might be looking at the lowest common denominator,” said Agata Gostynska-Jakubowska, a senior research fellow at the Center for European Reform, a research institute in Brussels.
This could lead to further trouble down the road.
“Many Europeans who went to the polls last month actively voted for change, and punished the center right and center left for muddling through, failing to come up with more bold actions on Europe’s pressing challenges,” Ms. Gostynska-Jakubowska said.
“If we end up with someone who’s not embracing this call for change,” she said, “there could be a bigger backlash the next time around.”
Source : Nytimes
