After German commissioner Gόnther Verheugen, it is the Polish member of the European Commission Danuta Hόbner, who complains about the increasing power of the civil servancy.
But the Polish commissioner's remarks are not as tough as the earlier comments by her German colleague, who in November attacked "high ranking bureaucrats" for trying to rule the commission at the expense of commissioners.
In Mrs Hόbner’s opinion: ‘the Commission has after enlargement become a more "presidential" organisation, but it is the commission's civil servants who have really won influence. The bigger the commission, the more presidential the system must be. This is not a negative assessment, it's just a reality.’
The number of commissioners has since the EU's 2004 and 2007 enlargement jumped from 20 to 27, a development seen as decreasing the weight of individual commissioners while strengthening the power of the commission president. EU diplomats have characterised the style of current commission president Josι Manuel Barroso as "presidential," with Mr Barroso personally steering Brussels' most important policy dossiers such as energy and the EU constitution.
But the real winner of influence in the post-enlargement commission is not President Barroso but the commission's civil servants, according to Mrs Hόbner.
‘The presidential system doesn't mean the president is making all the decisions, it means that there is a strong role of the commission secretariat’, she said.
The so-called secretariat-general of the commission - falling under the responsibility of Mr Barroso - crucially chairs the weekly meetings of the commissioner's cabinet chiefs which pre-cook many decisions ahead of the actual commission meeting every Wednesday.
‘With a bigger commission you have to be more disciplined. In commission meetings we discuss what has not reached final agreement at the cabinet’s level.
But with the influence of the commission's civil servants on the rise, commissioners must be careful not to lose grip of things’, Mrs Hόbner indicated.
Mrs Hόbner warned against re-thinking the future composition of the commission alone, without keeping the overall institutional balance of the EU in sight. The debate on the shape and size of the commission has seen a revival with the EU accession of Romania and Bulgaria. The two new commissioners, Romania's Leonard Orban and Bulgaria's Meglena Kuneva, were awarded portfolios seen as lightweight if not irrelevant.
