N. Peter Kramer’s Weekly Column
Looking at the new Commission, power centres like Timmermans, Vestager and Breton are missing. At the beginning of this week, Thierry Breton, French candidate-commissioner once again, was personally manoeuvred out of play by President Ursula Von der Leyen herself. Behind Breton’s back she pressed French President Emmanuel Macron to switch ‘for (unmentioned) personal reasons’ to another candidate.
VDL tried in this way to get rid of Breton, a heavyweight commissioner critical of her ‘dictatorial’ leadership style; she hoped to get a woman-candidate instead. She promised a more powerful commission position than she in fact intended to give Breton. But Macron sent another man to Brussels, Stephane Sejourne who indeed ended up with the rank of Executive Vice-President (EVP). He revealed later that he will have less power than his predecessor Breton, because he needs sign-off from his colleague and co-EVP Spanish Teresa Ribera to exercise key subsidy powers.
Ursula von der Leyen also surprised everyone by proposing newcomers Romania’s Roxana Minzatu and Finland’s Henna Virkkunen for EVP roles. Incumbent Commission veterans Slovakia’s Maros Sefcovic and Latvia’s Valdis Dombrovskis lost their VP-position and were demoted to a junior-commissioner role subordinate to an EVP.
Bureaucratically nothing is fully clear yet, some key policies are distributed across several portfolios and who exactly reports to whom is also unclear. Anyhow, now it is over to the European Parliament for the last say. Hearings, otherwise known as ‘grillings’, of the candidates are planned to start mid-October.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Melloni’s candidate, Raffaele Fitto, one of von der Leyen’s 6 EVP’s, will be especially in the spotlight. His party, ECR, is considered to be extreme-right by Liberals, Greens and Social-Democrats. Whereas for VDL’s EPP the ECR doesn’t belong to this category.
In Brussels, the dominant conclusion is that the picture of the new Commission emerges as one of a relatively week slate of commissioners. Maybe that is what von der Leyen intended.
