by Robert Tyler (political strategist, working for a European political party)
”Sofagate”, in which European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was deprived a chair and relegated to the sofa instead, while on a visit to Turkey together with European Council Chairman Charles Michel, has been viewed by many as a sign of Europe’s diminishing influence in the world.
Whether Michel had agreed the seating arrangement with the Turkish side or not, and aside from his poor judgement to simply sit down – something for which he half-heartedly apologised, this is fundamentally a sign of a deep power struggle between the European Council and the European Commission.
That doesn’t mean it is a power struggle between intergovernmentalism and supranationalism. Instead, it involves the distribution of power within the supranational EU level instead. Charles Michel’s office is after all a creation of the Lisbon Treaty and many clearly intended his job to become something akin to a “President of Europe”, even if in most languages, his title is something closer to “chairman”.
The Lisbon Treaty was signed in 2007 and came into force in 2009. The Treaty rehashed most of the content of the European Constitution. It also set out the division of powers between the President of the European Commission and the President of the European Parliament. It established the principle that the leaders of Member State governments – gathered in the European Council – must nominate the European Commission President while “taking into account the elections to the European Parliament”. This was reinterpreted by the European Parliament to mean that the Commission President should be the nominated “lead candidate” or “Spitzenkandidat” of the “European political party” that gets the most seats in the European Parliament.
Back in 2009, EU leaders went along with this logic, nominating Jean-Claude Juncker as EU Commission President. Juncker had been nominated by the EPP party as “Spitzenkandidat”, even if he had not even been running in the European Parliament elections in his native Luxembourg.
After this, Juncker set out to create what he dubbed a ‘Political Commission’.
The theory behind this was to create a European Commission which would hand down legislation to the European Parliament and which would also have a much more active role on the world stage, as opposed to simply acting as the EU’s civil service. In many ways, the increased presence of Jean Claude-Juncker at global summits and forums only further muddied the water and made him look like the top man in the European Institutions.
In 2019, EU leaders however simply decided to ignore the “Spitzenkandidat” arrangement and nominated German defence minister Ursula von der Leyen as the President of the Commission.
Despite lacking the legitimacy Juncker supposedly enjoyed of being the product of the “Spitzenkandidat” – process, von der Leyen nevertheless doubled down on the idea of a “political commission”.
Since taking charge of the Commission, von der Leyen has therefore been in continuous conflict with European Council President Charles Michel, with media reporting “there are almost daily incidents between them and their teams”, including for example a discussion in June 2020 on who’s entitled to send the invitation for a Brexit meeting with British PM Boris Johnson to relaunch Brexit talks.
This contrasts with the Juncker-days, who was known to have regular meetings with Donald Tusk, while their teams were on good terms. This was perhaps helped by the fact that both men came from the same European political party, the EPP.
While the ideological differences between Charles Michel and Ursula von der Leyen may not be large, it is clear that each of them feel that they have the most important role to play. It is not inconceivable that Charles Michel saw an opportunity in the Summit with Erdogan to reassert himself as the EU’s external face.
If true, serious questions need to be asked about Charles Michel’s judgement, especially given that we’re talking about the relationship between the EU and Turkey, a delicate matter for years. What’s more, in allowing a private and interinstitutional battle to spill over into public, Michel has fueled the narrative of hostile powers that the West is not only divided when it comes to external matters, but to internal ones as well.
It must be once more stressed that the institution of the chairman of the European Council is not of an “intergovernmental” nature. It is part and parcel of the EU’s supranational machinery. “Sofagate” is yet more evidence that trusting something as important as foreign policy to supranational actors that are bound to try to politicise their jobs – something an intergovernmental envoy tasked with a specific mission would be much less likely to do – may ultimately weaken the power of European nations joining up to bundle their foreign policy initiatives.
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