Europe’s leaders have been flooding the European Commission with new ideas and demands on hot-button issues like migration and defence, but where are they getting with it when the Commission is on its way out? Nowhere fast, it seems.
When police roll out blue-and-white tape to close off the European quarter, it can only mean it is Council summit time in Brussels.
The wish lists of Europe’s leaders were long – especially on migration – as they paraded past reporters and the famous lightbulb-shaped structure at the Council’s entrance.
Yet the frenzied activity around the meeting makes it easy to forget that Brussels currently sits in the middle of a power vacuum.
The mandate of the current college of commissioners officially expires in exactly 14 days. New commissioners are expected to be confirmed in December at the earliest, leaving the current ones to continue to hang around as lame ducks until then.
So what happens in the meantime to all the proposals that Europe’s heads of state and government have sent to the Berlaymont? In reality, not a lot.
Desks at the Commission’s headquarters must be overflowing with letters. These days, it seems like everything that bugs Europe’s leaders domestically gets sent vers Bruxelles.
That was the plan for the 15 EU countries who urged the Commission to reform the EU Returns Directive, that sets out the guardrails for removing rejected asylum-seekers. Likewise, the German and French interior ministers teamed up in August to pester the Commission about a migration deal with the new British government. Others want to bring forward EU-level migration reform and boost cross-border energy cooperation.
But – to paraphrase Kissinger – who picks up the phone in Europe when the Commission is on its way out?
Mostly, no one, it appears. While the mandates of the current commissioners are extended until their replacements take office, they will “primarily deal with routine matters or those that cannot be postponed,” says Luise Quaritsch, an EU politics expert at the Jacques Delors Centre. New initiatives should only surface next year, she estimates.
Officials in the capitals also seem to be expecting a standstill for the next months. Disgruntled diplomats from several EU countries have expressed their growing impatience to Euractiv. The EU needs an executive sooner rather than later, they say.
There is one not-so-lame duck still in town, however: the Commission president. When Ursula is home alone, as has often been the case in recent years, one should not be surprised if she answers the phone – to the dismay of some EU leaders who resent her growing power.
On migration, von der Leyen has jumped on the opportunity to respond to member states’ concerns with a seven-page letter that boldly foreshadows measures such as ‘return hubs’.
Parliament holds the keys
But in order to fill the vacuum and get the new commission up and running as soon as possible, the European Parliament needs to play its part in approving incoming commissioners.
As Decoded covered a few weeks ago, some lawmakers might just feel inspired to let commissioners-designate pass to accelerate the process.
“Delegations from parties that are part of national governments are more inclined to let the collective Commission through” a parliamentary source from the hemicycle’s progressive side told Euractiv.
Von der Leyen’s proposed line-up also seems to have succeeded in finding a delicate political balance. Should any one commissioner fall, it would risk catalysing political reprisals, and hence further delays to the process.
The suspicion that lawmakers are in a hurry was fueled when members of the Parliament’s legal affairs committee green-lit the entire slate of commissioners after whistling through their scrutiny of conflicts of interest. In 2019, two commissioners-designate fell at this first hurdle.
But no matter when the new Commission joins von der Leyen in the Berlaymont, the freedom she has discovered during her stint at home alone is unlikely to be given up easily.
