On the face of it, the old guard is still in charge of the European Union.
In the United States, a political ingénu is about to be sworn in as president. In London, the government of Theresa May, still in its infancy, has embarked on rewriting the U.K.’s international relations.
But in Brussels and Strasbourg, the establishment has not relaxed its grip.
The party of the centre right, which already holds the presidencies of the European Council and the European Commission, has, with the election of Antonio Tajani, secured the presidency of the European Parliament.
Far from being swept aside by some new order, it would seem that the European People’s Party (EPP) has turned the clock back to 2009-2011, when the EPP also provided three presidents.
Back then it was José Manuel Barroso in the Commission, Herman Van Rompuy in the Council and Jerzy Buzek in the Parliament. Now it is Jean-Claude Juncker, Donald Tusk, and Tajani.
Wakey-wakey
A latter-day Rip Van Winkle waking up today in Washington would be shocked by what he found. But if he woke up in Brussels, he might be tempted to turn over and go back to sleep.
What those sleep-encrusted eyes would not immediately discern is that the EPP is weaker than it was 10-15 years ago. The European Union has not escaped the insurgent anti-EU forces that have already unseated David Cameron in Britain and now threaten to loom large in this year’s election campaigns in France and the Netherlands.
Indeed, Guy Verhofstadt, the leader of the Liberal MEPs, as he announced on Tuesday morning that he was abandoning his bid to become Parliament’s president and wanted his party to swing behind Tajani, justified this marriage of convenience by citing some external threats. “With Trump, with Putin, with many other challenges Europe faces, it is key we cooperate.”
The deeply ingrained response of many pro-Europeans, when faced with “challenges,” is to circle the wagons and fight off the Euroskeptic enemy. In that respect, Verhofstadt’s decision to throw in his lot with the EPP is indeed a form of business-as-usual. But it would be wrong to extrapolate from Tajani’s victory that the EPP’s hegemony is unshakeable.
Checks on presidential powers
The first thing to bear in mind is that the mid-term election of the president of the European Parliament, such as we have just witnessed, has its own inbuilt time-lag. The term of office of the president is two-and-a-half years, i.e. half a parliamentary term.
So this president was elected by MEPs who were themselves elected at the end of May 2014. The results of those elections, in which the national parties that make up the EPP amassed most votes, were taken by the European Council to mean that the next president of the Commission should be the EPP candidate, that is, Juncker.
Schulz, the candidate of the centre left, was given the presidency of the Parliament for 2014-2016 as a sort of consolation prize, while the two biggest political groups replicated the grand coalition between the centre right and centre left that had already been established in Germany.
The second important thing to remember is the Parliament’s president is the least powerful of the three presidents. The president of the European Parliament is its speaker: He or she presides over debates, represents the institution on ceremonial occasions and trips abroad, and must keep discipline.
But the president does not make policy, unlike the presidents of the Commission and the Council. If the presidency of the Parliament mattered more, its election would be more fiercely contested and the outcome might be a more reliable barometer of the European weather.
Intriguingly, Tajani himself downplayed the role, as he sought to secure the support of the (mildly) Euroskeptic European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group ahead of the final round of voting. “It is not for the European Parliament president to push a political agenda,” was the crucial line in his statement, by which he sought to loosen himself from the deal announced earlier in the day between Verhofstadt’s Liberals and the EPP.
Verhofstadt’s adversaries could not take seriously his proclamation of “a pro-European movement to reform Europe,” coming as it did just a week after he had announced a tentative alliance with Italy’s 5Star Movement — apparently to boost his chances of winning the Parliament’s presidency.
Putting Verhofstadt’s ambition to one side (not an easy task — it’s a sizable object,) there was, however, something plausible about the passionately pro-EU Verhofstadt making common cause with the pro-EU leadership of the EPP.
The text agreed between the EPP and the Liberals — with its various paragraphs on economic governance, trade agreements, defense, the policing of democracy in the member countries, and the possibility of a convention to prepare treaty reform — reads like a Verhofstadt-inspired prescription to save the European patient with his favorite remedy: “more Europe.”
But timing is everything. The agreement’s reference to “a structured dialogue with the European Commission” is an admission that dreams of European reform will need help if they are to see the light of day.
Andrus Ansip, a Commission vice president and former liberal prime minister of Estonia, rather gave the game away last week. The Commission, he said, was now halfway through its term and had moved on to its implementation phase. The time for bright ideas, he implied, had already passed.
Time is running out
In many areas of EU policy, there isn’t enough time left in the life of the current Commission and Parliament to get legislation from drawing-board to statute book, particularly given that Brexit negotiations will be a growing preoccupation over the next two years, both for the Parliament and for the member countries.
That Tajani distanced himself from the agreement struck by his group leader Manfred Weber with Verhofstadt does not mean the EPP will abandon it. But it does hint at tensions within the EPP, which is not as synonymous with Christian democracy as it once was.
Tajani built his political career in Forza Italia, whose inclusion in the EPP family was a subject of controversy in European politics in the late 1990s. During the contest for the presidency, his opponents repeatedly brought up his past as a spokesman for Silvio Berlusconi. That he has nevertheless triumphed is an indication of how broad and how secular a church the EPP has become.
The EPP took a similarly accommodative stance when the EU expanded into the ex-communist states of Central Europe. The occasional embarrassment at the hands of Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s thick-skinned prime minister, is a price that the party is ready to pay for retaining European power.
Tajani’s presidency is evidence the EPP is still adept at taking the spoils, but what counts much more is the European Council, the meetings of the leaders of the member countries. Its membership is in constant flux, determined by the aggregation of 28 different national electoral cycles and by one-off events such as the referendums in the U.K. and in Italy, which saw off prime ministers David Cameron and Matteo Renzi, or shifts within national government coalitions (witness the recent example of Estonia).
In 2017, the presidencies that truly matter for the EPP and for the EU will not be decided in Brussels: they are the presidency of France and the chancellorship of Germany. Compared with those, the presidency of the European Parliament is a mere bauble.
Tim King writes POLITICO‘s Brussels Sketch