In 2009 each of the three Presidents of the European Union will be re-elected, though each in different ways…

Brendan Donnelly

Unless the Irish voters decide otherwise in their referendum this June, the first effects of the Lisbon Treaty are likely to be felt in the course of 2009. A number of the Treaty’s new provisions affect in particular the various Presidents and Presidencies that are responsible for the day to day running of the European Union.

Perhaps the most widely-discussed innovation of the Treaty of Lisbon is the modified Presidency of the European Council, the Union’s meeting-place of heads of state and government. Until now, this post has been exercised by the head of state or government from the member state holding the overall European presidency, a post changing by rotation every six months. In future, the Presidency of the European Council will be a full-time post, lasting two and a half years, renewable once. The President will be elected by majority vote within the European Council and is expected to bring to the job substantial personal and political credentials.

When the possibility of a non-rotating Presidency for the European Council was first mooted, its supporters plausibly argued that this change would bring greater continuity and political identity to the European Council itself and by extension to the European Union as a whole. At the same time, some of the new post’s supporters hoped, and some of its opponents feared, that future Presidents of the European Council could by their personal and institutional prestige serve to “rebalance” the workings of the European Union in a more intergovernmental direction.

In fact, it is highly doubtful whether any future President of the European Council will have the powers and institutional standing to make any significant difference to the institutional architecture of the European Union. The Lisbon Treaty is vague on the subject of the President’s competences precisely because the signatories had very different views about the new post’s appropriate workings. The sectoral, law-making Councils of the Union are in no sense subordinate to the new President of the European Council. Occasional and general exhortations from the European Council, of which the new President will be the articulator, will inevitably be diluted in the Union’s complicated negotiating and institutional structure.

In the United Kingdom, some discussion has been directed to the possibility that the first full-time President of the European Council might be Mr. Blair, possibly attracted by the representative function for the European Union which the Treaty of Lisbon confers on the future President.

An argument can certainly be made for the proposition that a well-known, prestigious international figure such as Mr. Blair would be a suitable first occupant of the European Council’s Presidency. At least as powerful an argument can be made that on the contrary the imprecise and limited objective resources given to the new Presidency by the Treaty of Lisbon point towards candidates, perhaps from smaller member states, with a broader and more varied experience of the Union’s structures than Mr. Blair’s.

Another important post within the European Union that will be allocated next year is that of the Presidency of the European Commission. The Lisbon Treaty contains potentially important clauses on this issue. As with many central questions taken up by the Treaty, the finally agreed text is one which can lend itself to varying interpretations and varying paths of implementation.

Under the Lisbon Treaty, the European Council will still be the proposer of the new President for the Commission in the later half of 2009. But the European Council is enjoined, when choosing its candidate, to “take into account” the preceding European Elections (June 2009), and the high threshold of a majority of the European Parliament’s members is set for the Parliament’s endorsement of the Council’s candidate. If the European Council’s candidate does not attain this majority, another candidate must be put forward within a month, with the Parliament once again needing a majority of its members to endorse the European Council’s candidate.

The new system certainly opens new possibilities of influence in the choice of Commission President to the European Parliament. It is an as yet unresolved question whether the political groups represented in the Parliament will be willing and able to take advantage of these new possibilities. At least two challenging hurdles would need to be surmounted before next year’s European Elections.

First, at least the major political groups within the European Parliament would need to choose and publicise beforehand their favoured candidates for the Presidency of the Commission. A previously named politician whose political family had garnered the largest number of votes in the European Elections of 2009 would be in a politically much stronger position to demand nomination from the European Council as President of the Commission than an individual whose interest in the Commission Presidency only emerged after the European Elections. Second, there would need to be an agreement between at least the largest political groups in the European Parliament that they would act together after the European Elections, and themselves respect the result of those elections, as they wish the European Council to respect them. Both of these are difficult preconditions for the Parliament to put in place before the Elections and observe after the Elections.

In addition to these two major presidential contests likely to be decided next year, the European Parliament will also need after the European Elections to choose a new president. The ministerial Councils of the European Union will, unlike the European Council, continue under the direction of “team presidencies,” whereby not one, but three countries will be responsible on a rotating basis for guiding the work of these specialist law-making councils. Ironically, national ministers will find their contribution to the workings of the European Union less changed by the Lisbon Treaty than will their political superiors, the heads of state and government. With this range of presidential authority to be exercised next year in the European Union, there will no doubt be pressure from national governments for a political and geographical balance to be struck in the new appointments. Such a balancing compromise between overlapping interests, in which the nomination for the new High Representative for External Affairs will probably also play a part, is an altogether more likely outcome by the end of 2009 than the over-drawn picture favoured by some commentators of a future European Union dominated, for good or evil, by an all-powerful President of the European Council. Evolution, not revolution is the current watchword of the European Union.

Brendan Donnelly is director of the Federal Trust

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