With just under six weeks to go until the European elections, the election campaign is picking up speed. The SPD, FDP, CSU, Left Party and AfD hosted party conferences and kick-off events at the weekend. FDP lead candidate Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann criticized Commission President Ursula von der Leyen – the EPP candidate is hiding and “not facing up to the citizens.” SPD Chancellor Olaf Scholz and CSU leader Markus Söder targeted the AfD, with Söder speaking of a party “with a nasty face.”
The European Parliament is launching its election campaign today, Monday, albeit of a different kind. The institution has had a film produced to encourage citizens to vote. EP chief spokesman Jaume Duch Guillot will present it this morning.
In the four-minute version, contemporary witnesses of the Second World War, the Prague Spring and the fall of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu talk to their grandchildren about their experiences with democracy and dictatorship. One elderly lady’s message: “Take good care of democracy when I’m gone.”
There are also short versions of the film for the TikTok generation. The major TV stations also broadcast them, most of them without payment. The films were produced by a Danish agency.
Have a good start to the first week of May.
In 22 member states, the lists for the European elections do not necessarily have to be drawn up according to democratic principles. Only in five member states do party candidates have to be democratically elected in delegate or party assemblies. The rules for drawing up party candidate lists for the European elections differ from member state to member state.
Among the member states where no democratic rules apply when drawing up lists for the European Parliament are EU founding states such as Italy, France, Luxembourg and Belgium. The chairman of a committee in the European Parliament told Table Briefings: “If these democratic deficits existed in EU accession candidates, they would be noted in relevant Commission reports.”
In many member states, the party leadership decides which politicians will run for promising positions. In Portugal, for example , the socialist party (Partido Socialista, PS) announced its list of candidates a few days ago. The names on the list were a big surprise: none of the nine PS members of the European Parliament made it onto the list.
S&D Group Vice-President Pedro Marques, who was already being touted as a possible group leader in the next European Parliament, is not in the running. Pedro Silva Pereira, one of 14 Vice-Presidents in Parliament, also has no chance of continuing. Instead of re-nominating top performers who are recognized beyond the boundaries of the parliamentary group, party leader Carlos César has nominated former ministers from the outgoing Costa government.
The national regulations allow the party leaders to determine the lists of candidates. Often, the list only follows the decision of the party leader. Some parties, such as the SPÖ in Austria, nevertheless choose the list according to democratic rules. In these 22 member states, the candidates are determined by party circles or leaders:
This contrasts with the procedure used in Germany, for example: At delegate assemblies or party conferences, the delegates or members must determine the lists according to democratic procedures. As a rule, the party leadership proposes the list. Combat candidacies are possible. As a politician in the European Parliament can shape a lot and the conditions are attractive, there is a high level of interest in a nomination. The list is determined by democratic competition.
The democratic procedure for drawing up lists is used in the following countries:
It should actually be a matter of course that the candidates for the democratically elected European Parliament are chosen according to democratic rules. If a politician is only nominated when he or she is in the favor of the party leader, many will leave after just one term. Accordingly, the turnover in the European Parliament is high. At the constituent meeting of the 9th parliamentary term in July 2019, 61 percent of MEPs were newcomers. Observers expect similar figures this time.
It is also clear that the longer a politician is in Parliament, the better they know the structures and the more effectively they can work. It certainly takes two years before an MEP is fully operational in the European Parliament. It is not without reason that many German MEPs are considered the top performers. A striking number of them chair committees, are rapporteurs and hold coordinator positions in their political group.
Many member states nominate late. In Poland and Spain, the lists have not yet been finalized, even though the elections are less than six weeks away. In Baden-Württemberg, for example, where nominations are always made very early, the five most promising candidates have been clear for over a year. They have been planning their election campaigns for a long time. The parties’ campaigns have long been underway. In Germany, the election posters for the European elections are already up, while elsewhere it is not even clear who is running.
In Italy, Finland, Poland and other member states, there is also the “preferential vote”: The voter does not vote for a list or party, but chooses a politician. The politician with the most votes wins a mandate, not the one at the top of the list. This means that prominent candidates have an advantage. All candidates from one party compete against each other, there are no constituencies, they have to campaign nationwide.
In Italy, for example, the candidates’ names are not even on the ballot paper. Voters have to know who they want to vote for before they go into the polling booth. They then have to write the name of their candidate by hand on the ballot paper. Because of this rule, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and opposition leader Elly Schlein, for example, have their names written at the top of the list in Italy although neither thinks of moving to the European Parliament but will remain in national politics. Instead, they hope to gain more votes for their parties by standing as celebrities in the election.
European Council meetings provide an exceptionally good vantage point from which to assess the state of the Union and its likely future direction. The meeting on April 17/18 is a good illustration even though, as we shall see, the signals that it gave were in some respects contradictory and discordant.
The meeting started on the evening of April 17 with four hours of discussions, firstly, for 40 minutes, with Roberta Metsola, about preparations for the June European Parliament elections and the appointments process which will follow, and the rest of the time, about the war in Ukraine, relations with Turkey and the crisis in the Middle East. The session had been well-prepared, and the discussion was serious, practical and consensual.
As far as Ukraine was concerned the main focus was on the country’s precarious military situation and its urgent need for reinforcement of its air defenses and faster and larger transfers of artillery, ammunition and missiles.
The German chancellor spoke first and – not for the first time in the European Council’s deliberations about Ukraine – set the tone for the session as a whole. Ukraine needed help urgently, he said, and Germany’s decision to transfer three Patriot air defense systems provided a clear example of what could and should be done. Orban remained silent, as he almost always does when Ukraine is discussed, but the debate as a whole confirmed that the European Council’s support for Ukraine is rock-solid.
Olaf Scholz was also prominent in the debate about whether or not the EU should enlarge the scope of its conversation with Erdogan’s Turkey. Thanks to well-drafted changes to the draft Conclusions suggested by the Greek government on the eve of the meeting.
The Cyprus president, who was Scholz’s principal interlocutor throughout, eventually settled for a text which gave the green light to a cautious rapprochement under the supervision of the European Council and Coreper.
On the Middle East, the most important decision, to impose fresh sanctions on Iran for the drone attack against Israel, had already been taken before the leaders met. The discussion therefore focused on Lebanon, including the risks of escalation and the vulnerabilities of significant sections of the Lebanese population and the substantial refugee population that Lebanon hosts, and Gaza.
Here the running was made by the Spanish prime minister and the leaders of other member states that strongly support the Palestinians. Divisions over the Middle East crisis undoubtedly persist in the European Council, but the leaders’ views have converged on several of the most important questions and their differences have been contained.
The debate about economic policy on the second day was very different. During the first two hours, the leaders discussed Enrico Letta’s report on the Single Market, which was circulated too late for the leaders to study it beforehand, but which Letta presented well.
The discussion was not particularly profound, but everybody who spoke acknowledged that the issues that the former Italian prime minister addressed were important and that both Letta’s report and the report by Mario Draghi which the European Council will consider in June were timely and merited serious study.
So far so good. Once Letta had left the room, however, the meeting began to go badly wrong. At Michel’s prompting, the leaders engaged in a four-and-a-half-hour debate about the paragraphs in the draft Conclusions outlining A New European Competitiveness Deal.
There were three rather basic problems. Firstly, the New Deal the Conclusions described was neither new nor a deal. Secondly, the text was poorly drafted and invited amendments in numbers. And thirdly, Michel – who always tries rather too hard for his own interests to be at the centre of the action – failed to impose any order on the discussion. So tedious and confused was the debate indeed that even the notetakers had difficulty at times in making sense of it and some if not most of the participants appeared to be increasingly bored and frustrated.
Some concrete results did emerge however, particularly with regard to Capital Markets Union. A substantial coalition led by the Luxemburg prime minister, Luc Frieden, succeeded in removing any mention of the harmonization of corporate tax law. But Scholz and Macron were able to safeguard the possibility of central supervision of capital markets across the EU.
And, most importantly of all, the paragraphs in the draft Conclusions in which the European Council pledged to monitor the EU’s work on the Single Market and more specifically to “review progress and discuss additional steps to deepen the Capital Markets Union at its meeting in June,” were retained. Capital Markets Union has become Chefsache in other words, as the German chancellor argued that it should when he spoke with surprising force at the March European Council.
Despite the highly unsatisfactory character of the Conclusions on the New Competitiveness Deal and the messy and directionless session with which the Special European Council closed, the April meeting was not therefore a non-event. Nor, still more important, is it the end of the story.
History does not repeat itself, but there are interesting parallels between the state of the Union now and the state of the European Community in 1984. The explanation of the European Community’s major advances in the second half of the 1980’s is complex and lessons from what was a very different era cannot easily be applied to today’s Europe.
The essential ingredients of the turnaround are not irrelevant however: strong collective leadership through the European Council, bold choices of personnel including not just Jacques Delors, the new president of the Commission – who, it should be noted, worked loyally as well as effectively with the European Council and Council – but also his lieutenants, some of whom, like Arthur Cockfield, pressure from the business community in the honeymoon days of the European Round Table, the completion of protracted accession negotiations with Spain and Portugal and of course ‘events’, which as always were of enormous importance.
It was a different age. But there have been moments in the European Council during the past few years, when the outlines of a bold and imaginative consensus about the future of the Union, shared and shaped by some of the European Council’s more consequential members, have been apparent. There are also ideas aplenty on which the leaders can draw, including most recently the Letta report on the revamping of the Single Market, the Eurogroup’s proposals concerning the Capital Markets Union and the Draghi report which the European Council will consider in June.
Events too have played their part. Von der Leyen has been a “geopolitical president,” not simply nor even mainly because that was her ambition, but because events have obliged her to. And Olaf Scholz, despite his party’s and his own natural inclinations, has become the most effective champion for Ukraine in the European Council. Last, but by no means least, there is demand for a Union that can hold its own in the global community, from business but also – if the polls are to be believed – from a majority of the electorate.
The makings of a major step forward in the making of the Union are present therefore, just as they were in 1984. Whether or not it materializes in bold and sound personnel choices, imaginative but at the same time feasible proposals and speedy and effective decisions, as it did from 1985 onwards, will however depend very largely on choices that will have to be made in the next five or six months.
Peter Ludlow is Chairman of EuroComment, Founding Director of CEPS and former Professor of History at the European University Institute in Florence. Since more than two decades, he publishes notes appearing seven days after each meeting of the European Council that provide a comprehensive analysis of the discussion and its outcome. Based on oral and documentary sources which are not normally available, they provide a unique insight into decision-making at the heart of the EU.
This text is a short version of his note that Peter Ludlow edited especially for Europe.Table. If you are interested in the full report, please write to info@eurocomment.eu
With just under six weeks to go until the European elections, the election campaign is picking up speed. The SPD, FDP, CSU, Left Party and AfD hosted party conferences and kick-off events at the weekend. FDP lead candidate Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann criticized Commission President Ursula von der Leyen – the EPP candidate is hiding and “not facing up to the citizens.” SPD Chancellor Olaf Scholz and CSU leader Markus Söder targeted the AfD, with Söder speaking of a party “with a nasty face.”
The European Parliament is launching its election campaign today, Monday, albeit of a different kind. The institution has had a film produced to encourage citizens to vote. EP chief spokesman Jaume Duch Guillot will present it this morning.
In the four-minute version, contemporary witnesses of the Second World War, the Prague Spring and the fall of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu talk to their grandchildren about their experiences with democracy and dictatorship. One elderly lady’s message: “Take good care of democracy when I’m gone.”
There are also short versions of the film for the TikTok generation. The major TV stations also broadcast them, most of them without payment. The films were produced by a Danish agency.
Have a good start to the first week of May.
In 22 member states, the lists for the European elections do not necessarily have to be drawn up according to democratic principles. Only in five member states do party candidates have to be democratically elected in delegate or party assemblies. The rules for drawing up party candidate lists for the European elections differ from member state to member state.
Among the member states where no democratic rules apply when drawing up lists for the European Parliament are EU founding states such as Italy, France, Luxembourg and Belgium. The chairman of a committee in the European Parliament told Table Briefings: “If these democratic deficits existed in EU accession candidates, they would be noted in relevant Commission reports.”
In many member states, the party leadership decides which politicians will run for promising positions. In Portugal, for example , the socialist party (Partido Socialista, PS) announced its list of candidates a few days ago. The names on the list were a big surprise: none of the nine PS members of the European Parliament made it onto the list.
S&D Group Vice-President Pedro Marques, who was already being touted as a possible group leader in the next European Parliament, is not in the running. Pedro Silva Pereira, one of 14 Vice-Presidents in Parliament, also has no chance of continuing. Instead of re-nominating top performers who are recognized beyond the boundaries of the parliamentary group, party leader Carlos César has nominated former ministers from the outgoing Costa government.
The national regulations allow the party leaders to determine the lists of candidates. Often, the list only follows the decision of the party leader. Some parties, such as the SPÖ in Austria, nevertheless choose the list according to democratic rules. In these 22 member states, the candidates are determined by party circles or leaders:
This contrasts with the procedure used in Germany, for example: At delegate assemblies or party conferences, the delegates or members must determine the lists according to democratic procedures. As a rule, the party leadership proposes the list. Combat candidacies are possible. As a politician in the European Parliament can shape a lot and the conditions are attractive, there is a high level of interest in a nomination. The list is determined by democratic competition.
The democratic procedure for drawing up lists is used in the following countries:
It should actually be a matter of course that the candidates for the democratically elected European Parliament are chosen according to democratic rules. If a politician is only nominated when he or she is in the favor of the party leader, many will leave after just one term. Accordingly, the turnover in the European Parliament is high. At the constituent meeting of the 9th parliamentary term in July 2019, 61 percent of MEPs were newcomers. Observers expect similar figures this time.
It is also clear that the longer a politician is in Parliament, the better they know the structures and the more effectively they can work. It certainly takes two years before an MEP is fully operational in the European Parliament. It is not without reason that many German MEPs are considered the top performers. A striking number of them chair committees, are rapporteurs and hold coordinator positions in their political group.
Many member states nominate late. In Poland and Spain, the lists have not yet been finalized, even though the elections are less than six weeks away. In Baden-Württemberg, for example, where nominations are always made very early, the five most promising candidates have been clear for over a year. They have been planning their election campaigns for a long time. The parties’ campaigns have long been underway. In Germany, the election posters for the European elections are already up, while elsewhere it is not even clear who is running.
In Italy, Finland, Poland and other member states, there is also the “preferential vote”: The voter does not vote for a list or party, but chooses a politician. The politician with the most votes wins a mandate, not the one at the top of the list. This means that prominent candidates have an advantage. All candidates from one party compete against each other, there are no constituencies, they have to campaign nationwide.
In Italy, for example, the candidates’ names are not even on the ballot paper. Voters have to know who they want to vote for before they go into the polling booth. They then have to write the name of their candidate by hand on the ballot paper. Because of this rule, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and opposition leader Elly Schlein, for example, have their names written at the top of the list in Italy although neither thinks of moving to the European Parliament but will remain in national politics. Instead, they hope to gain more votes for their parties by standing as celebrities in the election.
European Council meetings provide an exceptionally good vantage point from which to assess the state of the Union and its likely future direction. The meeting on April 17/18 is a good illustration even though, as we shall see, the signals that it gave were in some respects contradictory and discordant.
The meeting started on the evening of April 17 with four hours of discussions, firstly, for 40 minutes, with Roberta Metsola, about preparations for the June European Parliament elections and the appointments process which will follow, and the rest of the time, about the war in Ukraine, relations with Turkey and the crisis in the Middle East. The session had been well-prepared, and the discussion was serious, practical and consensual.
As far as Ukraine was concerned the main focus was on the country’s precarious military situation and its urgent need for reinforcement of its air defenses and faster and larger transfers of artillery, ammunition and missiles.
The German chancellor spoke first and – not for the first time in the European Council’s deliberations about Ukraine – set the tone for the session as a whole. Ukraine needed help urgently, he said, and Germany’s decision to transfer three Patriot air defense systems provided a clear example of what could and should be done. Orban remained silent, as he almost always does when Ukraine is discussed, but the debate as a whole confirmed that the European Council’s support for Ukraine is rock-solid.
Olaf Scholz was also prominent in the debate about whether or not the EU should enlarge the scope of its conversation with Erdogan’s Turkey. Thanks to well-drafted changes to the draft Conclusions suggested by the Greek government on the eve of the meeting.
The Cyprus president, who was Scholz’s principal interlocutor throughout, eventually settled for a text which gave the green light to a cautious rapprochement under the supervision of the European Council and Coreper.
On the Middle East, the most important decision, to impose fresh sanctions on Iran for the drone attack against Israel, had already been taken before the leaders met. The discussion therefore focused on Lebanon, including the risks of escalation and the vulnerabilities of significant sections of the Lebanese population and the substantial refugee population that Lebanon hosts, and Gaza.
Here the running was made by the Spanish prime minister and the leaders of other member states that strongly support the Palestinians. Divisions over the Middle East crisis undoubtedly persist in the European Council, but the leaders’ views have converged on several of the most important questions and their differences have been contained.
The debate about economic policy on the second day was very different. During the first two hours, the leaders discussed Enrico Letta’s report on the Single Market, which was circulated too late for the leaders to study it beforehand, but which Letta presented well.
The discussion was not particularly profound, but everybody who spoke acknowledged that the issues that the former Italian prime minister addressed were important and that both Letta’s report and the report by Mario Draghi which the European Council will consider in June were timely and merited serious study.
So far so good. Once Letta had left the room, however, the meeting began to go badly wrong. At Michel’s prompting, the leaders engaged in a four-and-a-half-hour debate about the paragraphs in the draft Conclusions outlining A New European Competitiveness Deal.
There were three rather basic problems. Firstly, the New Deal the Conclusions described was neither new nor a deal. Secondly, the text was poorly drafted and invited amendments in numbers. And thirdly, Michel – who always tries rather too hard for his own interests to be at the centre of the action – failed to impose any order on the discussion. So tedious and confused was the debate indeed that even the notetakers had difficulty at times in making sense of it and some if not most of the participants appeared to be increasingly bored and frustrated.
Some concrete results did emerge however, particularly with regard to Capital Markets Union. A substantial coalition led by the Luxemburg prime minister, Luc Frieden, succeeded in removing any mention of the harmonization of corporate tax law. But Scholz and Macron were able to safeguard the possibility of central supervision of capital markets across the EU.
And, most importantly of all, the paragraphs in the draft Conclusions in which the European Council pledged to monitor the EU’s work on the Single Market and more specifically to “review progress and discuss additional steps to deepen the Capital Markets Union at its meeting in June,” were retained. Capital Markets Union has become Chefsache in other words, as the German chancellor argued that it should when he spoke with surprising force at the March European Council.
Despite the highly unsatisfactory character of the Conclusions on the New Competitiveness Deal and the messy and directionless session with which the Special European Council closed, the April meeting was not therefore a non-event. Nor, still more important, is it the end of the story.
History does not repeat itself, but there are interesting parallels between the state of the Union now and the state of the European Community in 1984. The explanation of the European Community’s major advances in the second half of the 1980’s is complex and lessons from what was a very different era cannot easily be applied to today’s Europe.
The essential ingredients of the turnaround are not irrelevant however: strong collective leadership through the European Council, bold choices of personnel including not just Jacques Delors, the new president of the Commission – who, it should be noted, worked loyally as well as effectively with the European Council and Council – but also his lieutenants, some of whom, like Arthur Cockfield, pressure from the business community in the honeymoon days of the European Round Table, the completion of protracted accession negotiations with Spain and Portugal and of course ‘events’, which as always were of enormous importance.
It was a different age. But there have been moments in the European Council during the past few years, when the outlines of a bold and imaginative consensus about the future of the Union, shared and shaped by some of the European Council’s more consequential members, have been apparent. There are also ideas aplenty on which the leaders can draw, including most recently the Letta report on the revamping of the Single Market, the Eurogroup’s proposals concerning the Capital Markets Union and the Draghi report which the European Council will consider in June.
Events too have played their part. Von der Leyen has been a “geopolitical president,” not simply nor even mainly because that was her ambition, but because events have obliged her to. And Olaf Scholz, despite his party’s and his own natural inclinations, has become the most effective champion for Ukraine in the European Council. Last, but by no means least, there is demand for a Union that can hold its own in the global community, from business but also – if the polls are to be believed – from a majority of the electorate.
The makings of a major step forward in the making of the Union are present therefore, just as they were in 1984. Whether or not it materializes in bold and sound personnel choices, imaginative but at the same time feasible proposals and speedy and effective decisions, as it did from 1985 onwards, will however depend very largely on choices that will have to be made in the next five or six months.
Peter Ludlow is Chairman of EuroComment, Founding Director of CEPS and former Professor of History at the European University Institute in Florence. Since more than two decades, he publishes notes appearing seven days after each meeting of the European Council that provide a comprehensive analysis of the discussion and its outcome. Based on oral and documentary sources which are not normally available, they provide a unique insight into decision-making at the heart of the EU.
This text is a short version of his note that Peter Ludlow edited especially for Europe.Table. If you are interested in the full report, please write to info@eurocomment.eu
