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Yesterday in the early evening, Parliament was supposed to have received the written answers from the Commissioners’ candidates. Contrary to what was promised, the Commission did not deliver the answers at 7 pm, nor at 9.30 pm. A high-ranking MEP states that “this is not acceptable“.
The Commissioners-designate were asked two general questions and the specific questions of the specialist committees (three for each of the committees involved). The answers to these questions were prepared with significant support from the Directorates-General. They are therefore likely to have been carefully considered.
The candidates’ oral contributions will be more interesting at the confirmation hearings, which are scheduled to begin on Nov. 4 and end on Nov. 12 at 9:30 pm. The candidates will then answer more spontaneously. In the meantime, it has been decided how the speaking times will be allocated. The document is available to Europe.Table.
The committee chairman has five minutes to welcome the candidates, after which they are allowed to introduce themselves for 15 minutes. Then the first round of questions begins, in which the coordinators of the eight political groups are each given five-minute slots for questions and answers. However, if several committees have equal rights, such as Environment (ENVI), Industry (ITRE) and Economy (ECON) in the case of Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra, the coordinators of a political group must decide among themselves who may ask the question.
The second round lasts 84 minutes! How many slots (three minutes each) of question time the political groups are entitled to depends on the number of committees involved and the size of the political groups. If two committees are involved, the EPP, as the largest group, gets eight slots of three minutes each, S&D five slots of three minutes each, “Patriots”, ECR and Renew three slots, Greens and Left two slots of three minutes each. Invited committees also receive slots.
In the third round, each parliamentary group has one more slot before the candidate has five minutes for their closing statement. The whole process takes at least three hours and is broadcast. The coordinators then meet immediately to decide. A candidate for a Commissioner’s post requires at least the votes of the coordinators, representing two-thirds of the Members of Parliament, to be confirmed.
Get through the day safely!
Mr. Guttenberg, since the leak, there has been a heated debate about the Commission’s ideas for restructuring the EU budget. Will the reform be buried before it has even seen the light of day?
It is probably no coincidence that these ideas have reached the outside world at such an early stage. The approach calls many traditional structures into question. But I think it is a necessary discussion that we should have now.
We are discussing ideas from the Directorate-General Budget that are not yet fully developed. Neither Ursula von der Leyen nor the new Commissioners have dealt with them in detail yet.
Anyone who has read von der Leyen’s Political Guidelines or her Mission Letter to the new Budget Commissioner Piotr Serafin will not find anything really surprising in the presentation. The basic structure was already laid out there, such as the competitiveness fund or the idea of a uniform plan for each member state that bundles reforms and investments. There has long been a consensus in the EU that the Multiannual Financial Framework, as it stands, is not sustainable. But so far, the Commission has always shied away from proposing ambitious reforms. Now a far-reaching proposal is finally on the table. I think the burden of proof is now on those who want to carry on as before.
The member states that give the money will be decisive in this debate. So far, cautious support for the reforms has been heard from Berlin.
The tenor in recent months has been that the EU must become simpler and more transparent. The current MFF is a jumble of many different programs, some of which do the same thing. That’s why I think it’s only logical that there are no defensive reflexes in the German Government. It is also right that we first talk about the structure and what the money should be spent on, and only then about the size of the budget. Then we will have another discussion, in Germany and the EU.
Very loud criticism is already coming from the European Parliament. CDU/CSU MEPs Daniel Caspary and Angelika Niebler have warned von der Leyen to degrade the European Parliament to a “breakfast parliament” with no influence on spending and control.
I cannot understand this argument. The annual budget negotiations between Parliament and the Council are only ever about a small amount. A very large part of the budget, namely cohesion and agricultural policy, is firmly planned for years to come and is in the hands of the member states. They decide which specific projects are to be supported by the structural and agricultural funds, not the European level. Once the MFF has been adopted every seven years, Parliament no longer has any say in the matter. It is therefore a mystery to me why MEPs think that they would have less say compared to the current system. Things can only get better for Parliament as a budget legislator.
Parliament has little say in the Corona Recovery and Resilience Facility (ARF), the model for the reform concept from the Commission.
That is true, but it is because the ARF money runs outside the regular EU budget due to the contractual construction required for the joint debt. But we are talking about regular budget funds here. As a parliament, I would seize the opportunity to secure a greater say.
And how?
By securing its influence in shaping the plans, but above all by insisting that more money flows into areas managed directly by the Commission, such as the planned competitiveness fund. This would allow Parliament to act as a genuine budget legislator. The defensive and structurally conservative reaction from Parliament really baffles me.
Does the reform increase the risk of EU funds being wasted or misappropriated?
At the moment, we are making the Commission responsible for the use of funds in this shared management area, for which it can do little. It is not Brussels but national authorities that decide exactly how the money from the Structural Funds is spent. The Commission has to keep track of this, but it is not responsible if, for example, the construction of a golf course is funded. I therefore think it would be more honest to give the member states a share of the budget for structural and agricultural policy, subject to certain conditions, and to place the management of the money in their hands. Then they will also have to take responsibility for it. And, of course, we need a European control mechanism.
What could it look like?
In the ARF system, the Commission monitors compliance with national plans. The European Court of Auditors looks closely at whether the funds are being spent accordingly. I do not currently see any systematic control deficit. Above all, I don’t believe that the European Parliament’s political accountability and control options are better in the current system just because it is super granular. At the moment, nobody is really responsible for anything.
After all, the Budgetary Control Committee monitors the use of the funds.
Yes, but you also have to be clear about one thing: In the current system, payments are made from the EU budget for investment projects, some of which were decided up to ten years in advance. What we pay today has absolutely nothing to do with what we want politically today. This temporal divergence eventually leads to political control becoming absurd. This would be significantly improved if the costs were no longer settled retrospectively, but if the payment was linked to the performance of the member states.
As with the ARF, the national plans would be negotiated by the Commission and the national governments – which gives both a lot of power.
Of course, it is important to ensure that it is not just governments and the Commission sitting at the table. The national governments should involve the stakeholders, the regions, civil society, etc. in their own responsibility. This can certainly be done better than in the ARF. New rules should be introduced for this, but the member states cannot be relieved of their responsibility here either.
The federal states complain that they were barely involved in the German ARF implementation plan by the government.
I think it would make sense to have a joint discussion in Germany about how the federal, state and local governments spend EU money. This would make the system much more transparent. However, not everyone who benefits from the current system, which is difficult to understand, wants that.
The federal states are alarmed.
And that is understandable. You are a major beneficiary of the current system, in which the federal government sends money to Brussels, which is then transferred directly back to the federal states without any political discussion at federal level. That is convenient.
How effective do you think structural aid is?
The data on this is mixed at best. But I now see a massive lack of clarity in the objectives, especially in structural policy. A lot of things are supposed to be achieved at the same time, which rarely works. That’s why I think it would make sense to use some of these funds jointly in the future to achieve pan-European goals. Even before the Draghi report, there was a broad consensus in Brussels as to which priorities we should set to be competitive. This must then also be reflected in the way we spend money.
Von der Leyen is planning a competitiveness fund for this purpose, in which the many individual programs from InvestEU to Horizon Europe are to be combined. Is this the right approach?
It makes sense to simplify here too. However, it will be more crucial that we don’t just conjure up figures like we did with the Juncker Fund. There it was exaggeratedly said that we would turn two billion euros of fresh money into €200 billion by bringing in private investors.
Why not, given the tight public budgets?
There is nothing to be said against bringing private players on board where it makes sense. But that should not be the entire logic. The EU needs real money to be able to make real expenditures in order to build European railroad lines or power grids. That costs money, it can’t be helped.
Lucas Guttenberg has been a Senior Advisor at the Bertelsmann Stiftung since September 2024, where he is responsible for work on European economic policy. Previously, he worked as a consultant in the management staff of the Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Protection and as Deputy Director of the Jacques Delors Center at the Hertie School. In spring 2020, he and two colleagues developed a concept for an EU aid fund in the Covid pandemic, which was to serve as a blueprint for the Recovery and Resilience Facility in Next Generation EU. He began his career at the European Central Bank.
Michiel Scheffer has spent his entire life at the interface between science, politics and business. The Dutchman was born into a family of entrepreneurs – his father and grandfather were CEOs. “I was always running around among the machines as a child”, says Scheffer in an interview. He soon became interested in how business works, but above all how innovation works. Today, he is Chairman of the Board of the European Innovation Council (EIC) – and will be discussing the topic at the Falling Walls Science Summit in Berlin on Nov. 8.
In his doctoral thesis at Utrecht University, Scheffer wrote about “Trading Places, Fashion, Retail and the Changing Geography of Clothing Production in the Netherlands, Belgium, France and the United Kingdom”. He went on to enjoy success in both business and academia. He is familiar with the world of start-ups and has worked with many universities.
Scheffer is the founder and CEO of Polisema, a company that provides advisory and investment services to start-ups in areas ranging from ICT and textiles to medical devices and energy storage. He was CEO of Noéton Policy in Innovation, which provides consulting services in innovation management and public affairs.
The sometimes bad experiences he had with EU applications and funding projects prompted him to enter politics. He became Regional Minister of Gelderland. In this role, he was responsible for an ERDF program and for Interreg DE-NL. Scheffer was also a member of the Committee of the Regions.
This paved the way for the next logical step towards the EU. In 2023, the keen amateur cyclist took over as head of the EIC. And this in politically complicated times. The agency, which was set up in 2018 by the then EU Research Commissioner Carlos Moedas, did not get off the ground at first. At the time, the Commission was still arguing about how to handle the risk associated with equity investments in start-ups.
The EIC aims to identify, promote and disseminate breakthrough technologies and disruptive innovations, an area in which the EU has not previously made significant progress. Despite good research and development performance, the EU is still struggling to translate cutting-edge research into scalable products and services. Scheffer wants to promote deep tech in particular and help the start-ups there over the Valley of Death with his support. This is not just about money, but also about advice and networking with like-minded people.
The agency is now on a better path. Scheffer seems to have achieved a turnaround with what he himself describes as an open management style. He travels to the member states a lot and talks to those who have not managed to get EIC funding, he says. But of course, he also knows some best-practice examples and is visibly pleased with their positive development.
With the current budget, however, he is “not sure whether we are saving the lives of our grandchildren”, says Scheffer. “Even if you double the Accelerator’s budget, it will increase from €7 billion to €14 billion in seven years.” In 2024, Scheffer has just €1.2 billion at his disposal. The approval rate is correspondingly low (eight percent).
Against this background, the discussion about the future of the EIC is also in full swing. Will the ERC and EIC become large, independent agencies, while the Horizon program is absorbed into a large competitive fund? Should the EIC become an “ARPA-type agency” with faster procedures and improved governance, as called for in the Draghi report? Or should it remain strengthened, as recently recommended by the Heitor report?
Scheffer will probably be relaxed about these discussions and have short, precise answers at the ready – as he shows in his interviews. When do you want to retire? At 72. How much coffee a day? Four cups. How long do you need in the morning? 20 minutes. Where was your best kiss? In Malaga. Markus Weisskopf
At the Falling Walls Science Summit in Berlin, Michiel Scheffer will take part in a discussion organized by the Boston Consulting Group and the Sprind agency on Nov. 8 at 3 p.m. on “Europe’s Path to Innovation” organized by the Boston Consulting Group and the Sprind Agency. You can find the program of the summit here and read more portraits from the Table.Briefings series “Breakthrough Minds” here.
Yesterday in the early evening, Parliament was supposed to have received the written answers from the Commissioners’ candidates. Contrary to what was promised, the Commission did not deliver the answers at 7 pm, nor at 9.30 pm. A high-ranking MEP states that “this is not acceptable“.
The Commissioners-designate were asked two general questions and the specific questions of the specialist committees (three for each of the committees involved). The answers to these questions were prepared with significant support from the Directorates-General. They are therefore likely to have been carefully considered.
The candidates’ oral contributions will be more interesting at the confirmation hearings, which are scheduled to begin on Nov. 4 and end on Nov. 12 at 9:30 pm. The candidates will then answer more spontaneously. In the meantime, it has been decided how the speaking times will be allocated. The document is available to Europe.Table.
The committee chairman has five minutes to welcome the candidates, after which they are allowed to introduce themselves for 15 minutes. Then the first round of questions begins, in which the coordinators of the eight political groups are each given five-minute slots for questions and answers. However, if several committees have equal rights, such as Environment (ENVI), Industry (ITRE) and Economy (ECON) in the case of Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra, the coordinators of a political group must decide among themselves who may ask the question.
The second round lasts 84 minutes! How many slots (three minutes each) of question time the political groups are entitled to depends on the number of committees involved and the size of the political groups. If two committees are involved, the EPP, as the largest group, gets eight slots of three minutes each, S&D five slots of three minutes each, “Patriots”, ECR and Renew three slots, Greens and Left two slots of three minutes each. Invited committees also receive slots.
In the third round, each parliamentary group has one more slot before the candidate has five minutes for their closing statement. The whole process takes at least three hours and is broadcast. The coordinators then meet immediately to decide. A candidate for a Commissioner’s post requires at least the votes of the coordinators, representing two-thirds of the Members of Parliament, to be confirmed.
Get through the day safely!
Mr. Guttenberg, since the leak, there has been a heated debate about the Commission’s ideas for restructuring the EU budget. Will the reform be buried before it has even seen the light of day?
It is probably no coincidence that these ideas have reached the outside world at such an early stage. The approach calls many traditional structures into question. But I think it is a necessary discussion that we should have now.
We are discussing ideas from the Directorate-General Budget that are not yet fully developed. Neither Ursula von der Leyen nor the new Commissioners have dealt with them in detail yet.
Anyone who has read von der Leyen’s Political Guidelines or her Mission Letter to the new Budget Commissioner Piotr Serafin will not find anything really surprising in the presentation. The basic structure was already laid out there, such as the competitiveness fund or the idea of a uniform plan for each member state that bundles reforms and investments. There has long been a consensus in the EU that the Multiannual Financial Framework, as it stands, is not sustainable. But so far, the Commission has always shied away from proposing ambitious reforms. Now a far-reaching proposal is finally on the table. I think the burden of proof is now on those who want to carry on as before.
The member states that give the money will be decisive in this debate. So far, cautious support for the reforms has been heard from Berlin.
The tenor in recent months has been that the EU must become simpler and more transparent. The current MFF is a jumble of many different programs, some of which do the same thing. That’s why I think it’s only logical that there are no defensive reflexes in the German Government. It is also right that we first talk about the structure and what the money should be spent on, and only then about the size of the budget. Then we will have another discussion, in Germany and the EU.
Very loud criticism is already coming from the European Parliament. CDU/CSU MEPs Daniel Caspary and Angelika Niebler have warned von der Leyen to degrade the European Parliament to a “breakfast parliament” with no influence on spending and control.
I cannot understand this argument. The annual budget negotiations between Parliament and the Council are only ever about a small amount. A very large part of the budget, namely cohesion and agricultural policy, is firmly planned for years to come and is in the hands of the member states. They decide which specific projects are to be supported by the structural and agricultural funds, not the European level. Once the MFF has been adopted every seven years, Parliament no longer has any say in the matter. It is therefore a mystery to me why MEPs think that they would have less say compared to the current system. Things can only get better for Parliament as a budget legislator.
Parliament has little say in the Corona Recovery and Resilience Facility (ARF), the model for the reform concept from the Commission.
That is true, but it is because the ARF money runs outside the regular EU budget due to the contractual construction required for the joint debt. But we are talking about regular budget funds here. As a parliament, I would seize the opportunity to secure a greater say.
And how?
By securing its influence in shaping the plans, but above all by insisting that more money flows into areas managed directly by the Commission, such as the planned competitiveness fund. This would allow Parliament to act as a genuine budget legislator. The defensive and structurally conservative reaction from Parliament really baffles me.
Does the reform increase the risk of EU funds being wasted or misappropriated?
At the moment, we are making the Commission responsible for the use of funds in this shared management area, for which it can do little. It is not Brussels but national authorities that decide exactly how the money from the Structural Funds is spent. The Commission has to keep track of this, but it is not responsible if, for example, the construction of a golf course is funded. I therefore think it would be more honest to give the member states a share of the budget for structural and agricultural policy, subject to certain conditions, and to place the management of the money in their hands. Then they will also have to take responsibility for it. And, of course, we need a European control mechanism.
What could it look like?
In the ARF system, the Commission monitors compliance with national plans. The European Court of Auditors looks closely at whether the funds are being spent accordingly. I do not currently see any systematic control deficit. Above all, I don’t believe that the European Parliament’s political accountability and control options are better in the current system just because it is super granular. At the moment, nobody is really responsible for anything.
After all, the Budgetary Control Committee monitors the use of the funds.
Yes, but you also have to be clear about one thing: In the current system, payments are made from the EU budget for investment projects, some of which were decided up to ten years in advance. What we pay today has absolutely nothing to do with what we want politically today. This temporal divergence eventually leads to political control becoming absurd. This would be significantly improved if the costs were no longer settled retrospectively, but if the payment was linked to the performance of the member states.
As with the ARF, the national plans would be negotiated by the Commission and the national governments – which gives both a lot of power.
Of course, it is important to ensure that it is not just governments and the Commission sitting at the table. The national governments should involve the stakeholders, the regions, civil society, etc. in their own responsibility. This can certainly be done better than in the ARF. New rules should be introduced for this, but the member states cannot be relieved of their responsibility here either.
The federal states complain that they were barely involved in the German ARF implementation plan by the government.
I think it would make sense to have a joint discussion in Germany about how the federal, state and local governments spend EU money. This would make the system much more transparent. However, not everyone who benefits from the current system, which is difficult to understand, wants that.
The federal states are alarmed.
And that is understandable. You are a major beneficiary of the current system, in which the federal government sends money to Brussels, which is then transferred directly back to the federal states without any political discussion at federal level. That is convenient.
How effective do you think structural aid is?
The data on this is mixed at best. But I now see a massive lack of clarity in the objectives, especially in structural policy. A lot of things are supposed to be achieved at the same time, which rarely works. That’s why I think it would make sense to use some of these funds jointly in the future to achieve pan-European goals. Even before the Draghi report, there was a broad consensus in Brussels as to which priorities we should set to be competitive. This must then also be reflected in the way we spend money.
Von der Leyen is planning a competitiveness fund for this purpose, in which the many individual programs from InvestEU to Horizon Europe are to be combined. Is this the right approach?
It makes sense to simplify here too. However, it will be more crucial that we don’t just conjure up figures like we did with the Juncker Fund. There it was exaggeratedly said that we would turn two billion euros of fresh money into €200 billion by bringing in private investors.
Why not, given the tight public budgets?
There is nothing to be said against bringing private players on board where it makes sense. But that should not be the entire logic. The EU needs real money to be able to make real expenditures in order to build European railroad lines or power grids. That costs money, it can’t be helped.
Lucas Guttenberg has been a Senior Advisor at the Bertelsmann Stiftung since September 2024, where he is responsible for work on European economic policy. Previously, he worked as a consultant in the management staff of the Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Protection and as Deputy Director of the Jacques Delors Center at the Hertie School. In spring 2020, he and two colleagues developed a concept for an EU aid fund in the Covid pandemic, which was to serve as a blueprint for the Recovery and Resilience Facility in Next Generation EU. He began his career at the European Central Bank.
Michiel Scheffer has spent his entire life at the interface between science, politics and business. The Dutchman was born into a family of entrepreneurs – his father and grandfather were CEOs. “I was always running around among the machines as a child”, says Scheffer in an interview. He soon became interested in how business works, but above all how innovation works. Today, he is Chairman of the Board of the European Innovation Council (EIC) – and will be discussing the topic at the Falling Walls Science Summit in Berlin on Nov. 8.
In his doctoral thesis at Utrecht University, Scheffer wrote about “Trading Places, Fashion, Retail and the Changing Geography of Clothing Production in the Netherlands, Belgium, France and the United Kingdom”. He went on to enjoy success in both business and academia. He is familiar with the world of start-ups and has worked with many universities.
Scheffer is the founder and CEO of Polisema, a company that provides advisory and investment services to start-ups in areas ranging from ICT and textiles to medical devices and energy storage. He was CEO of Noéton Policy in Innovation, which provides consulting services in innovation management and public affairs.
The sometimes bad experiences he had with EU applications and funding projects prompted him to enter politics. He became Regional Minister of Gelderland. In this role, he was responsible for an ERDF program and for Interreg DE-NL. Scheffer was also a member of the Committee of the Regions.
This paved the way for the next logical step towards the EU. In 2023, the keen amateur cyclist took over as head of the EIC. And this in politically complicated times. The agency, which was set up in 2018 by the then EU Research Commissioner Carlos Moedas, did not get off the ground at first. At the time, the Commission was still arguing about how to handle the risk associated with equity investments in start-ups.
The EIC aims to identify, promote and disseminate breakthrough technologies and disruptive innovations, an area in which the EU has not previously made significant progress. Despite good research and development performance, the EU is still struggling to translate cutting-edge research into scalable products and services. Scheffer wants to promote deep tech in particular and help the start-ups there over the Valley of Death with his support. This is not just about money, but also about advice and networking with like-minded people.
The agency is now on a better path. Scheffer seems to have achieved a turnaround with what he himself describes as an open management style. He travels to the member states a lot and talks to those who have not managed to get EIC funding, he says. But of course, he also knows some best-practice examples and is visibly pleased with their positive development.
With the current budget, however, he is “not sure whether we are saving the lives of our grandchildren”, says Scheffer. “Even if you double the Accelerator’s budget, it will increase from €7 billion to €14 billion in seven years.” In 2024, Scheffer has just €1.2 billion at his disposal. The approval rate is correspondingly low (eight percent).
Against this background, the discussion about the future of the EIC is also in full swing. Will the ERC and EIC become large, independent agencies, while the Horizon program is absorbed into a large competitive fund? Should the EIC become an “ARPA-type agency” with faster procedures and improved governance, as called for in the Draghi report? Or should it remain strengthened, as recently recommended by the Heitor report?
Scheffer will probably be relaxed about these discussions and have short, precise answers at the ready – as he shows in his interviews. When do you want to retire? At 72. How much coffee a day? Four cups. How long do you need in the morning? 20 minutes. Where was your best kiss? In Malaga. Markus Weisskopf
At the Falling Walls Science Summit in Berlin, Michiel Scheffer will take part in a discussion organized by the Boston Consulting Group and the Sprind agency on Nov. 8 at 3 p.m. on “Europe’s Path to Innovation” organized by the Boston Consulting Group and the Sprind Agency. You can find the program of the summit here and read more portraits from the Table.Briefings series “Breakthrough Minds” here.