New Structure, New Priorities

Von der Leyen has recently unveiled the new structure of the next Commission. At first sight it looks like a relatively light structure composed of only three hierarchical levels: the President on top, six Executive Vice-Presidents (Executive VPs) in the middle and the Commissioners at the bottom. However, as this post will argue, the new Commission is likely to become more hierarchical and less coordinated than before. Moreover, the new structure also reflects changing priorities that will lead to a less green agenda and increased competitiveness of the EU.

The new structure: collegiality or hierarchy?

Von der Leyen’s press statement and mission letters to the college members repeatedly stress that Commissioners have to work together “in a spirit of collegiality”. “[A]s the treaty says, each Member of the College is equal – and each Commissioner has an equal responsibility to deliver on our priorities.”. Yet, the devil is in the details and much depends on how collegial cooperation is interpreted. It can mean both horizontal involvement of all members in decision-making or vertical coordination under the lead of the President. Depending on which of these aspects prevail, the practice of collegiality can vary significantly. In fact, since the Juncker Commission, the second aspect was privileged and the need for better coordination has led to a hiearchy of the relationships inside the college, that is called on to work together towards the implementation of the presidential agenda (Patrin: 117). A closer look at the new structure seems to confirm this trend and points in the direction of a more presidential and more hierarchical Commission.

Several commentators, and in particular a recent Politico article, have observed that the new structure will make the Commission President more powerful. It is argued that Von der Leyen has forced Member States (and in particular France) to pick candidates that would not contest her, that she diluted portfolios and tasks along the motto of divide et impera and that Executive VPs will form a sort of presidential cabinet. Beyond this, the new structure will allow the President to have direct control over many policy areas. And this not only because Executive VPs will report to her but also because several Commissioners are entrusted horizontal tasks that foresee direct reporting to the President. Such is the case of Commissioner Šefčovič, who, in addition to trade, will also be responsible for interinstitutional relations and transparency, and for the latter he will report to Von der Leyen. Furthermore, the Commissioner for the Budget will report to the President alone. By blurring hierarchical relations and creating transversal reporting lines, Von der Leyen will be able to better control, and steer, the Commission.

In a recent post on Verfassungsblog John Cotter has rightly argued that the Treaties provide for a leading role of the Commission President and bestow considerable discretion in the organization of the college. To be sure, in a college of 27 members some sort of layers and coordination mechanisms are essential to ensure the efficient functioning of the institution. In short, the Treaties themselves are compatible with the presidentialisation of the Commission, provided that such process is balanced out against the Treaty obligation to respect collegiality. Article 17(6) TEU foresees that the President herself must ensure that the Commission acts “as a collegiate body”. If indeed there is nothing in the Treaties against a powerful President, such a President shall watch over the collegial work of the Commission, which also implies leaving space to deliberation, debate and (why not?) contestation.

However, beyond the potentially stronger role of the President, the most problematic aspect of the new structure may be the overlapping hierarchies at the levels of both the College and the services. On paper, the removal of the Vice-presidents should ease out the coordination within the Commission, that will be entrusted to the Executive VPs. Yet, it is not clear what the role, powers and functions of the “executive” should mean in the absence of the old VPs.

To start with, there are significant differences between executive vice-presidents portfolios. For instance, the Spanish Executive VP Ribera Rodríguez will be in charge of “clean, just and competitive transition”, coupling the responsibility for the green transition with competition policy. Similarly, Henna Virkunnen will be responsible for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy, thus bringing together, in a somewhat inconsistent way, digital transition, security and home affairs and rule of law related issues. Conversely, more straightforward and less ambitious tasks are assigned to the Italian Fitto, who will be in charge of cohesion policy and to the Rumanian Mînzatu, who will be Executive VP for people, skills and preparedeness.

Furthermore, Executive VPs will be in charge of important policy areas that were in the past typically reserved to normal Commissioners, such as Competition, Cohesion Policy, Internal Market or Social Policies. This will make them more powerful but perhaps also busy with their own regulatory output. Such concentration of power will likely strengthen the hierarchical relations between services, empowering the DGs under direct VP supervision. Although we will need to wait for the Working Methods of the new Commission to better evaluate how policy-making will be concretely organized, it is likely that Executive VPs will have a sort of screening and filtering role similar to the past Commission, and thus the Executive VP’s services will be in the position to influence the work of the DGs working under their respective clusters. For instance, it would be easy for an influential DG such as DG Comp to have a say on the work of other DGs under the supervision of VP Ribera Rodríguez. If this was the case already in the previous Von der Leyen Commission, the concentration of powers and tasks seems to be even more evident now.

Finally, this structure could create confusion, with several overlaps and a distribution of competences which is not always coherent. Reporting lines run in different directions with several Executive VPs responsible for several Commissioners and Von der Leyen again responsible for some parts of the Commissioners’ portfolios. For instance, Virkunnen and Kallas are both in charge of security and it is not clear why the Health Commissioner reports to both Ribeira and Minzatu. Finally, the new structure fails to achieve the very much needed coherence between often split thematic areas. As I mentioned earlier, Executive VPs responsibilities bring together often inconsistent issues and there will be several people in charge of different aspects of a same policy area. As an example, industrial matters will be supervised by the French Executive VP, but will also fall in the remit of the Finnish Executive VP in charge of defence and digital or of the Spanish Executive VP in charge of the green transition.

Coordination will be very difficult in the presence of such a complex and unclear distribution of tasks. Since collegial decision-making is mostly about coordination, collegiality will be hard to achieve. As a result, the Presidency will probably be able to exert even more control over the work of the Commission. And if language can be taken as a sign of the future attitude, the top-down approach of the Commission’s President is already reflected in the Mission Letters, where the phrase “I expect” appears at least seven times in each letter.

New priorities: less green and social and more competitive?

The structure proposed by Von der Leyen reflects a shift in the Commission’s presidential agenda, which is set to be more focused on EU prosperity and competitiveness and less on green and social policies. At this preliminary stage, I can highlight the following three changes.

First, the tendency to concentrate important responsibilities under few Executive VPs will reflect on the way these policies are conducted. The new set up could help enhance synergies between policies, but it could also mark a shift in the policy agenda of the Commission. For instance, competition policy is assigned to an Executive VP in combination with the green transition. Competition policy is a sort of insulated area within the Commission, with a quasi-autonomous internal decision-making managed by DG Comp. It is seen as an exceptional policy where files need to be independently processed to avoid any undue influence and bias, even if policy-related. Interestingly, Von der Leyen has operated a shift already in the previous Commission by combining the competition portfolio with another policy area and assigning it to an Executive VP. In the previous Commission competition policy was put together with the digital transition. In the new Commission, it is coupled with a “clean and just” transition. The combination of environment and competition reflects a new approach to competition policy, which is more sensitive to the shifting economic priorities. As stated in the Mission Letter to Ribera Rodríguez: “one that is more supportive of companies scaling up in global markets, allows European businesses and consumers to reap all the benefits of effective competition and is geared to our common goal, including decarbonisation and a just transition”. On the other side of the policy combination, the green transition seems to be incorporated in this scheme as one priority among others. No Executive VP is exclusively in charge of the environmental agenda, which was one of the flagships of the first Von der Leyen Commission (where the Executive VP Timmermans was in charge of the Green Deal). What seems to underlie the new policy restructuring is a rethinking of some key tenets of the Commission’s policy agenda to cope with current global economic and trade challenges. In this context, both competition and environmental policies are being reframed under a more transversal, competitiveness-oriented approach. The synergies thus created can be a welcomed evolution if properly exploited, yet this will hopefully not happen at the expense of past efforts of the EU notably in the area of the environment.

The second, related change is the growing importance of industry-related matters. According to the Treaties, industry is a weak EU competence, where the EU can only “support, coordinate or supplement the actions of the Member States” (Article 6(b) TFEU). And yet the new Commission will have an Executive VP for prosperity and industrial strategy. To bring about such industrial strategy, the French VP will have to rely on his own responsibility for the single market but also on cooperation with his colleagues in charge of trade, economy, innovation and financial services. He will also have to coordinate with the Italian VP Fitto, who will be in charge of cohesion policy. The latter marks another new development, as cohesion policy scales up from a normal Commission’s portfolio to a VP responsibility. Cohesion policy thus becomes the overarching heading for other policy areas and tasks. Such a shift is presumably also due to the increasing importance that cohesion has assumed lately as a new means to implement horizontal reforms beyond regional policy, especially after it provided the legal basis for the Recovery and Resilience Facility under NGEU.

The third change is the absence of social welfare policies. In no portfolio appears the word “social”, be it of Executive VPs’ or Commissioner’s level. Minzatu will be responsible for DG Employment, social affairs and inclusion, yet this is not directly reflected in her title, which is very broadly formulated as Executive VP for People, Skills and Preparedness. Ribera Rodriguez is, among many other things, in charge of a “just transition” but apart from a new housing remit in the hands of Commissioner Jorgensen, there is little social-related competence among the Commissioners reporting to her. What will happen to social policies in the new Commission? The danger is that an increased focus on competitiveness and growth may end up sidelining social issues.

Eventually, we will have to see what will come out of the parliamentary hearings, but at a preliminary screening the proposed Commission’s structure appears to be rather complex, with overlapping, unclear and uncoherent repartitions of tasks and shifting priorities. Centralization of power and increased hierarchical coordination between policies and services can be more effective only if reporting lines are clear and if the subject matters are organized in a coherent way. If, on the contrary, many different DGs and Commissioners are dealing with similar matters and the boundaries are not clearly marked, the result could be more procedures, more hierarchy but a less consistent and effective output. Certainly, some structures and hierarchies are needed, yet the set-up presented by Von der Leyen will hardly achieve coherence despite the increased hiearchy of internal relationships.