Putting the Record Straight About the Spitzenkandidaten 

In the last few weeks, a great deal of nonsense has been said about the concept of the Spitzenkandidat. Some accuse the European Parliament of a power grab, subrogating the lawful role of the European Council in choosing the new Commission President. Others trivialise the role of the Parliament and doubt the democratic credentials of the process. Many believe that the candidate must always be drawn from the largest party come what may. All these assertions are wrong. As someone who worked on these questions in the drafting of the Lisbon Treaty and the author of two seminal reports of the European Parliament, I am moved to comment.  

In the elections of 2009, with the Treaty of Lisbon in sight, the Young European Federalists (JEF) launched a campaign teasing the political parties over “Who’s Your Candidate?”. The entry into force of the new Treaty on European Union then changed the constitutive process for the better. Article 17(7) TEU, now famously, laid down: 

“Taking into account the elections to the European Parliament and after having held the appropriate consultations, the European Council, acting by a qualified majority, shall propose to the European Parliament a candidate for President of the Commission.”

 Declaration 11 of the Treaty of Lisbon was added to emphasise that the Parliament and European Council are “jointly responsible for the smooth running of the process” of electing the Commission President. It foresees “necessary consultations” between the two institutions that “will focus on the backgrounds of the candidates … taking account of the elections”.¹⁾

The first official outing of the Spitzenkandidaten was in 2012 when Parliament’s Constitutional Affairs Committee (AFCO) decided to react to the defeat of my earlier proposal to install a pan-European constituency for which a certain portion of MEPs would be elected from transnational party lists (headed by top candidates). By way of a fall back from that more advanced — and still unfulfilled — ambition, Parliament resolved as follows: 

“Urges the European political parties to nominate candidates for the Presidency of the Commission and expects those candidates to play a leading role in the parliamentary electoral campaign, in particular by personally presenting their programme in all Member States of the Union; stresses the importance of reinforcing the political legitimacy of both Parliament and the Commission by connecting their respective elections more directly to the choice of the voters.”

The following July, Parliament voted through another Duff report on improving the practical arrangements for the holding of the 2014 elections. Recommendations were made on gender balance, the use of the emblems of the EU level political parties, publicity campaigns, and rules to encourage EU citizens resident in Member States other than their own to vote and stand as candidates (consistent with Article 22(2) TFEU).³ Quite properly, AFCO sought to reflect the letter and the spirit of the Treaty of Lisbon, whose first electoral trial this was to be. Paragraph 15 of Parliament’s 2013 resolution said:  

“Expects that, in this process, the candidate for Commission President put forward by the European political party that wins the most seats in the Parliament will be the first to be considered, with a view to ascertaining his or her ability to secure the support of the necessary absolute majority in Parliament.”

Note that we expected the political parties to choose champions for their electoral campaigns who would be eligible for nomination as Commission President. Nowhere was any reference made to an automatic right of the largest party to assume the election of its Spitzenkandidat. There has never been a formal or informal agreement to that effect: indeed, the smaller political groups would be mad to have done so. The agreed proposal was that the champion of the largest party, who may or may not have been a candidate themselves to become an MEP, should merely be “the first to be considered” by the European Council. This indeed was the case in 2019, when the heads of government first considered, then dismissed Manfred Weber, the top candidate of the European People’s Party (EPP).  

We also know that the authors of the Treaty of Lisbon foresaw the possibility that the European Council’s candidate might not be elected by the Parliament, where an absolute and not a simple majority is required. This time, therefore, Ursula von der Leyen needs 361 positive votes: abstentions are unhelpful to her. Should she fail to meet the threshold in the plenary vote on 18 July, the European Council will have one month to come up with an alternative nomination — who may or may not be from the EPP. In such circumstances there will be a political crisis, indeed, but not a constitutional one.  

Despite complaints from Council quarters that Parliament is seeking to subvert the Treaty of Lisbon by arrogating to itself the right to nominate the Commission President, this is not the case. The Brussels-based media have swallowed a less than full and ultimately misleading version of the Spitzenkandidat process. The fact is that the election of the Commission President is a joint endeavour between Parliament and Commission, democratically legitimate, and fully in conformity with EU law.